Engels: The Male Chauvinist Feminist April 29, 2009
Posted by Garibaldy in Books, Feminism, History, Marxism.40 comments
Tristan Hunt in today’s Guardian has a piece promoting his new biography of Friedrich Engels. Surprisingly for something written on Engels by this champion of New Labour, it is actually not an entirely uninteresting article, discussing as it does the contradictions between Engels’ principles and his behaviour. Few of us could stand up to such scrutiny, especially by anachronistic standards, and in the article Hunt seeks to judge Engels by the standards of his own time. The article, like the book, seeks to restore the human element to Engels. Here is the man himself writing to Marx
It is absolutely essential that you get out of boring Brussels for once and come to Paris, and I for my part have a great desire to go carousing with you,” Friedrich Engels wrote to Karl Marx in 1846. “If I had an income of 5000 francs I would do nothing but work and amuse myself with women until I went to pieces. If there were no Frenchwomen, life wouldn’t be worth living. But so long as there are grisettes [prostitutes], well and good!”
Hunt’s article essentially discusses Engels’ responsibility for the creation of modern feminism through his The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, describing how that work opened the way for a new understanding of the oppression of women. Hunt’s account ends with a sting in the tail about whether we should be too smug about some of Engels’ own attitudes
Few great thinkers are able to live out their ideals, and Engels was more contradictory than most. But the personal is not always political; philosophy exists beyond the person. And if much of Engels’ life no longer appears very enlightened, in an era when part-time male workers earn some 36% more than their female equivalents and one third of British women in work take home less than £100 per week, his insights into the economic foundations of sexual inequality seem as relevant as ever.
As for the book, it is in shops (though the official release date is tomorrow), and Waterstone’s had it at five pounds less than the £25 official price. Interested though I may be in the topic, and pleasantly surprised by this article as I am, I doubt I’ll be shelling out given that, unlike Robert Service in his Times review and Roy Hattersley in his Guardian review, I have my doubts about Hunt’s competence to discuss Engels’ political thought. However, with International Women’s Day May Day approaching, Hunt has still raised important issues that we especially ought not to neglect.
Still More TV November 17, 2008
Posted by Garibaldy in Books, Culture, Economics, Film and Television, History.add a comment
At the risk of seeming the laziest blogger in the land, or a paid advertiser for TV stations, I thought I’d flag up Niall Ferguson’s new six-part series The Ascent of Money starting tonight on Channel 4 at 8pm. I don’t know if I will watch it as I find the impeccably reactionary Ferguson sickenly smug and impossibly facile at the same time, but it is probably the sort of thing lefties should be watching. There is of course an accompanying book of the same name, of which there is a pleasingly snide review by the equally insufferable Tristam Hunt. Think I’ll definitely give the book a miss.
Mr. Squishy, R.I.P. September 16, 2008
Posted by smiffy in Books, Culture, United States.9 comments
David Foster Wallace
It’s inevitable as the years drag on that those of us of a certain age will see more and more of the heroes of our youths pass away. The past year or so has seen the deaths of Arthur C. Clarke, George McDonald Fraser, Tony Wilson, George Carlin, Richard Wright of Pink Floyd just yesterday (Syd Barrett having gone a couple of years ago) Norman Mailer and, of course, Gary Gygax. Big names in their own fields, and those are just the ones which stick in my mind.
While each death is sad, in its own way, and some might come as a surprise, none carried with it any real sense of shock. Will anyone raise an eyebrow when Philip Roth finally goes, given how much he’s been writing about it lately? All of which is my way of leading up to to mentioning the genuine shock I felt when, absent-mindedly browsing on Salon yesterday, I saw the headline “In Memory of David Foster Wallace, 1962-2008“.
David Foster Wallace (or DFW as his internet groupies tended to describe him) had nowhere near the kind of celebrity enjoyed by contemporaries of his such as Douglas Coupland, Dave Eggers, Jonathan Franzen or Brett Easton Ellis. It’s hardly surprising – while far from a slouch, he wasn’t a particularly prolific writer (two novels, three collections of stories, two collections of non-fiction and a book about Maths over the course of a twenty year career). Neither was he, for the most part, what one might describe as ‘reader-friendly’ writer, by any standard. However, in terms of talent he stood head and shoulders above anyone else of his generation and he was arguably one of the most gifted writers working in the English language.
The various obituaries and tributes which you can now find dotted across the internet invariably refer to him has primarily the author of Infinite Jest, his 1996 1000+ monster of a novel. I think that’s a slight shame; while Infinite Jest is certainly a dazzling piece of work, it was a flawed masterpiece. Michiko Kakutani rightly notes that it was overlong (even by Wallace’s standards) and in need of strong editing. However, it did reveal him as a great artist, allowing him to escape from the influence of writers like Barthelme and Barth and, above all, Pynchon which hung so heavily over his earlier works The Broom of the System and Girl with Curious Hair.
It’s his later works - Brief Interviews with Hideous Men and Oblivion, as well as his non-fiction – where his real talent is evident. Unlike a writer such as Pynchon, who has a tendency to throw a kitchen sink of allusions and references at the reader, Wallace’s genius wasn’t in his erudition but in his sheer intelligence. His techniques – self-referentiality, footnotes, narratives the twist and turn in on themselves like an Escher painting – now seem a little jaded as they’ve been taken up by a newer generation, most notably Jonathan Safran Foer and the McSweeneys group. However, while they weren’t original to Wallace he was using them far earlier than most others and to far greater effect. In comparison with the dead irony of someone like Douglas Coupland, where the flat, hyperreality of contemporary America is something to be neither celebrated nor denounced, with Wallace there was a thread of real despair beneath much of humour, the sense of someone constantly trying to approach a supreme transcendental truth (even, perhaps, Truth) while trapped within the medium they are using to express themselves. This is perhaps best exemplified in one of his finest stories (and one of my favourites) ‘Good Old Neon’ in Oblivion, which begins “My whole life I’ve been a fraud” and expands into a beautifully tragic dissection of the inauthenticity (or, perhaps, impossibility of authenticity) of contemporary life. To my mind, the artists he resembles most is probably Beckett, although where Wallace explores the limits of expression through an excess of language, Beckett does so through the manipulation of silences.
That said, even for those who found Wallace’s fiction to be too dense, difficult and ‘writerly’, there is much in his non-fiction that is wonderfully funny and alive. Where other writers might use journalistic assignments to cover, say, the Illinois State Fair or a Caribbean Cruise (both subjects of pieces in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again) to either bemoan the lackof sophistication of the participants, or romanticise their authenticity against the cool, detachment of New York, Wallace avoids both these traps turning about very personal pieces dripping with neuroses which share the theme of his own inability to relate to others.
One of the great sadnesses of his death is that we’ll never see what a novel from the later, more mature and certainly darker David Foster Wallace would be like. Every few months – and most recently last week – I would Google his name and look up his Wikipedia entry to see if any new work was forthcoming. It’s still hard to believe that it never will be.
