Robert Emmett Murphy, Jr.

  There was a long, protracted, battle to make Genocide a crime.   The word was coined by Raphael Lemkin, a Polish lawyer of Jewish descent, and he started agitating for the recognition of this crime was being, well, a crime, long before Hitler’s rise to power. His activism was on the stage of the World Community and his goal was to get them to accept a unified code that would made the mass murder of civilians a special crime against humanity. Lemkin was primarily motivated by the persecution of the Jews, though he was from Poland, the nation then-best known for ill-treatment oof that group, but by what we now call the Armenian Genocide, a campaign of exceptional savagery was committed by the Ottoman Turks in 1915. He was standing up for victims who were strangers to him.   The Armenian Genocide is both largely forgotten and a turning point in World History. Before it, similar savageries had been so typical they rarely even deserved mention in history books. A han...

  To try and explain some of the train-wreck of the Middle East…   To explain the train wreck of the Middle East you probably don't have to go back as far as the Crusades of that began e 11 th c. Muslim civilization was in its fullest flower then, Jerusalem was not really its center as Western media sometimes insists it was, so the great Arab and Muslim Empire of Saladin, from Egypt, was threatened, but never fully at-risk.   Stat looking later in the 19 th c. wherein the Middle East and Africa were dominated by outside Imperialist interests, both vicious and viciously-competing. It is important to remember that one of those interests was a Muslim, not a Christian, Empire, that of the Ottomans, based in Turkey. They were not Arab-ruled, and usually considered part of Europe, though more accurately called transcontinental, European and Asian.   It was during WWI that the Ottomans breathed their last gasp, caused by the Middle-Eastern, mostly Arab, Muslim...

  The Fury (1978)   Brian De Palma's immediate follow-up to “Carrie” (1976) it shared a theme, teenagers with destructive Telekinetic powers (and in this case, also Telepathy) and it also carries over some of “Carrie’s” talented cast and crew. Of the many notable things about the movie was that despite this, it was distinctly its own film.   While “Carrie” concerned High School hazing and Domestic Abuse, “The Fury” embraced the Paranoias of country reeling from the ever-worsening revelations of the criminality and blood-thirstiness of America’s Intelligence Agencies demonstrated by the Watergate Scandal and subsequent Church Committee. Though solidly within the SF/Horror genre it actually shared more with Espionage films like “Three Days of the Condor” (1975) than any other SF/Horror I can think of, including others that combined the themes of Political Conspiracy and PSI powers like “Scanners” (1981).   Though an inferior film to “Carrie” it is still a...

  Frenzy (1972)   The film opens with a credit sequence that features a long helicopter shot following the Thames River, going under London’s Tower Bridge, and then closes in on a public speech by some nameless Politian. The score (by Ron Goodwin) is triumphant sounding, and given that the audience must know what kind of movie this is, it more than a little incongruous.   The music is a bit of a in-joke, actually a double-joke: first it is a symphonic fanfare welcoming the greatest film Director in English history, Alfred Hitchcock, back home (this would be his first film made in England in about twenty years, only his third since he moved to Hollywood about fifty years prior), and secondly, it is very much the kind of music you’d find in a film produced by a tourist board, but the politician’s speech is about pollution in the Thames, and the bulk of the rest of the film unfolds in over-crowded, dingy and smelly, low-to-middle-class neighborhood of Covent Garden...