The settlers have a lot to celebrate these days. In the span of a single month, an unauthorized outpost overlooking Beit Sahour—on land once zoned for a Palestinian children’s hospital—was transformed from a handful of mobile homes into a state-sanctioned settlement: guarded by soldiers, connected by roads, publicly embraced by senior ministers, and folded into Israel’s newly redrawn map of the West Bank.

The pipeline from violent land seizure to official authorization has never run more smoothly. It’s only a matter of time before groups selling homes there are welcomed into synagogues across the U.S.

Even as the IDF itself reports a steep drop in Palestinian attacks in the West Bank—57 incidents in 2025, down from 258 the year before—it continues to claim a heightened risk of an October 7–style attack from a population it has largely disarmed, and from resistance groups it has systematically decimated. That claimed threat now justifies permanent deployments in Jenin and Tulkarm: new roads carved through refugee camps, buildings leveled, and residents treated as removable obstacles to “security”—all of it paving the way for resettling the north.

Meanwhile, the real growth curve is on the settler side: 867 Jewish attacks in 2025, a 27 percent increase from 2024, including 128 severe incidents—shootings, arson, and serious physical violence—up more than 50 percent year over year.

The settler pioneers, as their allies in government call them, are building new frontiers. A new outpost has popped up near Qusra—the deepest yet inside PA-controlled Area B—and it’s already been used as a base for settler attacks. Israeli forces have responded by tear-gassing the Palestinian village under siege.

To top it off, National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir approved gun permits for residents of eighteen West Bank settlements this week, extending a firearms policy that has rapidly militarized civilian settlers.

In light of all this exciting news, the Knesset hosted an actual celebration. On Monday, MK Limor Son Har-Melech held a tribute ceremony for the Hilltop Youth—the loose moniker for the most violent settlers at the front lines of land seizure—billed as a “Great salute to the pioneers of the settlements, the hills and the farms.”

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Among those honored was Daniella Weiss, the “godmother” of the settlement movement, who proudly tells anyone who’ll listen that she feels no empathy when Palestinian children are killed, and who closed her eyes when a reporter tried to show her my footage of a settler clubbing a Palestinian grandmother.

Also in attendance at the Knesset ceremony was Elisha Yered, who was suspected of involvement in the murder of a Palestinian teenager in 2023. I highlighted Yered in my piece Good Settler, Bad Settler, documenting how he functioned as a central ideologue and organizer within the hilltop movement, bridging violent outpost builders with the senior politicians and ministers who protect and empower them.

Here is Yered on X after the ceremony, waxing poetic about how far the settlement movement has come—from state alienation to full embrace, and from the myth of “good” versus “bad” settlers to open unity (emphasis mine):

Just back now from a historic and moving event held today in the Knesset. An official tribute ceremony in the Knesset building to the pioneers of settlement, the hilltop outposts and farms, every minute of which was like a healing balm for the wounds of the past that refused to heal until this day.

Years of persecution, of scorn and contempt, of lack of recognition for the life’s work of those who stubbornly kept the ember alive, carved deep wounds also in the hearts of the toughest among the activists.

And after them came other years of awakening and breaking forward. The contempt was replaced by awe and support, but alongside them grew a disgusting selection by certain elements who tried to divide between the settlement movements, between the pioneers and their comrades, between those worthy of government support and those whose blood is fair game, between those carried on shoulders and those deserving of condemnation and hostile treatment.

And here came MK Limor Son Har-Melech, who from her very first day in office refused to toe the line with those who tried to sow division and discord, to divide and conquer. At the tribute and appreciation conference she launched today for all the pioneering movements, we sat there together. Activists from the hilltops alongside members of the Nahala movement, farm residents alongside veterans of the young settlement. Jews filling different roles in the campaign, but all fighting for the same goal and even joining hands many times.

The Knesset members and ministers who came to express their support and appreciation repeated the same message again and again. You are the ones on the front lines of settlement, pulling the State of Israel forward to its Zionist values that it forgot over the years. Every boy, woman or father sitting here—they are soldiers in every sense. And not just them, also members of the second circle and the supporting environment without whom nothing would have succeeded in happening.

He then goes on to thank many members of the Israeli government who attended the ceremony.

As I often say, I truly appreciate the settlers for their candor. They understand the assignment laid out from the earliest days of Zionism, and have no patience for the pretense of “peaceful coexistence.”

Here’s what I wrote in The Baffler about Bezalel Smotrich—the finance minister and de facto governor of the West Bank—who has done more than anyone to pave the way for the current explosion in settlement growth:

Smotrich has always understood the origin of the current propelling him. “I believe that the yearning of generations for this land, and the confidence in our ultimate return thereto, are the most profound driving forces of the progression of the Return to Zion which led to the establishment of the State of Israel,” he wrote in the 2017 plan. On the inconvenient reality of the land’s current inhabitants, he added, “The statement that the Arab yearning for national expression in the Land of Israel cannot be ‘repressed’ is incorrect. It worked fine for the State of Israel, and it needs to work in the same way for Judea and Samaria.”

For Zionism, Smotrich knows, the formula has never changed: the founding myth will drive you forward, force will deliver the promise.

And the end of my article in The Drift about Israel’s archaeological warfare:

Aharon Tavger, another settler archaeologist at Ariel University, contends that the law around the occupied territories has never made much sense. “If we accept the recognition of Israel — the Israeli state,” Tavger said, “because of the historical right, or the connection of the people of Israel to the land, there is no difference between Tel Aviv and Sebastia.” He continued, “And I can say even the opposite: The heartland of Israel, of the ancient Jewish land, is Judea and Samaria — the West Bank — much more than Tel Aviv.” The whole argument against excavating in the West Bank, in his view, raises a thornier question.

“In 1948, Israel also occupied territory,” he said. “So what’s the difference?”

This is not a story about excesses or deviations, but the logical extension of a project that has always depended on ethnic cleansing to sustain itself. The fantasy that liberal Zionism could restrain or civilize it has fully collapsed.

Over the past several years, Democrats and liberal institutions in the United States have cheered on, amplified, and ultimately helped operationalize what had long been a far-right smear campaign against UNRWA, the largest aid agency for Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, effectively equating it with Hamas.

On Tuesday, that campaign reached its logical conclusion, as Israeli bulldozers tore through its headquarters in occupied East Jerusalem, confiscating equipment, expelling guards, and raising an Israeli flag over the ruins. Israeli ministers arrived on site to celebrate. National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir called it “a historic day.”

Created in 1949, UNRWA exists to serve Palestinians displaced during Israel’s founding and, in doing so, to preserve their status as refugees. That role alone makes it intolerable to a political project committed not just to removing Palestinians from the land, but to erasing the fact that they were ever there. In recent years, UNRWA has functioned as a lifeline in both Gaza and the West Bank—running schools, clinics, food distribution, and basic infrastructure where no substitute exists. In Gaza in particular, dismantling UNRWA has meant dismantling the only system capable of delivering food at scale, directly leading to the starvation crisis last year.

In early 2024, Israeli officials alleged—without publicly verifiable evidence—that twelve UNRWA employees, out of a workforce of roughly 30,000, had participated in the October 7 attacks. A U.S. intelligence assessment later characterized those claims with “low confidence” and could not independently confirm them. Even so, the damage was already done. Major U.S. outlets—most notably The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal—treated the accusations as credible breaking news, splashing them across front pages while burying caveats deep in the text. The timing was exquisite: the allegations broke just hours after the International Court of Justice found that Israel was plausibly committing genocide in Gaza.

Dozens of Western governments initially froze funding to UNRWA. Most quietly resumed it once the claims collapsed. The United States did not. Instead, President Joe Biden signed a bipartisan spending bill that extended the UNRWA funding ban, backed by Democratic leadership including Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries.

That complicity continues to this day, including from presidential hopeful Rep. Ro Khanna, who, just last week, voted for a bill that defunded UNRWA while sending security assistance to Israel. Days later, he offered a textbook display of liberal hypocrisy by circulating a strongly worded letter condemning Israel’s actions in the West Bank. (In September, Khanna also signed onto a letter decrying “man-made mass starvation,” apparently without noticing what policies were helping produce it.)

Here’s a remarkable exchange I had with Khanna last week, presented without comment:

The UNRWA precedent is now metastasizing. Israel has moved to shut down Doctors Without Borders clinics in Gaza, demanding staff lists, restricting speech, and barring supplies—explicitly citing the group’s use of words like “genocidal” as grounds for expulsion. Patients interviewed inside these facilities say that without these clinics, they will not survive. Amputees will lose access to physical therapy needed to walk again; burn victims will miss daily wound care that prevents infection and death; surgical wards performing dozens of operations a day will simply disappear. In a territory where Israel has already destroyed most hospitals, there is no backup system waiting to take over.

This is not an attempt to absolve Republicans. I take for granted that they will do what they have always done: inflict harm on brown people, wherever they are in the globe. What demands scrutiny are the “Good Liberals” who launder smears into respectable discourse, cast votes behind closed doors to codify them into law, and then retreat into moral language while the consequences unfold.

