Matthew Carr's Blog, page 20

Parasite: A Film for Our Times

Donald Trump isn’t generally known for pronouncements on world cinema.  But he and his fans seem to believe that he has the right to express even the most vapid opinions on everything, and given that Hollywood mostly despises him, it isn’t as surprising as it might seem at first sight  to find the Emperor of Mar-a-Lago taking a break from his electoral preparations to pontificate on the Oscars.

“How bad were the Academy Awards this year, did you see? ‘And the winner is … a movie from South Korea,’ ” the Great Man told  a rally in Colorado. “What the hell was that all about? We’ve got enough problems with South Korea with trade, on top of it they give them the best movie of the year?”

Pauline Kael eat your heart out, because this is cutting edge film criticism.  None of your woke Hollywood elitism here. After all, what the hell is going on with the world, that a South Korean movie should win the Oscars?  It’s political correctness gone mad – or something.   “I’m looking for like, let’s get ‘Gone with the Wind’ — can we get like ‘Gone with the Wind’ back, please?” the Gilded Monstrosity went on. “‘Sunset Boulevard,’ so many great movies.”

So many.  But Trump rates a dewy-eyed eulogy to the Confederacy.  Who would have expected that?  It could have been worse.  Given the depths to which we’ve plunged these last few years, he might just as well have mentioned Birth of a Nation, and few would have batted an eyelid, except that he probably hasn’t heard of it . But the point was clear: the best movies are American movies – movies made by white people for white people.  That’s what America did when it was great.

As most people with a brain will know, the film that displeased the capo dei tutti capi was Bong Joon-ho’s (what kinda name is that, huh?) Parasite, which broke with Hollywood tradition and won best picture award, even though it was a foreign-language film.

I saw Parasite yesterday, and it fully justified all the plaudits it received.  It’s a magnificent and completely engrossing achievement that fully succeeds in everything it tries to do.  It is part-black comedy, part- thriller, part-social satire, which weaves all these different genres into a profound and ultimately tragic meditation on class, inequality and rampant consumerism.

As Trump says, it is surprising that Hollywood should have given best picture to a film like this is, but not for the reasons that he thinks.

As a writer, I’m always interested in how cinema draws on a range of ingredients to tell its stories in ways that go beyond the script itself.  Cinematography, direction, acting, editing, music – all these components determine whether a film works or not and whether even a great written script lives up to its original potential.

Parasite is cinema firing on all cylinders.  Its foundation is a witty, clever and completely original storyline that Harold Pinter or Julio Cortázar would have been proud of, that positively bristles with nuance and intelligence, whose plot twists come out of nowhere and seem entirely justified in the context.   Boon Jong-ha transforms this material into a jewel of cinematic art, enhancing and building on its original premise using the full box of tricks available to a skillful and visionary director.

All this is even more remarkable, in that the film essentially oscillates between two locations: the ultra-modern, architect-designed house where the Park family live in untroubled luxury, and the underground cockroach-infested basement flat where the Kims eke out a precarious hand-to-mouth existence until the opportunity unexpectedly arises to infiltrate themselves into the lives of the former.

I won’t describe the plot, in case you haven’t seen it.  There are elements of Parasite which reminded me of other films depicting master-servant relationships, from The Servant, The Remains of the Day and Gosford Park.   Like these films,  Parasite explores the tensions and the black comedy in the quotidian reality of domestic lives built on envy, dehumanisation and exploitation. But Bong Joon-ha goes beyond mere social satire to draw a broader picture of the parallel and intersecting lives of the rich and poor, which is not only South Korean but global in its implications.

“It’s all metaphorical!” cries the young conman Ki-Woo.  In Parasite, it certainly is.  In a succession of dazzling images, metaphors and plot twists,  the film shows the abandonment of society by the rich, and the terrifying gulf between a tiny elite that has more than it could ever possibly need, while a large percentage of the world’s population is forced to survive at varying levels of precarity that families like the Parks are not even aware of.

Though there are some real laugh-out-loud moments in Parasite, the film is really a tragedy, because the world it depicts is tragic.  It is our world: a global society hollowed out by decades of reckless concentration of wealth in the hands of fewer and fewer people; by the disintegration of the public sphere, to the point where the rich live in gilded bubbles without the remotest idea of what is taking place beneath their feet – in the Parks’ case, quite literally.

You can be certain that neither Trump nor many members of his audience yesterday will have seen that film,  because what red-blooded American patriot would want to see a film with subtitles, right?  This is a pity, because in a roundabout way, Parasite is a film about Trump, Ivanka and Jared Kushner, and so many people like them.

And some of those more humble Americans who think that Trump and his family actually care about them might have learned something about the dystopian social dynamics of our collapsing  21st century world.

For those who think that cinema has moved on since Gone With the Wind, I urge you to see this tremendous film, which looks at the current state of things straight in the eye, and makes you laugh, weep, and gasp – and ultimately reminds you that this world has to change or we are all lost.

 

 

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Eugenics for Dummies

There’s been a lot of talk about eugenics in the UK this last week, thanks to Dominic Cummings’s ‘superforecaster’ Andrew Sabisky.   Sabisky’s rapid rise and fall is entirely due to the ‘controversial comments’, as the media likes to call them, that he made on various internet forums, including Cummings’s own blog.  These pronouncements include the recommendation that compulsory contraception could be introduced to  prevent the perpetuation of a ‘permanent underclass’; that black Americans have a lower average IQ than white Americans, and that ‘the very real racial differences in intelligence are significantly – even mostly – genetic in origin, though the degree is of course a very serious subject of scholarly debate.’

Sabisky also told Schools Week in 2016 that: ‘Eugenics are about selecting “for” good things,’ since ‘Intelligence is largely inherited and it correlates with better outcomes: physical health, income, lower mental illness.’

Elsewhere, though this has received less media attention, Sabisky could be found writing as an ‘agony uncle’ on Reddit seven years ago, where he advised a man whose Mormon wife was refusing to have sex with him that he  should to try to ‘rewire’ her brain ‘to the point where she no longer, consciously or subconsciously sees a conflict between a good Christian woman and serving you up 39 flavours of slut on command’.

There is more where this came from, none of which bothered Cummings – or Boris Johnson, who has yet to condemn him.

It’s doubtful whether many people will remember Sabisky’s name in a few months time, but they will remember Cummings.   And many people will now have become aware of an ongoing debate about eugenics that had previously been restricted to fringe alt-right forums and marginal scientific research. Sabisky’s defenders include Toby Young, who has also taken up eugenics as an intellectual hobby, and has railed against the ‘offence archaeologists’ who supposedly forced Sabisky’s resignation.

And over on Twitter, the mighty Richard Dawkins has popped up with the following observation:

 

 

There is a lot that you can say about this remarkably silly tweet.  We could start with the observation that human beings are not cows, horses, pigs, dogs & roses.  Or ask how Dawkins defines what ‘works’ and to what extent such definitions can ever ‘ignore ideology.’  Because the decision over which virtues  should be preserved and enhanced, and which should vices should be restricted and eliminated is always ideological and political, and always involves moral choices.

