How Wolverine Invented the Circus

La La Land probably among my top ten or fifteen favourite films. It’s a beautiful, heartbreaking film, one that aches with loss and yet is still imbued with such joy that even in still images its cast seem to be moving. The Greatest Showman is none of those things. What it is is a lazy, tawdry piece of tat that somehow manages to be over- and under-written at the same time.

                The Greatest Showman, starring Hugh Jackman and directed by some mediocrity or other, is a musical biopic of PT Barnum, the founder of the Barnum and Bailey circus. It starts with Barnum (Jackman) as a child, the son of a poor tailor, with a crush on a rich girl. Five minutes later his father dies and he’s out on his arse, and we get a montage of him being poor that might have elicited some emotion from m e if there’d been any attempt to make me care about this kid. Five minutes later (I’m exaggerating, but not by much) he’s grown up and married the rich girl with basically no difficulty. We see her father slap child-Barnum for making her laugh, then literally the next time we see her she’s riding off into the sunset with adult Barnum. This is a problem that will recur throughout the film – a problem appears that seems significant, only to be resolved almost immediately. It happens at what should be the pivotal moment in the film, when Barnum loses his job and decides to take out a massive loan in order to set up his circus. You expect this to be his big risk – he’ll offer his home as collateral, his entire life will be ruined if the business venture fails, and he’ll have to grow as a character in order to succeed. What happens is, he fraudulently takes out the loan, using a non-existent fleet of ships as collateral. He risks basically nothing – if the circus goes under, he’s in the same situation he was in before.

                This is a good metaphor for one of the major flaws in the film – there’s no conflict. Barnum takes a leap of faith by setting up a freak show, and after a quick montage, he’s a millionaire. Barnum’s wife leaves him because she thinks he’s having an affair (and also because he bankrupted the family), then they sing a song at the beach and she takes him back. The building that houses the circus burns down, Barnum says “let’s do it in a tent”, and – I swear I’m not exaggerating – we cut to a big musical number in a hugely successful tent circus. That’s the end of the film. No drama, no conflict, no real risk for anyone.

                I want to elaborate, here, on something I mentioned earlier – about the film being both over- and under-written. On the one hand, there is a stupid amount going on – you have Barnum’s attempts to make a name for himself (and shove his success in his in-laws’ faces), the prejudice the circus performers face (because they’re funny-looking, obviously, not because most of them are black – there definitely weren’t any problems for black people in 19^th century America, or at least none that the writers considered screen-worthy), and a love story between Zac Effron and a trapeze artist who I’m only now realizing looks kind of like Vanessa Hudgens. And yet, it still feels like nothing happens, because there’s no characterization, no space for any problems to develop enough to become significant, and no moment of tension that isn’t resolved almost instantly, as if the writers were terrified of anything resembling an involving story.

                And come to think of it, isn’t PT Barnum the least interesting character in this story? Why didn’t we get a film about a black brother-and-sister trapeze act who came to New York from the deep South to make their fortune? Why didn’t we get a film about the bearded woman who can sing like an angel, but is shunned by society because of her face, or the others who have been so outcast that the only way they can make a living is by being exhibited in a freak show? Why didn’t we get a film about Dog Boy? I want a three-part, Godfather—style epic about Dog Boy, including a scene where he punches PT Barnum in the dick for deciding that his stage name would be Dog Boy. Seriously, how did that conversation go? You’ve got this incredibly athletic man who’s covered from head to toe in hair. Should you call him the Wolf Man? The Incredible Half-Ape? Nah mate, fucking Dog Boy.

Throughout all this, we are presented with a series of what I can only describe as crap pop songs. The mark of a great musical score is that it sticks in your head for days after you see the film, but the songs in The Greatest Showman are so generic I forgot what they sounded like as I was hearing them. Not one of them is remotely interesting, affecting, or memorable in any way.

                This leads me to the cardinal sin of this film. I could forgive more or less every other flaw – poor writing, pacing, directing, an overwrought score, uninteresting set design, the fact that one of the actors has no surname for some reason – so long as I felt like the filmmakers had tried their best, but as the credits rolled I was left with the overwhelming impression that no one involved with the writing and directing of this pile of shite had actually put much effort in. Everything, from the songs to the dialogue to the endless failed attempts at a plot, is half-arsed. That is the ultimate sin for any artist. If you give your best effort and fail, there’s still something noble in the attempt – you can respect yourself for what you did. But when you phone it in, all you’re doing is taking up space that could have been taken up by someone who gives a fuck about what they do.

