THOM HARTMANN'S "INDEPENDENT THINKER" REVIEW OF THE MONTH
by Thom Hartmann, Exclusively for BuzzFlash.com

As the title would imply, Darfur Now is a movie about the situation in Darfur.

Since I returned from the region only a few weeks ago, much of the footage was of tragically familiar scenes - refugees, burned villages, disease, starvation, and the haunting echoes of mass rape and murder. I walked through camps that looked identical to what is in the movie, heard stories from mostly women (the men were either murdered or the few survivors fled) of how their husbands and children were murdered in front of them, and felt the helplessness, anger, and, frankly, fear that the Janjaweed or the Sudanese Army may show up at any moment and begin the killing anew.

(A week after we returned, a group of 3 relief workers driving a truck just like the one we used to deliver food to remote refugee camps was hijacked just 15 or 20 miles from where we had stayed, and all the of the relief workers were murdered. I'd ridden in the back of a similar truck, delivering tons of food to a similar camp, and when I read the story of it in my Oregon newspaper a deep chill went through me.)

This is real, it's happening RIGHT NOW, and you need to know about it and to show everybody you know this movie. You'll share the journey of discovery of people from activists to movie stars Don Cheadle and George Clooney.

But the real star of the movie, as horrific as the violence is (and it's not all that graphic, in a movie sense - people of nearly all ages could watch it), the real story of the movie, at least in my mind, was the story of one of the six people profiled, Luis Moreno-Ocampo.

Like the story of Al Gore's life that we learn in An Inconvenient Truth, only in Darfur. Now we learn that Luis had been a young man, an attorney, in Argentina when the military overthrew the government and began "disappearing" dissidents. Two of his friends simply "vanished," never to return (although mass graves were later found). He tells the story of how one of the country's top generals was eventually put on trial for mass murder and crimes against humanity, and Luis Moreno-Ocampo was the man who successfully prosecuted him.

Now he's building a case against Ahmad Harun and Ali Kushayb for the same crimes, only in this case instead of the disappearance of a few thousand or tens of thousands of Argentineans, it's the mass murder of hundreds of thousands of Sudanese in Darfur. Throughout the movie, we watch as he methodically builds and then presents to the International Criminal Court (ICC) in the Hague the indictment against these two high Sudanese government officials who planned and executed the genocide in Darfur. We learn of the complicity of transnational corporations and foreign governments, particularly China. And we see the toll of genocide in the lives of its survivors.

At one particularly poignant moment in the movie, he tells the off-screen interviewer that Argentina successfully prosecuted those who tried to rule the nation by terror, and democracy was returned. "If the ICC is successful then 25 years from now the world will look like Argentina," he says. If not, then the world will look like Darfur."

In that moment, I realized with a flash of horror that he could just as easily be talking about the crimes against humanity perpetrated by men such as Rumsfeld, Bush, Cheney, Rove, and Yoo. And I realized the incredible importance of our holding them to account for the world's second worst humanitarian disaster at the moment (4.5 million refugees and over 100,000 and perhaps as many as a million dead Iraqis) when they no longer hold power.

This movie is meta to the stories of Rwanda invoked at its beginning as inspiration for its tireless activists. It's meta to the Nurnberg Tribunals and the crimes of the Nazis, also invoked in the movie. And it's meta to the crimes of our nation, referred to by Pastor Wright - although not mentioned in the movie.

If you want a quick education on the situation in Darfur, how hopeful and hopeless it is without loud and decisive action on our part, and you want to make a difference in the world - if by nothing else being able to speak to others of the situation - buy and watch this DVD. At this price, in fact, buy a dozen copies and give them away to others

This DVD is available in the BuzzFlash Progressive Marketplace.

Thom Hartmann is a New York Times bestselling author and host of "The Thom Hartmann Program" syndicated nationally by Air America Radio. His website is ThomHartmann.com . You can find information on how to listen to his program (online if you don't have a radio station that carries it) and read more about his great books.

THOM HARTMANN'S "INDEPENDENT THINKER" REVIEW OF THE MONTH