A greater sadness, perhaps, is what he might now become in death. I haven’t discussing the circumstances of his death, but from much of the commentary available it seems relatively simple to put the pieces together. It’s hard to avoid the thought, though, that some too-easy links will be made between the themes of his work and his death (the already dark piece ‘The Depressed Person’ in Brief Interviews makes for even grimmer reading in retrospect) and that he’ll become another icon on the wall of miserable, bookish young men – a Sylvia Plath for the Facebook generation. Early in his non-fiction book on the mathematics of infinity, Everything and more, Wallace rubbishes the hoary old image of the tortured genius driven mad and to destruction by his pursuit of the transcendant, but it seems inevitable that he may suffer the same fate. In what Martin Amis terms the ‘War against Cliché’, Wallace was a Patton (and Amis – at best – a Custer). Let’s hope that he doesn’t become that which we can speculate with some confidence he would have detested – a cliché himself.
Pluto Crime: Pluto Press and the thriller genre May 31, 2008
Posted by WorldbyStorm in Books, Culture.26 comments
Is this familiar to anyone? [click on the image to enlarge] If not, to jog memories, it’s from this…
Some of you may recall from the late 1980s a series of books issued by Pluto Press under the Pluto Crime imprint. Chapters Bookshop in Dublin, then just off Henry Street, had a box load of them and sometime around 1989 I bought about eight of them at a discounted price.
The imprint had a cute logo with the PP of Pluto Press rendered as a bloody red fingerprint. Clever.
Characterised for the most part by unrelenting gloom the books were fairly throwaway. But not entirely. There were three or four which I thought were able to operate as thrillers and left-wing books. I don’t find that entirely unsurprising. Previously the issue of dissidence against the establishment in the Len Deighton thrillers has been discussed.
But this was different insofar as they were explicitly left wing. Now this ranged from a sort of cynical approach to international affairs to Manuel Vazquez Montalban’s novel “Murder in the Central Committee”. Central Committee of the… well if you haven’t guessed the party, let’s just say it has Communist and Spanish in its name.
I’m not sure that the quote from the Times:
“Is there anything inherently illogical with the concept of socialist – or, at least, politically and socially aware – crime fiction? Pluto Press publishers of serious left wing books, have inaugurated a crime list to prove that the two can mix… the first batch of pinko whodunits augurs well for the genre…
…is correct. And I’m almost entirely certain that the Guardian was simply wrong when it called it the ‘most innovative publishing experiment of the crime-story year!’, but at the same time it was much broader than one might imagine in terms of topic. For example, Nancy Milton’s “The China Option” was a geo-political thriller dealing with a left opposition developing inside the PRC. Dance Hall of the Dead by Tony Hillerman was a vaguely leftist crime novel dealing with a Navajo police detective in the US. The Dark Red Star by Ivan Ruff was a pretty good thriller touching on a former British PM who might or might not be a Soviet spy. Here is the opening page…
October Heat by Gordon DeMarco dealt with a hard-boiled leftwing PI in San Francisco in the 1940s (unions, Red Scares, and suchlike were the backdrop) while Junk on the Hill by Jeremy Pikser took a fairly cynical look at therapy and ‘new age’ tropes in the US.
Unsurprisingly, to me at least, Julian Rathbone, a very fine writer with a decidedly left wing approach contributed two books to the series, The Euro-Killers and Watching the Detectives. Both were quite excellent (and those who followed his career both before and after may know that he has subsequently written some brilliantly sardonic novels rooted in English history).
So, did it work? Well, not entirely. Many of the books were a bit slight, perhaps rushed from first or second draft to publication. Some were trying too hard to be left-wing. Nor did the blurbs help. For example, the Anvil Agreement dealt with big pharma, and was described as ‘…a medical thriller of Coma standards…’ (Coma being a popular medical thriller and later film…).
Well. Coma standards, you say? That low? Alright then.
For my money, while no classic, the best was arguably Days Like These by Nigel Fountain, as far as I can make out an SWP member. It had a party member coming across a fascist conspiracy, of sorts. Somehow it did convincingly convey something of the tone of London in the late 1980s and the nature of the politics too. Drug taking, gloomy sexual politics, an old Communist of the CPGB persuasion who was written about in a much more admiring way than one might imagine, and the Establishment and the real Establishment all made appearances. And enjoyably murky and cynical it all was.
That said, I can imagine many publishers resiling from the idea that they would promote ‘left’ or indeed ‘right’ books, simply because that might limit their readership. And, of course, while it is always nice to find a book which perhaps shares aspects of ones world view, there are many authors whose beliefs are quite different and distinct who nonetheless establish themselves as favourites. And in part that was perhaps a crucial problem with the idea. Crime and political thrillers have often tended to work from the basis of opposition, whether to the establishment, social structures or even states, they tend to pitch an individual against a system. I can, and I’m sure you as well, list off scores of leftish political thrillers from that time and afterwards.
They work, or fail, not because of their political stance, but in large part because of the sense of the individual against greater forces, be they wealth, corrupt police forces or whatever. Now, that of course is a political stance, but somehow to rope the collective, or aspects of collective action into such works is more difficult.
I’d love to know how the series fared, how long it lasted and did the books sell? Anyone know?
Morrissey: The Pleasures of Reaction May 1, 2008
Posted by smiffy in Books, Culture, Media and Journalism, Music, racism.23 comments
There’s a country
You don’t live there
But someday you would like to
And if you show them what you’re made of
Oh, then you might do
Morrissey – “The National Front Disco”
Oh that Morrissey. He certainly doesn’t make it easy for a serious, conscientious lefty to like him, does he? Not content with displaying a rather venal – not to mention “devious, truculent and unreliable” – character during the court action over the distribution of royalties from The Smiths and a rather ambiguous attration towards the aesthetics of skinheads, he now intends to perform at a music festival in Tel Aviv. No doubt angry letters are already winging their way towards the NME.
Of course, the greater shadow hanging over him is the question of racism: is he or isn’t he? It’s dogged Morrissey since the demise of The Smiths over twenty years ago, with the questionable lyrics of songs like ‘Bengali in Platforms’ on his fist solo album, Viva Hate and his flirtation with National Front iconography at the Madness reunion concert in Finsbury Park in the early nineties. However, while many of his statements and lyrics over the years are rather ambiguous, allowing him the benefit of the doubt, his infamous interview with the NME late last year, where he expressed sentiments like “The gates of England are flooded. The country’s been thrown away” and “These days you won’t hear a British accent in Knightsbridge” when speaking about immigration into the UK are far more direct and, as a consequence, far more troubling.