A Response to Larry Elliott

Never be fooled into thinking that the rich will allow you to vote away their wealth

- Lucy Parsons

Like any good communist, I spend probably too much time arguing with liberals. It may not be the most productive use of my time, but I tend to choose fun and easy over productive more often than I should. So when I saw Larry Elliott’s Guardian article, entitled “Think our governments can no longer control capitalism? You’ve been duped”, I was ready to start pointing and laughing before I even started reading. As I read the article, though, I realized that that was the wrong response. Larry Elliott, it turns out, is not the stereotypical clueless liberal who thinks that all it takes is a few Change.org petitions and a slight increase in corporation tax to solve all our problems. His analysis of the way that neoliberal orthodoxy has gradually replaced the post-war consensus is good shit. In the whole of this article, Elliott makes only one mistake; the problem (and the reason why I’m writing this response) is that his entire argument is built upon that mistake. Like all liberals, Elliott thinks that whoever controls the state controls the economy: in reality, the opposite is true.

                What I’m about to say will be familiar to anyone who’s watched my video “Democratic Socialism: Baby Steps to Nowhere”. While it may seem like the government runs the country – they are, after all, the ones who make the laws – in reality control lies with the capitalist class, and in particular the super-rich members of that class. The first draft of this post had a long rant here about the various socialist and social-democratic governments that were overthrown by the US and replaced with military dictatorships in order to protect the interests of the global capitalist class, but that was getting a little off topic, because capitalists don’t necessarily need to push powerful governments into military action in order to defeat left-wing and centrist economic policy. While they often have, from Yeltsin’s assault on the Russian parliament to the US-backed coup that crushed democracy in Iran, the capitalist class has other means at its disposal than brute force. Economists from Arthur Laffer to Judith Panadés have explained how increases in taxation on higher earners can actually lead to a reduction in tax revenue, due to an increase in tax avoidance and evasion. This will come as no surprise to most liberals – barely a day goes by without a left-wing or centre-right Facebook page posting a meme about the rich not paying their fair share of tax.  And yet, somehow, these same people think that we can fund Attlee-style reforms by raising the taxes that the super-rich don’t pay.

                Of course, there are some who say that the answer to this problem is simple – just close the tax loopholes, and Richard Branson et al will have to pay up. I certainly said similar things when I was a liberal, because I didn’t understand just how much power a certain level of wealth confers. These are people who can take their money and go. If the loopholes get too tight, the wages too high, or the unions too strong, they can take their business to a country where the workers are easier to exploit. They can arrange capital strikes. They can lobby governments to impose sanctions. Economic warfare can be every bit as destructive as the normal kind, and it can be even more difficult to resist.

                If a British government were to introduce the kind of sweeping social reforms that Attlee or Chavez did, think about what the response would be from those who have the most to lose from such reforms. For a start, let’s look at the financial sector, where 3.1% of our jobs are located and which last year contributed 7.2% of gross value added to our economy. If our government were to start introducing measures such as bonus caps, tighter tax laws, stricter regulations and so on, there would be an immediate backlash – in fact, we could expect the mass exodus of funds to happen before the changes to our laws were even implemented. It would be chaos. And that’s not even taking into account the other sectors of the economy where major business owners would be eager to penalize any government that had the audacity to challenge them. Think Venezuela meets the Winter of Discontent. The fact is that we’ve been paying the Danegeld for decades, and the Danes aren’t going to leave us alone without a fight.

So why, then, you might ask, did Clement Attlee, FDR, Einar Gerhardsen and the other famous reformers manage to make such huge changes without provoking such a response? Well, Larry Elliott actually touches on this in his article:

Consider the facts. By almost any measure, the past decade has been a disaster for living standards. Unemployment has fallen from its post financial-crisis peaks across the developed world but workers have found it hard to make ends meet. Earnings growth has halved in the UK even though the latest set of unemployment figures show that the jobless rate is the lowest since 1975.