To be perfectly clear: countless mainstream Democrats and liberal institutions helped deliver Itamar Ben-Gvir one of his lifelong dreams—the destruction of the largest aid agency for Palestinians. That is whose team they’re on.

Whatever one thinks about Israel’s history, the comforting versions of that story no longer do any explanatory work. What matters is what Israel is today. The Israel that has thrown its full support behind the most violent settlers in the West Bank. The Israel that is dismantling critical aid networks for Palestinians just because it can. The Israel that, on Wednesday, violated the “ceasefire” for the umpteenth time by killing three Palestinian journalists in Gaza while they were documenting life in displacement camps.

In the United States, as we sink deeper into fascism, the way our bipartisan consensus on Israel intersects with this trajectory has become impossible to ignore. Figures like Jonathan Greenblatt, Bari Weiss, and Chuck Schumer have systematically downplayed the rise of literal Nazism on the American right in favor of targeting critics of Israel. (A Justice Department official who resigned in May put it plainly: “There was no interest in antisemitism unless it involved protests of Israel or the war in Gaza.”) Last week, Israel dispatched officials across the U.S. to pressure institutions into banning the term “West Bank” in favor of “Judea and Samaria.”

This is why, as I wrote last year, Trump was so savvy to deploy a crackdown on pro-Palestine activists as the vanguard of his assault on the Constitution, one that was facilitated every step of the way by Democrats. America’s unwavering support for Israel—the “beacon of democracy in the Middle East,” where millions can’t vote or claim basic rights—has long been one of its central contradictions. It was only a matter of time before an authoritarian cashed in.

It should come as no surprise, then, that ICE’s tactics increasingly resemble the IDF’s: executing civilians in broad daylight with impunity, blocking medical care, and issuing bald-faced lies about the circumstances of these killings. This is not to suggest that one is derivative of the other, but that this is what a fascist crackdown looks like, whether it’s carried out at home or abroad.

Today, support for Israel means support for a far-right, antidemocratic movement that is killing and displacing Palestinians and Arabs across the region, while feeding into the erosion of civil liberties here in the United States. And as if we needed further proof of that connection: On Thursday, Haaretz reported that U.S. authorities chartered a private jet owned by an Israeli-American businessman and close friend of Donald Trump to deport eight Palestinians living in the United States to the West Bank. Days earlier, Israel deported an American Jewish activist due to his “leftism,” citing as evidence a photo of him protesting against Nazis in Charlottesville.

The through-line is no longer subtle. A single political logic now runs from hilltop outposts to humanitarian strangulation, from Gaza to the West Bank, and straight into the heart of American institutions—where many of the same Democrats who maintain steadfast support for Israel now caution against the push to abolish ICE. This is the end of the story liberals told themselves: that power could be outsourced without consequence, violence compartmentalized, and moral language made to stand in for material reality. What remains is a single, expanding architecture of force. History will not be confused about who made that possible.

A few final notes before I sign off:

• In case you missed it, I had what I thought was an excellent conversation with Mouin Rabbani about Israel’s endgame in the West Bank. You can watch it here.

• Columbia Journalism Review interviewed me about how I navigate the line between reporting and activism.

• I’ll be joining an online panel discussion on the West Bank hosted by the Arab Center Washington DC on January 29 at 10 a.m. EST. You can register here.

• And some rare good news: after a sustained global pressure campaign, Israel called off plans to demolish a youth soccer field in Aida Refugee Camp in the West Bank.

See you next time.

I often find myself searching on the FIAF database for the location of archive film prints. The database isn’t definitive, but it is often a helpful indicator. Anyone searching for archive copies of Abel Gance films would likely have spotted an entry for Le nègre blanc (1912). Click further and you would have seen that the Filmmuseum Düsseldorf was listed as holding a 16mm print of this film. I think I’ve known, vaguely, of this FIAF listing for many years. It had never occurred to me to investigate it further. Why? Well, I supposed that something so rare would have long since been checked and confirmed by another researcher. I also suspected that the copy might be so fragile that it was unavailable for viewing. The fact that the recent Gance retrospective at the Cinémathèque française did not include this film in its “complete” screening schedule seemed to confirm this (see my four posts from September 2024). But the question remained, lodged in my brain.

In the last few years, I have felt more willing and able to venture onto the continent in order to pursue various strands of my research. With a prospective trip to Germany planned for December 2025, I decided in advance that I should investigate this mysterious print in Düsseldorf. Over the autumn, there followed a long exchange of emails with various archivists, and the team at Düsseldorf kindly agreed to check their print in advance of my visit. I received the startling information that they had two prints of this title: one on 16mm and another, shorter, copy on 9.5mm. The former was approximately the length one would expect for an early two-reel film; the latter was clearly an abbreviated version of a single reel. My curiosity grew (as did my doubts), but I knew I must hold my excitement until someone had checked the prints to confirm their identity. Before I reach the inevitable (and I’m sure not surprising) conclusion of this search, I should say why the very idea of this film’s existence is so interesting. Interesting to me, anyway…

For a start, this print of Le nègre blanc would be the earliest surviving film directed by Gance. Some of his earlier appearances as an actor are preserved in films by others, but La Folie de Docteur Tube (1915) is his earliest known work as a director to exist. That this is so is something of a miracle, as the film was never commercially released. It is also frustrating, since all of Gance’s two- or three-reel films that did get released in 1912-15 are considered lost. These are the films that earned him enough success to make the more substantial features of 1916-18, films which anticipate so much of the dramatic and aesthetic qualities of his masterpieces of the next decade. What was Gance like as a filmmaker before 1916? We simply don’t know. So to find a print of any Gance film from 1912 would be of enormous interest.

Secondly, Le nègre blanc is of interest for its subject and stars. The earliest synopsis I have to hand is in Sophie Daria’s Abel Gance, hier et demain (1959), which was based on a number of conversations with Gance. As a result, it is often inaccurate and evasive – but certain details are found nowhere else. The book offers a brief sketch of Le nègre blanc, adding that “it was never projected” (44). Having searched the major film journals and major newspapers of the period, I can indeed find no evidence of a public screening. But that the film was actually made is indicated by the survival of a document from 16 April 1912, citing payment for Gance’s performance from Le Film français, the company which produced Le nègre blanc. (They paid him 500F. You can see below an image of this document, taken from the auction catalogue of 1993, at which Nelly Kaplan sold her huge collection of Gance’s personal papers. Happily, the highest bidders were two French state archives.) And before you ask, yes, Gance did play the lead role of the titular black character, so presumably would appear on screen in blackface. To what end? Well, a little more information on Le nègre blanc is given in Roger Icart’s biography of Gance from 1983:

A black boy goes to school with white children. Cold-shouldered and ridiculed by his classmates, he decides to make himself look like them by painting his face and body white. His appearance thus disguised provokes a redoubled dose of mockery, while he dies, his body slowly poisoned by his naive stratagem. (49)

As I discovered when I searched for the phrase, “le nègre blanc” (which I hope you don’t need me to translate) had a remarkably wide circulation in the early twentieth century. It appeared in any number of cultural and political contexts, as a derogatory term, a term of entreaty, of warning, of classification. In using it for the title of his film, Gance was clearly tapping into a phrase that was common enough on people’s lips. Sophie Daria cites the film as “anti-racist”, while Roger Icart cites it as “anti-racist(?)”. I like the hesitancy of Icart’s parenthetical question mark. Clearly, the film can be read both as a parable about the poison of racism – but might also hint at something less palatable about the insurmountable nature of race. Added to these murky cultural waters is the fact that, in the 1930s, Gance was identified by some as Jewish and vilified as such. (The right-wing press in France mounted numerous vile attacks on his films and him. The label “Jew”, for them, could be applied to anyone they didn’t like. Chaplin, too, was called a “Jew” by like-minded fascists in this period.) That Gance was adopted seemed to hint at family secrets, and the figure of a fatherless male seeking to rebuild (or adopt) a family is a recurrent theme throughout his films. However crude, Le nègre blanc is surely an important marker of this interest in lone men seeking identity and belonging – a kind of destiny – and being destroyed by it.

But Gance was not the first to use this title for a film. Le nègre blanc was the title of one of the numerous “Rigadin” comedies starring Charles Prince, this one being produced by Pathé in 1910 (some sources say 1912). This film (viewable online) follows much the same plot as Gance’s, though its comedy is less touched by tragedy. In the Pathé version, a black man is mocked at a high society party when he proposes to a white woman. Rejected because of his colour, he finds a potion to turn himself white. In this form, he returns to the woman – but she is now engaged to another man. In revenge, he slips her some of his potion and she turns black. Rejected by her fiancé because of her colour, she tries to seek solace with Rigadin. But now he has the last laugh and rejects her because she is “black” and he is “white”. Like Gance’s synopsis, the Pathé film is an awkward satire on the idea of race – and (in its casting and use of blackface) a perpetuation of racial stereotypes. Perhaps the very existence of this contemporary film discouraged Gance’s producers from releasing his version.