Many critics of Sabisky – and Dawkins – have drawn attention to the Nazi eugenics programs, such as the Aktion T-4 n which tens of thousands of disabled people, mentally-ill were killed and another 400,000 Germans considered to be ‘worthless mouths’ forcibly sterilised. But the historical reminders about Hitler’s eugenics programs and the Holocaust – while important to make – are not the most useful prism through which to view the reemergence of the eugenics ‘debate’ in the 21st century.

To understand why so many deeply obnoxious white men are showing such an interest in eugenics, we need to look a little further back.  Eugenics first emerged in the late nineteenth century, when the term was coined by Darwin’s cousin, the polymath Sir Francis Galton, in his book Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development (1883).  Galton later defined eugenics as ‘the study of agencies under social control that may improve or impair the racial qualities of future generations, either physically or mentally.’

This suggestion that ‘racial qualities’ could be improved or impaired was crucial to the popularity and the intellectual credibility that eugenics acquired both in the decades leading up to World War 1 and also in the years that followed.  Eugenics took root at a time when governments and a host of writers, from the English antisemite journalist Arnold White to the American journalist Madison Grant were concerned that the white race was being ‘out-bred’ by inferior racial stocks both inside their countries and globally.

Eugenics – in addition to immigration restrictions based on perceived racial characteristics associated with people of colour – was seen as an instrument for preventing racial decline.  These fears of racial degeneration were not only directed at outsiders, however.  In the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth, many governments believed that the national ‘stock’ was deteriorating as a result of poverty, crime and the unrestricted breeding of the ‘unfit’, to the point when some countries worried that they might not be able to wage war effectively.

In England these fears of national/imperial decline were confirmed by the near-disaster of the Boer War.  At the end of the Second Boer War in 1902, the British government established the Inter-Departmental Committee on Physical Deterioration in order to ‘make a preliminary enquiry into the allegations concerning the deterioration of certain classes of the population as shown by the large percentage of rejections for physical causes of recruits for the Army.’

These fears of degeneration encompassed a wide range of ‘unfit’ people, including unwanted foreigners, Jews, the physically disabled and the ‘feebleminded’, criminals, alcoholics, paupers, and recipients of charity. In effect eugenics came to be seen as a ‘scientific’ solution for cultural and political anxieties rooted in empire, racism, the social deformations of unregulated capitalism, militarism and nationalist paranoia, to the point when it was seen as entirely legitimate for the state to limit the ability of designated undesirable people to procreate, so that those elements of the population considered to be superior could continue to thrive.

Women – and the rise of womens rights movements – were also seen as a potential source of national degeneration through excessive ‘feminisation’ of the national stock.  Then, as now, the men who made these judgements tended to be white men, who took their own superiority for granted and decided  which characteristics should be preserved or eliminated, and whose lives were valuable and whose were not, as they weighed up the moral consequences of ‘positive eugenics’ (increasing desirable traits) and ‘negative eugenics’ (eliminating undesirable traits)

As the world well knows, Nazi Germany became the most barbaric proponent of the latter, but coercive eugenics were also practiced in a number of other countries, including the United States, the UK and in Scandinavia.

Today’s ‘Return of Eugenics’, as the Spectator‘s Fraser Nelson described it in a 2016 article that he recycled last week, is primarily concerned with positive eugenics, and the propagation and enhancement of supposedly genetically inherited characteristics.   But it is no coincidence that this re-emergence has taken place at a time when far-right racial phobias about racial ‘replacement’ are moving ever closer towards the political mainstream; when immigration restrictions and exclusion are seen as instruments for preserving ‘national identities’ against an influx of undesirable foreigners; when liberal democracies are being roiled by populist politics rooted in nationalism, nativism, and racism; when inequality has reached record levels,  and the rich and powerful display the most brazen contempt for even the most elementary notions of the common good.

Today’s eugencists do not consider the possibility that overpaid CEOs, hedgefund managers, political charlatans, demagogues or privileged sociopaths who see politics as an exercise in narcissism and ego-gratification may not be as beneficial to society as they assume them to be.

Instead, it’s far more convenient to focus on the poor and the underclass, on welfare dependents who have ‘too many’ children, and other people who cost the state more money than it is willing to provide, and have therefore contributed to deteriorating quality of the 21st century ‘human stock.’

We are a long way from the Nazi euthanasia and forced sterilisation programs, and today’s eugenicists are not advocating such methods – yet.

But that isn’t as reassuring as it might sound.   The ‘debate’ about eugenics is a debate we don’t need, and shouldn’t be having, and the fact that it is now creeping back into the mainstream is another symptom of our reactionary drift.  Today, as in the past, clever white men who are used to looking down on the world from a great height are once again turning to ‘science’  for solutions to social problems rooted in the distribution of wealth, the prioritisation of resources, misgovernance, and the inability of democratic governments to hold the powerful to account.

And the fact that such men have found their way into one of the most rightwing governments in British history may not mean that we are about to descend into Nazism, but it does not indicate that we are headed anywhere good.

 

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Brexit: Springtime for Racists

For anyone seeking inspiration in these dark times, I recommend the moving Storyville documentary My Italian Secret:  Italy’s Forgotten Heroes.  It tells the story of the Italian cyclist Gino Bartali and the Italians who saved more than 10,000 Jews from Nazi extermination during World War 2, by hiding them or smuggling them to safety.   Like Bartali himself, most of the interviewees were ‘ordinary people’ from all walks of life and from very different ideological and political persuasions, all of whom were equally modest about the courage and heroism that led them to risk their lives to save complete strangers.

These Italians all shared the belief, memorably expressed by one of the interviewees, that ‘we couldn’t see why people should be killed just for being a little bit different.’  This simple observation ought to go unquestioned, but there is a very real danger in the decaying democracies of the early 21st century that governments and electorates may not want people to killed for being ‘a little bit different’, but are nevertheless willing to tolerate the marginalisation and victimisation of difference in order to preserve hegemonic racial and national identities within their own borders.

Since the referendum, these tendencies have been particularly striking both in Trump’s America and in Brexit Britain.  Last week I was at my godchild’s birthday in Nottingham when his grandfather told me of a Brazilian neighbor who had just been  harangued in her local Lidl by a customer because she was speaking Portuguese on the phone in a supermarket queue.

This incident did not entirely surprise me.  Over the last four years there has been a constant stream of incidents like this, in which foreigners, immigrants, Muslims, Jews, and people of colour have been subject to verbal and physical attacks in public places.  Statistics have shown a rise in reported hate crime since the referendum, both racial and gender-oriented, which has sometimes surged in response to key moments in the Brexit process. Many such incidents are not reported to the police, but emerge anecdotally, through social media and other fora.

Many of them contain the same language and assumptions: Foreigners are only ‘allowed’ to speak English in the UK.  This is ‘our’ country.  We voted for you to leave.  Go back to your hellhole, etc, etc.

These are some of the incidents that have I’ve become aware of in the last twenty-four  hours alone:

The two and half year-old daughter of a German woman was called a ‘Nazi’ by a mother at a playground because she spoke German to her own mother

At the village of Harbury in Oxfordshire, someone painted out the French twinned town Samois -sur- Seine

A group of Polish cleaners who clean holiday cottages was ordered by their employers not to speak Polish at work

A Romanian couple in Cornwall had their taxi vandalised three days running in the lead-up to Brexit Day.