The reason is not hard to find. Unions are far less powerful; collective bargaining in most of the private sector is a thing of the past; part-time working has boomed; and people who were once employed by a company are now part of the gig economy.[1]

In the past, unions were stronger, which meant workers had more ability to directly resist their employers – this is why the first order of business for the neoliberal governments of the ‘70s and ‘80s was to break the strength of those unions. On top of that, it was simply much harder for manufacturers to up sticks and move production to China or Bangladesh, which meant that they had a more limited pool of labour to draw on. Finally, there was the looming threat of revolution or revolt. In the 1930s, when Franklin Roosevelt proposed the New Deal, it had been just over a decade since ten thousand miners took part in an armed uprising in West Virginia, and the Farmers’ Holiday Association were blockading highways in the Midwest, threatening to starve the cities in protest at farm foreclosures. In the UK, two years before Clement Attlee was elected Prime Minister, civil unrest was so great that Conservative MP Quintin Hogg was heard to remark, “we must give them reform or they will give us revolution.” Ever present in the minds of the ruling class was the red spectre of the Soviet Union; all they had to do was look to Russia, where just two or three decades earlier what they feared had actually happened.

                Compare that to now, when union membership is at an all-time low, the Overton window is shifting further to the right every year, and the very word “socialism” has been co-opted by the centre-right. The threat of militant action that made past reforms possible is simply no longer there. The ruling class hold all the cards, and electing a moderate centrist or centre-left government is not going to change that.

                What will change it, then? We will. Or we can, at least. An organized, politically conscious public is far more dangerous to those in power than Corbyn or Sanders. We need to stop looking to politicians for help and start helping each other, and ourselves, by engaging in meaningful political action where we are – change comes from the street, not the ballot box.

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[1] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/dec/14/governments-control-capitalism-class-war-right-undermine-workers

Why Bob Dylan Shouldn’t Have Won the Nobel Prize for Literature

Let me preface this by saying that I’m a huge Bob Dylan fan. I’ve been into his music since my mid-teens. He’s the reason why I write songs. In fact, I’d be willing to say that I’m a bigger Dylan fan than you, reader, whoever you might be. I could write a book on the guy – in fact, someday I’d quite like to. I know my Dylanology, is what I’m trying to say.

            He didn’t deserve that Nobel Prize, though.

            Don’t get me wrong – he’s arguably the greatest songwriter of the last hundred years, at least in the English language, and an astounding singer as well. What he isn’t, though, is an author – that is, he doesn’t write books. Apart from his autobiography and the speed-addled ramblings collected in Tarantula, Bob Dylan’s contribution to the world of literature consists of a single poem, “Last Thoughts On Woody Guthrie,” written in the sixties. While that is a good poem, it’s not Nobel Prize-worthy, and even if it were, they don’t give out Nobel Prizes based on single poems (or at least, I hope they don’t). Bob Dylan is a songwriter - his work is to combine words and music, and then to perform them. You don’t read a song. You hear it. I would have hoped that was obvious enough not to need saying, but apparently the Nobel Committee weren’t aware. Maybe they suffer from some unique form of synaesthesia that causes them to interpret sounds as written words (in which case, that sounds both awesome and very inconvenient) but I doubt it; more likely, they were trying to prove that they were down with the kids by honouring a seventy-five-year-old folksinger who hasn’t made a great album since 1997. Sort of like how the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences tried to prove they cared about slavery and the historical oppression of black people by honouring Twelve Years A Slave, the most sanitized portrait of slavery since Gone With The Wind. But let’s not get sidetracked into talking (again) about how fucking dreadful that film was. My point is that the Nobel Committee, in all likelihood, don’t give a shit about Dylan or his body of work. I’d be willing to bet they’ve heard, at most, maybe half a dozen of his songs, and they probably didn’t like them. I have nothing against a good publicity stunt, but this is a Nobel Prize for Literature – it’s not some meaningless bauble that anybody can win, like a Nobel Peace Prize. This matters.

Wait a minute. Be very, very quiet. Be so silent you’re barely breathing, and you’ll hear it, a whisper on the wind, rising like a belch from the unwashed mouths of a million pretentious undergraduates, the eternal battlecry of the musical pseud:

He’s not a lyricist! He’s a poet!

Sorry, but no. No, he isn’t. That’s not my opinion, by the way – it’s an objective fact. Bob Dylan writes songs, not poems.