Whatever the reason, the theme of Le nègre blanc reappeared in one of the few Gance films of this period about which we have a fuller description: Le masque d’horreur (1912), starring Édouard de Max. In this film, an artist has spent years trying to create a lifelike mask expressing the greatest fear imaginable. Driven almost to the point of madness, he decides at last to become his own model. He sits before a mirror, takes poison and cuts his wrist. (As the artist smears his blood over the lamp that lights his face, so Gance tinted his film red to mimic the gruesome aesthetic.) As the artist dies, so the mask becomes more and more lifelike. He embraces his creation, and dies. Like Le nègre blanc, therefore, Le masque d’horreur portrayed a figure seeking self-transformation through the creation of a mask – and the adoption of this mask caused his death. Unlike Le nègre blanc, however, Le masque d’horreur was actually shown. After a processing error botched the first print struck of the film, it was seemingly reprinted and projected in May 1912. This brief foray into the public realm did not stop the film’s disappearance. Like everything else from this period of Gance’s directorial work, it remains lost.

Returning to Le nègre blanc, another major interest is the fact that it was made in the year Gance married his co-star in this film, Mathilde Thizeau. About Thizeau, I know frustratingly little. Though she was his first wife and starred in at least two of Gance’s films in 1912, she is a virtual non-entity in most accounts of the filmmaker. Sophie Daria cites the existence of this woman in a carelessly off-hand way: “the young cineaste had married a journalist older than himself: Mathilde, a good and simple girl with whom he lived in harmony for a few years” (65). Ouch. Given that Daria certainly got her information from Gance himself, this is quite an insult. (Of course, by 1959 he was married to Sylvie (née Marie Odette Vérité), his third wife.) The truth is that Mathilde Thizeau was only five months older than “the young cineaste”: they were both 23 when they married in 1912. Furthermore, Gance’s biographer Roger Icart offers a far fairer (though no less brief) account of Mathilde as “a young journalist of great spirituality, like [Gance] enamoured by art and philosophy, who would participate in all his endeavours and inspire him to write numerous poems, dedicated ‘to my Thilde’. Above all, she would reinforce his ambitions as an author” (23).

But who was Mathilde Thizeau? Where did she come from? What was her background? Who were her family? All I know is drawn from the scant evidence of her name in some contemporary journals. Thus on 28 October 1912, the Journal des débats announces the marriage of Abel Gance, “dramatist”, to Mathilde Thizeau, “journalist”. I am re-reading Proust at the moment, and today reached the last part of Swann’s Way (1913), in which the narrator recalls his childhood love for Gilberte. They often play together on the Champs-Élysées, and while the narrator waits in hope of Gilberte’s arrival, he makes friends with an old woman who comes loyally to sit on a bench. Here, she passes the time – come rain or shine – by reading what she calls “my old débats”. To this scene, set one imagines sometime in the early 1880s, an old woman expresses her fondness for her old journal. Proust’s novel was first published the year after the announcement of Gance’s marriage. What a strange world this is, and how charmingly old-fashioned, even then, to announce one’s marriage in the Journal des débats.

Searching for anything written by Thizeau, I eventually found my way to the issue of Le Gaulois du Dimanche published on 31 August 1912, two months before her marriage. There – among the pretty pictures, the silly adverts, the coverage of Massenet’s death and the latest crisis in the Balkans, the photos of cats and dogs, the latest women’s fashions, and a sentimental song – is Mathilde Thizeau’s piece: “La Rose qui a vu jouer ‘Héliogabale’”. A curious title, and it took me a little while to identity the “Héliogabale” it cites. It seems that Héliogabale (the Roman emperor Elagabalus) was the subject of a small number of artistic works in France around the turn of the century – there were a few plays, plus Louis Feuillade’s film Héliogabale (1911). Thizeau quotes a line from act I, scene ix of her particular source: “…et les plafonds ouverts / Sur eux laissent tomber les roses une à une…” (“…and over them the open ceilings / Let fall the roses one by one…”). I eventually found these enigmatic lines in the libretto of Déodat de Séverac’s eponymous opera of 1910. I knew Séverac by his lovely piano music, as well as by his charming opera Le Cœur du moulin (1908). He was from Languedoc in southern France and portrayed the landscapes and people of this region in his music, so it’s no surprise to learn that Héliogabale was first performed in Béziers. This took place in August 1910 in a huge arena populated by 15,000 spectators. Despite its place in a festival in high summer, the opera was a financial disaster and swiftly disappeared. But it was revived for a small number of performances at the Salle Gaveau in Paris in February and April 1911. It was here, one presumes, that Mathilde Thizeau experienced it.

Thizeau’s short prose poem takes inspiration from the scene in which Héliogabale arranges that his enemies, whom he has invited to dine, be smothered by thousands of rosebuds and petals emptied from the rafters. In Thizeau’s text, a rose watches the performance of this scene in the opera as the blossoms smother the banqueters below. She marvels at what she imagines to be the revenge of the roses against the men who have cut them from their stalks. At night, she decides to take her own revenge on the beetle which seeks to steal the nectar from her heart. When the beetle finally crawls into the flower, she “bleeds” herself to death: emptying her nectar into a delicious pool that the beetle drinks until it is insensible. Then the rose lets herself die, her petals falling over the beetle and entombing it in blossom. Thus ends the only piece of writing I have ever read by Mathilde Thizeau. What to make of it? Well, it’s very fin-de-siècle, and the imagery of male predator entombed inside a female flower is very… well, familiar. But it’s charming for how particular it is, and the fact that the story is taken from the perspective of a flower is curious. It’s a sidelong glance at a tiny corner of the world of 1912, and it’s an animistic close-up of nature.

I suppose it interests and charms me because it makes me want to know more. Did Thizeau see this opera with Gance? What was his reaction? And did they write together? Gance was performing in the theatre as well as being involved in the cinema. In the 1910s, he appeared in some important productions of D’Annunzio’s exotic, multimedia French plays – including Le Martyre de saint Sébastien (1911) and La Pisanelle ou La Mort Parfumée (1913). The latter ends with the protagonist being suffocated while inhaling the heady scent of roses, so not so far away from the world of Héliogabale. (And I have written about the links between D’Annunzio and Gance elsewhere.) So here we have this newly married couple, thinking and living theatre and music, within touching distance of the heady world of late romantic art. Such a world must have seemed far in advance of some of the films they were able to make in 1912-13, and Gance abandoned cinema for a year or more in 1913-14 in order to complete his own epic, multimedia stage drama La Victoire de Samothrace. How much of Mathilde lies in this piece, and what kind of life did they lead in these years? Sometime in 1914, Gance met Ida Danis, a secretary working for his new production company, Le Film d’Art. He fell in love with her and divorced Mathilde in 1919. Of course, Ida died in 1921 during the production of La Roue, leaving the filmmaker with a lifelong sense of loss. (Never having married Ida, he married her sister Marguerite in 1922. The marriage ended in turmoil in 1930, by which point Gance had met Sylvie…)

All of which is to say that Gance’s choice of film over theatre was echoed in his choice of Ida over Mathilde. Film history knows all about Ida as Gance’s “great love”, which only makes Mathilde’s fate the more poignant to me. Here are the limits of history. I know when Mathilde was born and died, and when she married and divorced Gance. But I don’t know her: her interests, her ambitions, what animated her soul, what drew her to Gance, or how they fell in love. I don’t even know what Mathilde looked like. Perhaps there is a photo somewhere in the archives, but when I did my research in Paris many years ago, I didn’t think to inquire. She died in 1966, but of her life after her divorce from Gance I know nothing. Did she know or care what happened to him – or see his films? Did he know or care what happened to her? And what did she do with her life?

For all these reasons, therefore, I was keen to know if the Filmmuseum Düsseldorf did indeed hold one or even two prints of Le nègre blanc. Eventually, the prints were located and examined. I received my answer… As I’m sure you’ve guessed, neither print was of Gance’s 1912 film. Instead, they were reduced versions of a film by the same name from 1925. This was made by Serge Nadejdine, Nicolas Rimsky, and Henry Wulschleger for Films Albatros. (I told you that title had surprising circulation in the early twentieth century.) At some point in the past, decades ago perhaps, the wrong iteration of this particular title was selected and recorded on a database. So no lost oddity for me, and no lost oddity for you.

But this wild goose chase offers another valuable lesson in the problems of film history. Evidently, we rely on a lot of unverifiable data. Scholars (including myself) copy and paste much of our information on a film’s cast, crew, length, date etc. without being able to check it against primary sources. (I discussed this same issue in my frustrated search for Der Evangelimann (1923).) And many films like Le nègre blanc do not survive for us to test our information or assumptions. But my experience chasing after a false entry on the FIAF database demonstrates that it’s always worth asking archives directly about what they possess. Material from this period is often sketchily catalogued on archival databases, let alone centralized platforms like FIAF. And the archivists themselves are a necessary and inspiring set of guides through the unique material they hold. If I did not get to see Le nègre blanc, I’m sure there are plenty of other surprises out there, waiting to be discovered.

