Military vehicles enter Istanbul Ataturk Airport following an attempted coup

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After my wife had returned home we expected a police raid or something, but nothing happened. Immediately, my wife was on the phone, trying to connect with her new employer, which she so prudently had found well beforehand, and now she was imploring them to help us. We did not have enough cash for even one plane ticket, and we needed two. Fortunately, the employer already knew what was happening in Turkey and agreed to advance us the money. Thus our plane tickets were purchased for us immediately.

We fled the country the very next evening.  The day was spent in crazy packing and preparation. We were leaving nearly everything we had bought in Turkey. Around midnight we stepped out of our apartment for the last time, carrying two suitcases and a couple of bags. I looked back at our temporary home and only shook my head in sad disbelief. It had served us well while it lasted. It was a typical furnished modern apartment in a typical Turkish apartment house, completed with a customary sofa and plump armchairs, a Turkish rug, a dishwasher, a huge bed, and various trinkets. We did not manage to add to its furnishing much — just a few lamps, cookery, and other small things. Still, it used to be our home. The only thing that we carried from the apartment, except for our luggage, was our live Christmas tree that we bought the last Christmas. (I was somewhat surprised that Turkish supermarkets sold Christmas decorations and tiny live Christmas trees planted in soil-filled baskets.). I hated the thought of throwing it away. Therefore, we took it to the lobby and implored a security guard to give it to a maintenance guy in the morning so he would plant it somewhere on the building grounds.

After that, we asked the security guard to call us a taxi. It arrived promptly within ten minutes. But when we told the driver we were going to the airport,  he broke into a long angry tirade in Turkish. The security guard, who was standing nearby, tried to translate what the guy had said. It went this: “You need special permits to go to the airport! Do you have special permits? No?”

The taxi turned around and left without us. We were stunned. What special permit? What was he talking about? My wife was frantic while she continued to ask the security guard the same question again, again and again. He called us another taxi, but this time my wife showed the driver our boarding passes, which she smartly printed a while ago. The driver seemed satisfied this time, and so we got into the taxi and drove off. Read more

Chaucer, Shakespeare and Dickens are perhaps the three central figures of English literature. Representing respectively poetry, drama and prose, they have been hugely influential for centuries, read, analysed and quoted by countless millions around the world in every language from English and Afrikaans to Hindi and Mandarin.

Viral Vectors

But in modern times all three of them have also been condemned as vectors of an ancient and deadly ideological virus: anti-Semitism. In the Prioress’s Tale (c. 1390), Chaucer wrote of a saintly Christian child murdered by evil Jews. In The Merchant of Venice (c. 1596), Shakespeare brought life to Shylock, a vengeful and cunning Jewish merchant. In Oliver Twist (1838), Dickens portrayed Fagin, the corrupter, tutor and fence to a gang of child-thieves:

In a frying-pan, which was on the fire, and which was secured to the mantelshelf by a string, some sausages were cooking; and standing over them, with a toasting-fork in his hand, was a very old shrivelled Jew, whose villainous-looking and repulsive face was obscured by a quantity of matted red hair. He was dressed in a greasy flannel gown, with his throat bare; and seemed to be dividing his attention between the frying-pan and the clothes-horse, over which a great number of silk handkerchiefs were hanging. (Oliver Twist, chapter 8)

Dickens began his hate-stereotype as he meant to go on: sluicing Fagin with millennia’s-worth of gentile malice, from the red hair of Judas to the venality and ruthlessness ascribed to Jewish moneylenders in the Middle Ages. Fagin looks villainous because he is villainous: selfish, cunning, and manipulative. And his villainy is inseparable from his race and religion. Dickens refers to him as “the Jew” more than three hundred times in early editions of Oliver Twist.

Charles Dickens (1812–1870)

Because Fagin is a hate-stereotype, there is no need to ask whether he also is an accurate portrayal of how some Jews behaved in Victorian times. Some scholars have claimed that Fagin was based on the Jewish criminal Ikey Solomon, whom Dickens observed when he worked as a journalist. Dickens himself claimed: “Fagin in Oliver Twist is a Jew, because it unfortunately was true of the time to which that story refers, that that class of criminal almost invariably was a Jew.”

These claims are irrelevant. As I pointed out in “Reality is Racist,” if an accusation invokes a hate-filled stereotype, the accusation can be dismissed out of hand. All decent people know this. When the playwright Alan Bennett came across a British cartoon from World War II that portrayed “black marketeers” as “strongly Semitic in features,” he condemned it instantly as unacceptable, without pausing to consider whether it was based on a statistical reality. Read more

“I’m caught in a whirlwind
I’m going to heaven
I’m standing on trial and it’s painted on canvas
An eternal testament to how we are so animalistic ”
– Ashamed, by Deertick

Oliver Stone has quite the track record when it comes to biopics. With three films based on former United States Presidents (JFK, Nixon and W.), and an additional feature about the man who is arguably the most influential leader in the history of Western Civilization (Alexander) he is no stranger to the complexity of the human spirit caught in flight between the firmament of absolute truth and the gravity of the world as it is, with mankind’s’ jealousy and corruption dragging down the state. These men all stood on the precipice of a great decline — a potential implosion of their societies — and in their own respective ways tried to arrest the social decay and abuses they saw eating at their population.

So too, Snowden. The character studies his previous films became have been criticized by some for being sympathetic. But for his own part, Stone has insisted sympathy was never his goal. In an industry that has relied on the formula of the Hero’s Journey, Oliver Stone has attempted many times to break the mold and create a fresh perspective for informed audiences of his historical dramas. With Snowden we finally watch this alternate narrative truly flourish. The audience isn’t left loving or hating Edward. Instead we gain an understanding of the weight of this man’s convictions. This understanding forces viewers to question themselves and in that way develop empathy for the subject. Could you stand up against the great beast? How would you endure, not knowing if you’d be destroyed by a seemingly all-powerful super state or exonerated by the people it was supposed to protect?

During a recent interview at the Harvard Institute of Politics Stone told Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Ron Suskind that he initially had turned down the option to make the film. It’s not usually a good investment to tell the story of someone who is still making headlines. The potential for us to come to a conclusion about the subject that will later be abrogated by some startling and unforeseen revelation is too great. If such details unfold, the integrity of the film you’ve made is irreparably damaged. It was only after being contacted by Ed Snowden’s Russian lawyer — who has also authored an untranslated spy novel about a conflicted whistle blower — he began to warm up to the idea. Meeting Snowden in Moscow several times the director learned there was an opportunity to tell a story that would persuade theater goers to question both themselves and the government. Read more