            Again, you’d think that would be obvious, but it isn’t. Not to the army of “journalists” and hipsters who rush out to brand every half-decent songwriter a poet, and study their lyrics in complete isolation from their music or their performance. These people are to music what pigeons are to statues. It’s as if they can’t bring themselves to admit that songs have any artistic merit. Music, of course, is one thing; they’ll ooh and aah over the brilliance of Bach and Stravinsky all you want, and of course they’ll be able to quote poetry all day long. The worth of words in isolation, and music in isolation, is inarguable to them. But, to them, that’s it; that’s the limit of their artistic consciousness. So when they hear a song, they’ll judge the lyrics by the standards of poetry (a medium in which the words stand alone) and the music by the standards of classical music (a medium in which the sound stands alone), with no awareness of the fact that the two require each other. In a song, the lyrics rely on the music and vice versa. While there are songwriters whose lyrics can be read as poetry (Joni Mitchell, Bill Callahan) and even some whose music could function as instrumentals (Frank Zappa, Scott Walker), most do not fit into that category. If you actually try to read Bob Dylan’s lyrics as poetry, they fail miserably, and the same goes for his music when taken without his voice and lyrics. The magic – the thing that makes him a genius – is what happens when you put the two together. That’s how a song works, and that’s what the Nobel Committee will never understand.

            Murakami wouldn’t have deserved to win either.

The Trouble With Corbyn

Let me start off this article by saying this: I like Jeremy Corbyn. He has solid policies, he’s providing a genuine opposition to the Conservative Party (something no Labour leader has done since the wilderness years before Blair) and, best of all, he’s resolutely refused to engage in the kind of childish name-calling and groin-kick politics that dominate the British political landscape. In a world where MPs in the House of Commons behave with less dignity than a class of five-year-olds, and it has become standard practice to accuse your opponents of being everything from Nazis to Islamofascists to Stalinists due to minor policy differences, Corbyn is a mature, dignified man, quietly presenting the public with fact-based arguments and policies that actually stand up to scrutiny. I’m confident that he will win even the sham of a leadership election that the right wing of the Labour party will allow him to have. I even have a little hope that he might manage to win a general election if it doesn’t happen in the next year or two. But there’s something about Corbyn that makes me less than optimistic on that last score. The politeness and maturity that I – and many others – admire is the very thing that puts Corbyn at a disadvantage. The thing is, it’s difficult to sway people with well-thought-out arguments and logic if they’re not already on vaguely the same side as you. When it comes to bringing people over to your side, brash, emotive arguments and easily-quotable soundbites are much more effective – that’s why the Daily Mail is so much more popular than, say, the Telegraph, despite the fact that they have roughly the same political positions. Corbyn is trying to move us as a nation away from the politics of personality, when politics has always been about personality.

I don't say this often, but maybe we should take a leaf out of Nigel Farage’s book. I mean, look at him: he’s a scrotum-faced, politically incoherent failed abortion of a man with a personality somewhere between the Fat Controller and that weird uncle that’s always one drink away from ranting about the Jews. More importantly, he’s terrible at propaganda. He pretends to be a stereotypical “man of the people” while wearing suits that cost more than I make in a month and having the kind of ridiculously posh voice that you don’t hear anymore outside of newsreel footage from World War Two. Despite the fact that his main political gimmick was being photographed in pubs, he never quite got the hang of looking like he belonged in one. The act of drinking seemed completely alien to him – that’s how bad he was at acting. Maybe he was just used to having his drinks fed to him by gilded castrati. And yet, despite the fact that no one with half a brain could possibly be taken in by him – people were. Smart people. People who actually gave a shit about politics were convinced by the Tommy Wiseau of politicians. Why? Simple: he was loud, confident, unconcerned with good manners or gentlemanly conduct, and he presented himself as an alternative. The fact that he was more of the same, only worse, made no difference – he brought in the protest vote, and now he sits in a parliament he never wanted us to be involved with, collecting a nice big salary. What we need is a left-wing (or, in Corbyn’s case, centre-left) Farage – someone who realises that politics is a fight, not a boxing match, and that if you don't hit below the belt every now and then you’ve got precious little chance of winning. What we need is someone who’s loud, unapologetic, and willing to fuck shit up even at the risk of their career or their success at the polls. Corbyn has to be a firebrand, a Fidel, a John MacLean, PT Barnum with a red flag – someone who can bring over the protest vote with ballyhoo, then keep them on-side with substance. At the moment he’s all steak, no sizzle, which is every bit as bad as the opposite extreme.

Having said that, if you use Corbyn’s alleged “unelectability” as a reason not to vote for him, you’re a fucking idiot, and I hope a seagull shits in your hair. 

