From a reader:

Four Hours at the Capitol is an important new film now playing on HBO. This film consists of footage of the January fascist attack on the capital, fomented by Donald Trump. The footage begins around the time the Proud Boys march over to begin the attack and runs through to the dispersal of the crowd four hours later. It’s interspersed throughout with interviews of fascists who participated, cops who were attacked, a few photographers and reporters, and some of the congresspersons in the building at the time.

This film reveals a sobering and visceral picture of the savagery and size of the mob. It shows how very close things came to an actual coup in which violence would have been done to major politicians and martial law declared, and Trump declared president by a rump Congress.

In the months since January 6—and this, too, the film reveals, at least to a degree—the fascist base that carried out this coup attempt has hardened. The filmmakers seem intent on exposing the criminal character of these fascists, and this they do. The viewer can see this in the words of the fascists themselves. In these ways, this film makes a real contribution.

At the same time, the effect of this film will likely be mixed. For one thing, the fascists will study this with “next time” in mind in the same way a football team would study films of a close loss in order to improve their attack. There will also be those attracted to the unhinged politics of the fascists on the camera—whom the filmmakers allow to run their lunacy unchallenged. In addition, the emotional center of the film revolves around the police—they are the most sympathetic characters—and this one-sided portrait of “cops as heroes” erases their true overall character and role in this society.

But perhaps the biggest problem is that these fascists run their madness essentially unchallenged. It is important to hear what these people are thinking and saying, but if the filmmakers believe that these fascists will expose themselves, that idea is deluded in a society that is tearing apart at the seams and in which half the people are locked in a lunatic echo chamber and way too many are subject to be swayed by them. And when the only opposed voices are the likes of Chuck Schumer and other Democratic Congresspeople who have no real answer to this threat other than clucking and tsking about how bad it is, that’s a problem. Nonetheless, even with these significant weaknesses, this film has real strengths and should be watched.

When I watched it, I could not help but think of this passage from A Declaration, A Call to Get Organized Now for a Real Revolution:

These days there is a lot of talk about another civil war, especially from fascists, in government and the broader society, who think they could just carry out a one-sided slaughter of those they hate, including Black people and other people of color, “illegal immigrants,” “uppity women” and those who don’t conform to “traditional” sexual and gender relations and “norms.” This situation needs to be radically changed, to where there are masses of people prepared to defeat these fascists and to do so as part of getting rid of this whole system, which has bred these fascists, along with all the other horrors it continually perpetrates.

And then, what follows:

What we need is “repolarization for revolution”— making real revolution an active and increasingly powerful force of first thousands, and then millions, of people organized to work for and win more and more people to this revolution—radically changing the “terrain” on which the revolution will be fought.

This film, along with recent coverage at Revcom and on The RNL—Revolution, Nothing Less!—Show on YouTube, also struck me with this truth, from Bob Avakian in his A New Year, The Urgent Need For A Radically New World—For The Emancipation of All Humanity, shortly after the events of January 6:

The electoral defeat of the Trump/Pence regime only “buys some time”—both in relation to the imminent danger posed by the fascism this regime represents, and more fundamentally in terms of the potentially existential crisis humanity is increasingly facing as a consequence of being bound to the dynamics of this system of capitalism-imperialism. But, in essential terms, time is not on the side of the struggle for a better future for humanity. So the time there is must not be squandered—mired in oblivious individualism and political paralysis or misspent on misdirected activity that only reinforces this system which perpetuates endless horrors for the masses of humanity and has brought things to the brink of very real catastrophe.

Those are the messages that we must take, and take out, from this film.