This poster was posted in a Norwich tower block

A non-white British A&E doctor at St Thomas’ Hospital was racially abused while treating people who had injured themselves during the Brexit celebrations in parliament square

Go a little further back and you find images like this, from Blackheath South East London on the eve of Holocaust Memorial Day:

It would be both  an exaggeration and an over-simplification to attribute these developments to the referendum, but it would also be dangerously naive and complacent to ignore the evidence that Brexit has given a new sense of emboldenment and entitlement to racists and xenophobes across the country.  Before 2016, it was difficult to imagine so many people having the confidence to tell someone in a public place that they are not allowed to speak their own language in the UK without fear of censure.

Brexit – and the language and messages of many of its leading exponents – has made these people believe that their time has come, and that ‘taking our country back’ means taking it back from foreigners and immigrants.  Politicians and the rightwing press have reinforced a sense of national/racial grievance and victimhood, in which the perceived differences of migrants – or simply the perceived difference of skin colour and religion – have been identified as cultural pollution or ‘invasion’.

Of course the authors of these messages will always deny that they intended anybody to be hurt by them, but when politicians like Farage complain about English not being spoken on the tube, or when Johnson accuses Europeans of ‘treating the UK like their own country’, or when newspapers pour forth a constant stream of hysterical headlines depicting migrants as parasites and cultural usurpers, you can’t be entirely surprised if someone further down the foodchain feels like bullying their neighbor or punching a Spanish woman on the tube.

In effect, Brexit has become a kind of springtime for racists.  It is the single biggest victory for the far-right in British history – not to mention the far-right outside Britain.  It has undermined hard won achievements in race relations and the treatment of minorities, and unleashed persecutory tendencies that will be difficult to contain.

It’s comforting to reduce all this to ‘ a few bad apples’ or social media rumour,  and deny the extent to which racism and xenophobia have become increasingly routine and normalised.  We are right to celebrate the Norwich tenants who publicly protested the fascistic Happy Brexit Day poster that went up in their building.  But we will not contain this poison unless we recognise where it came from, and treat it with the seriousness it deserves.

Few politicians are willing to acknowledge this.  The right, for obvious reasons, has no interest at all in taking responsibility for a phenomenon that they helped create.  In four years I have not heard a single Leave politician or voter acknowledge the new vulnerability that so many migrants and people of colour have expressed.  On the contrary, most of them seem more concerned with presenting themselves as victims by citing  the strawman argument that ‘all Leavers are racists’ than they are with denouncing the racists who are seeking to take their country back.

The left has not always been much better.  It’s far easier to denounce Trump or simply ‘stand up to racism’ than it is to acknowledge the extent to which the racism that we must now stand up to has been increasingly Brexit-related.

I can’t think of a single Labour politician, except for  Sadiq Khan ,who has acknowledged the extent of post-Brexit racism.

This needs to change – and quick.  Because the ‘cultural’ counter-revolution unleashed by Brexit has not ended by any means.  It will continue, and as legitimised hate tends to do – it will find continue to find new outlets,  in the disabled, in transgender people – in anyone perceived to be a ‘bit different.’

Unlike the Italians of World War 2, we aren’t looking at extermination, but the normalisation of attitudes and behaviour that – until recently – we considered unacceptable and beyond the pale.  Now, whatever happens in the next few years, it is incumbent on all of us to find a way to prevent this poison from spreading, to make it known to all those who want to ‘take our country back’ that they do not have exclusive ownership over it, and to stand together with our friends and neighbors, and to the strangers we have never met, and fight to make this country reflect the best of us, rather than the worst.

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Independence Day

More than four years after the referendum that plunged the UK into what has been the most bitter and divisive political crisis in its history, we have finally reached the day that so many Brexiters have dreamed of and yearned for.  For many of those who voted and campaigned to leave the European Union, today is the day when Britain becomes a ‘free country’ once again, and extricates itself from the ‘shackles’ of EU membership – or what Brexitspeak terms ‘dictatorship’.

As we heard ad infinitum during the election campaign last month, today is the day when Brexit finally gets ‘done’.  Like so much that comes out of Johnson’s mouth, this claim is a lie, because today’s ‘end’ is actually the beginning of years of difficult wrangling over trade deals, and grappling with technical details that successive UK governments have either ignored or failed to understand.

The UK may or may not escape the spectre of No Deal, depending on how much the government is prepared to concede in terms of regulatory alignment and extending the transition period.  But Brexit will dominate British politics for decades, as successive (Tory) governments fight over which laws and regulations to change and what to replace them with; over immigration and the rights of EU nationals and Brits abroad; over fishing rights and fishing export markets; over a thousand crucial details regarding customs checks in Northern Ireland, supply chains, tariffs and non-tariff barriers to trade; over Scottish and possibly Irish independence and so much else that has been largely ignored, treated as irrelevant or breezily dismissed as ‘Project Fear’.

For some Leavers, all this pales beside the symbolism of recovering ‘sovereignty’ and ‘taking our country back’.  Like Trumpism, Brexit has also been driven by  a reactionary vision  of ‘greatness’ that was often steeped in imperial nostalgia and splendid British isolationism and national exceptionalism.  Consider these sinister meditations from Jacob Rees-Mogg in the Daily Mail this week, which hailed Brexit as the beginning of a new golden age:

The moment of national renewal has come. While spring is yet to sweep the chill from the air, fresh shoots of rejuvenation and regeneration are piercing through the cold earth. The electorate, the British people, the most patient and forbearing in the world, will finally have their decisiveness rewarded and, thanks to the General Election result, we will have got Brexit done.  By unleashing a reviving wave of blue MPs to rehydrate the parched soil, the British people have set the scene for the biggest restoration of vitality and viridity to our land in generations.

As George Orwell once observed, bad prose is often an indication of bad thoughts, and it takes a strong stomach to accept  Rees-Mogg’s claim that ‘Over two millenniums since mighty Augustus quelled the unrest and strife in ancient Rome and brought in a new golden age, our auriferous Prime Minister is bringing in a new era of revitalisation to our nation.’

For those who didn’t know ( I was one of them) ‘auriferous’ means ‘containing gold’.  This is the kind of epithet that you would have expected from some fawning sixteenth century courtier trying to curry favour with Henry VIII, and the comparisons between our sleazy Etonian charlatan and a Roman dictator ought to be as worrying as Rees-Mogg’s vision of ‘national renewal.’

And at the other end of the political spectrum, Socialist Worker offered another form of magical thinking, which is no less painful to read:

Brexit presents opportunities for the left, not just the right. It’s an opportunity to fight for a huge programme of renationalisation and state aid that EU rules were designed to stop. Brexit has unleashed four years of crisis on British politicians, bosses and bankers. Their divisions give us more chance of stopping Tory assaults—and of challenging the neoliberalism and austerity that dominates British politics.

