PART I
The Free state of Jones is the story of how the plantation South lost everything . . . including its mutherfuckin mind . . . forever.
The ideology of colonialism held together all the classes, whose livelihood, one way or another, was dependent upon keeping the slave proletariat in chains. The plantation South perfected the colonial ideology of supremacy, as the divine will of God, recast it with the doctrine of poor “white trash” and then crafted a justification for slavery cloaked in the grab of black inferiority. The ideological mystification outran the reality. Black was tightly wedded to everything evil and vile. This doctrine of white supremacy allowed the “trash” of “Europe” to experience the feeling of nobility. For the black must bleed was the slave masters creed.
The South lost out its mind and along with it its heart and soul.
Where does the mind go when it is lost . . . and turned out?
Free state of Jones . . .
Free?
. . . . is the story of how a section of the legions of Southern reaction, came to split apart under the pressure of war, greed, money, class strife and slave-based property relations. Slavery was a pathway to riches, wealth and freedom from the lot of the lower classes.
II.
“If I leave here alive, I’ll leave nothing behind.
They’ll never count me among the broken men.”
Prison letters of George Jackson.
The historians lie . . .low.
Horse theft and prostitution are not the oldest professions. Next to securing the means of minimum survival, the first profession, war is the oldest of institutions. War, an ancient competitive human activity to capture someone outside ones gene pool, was meant to bring fresh blood and life into ones community. With the advent of private property, war becomes the primary pathway of development and quantitative expansion of the existing system. War and colonialism becomes the means for bringing the less developed peoples into the orbit of the colonizers. Less developed refers to arms and armaments, although the ideologists of the bourgeoisie have spent an epoch declaring it is the people’s brain that is less developed.
Jones is about war, warfare and the horrific ass whipping the South took. The idea that an agrarian economy can militarily defeat an industrial social pattern, with its advanced means of food production, armaments, clothing and finance is an acute form of insanity.
Where did the insanity come from?
Where does it go? Where is it lodged?
Rather than a story of the heroic white savior, this movie struck me as the story of a spiritual wakening of an individual, whose war time exploits compelled him to question his individual role in a war that promised to bring him nothing but the honor of remaining the same.
By spiritual awakening is meant the ability of the individual, indeed masses, to feel, see and realize a state of consciousness and being previously outside their ability to achieve. This narrative is played out through the life of Newton Knight.
Knight/night conjured profound symbolic meaning.
The gravity of night . . . the black w/hole experience.
It seems Newton was transformed from Knight to Night, under the gravity of events outside his control. He was transformed into a fountain for the striving of a people, seeking escape from the despotic rule of the glutton’s of Cotton. Gluttony, degeneracy, over consumption = obesity, as slavery put the world in white cotton pants . . . . and skirts.
Consumption and gluttony – the body of capitalism is inherently degenerate. Look at the body of our people. You, me, we are fat and ugly due to gluttonest consumption of the earth. Then we shit out the lifeless substance.
The earth will be reborn.
Rebirth rather than redemption is Newton’s story.
Rebirth lost to redemption.
Newton story is the story of slaves yearning to be free of the glutton of capital.
This story takes the narrative of the experience of a section of Southern whites compelled to live in the swamps alongside the former slaves “who are darker than blue.” It is from the darkest Knight/night that Knight slips between the instance that separates day from night and is reborn. Redemption is counterrevolutionary and the enemy of truth. Rebirth is revolutionary.
Rebirth wrestles with Redemption. Rebirth is slain on the battlefield. Rebirth was hung by the neck amid the cheers of snitches, haters, nitpickers and the ideologist of confusion. These obese degenerates who grew fat from finance capital ushered in the long night of Jim Crow. The slave-master’s hate is always passed to the slaves and the driver man.
(End of part 1)
Thank you for this thoughtful review. This grotesque and sordid story — should I see the movie?
I viewed the Free State of Jones for the first time, while teaching an introductory class on Marxism and the materialist conception of history. . . . on a plantation. A deeply spooky experience.