Perhaps more damning than the sentiments themselves is Morrissey’s reaction to the accusations of racism. In the statement he released after the NME interview was published, and while also issuing writs against the magazine, he stated:
If Conor (McNicholas - NME editor) can provoke bureaucratic outrage with this Morrissey interview, then he can whip up support for his righteous position as the morally-bound and armoured editor of his protected readership – even though, by re-modelling my interview into a multiple horror, Conor has accidentally exposed himself as deceitful, malicious, intolerant and Morrissey-ist – all the ist’s and ism’s that he claims to oppose. Uniquely deprived of wisdom, Conor would be repulsed by my vast collection of World Cinema films, by my adoration of James Baldwin, my love of Middle-Eastern tunings, Kazem al-Saher, Lior Ashkenazi, Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison, and he would be repulsed to recall a quote as printed in his magazine in or around August of this year wherein I said that my ambition was to play concerts in Iran.
Missing the point entirely, and failing to address the statements he made which raised concerns – he falls back on some of the most tired and well-worn clichés used when someone is accused of racism: the “Some of my best friends …” argument
Worse yet is his approach to far milder discussions of his attitudes towards race. In March, David Quantick wrote a review of Morrissey’s latest ‘Greatest Hits’ collection in Word. It’s scathing stuff, displaying a rather intense dislike on Quantick’s part for Morrissey’s recent output – both musical and political. However, with the possible exception of the suggestion that his views on immigration might be hypocritical given his provenance (to my mind, the child of an immigrant is just as entitled to a racist opinion as someone who can trace their ancestry to the Magna Carta, or to the Battle of Clontarf) it’s all fair comment. Morrissey’s reaction? Call in the solicitors and force Word to settle in court. Billy Bragg’s view of the legal action against the NME is worth recalling all the more in this context:
Had Morrissey claimed freedom of speech in his own defence, I would have supported his stance. Instead, we have the unedifying possibility that a man who once skilfully wielded his dazzling wit to confound his detractors and delight his audience has been reduced to relying on a writ in order to stifle his critics.
In my view, there’s no strong reason to think Morrissey is a racist, even if his support for anti-racism campaigns does seem a little pro forma. However, given the sentiments expressed in the NME interview, I think there’s little doubt that he’s anti-immigration and has a rather xenophobic streak. The only thing that surprises me is that anyone should be surprised by this.
The emotional landscape of Morrissey’s lyrics, from the earliest days of The Smiths, has always been characterised by an intense conservatism. The nostalgic obsession with 1960s icons like Sandy Shaw, Viv Nicholson, the Carry-On crew and the Krays suggests a yearning for a Golden Age of Britishness (which indeed the very act of nostalgic recollection helps to define). Quantick is right, to an extent, when he says that “once Morrissey made music that talked about the underdog, the victim and those in the minority”. However, it should be stressed that Morrissey only ever spoke to some underdogs, some victims and some minorities. Is it really that strange that such an Anglophile, and an Anglophile of such a particular type, should be less than welcoming to those he thinks are taking his England away from him? And should Morrissey really be given such an easy ride when he expresses views which – by any standard – are reactionary compared with the kind of reaction which one could envisage if, say, Boris Johnson and Simon Heffer made the same comments? Indeed, perhaps the greatest criticism that could be levelled at Morrissey is that the views themselves are pretty indistinguishable from what one might expect from Heffer or – worse – Richard Littlejohn (like Morrissey, a rich ex-pat who likes to talk about the decline of England).
Perhaps the real question that could be asked is whether any of this should make any difference to our appreciation of Morrissey’s music. If he really was a racist, would it mean that songs like “That Joke Isn’t Funny Any More”, “I Know It’s Over” or ”Every Day is Like Sunday” are any the worst for it?
There’s nothing to suggest that progressive political opinions of the part of any artist necessarily translates into good art, or that reactionary views diminish the work. If one looks at some of the great writers of the twentieth century – Yeats, Proust, Stuart, Pound, Céline, Waugh, Larkin – you find anything from snobbery and racism to outright fascism. In each case, the reactionary politics are not incidental to the work. In fact, they’re integral to the writer’s entire outlook.
On a lighter note, I’m a big fan of the Flashman series of novels, by George McDonald Fraser who died earlier this year. However, much as I might admire the writing (in some of the books more than others, admittedly), and enjoy the satirical presentation of the British Empire, it must be conceded that there is a very questionable political undercurrent running through them, particularly in relation to the depiction of the natives of the lands Flashman visits.
By the same token, while it’s undeniable that Tressell’s The Ragged Trousered Philantrophists is a hugely important book both for its depicition of working-class life in the nineteenth century and for its pedagogical value, it’s also a rather turgid read, smacking in places of the worst kind of Dickensian senimentality and, aesthetically, doesn’t compare to work of Eliot, James or Conrad.
Morrissey’s action against the NME is unlikely to be heard for some time yet, and it may well prove to be his undoing. He didn’t come well out of his previous appearance in court and, like David Irving, he could find that he’s made a huge mistake in voluntarily putting his opinions under the microscope of judicial inquiry. Whatever the outcome, however, I don’t think it should make any difference to how we listen to his music in the future.
The return of Sokal March 8, 2008
Posted by smiffy in Books, Capitalism, Philosophy, Science.81 comments
Alan Sokal, of the famous (or infamous (or, if you’re Julia Kristeva (in)famous)) ‘Sokal hoax’ had an interesting piece in the Guardian recently on ‘Taking evidence seriously’, a defence of scientific rationality when it comes to public spending and opposed to government support for pseudo-sciences like homeopathy or intelligent. The piece appears to be a flag-raiser for his forthcoming Beyond the Hoax: Science, Philosophy and Culture. While it’s not published yet, the blurb on Amazon reads as follows:
In 1996, Alan Sokal, a Professor of Physics at New York University, wrote a paper for the cultural-studies journal Social Text, entitled: ‘Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a transformative hermeneutics of quantum gravity’. It was reviewed, accepted and published. Sokal immediately confessed that the whole article was a hoax – a cunningly worded paper designed to expose and parody the style of extreme postmodernist criticism of science. The story became front-page news around the world and triggered fierce and wide-ranging controversy.
Sokal is one of the most powerful voices in the continuing debate about the status of evidence-based knowledge. In Beyond the Hoax he turns his attention to a new set of targets – pseudo-science, religion, and misinformation in public life. Whether my targets are the postmodernists of the left, the fundamentalists of the right, or the muddle-headed of all political and apolitical stripes, the bottom line is that clear thinking, combined with a respect for evidence, are of the utmost importance to the survival of the human race in the twenty-first century.
This conflation of what might describe as post-modern, post-structuralist, or Twentieth-Century Continental Philosophy (none of which are perfect descriptions, but are about as good as we have) with religious or pseudo-religious irrationality is a well-worn theme in recent years. It’s found in the work of writers like Francis Wheen (in his How Mumbo Jumbo Conquered the World), Johann Hari, the Butterflies and Wheels crew and most of the guests on Little Atoms. While many of the criticisms made of contemporary or not-so-contemporary phenomena like crystal healing, astrology or the much and deservedly maligned homeopathy are valid, it’s quite a stretch to see them as part of some kind of continuum with the work of Lacan, Foucault or Derrida. In fact, one can tell how poorly a particular writer understands ‘postmodern’ philosophy by the extent to which they rely on the arguments of Sokal and his book Intellectual Impostures (also published as Fashionable Nonsense).
