[MANY people will be drawn to this film…]

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MANY people will be drawn to this film by the new Australian 'super-star' Mel Gibson: but though he is a good actor, the events depicted in the film are too important to be portrayed in such terms.

He plays a reporter in Indonesia in the run-up to the military takeover of 1965, which was one of the great tragedies in the history of the world's working class. Up to one million people - mostly members and supporters of the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) were massacred, in the bloody coup which brought the present-day Suharto leadership to power.

The PKI was at that time the biggest Communist Party in the world (leaving aside "the 90called "parties" that rule in the Stalinist states).

The PKI looked towards the "left" talking Peking leadership rather than Moscow for its politics. Embracing Mao's reactionary policy of seeking a 'bloc of four classes". , the PKI gave complete support to the bourgeois nationalist regime of Sukharno, and rejected any notion that the working class abould take the leadership in the struggle for power.

The events were in fact a grotesque echo of the massacre of Chinese communists in 1926-27 after their leaders - on Stalin's orders — had tailWITH all the nuhlicity shnut the WITH all the publicity about the US and UK using servicemen as guinea-pigs during the series of utmospheric nuclear bomb tests in the '40s and '50s, it is perhaps useful for socialists to examine the record of the Soviet bureauTony Richardson reviews 'The Year of Living Dangerously' ended the "progressive" nationalist Kuomintang led by vicious anti-communist Chiang Kai Shek.

Though Mao's bureaucratic leadership had by 1965 taken its distance from its "big brother" in the Kremlin, it still shared a common Stalinist political heritage: its more demagogic "anti-imperialist rhetoric was not linked to any line for the independent struggles of the working class.

Some of the reality of the Indonesian events just about scrapes into the film - but only if you already know something about it.

Posted to Indonesia, the journalist hero befriends Billy, a Chinese-Australian photographer who is sympathetic to the PKI. Billy is the means through which the widespread illusions in Sukharno are reflected in the film. Only at the last moment does he recognise Sukharno's real position, hanging out a banner denouncing 'him, and gets killed for his pains.

Gibson also takes up with JIl (played by Sigourney Weaver), who works at the British Embassy. He publishes a story based on information she gave him in confidence - concerning a boatload of arms for the PKI.

This simultaneous betrayal of the PKI and of his relationship with Jill is of no significance to him as a professional reporter.

But eventually Gibson renounces these values, and WE are already half way through 'The CLR James Lectures" (Channel 4, Mondays, 11.30). The first was about america, the second about cricket. Next week, the octogenerian Marxist will deal with the USSR, which he believes is state capitalist.

The cult of 'CLR' is one of the strangest things in the media right now.

In last week's New Statesman the producer of this series H.O. Nazareth ends a very interesting interview like this:

•I left James watching the cricket. I went past the Front Line on Railton Road to Brixton tube, my head buzzing.. from CLR's discourse .

James is much lauded and praised in this vein and clearly sets lots of heads "buzzing" • even those who don't admit it in print.

Certainly he has had an Mel Gibson - new 'superstar"

gets out of Indonesia with Jill just as the really "big story"

- the coup - takes shape.

Director Peter Weir takes a vaguely liberal stance, showing some of the deprivation of the Indonesian masses, and giving a sympathetic portrayal of a PKI member arguing the case for their struggle.

Frank Higgin amazing life. Professional cricket commentator, Marxist, the longlived Nestor of Black struggles over 50 years in the USA, the West Indies and Africa, associate of George Padmore, mentor of Kwame Nkrumah and Eric Williams, James was also a central figure in the Trotskyist movement in Britain in the 193.0s - the leading advocate of a sectarian attitude towards the Labour Party.

He then wrote 'World Revolution', il systematic presentation of the case for Trotskyism, and "The Black Jacobins'. , a famous study of the impact of the French Revolution in Haiti.

He went to America and did tremendous work organising blacks.

In 1940, together with Max Schachtman, he broke with Trotsky and with the American SWP. He rejoined in 1947, and left again in 1951.

Around 19 he divined sometimes overflowed. No screens or glove boxes were used, so workers could be splashed or breathe dust and fumes. In any case, the air was already full of radioactive dust, But Weir's film lacks the suspense of Costa Gavras' 'Missing'; its concentration on individual responses to the situation trivialises the events; and the final scenes are ridiculous.

For Mel Gibson, however, rather like the journalist he depicts, things aren't so bad: it was an acting part like any other - for which he was reportedly paid $100,000.

Gibson can expect swiftly to improve on that fee: but someone should make a better film about the Indonesian events.

world Trotskyist movement a struggle between what he called "Cannonism" and "Pabloism" -something James P Cannon of the SWP was not to discover until 3 years later.

A decade later on, still calling himself a Marxist, he was Secretary General of the ruling party in Eric Williams' Trinidad!

Personally, he is very impressive; his material less so.

Prophet-like, he reveals the "inner secrets" of events with a lucid, clear story-line certainty that makes me suspicious.

Why was Martin Luther King assassinated? Because he expressed criticism of the US war in Vietnam. This could have led to a fusion of the Black movement and the student anti-war movement. Did this not happen just because of Kings death?

Still, I think SO readers would find the 2 remaining talks worth switching on for. grisly iceberg, because tens of thousands of workers were involved in the bomb project from the uranium mines to the test ground. Most of the donkey work was done by concentraFOR over 20 years opposition to the EEC has been an article of faith on the left.

In the last seven or eight years it has been twinned with the protectionism of the Alternative Economic Strategy and explained as necessary to it. But it goes back much further than that and has at other times had different rationales.

The entire British ruling class had at first opposed the EEC, cherishing their own special links with the Commonwealth and with the USA.

But by the start of the '60s they knew they had no choice but to join. Britain was too weak to stand on its own.

Labour leaders like Gaitskell opposed it because they remained committed to the Commonwealth. For the same reason they opposed the 1961 racist Immigration Act.

All that soon changed in the mid-'60s and Wilson tried to join in 1967.

The Labour Left and the communist Party opposed the EEC from the beginning. Naturally the "ideological leading role" was the CP's. Long-time specialists in preaching British patriotism and anti-Americanism they denounced the EEC as an international pro-NATO, anti-USSR conspiracy. The Tribune left, led by patriots like Michael Foot followed.

The various Marxist groups -all of them without exception -at first scorned and denounced this assessment of the BEC, advocating European workers' unity with slogans like "In or out the fight goes on"

Then under pressure most of them changed.

They felt it was imperative "to stay in line with Whereas the original EEC had 15 years of tremendous economic boom which knitted the EEC countries economically together