Easy work:
you just fail
everybody
Helen Mirren is right.
The UK has become
brutal and cruel
Politicians
of the
week
Dharmendra Singh reviews The Social Network
My rating: 4/5 stars
‘You don’t get to 500 million friends without making a few enemies.’
When I read that this film was about the creation of Facebook, I thought: would I be as enthused by a film about the creation of Twitter? But this film isn’t about social networks. It’s about what happens to friends when ambition, commitment and loyalty turn into greed, envy and betrayal.
Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg is an adept computer-programmer. After breaking up with his girlfriend, he revengefully hacks into confidential records to retrieve images of female students, which he uses to create a perverse online game where people can decide who is ‘hot or not’.
This causes a furore, as singular dexterity was required to commit such an act. His programming prowess duly attracts the attention of other Harvard students, who request Zuckerberg’s help to form a forerunner of Facebook. Zuckerberg accepts and before long is sued by them – and also by his best friend – for intellectual property theft.
Much of the film takes place before a tribunal.
We learn that Zuckerberg’s motivation is not money. Nor is it prestige. It is battling against an inferiority complex by obsessing in his vocation. Either that or he is what some people with power cannot avoid being: hubristic.
It’s understandable why he did not want a film to be made about him while he was alive. His portrayal (by Jessie Eisenberg) is not a generous one: cold, supercilious, treacherous. Paradoxically, he was the one to realise what humans crave most is interaction with other humans.
Aaron Sorkin deserves standalone recognition for his peppery script. Unlikely though it may be, Justin Timberlake (yes, the pop singer) gives a suave performance as business brain Sean Parker. I didn’t think I’d sympathise with the plight of the well-to-do youngsters; yet I did, thanks to the credible lead performances of Eisenberg and Andrew Garfield (soon to play Spider-Man) as Facebook co-creator Eduardo Saverin.
Oscar Wilde said: ‘To disagree with three-fourths of the British public is one of the first requisites of sanity’. You could say a similar thing about the one in every 14th person on earth who subscribes to Facebook. But not of Mark Zuckerberg. He is arguably one of the finest minds of our dot-com era. Unarguably, he is the youngest billionaire in history.
Alan Fisher
Across the world last Friday night, a selected few news outlets published and broadcast the details of the biggest leak of classified military documents. Obtained by the website Wikileaks, the 400,000 documents gave a startling insight into the war in Iraq. Here is where I declare my interest.
Besides the Guardian newspaper in the UK, the New York Times and Germany’s Der Spiegel, my employer, the global news channel Al Jazeera English, was one of the outlets with prior access to the documents. Working with the Bureau for Investigative Journalism, it combed the documents for 10 weeks to produce a series of reports.
Two of the most startling revelations were that despite repeated and persistent denials, the US has been keeping a running tally of the civilian deaths in Iraq. From the figures in the documents, the respected organisation the Iraq Body Count has amended its figures upwards for the number of innocent civilians killed in the war. It now stands at 122,000.
The US always denied keeping the figures because it wanted to undermine any protests against civilian loss of life, a lesson learned from its involvement in Vietnam. In short, when asked for a tally – it lied. Then there is the shocking revelation that Saddam’s torture chambers have not been dismantled but are now operating under new management.
The documents reveal that far from bringing democracy and humanity to a country ruled by a blood-soaked tyrant, the Americans turned a blind eye to the systematic torture, abuse, rape and murder carried out by Iraqi security forces. Just last December American troops ignored a video passed to them which allegedly showed Iraqi army officers executing a prisoner.
far from the predictable anger of ‘jihadists’ and ‘radicalisers’, perhaps the biggest concern is the reaction of ordinary Iraqis for whom the war was allegedly fought.
At the height of military operations in post-Saddam Iraq, a senior Army officer, during a Pentagon briefing was asked about allegations of torture. He reiterated that US troops should stop such things if they knew them to exist. He was quickly corrected by the then defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, who said they should ‘report it’.
And it has become clear that 681 civilians, including 30 children, have been killed at checkpoints manned by US and Iraqi troops. The number of insurgents killed in this way is 120. It must be terrifying to be on patrol, worried if the next car is the one which is packed with enough explosives to carry you to the hereafter. It may explain some of the deaths but critics say it doesn’t explain them all.
It is hard for the Pentagon and the other countries involved in the coalition of the willing to dismiss these figures as biased, or skewed or wrong. Or to be dreamt up by journalists or anti-war protestors. These are figures from their own troops on the front line. And so there is the predictable line of defence that these figures are ‘unhelpful’ or that they put the lives of soldiers and Iraqi civilians at risk.
The former head of international terrorism and Iraq for the UK’s joint intelligence committee is scathing about the release. Colonel Richard Kemp says there is nothing new in the documents but that they are a propaganda victory for the jidhadists and ‘excellent tools for fundraisers and radicalisers’. There appears to be a contradiction here. If indeed there is little new, how can this leak stir up fresh anger? And far from the predictable anger of ‘jihadists’ and ‘radicalisers’, perhaps the biggest concern is the reaction of ordinary Iraqis for whom the war was allegedly fought.
Colonel Kemp criticises the founder of Wikileaks, Julian Assange, as a man without first- hand combat experience and limited understanding of the ‘inevitable and universal horrors of war’. As if somehow that diminishes the ability he – or others who have never been on the front line – may have to distinguish right from wrong.
The release of these documents reaffirms what many of us have realised for a long time; the genie the information revolution has released is not about to be put back in the bottle and populations cannot be easily shielded from the consequences of war. And, in turn, that means that the public must be convinced of the necessity to go to war, the cause being fought for and importantly, how it is being fought. This greater transparency may make it harder to go to war. Given the human cost laid bare here – that is right and proper.
Alan Fisher is an Al Jazeera correspondent
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