‘Guerrilla’ Reminds Us How Peaceful Our Political Resistance Is
Not long ago, leftists waged war
Guerilla is Showtime’s newest attempt to break into the prestige television market. Watching it made me think of Beyoncé’s 2016 Super Bowl halftime show.
In case you missed the controversy, right-wing snowflakes Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity, among others, denounced Beyoncé’s show for invoking the “violent” Black Lives Matter movement.
O’Reilly and Hannity have no idea how lucky they are. Today’s progressive movements are radically nonviolent. American police gun down unarmed black people at an shocking rate, and yet no organized, violent resistance has formed to fight back.
True, some lone-wolf radicals preaching black liberation theology have gunned down cops, but those isolated incidents are nothing like the organized and violent resistance of past decades.
In the 1970s, leftist violence swept across the West. We haven’t seen anything like it since. Guerrilla is about that era.
John Ridley — the writer behind American Crime Story, 12 Years a Slave and Three Kings — produced and directed Guerrilla. The eight-part miniseries is easily as good as anything on HBO or AMC.
The story follows the formation of a black radical group in London in 1971, the year the Immigration Act passed. Prior to the law, citizens born in the commonwealth could immigrate to the United Kingdom and stay. It wasn’t an easy life, by any means, but it was often better than staying behind in the former colonies.
The Immigration Act stripped commonwealth citizens of their automatic right to remain in the United Kingdom. From then on, immigrants had to live and work in the United Kingdom for five years before they got citizenship.
But this was the 1970s, when work was scarce and immigrants didn’t top the list of potential employees. The fascist National Front gained power. People rioted. Political violence was common.
Guerrilla stars Babou Ceesay as Marcus Hill and Freida Pinto as Jas Mitra. Hill is an unemployed English teacher and a black man. He travels to prisons to teach and organize black convicts. Mitra is his Indian wife, a nurse at a local hospital. She’s far more radical than her husband is.
Idris Elba rounds out that cast as Kent Abbasi, an artist and a centrist. Nathaniel Martello-White plays Dhari Bishop, an imprisoned black radical who quickly becomes the voice and soul of a new movement that draws in Hill and Mitra.
Guerilla doesn’t fuck around. It has a low opinion of so-called radicals who, in Mitra’s words, “Smoke weed, talk some shit and fuck whatever’s in front of them.”
The first episode believably charts the couple’s descent into violence. The leader of their movement is a moderate who’s sleeping with a white Irish woman. He advocates political resistance, but also preaches a racially integrated future.
His moderation doesn’t save him. The cops engineer a riot during a peaceful protest and use that as cover to assassinate him.
That death radicalizes Mitra, who pressures Hill into joining her. He’s reluctant at first. He wants to educate people, not commit violence. But then he goes to the labor office for the hundredth time to get a job and the guy behind the counter asks if he can drive a car.
He can see that Hill is “one of the smart ones,” you see, and he wants to get him the best job possible. The casual racism pushes Hill over the edge.
The couple hook up with an IRA contact, get a gun, make a plan and break Bishop out of prison with the goal of making him the leader of a new radical movement. A movement Ridley modeled on the real-life British Black Panther Party and the Race Today Collective.
Guerrilla doesn’t shy away from violence and its consequences. Mitras vomits at the end of the first episode after she realizes she’s irrevocably changed her life. If you live by the sword, you die by the sword — and Guerrilla takes pains to show both the consequences of political violence and the actions of more peaceful revolutionaries.
Bonus points to Ridley for including a subplot involving an anti-activist police officer who’s got a complicated relationship with the movement itself. Rory Kinnear’s portrayal of the cop mirrors the weirder and more horrifying aspects of colonialism and its effects on the oppressed as well as the oppressor.
Guerrilla reminds us that there are more dangerous things than a pop singer subtly advocating racial justice. If the political left ever resorts again to violence, right-wing pundits will surely long for those halcyon days when the left’s resistance was so peaceful.
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