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Popular Culture Review
the establishment and the efforts of the FBI through COINTELPRO to discredit
and violently suppress the BPP are well documented. Accordingly, Van Peebles
argues that a desperate Hoover, whose links with organized crime extended back
to the days of prohibition, decided to use his mob ties to neutralize the Panthers
and medicate die black community. Van Peebles goes on to maintain that drugs
and guns are not manufactured in the ghetto, and that “there is simply no
logistical way that these large quantities of narcotics and weapons can get into
all our major urban communities without the cooperation of authority
somewhere.” The filmmaker credits his father with the idea of comparing FBI
efforts to introduce drugs into the black community with the British policy of
forcing opium grown in India upon the Chinese people in the Opium Wars of the
nineteenth century, provoking the Boxer Rebellion in response. Van Peebles
argues, “Britain fought China over the trade wars and flooded China with opium
that addicted the Chinese. Mao Zedong later came along and drove the drugs
out. Drugs as a socioeconomic weapon are historically nothing new.”^^
How should scholars evaluate the case for his film? As historian Robert
Brent Toplin insists in his book Reel History: In Defense o f Hollywood,
commercial filmmakers are not professional historians and should not be
evaluated by the same standards.^^ For dramatic purposes some license must be
granted to artists who create dialogue where no Mstorical documentation exists.
Also, in order to tell a complex historical story within the two-hour time frame
of a commercial movie, the compression of chronology, creation of composite
characters, and focus upon a few individuals are standard tools of the historical
filmmaker which Van Peebles employs in Panther.
Critics, of course, charge Van Peebles with ignoring the historical
complexity of the 1960s by creating simplistic heroic black characters and evil
white caricatures. In his defense, the film director asserts that neither he nor the
Panthers should be considered as racists. While white policemen are not
portrayed in a positive light by Van Peebles, white allies of the Panthers such as
the SDS and attorney Charles Garry (Robert Culp) are acknowledged. Critics
also compare the conspiratorial conclusions of Van Peebles’s film with director
Oliver Stone’s JFK (1990), in which Stone proclaims that the military/industrial
complex plotted to murder John Kennedy and install Lyndon Johnson in the
White House in order prevent the withdrawal of American support for the
Vietnam War. Most establishment scholars find the theories of Stone and Van
Peebles implausible, but historians have generally shown Stone greater respect
due to his efforts to document his case, albeit with considerable circumstantial
evidence. However, well-documented research into the role of the U.S.
government in promoting drug trafficking in Central and South America should
give pause to those who would immediately dismiss the claims of Van Peebles.^"*
Influential black critic Michael Eric Dyson does not believe that the
images employed by Van Peebles in Panther are exaggerated. Dyson writes,
“While there may be no conscious collaboration between political elites and