the last king of scotland

I just finished watching a film called ‘the last king of scotland’ which had very little to do with Scotland or kings but was actually about Id Amin, a Ugandan military dictator who came to power with aid from the British military because he was anti-communist and murdered hundreds of thousands of people – possibly as many as 500,00 – before finally being overthrown.

Now having not read much on the man previously, I can’t verify or deny the authenticity of any of these claims, but according to the film, after the British turned against him due to his heavy-handed tactics he decided to give his image a makeover and pretend to be a champion of anti-imperialist resistance. he did that by publicly opposing apartheid in South Africa, supporting Palestinian sovereignty, and even lending rhetorical support to Scottish nationalism – claiming that he was “the last king of Scotland” because he had defeated the English imperialists in Africa and his “friends” in Scotland were waiting for him to defeat the English there as well . On this last point he went particularly far – he was known to publicly wear a kilt and frequently featured columns of kilted bagpipers in military parades. Talk about cultural appropriation! and people give ME shit for being a Scottish-American and making hip hop music! ha!

The big thing I walked away from the film with is a reinforcement of my long-held belief that just because someone is my enemy’s enemy that doesn’t make them my friend. Imperialist London supported Amin because he opposed the communists that they also opposed, and that support ended up costing more then 300,000 people their lives. Later on, his anti-imperialist rhetoric won him friends on the authoritarian Left, but it’s a pretty shabby sort of leftism that will lend support to a mass murderer just because he claims to oppose someone else’s murders. To use an incredibly cheesy hollywood metaphor, it’s like picking sides between Freddy and Jason or Alien and the Predator – no matter which one wins, humanity loses.

I see that a lot in politics – equally horrible pairs of mirror-image murderers are set up as “opposites” and we are expected to choose between them: Hamas vs the Zionists, Al Queda vs the CIA, muslim fundamentalists vs christian fundamentalists, war-criminal in chief Bush vs “wants to nuke Iran” hillary clinton vs “thinks invading Pakistan would be a good idea” Obama. dear gods, when will the madness stop?

and i can’t help but thinking, maybe the madness won’t stop. maybe we’ll just keep going like this until we all wipe each other out. I hope not. I like humans. I think we’re actually pretty cool in a lot of ways. I just wish we weren’t so damn easy to manipulate. The lesser evil is still evil, and as often as not it’s not even all that “lesser”.

Posted: September 1st, 2007 under culture war.
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