Coming only one month after the Labour Party was comprehensively slaughtered, perhaps for a generation, the least you can say about these predictions is that they reveal a tendency towards excessive optimism.  Nevertheless these fantasies of national transformation – whether imagined by the right or the left – are part of the explanation for how we found ourselves in our current predication: a mid-range power that has detached itself from membership of a trade bloc and political organisation whose concerns it had a crucial impact in shaping, in pursuit of an ‘independence’ that leaves it in a far weaker position -politically and economically – not only in regards to Europe, but to the United States, whose support Brexiters see as crucial to the success of their project.

At present we are not aligned to either Europe or the United States, and there is absolutely no guarantee that any of this will work out well.  Yet we have embarked on this adventure without weighing up the consequences,  without moving cautiously and carefully, without trying to forge consensus based on expert advice and wise counsel. Instead we have allowed charlatans, demagogues, liars, fanatics and ignoramuses to drive Brexit forward, and actively ignored expertise that told us what we didn’t want to hear.

All this is a terrible indictment not only of the politicians who campaigned for it and made it possible, but of the entire political class.  It has been a political failing, a failure of public education, a failure of leadership and responsibility, and also a media failure, in which large sections of the British media either churned out pro-Brexit propaganda or failed to challenge and unpick it.

It has been part of the tragedy of Brexit that three of the worst governments in British history have overseen this process in the face of the worst opposition in British history.  This failure is not simply due to Jeremy Corbyn, though Corbyn’s Labour is certainly at fault.

During last year’s election, Labour had what was probably the most sensible of all the positions available, in terms of forging some kind of national unity.  A confirmatory vote was certainly a more democratic way of  reaching across the Leave/Remain divide than the Lib Dems’ promise to revoke Article 50.  The problem was that Labour had been dragged to it so slowly, and with such obvious reluctance, that it made no sense to many voters, and the Labour leadership often seemed as divided and lukewarm about this policy as it was about EU membership during the referendum itself.

In effect, the Labour Party failed to show leadership on the defining political issue of the age, and it has now been punished so comprehensively that it is difficult to imagine how it can find its way to power again.  Some have attributed these failings exclusively to Corbyn’s leadership.

But too many politicians across the spectrum refused to tell the electorate things that it did not want to hear, for fear of being seen as undemocratic and ‘anti-Brexit’. Too often ‘democracy’ was reduced to the zero sum game of the referendum, in which the side that wins is the side that gets its foot over the finishing line first.

This view essentially left more than half the country, which either explicitly rejected Brexit or didn’t vote for either option, without no choice but to accept whatever form of Brexit transpired.   ‘Loser’s consent’ works in elections, because there is always the possibility of changing the result every few years.   A referendum involving permanent constitutional change and the loss of rights for millions of people is an entirely different matter, and it should have been treated as such.

The possibility of reaching consensus was more or less shot to pieces when Theresa May tacked to the right in 2016 in order to shore up her position within the Tory Party, only to back down when faced with the practical consequences of realising her ludicrous ‘Brexit means Brexit’ mantra.  Now that schism remains as sharp and as brutal as it was in the beginning, and it is difficult to see the more emolient and magnanimous speechifying from Johnson and some Tory politicians as more than a cynical attempt to share ownership for a project that belongs exclusively to them.

There may some kind of karma in watching a country that once specialised in divide and rule imperial governance – often with tragic consequences for those it ruled – so comprehensively divided and undone by the stupidity, venality and incompetence of its own rulers, but that is the situation we are in.

The last four years have diminished and shrunk us morally, politically, economically, culturally, and intellectually. We have seen parliament, judges and the civil service attacked in the press and by the government for being infiltrated by traitors’ and ‘Remoaners’ – supported by a mob chorus from the streets.  Again and again, we have seen successive Tory governments seeking to weaken parliament and remove the Brexit process – and themselves – from accountability and scrutiny.  To get Brexit, they have tried to neuter judges, prorogue parliament, suppress reports indicating Russian interference in domestic politics, and much else

Most depressingly of all, there has been an almost blanket refusal across the political class to recognise the dangerous rise in ‘take our country back’ hate crime, or stand up for the EU nationals who have been variously used as ‘bargaining counters’ or treated with shameful hostility, contempt, and indifference.

The left has been, for the most part, no better than the right, in opposing these forces, relying too often on formulaic ‘migrants welcome here’ slogans that fail to recognise the very specific victimisation and/or marginalisation of EU nationals – or the extent to which Brexit has emboldened and legimised racists and xenophobes across the country.

Even now, some sections of the Labour left blame ‘Remainers’ for Labour’s defeat and dismiss the genuine sense of pain and separation with which millions of people – both Brits and EU nationals in this country – have felt in response to Brexit and the loss of their European identity.

The EU can certainly be criticised, but the contemptuous dismissal of Europeanism by some sections of the left as a truncated form of internationalism fails to explain what kind of internationalism can take its place – in a country that has rejected even the limited ‘European’ concept of pooled sovereignty and transnational citizenship.

Throughout this dismal process, I have often been struck again and again, by the mean-spiritness, selfishness, arrogance, jingoism, and petty vindictiveness at the heart of Brexit.  In these last four years, I cannot think of a single generous sentiment or idea that has come out of it – unless you consider the persistent calls to ‘put our own people first’ as the basis for some kind of social solidarity.

I don’t think it is.  I very much doubt that many of those who claim to care about ‘our people’ really care about any people.  If they cared about ‘our people’ they had various opportunities to vote for Labour governments that would have taken steps to alleviate austerity, homelessness, food banks etc.

They didn’t.  Instead they voted for a reactionary political project, lubricated by the fear and loathing of immigrants and foreigners and fatuous delusions of Global Britain that I suspect will be painfully unraveled over the coming years.

All this may get worse, when the promises of our newfound ‘freedom’ fail to materialise.   Because the radical conservatives, populists and far-right groupings that supported Brexit didn’t do all this just to end at this point.

For all Johnson’s talk of ‘healing’, social media is awash right now with Brexiters exulting in their victory and inviting ‘Remoaners’ to ‘suck it up.’ Rarely, as Nigel Farage and his gang showed in the European Parliament yesterday, has victory been so joyless, so lacking in grace, dignity and magnanimity, so steeped in bitter relish at the humiliation of the opposition.

Millions of us did not want this outcome, for various reasons that cannot be encapsulated by the label ‘Remainers’.  We failed to stop it or even to mitigate its destructive impact.  Now we will have to live with the consequences for a long time.

So today we have a right to mourn what we have lost, and then we will have to move on to our common task: to fight a destructive and clueless Tory government that  will seek to shift the balance of political and economic power even more than it already is in the interests of the rich and powerful; to show solidarity with the minorities that will come under attack and who are already under attack; to stand up for the values of internationalism, liberalism, and solidarity which the European Union itself as not always upheld in practice.

If we can do this, we might become a half-decent country once again.

But right now, that day is a long way off.

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Chronicle of a Coup Foretold

A week on, there is no way you can really look on the 2019 General Election that makes it feel any better than it did on the night. The bare facts speak for themselves. The single greatest concentration of conmen, chancers, fanatics and incompetents in British political history have been given a majority by the British electorate beyond their wildest dreams. An amoral, pampered charlatan whose entire career trajectory from journalist to politician is based on telling the Tory Party the lies it wants to hear, crushed Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party in Labour’s own heartlands, sweeping up seats that have remained stolidly Labour for decades.

