[This article was originally published by HuffPost.]

By Norman Solomon

In the last few days, both Politico and the New York Times have reported that freshman Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has ruffled the feathers of fellow congressional Democrats. Chief among the reasons for the tension? Ocasio-Cortez’s apparent support for progressive primary challenges against centrist Democrats.

It’s one of the most significant ideas the young New York congresswoman has brought with her to Washington.

That’s because turning the Democratic Party into a truly progressive force will require turning “primary” into a verb. The corporate Democrats who dominate the party’s power structure in Congress should fear losing their seats because they’re out of step with constituents. And Democratic voters should understand that if they want to change the party, the only path to do so is to change the people who represent them. Otherwise, the leverage of Wall Street and the military-industrial complex will continue to hold sway.

These days, with fingers to the wind, incumbents often give lip service to proposals that have wide public support nationwide, such as Medicare for All (70 percent) and higher taxes on the wealthy (76 percent). But big gaps remain between what most congressional Democrats are willing to fight for and what their constituents actually want.

Credible primary challenges ― or even just the threat of them ― can work wonders. Instead of merely asking a member of Congress to do the right thing, activists can convey a much more persuasive message: Do the right thing or we’ll replace you with someone who will.

Alexandra Rojas, executive director of Justice Democrats (a group that played a major role in Ocasio-Cortez’s election victory), emphasizes that “safe” Democratic districts shouldn’t stay safe for just any Democrat. The goal is to “hold representatives who throw diverse working-class voters under the bus accountable.”

Justice Democrats communications director Waleed Shahid wrote in a Jan. 6 mass email that “real on-the-ground organizing work” can bring “a new generation of progressive leaders like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez into the Democratic Party.” He added: “We believe there are leaders just like Alexandria in every district ― who just need a little bit of encouragement and support.”

While largely ideological, the battle lines are also attitudinal and behavioral. Democrats need to replace passive liberals with real progressive boat-rockers. That’s how Northern California Rep. Ro Khanna has distinguished himself from the longtime incumbent he defeated in 2016, Mike Honda. And attitude was a big reason why, in Boston last year, Ayanna Pressley was able to win a primary victory over senior Rep. Mike Capuano.

Both Honda and Capuano hardly legislated as centrists ― both leaned left and earned antiwar credentials ― but they lost to challengers who insisted that just checking progressive boxes wasn’t enough. There’s a crying need for highly assertive leaders who think and act outside the box. During his first two years in office, Khanna has repeatedly put forward wise alternatives to Democratic leadership on domestic issues as well as foreign-policy matters ranging from Syria, Yemen and Korea to U.S. relations with Russia.

Yet Ocasio-Cortez and Pressley were the only two candidates to oust Democrats from Congress in primaries last year, a fact that underscores how difficult it is to win a primary against an entrenched incumbent. It also reflects the routinely unmet need to devote sufficient advance planning, time and resources to the mission.

What’s needed is rigorous long-term organizing to make “primarying” an effective weapon ― identifying which incumbent Democrats to confront and then implementing visionary yet realistic campaigns to beat them. That’s what Ocasio-Cortez did to defeat the fourth-ranking Democrat in the House, Joe Crowley, last summer.

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By Norman Solomon

Well-informed public discussion is a major hazard for Democratic Party elites now eager to prevent Bernie Sanders from winning the 2020 presidential nomination. A clear focus on key issues can bring to light the big political differences between Sanders and the party’s corporate-friendly candidates. One way to muddy the waters is to condemn people for pointing out facts that make those candidates look bad.

National polling shows that the U.S. public strongly favors bold policy proposals that Sanders has been championing for a long time. On issues ranging from climate change to Medicare for All to tuition-free public college to Wall Street power, the party’s base has been moving leftward, largely propelled by an upsurge of engagement from progressive young people. This momentum is a threat to the forces accustomed to dominating the Democratic Party.

