Honor Diaries

Everything is propaganda. It can be overt or subtle, acknowledged or denied, conscious or unconscious. Sometimes this makes it hard to tell what precisely it's propaganda for... but it's propaganda none the less.

Yesterday I went to see two films. “The Honor Diaries”, a documentary about violence against women in the Middle East, and “Avengers 2: Age of Ultron”, a film about punching robots in the face with explosions. I saw the former with a group of friends and the latter all alone… yeah, I have weird friends.

I’m going to talk mostly about the Honor Diaries here, but I might throw in a few shallow comparisons.

Just before the start, we were advised that the society presenting the film hadn’t reviewed its content. We were warned that its funding was questionable, and that its producer was an anti-muslim bigot whose films all seemed designed to whip up a panic about coming jihad. We were warned that one of the subjects is married to Peter Mackay, though nothing was said about what she may or may not have done rather than what her husband may or may not have done.

The introduction was, of course, also propaganda. Everything is. But some of it seems to be true… the producer does have some worrying ties to neoconservatives in the United States and previous attempts to incite a war with Iran. Yikes. And one of the other subjects, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, has advocated for “crushing” Islam. Not sure how exactly she wants to go about doing that.

The film is structured as a conversation between 11 women, with frequent cutaways to film footage as they describe one horrible thing or another. And there are many: topics include mandatory burqas, female genital mutilation, acid attacks, forced marriages, and honour killings.

There is a narrow geographical focus here. There is a brief mention of caste-based violence in India, but aside from that the film only covers the Middle East and North Africa. And there is a narrow religious focus as well: One of the panellists is a Sikh, but from what I can remember none of the examples of victims are Sikhs.

This focus might be warranted or might not be, the film really never compares things outside of that region. Perhaps there are similar rates of honor violence elsewhere? All it would have taken was a throwaway line… something like “Women are ten times more likely to be murdered by their husbands in Muslim countries than elsewhere”. If such is the case, the film does not deign to tell us. Instead it is simply presenting the narrative, devoid of the statistics that could provide context.

There is also no comparison with other honor violence. Certainly I’ve heard of such things existing elsewhere… the Southern US and Latin America come up a lot. Are rates of violence similar there? Did the rates used to be similar, but then decline? That could be worth knowing, because success somewhere helps show possible solutions.

The film really doesn’t suggest any solutions, though. It presents some very terrible things, but without ideas what might be done to improve them. The closest it comes is a note at the end to check out their website for further info and to donate. That leaves the film a little… anticlimactic.

The whole thing comes off as trying to subtly suggest violent solutions to problems that aren’t likely to be solved by violence. Certainly the producer’s other films give that impression, just from the titles: “Obsession: Radical Islam’s War Against the West”. “The Third Jihad: Radical Islam’s Vision For America” “Iranium”.

Avengers 2 also suggested violent solutions to problems that aren’t likely to be solved by violence… though you could hardly call it subtle. Perhaps the solution to honor violence is punching people in the face with explosions? I dont know. It seems to me that if violence was going fix things it would have worked by now. It’s not as though that hasn’t been tried before.