The Lib Dems also paid a price for their hubris and opportunism, and for an astonishingly misconceived ‘presidential’ campaign which raised the hapless Jo Swinson to a position she had done nothing to deserve and did not even begin to justify. But it is in relation to Labour that Johnson’s victory is most humiliating and difficult to swallow, because this was not just a triumph for the worst British politics has to offer; it was  a brutal and unequivocal repudiation of Corbyn and the Corbynite project in precisely those parts of the country that Corbynism most hoped to reach.

As shocking as it was, this result should not have come as a complete surprise. For weeks – and months – polls had indicated persistently that Corbyn’s personal ratings were plummeting. Some of this was not his fault. There is no doubt that Corbyn was subjected to one of the most vicious and sustained campaigns of vilification ever inflicted on a British politician, much of which was grossly unfair, manipulative and dishonest.

But the result cannot be blamed on a largely hostile right-wing media that will always seek to destroy any left-wing Labour politician….

 

My Piece for Ceasefire Magazine.  You can read the rest here

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All Hail to the Monster

Readers of this blog will probably know that I’m not a great fan of Boris Johnson.  In fact it would be safe to say that I  despise him as much as any British politician I have ever witnessed in my lifetime.  It’s hard to put my finger on exactly why.  It might be the constant lying or the instinctive dishonesty that be brings to everything he says or does.

It could the almost psychotic self-adulation, the bullying, the fake hail-fellow-well-met persona, the racism and vicious rightwing politics that constantly seep through his manufactured persona.  Or the arrogance and entitlement, the pompousness, the drippy jokes, the pretentious wordiness and Latin verbiage, the glaringly transparent shallowness and laziness that constantly peeks through the greasy veneer of learning.

This is a man who who lives inside the bubble of himself like trapped gas and floats on the scummy white foam of our degraded politics.    All these qualities should have kept from any serious profession forever.  Instead 92,000 Tories have made him Prime Minister.

Johnson has got his dream, and that dream has confirmed our ongoing  nightmare.  And the more nightmarish it becomes the more his acolytes revel in it and build their little career campfires around his dingy tent.

Having said all that,  for the first time I can remember Johnson has finally something potentially worthy of gratitude.  This isn’t due to any altruism or patriotism on his part.  Forced to reconvene parliament as a result of the Supreme Court’s ruling, he was as loutish and unrepentant in the commons last night as we have come to expect from him.

Though he respected the Supreme Court’s judgement, he didn’t agree with it.  And no he wasn’t sorry.  About anything.  And even though he was forced to attend parliament, he made it clear that he held it total contempt.

He brayed and shouted, and the Tory hordes brayed and shouted with him, as he taunted the opposition to give him the election that he thinks is the only thing that can save him.

Backed up by an equally fake performance from the disreputable attorney general, Johnson made it clear that he regards himself as a more legitimate representative of  the ‘will of the people’ than the country’s elected representatives.

All that was bad enough, but then Johnson made one of the most shocking descents into pure political depravity that parliament has ever witnessed.

Asked by Labour MP Paula Sheriff in a heartfelt and passionate speech to moderate his language and stop using words like ‘surrender bill’ when she and so many of her colleagues have received death threats which echoed the same narratives of betrayal and treason, Johnson replied that ‘I have never heard such humbug in all my life’ and proceeded to double down on the same language.

When Labour MP Tracy Brabin reminded Johnson that Jo Cox had been murdered by a far-right extremist who used very similar language, Johnson had the unbelievable gall to suggest that ‘the best way to honor the memory of Jo Cox and indeed the best way to bring this country together would be, I think, to get Brexit done.’

It’s worth pausing here to reflect on this: the Prime Minister of the UK essentially said that an MP who was murdered because she campaigned to stay in the EU should be ‘honored’ by doing what the man who killed her wanted to do in order to ‘bring this country together.’

This statement naturally stunned the house, and brought some MPs to tears, but Johnson’s cohorts howled and smirked at the cheekie chappie’s antics.   On social media some of Johnson’s supporters, such as the Spectator’s Isabel Hardman, expressed shock at Johnson’s words.  Even Johnson’s sister described them as ‘tasteless.’

We shouldn’t be impressed by this hand-wringing.  It has been obvious what kind of person Johnson is for some time, or at least it should have been.

And anyone who has spent time on social media these last few years will know that there are many people who will have enjoyed Johnson’s performance last night.

They will what Johnson wants them to see:  honest Boris, the antihero who ‘respects the referendum’, challenges the ‘elite’ and baits the libtards.  They will especially have enjoyed watching him taunt the female MPs, since the only thing worse than a libtard is a female libtard.

Until last night, Johnson has occasionally paid lip service to One Nation Toryism, if only to scoop up more votes.  Last night he embraced his inner Trump.  In doing so he revealed himself at last to be an authentic political monstrosity, not a monster with horns and scales, because that is not what political monsters look like, but  a slobbering cynical bully devoid of  morality or decency.

We know he isn’t unique in this.  The point of ‘populists’ like Trump, Johnson, Bolsonaro and Salvini is to act as vectors for a whole range of ideas and attitudes that were once not seen as legitimate or mainstream.  Misyogyny, racism, white supremacism and white privilege, ethnonationalism, anti-liberal rage, climate change denialism, loathing of liberal values – all these forces have been brought ever closer to the mainstream on the populist wave.

Here in the UK, Brexit has acted as the galvanising issue that has enabled this cultural war – or counter-revolution – to unfold.   But these intentions have often been concealed by arguments about democracy, sovereignty, the ‘left behinds’ and the ‘will of the people.’

Last night, Johnson showed the world what we are up against: a genuine political evil that threatens to shatter the country and transform it into something uglier and nastier than many of us once imagined possible.

If anyone doubts the direction of travel, consider what happened this morning when Johnson’s equally sociopathic Brexit Richelieu Dominic Cummings, was told by Labour MP Karl Turner that MPs including himself had received more death threats.

According to the Guardian, Cummings responded: “Well vote for a deal then.”

This is essentially what Johnson told the female MPs who challenged him last night:  Vote for our deal or expect to get death threats.  Neither Johnson nor Cummings addressed the possibility that these threats might actually be realised, and probably don’t care if they are.

Once again, there are those who will not be bothered by any of this, and may even approve of it, from the radicalised Tory Party to the Brexit Party and even further out in the fringes.

But there are millions who will have been appalled by what they saw last night.  If we are to have any chance of saving this country from the plague that Brexit has unleashed, we need to mobilise them.

We don’t need to cry or wring our hands about what’s happening to the country.  We may think it’s terrible, because it is, but we shouldn’t be terrified and we should not be bullied.

On the contrary, the monster who revealed himself to the world last night should embolden us, the way he is trying to embolden his corrupted base, to reject the kind of society he and his cohorts are trying to ram down our throats, using Brexit as the battering ram.

And if that happens, then Johnson, perhaps for the first time in his life, may actually have done his country some good.