Sokal’s book (co-written with Jean Bricmont) itself is insightful, informed and important. However, it is also rather limited in its argument, as Sokal would be the first to acknowledge. It is not by any stretch a comprehensive attack on ‘postmodern’ philosophy. Rather, it specifically focuses on the systematic abuse and misrepresentation of scientific concepts by a number of key ‘postmodern’ thinkers and writers. In the case of writers like Kristeva or Baudrilliard, the abuse of scientific concepts is not central to their overall philosophy although it might reasonably cause one to question the extent to which anything they write should be taken seriously. For someone like Lacan, the criticism is more damning, but still not overwhelming; much still remains of Lacan’s work even with the ‘topology’ removed. It’s also particularly notable that arguably the two greatest bêtes noires of the anti-’postmodern’ists – Derrida and Foucault – are decidely absent from Sokal’s attack. Derrida is mentioned for an off-hand comment at a seminar about the Einsteinian constant not being a constant and Foucault is only invoked in passing.
For Francis Wheen or Johann Hari (despite his much vaunted – primarily by himself – First) to dismiss the work of these writers on the basis of Sokal’s criticism reflects a profound ignorance on their part. A particularly egregious example of this approach is that of Nick Cohen. Although he once popped in to this site to rebut the suggestion that he didn’t actually understand what he was talking about, the arguments he puts forward in his postscript to the revised edition of What’s Left (reprinted in Democratiya) demonstrates that some of the lessons just aren’t sinking in. Nick writes, with an almost epic lack of self-awareness:
[P]ost-modernists took the liberal idea of tolerance and pushed group-based identity politics into an extreme relativism. I am unqualified to discuss their philosophy, although I instinctively feel it is wrong, but a child could understand their politics, which is why they had to hide them in such convoluted prose.
“I don’t understand the philosophy, but I understand the politics behind it”? Is this any different from the approach taken by those criticised by Sokal? Surely the key error on the part of the Luce Irigirarys and Bruno Latours’ is that they don’t understand the science but claim (incorrectly) to understand the philosophy underlying it. Indeed, the one concrete example that Cohen gives of the ‘politics’ of postmodernism shows that he’s confused even when it comes to basic facts. He writes, of the much-maligned Michel Foucault:
When the Islamic revolution in Iran began its persecution of leftists, the nominally left-wing Michel Foucault said Europeans should not condemn because Iranians ‘did not have the same regime of truth as ours’.
This is simply and factually incorrect. Foucault’s endorsement of the Iranian revolution has been used as a stick to beat ‘postmodern relativists’ for decades now. What’s rarely, if ever, pointed out is that Foucault’s support for the revolution came prior to the fall of the Shah. As Eric Paras shows in his Foucault 2.0 ,which examines the support for human rights and liberty in Foucault’s later work, Foucault never supported Khomeni’s theocracy, nor should his support for the revolution in its early stages be confused with a tacit endorsement of the current regime. Paras writes of Foucault’s support for the opposition to the Shah’s rule:
Foucault expressed scepticism that the opposition movement was primarily religious in its orientation or in its goals. Behind the Islamist rhetoric of the mullahs, he detected “a movement traversed by the breath of a religion that speaks less of the beyond than of the transfiguration of this world”. Even as the Ayatollah Khomeni rallied dissident elements from his haven in France, Foucault was writing “One fact should be clear: by ‘Islamic government’, no one in Iran means a political regime in which the clergy would play a role of direction or leadership”.
He goes on to write:
[I]t should be said that the events of the winter of 1978-79 went far toward suppressing his early enthusiasm for the Iranian experiment. On February 1, 1979, Khomeni returned to Iran in triumph and established a theocracy that promptly and bloodily settled accounts with its opponents. Attacked in the French press for his support of the revolution, Foucault told the reporters of Le Monde, “There is, certainly, no shame in changing one’s opinion: but there is no reason to say that one has changed it when one is today against the cutting-off of hands, after being yesterday against the tortures of the Savak”. Elsewhere in the piece, he argued that “[t]he spirituality to which those who rose up and died referred is in no way comparable to the bloody government of a fundamentalist clergy”.
While one can never be sure what the heroic Iranian bus drivers think about the Death of the Subject, but coupled with his meeting of minds on human rights issues with Nouvelle Philosophes like André Glucksmann and Bernard-Henri Levy Foucault seems little different from that doyenne of muscular liberalism, Azar Nafisi (except, perhaps, for the fact that Nafisi’s support for the revolution – grounded as it was in a rather extreme form of Maoism – was rather more bloodthirsty than Foucault’s).
To return in conclusion, however, to Sokal’s article, it’s hard to argue with his insistence that public policy and state spending should be grounded in evidence-based rationality and honest and open debate. He writes:
The bottom line is that all of us – conservative and liberal, believer and atheist – live in the same real world, whether we like it or not. Public policy must be based on the best available evidence about that world. In a free society each person has the right to believe whatever nonsense he wishes, but the rest of us should pay attention only to those opinions that are based on evidence.
Who could argue with that? The problem, however, is his choice of target in the article. Certainly homeopathy, creationism and, indeed, the worldview of the Bush administration are not representative of a clear-thinking which is grounded in science and objective reasoning. But surely a greater hazard to an informed public debate around what might be termed ’scientific’ issues is much of the scientific industry itself. As Dan Hinds points out in his The Threat to Reason, the influence of market capitalism is a far more pernicious obstacle to the disinterested search for the truth in Western society than any amount of religious fundamentalism or New Age quakery. We saw it in the past with the success of tobacco companies in concealing the link between smoking and cancer for decades, we see it in the attempt to create some kind of false ‘debate’ in relation to man-made climate change and it most recently arose in the story about pharmaceutical companies not releasing the results of clinical trials showing that a number of anti-depressant drugs, including Prozac, had little or no effect on all but the most serious illnesses.
At least when it comes to religious superstition or other discourses which don’t even pretend to be rational, we can point to an objective standard of proof and evidence through scientific enquiry in response. When it comes to the very corruption of scientific enquiry itself through vested economic interests, however, many of the current defenders of Truth and the Enlightenment fall silent. This includes, unfortunately, certain self-proclamed ‘leftists’ like Sokal.
Samantha Power and the Obama Campaign February 26, 2008
Posted by smiffy in Books, Democrats, International Politics, Iraq, US Politics, United States.60 comments
Via Normblog, a rather disappointing Sunday Times interview with the very intriguing Samantha Power.Power’s an interesting character. She’s a strong human rights advocate who doesn’t fall into any easy ideological categories. Her opposition to the invasion of Iraq distinguishes her from both the hawkish elements within the current US administration who use the language of human rights to cloak a rather more base military adventurism and the Nick Cohen-ite ‘muscular liberals’ so comprehensively ridiculed in the always brilliant Encyclopedia of Decency. However, she’s by no means a pacifist and her support for military intervention in certain cases puts her at odds with much of what might loosely be described as the broad-left anti-war movement.