He Never Died review

He Never Died is a recent[1] film starring Henry Rollins as an immortal, Jack, who discovers he has a daughter. I’m gonna try to say as little as possible about the plot, because I think it’ll be much more enjoyable for you if you don't know what’s coming. What I will say, though, is that it involves mobsters, cannibalism, and a surprising amount of bingo. What it also involves is a standout performance from Rollins. Jack is pretty similar to Rollins – or at least, to the image of himself that he presents – but even accounting for that, Rollins manages to give a nuanced, engaging portrayal of what could in the wrong hands have been a pretty one-dimensional character. I’ve never seen Rollins act before, apart from his non-speaking role in Heat, and I have to say I was pleasantly surprised. His reaction shots – often a challenge for actors – are hilarious, and his deadpan delivery brings out the comedy in the film, a necessary counterweight to the horror elements of He Never Died. I’m hesitant to describe this as a horror film. Though it deals with a lot of subject matter normally found in horror (gore, the supernatural, possibly the Devil) the overall intent of the film seems not to be to scare the audience, but rather to draw them into Jack’s world. It’s more like a kind of noir character piece, but without the faux-Raymond Chandler shtick that defines too many contemporary attempts at noir.

                The supporting cast are pretty solid too. Jordan Todosey and Kate Greenhouse, playing Jack’s daughter Andrea and love interest Cara respectively, manage to convey a lot of character through very few lines. That’s something that’s worth remarking on, actually – there are very few words per minute in this film. In a world where far too many films feel the need to cram big, unwieldy lumps of dialogue (much of it pointless) into every scene, it’s refreshing to see that writer-director Jason Krawczyk knows when to let his characters be silent.

Having said that, there are still some things wrong. This isn’t Krawczyk’s first feature film, but it sometimes feels like it is. The first forty minutes is about ten minutes too long. The story briefly gets lost, and while I don’t want to spoil anything, there’s something Jack does that doesn’t seem to fit with his character. Also, while Rollins is a good actor, he still flounders a little in the film’s finale – there are a few lines that he delivers as if he’s reading them for the first time. Overall, something just seems to be missing, and I can’t quite tell what. The plot is fascinating, the characters are well-written, the camerawork is excellent, and yet I still found my attention drifting at moments when my eyes should have been glued to the screen. There’s just something about the whole thing that makes it feel like less than the sum of its parts.

                All in all, I’d recommend seeing He Never Died if you’ve got 99 minutes to spare. It’s on Netflix, and it’s certainly superior to most horror films out there at the moment.

Rating: 6/10

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[1] Released 17 March this year

International Working Women's Day - Part Five

To begin the fifth part of my International Working Women's Day series, I need to tell you a little about the Stonewall uprising.

The Stonewall Inn was a queer pub in the Greenwich Village area of Manhattan, back in the sixties. As you'd expect, the police regularly raided the bar. They would subject the patrons to sexual harassment and assault, as they did in most queer bars at the time. On the night of the 28th of June 1969, though, they came to the wrong pub.

It's often said that noone knows who struck the first blow, but that's inaccurate - we know who struck the first blow, and the second, the third, and the hundredth. The police did. What we don't know is who was the first to fight back. The way I heard it was that Marsha Johnson was the second one to bottle a police officer, and it's her that I'll be focusing on today.

Johnson was no stranger to police brutality. As a black, transgender, homeless woman she was regularly on the receiving end of violence from queerbashers, civilian and police both. Many others who fought at Stonewall had similar experiences - the uprising was led by the queer street youth, who were primarily transgender and black or latino. As the police began loading people into a waiting van, the patrons of the bar began throwing coins at the officers. That they threw coins was especially important - many of these were people who may not have eaten that day, who had practically nothing, but they took the change in their pockets and used it as a weapon to fight for their brothers, sisters and non-binary siblings. That is what solidarity means.

The coins were followed by bottles, and soon the rioters had rushed the van and liberated the prisoners, while the police resorted to locking themselves in the pub. Detective Inspector Pine, one of the men who was involved in the raid, said, "I had been in combat situations, but there was never any time I felt more scared than then." (1)

He had reason to be scared - the rioters were nowhere near finished. There was an attempt made to set fire the the Stonewall Inn and burn the police inside - when that failed, the rioters ripped a parking meter out of the ground and used it as a battering ram.

