 when it was roundly mocked on the Chapo podcast. I immediately knew that I had to see this film;){kind=link}
I first heard about Red Scorpion (1988) when it was roundly mocked on the Chapo podcast. I immediately knew that I had to see this film; especially since I am also reading the landmark tome of historian Piero Gleijeses on Cuba’s efforts to defend Angola from the marauding armies of apartheid South Africa.
The film is a bad action movie and I don’t even say that for political reasons. The acting is terrible, the dialogue is poorly written and the stunts are poorly shot, so much so at times that they create a visual ellipse by cutting a botched take. The heroes are seemingly invincible to bullets, so everybody does that 80s action thing where you run around in plain sight, shooting from the hip.
What sets this film apart from other bad actions is that it was financed by the military of South Africa’s apartheid regime, through an American lobbyist named Jack Abramoff — a Reaganite who would later accede to the Bush administration, before being jailed for swindling Native-American tribes to the tune of 85 million dollars in a casino lobbying scam. He made himself known in college for organizing a celebration on the one-year anniversary of the invasion of Grenada. He then founded the “International Freedom Foundation”, which served as a front for the apartheid money and propaganda efforts that produced this movie.
Red Scorpion succeeds in being a pro-apartheid film and it does so by not presenting apartheid as we would understand it: a system of white supremacist, imperial and capitalist domination over millions of black-skinned African peoples, in which the latter are geographically constrained, politically policed and economically drained. In fact, apart from a plucky American “journalist”, the whites in this movie are all Soviets and Cubans, each crueler than the other. This is possible because the movie is set in Angola, a country north of Namibia that the South African military was not supposed to be in… If the macro-structure and cui bono reality of apartheid is not visible then, what we see in Red Scorpion is a world defined by the most optimistic expression of its ideology: the virtue of racial separateness (the Dutch word apartheid could be literally translated as “apart-hood”, the quality of existing apart), such that a paradigm of benign, extra-temporal and mystical Black-African difference affronts multiracial and godless modernizers and their totalitarian universalism, incarnated by the MPLA regime and their Communist patrons.
Apartheid was structured by the creation of landlocked and exclusive “Bantustans” reserved for different local tribes, which would allegedly allow for each “race” to develop according to its own intrinsic nature. And because by the 1970s the international Left had succeeded in largely discrediting the principle of white supremacy, making Western capitalist support for and commerce with South Africa increasingly costly, Pretoria and its partisans abroad had to redefine the terms of their ideological framework. In 1974, selling his pro-apartheid, pro-“European” position, French fascist writer and father of today’s “Identitarian” current Alain Benoist would avoid an explicitly pro-Nazi line and instead aimed to present his position as one of even-handed and civil-rights-minded defender of cultural identity. In “Against All Racisms” (sic), he wrote: ”One has the right to be for Black Power, on the condition that one is, at the same time, for White Power, and Yellow Power.”
Accordingly, Nikola, the movie’s Soviet-Ukrainian hero, becomes a good guy disposed toward killing Communists only once he has been adopted, initiated and physically branded by a hermetic tribe of Bushmen living in Stone Age conditions, who believe in spirit animals and operate an obscure shamanic ritual on him with scorpion venom. This embarrassing sequence contains no dialogue, as the pure, untouched cultural identity of the Bushmen is apparently tangential to modern forms of discursive logic: as our hairless half-naked hulk Nikola returns to the camp of the all-black, anticommunist “liberation” fighters he once persecuted, he simply declares : “I think now that I understand your struggle”.
Also visible in Red Scorpion are the gendered politics of violent anticommunist internationalism as described by historian Kyle Burke in his Revolutionaries for the Right: “US conservatives’ affinity for anticommunist guerrillas in the global South also stemmed from and reinforced gendered assumptions about the kind of action needed to win the Cold War. They tended to believe that the struggle against Communism could only be won through a style of combat that prioritized manly virtues such as courage, strength and derring-do. For them, paramilitary or guerrilla warfare was the ideal mode of action not just because it destabilized communist nations from within, but also because it embodied and enhanced the gendered notions they held dear. […] these were hard men doing the hard work of fighting subversives and building strong societies.”
Appropriately, during the hero’s ominous initial briefing in Moscow, a Soviet woman is present among the military brass. Later in the film, a uniformed Cuban woman accompanies the commander of the Cuban mission in Angola. But neither of these seemingly important women seem useful for anything; neither speak, even when spoken to, and the Cuban, though passively complicit in the purposeless torture of the hero, is neither capable of defending herself, nor even worth killing. Conversely, the women of the God-fearing “rebels” are always depicted babe in arms or running in fear, predictable but precious objects of the wartime failures and victories of more-or-less valiant men.
The last aspect to address in Red Scorpion is its perverted inversion of historical reality as concerns methods of repression and responsibility for crimes in southern Africa. The fact is that revolutionary Cuba mounted a generous and heroic defence of Angola’s independence, in the face of Pretoria’s illegal incursions and without compromising on the MPLA’s righteous decision to allow anti-apartheid guerrillas from other lands (Zimbabwe, Namibia) to circulate and establish bases in their country. Of course, at the time of this film’s release, your average American viewer would have been fermenting from birth in all kinds of lazy but audacious propaganda about Cuba and the USSR’s role on the world stage, and the cartoon-bad guy meanness of their people in Angola would have been even easier to believe for those who gave any credence to their president: According to Reagan, South Africa’s government was protecting itself and its neighbors from Marxist terrorists who were at once manipulated by the USSR (Cuba, the major anti-apartheid player in the region, was systematically presented as a Soviet puppet) and themselves manipulating a rhetoric of national liberation and anti-racism in their efforts to impose an aggressive and murderous ideology. For anybody familiar with the record though, it’s baffling to see this movie’s omnipresent Soviet gunships (when there were effectively none, allowing South Africa to bomb Angola, occupy its southern regions and supply the pro-apartheid bands of Jonas Savimbi without obstacle); its poison gas used against civilians (which never happened); its flame-throwing of recalcitrant villages (something that was actually done by the Portuguese colonial army with help from NATO as seen in Göran Olssen’s documentary Concerning Violence); its mention of a Czechoslovak military presence in Angola (there was none, although Czechoslovakia hosted, trained and armed fighters for Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress) and, of course, its apparent lack of any South African agents among the scrappy and lovable freedom fighters, when in actual fact Savimbi’s UNITA owed their equipment and their victories to their patrons in Pretoria and acted in subservience to Apartheid regime’s strategic imperatives.
Does this at once tedious and heinous movie have any lessons for today? It might encourage Western leftists to dive into recent African political history, reminding them that there is no inherently progressive or reactionary valence attached to any origin or skin color. It could also be worthy to look at similarities (ven if only superficial) between South Africa’s discourse on the virtues of living apart and certain unfortunate caricatures of our richest countries’ liberal identity politics. As The Jacobin Show’s Jen Pan warned us: we have to avoid adopting a framework of racial politics that mimics that of our enemies, while simply placing ourselves on the other side of the inherent binaries it supposes. This is not only a recipe for understanding nothing, it is a recipe for crushing defeat.
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