Power’s 2002 book A Problem from Hell: America in the Age of Genocide is a compelling and illuminating piece of work which analyses the evolution of the international community’s understanding of genocide as a distinct crime, and the responses of various US administrations to it throughout the 20th century. The material on the Kurds is particularly good, specifically in detailing the internal politics driving the State Department’s response to the Anfal campaign.
Her new book, Chasing the Flame, is a biography of Sergio Vieira de Mello, the senior UN diplomat most notable for overseeing the transition of the then East Timor to independence and for his death at the hands of jihadists in a car bomb attack on the UN headquarters in Baghdad in August 2003. Even prior to his death Vieira de Mello was a fascinating figure and was profiled in Paul Berman’s Power and the Idealists as one of a number of soixante-huitards (the others including Joshka Fischer and Bernard Kouchner) who came to a difficult accomodation with the defence of human rights and the need for humanitarian interventionism in the 40 years since the riots of the summer of ‘68. Berman’s review of Power’s book can be found here: ironically, his main criticism of the work
But the biggest difficulty, or so my reading of Chasing the Flame leads me to suppose, is a problem of the imagination. A philosophical issue. It’s the same problem that keeps popping up in Power’s earlier book as well: an inability to imagine why some people might set out to destroy whole populations. Vieira de Mello participated in U.N. missions that followed any of several logics—the logic of peacekeeping, or of establishing safe havens for the persecuted, or of providing humanitarian aid. But each of those logics presumes that if horrific conflicts have broken out, it is because otherwise reasonable people have fallen into misunderstandings and a neutral broker like the U.N. might usefully intercede. Yet conflicts sometimes break out because one or another popular political movement has arrived at a sincere belief in the virtue of exterminating its enemies, and horrific ideologies lie at the origin. Neutral mediations in a case like that are bound only to obscure the reality—which has happened several times over, as Power usefully demonstrates.
is precisely the aspect of Berman’s own writing which is the weakest. Particularly in Terror and Liberalism, but also elsewhere, he has a tendency to move from relatively well-considered fact-based arguments to vague theorising about ideology – in particular about the ‘irrationality’ of certain ‘death-cults’ – which isn’t really supported by convincing evidence and which one suspects is only thrown in to allow Berman to make spurious analogies between Fascism, Stalinism and (for want of a more accurate term) Jihadism.
While Chasing the Flame isn’t published (this side of the Atlantic) until next week, I hope it will examine in some detail how possible the post-invasion reconstruction of Iraq was at the time of Vieria de Mello’s death. Recent books like Imperial Life in the Emerald City and The Occupation suggest that the reconstruction efforts were always doomed to failure, due to the, at best, incompetence and, at worst, criminal and deliberate negligence of the Coalition Provisional Authority. However, what the argument that the current morass in Iraq was the inevitable and unavoidable outcome of the invasion doesn’t consider is what might have happened had the initial reconstruction effort been headed up by the United Nations rather than Paul Bremer and co. It’s something of a pointless debate, of course: we have no real way of knowing what might have happened had things been otherwise, and it certainly doesn’t assist in considering a possible solution to the present situation. However, it’s an argument worth having, to inform future questions of military intervention (however unlikely these may be in the short term).
What’s so disappointing about the Sunday Times piece, though, is that there’s so little in it. Power’s close involvement with the Obama campaign certainly cause me to pay closer attention to his campaign (although her somewhat star-struck descriptions of him in the interview do tend to grate). However, nowhere in the article is the question of what US foreign policy under an Obama administration might look like, particularly in the area of human rights and humanitarian intervention. That said, her presence is still something to keep an eye on in the course of the campaign and certainly if Obama manages to win the Democratic nomination and becomes an actual Presidential candidate.
Buying for Lefties II January 7, 2008
Posted by franklittle in Art, Books, Culture, Film.13 comments
Last year we ran a Buying for Lefties thread, suggesting books and films that some of us here at the Cedars had enjoyed over the year. The notion was that those of us with friends or spouses without political inclinations could be quietly directed to the site to better facilitate the purchasing of presents and ensuring quieter, happier households come Christmas Day. Regrettably, we didn’t get around to it before Christmas but perhaps it’s now in time for the January sales. So these are some books or films that I highly recommend from 2007 for the lefty in your life. With one exception they all came out this year. Please feel free to add or criticise.
I was a big fan of Naomi Klein’s No Logo when it first came out and had been slightly disappointed with her works since then like Fences and Windows but she redeemed herself bigtime this year with The Shock Doctrine: The rise of disaster capitalism, easily the best book I’ve read this year. Klein defines what she calls ‘the shock doctrine’, the use by capital of the disorientation left by war, revolution, coups or natural disaster to push through right-wing economic policies based on privatisation and the seizure of land and resources. She uses as a continuing metaphor the practice by the CIA in the 1950s of psychologically dismantling innocent people who had volunteered for psychiatric treatment. This practice, previously unknown to me but well-documented, was based on wiping a person’s personality and then building a new person on the ‘blank slate’. Disaster capitalism is the transference of this way of thinking to whole countries. She examines a range of countries as case studies including Chile, the Soviet Union, South Africa, Poland, Sri Lanka, the US post-Katrina and others. Highly recommended.
Níamh Puirseil’s The Irish Labour Party: 1922-73 is a workmanlike account of the history of Ireland’s third largest political party from the foundation of the state up until the 1973 election and the height of the conflict in the North. As a factual historical account of who did what, where and why it’s a pretty good read and interesting, also depressing, to see the same fights within the left fought out again and again. The weakness of the book for me was in its analysis. Puirseil, who is clearly sympathetic to Labour, ends with the damning conclusion that, “Offering little and delivering less, Labour received the support it deserved.” Yet she is clearly uncomfortable with those who argued for a move to the left within Labour over those five decades and especially so to those outside Labour on the left. She is also pretty good on the failures of Labour in government to deliver but tends to ascribe this as much to the failures of individual Labour ministers than the conservative alliances ranged against them, though the Church does come in for a bit of a kicking.
Earlier in 2007 I was delighted to get a copy of Steve McGiffen’s The European Union: A Critical Guide, a very well-written and direct analysis of the European Union from a radical left perspective. One of McGiffen’s strength is that while he makes his bias extremely clear, he is also able to separate it from the straight-forward factual information required for people to navigate the European Union. First published in 2001, an expanded edition in 2005 contains an analysis of the then European Constitution. For those on the left who always meant to find out more about the EU but never got around to it, this is the perfect choice as McGiffen brings us around the EU’s decision making structures without ever losing sight of the sheer madness of most of it.