Paul Cuff

My thanks to Andreas Thein and Thomas Ochs of the Filmmuseum Düsseldorf, and to Oliver Hanley for oiling the wheels of communication.

References

Sophie Daria, Abel Gance, hier et demain (Paris: La Palatine, 1959).

Roger Icart, Abel Gance, ou Le Prométhée foudroyé (Lausanne: l’Age d’homme, 1983).

Jupiter Castillo, a UC Santa Barbara graduate and healthcare worker, shares his experience of detention and deportation.

The post Here Today, Gone Tomorrow: What Happens After an ICE Arrest appeared first on The Santa Barbara Independent.

Francesca Albanese - by Mr. Fish

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NICE, France — It is a late November afternoon. I am driving to Genoa, Italy with Francesca Albanese, the U.N. Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967. We are traveling to join striking dockworkers. The dockworkers call for a moratorium on weapons bound for Israel and a halt to the Italian government’s plans to increase military spending.

We speed past the inky waters of Baie des Anges on our right and the razor-backed French Alps on our left. Châteaus and clusters of houses with red-tiled roofs, shrouded in the fading light, are perched on the rolling hillsides. Palm trees line the seafront road.

Francesca — tall with flecks of gray in her hair and wearing large black-framed glasses and hoop earrings — is the bête noire of Israel and the United States. She was placed on the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) list of the U.S. Treasury Department — normally used to sanction those accused of money laundering or being involved with terrorist organizations — six days after the release of her report, “From economy of occupation to economy of genocide.”

The OFAC list — weaponized by the Trump administration to persecute Francesca and in clear violation of the diplomatic immunity granted to U.N. officials — prohibits any financial institution from having someone on the list as a client. A bank that permits someone on the OFAC list to engage in financial transactions is banned from operating in dollars, faces multimillion-dollar fines and is blocked from international payment systems.

In her report, Francesca lists 48 corporations and institutions, including Palantir Technologies, Lockheed Martin, Alphabet Inc., Amazon, International Business Machines Corporation (IBM), Caterpillar Inc., Microsoft Corporation and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), along with banks and financial firms such as BlackRock, insurers, real estate firms and charities, which in violation of international law, are making billions from the occupation and the genocide of Palestinians.

The report, which includes a database of over 1,000 corporate entities that collaborate with Israel, demands these firms and institutions sever ties with Israel or be held accountable for complicity in war crimes. It describes “Israel’s “forever-occupation” as “the ideal testing ground for arms manufacturers and big tech — providing boundless supply and demand, little oversight and zero accountability — while investors and private and public institutions profit freely.”

You can see my interview about the report with Francesca here.

Francesca, whose previous reports including “Gaza Genocide: a collective crime” and “Genocide as colonial erasure” along with her empassioned denunciations of Israel’s mass slaughter in Gaza, have made her a lightning rod. She is excoriated every time she deviates from the approved script, including when pro-Palestine demonstrators stormed the headquarters of the Italian daily newspaper La Stampa while we were in Italy.

Francesca condemned the incursion and property destruction — protesters scattered newspapers and spray-painted slogans on the walls such as “Free Palestine” and “Newspapers complicit with Israel” — but added that it should serve as a “warning to the press” to do its job. That qualification expressed her frustration with the media’s discrediting of the reporting of Palestinian journalists — over 278 journalists and media workers have been killed by Israel since Oct. 7 along with over 700 of their family members — and uncritical amplification of Israeli propaganda. But it was seized upon by her critics, including Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, to lynch her.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio imposed sanctions on Francesca in July.

“The United States has repeatedly condemned and objected to the biased and malicious activities of Albanese that have long made her unfit for service as a Special Rapporteur,” the State Department’s press release read. “Albanese has spewed unabashed antisemitism, expressed support for terrorism, and open contempt for the United States, Israel, and the West. That bias has been apparent across the span of her career, including recommending that the ICC, without a legitimate basis, issue arrest warrants targeting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant.”

“She has recently escalated this effort by writing threatening letters to dozens of entities worldwide, including major American companies across finance, technology, defense, energy, and hospitality, making extreme and unfounded accusations and recommending the ICC [International Criminal Court ] pursue investigations and prosecutions of these companies and their executives,” it went on. “We will not tolerate these campaigns of political and economic warfare, which threaten our national interests and sovereignty.”

The sanctions followed those imposed in February and June on the court’s prosecutor Karim Khan along with two judges for issuing arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant.

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Francesca is barred from entering the U.S. even to appear at the United Nations in New York City, to present one of her two annual reports. The other is delivered at the United Nations Office at Geneva.

Francesca’s assets in the U.S. have been frozen, including her bank account and her U.S. apartment. The sanctions cut her off from the international banking system, including blocking her use of credit cards. Her private medical insurance refuses to reimburse her medical expenses. Hotel rooms booked under her name have been cancelled. She can only operate using cash or by borrowing a bank card.

Institutions, including U.S. universities, human rights groups, professors and NGOs, that once cooperated with Francesca, have severed ties, fearful of penalties established for any U.S. citizen who collaborates with her. She and her family receive frequent death threats. Israel and the U.S. have mounted a campaign to get her removed from her U.N post.

Francesa is proof that when you stand steadfastly with the oppressed, you will be treated like the oppressed.

She is unsure if her book, “When the World Sleeps: Stories, Words, and Wounds of Palestine,” which has been translated into English and is expected to be released in April next year, will be distributed in the U.S.

“I’m a sanctioned person,” she says ruefully.

But she is not cowed. Her next salvo will be a report that documents the torture of Palestinians in Israeli prisons. While torture, she says, was “not widespread,” before Oct. 7, it has now become ubiquitous. She is collecting testimonies of those released from Israeli detention.

“It reminds me of the stories and testimonies I read from Argentina’s dictatorship,” Francesca tells me. “It’s that bad. It’s systemic torture against the same people. The same people are taken, raped and brought back, taken, raped and brought back.”

“Women?” I ask.

“Both,” she answers.

“To have women tell you they have been raped, multiple times. They’ve been asked to masturbate soldiers. This is incredible,” Francesca says. “For a woman to say that. Imagine what they have endured? There are people who have lost their words. They cannot talk. They cannot speak after what they’ve endured.”

Establishment media organizations, she says, not only dutifully parrot back Israeli lies, but routinely block reporting that reflects negatively on Israel.

“In April, I reported the first cases of sexual harassment and rape that had taken place in January and February 2024,” she says. “People didn’t want to listen. The New York Times interviewed me for two hours. Two hours. They didn’t write a line about it.”

“The Financial Times had — because of the relevance of the topic — an embargo’d version of ‘From economy of occupation to economy of genocide,’” she says. “They didn’t publish it. They didn’t even publish a review, an article, days after the press conference. But they did publish a critique of my report. I had a meeting with them. I said, ‘This is really depressing. Who are you? Are you paid for the work you do? Who are you loyal to, your readers?’ I pushed them. They said, ‘Well, we didn’t find that it was up to our standards.’”

This, I tell her, is how the New York Times would spike stories by reporters that editors deem too incendiary.

“They discredit your sources regardless of what your sources are,” I tell her. “That becomes the vehicle by which they don’t publish. This isn’t a good faith discussion. They’re not giving a fair analysis of what your sources are. They are categorically dismissing them. They’re not telling you the truth, which is, ‘We don’t want to deal with Israel and the Israel lobby.’ That’s the truth. They don’t say that. It is always, ‘It’s not up to our standards.’”

“There is no free media, no free press in Italy anymore,” Francesca laments. “There is, but it’s fringe or on the margins. It is an exception. The main newspapers are held by groups connected to big powers, financial and economic powers. The government controls — directly or indirectly — much of Italian TV.”

The drift towards fascism in Europe and the United States, Francesca says, is intimately tied to the genocide, as is the emerging resistance.

“There is a brewing anger and dissatisfaction with political leadership in Europe,” she says. “There is also a fear that lingers in many countries because of the rise of the right. We’ve been there. There are people who have living memories of fascism in Europe. The scars of Nazi-fascism are still there, even the trauma. People cannot process what has happened and why it’s happened. Palestine has shocked people. Italians in particular. Maybe because we are who we are in the sense that we cannot be silenced that easily, we cannot be scared as has happened to the Germans and the French. I was shocked in France. The fear and repression is incredible. It is not as bad as Germany, but it’s much worse than it was two years ago. The minister of education in France cancelled an academic conference on Palestine at the Collège de France — the highest institution in France. The minister of education! And he bragged about it.”

Francesca says our only hope now is civil disobedience, embodied in actions such as strikes that disrupt commerce and government or the attempts by the flotillas to reach Gaza.

“The flotillas created this sense of ‘Oh, something can be done,’” she says. “We are not powerless. We can make a difference even in shaking the ground, rocking the boat. Then the workers have come in. The students have already been mobilized. There has been a sense through the various protests that we can still change things. People have started to connect the dots.”

