jakob13

'Exterminate All the Brutes', a title lifted from Joseph Conrad's much quoted 'Heart of Darkness', seemed so promising. Sorry to say, it disappoints. It is as ddry as a university lecturers endlessly droning on during a class that encourages yawns and looking at the clock until the hour ends.

As a series of four, it is hardly exciting.

Raoul Peck is our don; he is in and out of the camera's eye; his voice is everywhere.

He as he says is interested in 'understanding', not condemning. And you can be sure, this grand piety is everything that is condemnatory. Slavery, exploitation, extermination are everything to condemn, for sure.

White supremacy rules 'uber alles'; its essence springs from capitalism that has the ability to redefine and find an afterlife.

From Marx and Engels (Peck shot an excellent 'Young Marx') through Lenin, Trotsky, Galiano, Che, Samir Amin so name a few the red thread weaves a pattern not unfamiliar, yet for Americans and many others, the critique is dulled to the point it hardly ruffles the Puritan way of life of capitalism, a challenge to the order of how things are and ought to be, examples to the contrary.

Public intellectuals anchors to reality have abdicated responsibilty; they have become talking heads on television full of vacuous opinions, vomiting the tritest of the obvious. Individualism pushed to extremes.

On the other anti-European has its mirror image in Said's 'orientalism' or Ian Buruma's 'occidentalism' or Pankash Mishra's writings on Tagore and East Asian writers.

Anyway Peck slices the onion his four part documentary enlightens. (HBO Max offer them only at set dates and times, in English or Spanish. Why?) Despite Peck's flaws, it is worth viewing.

'The Animal Protection Documentary' opens with a song of farewell and departure and by extension of death, a sentiment shared by many animal rescuers and lovers when the animals they saved die. Today in a world overshadowed by a life threatening pandemic COVID-19, it might be sad the documentary speaks to our condition. Wrong. Chan Chi Wah's film is strong and life affirming. The lens he looks through is inspired by the teacc]hing and philosophy of the Venerable Hong Yee. A dharma named monk, once called Lee She Tong, who preached universal protection of all sentient beings with compassion and humility. A belief rooted in behavior in accord with the universe. vision of world solidarity. This vision of world solidarity as translated by Master Yee inducted the most common of men and women with a sense of one's own humanity that makes life feel large and with merit. Chan Chi Wah is a man of protean energy: he wears many hats-Royal Fellow, social anthologist, businessman, award-winning film maker, publisher, producer. "Animal Protection Documentary' is about animal rescuing in Singapore where Chan lives. Its import is not parochial but universal in message. For the ideas it conveys speaks to every corner in our world where animals are rescued and loved, in good times and bad. I am thinking of Aunty Betty an elderly rescuer and carer who can hardly walk who cares for strays with food and love. Or Mrs. Lee who runs Metaccat and places rescued cats in homes. And of course the monasteries who offer sanctuary to cats, rabbits, dogs and sundry other abandoned animals. And the nameless army of animal rescuers and lovers who pay for medical expenses for say Henry an abandoned cat with a kidney disease or is HIV+; and then there are the animals animals abused, made blind or mistreated a d so on. The sad story is that in 2015 86 percent of abandoned or stray animals in Singapore are destroyed. 'The Animal Documentary' is a lesson in human decency and deserve the widest distribution possible.