While Noel Whelan still stalks the land touting his inept punditry and the occasional book of election statistics it is well to remember that Ted Nealon got it right a long time ago and it hasn’t been improved on since. Nealon’s Guide to the 30th Dáil and Seanad, now published by the Irish Times and edited by Stephen Collins, is still the definitive guide to Dáil elections. Every count in every constituency is broken down. Detailed profiles of TDs and Senators are contained. Well designed and laid out and even Collins is tolerable enough in it. A must for election nerds like me (I confess to having every one as far back as the ‘87 election) and a valuable resource tool for political activists and commentators. Slightly surprised that nothing similar has come out from the Northern Assembly elections come to think of it but perhaps the previous effort from Whelan and Whyte showed there wasn’t a market for it.
And, moving onto films. I have to admit to having always had a sneaking regard for Michael Moore. Yes, he does occasionally play a bit fast and loose. But then, they have Ann Coulter, Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity on their side and frankly, a little politically skewed editing seems like small potatoes next to outright personal, political and professional dishonesty. But in Sicko he makes his best movie to date, due perhaps in no small part to the fact that Moore has less screen time than he has had in other films and that with one big exception, he avoids a lot of the ’stunts’ that featured in his other films. He simply allows Americans who have been victims of their health industry to tell their stories and in doing so lets them deliver a severe beating to the American health insurance industry a severe beating. While he’s wearing a seriously rosy tinted pair of spectacles when looking at the British and French health models, it does bring home how much we take public healthcare for granted when compared to the US version and when Tony Benn outlines the ideology of public healthcare, of public ownership and of solidarity with those in need, it’s almost enough to bring a lump to this old cynic’s throat.
Another outstanding documentary this year for me was Occupation 101, which I wrote about after attending the premiere back in November and so will merely direct you back there for more information.
Finally, two outstanding films for me. The first overturned years of dislike for Pat Shortt in Lenny Abrahamson’s Garage, one of the most powerful and certainly the most emotionally moving film I saw all year. It doesn’t seem to be out on DVD yet but it picked up a few prizes over the year and hopefully it’ll be available soon. Again, I wrote about this earlier in the year so more detail here. Best Irish film this year and a must-buy when it comes out.
And finally, we come to a film that can, I was surprised to discover from an old Stalinist acquaintance be seen as a tribute to the all-powerful and vigilant nature of the Stasi but which I took as an exploration of the effect living in, and assisting to administer, a totalitarian state can have on a person. In The Lives of Others Ulrich Muhe gives a very subtle, complex performance as a Stasi agent put in charge of a surveillance operation whose disquiet with the regime grows rapidly after he discovers the operation has more to do with a high-ranking official eliminating a romantic rival than the protection of the state. Deserved winner of an Oscar watching it now is especially poignant after Muhe’s death from stomach cancer earlier this year. Ironically, he was himself under surveillance by the Stasi as a young actor in the GDR and his wife was one of the agents recruited to monitor him. That level of surveillance is conveyed brilliantly in a film that brings home the atmosphere of paranoia and fear of the state that characterises totalitarian states.
Also rans. I haven’t got round to reading Judging Dev by Diarmaid Ferriter or The Corporate Takeover of Ireland by SWP capo Kieran Allen but both are on the seriously considered list. Comments on either would be welcome.
Reading Camus in Salford while we’re reading Huxley in Kilbarrack and Raheny… Joy Division, a European Cultural Aesthetic, and how come we got the hippies? December 2, 2007
Posted by WorldbyStorm in Books, Culture, Film, Music.51 comments
Reading Prospect (sub req’d) last month there was a fascinating short article by Paul Lay on Joy Division. In it he enquired “What became of the young working-class intellectual?”
His question was prompted by:
“Control, Anton Corbijn’s biopic of Ian Curtis, singer of Joy Division, the most celebrated product of a period of extraordinary cultural aspiration among British working-class males. The phenomenon seems all the more astonishing viewed from our age of Nuts and wall-to-wall sport. To get some flavour of the age, look at any copy of the New Musical Express between 1978 and 1982. The NME ran a weekly column, “Portrait of the Artist as a Consumer,” in which musicians would list their favourite books, films and thinkers. References to Bergman, Beckett, Nietzsche, Fellini and Dostoevsky abound. Tarkovsky is a favourite; the austerely Catholic films of Robert Bresson get a namecheck. The Fall, led by that other Mancunian working-class autodidact, Mark E Smith, took their name from Camus’s novel, while the Cure’s first single, “Killing an Arab,” was inspired by L’Etranger.
He also enquires:
Where did this fascination with high culture, especially the European avant garde, come from? Well, Europe, viewed from a northern council estate before mass travel, seemed impossibly exotic.
Before answering that: They followed a trail set by David Bowie and Brian Eno, who, having shown young men the delights of androgyny, led them to a cold, divided Berlin, where they recorded the groundbreaking records Low and Heroes, mixing Manhattan cool with the unbearable heaviness of European history.
And he also suggests that:
Britain in the late 1970s was a remarkably quiet place, nowhere more so than in the pub, usually music-free, where young bands gathered to discuss world domination over pints of mild before going home to listen to John Peel. There were few distractions: television closed down early, video was yet to arrive, computer games were crude, food was functional. LPs and singles were expensive and thus treasured, as were books. Britain had not yet made the shift from a largely literary culture to the overwhelmingly visual one of today.
What I find interesting about all this is not how closely it tallies with the experience of my own friends and myself in Raheny and Kilbarrack, but how little. Now, it has to be said, we were 15 or so in 1980, so we were a good eight or nine years behind Curtis et al in terms of age. But from my recollections it wasn’t so much the Irish Sea that lay between us and Manchester in cultural terms as the Atlantic Ocean.
Sure. There are elements in common. Bowie was venerated. But… moreso for the earlier material than the later, more ‘difficult’ albums. I never recall Neu or Can being mentioned during that time. The most exotic record collections tended to contain King Crimson, the more obscure (for which read ‘early’) Pink Floyd albums. Indeed all things Floyd were considered good… hence a curious subculture which dedicated themselves to swapping poorly taped Syd Barrett cassettes. Indeed, strikingly, the reference points for the more avant-garde amongst us weren’t European experimentation but largely the tail end of the hippy era. Prog-rock bands, some slight element of jazz and there you go. Fripp was perceived in these circles as being a ‘genius’. And perhaps he was, perhaps he was.
The Velvet Underground and the Doors were cool, or so one was told. I’m presuming at this point that a picture is emerging. This was a mid-Atlantic taste.
Donagh on Dublin Opinion mentioned Roger Doyle, whose electronic experimentation in Operating Theater was completely off the radar for almost all (I taped a couple of tracks off the radio – probably Dave Fanning back when he was gud – because I liked the cinematic sweep of the stuff, and as I’ve previously noted was intrigued by all things synth). In fact, precisely because large tranches of New Wave made considerable use of synthesisers they were dismissed, presumably because of some lack of ‘craft’.