Francesca presented her 24-page report “Gaza Genocide: a collective crime” to the U.N. General Assembly in October, a report that had to be delivered remotely from the Desmond and Leah Tutu Legacy Foundation in Cape Town, South Africa, because of the sanctions.

Danny Danon, the Israeli ambassador to the United Nations, following her presentation, said, “Ms. Albanese, you are a witch and this report is another page in your spellbook.” He accused her of trying to “curse Israel with lies and hatred.”

“Every page of this report is an empty spell, every accusation, a charm that does not work, because you are a failed witch,” Danon continued.

“It triggered a moment of enlightenment.” Francesca says of the insults. “I connected it to the injustice that women have suffered through the centuries.”

“What is happening to the Palestinians and to those who are speaking out for the Palestinians, is the 2025 equivalent of burning witches in the public square,” she goes on. “It was done to scientists and theologians who didn’t align with the Catholic Church. It was done to women who held the power of herbs. It was done to religious minorities, to indigenous people, like the Sámi people.”

“Palestine,” Francesca says, “has opened a portal to history, to where we come from and to what we risk if we don’t pull the brakes.”

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By Emran Feroz Originally Published by Truthout.

After two National Guard soldiers were shot in Washington, D.C. last week, several U.S. pundits and politicians were quick with their descriptions of the alleged attacker. They erroneously assumed that he brought his “culture” or “society” to the United States.

“You are not just importing individuals. You are importing societies… At scale, migrants and their descendants recreate the conditions, and terrors, of their broken homelands,” said White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy Stephen Miller on X.

Miller’s assumption about the “great lie of mass migration” was dead wrong. When I saw the suspect’s name, Rahmanullah Lakanwal, I immediately recognized that he used to work as a U.S.-trained militiaman, and it was the United States that destroyed his childhood, his life, and his home country. Lakanwal came to the United States in 2021 as a longtime member of one of the CIA’s own paramilitary forces in Afghanistan: the Zero Units. For years, Lakanwal was treated as a U.S. ally and equipped with many resources from the U.S. military and intelligence service to do some of the most brutal work on behalf of the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan.

The Zero Units were among the most aggressive instruments of the U.S. campaign in Afghanistan. Though some units were formally tied to Afghan intelligence, they were in practice created, trained, armed, and directed by the CIA. They operated outside Afghan law and far beyond any realistic oversight. And they became known inside the country as some of the most feared armed actors of the war.

In 2019, Human Rights Watch documented at least 14 major cases of abuse committed by these forces between 2017 and 2019 alone, including unlawful killings, disappearances, and attacks on medical facilities. The real number is almost certainly higher; many areas where the Zero Units operated were inaccessible to journalists and rights monitors due to massive restrictions and repression.

In Khost Province, where Lakanwal came from and where I reported extensively in 2017, residents described repeated arbitrary detentions, killings, and notorious night raids, in which civilian homes were brutally targeted by soldiers and militiamen. In one incident, the clandestine fighters of the Khost Protection Force, another CIA-backed militia similar to the Zero Units, killed 14 civilians, including women, during a single operation. Afghan officials could not intervene, because the units did not answer to Kabul. “Don’t let them catch you,” several friends of mine in Khost told me when I was investigating U.S. war crimes in the region back then.

According to multiple sources from his home district, Lakanwal’s unit also carried out operations in Kandahar, where war crimes occurred and even members of the U.S.-backed Afghan security forces were killed. These actions never resulted in consequences for the Zero Units or their American handlers. Impunity was an operational fact, not a malfunction.

Before the return of the Taliban in 2021, Afghan officials told me repeatedly that their government had no authority over these CIA-built militias. This was widely understood inside Afghanistan: If Zero Unit fighters arrived at your home at night, no Afghan court, police officer, or ministry could protect you.

Washington designed the units this way. The U.S. wanted a rapid-response force unconstrained by local bureaucracy, political negotiations, or legal limits. The long-term risks — political, social, and psychological — were all ignored.

When the Taliban took over Kabul four years ago, the Zero Units abruptly lost the protection they had relied on for years because their U.S. backers withdrew. For good reason, their fighters feared that their history of killings would make them immediate targets for the incoming Taliban regime. During the chaotic U.S. withdrawal, members of those units were assigned to secure the Kabul airport. Witnesses have described Zero Unit members beating back crowds and taking large sums of money from Afghans desperate to reach evacuation flights.

Yet the United States evacuated the Zero Units and other de facto war criminals anyway. Not selectively, not cautiously — but comprehensively. A militia built for a shadow war was relocated to American suburbs without any public accountability process — not internationally, or within the U.S. or Afghanistan — and without a plan to address the extensive trauma its members carried.

According to different sources, Rahmanullah Lakanwal was between 14 and 16 years old when he became a militiaman. Many others, including former soldiers I am in touch with, started their war journeys as minors too. Once in the United States, some former fighters found themselves isolated, without language support, community ties, or psychological care. According to sources in both Khost and the U.S., Lakanwal had long struggled well before he left Afghanistan. Several media outlets reported that he had been deeply traumatized by the operations he conducted under U.S. direction. His work as an Amazon delivery driver did little to change that reality.

Meanwhile, Donald Trump’s promises of mass deportations and rising bipartisan anti-immigrant racism left many Afghan evacuees, including former Zero Unit fighters, fearing removal to Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. For someone like Lakanwal, deportation was not a theoretical concern. It was a death sentence.

The United States must acknowledge what this shooting represents. It is not a failure of immigration vetting or a surprise act of radicalization. It is the direct outcome of a U.S. military strategy that relied on militias empowered to kill without consequence — and then attempted to fold those same fighters back into society, and a completely new society at that, without addressing their history.

The U.S. built a war in which Afghan partners were encouraged to operate outside the law, and sometimes outside basic norms of human conduct. It then evacuated many of them with no structure for accountability, no mental health support, and no acknowledgment of either what they had done or endured.

Rahmanullah Lakanwal did not bring a foreign ideology to American soil. He was shaped by the U.S. counterterrorism system itself. The violence he carried out in Washington, D.C. is linked to the violence he carried out in Afghanistan — not because he shared the Taliban’s goals, but because he shared the CIA’s operational environment. His violence is among the many monsters that the U.S. created during the “war on terror.”

If U.S. policy makers want to understand how a man trained and empowered by their own security apparatus ended up killing two American soldiers near the White House, they should start with a basic admission: When you run a shadow war for two decades, eventually it stops staying in the shadows.

Emran Feroz is an Afghan-Austrian journalist, writer and activist currently based in Germany. He is the founder of Drone Memorial, a virtual memorial for civilian drone strike victims. 

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Coming out of 1998, the folks at Looking Glass Studios believed they had pretty good reason to feel optimistic about their future. With Thief, they had delivered not just their first profitable original game since 1995’s Flight Unlimited but their biggest single commercial success ever. They had no fewer than four more games slated for release within the next fifteen months, a positively blistering pace for them. Yes, all of said games were sequels and iterations on existing brands, but that was just the nature of the industry by now, wasn’t it? As long-running franchises like Ultima had first begun to demonstrate fifteen years ago, there was no reason you couldn’t continue to innovate under a well-known and -loved banner headline. Looking Glass closed their Austin office that had done so much to pay the bills in the past by taking on porting contracts. In the wake of Thief, they felt ready to concentrate entirely on their own games.

Then, just as they thought they had finally found their footing, the ground started to shift beneath Looking Glass once again. Less than a year and a half after the high point of Thief’s strong reviews and almost equally strong sales, Paul Neurath would be forced to shutter his studio forever.

We can date the beginning of the cascading series of difficulties that ultimately undid Looking Glass to March of 1999, when their current corporate parent decided to divest from games, which in turn meant divesting from them. Intermetrics had been on a roller-coaster ride of its own since being purchased by Michael Alexander in 1995. In 1998, the former television executive belatedly recognized the truth of what Mike Dornbrook had tried to tell him some time ago: that his dreams and schemes for turning Intermetrics into a games or multimedia studio made no sense whatsoever. He deigned to allow the company to return to its core competencies — indeed, to double-down on them. Late in the year, Intermetrics merged with Pacer InfoTec, another perennial recipient of government and military contracts. The new entity took the name of AverStar. When one looked through its collection of active endeavors — making an “Enterprise Information Portal” for the Army Chief of Staff; developing drainage-modeling software for the U.S. Geological Survey; providing “testing and quality-support services” for the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts; writing and maintaining software for the Space Shuttle and other NASA vehicles — the games of Looking Glass stood out as decidedly unlike the others. Michael Alexander and his reconstituted team of managers, most of them grizzled veterans of the Beltway military-industrial complex, saw no point in continuing to dabble in games. In the words of Looking Glass programmer Mark LeBlanc, “AverStar threw us back into the sea.”

