A victim of state terror in the US

Myth, Propaganda and Disaster in Nazi Germany and Contemporary America: A
Drama in 30 Scenes by Stephen Sewell

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2003/sep2003/ssew-s11.shtml

By Margaret Rees

11 September 2003

Australian writer Stephen Sewell’s latest play attempts to examine the
rapid expansion of the US state apparatus since September 11, 2001 and how
the Bush administration’s “war against terrorism” is being used to attack
democratic rights and victimise innocent citizens. Directed by Aubrey
Mellor and with a strong cast, it recently played at Melbourne’s Playbox
Theatre and the South Australian State Theatre in Adelaide.

While Sewell is well known in Australian theatrical circles for dealing
with political themes his plays were largely marginalised during the
1990s. Theatre audiences, however, have begun responding to more overtly
political dramas in recent times. In fact, a number of plays critical of
government policies and militarism were staged at this year’s Edinburgh
Festival.

Myth, Propaganda and Disaster in Nazi Germany and Contemporary America
marks Sewell’s return to mainstream state-funded theatres where it evoked
enthusiastic audience responses. Inspired by Franz Kafka’s The Trial and
George Orwell’s 1984, it captures the shocked response of those witnessing
the Bush administration’s onslaught on democratic rights and their
terrifying ignorance of why it is happening.

The play centres on the fate of Talbot Finch, an expatriate Australian
academic working at a New York university, and a liberal democrat. He is
deeply concerned about political developments in the US and has written a
book entitled Myth, Propaganda and Disaster in Nazi Germany and
Contemporary America, which he naively believes will soon be published.
His lectures attempt to explain this political analogy.

As he tells his American wife Eve: “It’s like the bad old days of the Ugly
American are back; we’re still overthrowing governments in Latin America,
murdering people in their beds; we’ve got a string of prisons dotted
across the world filled with people who’ll never be charged with any
offence and we’ve got an intelligence service breathing so closely down
everyone’s necks we might as well call it a police state.”

When Eve points out Ground Zero, site of the former World Trade Centre,
from their apartment window, Finch replies: “Those terrorist attacks—you
know how many people were killed in car accidents last year? Forty-three
thousand. How come we’re not launching a pre-emptive strike on Detroit?
All this s... about terrorists is b...s.... They exist, sure they exist,
but they exist because we made them, and everything we do to get rid of
them just makes more of them.”

But in post-September 11 America, Finch’s forthright views, which he
espouses to anyone prepared to listen, are regarded as treasonous and soon
cause his life to unravel. A thug invades his university office and begins
to pistol whip him quoting lines from Kafka, “Someone must have been
telling lies about Joseph K, for without having done anything wrong he was
arrested one fine morning.”

Despite this blatant political assault, the university security services
deny knowledge of any interloper. The bewildered Australian lecturer
doesn’t realise that his life is being engulfed by a state security
operation. Next, a young overseas student mistakenly believes Finch to be
a socialist and inadvertently helps university authorities launch a sexual
harassment case against him.

Eve, who lives a cocooned existence as a TV scriptwriter, continues to
misunderstand him badly. When he disappears, and she eventually tries to
find and help him, she too becomes enmeshed in the state frame-up against
her husband.

Finch is kept incommunicado by state authorities and tortured by an agent
from Homeland Security, the shadowy federal government department
established by the Bush administration in the aftermath of September 11.
This massive organisation, which brings together 22 American security
agencies and has 170,000 employees, provides the framework for a US police
state. In line with this development, the Bush administration maintains a
string of offshore prison bases where anybody suspected as an opponent of
American foreign policy can be imprisoned indefinitely without trial.
Images of shackled and hooded Afghanistan war prisoners, incarcerated in
cages at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba are infamous.


Defence of basic rights

Sewell has correctly insisted that all artists must speak out against the
violation of civil liberties and basic democratic rights now underway. As
he told one publication, it is necessary “to resist, to state the truth,
to put up a fight. If we allow ourselves to be shut up, or start believing
the lies in order to get along, ultimately we’re going to get our throats
cut anyhow.”

