Movie Whitewashes Capitalism’s Racist Attacks on Native Americans here ♦ “Oppenheimer” Imperialism: Death and Destroyer of Worlds here ♦
Osage men in Pawhuska Oklahoma, 1918
“Killers of the Flower Moon” Whitewashes Capitalism’s Systemic Racist Attacks on Native Americans
“This was as bad as Mississippi Burning (1988),” said Lucy. “The FBI is the hero. No wonder it’s being promoted.”
“The big oil companies like Phillips Petroleum were let off the hook,” said Gloria. “It’s all about one bad guy.”
“About two white bad guys,” said Tina. “It should have focused on Mollie, the Indigenous woman who was the real hero. The focus is always on white people.”
Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon has ten Oscar nominations. It’s a long piece of ruling-class propaganda wrapped in amazing production values.
It distorts the true story of the Indigenous victims of an evil white “pillar of the community” (Hale) and his gutless nephew (Ernest). They conspire to murder a whole family to get Osage people’s oil rights and are stopped by the FBI.
As Tina suggested, this is a deeply racist movie. Native women appear as dehumanized victims. Mollie is mainly shown as passive and foolishly trusting. Scorsese concentrates instead on Mollie’s murderous husband Ernest’s “moral dilemma.”
The book behind the movie tells a broader story. Dozens of Indigenous Osage people were murdered for their rights to the oil beneath the ground in Osage County. Dozens more were murdered by their white “guardians.” The FBI solved one set of murders, locked up two bad guys, and made themselves heroes. They left the rest of the murders uninvestigated, and of course the racist social relations that set the Osage up for this massacre.
Ruling Class Media Don’t Expose Bloody Capitalist Social Relationships
The real story of the Osage isn’t about a few greedy individuals. It’s about the violent imposition of a new set of capitalist social relationships. These were based on money, commodities, property rights, and competition.
Capitalism itself paved the way for this murder and theft. The Osage tragedy is the same tragedy that capitalism has inflicted on people around the world over and over.
The Osage, like many North American Indigenous groups, had long lived communally. Land was held in common and worked to benefit their common wellbeing. Native Americans were violently evicted from their land and forced onto land less valuable for capitalist agriculture.
The Dawes Act (1887) attacked their communal lifestyle by dividing these “reservations” into private property, much of which was then sold to capitalist farmers. The Osage resisted until 1907. When they finally agreed, they made it illegal to buy or sell the rights to the oil and other minerals underground.
Oil was just then becoming a valuable commodity. The rush to drill on Osage land resulted, by the 1920s, with the Osage reaping tremendous short-term wealth from rental of oil rights.
But this made Osage people a target. Each person listed on the Osage roll in 1906 had a share of the mineral rights (“headrights”) and the profits it generated. Osage individuals could not sell or give their “headrights” to anyone. They could only be inherited. This set Osage people up for the murders shown in the film.
In addition, the federal government appointed white “guardians” to most Native Americans, including the Osage, supposedly to protect them from exploitation. This system, started in the 1830s, was justified by the racist lie that Native Americans were not competent to make their own decisions.
Many “guardians,” lawyers and businessmen like Hale, used these positions to exploit their “wards.” They approved payment of gouged prices for things their Osage “wards” bought, receiving kickbacks from crooked merchants. They found ways to become the designated heirs to their wards’ headrights, and then set them up for murder.
Opposing the Osage: Forces Much Bigger than Hale, the FBI, or Scorsese Could Imagine
The Getty family (George and his son J Paul) became millionaires from Osage County oil. Phillips Oil and Petroleum did too. All the power was in the hands of the oil companies, the “guardians,” and local politicians who made deals with the oil companies.
The movie shows the murder of one family but ignores the other deaths of Osage people in what the Osage call the 1920s reign of terror.
And more fundamentally, it completely ignores the destruction of the communal society of Indigenous people in the service of capitalism.
Hollywood will never expose the bloody and inhumane birth of capitalism and its murderous reality today. That’s our task. Along with building the fight for a communist society – based on comradely social relationships, not money – that can recreate communal property and cooperation on an even stronger basis.
Movie Review: “Oppenheimer” Imperialism: Death and Destroyer of Worlds
EL SALVADOR— “As the film develops, it shows the Manhattan Project as the manipulation of the destructive power and sadism of imperialism.” This was a Red Flag reader’s comment after a group watched and discussed it.
This film brings us face to face with the imperialist rivalry, the war, and the crisis that existed in 1945. Capitalism in its imperial stage had become a system of oppression and strangulation of the working class worldwide. This framed the confrontation between the Allies and the Central Powers in World War II.
The United States wanted to become the number one world power. It disguises the use of the atom bomb in 1945 as “necessary” to end the conflict and lay the foundations for peace.
Oppenheimer defends the use of the atomic bomb: “They will not fear it until they understand it, and they will not understand it until they have used it.” Oppenheimer is the film’s focus, not the atom bomb’s victims.
The movie does not show the full horror and devastation experienced in Japan after the bombing. 214,000 workers and family members were incinerated. Many survivors suffered radioactive effects, cancers, discrimination, and social rejection.
All this even though the United States knew that Japan was about to surrender. It was just an imperialist strategy, a direct threat to Russia to stop its imperialist expansion.
It forced other US allies to accept that the new world order would be led by US imperialism with its IMF and its World Bank.
The film also does not show the impact of the bomb elsewhere.
The Trinity test in New Mexico, on July 16, 1945, was the first-ever detonation of a nuclear weapon. The United States Army conducted it as part of the Manhattan Project of Los Alamos National Laboratory.
It released large-scale radiation over areas populated primarily by Hispanics and Native Americans. High levels of radiation cause deaths and cancers to this day.
Later, the US exploded a hydrogen bomb a thousand times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb over the Marshall Islands, a Pacific archipelago. Several islands were vaporized. Many people died. Others suffered birth defects and battled cancer. In total, 67 nuclear explosions occurred there between 1946 and 1958.
Capitalist imperialism has hidden the historical events on which the film is based. Obviously, the ruling class does not care about life or the environment, but only about its power.
Capitalism and Imperialism = Death and Destruction
Comrades and friends discussed and criticized the film. C concluded: “Capitalists only seek to maximize profits. They live by competing. They do what they do best: money for a few and the masses are still hungry. That is why they always need imperialist wars to remain the most powerful, thus defeating their enemies.”
“In the middle of a new European war, the Yankees (US) and NATO use Ukrainian people as cannon fodder. The UN is inert in the face of ethnic cleansing by the Russians, threats of tactical nuclear bombs, thousands of civilians killed by cluster bombs, only to mention what is visible on the western side of this media war,” R added.
The capitalist class maintains control through violence. We said that only communist revolution can end imperialist wars, racism, sexism, borders, and exploitation. We encourage other readers to watch and discuss it as well.
Life Depends on a Communist World
The rulers use nuclear war as a threat against the communist revolution, to build pacifism, and to try to get people to accept a “lesser evil” imperialist. We will not be intimidated into passivity. Nor will we side with one imperialist over another. ICWP needs to mobilize masses of workers, youth, and soldiers to fight for communist workers’ power.
If the rulers threaten to use — or do use — nuclear weapons anywhere in the world, the workers of the world must and will mobilize to end their rule forever! Neither nuclear blackmail nor nuclear war will stop the communist-led working class from making revolution.