 

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The Strange Tale of the Disappearing Country

I’ve been abroad in the Pyrenees for nearly three weeks now and it was, as it always is these days, a huge relief to be away from these septic isles.  Of course you don’t forget them.  Nowadays, you take Brexit with you in your mental baggage, even if you never meant to pack it.  It’s the political equivalent of Don DeLillo’s Airborne Toxic Event.   It hovers over your country like a black cloud and a harbinger of worse things to come.

It shapes the way you look at your country, and the perplexed and faintly horrified expressions on the faces of almost any foreigner who asks you about it make it clear that it shapes the way others see it too.

In the age of social media it’s also impossible to ignore what is happening, without switching off completely, which for better or worse I’m unable to do.   We left two days after Boris Johnson ‘prorogued’ parliament, in a brazen constitutional sleight-of-hand whose true purpose was obvious to anyone who wasn’t lying about it.

From where I was – a remote farm in the Cerdagne near the Spanish border – I listened to the extraordinary torrent of barefaced lies emanating from the Johnson team and the government’s social media propagandists, which insisted that sending parliament home had nothing whatsoever to do with Brexit and it was just that every new government had to present its proposals to the Queen, etc, etc.

All this was rancid Trumpist garbage and it smelt like rancid Trumpist garbage, wafting up from a body politic that has been corrupted and poisoned by Brexit – or which has had its poisons brought to the surface by Brexit.

There were a few cracks of light: when the Tory rebels finally showed some backbone and joined with other MPs in voting against the destructive lunacy of No Deal; when Corbyn neatly avoided falling into Johnson’s trap and refused to accept a general election that would have made No Deal inevitable; when parliament forced the government to publish its Yellowhammer report, which revealed that the government had lied yet again.

All this seemed promising.  Parliament, it seemed, was remembering that it was a parliament and that it was not obliged to blindly follow the dictats of an arrogant and overwheening executive claiming to take its authority from the ‘will of the people’.

There were moments of satisfying schadenfreude, in watching Johnson challenged again and again whenever he went out to ‘meet’ the ‘ordinary people’ he claims to represent.  In every single public situation, Johnson has proven himself to be shockingly inadequate, whether squirming like a toddler with ADD during his press conference with Varadkar, babbling Nigel Molesworth insults in parliament, or running away from a press conference in Luxembourg because 75 of his own countrymen and women had gathered to heckle him.

Tomorrow may provide another of those moments, if the Supreme Court judges rule against the government’s prorogration.  But whatever the result of their deliberations, there is little sign of any immediate way out of this nightmare and schadenfreude cannot compensate for the grim reality of a country that has been paralysed, divided and poisoned by Brexit and by the horrific forces that it has unleashed.

Last week Brexit ‘protesters’ screamed insults at Shami Chakrabarti and Gina Miller outside the Supreme Court and sang songs calling for traitors to be strung up on lampposts.  Yesterday a 50-year-old man in Manchester was knocked out cold when he intervened to defend an Asian teenager who was being kicked in the head and told to ‘speak fucking English.’

 

 

Britain First have joined vigilantes ‘patrolling’ Dover and Kent to ‘protect’ the country from migrants.  This weekend the army announced that it will be setting up a camp in Swindon as an ‘urban training exercise’ to prepare for ‘civil unrest’, that locals should expect to see soldiers carrying firearms, and that other unspecified camps will be forthcoming.

All this because of a referendum over whether to leave or remain in the European Union, which failed to allow any further discussion or consultation on what leaving meant in practice and how it could be achieved; a referendum steeped in  anti-immigration rhetoric that has become a vector for  racism, xenophobia,  and chauvinistic  English nationalism that our politicians have mostly failed to acknowledge – and that I have not heard a single Leaver anywhere acknowledge.

Beyond the daily drumbeat of Brexit extremism, a government of reactionaries, chancers, and ideological zealots that has already begun the destruction of its own party and attempted to con the British public into believing that it has a negotiating strategy when it has nothing at all, is set on a confrontation with parliament that threatens to pull apart the mechanisms and institutions that define a (flawed) British democracy and replace them nothing but itself – and the ‘will’ that it claims to represent.

All this in pursuit of a dream of ‘freedom’ that has more to do with a Cargo Cult than a rational political project, that will benefit no one except the hedgefund managers who financed Johnson’s campaign, and the asset strippers who are already swooping on the UK.

That is bad enough, but what is really terrifying is that this same government is still leading the polls, when it should be dozens of points below zero.  Incredibly, Johnson is seen by a significant section of the electorate as the man to ‘get Brexit done.’  No good pointing out that if No Deal happens, it will end nothing and solve nothing and that a ‘clean break’ is no such thing.  No good explaining that people will go without medicines and may even die in the event of No Deal.

No good telling people that EU citizens will be cast into a legal no mans land and that more than one million Brits will be too.  There is little evidence that many Leavers ever cared about them.

Too many Brexiters either dismiss such claims as ‘Project Fear’ or they simply don’t care any more about ‘our people’ than they do about any other people.   For these voters it doesn’t matter that the PM is a charlatan, who doesn’t feel obliged to pay even lip service to the truth.  It doesn’t matter if parliament – the ‘swamp’ – goes under, that the army may be in the streets in peacetime, that the poor will be poorer, that the union will break up, that the country will be even more humiliated and diminished than it already is.

Only Brexit matters, because Brexit means Brexit and We Voted to Leave.   So please don’t ask me to ‘respect’ this.   Please don’t expect me to believe that somehow all this is happening because the British people love ‘democracy.’

What we are witnessing is far darker than that, far nastier, and far more destructive, I can’t help feeling that the destruction still has some way to go.

One day Brexit may become an insult for future generations, and a reminder of how easily even the most seemingly sophisticated countries can succumb to their own delusions of grandeur and exchange any notion of the common good or pragmatic self-interest for political fantasies.

But right now that day seems a long way off,  and I can’t help wishing that I was back in the Pyrenees, with the mountains and horses.  But most of all I can’t help wishing that we had politicians who were able to show courage and leadership, and that we could find a common way forward to bring back some semblance of common sense and decency, repair the political and social damage of the past decade, and allow us to begin the very real work that we all need to do to make this country worthy of admiration and respect instead of the pitiful laughing stock that it has become.

 

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Guest Post: Robert Mugabe (1924-2019): A History of Wounds

Guest Post from Richard Drayton, Professor of History at King’s College, London.

Robert Mugabe is a hate figure in the West, especially in Britain, where the political right had such important family, economic and political connections to white-minority Rhodesia. And he did his own memory no favours: he was a man with very serious flaws, whose regime was marked by episodes of state violence and many authoritarian mutilations of Zimbabwe’s democracy.

But while the word ‘dictator’ is bandied about, he was not a dictator: Zimbabwe retained elections, opposition parties and an opposition press, a surprisingly independent judiciary, and in fact the preservation of white capital’s ownership of most of the economy.

Mugabe deserves to be examined with more care than he seems to be. For what we have here is not just a man but a document of 20th century history: his achievements and failures were the products of historical forces which he was only partly the master of.

