Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare
Film Review
Editorial Note:
As with all film and book reviews, I will try not to be egregious, but if you fear spoilers don’t read this and don’t even watch trailers, just judge whether you want to see or read or hear something by its cover. Trust your gut.
The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare (MUW). 2024. R. 2hrs.
Jeff Riggenbach, as I mentioned in POAAS 3, masterfully begins Why American History is not What They Say: An Introduction to Revisionism with a few chapters demonstrating that history, historically, is not all too different from historical fiction. But the quality of the writer matters as well. Here are some bites, but you will have to head over to Mises Institute to purchase his text, or cop it for free as a .pdf.
there was the problem of historical fiction. Was it really advisable to take any work of fiction seriously as a source of information about history? Fiction was . . . well, you know— fiction. It was “made up.” How could we rely on any information we picked up about the events of the past from reading such a work?
…
until late in the 19th Century, most historians regarded themselves neither as social scientists (a concept that did not even exist before the 19th Century) nor as humanistic scholars, but rather as literary men, men of letters. The stories they were telling were true, of course, but nonetheless they were telling stories, just as though they were novelists, and their job, as they saw it, was to tell their stories as vividly and poetically as any novelist.
…
Is there any reason a reader should place any more confidence in the work of an historian than in the work of an historical novelist? The answer is that everything depends on what historian we’re talking about, what novelist we’re talking about, and what kind of historical fiction we’re talking about.
Imbibe the vibe. The vibe itself is directionally instructive, even if some nitty-gritty details are off.
MUW is an historical fiction story, based on a true story found in Churchill’s letters, set in WWII, about British black ops (credits tell you the history) sent to kill Germans and sink their ships harbored on islands off the coast of West Africa; thereby luring Americans into the fray. It is directed by Guy Ritchie, whom I love forever for Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998) and Snatch (2000) and earning his authentic blackbelt in jujitsu under Renzo Gracie (whom I had the pleasure of meeting during a seminar in Tracy, CA). The cast includes: Henry Cavill, Alan Ritchson, Babs Olusanmokun, Til Schweiger, Eiza González.
WWII
In the Los Angeles Review of Books, Elias Wondimu, founder of Tsehai Publishers, asks the thought-provoking rhetorical question, “What would you say if I told you that the two World Wars didn’t start in Europe?” His point, three years ago, was that the scope and scale of the conflict was far-reaching beyond the European subcontinent.
On the March 9, 1894, the Emperor (Menelik) signed a decree granting Alfred Ilg, the Emperor’s advisor and a Swiss engineer, and Léon Chefneux, a French engineer, to work on a railway between the port of Djibouti and the capital of Ethiopia. The railway was intended to open up the Ethiopian Empire, which is landlocked, to further trade on the Red Sea. This, however, created a conflict over the contract that lasted for almost a decade between the French, who controlled the small port protectorate of Djibouti, and the British, who controlled the majority of North-Eastern Africa (including Egypt, Sudan, Kenya, Uganda, and Somaliland). The conflict was exacerbated by the Bonheur-Chefneux Convention of 1902, when Ilg and Chefneux sold the concession to the French government, giving them much more territorial power than initially stated — a significant advantage over the British Empire. This stalemate ended on April 8, 1904, with the Anglo-French Entente Cordiale. The Entente, which settled colonial tensions both inside and outside of Africa, brought the British government into the contract, giving them more sway over the future of the railroad than was originally given by Menelik II. Since the Entente was also a promise to support each other’s East African interests against German influence, the French government privately intended to use the agreement to attempt a French monopoly on the Ethiopian markets. British opposition to this came not from a place of support for Ethiopian sovereignty, but as an objection to any European monopoly that wasn’t their own.
At the end of the same year, Germany sent a mission to the Emperor’s court and, on March 7, 1905, signed a commercial treaty with Ethiopia. The treaty, paired with Germany’s growing military strength and renewed European tensions in Ethiopia, put the positions of France and Britain in Ethiopia in danger. This led France, Italy, and Britain to sign the Tripartite Treaty of December 13, 1906, which concerned Ethiopian sovereignty and the railroad construction. Though the treaty on its surface settled the commercial differences between the three nations, it was essentially a contingency plan for the death of Menelik II. Without any consent from the king, it allotted each nation a sphere of influence in Ethiopia, setting up a confrontational dynamic between the Ethiopian government and the Europeans. The Tripartite Treaty paved the way for the participants’ cooperation against Germany — a decade preceding World War I.
In 1909, Emperor Menelik II declared Iyasu, his grandson, as his successor. In the years that followed, and during the Emperor’s sickness, Iyasu served as regent under Empress Tayitu. During this time, the Germans got much closer to the court and appointed the physician of the emperor, the tutor of Lij Iyasu, and the advisor to the Justice Minister. In July 1914, the same month that World War I began, Emperor Menelik and Empress Tayitu formalized this close relationship by signing a collaborative agreement with Germany. When the emperor died, Iyasu officially inherited strong relationships with the Germans and the emperor’s close advisor, Hassib Yidlibi, a Turk of Syrian origin, whom he appointed as his adviser and government official in Dire Dawa, a town adjacent to Djibouti…
While the Germans and the Ottomans supported Lij Iyassu, the uncrowned emperor from 1913 to 1916, the opposing faction (Great Britain, France, and Italy) conspired against him.