In recent weeks, Texas Congressman Beto O’Rourke has become a lightning rod in a gathering political storm — largely because of the vast hype about him from mass media and Democratic power brokers. At such times, when spin goes into overdrive, we need incisive factual information. Investigative journalist David Sirota provided it in a deeply researched Dec. 20 article, which The Guardian published under the headline “Beto O’Rourke Frequently Voted for Republican Legislation, Analysis Reveals.”

Originating from the nonprofit Capital & Main news organization, the piece reported that “even as O’Rourke represented one of the most solidly Democratic congressional districts in the United States, he has frequently voted against the majority of House Democrats in support of Republican bills and Trump administration priorities.”

Progressives have good reasons to like some of O’Rourke’s positions. But Sirota’s reporting drilled down into his voting record, reviewing “the 167 votes O’Rourke has cast in the House in opposition to the majority of his own party during his six-year tenure in Congress. Many of those votes were not progressive dissents alongside other left-leaning lawmakers, but instead votes to help pass Republican-sponsored legislation.”

But it’s better to learn revealing political facts sooner rather than later. Thanks to Sirota’s coverage, for instance, we now know “O’Rourke has voted for GOP bills that his fellow Democratic lawmakers said reinforced Republicans’ anti-tax ideology, chipped away at the Affordable Care Act (ACA), weakened Wall Street regulations, boosted the fossil fuel industry and bolstered Donald Trump’s immigration policy.”

The backlash to Sirota’s news article was in keeping with a tweet two weeks earlier from Neera Tanden, the president of the influential and lavishly funded Center for American Progress, who has long been a major ally of Bill and Hillary Clinton. On Dec. 6, Tanden went over-the-top in response to a tweet from Sirota simply mentioning the fact that O’Rourke “is the #2 recipient of oil/gas industry campaign cash in the entire Congress.”

Tanden lashed out via Twitter, writing: “Oh look. A supporter of Bernie Sanders attacking a Democrat. This is seriously dangerous. We know Trump is in the White House and attacking Dems is doing Trump’s bidding. I hope Senator Sanders repudiates these attacks in 2019.”

Such calculated nonsense indicates just how panicky some powerful corporate Democrats are about Bernie’s likely presidential campaign — and just how anxious they are to protect corporate-oriented candidates from public scrutiny. The quest is to smother meaningful discussions of vital issues that should be center stage during the presidential campaign.

Corporate Democrats are gearing up to equate principled, fact-based critiques of their favored candidates with — in Tanden’s words — “seriously dangerous” attacks that are “doing Trump’s bidding.” Such demagogic rhetoric should be thrown in the political trash cans where it belongs.

This is not only about Beto O’Rourke — it’s about the parade of Democratic contenders lined up to run for president. Should the candidates that mass media and party elites put forward as “progressive” be quickly embraced or carefully scrutinized? The question must be asked and answered.

     Norman Solomon is co-founder and national coordinator of RootsAction.org. He is the author of a dozen books including "War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death."

By Norman Solomon 

News media tell us that Beto O’Rourke has reached the top tier of potential contenders for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination. CNN polls now rank him in third place — behind only Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders — among likely Iowa caucusgoers as well as among Democrats nationwide.  

Progressives are apt to be enthusiastic about O’Rourke — if they don’t know much about his record.

Inclinations to hop on the Beto bandwagon are understandable. O’Rourke was inspiring this year as he fought to unseat the despicable U.S. Senator Ted Cruz with a campaign that built a broad coalition of Texans, while gaining huge small-dollar support from across the country. In late summer, many were thrilled by a video of Beto’s response to a question about NFL players kneeling in protest during the national anthem; his ringing defense of dissent in the context of civil rights history was excellent.

Cruz had to sweat it out on election night and won by only 2.6 percent, a slim margin in such a conservative state. Since then, publicity about Beto O’Rourke potentially running for president has mushroomed, with corporate news outlets portraying him as a progressive.