Just as is the case with Intermetrics’s acquisition of Looking Glass barely a year and a half earlier, the precise terms under which Alexander threw his once-prized catch back have never surfaced to my knowledge. It’s clear enough, however, that Looking Glass’s immediate financial position at this juncture was not quite so dire as it had been, thanks to the success of Thief if nothing else. Still, none of the systemic problems of being a small fish in the big pond of the games industry had been solved. Their recent success notwithstanding, without a deeper-pocketed parent or partner to negotiate for them, Looking Glass was destined to have a harder time getting their games into stores and selling them on their own terms.

The next unfortunate event — unfortunate for Looking Glass, but deeply tragic for some others — came about a month later. On April 20, 1999, two deeply troubled, DOOM-loving teenagers walked into their high school in the town of Columbine, Colorado, carrying multiple firearms each, and proceeded to kill thirteen of their fellow students and teachers and wound or terrorize hundreds more before turning their guns on themselves. This act of mass murder, occurring as it did before the American public had been somewhat desensitized to such massacres by the sheer numbing power of repetition, placed the subject of violence in videogames under the mass-media spotlight in a way it hadn’t been since Joseph Lieberman’s Senate hearings of 1993. Now Lieberman, a politician with mounting presidential ambitions, was back to point the finger more accusingly than ever.

This is not the place to attempt to address the fraught subject of what actual links there might be between violence in games and violence in the real world, links which hundreds of sociological and psychological studies have never managed to conclusively prove or disprove. Suffice to say that attributing direct causality to any human behavior outside the controlled setting of a laboratory is really, really hard, even before one factors in the distortions that can arise from motivated reasoning when the subject being studied is as charged as this one. Setting all of that aside, however, this was not a form of attention to which your average gaming executive of 1999 had any wish to expose himself. First-person action games that looked even vaguely like DOOM — such as most of the games of Looking Glass — were cancelled, delayed, or de-prioritized in an effort to avoid seeming completely insensitive to tragedy. De-prioritization rather than something worse was the fate of Looking Glass’s System Shock 2, but that would prove plenty bad enough for a studio with little margin for error.

The story of System Shock 2′s creation is yet another of those “only at Looking Glass” tales. In 1994, a 27-year-old Boston-area computer consultant named Ken Levine played System Shock 1 and was bowled over by the experience. A year or so later, he saw a want ad from the maker of his favorite game in a magazine. He applied and was hired. He contributed a great deal to Thief during that project’s formative period of groping in the dark — he is credited in the finished game for “initial design and story concepts” — and then was given a plum role indeed. Looking Glass had just won a contract to make an adventure game based on the popular new television series Star Trek: Voyager, and Levine was placed in charge of it.

Alas, that project fell apart within a year or so, when Viacom, the media conglomerate that owned the property, took note of the lackluster commercial performance of another recent Star Trek adventure game — and of recent adventure games in general — and pulled the plug. Understandably enough, Levine was devastated at having thus wasted a year of his life. Somewhat less understandably, he blamed the management of Looking Glass as much as Viacom for the fiasco. He left to start his own studio, taking with him two other Looking Glass employees, by the names of Jon Chey and Rob Fermier.

This is where the story gets weird, in an oh, so Looking Glass sort of way. Once they were out on their own, trading under the name of Irrational Games, the trio found that contracts and capital were not as easy to come by as they had believed they would be. At his wit’s end, facing the prospect of a return to his former life as an ordinary computer consultant, Levine came crawling back to his old boss Paul Neurath. But rather than ask for his old job back, he asked that Irrational be allowed to make a game in partnership with Looking Glass, using the same Dark Engine that was to power Thief. Most bosses would have laughed in the face of someone who had poached two of their people in a bid to show them up and show them how it was done, only to get his comeuppance in such deserving fashion. But not Neurath. He agreed to help Levine and his friends make a game in the spirit of System Shock, Levine’s whole reason for joining the industry in the first place. In fact, he even let them move back into Looking Glass’s offices for a while in order to do it. Neurath soon succeeded in capturing the interest of Electronic Arts, the corporate parent of Origin Systems and thus the owner of the System Shock brand. Just like that, Levine’s homage became a direct sequel, an officially anointed System Shock 2.

The ironic capstone to this tale is that Warren Spector had recently left Looking Glass because he had been unable to secure permission to do exactly what the unproven and questionably loyal young Ken Levine was now going to get to do: to make a spiritual heir to System Shock. Spector ended up at Ion Storm, a new studio founded by John Romero of DOOM fame, where he set to work on what would become Deus Ex.

In the course of making System Shock 2, the Irrational staff grew to about fifteen people, who did eventually move into their own office. Nonetheless, the line separating their contributions from those of Looking Glass proper remained murky at best. As a postmortem written by Jon Chey would later put it, “the project was a collaborative effort between two companies based on a contract that only loosely defined the responsibilities of each organization.” It’s for this reason that I’ll be talking about System Shock 2 from here on like I might any other Looking Glass game.

The sequel isn’t shy about embracing its heritage. Once again, it casts you into an outer-space complex gone badly, horrifyingly haywire; this time you find yourself in humanity’s first faster-than-light starship instead of a mere space station. Once again, the game begins with you waking up disoriented, not knowing how you got here, forced to rely on narrations of the backstory that may or may not be reliable. Once again, your first and most obvious antagonists are the zombified corpses of the people who used to crew the ship. Once again, you slowly learn what really went down here through the emails and logbooks you stumble across. Once again, you have a variety of cybernetic hardware to help you stay alive, presented via a relentlessly diegetic interface. Once again, you meet SHODAN, the disembodied, deliciously evil artificial intelligence who was arguably the most memorable single aspect of the very memorable first game. And once again, she is brought to iconic life by the voice of Terri Brosius. In these ways and countless others, this apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.

But even as it embraces its heritage in the broad strokes, System Shock 2 isn’t averse to tinkering with the formula, through both subtraction and addition. The most significant edit is the elimination of a separate, embodied cyberspace, which was already beginning to feel dated in 1994, having been parachuted in straight out of William Gibson’s 1984-vintage Neuromancer. Cyberspace has its charms in System Shock 1, but few would deny that it’s the roughest part of the game in terms of implementation; it was probably a wise choice for Ken Levine and company to focus their efforts elsewhere. More debatable are their decisions to simplify the hacking mini-games that you sometimes need to play to open locked doors and the like, and to eliminate the unique multi-variant difficulty settings of the first game, which let you turn it into whatever kind of experience you desire, from a walking simulator to an exercise in non-stop carnage to a cerebral pseudo-adventure game. System Shock 2 settles for letting you choose a single setting of “Easy,” “Normal,” “Hard,” or “Impossible,” like any standard-issue shooter of the era.

In fact, at first glance this game looks very much like a standard shooter. If you try to play it as one, however, you’ll be quickly disabused of that notion when you die… and die and die and die. This isn’t a stealth game to the same extent as Thief, but it does demand that you proceed with caution, looking for ways to outwit enemies whom you can’t overcome through firepower. If you can’t see your way to noticing and disabling the security cameras that lurk in many a corner, for example, you’re going to find yourself overwhelmed, no matter how fast and accurate a trigger finger you happen to possess.

By way of a partial replacement for the multi-variant difficulty settings of its predecessor, Irrational chose to graft onto System Shock 2 more CRPG elements. Theoretically at least, these give you almost as much control over what kind of game you end up playing. You can go for a combat-oriented build if you want more of a shooter experience — within reason, that is! — or you can become a hardcore tech-head or even a sort of Jedi who makes use of “psi” powers. Or you can judiciously mix and match your abilities, as most players doubtless wind up doing. After choosing an initial slate of skills at the outset, you are given the opportunity to learn more — or to improve the ones you already have — at certain milestones in the plot.

You create your character in System Shock 2 in a similar way to the old Traveller tabletop RPG, by sending him off on three tours of duty with different service branches — or the same one, if you prefer. (I fancy I can see some traces of the Star Trek: Voyager game which Ken Levine once set out to make in the vibe and the iconography here.) This is an example of how System Shock 2 can sometimes feel like it has a few too many ideas for its own good. It seems like an awful lot of effort to go through to establish a character who is about to get his memories erased anyway.

System Shock 2 is an almost universally acclaimed game today, perhaps even more so than its uglier low-res predecessor. There are good reasons for this. The atmosphere of dread builds and builds as you explore the starship, thanks not least to masterful environmental sound design; if anything, this game is more memorable for its soundscape than for its visuals. Although its emergent qualities are certainly nothing to sneeze at, in my opinion the peak moment of the game is actually pre-scripted. A jaw-dropping plot twist arrives about halfway through, one of the most shocking I’ve ever encountered in a game. I hesitate to say much more here, but will just reveal that nothing and no one turn out to be what you thought they were, and that SHODAN is involved. Because of course she is…

For all its increased resolution and equal mastery of atmosphere, however, System Shock 2 doesn’t strike me as quite so fully realized as the first System Shock. It also suffers by comparison with Warren Spector’s own System Shock successor Deus Ex, which was released about nine months later. System Shock 2 never seems entirely sure how to balance its CRPG elements, which are dependent on character skill, with its action elements, which are dependent on player skill. Increasing your character’s skill in gunnery, for example, somehow makes your guns do more damage when you shoot someone with them; this is not exactly intuitive or realistic. Deus Ex just does so much of this sort of thing so much better. In that game, a higher skill level lets your character hold the gun steadier when you’re trying to shoot with it; this makes a lot more sense.

