“If they bring their savagery, we’ll meet it with savagery of our own.”  Such words could be spoken by any law-and-order government facing terrorism.  They could be spoken by terrorists.  They could be spoken by Americans in a post-9/11 world.  They could be spoken by Iraqis in the midst of a foreign occupation.  In The Wind that Shakes the Barley the words happen to be spoken by an Irish Republican fighting against the forces of the British Empire.  They could just as easily have been spoken by a British officer about the Irish guerrillas that are killing British troops.



Director Ken Loach won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 2006 with this film.  It focuses on a band of Irish Republican Army irregulars (we would classify them “enemy combatants”) during the Irish War of Independence.  It centers on two brothers in the band, Teddy and Damien.  Teddy is a natural leader—big, commanding, quietly sullen.  He serves as the de facto leader of the IRA group.  Damien is the brighter of the two.  He has been in medical school and at the beginning of the movie is about to go to London to finish his training as a doctor.  After witnessing some British soldiers abusing railroad workers who have stood up to them, Damien stays and pledges himself the IRA.

Much of the film deals with the war and its violence.  We see violence and intimidation by the British soldiers and the police under British authority (“Black and Tans”).  We also see the violence by the freedom fighters (or terrorists, depending on your sympathies) against the British.  The more violent one side becomes, the more violence the other side answers with.  The carnage just keeps escalating.

The real conflict of the film, though, is not the fight between the Irish and the British; it is the conflict, represented in Teddy and Damien, between idealism and pragmatism.  As the film begins, Damien is about to do the most pragmatic thing of his life—leave Ireland with all its fighting.  But he can’t do it when he sees what is happening.  His love of justice and freedom compel him to stay and take up arms himself.  He is the idealist.  Teddy also loves his homeland and freedom, but for him the battle is about how to achieve a given goal.  If it means bending justice or even going against the shadow Irish government, he’s willing to sacrifice right for a victory.

For much of the film, their two outlooks overlap.  But as the IRA gains more power and especially after a treaty is signed creating the Irish Free State, Teddy and Damien often end up with very different agendas.  Teddy is willing to accept the victory that is won, even if it is not total; Damien sees the victory (which required allegiance to the British Crown) as incomplete.  As a pragmatist, Teddy is ready to do what can be done with the new power he has.  As an idealist, Damien is disappointed that his ideals—for which he has in some ways given his life and (more importantly) his soul—remain unrealized.

There is much in this film that can serve as a lens through which we can see the conflicts of our time.  It would be an oversimplification to see American and British military in Iraq in the same light as the Black and Tans, but there are parallels.  Many of those serving in Ireland saw themselves as doing their duty for their country and striving to maintain their own ideals.  Likewise, there is a great difference between the IRA seeking freedom and Iraqi insurgents, but there are also similarities.  By comparing the story of the Irish War for Independence with our war in Iraq, we may learn a bit more about both sides of the conflict.

We may also see that the tension between idealism and pragmatism continues to play out in the way we see the current conflict.  Everyone claims to be fighting for ideals—democracy, defense of nation, or religion.  But in the end, it is often pragmatism that controls the decisions and policies.

The film invites us to identify more with the idealist (or maybe it just seems that way to me since that is where my sympathies lie).  But it also makes it clear that those ideals that we live by can carry great costs.