Released a week ago, the much-publicized results of a poll that MoveOn conducted of people on its email list found O’Rourke in first place, neck-and-neck with Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders. Media spin intensified, portraying Beto as a challenge to Bernie.

NBC News broke the news of the MoveOn poll while calling it “a potentially troubling indication for Sanders.” A couple of days later, the New York Times speculated that “Mr. Sanders’s hold on the party’s progressive base may be slipping as a new generation of Democrats like Representative Beto O’Rourke demonstrate early strength in polls and straw polls, such as the one conducted this week by the liberal group MoveOn.”

Meanwhile, Democracy for America was concluding a poll of its own active supporters online. As the second week of December began, the organization’s website was showing Bernie Sanders far ahead in the top spot at 38 percent, followed by Biden at 15 percent, O’Rourke at 12, Elizabeth Warren at 8, and Kamala Harris at 7. (DFA later removed the running totals from its site until release of final numbers.)

Given their at-times extreme antipathy toward Bernie during his first presidential run, mainstream news media are likely to have an appetite for a 2019 storyline that Sanders’ support is eroding. O’Rourke is apt to be quite useful for such a narrative. The Democratic Party establishment that went all-out to get Hillary Clinton the 2016 nomination is palpably eager to block Bernie. And some in that establishment are already indicating that they believe O’Rourke might do the trick.

A revealing sign came early this month from a leading sentinel of the Democratic Party’s corporate wing — the relentless Clinton loyalist Neera Tanden, president of the Center for American Progress. What set her off was a matter-of-fact tweet from investigative reporter David Sirota, who told people “Something I didn’t know: Beto O’Rourke is the #2 recipient of oil/gas industry campaign cash in the entire Congress.” Sirota provided a link to campaign finance data.

Tanden quickly went into onslaught overdrive with a tweet lashing out at the sharing of such information about the three-term congressman: “Oh look. A supporter of Bernie Sanders attacking a Democrat. This is seriously dangerous. We know Trump is in the White House and attacking Dems is doing Trump’s bidding. I hope Senator Sanders repudiates these attacks in 2019.”

A money-in-politics reporter, Alex Kotch, responded that he was “pretty shocked” to see Tanden attack Sirota for simply sending out a factual tweet: “Tanden, a close Clinton ally and Bernie Sanders foe, has had a contentious relationship with the left, with which Sirota is often associated. But her claim that a reporter’s tweet of campaign finance statistics about a potential 2020 candidate was a dangerous attack that Trump would have ordered? Who was really being attacked here?”

For some context, Kotch added: “It’s worth noting that the Center for American Progress has in the past accepted donations from multiple fossil fuel companies and, as of 2017, was still receiving money from Pacific Gas and Electric Company. During the 2016 Democratic Platform Committee’s drafting process, Tanden voted against a fracking ban, a carbon tax, and a measure to keep fossil fuels in the ground.”

Kotch followed up on Dec. 12 by reporting: “I have confirmed that according to the latest campaign finance report, which covers the period from Oct. 17 through Nov. 26, the O’Rourke campaign had not returned 29 ‘large donations’ of over $200 from oil and gas executives, violating the No Fossil Fuel Money pledge O’Rourke signed.”

Beto O’Rourke’s actual political record deserves scrutiny, and it’s not what progressives might expect from the overheated adulation that has sent his presidential balloon aloft. Some pointed reporting and critiques this month may have begun a process of bringing Beto fantasies down to earth. For instance:

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By Norman Solomon

Twenty-five years ago — when I wrote a book titled “False Hope: The Politics of Illusion in the Clinton Era” — I didn’t expect that the Democratic Party would still be mired in Clintonism two and a half decades later. But such approaches to politics continue to haunt the party and the country.