Unusually for Looking Glass, who seldom released a game before its time, System Shock 2 shows all the signs of having been yanked out of its creators’ hands a few months too early. The level design declines dramatically during the final third of the game, becoming downright sketchy by the time you get to the underwhelming finale. The overall balance of the gameplay systems is somewhat out of whack as well. It’s really, really hard to gain traction as a psi-focused character in particular, and dismayingly easy to end up with a character that isn’t tenable by choosing the wrong skills early on. I found a lot of the design choices in System Shock 2 to be tedious and annoying, such that I wished for a way to just turn them off: the scarcity of ammunition (another way to find yourself in an unwinnable cul de sac), the way that weapons degrade at an absurd pace and constantly need to be repaired, the endlessly respawning enemies that make hard-won firefights feel kind of pointless, the decision to arbitrarily deprive you of your trusty auto-map just at the point when you need it most.

Granted, some of this was also in System Shock 1, but it irritated me much more here. In the end, the two games provide very similar subjective experiences. Perchance this was just a ride I was only interested in going on once; perchance I would have a very different reaction to System Shock 2 if I had met it before its older sibling. Or maybe I’m just getting more protective of my time as I get older and have less and less of it left. (Ach… hold that morbid thought!)

Whatever its ratio of strengths to weaknesses, System Shock 2 didn’t do very well at all upon its release in August of 1999. Many folks from both Looking Glass and Irrational attribute this disappointment entirely to the tragic occurrence of four months earlier in Columbine, Colorado. Although the full picture is surely more nuanced — it always is, isn’t it? — we have no reason to doubt that the fallout from the massacre was a major factor in the game’s commercial failure. According to Paul Neurath, Electronic Arts pondered for a while whether it was wise to put System Shock 2 out at all. He remembers EA’s CEO Larry Probst telling him that “we may just want to walk away from doing shooters because there’s talk of these shooters causing these kinds of events.” “We convinced them to release the game,” says Neurath, “but they did almost zero marketing and they put it in the bargain discount $9.95 bin 45 days after the game launched. It never stood a chance to make any money. That really hurt us financially.”

If System Shock 2 was to some extent a victim of circumstances, Looking Glass’s next game was a more foreseeable failure. For some reason, they just couldn’t stop beating the dead horse of flight simulation, even though it had long since become clear that this wasn’t what their primary audience wanted from them at all. Flight Unlimited III wasn’t a bad flight simulator, but the changes it introduced to the formula were nowhere near as dramatic as those that marked Flight Unlimited II. The most notable new development was a shift from the San Francisco Bay to Washington State, a much larger geographical area depicted in even greater detail. (Owners of the second game were given the privilege of loading their old scenery into the new engine as well.) Innovation or the lack thereof aside, the same old problem remained, in the form of Microsoft’s 800-pound-gorilla of a flight-simulation franchise, which was ready with its own “2000” update at the same time. Published by Electronic Arts in late 1999, Flight Unlimited III stiffed even more abjectly than had System Shock 2.

On the left, we see Seattle-Tacoma International Airport as depicted in Microsoft’s Flight Simulator 2000. On the right, we see the same airport in Flight Unlimited III. The former modeled the whole world, including more than 20,000 airports; the latter tried to compete by modeling a comparatively small area better. Regardless of the intrinsic merits of the two approaches, Looking Glass’s did not prove a formula for marketplace success.

A comparatively bright spot that holiday season was Thief Gold, which added three new missions to the original’s twelve and tweaked and polished the existing ones. It did decently well as a mid-tier product with a street price of about $25, plus a $10 rebate for owners of the previous version of Thief and the promise of a $10 discount off the upcoming Thief II. But a product like this was never going to offset Looking Glass’s two big failures of 1999.

In truth, the Looking Glass goose was probably already more or less cooked as Y2K began. The only thing that might have saved them was Thief II: The Metal Age turning into a massive hit right out of the gate. Sadly, there was little likelihood of that happening; the best that Looking Glass could realistically hope for was another solid half-million seller. There was already a sense in the studio as the final touches were being put on Thief II that, barring a miracle, this game was likely to be their swansong.

As swansongs go, Thief II acquits itself pretty darn well. It comes off as far more self-assured than its predecessor, being focused almost exclusively on stealth rather than monster-slaying through its fifteen cunningly crafted levels. Some of these spaces — a huge central bank, a sprawling warehouse complex, a rich art collector’s country estate — are intricate and beautiful enough that you almost wish there was an option to just wander around and admire them, without having to worry about guards and traps and all the rest. There’s a greater willingness here to use gameplay to advance the larger story: plot twists sometimes arrive in the midst of a mission, and you can often learn more about what’s really going on, if you’re interested, by listening carefully to the conversations that drift around the outskirts of the darkness in which you cloak yourself. Indeed, Thief II is positively bursting with little Easter eggs for the observant. Some of them are even funny, such as a sad-sack pair of guards who have by now been victimized by Garrett several times in other places, who complain to one another, Laurel and Hardy style, about their lot in life of constantly being outsmarted.

The subtitle pays tribute to the fact that the milieu of Thief has now taken on a distinct steampunk edge, with clanking iron robots and gun turrets for Garrett to contend with in addition to the ever-present human guards. Garrett now has a mechanical eye which he can use to zoom in on things, or even to receive the visual signal from a “scouting orb” that he’s tossed out into an exposed space to get a better picture of his surroundings. I must confess that I’m somewhat of two minds about this stuff: it’s certainly more interesting than zombies, but I do still kind of long for the purist neo-Renaissance milieu I thought I was getting when I played the first level of Thief I.

The “faces” on the robots look a bit like SHODAN, don’t they? Some of the code governing their behavior was also lifted directly from that game. But unlike your mechanical enemies in System Shock 2, these robots have steam boilers on their posteriors which you can douse with water arrows to disable them.

Beyond this highly debatable point, though, there’s very little to complain about here, unless it be that Thief II, for all its manifest strengths, doesn’t quite manage to stand on its own. Oddly in light of what a make-or-break title this was for them, Looking Glass seems not to have given much thought to easing new players into this very different way of approaching a first-person action game; they didn’t even bother to rehash the rudimentary tutorial that kicks off Thief I. As a result, and as a number of otherwise positively disposed contemporary reviewers noted, Thief II has more the flavor of an expansion pack — a really, really well-done one, mind you — than a full-fledged sequel. It probably isn’t the best place to start, but anyone who enjoyed the first game will definitely enjoy this one.

Looking Glass’s problem, of course, was that none of what I’ve just written sounds like a ticket to id- or Blizzard-level success, which was what they needed by this point to save the company. As Computer Gaming World wrote in its review, Thief II “is a ’boutique’ game: a gamer’s game. It pays its dividends in persistent tension rather than in bursts of fear. It still pumps as much adrenaline, but it works on a subtler level. It’s the difference between Strangers on a Train and Armageddon, between the intimated and the explicit.”

Having thus delivered another cult classic rather than a blockbuster, Looking Glass’s fate was sealed. By March of 2000, when Eidos published Thief II, Paul Neurath had been trying to sell the studio for a second time for the better part of a year. Sony was seriously interested for a while, until a management shakeup there killed the deal. Then Eidos was on the verge of pulling the trigger, only to have its bankers refuse to loan the necessary funds after a rather disappointing year for the company, in which the Tomb Raider train seemed to finally be running out of steam and John Romero’s would-be magnum opus Daikatana, which Eidos was funding and publishing for Ion Storm, ran way over time and budget. Not wanting to risk depriving his employees of their last paychecks, Neurath decided to shut the studio down with dignity. On May 24, 2000, he called everyone together to thank them for their efforts and to tell them that Thief II had been Looking Glass’s last game. “We’re closing,” he said. What else was there to say?

Plenty, as it turned out. The news of the shuttering prompted paroxysms of grief throughout gaming’s burgeoning online ecosystem, frequently accompanied by a full measure of self-loathing. Looking Glass had been just too smart for a public that wasn’t worthy of them, so the story went. Many a gamer who had always meant to pick up this or that subtly subversive Looking Glass masterstroke, but had kept delaying in favor of easier, more straightforward fare, blamed himself for being a part of the problem. But no amount of hand-wringing or self-flagellation could change the fact that Looking Glass was no more. The most it could do was to turn having worked for the studio into a badge of honor and one hell of a line item on anyone’s CV, as a Looking Glass diaspora spread out across the industry to influence its future.

To wit: the tearful tributes were still pouring in when Ion Storm’s Warren Spector-led Deus Ex reached store shelves in June of 2000. Cruel irony of ironies: Deus Ex became a hit on a scale that Thief, Looking Glass’s biggest game ever, could scarcely have dreamed of approaching. Right to the end, Looking Glass was always the bridesmaid, never the bride.