I remember vividly the one time I saw Mugabe in the flesh. It was December 1983, and he was speaking to the Harvard Law School Forum. Sanders Theater was packed to the rafters, and its wooden floors and benches resounded to our cheering, and he and his entourage applauded the audience in return. It was the early years after independence in 1980, and there seemed every reason to applaud. Here was the poor Shona boy from the dirt poor hill town who had made it to Fort Hare University, had spent a decade in grim imprisonment, then had led a war of liberation which had won.

Mugabe appeared to have managed a peaceful transition from the terror of the white minority regime in Rhodesia to a democracy in which significant new initiatives in education and healthcare were accompanied by economic growth. The Zimbabwe army was helping Mozambique fight the Renamo terrorists who had been created by South Africa and the CIA. Zimbabwe’s success was clearly strengthening the pressure on apartheid South Africa.

Little did we know that as he was speaking to us and we were cheering in 1983, his 5th Brigade, the North Korean trained Praetorian guard, were conducting a murderous crushing of a revolt in Matebeleland which resulted in the deaths of 10,000-20,000 people.

What is interesting is that the Western states and media were quite silent at the time about this early dark turn. So long as he kept the white minority and their property safe, keeping the bargain he had made in the Lancaster House negotiations with the British, they didn’t really care.

The British however did not keep their side of the bargain. At the Lancaster House negotiations, it had been agreed that the British government would provide the funds which would allow for white farmers, who occupied the best farming lands after seven decades of British colonial landgrabbing, to be bought out to allow land reform. The tape recordings of the negotiations, which were in the care of the British government, mysteriously disappeared.

For people who had suffered immensely in the liberation war to find themselves as poor as before created great discontent. Mugabe tried to get land reform going with state revenues, on the willing buyer willing seller model. But nothing worked. In the 1990s it was still true that 1% of the population, almost all white, owned 70% of the arable land. Popular discontent was met with force. He decided that he would take the step of encouraging people to squat allow armed squatting of farmland.

By 2000, the state was encouraging reverse landgrabs. It is in that late 1990s moment that the IMF decided to put the squeeze on Zimbabwe, and he became the ‘African Hitler’ of the British right wing press. The people in Britain who had fervently backed white minority Rhodesia now became very concerned about the fate of democracy in Zimbabwe.

This 1990s and early 2000s period was accompanied by high levels of violence of all kinds, and a collapse of the economy. Trade unions and demonstrations met state repression. Opposition politicians were harassed. Ndebele Zimbabweans felt this was a Shona-biased regime, while White and Asian Zimbabweans were made to feel unsafe, and to have their membership in the nation brought into question.

At the same time, the political elite appeared to be living well, through their access to the state, and there was the rumour of corruption. Zimbabwe’s intervention in the Congo civil war was linked to army officers getting rich from diamonds and metals they returned with.

How are we to make sense of this collapse of the promise of the moment of Zimbabwe’s independence?

First, we need to understand that political independence and democracy mean nothing if they are accompanied by extraordinary economic inequality. The land and inequality crisis in Zimbabwe has its partners in every postcolonial country, in particular in Africa, where independence in Kenya and the end of apartheid in South Africa left almost unchanged the structure of wealth and poverty created by white supremacist regimes.

This is why there remains across Africa, and indeed in the wider African diaspora, great compassion, if not even in many quarters outright support, for what Mugabe was trying to do, in his chaotic and often violent way.

Second, we need to take stock of the legacies of one hundred years of violence and undemocracy in Rhodesia. The 1990s turn in Mugabe’s policy was undoubtedly provoked by memory of the 1890s uprising, which was crushed with extraordinary brutality by Cecil Rhodes’s British South Africa company troops. That 1890s defeat led to the first land grab, followed by a century in which the space of land claimed by whites was ever expanding.

And it was not just the violence of conquest:  colonial power and the farming economy were accompanied by extraordinary private physical violence. Beatings of blacks were  a standard part of ordinary life. I don’t have the figures for Rhodesia, but I know in Kenya that no white person was ever convicted of murdering a ‘native’ until the decade before independence.

Colonial rule resulted in economic precarity, extreme poverty and hunger. Those who know deprivation early in their lives will spend the rest of it seeking compensations. Apart from this physical violence, we need to take stock of the psychic violence of white supremacy – over on Africa is a Country there is a sneer about how Mugabe hated reggae and only valued western classical music – but in this I am reminded of Marcus Garvey’s refusal of jazz and Eric Williams’s contempt for carnival.

We should not forget how even the anticolonial leader was formed by the colonial experience, by a culture of contempt and self-contempt, which could only be conquered by wearing a suit, acquiring first hand taste of ‘high culture’ and showing you were the civilised match of the white man.

Beyond all of this, whatever ideas he was exposed to, Mugabe learned about authoritarian rule by looking all around him as he was a child: the military dictatorships of Pakistan and the distorted democracy of India carry within them the memory of the colonial experience, much as the state formed in Russia after 1917 continued the czarist traditions of secret police and political prisons.

The Mugabe who stood before me in 1983 was thus bearing wounds which we could not see, was knotted by scar tissue which stiffened him and made his movement through the world awkward. That Mugabe, with all his horrors, we bury with regret and compassion, to be absorbed by Zimbabwe’s future history. May he in death be healed, or at least separated from that experience of pain and mutilation.

But there is another Mugabe, the little boy who said to himself this is not fair, this is not right, I will fight, whatever the cost, we will demand freedom and justice. That Mugabe who lent his help to the making of freedom in Angola, Namibia and South Africa. That brave big-hearted man is an object of great interest to me. For his courage is shared by many, even are many of his wounds and scars. Mugabe is in no simple way a hero, but there was much heroic about the man.

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We Could Be Heroes (Just for No Deal)

We have heard a great deal of stirring talk from Brexiters about World War 2 these last few years.  It might be Boris Johnson comparing Francois Holland to a  Colditz prison guard dealing out ‘punishment beatings’ to the UK in 2017, or condemning MPs as ‘collaborators’ with the EU in his Facebook video last month.

In May Brexit Party candidate Ann Widdecombe declared that no deal Brexit wouldn’t be as bad as ‘the sacrifice of World War Two’ – a comforting thought, that it would have been useful to hear back in 2016.  In June Nigel Farage walked onto the podium for a Brexit Party rally in Birmingham to the sound of air raid sirens.

Much of this wartalk is so historically inane that it is almost beyond parody, or rather it demonstrates the extent to which the UK has become a parody of itself.  Nevertheless there are certain recurring themes in this Brexit wartalk, which tell us a great deal about the aspirations that have resulted in our ongoing political and moral collapse.

Perhaps the most significant World War 2 meme is the idea that the war was a defining episode of national heroism in which Britain (England) ‘stood alone’ and prevailed against overwhelming odds – a notion often accompanied by the idea that ‘we saved Europe yet again.’

One of the most dismal exponents of such jingoistic national remembrance is  the insufferably smug MP for Rayleigh and Wickford Mark Francois, who (in) famously tore up a letter from Tom Enders, the German head of Airbus, citing the negative impact of leaving the EU on live tv, and accused Enders of ‘Teutonic arrogance.’  Francois cited his father as a ‘D-Day veteran’ who ‘never submitted to bullying by any German.’