The last two Democratic presidencies largely involved talking progressive while serving Wall Street and the military-industrial complex. The obvious differences in personalities and behavior of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama diverted attention from their underlying political similarities. In office, both men rarely fought for progressive principles — and routinely undermined them.

Clinton, for example, brought the country NAFTA, welfare “reform” that was an assault on low-income women and families, telecommunications “reform” that turned far more airwaves over to media conglomerates, repeal of Glass-Steagall regulation of banks that led to the 2007-8 financial meltdown, and huge increases in mass incarceration.

Obama, for instance, bailed out big banks while letting underwater homeowners sink, oversaw the launching of more missiles and bombs than his predecessor George W. Bush, ramped up a war on whistleblowers, turned mass surveillance and the shredding of the Fourth Amendment into bipartisan precedent, and boosted corporate privatization of public education.

It wasn’t only a congressional majority that Democrats quickly lost and never regained under President Obama. By the time he left the White House (immediately flying on a billionaire’s jet to his private island and then within months starting to collect giant speaking fees from Wall Street), nearly 1,000 seats in state legislatures had been lost to Democrats during the Obama years.

Thanks to grassroots activism and revulsion toward President Trump, Democrats not only won back the House last month but also recaptured one-third of the state legislative seats that had been lost while Obama led the party and the nation.

During the last two years, progressive momentum has exerted major pressure against the kind of corporatist policies that Bill Clinton set into cement atop the Democratic Party. But today, the party’s congressional leaders like Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer are still in a mode loosely replicating Clinton’s sleight-of-tongue formulas that have proved so useful — and extremely profitable — for corporate America, while economic inequality has skyrocketed.

As 2018 nears its end, the top of the Democratic Party is looking to continue Clintonism without the Clintons.

Or maybe Clintonism with the Clintons.

A real possibility is now emerging that Hillary Clinton will run for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination. On Sunday, the New York Times printed a Maureen Dowd column that reported: “Some in Clintonworld say Hillary fully intends to be the nominee…. And Bill has given monologues to old friends about how Hillary knows how she’d have to run in 2020, that she couldn’t have a big staff and would just speak her mind and not focus-group everything. (That already sounds focus-grouped.)”

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By Norman Solomon

When Democrats take control of the House in early January, they’ll have two kinds of leadership — one from the top of the party’s power pyramid, the other from its base. With formal control, Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer can brandish huge carrots and sticks to keep Democratic lawmakers in line. With grassroots support, a growing number of those lawmakers can — and should — strategically step out of line to fight for progressive agendas.

Pelosi and Hoyer have been running the Democratic machinery in the House of Representatives since 2003, and they’re experts at combining liberal rhetoric with corporate flackery. Pelosi is frequently an obstacle to advancing progressive proposals. Hoyer is significantly worse as he avidly serves such “constituents” as giant banks, Pentagon contractors and other Wall Street titans. The duo has often functioned as top-drawer power tools in the hands of powerful corporate-military interests.

Pelosi is a longtime wizard at generating and funneling hundreds of millions of election-cycle dollars, and as speaker she’ll wield enormous power over committee assignments. But she must keep Democratic House members minimally satisfied — and along the way that should mean yielding more power to the Congressional Progressive Caucus. Buoyed by wins in the midterm elections, the caucus includes two-fifths of all Democrats in the House.

That’s where the other kind of leadership comes in — if a hefty number of self-identified progressives in Congress go to the mat to vigorously represent progressive constituencies. For that to happen, a dubious aspect of the Progressive Caucus past must not repeat itself.

“When historic votes come to the House floor, party functionaries are able to whip the Progressive Caucus into compliance,” I wrote six years ago. A grim pattern set in during the Obama presidency, “with many Progressive Caucus members making fine statements of vigorous resolve — only to succumb on the House floor under intense pressure from the Obama administration.”

