A decent documentary about the global arms trade

Devil's Bargain: A Journey into the Small Arms Trade
Seen at DOXA, the Vancouver documentary film festival.

If you've seen Lord of War, the largely ignored film starring Nicholas Cage as an international arms dealer, this documentary covers a lot of the same ground. In fact, Cage's character is based on the arms dealer Victor Boot who--as shown in Devils' Bargain--is simultaneously hunted by law enforcement for supplying arms to the world's insurgencies while working for the US department of defense.

Like Lord of War, the film explores the intricate routes small arms take from the rusting eastern bloc arsenals into the hands of combatants from Iraq to the streets of Nairobi. What's great about this film is its visual depiction of globalization, starting in Somalia (actually I missed the first few minutes so this is where I came in) where we meet a group of young men armed with Kalashnikovs. One is giving an impassioned speech about the need to be armed amidst the chaos of post-collapse Somalia. His friend, looking bemused, says "what did you say? no, we use these to rape women."

From there we hear from Moldovan pilots, a Russian who runs an African air-cargo company, and plenty of arms salesmen as they discuss the finer points of lightweight automatic weapons. The talking heads include people from various organizations that document the global movement of arms to John Bolton who defends the US's stance against an international treaty to regulate the industry ludicrously claiming it would violate Americans' second amendment rights.

Watch this in tandem with Lord of War and Darwin's Nightmare and you'll have a pretty good idea of how it works.

Some Afrocentric Links

Scarlett Lion is a very good blog (with photos) that I found through the Walrus website. The author takes her role as a Western journalist living in Africa very seriously; something I do not do. Maybe I should start.

A bumptious guide to book writing is an article mentioned on Scarlett Lion describing the pretentious flock of young men who aspire to write books about Africa and end up with "a manuscript that is all about you, with Africa as a picturesque backdrop to your macho derring-do." FYI I have no intention of writing a book but if I did, yeah, it would probably be as described above but weirder and not all that macho.

On that note, I genuinely enjoyed The Village of Waiting by George Packer which is a young man unashamedly writing about himself. In fact I routinely recommend this book to anyone who hasn't already been annoyed by my giddy lectures on, Darwin's Nightmare, my favourite documentary.