It’s easy – and entirely correct-  to call out Francois for his braying xenophobia, but something more is at play here.  According to his website, Francois once ‘served as an infantry officer in the Territorial Army, including with the local Royal Anglican Regiment’ during the ‘Cold War.’

We know that the Royal Anglicans saw a lot of action during the Cold War, so we are probably lucky that Francois is still with us.  Because Francois is a tough, implacable sort of guy, who once described himself as a member of the Brexit ‘Spartan Phalanx’.

Defending his rejection of one of May’s deals in the commons he once claimed ‘ I am not going to back a lose.  I was in the army, I wasn’t trained to lose.’  As Brexiters keep reminding us, this is the kind of indomitable defiance that once made our country great.   Never mind that this is an MP who once boasted to Will Self about the size of his penis and once submitted expenses claims for Trebor mints,  Haagen-Dazs ice cream, Snickers, Twiglets and Peperami snack packs.

This is a less-than-spartan diet, and King Xerxes would surely have given up at Thermopylae if he had been aware that such a greedy tub of lard like this was waiting for him.

It takes a special kind of chutzpah to claim expenses for Twiglets on a £64,000 taxpayer-paid salary, but it is clear that Francois, like so many of his cohorts, wants to be the kind of hero his dad was, and that he believes he has found the opportunity to realise his own personal Commando comic fantasies through Brexit.

Other Brexiters share a similar longing to be heroes, and a similar belief that World War 2 once made us heroic.  It is clear that peace bores these Brexit warriors, and some of them positively lust after conflict, or at least the idea of it.    Last month, Rod Liddle wrote a column that was gibberingly inane even by his standards, in which he declared his longing ‘for us to have another war with someone’ and ‘not a high-tech war against impecunious Arabs, such as the Iraq war, which impinges on us all.’

Liddle, a man who was once arrested for allegedly punching his pregnant girlfriend in the stomach,  argued that war ‘reduces personal dissatisfaction’ and ‘increases social cohesion and integration’ and that ‘ a peaceful, easy life hasn’t made us happy.’

Dipping his pen – or perhaps some other part of his anatomy – in the kind of (Boris) Johnsonian prose that writers like him believe indicates cleverness and philosophical depth – he argued that ‘ We have become softened and prone to be frit at everything, perpetually discombobulated in our pacific affluence and our ease, to the extent that we would throw it all away.’

I thought of Liddle and Francois while reading A Pacifist at War, a biography of the Special Operations Executive (SOE) agent Francis Cammaerts.  For those who don’t know, SOE was the clandestine organisation established by  Churchill to ‘set Europe ablaze’ in 1940, by assisting the various resistance movements across Europe and carrying out acts of sabotage and guerrilla attacks modelled on the IRA and Spanish guerillas during the Napoleonic Wars.

The proposal to create such an organisation was initially made by Hugh Dalton, the Minister of Economic Warfare who called for a new  ‘democratic international’ to ‘coordinate, inspire, control and assist the nationals of the oppressed countries who must themselves be the direct participants.’

Much of SOE’s efforts were concentrated on France, where SOE agents played a pivotal role in establishing, coordinating and equipping Résistance movements across the country.  These agents lived lives of extreme risk, stress and danger.  Those who were caught were routinely tortured and executed according to Hitler’s Night and Fog decree.   The average survival rate for SOE wireless operators in France was six weeks, and a quarter of all SOE agents infiltrated into France never returned.

One of SOE’s most effective agents was Francis Cammaerts, the uncle of the author Michael Morpugo.  The son of a Belgian poet with anarchist sympathies, Cammaerts was a committed pacifist, who joined SOE in 1942, after his brother Pieter was killed returning from a bombing mission.

Parachuted into France in 1943, Cammaerts went on to establish the Jockey network or ‘circuit’ which included some 10,000 resistance fighters.   Cammaerts, unlike most Brexit heroes, knew war at firsthand.

He survived the horrific massacre of the Maquis on the Vercors plateau and once executed a captured member of the Vichy militia himself because he was unwilling to order anyone else to do it. Promoted to lieutenant-colonel for his 15 months service in France, Cammaerts received a DSO, the Legion d’honneur, and the Croix de Guerre, but he never liked being described as a hero, and once declared:

I’ve spent a lot of time talking about this period in my life and the most extraordinary and the most valuable part of it was the housewife feeding us, lodging us, cleaning us, saying what you like to eat, we haven’t got much but…That was what made the ordinary an extraordinary experience and why I hate heroics – because it’s wrong; what was right was ordinariness.

Cammaerts rejected ‘the talk of resistance as if it was created by a few heroes and heroines’ and hailed the  Frenchmen and women who

were sacrificing everything – children, partners, elderly relations, their land.  The notion that we both owed so much to each other had nothing to do with father, mother, sister, brother…it had to with something absolutely special – like something you and I have with former students.  Who has ever defined love! That was a passionate love which was neither physical nor intellectual and yet eternal, can’t die.  Nothing can take it away.

It should be clear that Cammaerts was operating on an entirely different moral plane to the likes of Rod Liddle and Corporal Francois.   It is unlikely that he would have thought much of Liddle’s wartalk or his suggestion that ‘The obvious candidate for an act of unprovoked aggression on our part is France – but it might be over too quickly for the beneficial side effects to take root.’

Cammaerts knew war.  He fought as a European in a war against fascism, alongside other Europeans.  He did not do this in order to become heroic and he did not believe that war made people heroic.

People who have actually experienced war do not generally long for it to be repeated.

And today, on the 80th anniversary of the outbreak of World War 2, Cammaerts’s celebration of the ‘ordinary’ heroism of the resistance movements he fought alongside is a useful antidote to Brexit war nostalgia, and a reminder that we did not ‘stand alone’ and that the  ‘ordinariness’ of peace is something to be cherished, not despised or thrown away by armchair warriors who have never fought and never will.

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Chronicle of a Coup Foretold

Today, after weeks of hints, denials, and rumours, the UK has lurched closer towards constitutional and political collapse when the Boris Johnson government announced that it would ask the Queen to suspend parliament in the second week of September, and reconvene with a Queen’s Speech a month later, on 14 October. Many people have seen this coming for some time and have been actively preparing to prevent it.

It is now clear that everything the Johnson government has done since 92,000-odd  Tories voted it into office last month, has been part of a strategy that is far more coherent than anything its opponents have had to offer. First, the hardline law-and-order agenda to please the Tory base and win over Brexit Party defectors: More prisons, more Stop & Search, more ‘terror’ for criminals and more money for police. Then the fake promises about increasing public spending and ‘offers’ of already-existing money for the NHS. Rethinking HS2; better Broadband; ending freedom of movement on the 31st October; a schools ‘revolution’ with academisation and pupil exclusion at its core — the stream of proposals in the last few weeks has already outdone what May offered in three year.

All this has been bolstered by an equally febrile social media campaign, largely revolving around videos of Eton’s tousle-haired Rent-a-Churchill, sleeves rolled-up, chatting to hospital patients or delivering giddily vapid monologues about making the UK the ‘greatest country in the world to live in’ and suggestions that reality can somehow be avoided through optimism, oomph and national self-belief.

My piece for Ceasefire Magazine.  You can read the rest here:

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