Word: hooverism
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...Oliver Stone let this one get away? A gang of '60s rebels, an aura of righteous violence, the charge that fbi boss J. Edgar Hoover and the Mafia flooded America's cities with cheap drugs-why, it's all so lurid, it must be true. And if it's not, it can still be a movie...
...film's main new charge is that with the Mafia's connivance, Hoover sent the Black Revolution a toxic sedative: cheap dope. And it worked too well, enslaving whites as well as blacks. As Panther notes, America has 10 times as many drug addicts now as it did in the '60s. The notion of the fbi's fomenting a domestic opium war is piquant-but preposterous. And what if it's true? Are we to blame aboriginal Americans for introducing tobacco to the Europeans...
...only the "enemy" were painted in half as much detail as the Black community. The policemen are unrelentingly brutal and mindless in their hatred. Hoover (Richard Dysart) and his aide (Beau Windham) are ridiculous in their suspicions of Communist influence behind the Panthers; the one black FBI agent is a robotic mouthpiece for integrationism. Like the Black people of Oakland, we can't fathom what fuels their intense hatred, and can only accept the police as an omnipresent menace. The film's interpretation depends on the individual viewer's ability to conceive of law enforcers as a malignant force...
Although the Panthers are soon de-armed by the Mulford Gun Control Bill, Hoover's pressure to eradicate them leads the FBI to seek the aid of informants and, finally, drug dealers. And therein lies the downfall of the Panthers. Like Van Peebles' earlier work, "New Jack City," "Panther" ends with a lament about drugs, whose ravaging effects spread from the hood and into the rest of America, devastating us all. In this new fight, we are all united against a common enemy...
...military installation." Memories are still fresh of the FBI's unbridled COINTELPRO operations in the 1960s and '70s, which targeted antiwar groups. "If we panic, we shall wind up demonizing ethnic groups and letting our law-enforcement agencies become as self-serving and corrupt as was J. Edgar Hoover's,'' says the philosopher Richard Rorty. "Britain has been coping with terrorist bombs for a generation without much retrenchment of civil liberties. If they...