Backing down had tragic consequences for the nation’s healthcare system. In September 2009, Progressive Caucus leaders sent a letter to President Obama pledging not to vote for any healthcare bill “without a robust public option.” They wrote: “Any bill that does not provide, at a minimum, a public option built on the Medicare provider system and with reimbursement based on Medicare rates — not negotiated rates — is unacceptable.” Six months later, every member of the Progressive Caucus abandoned the demand and voted for a healthcare bill with no public option at all.

In recent years, the leadership of the Progressive Caucus has become more impressive. The current mix of leaders and new members — which includes veteran lawmaker Raul Grijalva, more recent House arrivals like Mark Pocan, Pramila Jayapal and Ro Khanna, and notable incoming progressives such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib and Ayanna Pressley — seems to augur well.

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[This article was originally published by Truthdig.]

By Norman Solomon

Nancy Pelosi will probably be the next House speaker, a prospect that fills most alert progressives with disquiet, if not dread. But instead of fixating on her as a villain, progressives should recognize the long-standing House Democratic leader as a symptom of a calcified party hierarchy that has worn out its grassroots welcome and is beginning to lose its grip.

Increasingly at odds with the Democratic Party’s mobilized base, that grip has held on with gobs of money from centralized, deep-pocket sources—endlessly reinforcing continual deference to corporate power and an ongoing embrace of massively profitable militarism.

Pelosi has earned a reputation as an excellent manager, and she has certainly managed to keep herself in power atop Democrats in the House. She’s a deft expert on how Congress works, but she seems out of touch—intentionally or not—with the millions of grassroots progressives who are fed up with her kind of leadership.

Those progressives should not reconcile with Pelosi, any more than they should demonize her. The best course will involve strategic confrontations—nonviolent, emphatic, civilly disobedient—mobilizing the power of protest as well as electoral activism within Democratic primaries.

Such well-planned actions as Tuesday’s “Green New Deal” sit-in at Pelosi’s Capitol office serve many valuable purposes. (Along the way, they help undermine the absurd right-wing Fox News trope that portrays her as some kind of leftist.) Insistently advocating for strong progressive programs and calling Pelosi out on her actual positions despite nice-sounding rhetoric can effectively widen the range of public debate. Over time, the process creates more space and momentum for a resurgent left.

There is much to counter at the top of the party. Pelosi still refuses to support single-payer enhanced “Medicare for all.” As on many other issues, she—and others, such as the more corporate-friendly House Democratic Whip Steny Hoyer—are clinging to timeworn, Wall Street-friendly positions against powerful political winds generated by years of grassroots activism.

Increasingly, such leadership is isolated from the party it claims to lead. Yet the progressive base is having more and more impact. As a Vox headline proclaimed, more than a year ago, “The stunning Democratic shift on single-payer: In 2008, no leading Democratic presidential candidate backed single-payer. In 2020, all of them might.” The Medicare for All Caucus now lists 76 House members.

Any progressive should emphatically reject Pelosi’s current embrace of a “pay-go” rule that would straitjacket spending for new social programs by requiring offset tax hikes or budget cuts. Her position is even more outrageous in view of her fervent support for astronomical military spending. Like Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (who was just re-elected to his post), Pelosi went out of her way last winter to proclaim avid support for President Trump’s major increase in the already-bloated Pentagon budget, boasting: “In our negotiations, congressional Democrats have been fighting for increases in funding for defense.”

[Continue reading this article here.]

[This article was originally published by Truthout.]

By Norman Solomon

Election results were still pouring in Tuesday night when pundits on cable news channels began to revive a media refrain that conventional wisdom has been aiming at Democratic Party leaders for decades: Stay away from the left and move toward the center.

We should expect plenty of such advice during the months ahead as Democrats take control of the House for the first time in eight years. It may sound prudent to urge “affordable health care” instead of Medicare for All, or “subsidies for community colleges” instead of tuition-free public college. But such positions easily come across as wonky mush that offers no clear alternative to a status quo that played a role in driving populist anger into the arms of the right wing in the first place.