Which leads me to film. Probably because of the capability to see BBC and ITV in Dublin there was some cross over on the visual side. I too cherished Tarkovsky’s Stalker from an early age. A close friend of mine conceived a passion for French cinema which has endured to this day and arguably art-house cinema in Ireland (and I’m thinking of Kino as much as the IFI) was given its first push at this point in time. I don’t want to overstate this. Consider that three or four years earlier we’d been enraptured to a greater or lesser degree by a Wookie so our ability to critique European New Wave cinema was questionable at best. In fact a bigger influence again was to be the arrival of Channel Four a year or two later which delivered the real stuff for us. Saturday nights would never be the same again, at least the one’s we stayed in for.
And literature? Books? Well, this too was curiously Atlanticist in content. A close friend read Tolkien in the Summer of 1981 which was actually late in the day all things considered. I was reading the Illuminatus Trilogy that year (which actually reads better the more one realises it’s concealed history of libertarianism), or was it the year previous? And science fiction. Lot’s of it. Which explains why Huxley figured as well, as did some Ballard. Oh yes, and Vonnegut. And “Fear and Loathing”, and any number of tomes devoted to the years of zonk – including Christgau… That this was part and parcel of another subculture is perhaps also evident. If anything this was late hippy, somewhat West Coast, an entire cultural aesthetic transplanted to Dublin. And importantly it’s worth noting that the hair styles tended towards the longer. None of the minimalist spiky barnets that others had.
But in fairness there were other strands. I’d fallen in love with the incomparable James Tiptree Jr’s science fiction (JT Jr. in reality being Alice Bradley Sheldon, one of the leading female and feminist SF writers of the 1970s) a year earlier. In film, as I’ve mentioned before, Michael Caine and the Ipcress File were in there too… And curiously post-punk was a significant influence for many of us, from John Cooper Clarke to Joy Division/New Order and various luminaries of the New Wave scene such as Echo and the Bunnymen, Department S, Siouxsie, The Church (in their earliest NW guise), Robyn Hitchcock (again going through something of a NW phase). But don’t let this deceive you. The still nascent record and tape collections were filled with Kiss, Sabbath, Deep Purple, Motorhead, AC/DC, Rainbow, Saxon, early Venom… and so on. What was popular a year or two before might not have been played much (indeed in a fit of almost Maoist self-abnegation I sold almost all my heavy metal albums in early 1982 or 3 – a fit of willful cultural vandalism that took me years to recover from, and a considerable amount of money to repurchase in various formats across the next decade).
I think there was a reason for the more Americanised tastes. Many many record collections consisted initially of records (and they were almost all records) passed down or stolen from older siblings. Radio stations were slow to pick up on punk and later New Wave and tended once more towards a more American sound (hence the fact that I can still remember far too many Hall and Oates songs – and lyrics). Therefore that which had come before exercised a considerable momentum as regards the development of tastes. So once the immediate had been satisfied and tastes matured, considering too that from the vantage point of 1980 punk looked a little dated, what then? Those records provided a path forward into ‘deeper’ material. And those older tastes were very strongly influenced by US music – perhaps to a much greater degree than their counterparts in the UK.
One major divergence? Or so it seemed? Well, Lay notes that: it is remarkable how much religious imagery is invoked in Joy Division songs, even their very titles. … Joy Division’s songs, especially on the final album Closer, are drenched in this religious language, which has now all but disappeared. For Curtis’s generation was among the last to be brought up in a Britain where religious language was ubiquitous, transmitted through school assemblies, religious studies classes and the shared landmarks of baptisms, weddings and funerals, all of which offered Curtis access to a vocabulary of transcendence.
That certainly wasn’t a part and parcel of our cultural lives – and I remember being enormously puzzled a couple of years later to be told that religion was central to Curtis. Still, I’m not entirely right. Ireland did produce an avowedly religious band which went on to have a certain measure of fame. Never much liked them though, then or now…
Still, if we go back to the original article I have to raise one significant point that makes me cautious about the whole thesis. Frankly music was, whether in Manchester or Dublin, a bit of a minority interest. More were interested in sport. Most were interested in practically anything else. And while the NME might well have ploughed it’s furrow, and granted Sounds and Melody Maker were also extant then, I wonder how broad their appeal truly was.
It’s odd, perhaps we were just too young. Perhaps Dublin was different in terms of class and environment. Perhaps there were clusters of working class intellectuals in Dublin reading Camus and Sartre and Ballard (oddly enough I know for a fact that in Maynooth during the mid-1980s some people influence in part by Morrissey were reading Camus – but they were younger again). Perhaps some of you? And yet, it’s striking how Roddy Doyle when he came to write the Commitments positioned the music in an American context. At the time – influenced by New Wave and after I thought that was almost deceitful. Now I’m not so sure.
Len Deighton, class and the right… September 30, 2007
Posted by WorldbyStorm in Books, Class, Culture, The Left.4 comments
One of the most interesting analyses of class in contemporary society I have ever read is available at Dublin Opinion at the moment. Conor has been working through aspects of class definitions, structures and the representation of the working class in Ireland and really getting to grips with something that while elusive retains enormous potency (or ‘agency’ as the current idiom would have it).
And it brought to mind the point that class looms large as an element of many different aspects of representation. For an example of same can I direct people to the thrillers of Len Deighton? What is curious here is that these thrillers, in particular the ‘Harry Palmer’ series did not come from a left-wing base, but instead a more generalised meritocratic approach and one I’d argue that was uniquely British and fed into a later version of right populism.
Across a series of books, from The Ipcress File, through Horse Under Water, on to Funeral in Berlin, Billion Dollar Brain, Spy Story and Yesterday’s Spy, the initially nameless agent for an obscure branch of British intelligence is pitted not merely against ideological opponents in the shape of East German and Russian agents and military, but also the bureaucracy of civil service institutions which are led by the upper and upper middle classes (who either turn out to be fallible, inefficient or actual traitors). Palmer (as he is later called although it is not clear if the narrator in Yesterday’s Spy is the same agent) is underpaid, from a working class or lower middle class background, lives a very ordinary lifestyle and has a chequered past including military service.
It is this sense of having a strong class differentiation that permeates the novels giving them a curious, and sometimes humorous edge, as Palmer attempts to negotiate through a labyrinthine complex of rival intelligence units headed by elites. Indeed there is often a tellingly bitter tone to the pieces and a sense that the rationale for this new colder war are never quite as clear cut as is often presented. Having said that the books are unequivocal in their anti-Communism.
The Ipcress File, published in 1962, starts the series (I always remember my father seeing the film version – which arguably helped launch Michael Caine on the road to stardom – a feature of which is a rather high-tech, for the 1960s, torture and brainwashing device and muttering about it being exactly how British intelligence operated in the North). It’s interesting when one considers the date. The society was changing, with the Lady Chatterly’s Lover trial a mere two years previously. But Deighton wasn’t addressing youth culture as such. You’ll search for quite a while before finding any references to popular music or suchlike. His concerns were those of men (and the books are pretty male oriented) who had served in the War or had just missed it, a tranche in their late 20s and 30s from largely working class or lower middle class backgrounds in rather mundane jobs. Too old for youth culture but shaking off the social mores of previous decades.