When riot police arrived to back up their colleagues, the Stonewall rioters took them on, too, and held their own. Altogether, the uprising continued in spontanaeous protests and disturbances for five days.

Marsha Johnson fought in the Stonewall uprising, but that wasn't her only, or even her most important, achievement. Soon after Stonewall, in the face of condemnation from mainstream gay organisations like the Mattachine Society, Johnson and several other radical queers form the Gay Liberation Front. They consciously named themselves after the National Liberation Front in Vietnam, and they linked the struggle for queer rights to socialism. They raised money for striking workers, and organised in solidarity with the Black Panther Party, leading Huey Newton to publicly declare his support for queer rights. Soon, the GLF had sister organisations on three continents, including one lead by Peter Tatchell.

Along with her close freind and fellow Stonewall veteran Sylvia Rivera, Johnson founded STAR (Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries) in 1970 as a caucus of the GLF. STAR took in homeless queer youth, giving them a place to stay and a surrogate family, led by the Queen Mother herself, Marsha Johnson. Johnson and Rivera often did sex work in order to pay rent and bills, and to keep their young charges from having to do the same.

Later, in the 1980s, Johnson became a part of ACT UP, the AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power. At a time when the US government was content to let gay people die from AIDS, ACT UP organised demonstrations to bring attention to the AIDS crisis, and to push for government action to deal with it. They had many successes, and their actions have been credited with helping push the government into passing reforms that made AIDS and HIV medication easier to access.

In 1992, Marsha P Johnson's body was found floating in the Hudson River.

There is some debate over whether she was murdered or committed suicide, but it comes down to the same thing in the end. Regardless, Johnson's life was one worth celebrating: she was by all accounts a colourful, vivacious woman who brought great joy to those who knew her, and she was one hell of an activist, which is why I'm writing about her here.

1. http://www.socialistalternative.org/stonewall-riots-1969/

International Working Women's Day - Part Four

Hello again - I was travelling most of Friday and working yesterday, so I didn't get a chance to post the fourth part of my International Working Women's Day series. Anyway, here it is.

Leila Khaled has been a hero of mine ever since I saw her speak at an SWP event in London in 2012. She had to give her lecture via Skype from Oman, because due to her activities as a member of the PFLP she had been denied entry to the UK.

The PFLP (Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine) is a Marxist-Leninist revolutionary group fighting for an independent, socialist Palestinian state. Leila Khaled is a founding member of the group, which grew out of the Pan-Arab Nationalist Movement, and she has participated in numerous actions, including being part of the Black September hijackings in 1970.

By 1970, twenty-six-year-old Khaled was no stranger to hijackings - the previous year she had become the first women ever to hijack an aeroplane. That plane had been TWA Flight 840, flying from Rome to Athens, with - so the PFLP leadership thought - Yahtzik Rahman, Israeli ambassador to the United States, on board. Unfortunately, they were mistaken. Khaled had the pilot fly over Haifa, her birthplace, before landing in Damascus - she wanted to see the place where she was born, a place she hadn't been to since she and her family were forced from their country in 1948. The passengers were allowed to disembark (unharmed, I should add) and once they were out of harm's way Khaled and her fellow hijackers blew up the nose section of the plane.

After the hijacking, a picture of Leila Khaled wearing a kaffiyeh and holding an AK-47 was widely publicised. A cross between Audrey Hepburn and Che Guevara, Khaled's image became iconic - this posed a problem for her. If she was to carry out further hijackings, she couldn't afford to be recognised.

For Khaled, the answer was simple: if her face made her a less effective revolutionary, then she would change her face. And that's just what she did - between her first hijacking and Black September, Leila Khaled had six operations on her nose and chin to alter her appearance. Clearly, the operations worked.

Unfortunately, the hijacking was a failure. Israeli air marshals captured Khaled and killed her comrade, Nicaraguan-American Patrick Arguello. She was later released as part of a prisoner exchange with the PFLP.

At the lecture she gave in 2012, Khaled proved that the years have done nothing to dull her intellect, or her commitment to the struggle. She brilliantly broke down the events that were then occurring in Syria, and spoke of the need for Syria - and all Arab countries - to be free from both Western imperialism and their own home-grown tyrants. She also warned of the risk of "further Islamification" (her words) of the Middle East, a warning that, with the rise of ISIS, proved to be accurate.

Leila Khaled was, and remains, an iconic example of someone who has dedicated her life to a noble cause.