Last week, in the closing days of the midterm campaign, Barack Obama campaigned saying that he wanted to appeal to “compassionate conservatives,” a phrase propagated by George W. Bush two decades ago. Few Republicans actually turn out to be persuadable at election time. Efforts to pander to them show contempt for progressive principles. Such pandering can lessen the kind of grassroots enthusiasm that helped to defeat GOP candidates in the latest midterms.

Though Andrew Gillum’s gubernatorial quest in Florida fell just short of victory and Stacey Abrams may not reach a runoff election for governor of Georgia, their campaigns boosted turnout that surely helped some Democratic contenders to flip congressional districts. People of color and youthful voters proved to be pivotal — energized not by “moderate” candidates but by strong progressive populism.

The same held true for the Senate campaign of Beto O’Rourke, whose inspiring race in Texas came within less than 3 percent of toppling the extreme right-wing incumbent Ted Cruz. Texas journalist Mimi Swartz commented in a New York Times piece that “O’Rourke gave Texans who have long felt disenfranchised a glimpse of what could be, and I hope they don’t take his defeat as a sign that victory is beyond their grasp.” She added that “the enthusiasm for Mr. O’Rourke most likely helped less glamorous and less moneyed candidates win down the ballot.” And seeds were planted for years to come: The president of Voto Latino “said that her organizations saw a 500 percent increase in registration among young Latino voters in Texas, the state that previously had the lowest voter participation of all.”

When political campaigns are deeply authentic from the grassroots, they serve as compost to prepare the ground for future victories. In sharp contrast, there’s little left to build on after Election Day in the wake of top-down campaigns that promote moderate notions in response to extremely dire problems. While commonly applauded by mass media, centrism smothers the fires of grassroots excitement.

This week, media coverage has often focused on “suburban” voters as key to the defeat of GOP candidates — while rarely noting the demographic changes in many suburbs that have made them more racially diverse. People of color and young voters are often drawn to progressive populism that directly challenges widening income inequality, institutional racism and environmental degradation.

Incantations about the need for so-called moderate policies do little to stimulate a big turnout from the Democratic base — and other voters — oriented to voting against Republican candidates if their opponents draw sharp contrasts between advocacy for economic justice and flackery for de facto oligarchy.

Surveys show that voters are hungry for genuinely progressive policies that have drawn little interest from mainstream media outlets. For instance, polling of the US public shows:

• 76 percent support higher taxes on the wealthy.
• 70 percent support Medicare for All.
• 59 percent support a $15 minimum wage.
• 60 percent support expanded tuition-free college.
• 69 percent oppose overturning Roe v. Wade.
• 65 percent support progressive criminal justice reform.
• 59 percent support stricter environmental regulation.

Yet such popular positions are routinely ignored or denigrated by elite political pros who warn that such programs are too far left for electoral success. The same kind of claims assumed that Bernie Sanders would never get beyond single digits in his 2016 presidential campaign.

[Continue reading this article here.]

[This article was originally published by The Nation.]

By Norman Solomon, Jeff Cohen, Pia Gallegos, Sam McCann and Donna Smith

In October 2017, a team of progressive researchers published “Autopsy: The Democratic Party in Crisis,” which probed the causes of the disastrous 2016 election defeat. The report came in the wake of the party leadership’s failure to do its own autopsy. In a cover story for The Nation, William Greider wrote that the “Autopsy” is “an unemotional dissection of why the Democrats failed so miserably, and it warns that the party must change profoundly or else remain a loser.”

Now, “Democratic Autopsy: One Year Later” evaluates how well the Democratic Party has done in charting a new course since the autumn of 2017. This report rates developments in each of the seven categories that the original report assessed.

The upsurge of progressive activism and electoral victories during the last year has created momentum that could lead to historic breakthroughs in the midterm elections and far beyond. Realizing such potential will require transforming and energizing the Democratic Party. 