A prolific writer, Sewell, who plans to develop the play into a film, says
that his dramas are linked thematically. The hellish torture inflicted on
Finch continues a recurring motif in several earlier plays. In Traitors—a
play concerning Left Oppositionists in Russia in 1926—a Stalinist torturer
sleeps with a woman Oppositionist the night before he virtually rapes a
man he is interrogating.

In Dreams in an Empty City—a work about corporate criminality in the 1980s
and a play within a play—provides a brief glimpse of a Latin American
military figure torturing a radical priest. This anticipates the hit-squad
murder of the actor who plays the torture victim.

In this latest play Sewell condemns twenty-first century America by
forcing his audience to confront the implications of the Bush
administration’s turn to the methods previously used by fascist regimes.

As Finch is tortured his complacent and corrupt academic colleagues enjoy
themselves at a champagne reception at the Guggenheim Museum. A voice-over
intones, “Imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever”. This
terrifying image is of O’Brien, Winston Smith’s torturer in George
Orwell’s 1984.

Sewell also uses film footage projected onto a giant screen at the back of
the stage to emphasise key moments in the drama—beginning with visuals
from Nazi Germany to illustrate Finch’s lecture about political
developments in the US. Later, when the Homeland Security agent confronts
Finch, the screen features a huge George W. Bush delivering a particularly
sinister and threatening speech—shades of Big Brother in 1984. The second
act explodes with the devastating appearance of Finch clad in hooded
bright orange Guantanamo Bay fatigues.

However, Myth, Propaganda and Disaster in Nazi Germany and Contemporary
America relies on a slick anti-Americanism that reduces all US culture
into the pap churned out by Hollywood. Sewell’s fictional New York is
populated by an homogenous, privileged layer and is presented as a
microcosm of a United States that is nothing but a dystopia. This outlook
prevents any serious probing of the reasons for the attack on democratic
rights and the eruption of US militarism.

All of the play’s American characters, with the belated exception of Eve,
are comic book caricatures and so uniformly vile that they ignore
everything Finch says. Finch can only confide in fellow expatriate
Australian, Max, who starts out as an articulate larrikin privately
putting down American culture in lines that Sewell intends for black
comedic effect. But Max soon changes his tune and ingratiates himself with
the university high-ups.

The play’s climax involves Max’s treachery and the revelation that he is a
Guantanamo Bay torturer. While this transformation of the “Aussie mate”,
the foil for Finch’s innocence and naïveté, allows Sewell to resolve
various strands of the plot, it only serves to highlight the playwright’s
problems with characterisation.

Furthermore, the form that Sewell has chosen for the play—a comedy of
contemporary manners—is inadequate for its subject matter and fails to
effectively convey the seriousness of his theme. At times the dialogue
descends into vacuous exchanges that threaten to derail whole scenes.
Characters decry the internal US police state through various literary
parallels that are presented as undisputed facts. Sewell also strives for
sinister effect by having his torturer debate philosophy with Finch, as a
modern parallel with the dungeons of the Inquisition, but this device is
contrived and unconvincing.

The main weakness, however, is Sewell’s deep-seated pessimism and despair.
This is most obviously expressed by his protagonist Finch, who anticipates
an all-powerful American empire that will last for centuries. This
outlook, which thoroughly permeates the play, denies the profound
contradictions wracking US capitalism: the growing economic crisis, the
unprecedented social polarisation, the social tensions building up just
below the surface, the hostility felt by millions of ordinary Americans to
the Bush administration and its deranged militarist agenda.

While Sewell is rightly concerned about the monumental attack on
democratic rights, he adapts himself to the images generated by the
thoroughly corrupt and venal US media. He sees no social force—i.e.,
ordinary working people in the US—capable of challenging the present
social and economic order.

The development of increasingly politicised audiences will no doubt see
more plays and other artistic endeavours exploring the themes touched on
by Sewell. Hopefully this will assist in creating a climate where Sewell
and others like him are able to see beyond the media hype and surface
appearances and develop a more rigorous and critical approach to their
work.

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