These shifting alliances should prompt the historian, the student of history, and the Christian to ponder on the motivations of all parties involved, rather than instinctively categorizing some as good guys and some as bad guys. Read the whole piece. The main point is that important things were happening in Africa, and specifically Ethiopia was (and is) a linchpin of sorts. I can easily imagine the World Wars playing out differently with Ethiopia allied with Germany and the Turks (who had the active local Red Sea port for a few centuries). MUW fictionalizes a linchpin on the other coast of Africa.
Cast and Characters
Cavill is freshly departed from 3 seasons of The Witcher (ongoing), and his role as the DC cinematic universe’s übermensch. In Men’s Health, he esoterically mentions his time there was spent with “monsters and adventures”. Still no confirmation as to why, but depending on your predilection, it is either bumping heads with the female head of the show and writers as a Gamergate redux, or over the television series’ lackluster faithfulness, if not open opposition to, adaptation of the novels. He makes a great lead here in MUW, as he did in The Witcher, and adds humor with requests of British officers’, and forced removal of Germans’, aesthetic apparel and accessories. The latter reminds us of Hugo Boss et al.
Ritchson, who is getting bigger because of Reacher, but I know better from Smallville (2001-2017) and Blue Mountain State (2010-2011), is unfathomably jacked, and plays the part of Hyperborean barbarian well. Diablo II and Forgotten Realms stans will appreciate. In addition to great hand-to-hand combat in tight corridors, we witness his expert marksmanship with a bow-and-arrow. If that does not jolt you with epigenetic flashbacks to the steppe, nothing will.
Olusanmokun, like Ritchie, is a blackbelt (and even more, a champion) in jujitsu. In MUW, he plays an African background having Anglo-American Empire agent who outwardly does business with all sides, but behind-the-scenes plants British bombs and connects British black ops with local Blacks, including an Eton-educated prince of the island who is more interested in ancien régime titles than cash. Commiserations to Wu-Tang Clan and their subsidiary Wu-Tang Financial.
Schweiger plays an excellent National Socialist leader. Noteworthy for his refusal to do so up to this point in his career. The closest thing he has played is a little contextualized killer of Nazi leaders in Inglorious Bastards (IB).
González goes deep undercover as a femme fatale vengeful vixen American goldbug pursuing relations with Schweiger’s character. She is, in MUW, secretly a mischling, of mixed parentage, and even bold enough to jokingly suggest as much herself in an at first serious tone to the nazi leader’s face. It so unsettles him, when he finds out, that he clenches his fist then coldly and calculatingly sets her up for torture, under the pretenses of coitus, only to be foiled in Scooby-Doo like fashion by those, unbeknownst to him, meddling kids. The way in which he finds out also mirrors IB. In IB, it’s the configuration of fingers you display for the number three. In MUW, it is her liberal usage of the German tongue, when drunk singing, accidentally slipping into Yiddish. In a post-Hamilton (musical) world, you hope any actor can play any actor, without fear of blackface and vice-versa. We are not worried about a resurgence of minstrel shows in 2024. Mexico City, her hometown in real life, is famously or infamously more European than Tijuana and Juarez, let alone Guerrero and Veracruz. But when one fuses science with the humanities, as Razib Khan has done on Unsupervised Learning, you can easily see González shares an Iberian connection with Askenazim and Sephardim, and even trace amounts of Iberian amongst the Welsh (‘tis no accident that Catherine Zeta Jones played a conquistadora heiress in The Mask of Zorro (1998)).
Overall, the general arc of the story reminds us of the utmost importance of comparable technology and superior tactics. MUW has cinematic usage of enhanced silence and pauses during moments of scheming to smoke cigars and cigarettes on cigarette holders. The most critical takeaway I had was that missions like this, and perhaps everyday work as well, are best performed with macromanagement and not micromanagement. Give big and clear end goals, but leave the how up to the experts on the ground closest to the information at hand. The British bureaucracy is split on whether to keep fighting the Germans (Churchill faction), or to surrender to, or ‘appease’, the Germans (chilling committee of admirals and generals). An admiral tells the black ops to abort the mission. The black ops deliberately disobey. The black ops succeed.
Their success is evidence in favor of Black Water (private military company) Erik Prince’s call, on Caribbean Rhythms, for a return of marques and reprisals in American foreign policy. It is constitutional. It stopped the Barbary pirates, when America was a fledgling republic. And it is what Ron Paul thought Congress was calling for with the 60 words that made up the Authorization for Use of Military Force of 2001 (AUMF) to go after Osama Bin Laden. This is the same spirit as the agile manifesto behind American technological prestige, and kaizen, behind the Toyota Chief Engineer and Japanese car manufacturing excellence writ large.
Let us attend.