Corporate Power and the Party:

Somewhat worse

The Democratic Party has implemented modest reforms, but corporate power continues to dominate the party. In 2017 and early summer 2018, the Democratic National Committee voted to refuse donations from a handful of toxic industries that contradict the party’s platform—though the ban on fossil-fuel money was effectively repealed in August 2018. Meanwhile, the DNC and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee continue to freely take big corporate donations.

A test for Democrats on Capitol Hill came this year when the GOP successfully worked with powerful bank lobbyists to weaken the Dodd-Frank Act (under the guise of helping small community banks). More than one-third of Senate Democrats joined the effort; many were recipients of significant banking donations. In the House, 33 Democrats joined most Republicans to pass the measure; journalist David Dayen reported that nearly all of the 33 identify as corporate “New Democrats.”

In September, House minority leader Nancy Pelosi preemptively boxed in any potential left-populist agenda on Capitol Hill by backing reinstatement of a “pay-go” rule to offset all new spending with tax increases or budget cuts. A former legislative director for three Democrats in Congress, Justin Talbot-Zorn, responded with an article for The Nation pointing out that “bold progressivism and ‘pay-go’ fiscal conservatism are mutually exclusive.” He added: “The existential challenge of climate change demands that we fully overhaul our energy and transportation infrastructure in a short period of time. The issues of America’s rising inequality and frayed social contract—including stagnant wages, unaffordable college, and exorbitant health care can only be fixed with major new investments.”

After writing a recent analysis for The Guardian that looked at how Democratic leaders act on economic issues in states (from California to Connecticut) that they politically control, David Sirota put his conclusions in a tweet: Democrats in blue states “have used their power to block single payer & a public option, enrich Wall St, subsidize corporations, slash pensions, lay off teachers, promote fracking & engage in pay to play corruption.”

For the Democratic Party, a crucial disconnect remains between rhetoric about corporate influence and subservience to it.

[Continue reading this article here.]

[This article was originally published by The Nation.]

By Norman Solomon

The most widely acclaimed TV series ever about the Nazi occupation of France is a relentless epic with little use for the familiar images of craven collaborators and selfless resisters. Un village français focuses on a fictional rural community that endures a tightening vise of German control for more than four years. The villagers live far away from black-and-white tropes. Even a ruthless Nazi official eludes the usual monochrome. The humans are all too human. 

Un village averaged about 3.4 million French viewers during 72 episodes between 2009 and 2017. The dramatic series has also aired in upward of 40 countries, according to producers. Now gaining an audience in the United States via online platforms (under its English title A French Village), Un village is far afield from routine US media assumptions about bright lines between good and evil. 

From the start of the series, when German troops suddenly arrive in mid-June 1940, the choices for locals are bad and keep getting worse. Un village is riddled with dilemmas that often go from painful to insoluble. The drama’s creators aimed “to bring some shades of grey to the public memory of World War 2 in France,” historian Marjolaine Boutet wrote; they had “the ambition to evoke an empathetic response from the audience towards every character”—while bypassing the timeworn formula of “collaborators as villains and Resistance fighters as heroes.” Based on solid historical research, the poignant and often heartbreaking script comes alive with a superb ensemble cast in more than 20 major roles. The result is a dramatic tour de force that undermines Manichean views of the world. 

After watching the 63 hours of Un village français, I was eager to interview its head scriptwriter, Frédéric Krivine. We met on a rainy Paris morning at a café not far from Place de la République. My first question: “How and why did you want to make a Nazi human?” 

Krivine, who is Jewish, responded with a fleeting quip—“It’s a good Jewish story”—and quickly turned serious. “A good show, especially a show to last for a while, needs to have characters who are really representative of the complexity of human nature,” he said. “Otherwise, you mustn’t use them.” Nazis, he went on, “were human beings, with desires and problems,” at the same time that “in another point of view, they were kind of monsters.” 