The daily travails of the then nameless protagonist as he is shuttled from one obscure intelligence unit to another are detailed exquisitely. The peculiar hierarchy of the British (indeed any) civil service is laid bare.
Ross, the man I had come to see, looked up from the writing that had held his undivided attention since three seconds after I had entered the room. Ross said, ‘Well now,’ and coughed nervously. Ross and I had come to an arrangement of some years’ standing – we decided to hate each other. Being English, this vitriolic relationship manifested itself in oriental politeness.
Class issues abound.
Dalby was an elegant languid public school Englishman of a type that can usually reconcile his duty with comfort and luxury.
Dalby tightened a shoe-lace. ‘Think you can handle a tricky little special assignment?’
‘If it doesn’t demand a classical education I might be able to grope around it’.
In Yesterday’s Spy, published in 1975, the plot becomes even more explicitly political and mirrors the concerns of the time. A resurgent Egypt and Syria, supported by the USSR. The protagonist is a former member of a WW2 resistance network in France. One of his old contacts was a Jewish Communist named Frankel. In a flashback Frankel is met my the narrator for the first time in the early days of the war.
“But Hitler and Stalin have signed the peace pact. In Lyon the Communists are even publishing a news-sheet”.
Frankel looked up at me, trying to see if I was being provocative. He said, ‘Some of them are even wearing the hammer and sickle again. Some are drinking with the German soldiers and calling them fellow workers, like the Party tells them to do. Some have resigned from the Party in disgust. Some have already faced firing squads. Some are reserving their opinion, waiting to see if the war is really finished. But which are which? Which are which?’.
Steve Champion (!), who is for much of the book portrayed as the villain of the piece comments:
‘Oooh, they’ve changed you, Charlie! Those little men who’ve promised you help with your mortgage, and full pension rights at sixty. Who would have thought they could have done that to the kid who fought the war with a copy of Wage Labour and Capital in his back pocket?…’
The idealism of youth is gone. Replaced, as Champion says, with a pragmatic approach to life. And this is true not just of the narrator Charlie, but also other characters.
Later Frankel in a discussion with Charlie says:
‘The risks I ran, the times I was beaten with police truncheons, the bullets in my leg, the pneumonia I caught duringthe Spanish Winter fighting… all this I don’t regret…. When they told me about the Stalin-Hitler pact I went around explaining it to the men of lesser faith. The war you know about. Czechoslovakia – well, I’d never liked the Czechs, and when the Russian tanks invaded Hungary…well they were asking for it, those Hungarians…. But I am a Jew…they are putting my people into concentration camps, starving them, withdrawing the right to work from anyone who asks to go to Israel When these pigs who call themselves socialists went to the aid of the Arabs then I know that no matter what kind of Communist I was, I was first and foremost a Jew. A Jew! Do you understand now?’
I think this is interesting if only because it points to one period and set of events during the war years which was a huge betrayal to many on the left (and coincidentally while I was writing this post Ed Hayes brought up much the same point in comments on the CPI). Charlie’s idealism is gone by the end of the war. It is clear from the narrative that actually existing Communism failed in his eyes. Frankel’s devotion to the cause persists much longer. And his split is over religion/nationality in the context of the USSR treatment of a religious minority.
In a later exchange with a German there is the following…
“And if you’d been living just a few miles farther east, you’d be doing your duty on behalf of the Communists, I suppose.’
Claude smiled. ‘I can remember a few nights during the war when you were telling us all how much you favoured theoretical Communism.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Well, almost everyone’s in favour of theoretical Communism. Maybe even those bastards in the Kremlin.’
In a way it is a sad and bitter little tale. The British are no longer masters of their world. Schlegel, the US intelligence officer is the one in charge.
‘Not all of it,’ said Schlegel. ‘Long after the file closes, Champion was still reporting back to this department.’
‘Was he!’
‘Long before my time, of course,’ said Schlegel, to emphasize that this was a British cock-up, less likely to happen now that we had him with us on secondment from Washington.
Former ‘officer’ class characters such as Charlie’s nominal superior Dawlish appear. Their position is diminished by the intervention of the US. But there is little sympathy for them as the following excerpt demonstrates:
I’d hardly started having a look round when Dawlish arrived. If Schlegel was hoping to keep our break-in inconspicuous, I’d say that Dawlish screwed up any last chance, what with his official car and uniformed driver, and the bowler hat and Melton overcoat. To say nothing of the tightly rolled umbrella that Dawlish was waving. Plastic raincoats are de rigueur for the rainy season in Barons Court.
‘Not exactly a playboy pad,’ said Dawlish, demonstrating his mastery of the vernacular.
And throughout it there runs a strain of civil service speak. Small complaints about the nature and conditions of the job.
Dawlish said, ‘So, should I infer that you have a little blot-hole like this, just in case the balloon goes up?’ Even after all these years together, Dawlish had to make sure his little jokes left a whiff of cordite.
‘No sir,’ I said. ‘But on the new salary scale I might be able to afford one – not in Central London, though’.
It is this mix of the banal and the extraordinary which characterises what Deighton writes. And it is curious because the political analysis is one which is resolutely anti-elitist, but one which in a grudging identification with the US ultimately can be seen as a precursor of certain narratives which are perhaps best exemplified by those who supported Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s. The understanding, even the critique of class is present and correct, but then it veers off in a completely different direction from the left. I am thinking in particular of the developments in the UK Conservative party which were very much a reaction against the traditional patrician ‘one nation’ mentality which had infused the party for much of the 20th century. This is, to some degree, the same song as that sung by Rupert Murdoch when through his media he decried old monied elites who held back entrepreneurial endeavour. That he was establishing a further elite appears to have eluded him. It’s a populist message, one where the ordinary man cannot trust the old elites, cannot trust those who supposedly speak for him (there is a throwaway line in a club setting where two “socialist” MPs are talking about golf and wine) and in the end it is the Americans who are – if not quite heroic – at least a means towards some sort of a better future.
Deighton wrote many books after these, again mostly dealing in the world of intelligence agencies (bar the extremely odd, and rather cheerless MAMISTA which dealt with South American guerillas). And they’re all fine books. But, something was missing by then. The edginess and friction that his exploration of the interface between different social classes during a time of rapid societal change had dissipated. The later books are rather…well…middle class, as are the concerns. The last really good book I read of his was Violent Ward, set in California and something of an homage to Chandler. He is still around, lives in the US and holds fairly right-wing views on unions and suchlike.
But for all that I think he had something back in the 1960s and early 1970s and caught, perhaps inadvertently, a snapshot of Britain and what it meant to be British.
I should also note an excellent essay by Charles Stross, the science fiction and fantasy writer, who has, in the form of his novella The Atrocity Archive, written a homage to Deighton that manages to cross the Cthulu mythos with…well… the hierarchical structures of the civil service. Good fun and very perceptive (incidentally am I the only one who thinks Stross is something of a latterday Silverberg or Pohl who tries his hand at everything the genres have to offer and generally comes away successfully?).