Looking Glass was a cool group, and a lot of us put a lot of time and energy and a large part of our lives into it, and it’s sad when that doesn’t work out. So there’s some part of me that says, oh, that sucks, that’s not fair, but it’s the real world and it had a pretty good run.

— Doug Church

Without consciously intending to, I’ve found myself writing quite a lot of obituaries of gaming icons recently: TSR, Sierra On-Line, MicroProse, Bullfrog, the adventure-making arm of Legend Entertainment. Call it a sign of the millennial times, a period of constant, churning acquisition and consolidation in which it began to seem that just half a dozen or so many-tendriled conglomerates were destined to divide the entirety of digital gaming among themselves. Now, we can add Looking Glass to our list of victims of this dubious idea of progress.

A lot of hyperbole has been thrown around about Looking Glass over the past quarter-century. A goodly portion of it is amply justified. That said, I do think there is some room for additional nuance. (There always is, isn’t there?) At the risk of coming off like the soulless curmudgeon in the room, I’m not going to write about Looking Glass here as if they were a bunch of tortured artists starving in a garret somewhere. Instead I’m going to put on my pragmatist’s hat and go off on in search of some more concrete reasons why these remarkable games didn’t resonate as much as they may have deserved to back in the day.

It shouldn’t be overlooked that Paul Neurath and Ned Lerner made some fairly baffling business decisions over the years. Their disastrous choice to try to make a go of it as an independent publisher against gale-force headwinds in 1995 can be all too easily seen as the precipitating event that sent Looking Glass down the road to closure five years later. Then, too, Neurath’s later insistence on persisting with the Flight Unlimited series must stand high on the list of mistakes. Incredibly, at the time Looking Glass was shut down, they were still at the flight-simulation thing, having spent a reported $3 million already on a fourth one, which was finally to add guns and enemy aircraft to the mix; this was half a million more than they had spent to make Thief II, a game with a far more secure customer base. ^[1]After the closure, some Looking Glass staffers migrated to the nearby Mad Doc Software, where they incorporated much of their flight-simulation code into Jane’s Combat Simulations: Attack Squadron. Released in 2002, it was not positively reviewed.

Then again, this isn’t a Harvard Business School case study. What final words are there to say about the games themselves, the real legacy of this company that failed rather spectacularly at its business-school ambition of making a lot of — okay, any — money? How should we understand them in their full historical context?

As you probably know, historical context is kind of my jam. Writing for this site is for me a form of time travel. I don’t play modern games for lack of hours in the day, and I’ve long since settled into a more or less one-to-one correspondence between present time and historical time; that’s to say, it takes me about one year worth of articles on this site to fully cover one year of gaming history and matters adjacent. We’ve by now moved out of the era when I was playing a lot of games in my previous life, so most of what I encounter is new to me. I think this puts me in a privileged position. I can come pretty close to experiencing and appreciating games — and the evolution of the medium as a whole — as a contemporary player might have done. When I read in the year 2025 that Looking Glass was poorly rewarded for their uncompromising spirit of innovation, I can understand and even to a large extent agree. And yet, in my role as a time traveler, I can also kind of understand why a lot of gamers ended up voting with their wallets for something else.

The decade after Looking Glass’s demise saw the rise of what gaming scholar Jesper Juul has dubbed the Casual Revolution; this was the heyday of Bejeweled, Zuma, Diner Dash, and the Big Fish portal, which brought gaming to whole new, previously untapped demographics who dwarfed the hardcore old guard in numbers. In 2010, when this revolution was at its peak, Juul put forth five characteristics that define casual gaming: “emotionally positive fictions”; “little presupposed knowledge” on the player’s part; a tolerance for being played in “short bursts”; “lenient punishments for failing”; and “positive feedback for every successful action the player performs.” The games of Looking Glass are the polar opposite of this list. At times, they seem almost defiantly so; witness the lack of an “easy” setting in Thief, as if to emphasize that anyone who might wish for such a thing is not welcome here. Looking Glass’s games are the ultimate “gamer’s games,” as Computer Gaming World put it, unabashedly demanding a serious commitment of time, focus, energy, and effort from their players. But daily life demands plenty of those things from most of us already, doesn’t it? In this light, it doesn’t really surprise me that a lot of people decided to just go play something more welcoming and less demanding. This didn’t make them ingrates; it just made them people who weren’t quite sure that there was enough space in their life to work that hard for their entertainment. I sympathize because I often felt the same in the course of my time-traveling; when I saw a new Looking Glass game on the syllabus, it was always a little bit harder than it ought to have been for me to muster the motivation to take the plunge. And this is part of what I do for a living!

Now, there’s certainly nothing wrong with gamer’s games. But they are by definition niche pursuits. The tragedy of Looking Glass (if I can presume to frame it in those terms in an article which has previously mentioned the real tragedy that took place at Columbine High School) is that they were making niche games at a time when the economics of the industry were militating against the long tail, pushing everyone toward a handful of tried-and-true mainstream gameplay formulas. After the millennium, the rise of digital distribution would give studios the luxury of being loudly and proudly niche, if that was where their hearts were. (Ironically, this happened at the same instant that ultra-mainstream casual gaming took off, and was enabled by the same transformative technology of broadband in the home.) But digital distribution of games as asset-heavy as those of Looking Glass was a non-starter throughout the 1990s. C’est la vie.

This situation being what it was, I do feel that Looking Glass could have made a bit more of an effort to be accessible, to provide those real or metaphorical easy modes, if only in the hope and expectation that their customers would eventually want to lose the training wheels and play the games as they were meant to be played. On-ramping is a vital part of the game designer’s craft, one at which Looking Glass, for all their strengths in other areas, wasn’t all that accomplished.

Another thing that Looking Glass was not at all good at, or seemingly even all that interested in, was multiplayer, which became a bigger and bigger part of gaming culture as the 1990s wore on. (They did add a co-operative multiplayer mode to System Shock 2 via a patch, but it always felt like the afterthought it was.) This was a problem in itself. Just to compound it, Looking Glass’s games were in some ways the most single-player games of them all. “Immersion” was their watchword: they played best in a darkened room with headphones on, almost requiring of their players that they deliberately isolate themselves from the real world and its inhabitants. Again, this is a perfectly valid design choice, but it’s an inherently niche one.

Speaking only for myself now, I think this is another reason that the games of Looking Glass proved a struggle for me at times. At this point in my life at least, I’m just not that excited about isolating myself inside hermetically sealed digital spaces. If I want total immersion, I take a walk and immerse myself in nature. Games I prefer to play on the sofa next to my wife. My favorite Looking Glass game, for what it’s worth, is System Shock 1, which I played at an earlier time in my life when immersion was perhaps more of a draw than it is today. Historical context is one thing, personal context another: it’s damnably difficult to separate our judgments of games from the circumstances in which we played them.

Of course, this is one of the reasons that I always encourage you not to take my judgments as the final word on anything, to check out the games I write about for yourself if they sound remotely interesting. It’s actually not that hard to get a handle on Looking Glass’s legacy for yourself. Considering the aura of near-divinity that cloaks the studio today, the canon of widely remembered Looking Glass classics is surprisingly small. They seem to have had a thing for duologies: their place in history boils down to the two Ultima Underworld games, the two System Shock games, and the two Thief games. The rest of their output has been pretty much forgotten, with the partial exception of Terra Nova on the part of the really dedicated.

Still, three bold and groundbreaking concepts that each found ways to advance the medium on multiple fronts is more than enough of a legacy for any studio, isn’t it? So, let us wave a fondly respectful farewell to Looking Glass, satisfied as we do so that we will be meeting many of their innovations and approaches, sometimes presented in more accessible packages, again and again as we continue to travel through time.

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Sources: The books Game Design Theory & Practice (2nd. ed.) by Richard Rouse III, A Casual Revolution: Reinventing Video Games and Their Players by Jesper Juul, and the Prima strategy guide to Thief II by Howard A. Jones; Computer Gaming World of January 1999, November 1999, January 2000, February 2000, and June 2000;  Retro Gamer 60, 177, and 260; Game Developer of November 1999; Boston Globe of May 26 2000; Boston Magazine of December 2013.

Online sources include “Ahead of Its Time: A History of Looking Glass” and “Without Looking Glass, There was No Irrational Games” by Mike Mahardy at Polygon, James Sterrett’s “Reasons for the Fall: A Post-Mortem on Looking Glass Studios,” a GameSpy featurette by John “Warrior” Keefer, Christian Nutt’s interview with Ken Levine on the old Gamasutra site, and AverStar’s millennial-era corporate site.

My special thanks to Ethan Johnson, a fellow gaming historian who knows a lot more about Looking Glass than I do, and set me straight on some important points after the first edition of this article was published.

Where to Get Them: System Shock 2: 25th Anniversary Remaster (which includes the original version of the game as a bonus) and Thief II: The Metal Age are available as digital purchases on GOG.com.