The main Nazi character in Un village is a powerful intelligence officer whose romantic charm and steely wit coexist with willingness to torture and execute if necessary to get the job done. I asked Krivine whether there was a message in the mixture. 

“People who do horrible things are human beings,” he said. “We have to find a way to talk about them without hiding what they do and without treating them as nonhuman people, nonhuman beings. They are human beings; like us they belong to, we are in, the same species, human species…. It’s humans who kill now everywhere in the world where people are killed. It’s because they are human beings that we have problems—because if they were just extraterrestrial or monsters we could just erase them.” 

Un village is an intricate counterpoint to Marcel Ophüls’s landmark 1969 documentary The Sorrow and the Pity, which left many viewers with the broad-brush impression that occupied France was virtually a nation of collaborators, except for a few heroes. Krivine balks at such sweeping categories. In his script, some of the resisters are unable to resist their own egotism, opportunism, dogmatism, or lethally displaced rage. The purpose of the plot points is to engender not cynicism but realism. 

Overall, Krivine commented, most people are apt to remain bystanders. In the case of wartime France, an overwhelming majority of the population were neither resisters nor collaborators and didn’t do anything, “bad or good.” (Meanwhile, many more French citizens cooperated with the occupiers than resisted them.) When I asked about human tendencies to go along with evils, Krivine replied that “it’s a very complex matter,” and then swiftly reframed my question this way: “Of what is made indifference, and what are the consequences of indifference?” 

Krivine brought up two current examples. He pointed out that several million people have died of AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa over the past decade—yet life-saving medicines exist and could be delivered for use in a far-reaching program. “But we don’t do it.” Krivine then spoke of how snipers in the Israeli military had recently been killing Palestinians along the Gaza border. Yet scant opposition came from the Israeli public. 

When I remarked that such cases are forms of collaboration by the majority, Krivine demurred. “I don’t feel it as collaboration,” he said. “But it’s not nothing.” When I suggested the word “complicity,” he differed again, and said: “People don’t react when they don’t have the horror in their eyes.” 

During the first year of the occupation, the tightening repression of Jews caused little critical response from the French public, he said. It was only when police began to separate Jewish parents and their children in 1942 that a widespread negative reaction from the population set in. German authorities took note and started to implement similar policies more discreetly; the public concern dissipated. 

Near the close of Un village français, two scenes notably bring the past into the present. 

After barely eluding the dragnets of Vichy and German forces, Rita and Ezechiel escape to Palestine. But, contrary to boilerplate story lines, the Jewish couple doesn’t get a happy ending in the Promised Land. On a desert road one day in 1948, they come under attack from Palestinians; when Rita expresses bafflement at the ambush, Ezechiel tells her that Jewish settlers have recently massacred Palestinian families in a village called Deir Yassin. More than one layer of tragedy hangs in the air. 

The postwar trajectory of the central Nazi character—Heinrich Müller, the top SD (Sicherheitsdienst, or Security Service) intelligence official in the town—also goes against the familiar grain. As German forces retreat from advancing Allies in the late summer of 1944, Müller deserts with his French lover in an unsuccessful effort to reach Switzerland. Soon the American military captures Müller and discovers his identity. Later, when he resurfaces in the series, the year is 1960, the country is Paraguay, and—as a CIA operative—Müller is overseeing a torture session. The goal is to extract information from a woman who is part of a guerrilla insurgency against a fascistic regime being propped up by the US government. 

With both narrative twists, so different than what we’re apt to see in US mass entertainment, I asked Krivine: What’s the big idea? 

“The idea was,” he said, “we need to show the long-distance consequences of an event like occupation. And it was interesting to show one guy in Paraguay in the sixties. And the Jews who escaped—it was so for Rita and Ezechiel a narrow escape, they were survivors, and then they’re in another place, in another story. The idea was to say: there is no ending to that kind of story.”

[Continue reading this article here.]