No Crime and No Punishment

Aww, don'tcha just love the bourgeois mainstream?  I mean, ain’t they precious and priceless?  Isn’t their disingenuous, blithe, untroubled faith in recieved opinion; and their unquestioning belief in the fundamental goodness and honesty of the world they live in; just kind-of adorable?  Like toddlers who treat Mummy and Daddy like all-knowing, ever-protective gods.  And aren't they sweet the way they get all serious about pondering the eternal verities they take for granted, like the way little kids are when they get all serious about a let’s-pretend game they’re playing.

I mean, look at this...

Dostoyevsky’s characters “justify murder in the name of ideological beliefs” which, according to the BBC, means he “foresaw the rise of the totalitarian state”.

Because it goes without saying that ‘democratic’ states never ever justify murder ideologically.  Nuh-uh.   The idea. 

Mindless, vacuous, unconcerned contentment of this type is sort-of cute, like the way cattle just mooch aimlessly around fields taking in the same sights over and over again, and happily munching on the cud.

Secret Reality

Spoilers



The last episode of The Blacklist was hilarious.  Red describes an international cabal - comprised of people in government and the private sector - who run the world behind the scenes, start wars, control the media, kill to protect their power, etc.  It’s supposed to be so edgy.  Dark, terrifying conspiracy.  He has to get loads of investigate journos to attend his briefing in secret.  They’re all stunned by what he says.  But… he’s just describing the ruling class!  Seriously, the ‘Cabal’ is just the capitalist military-industrial-media-government complex.  But we’re supposed to be shocked by the existence of this group.  Once informed about it, the Washington Post runs a front page story telling everyone of the breaking news.  SHOCK NEW REVELATION: SMALL NUMBER OF POWERFUL PEOPLE ARE POWERFUL AND GET UP TO STUFF FURTHERING THEIR OWN POWER WITHOUT TELLING US!  The evil director of the CIA looks at the paper in horror, like he’s thinking “oh no, now everyone knows!”  It’s like structuring the big, dramatic denouement of a drama series around the astonishing revelation that water is wet, and having all your characters suddenly back away in terror from any rivers or taps they happen to be standing next to.

On the other hand, I can't help thinking this is still more charged than a story in which such facts of life are ignored.  Even presented as an outlandish, shocking revelation, it's still presented.  Even framed as a surprise, it's still there.  

Reminds me of the best Bond film ever, Quantum of Solace, in which a bunch of corporations, eco-businesses, military hardmen and Western politicians are presented as members of a secret criminal cartel who are trying to take over Bolivia's water reserves.  Now this basically happened in the real world.  The film depicts it as an evil secret conspiracy that MI6 wants to stop.  It also depicts Quantum as sneakily damming up loads of water to create an artificial shortage.  But it basically connects with the real world, albeit distantly.  It's far more connected to the real world than anything in the follow-up movie Skyfall (which is total shit, by the way, both politically and as entertainment).  Quantum of Solace also connects with the idea that powerful Western interests are behind politically-motivated Right-wing coups in South America... which is just one of those things that any sensible person takes for granted as an established historical truth, but which the mainstream media treats as a bizarre revelation.  But Quantum of Solace at least acknowledges it.  The movie puts the evil secret conspiratorial organisation behind such things rather than, y'know, the CIA and the US government... though it does have the CIA complicit in Quantum's machinations, even if it is because one CIA guy is a rotten apple.

Is this subversive?  Of course not.  It's gatekeeping.  It acknowledges things about the real world that people either know about or strongly suspect.  It then packages them in the classic methods of containment of such incendiary truths.  Bad Apple Theory.  Conspiracy Theory (which works either way - either as instant dismissal or as an obfuscation of the structural and legal nature of most real conspiratorial shenanigans).  Etc, etc.

On the other hand, I think the capitalist culture industries may underestimate the potential ultimate result of such things.  When such things become common knowledge, something that people all take for granted, even in a watered-down and ideologically-neutered form, that tells us something.  Loss of any confidence in the current state of the world may not start any fires, but it does erode. This isn't what the capitalist culture industries want to do.  It's something they have to do in order to appear even superficially plausible.

As I say, it's gatekeeping.  But the thing about gatekeeping is that it constitutes an acknowledgement that the gate is somewhat insecure, and that there are people who want to break through it.

Also, James Spader kicks it.

Public Service

Might as well put this up too...


Been watching a PBS documentary about the Scottsboro Boys.  The narration does everything it can to infantilise the Communists who got involved, to downplay their contribution, to chalk it up to cynical opportunism, to suggest their involvement did more harm than good, etc. 

The basically accurate account of events makes it clear, however, that it was the involvement of communists (and other people who got involved because communists made the case an issue) which ultimately led to the Scottsboro defendants getting even the meagre amount of justice and freedom they did. 

Towards the end, the narration says “not protests or marches or newspaper articles but simply time itself” brought Alabama to free most of the defendants… which, if you stop to think about it, is an absolutely out-fucking-rageous thing to say.  As if just waiting for a while would’ve freed the defendants by itself.  As if the Alabama ‘justice system’ would’ve seen the light eventually even if nobody had ever kicked up a ruckus about it.  As if the Alabama racists didn’t need to be opposed and fought and exhausted and embarassed into submission.

The message is clear: don’t fight injustice, or protest about it, or write about it, or do anything that could be considered political agitation.  That’ll just make you a cynical opportunist doing more harm than good - like the Communists.  Just shut up and wait.  Time and the system will heal all problems.  Then we can look back on it all nostalgically, with a sense of our own modern-day superiority, and call what happened a ‘tragedy’ (the title of the documentary is ‘Scottsboro - An American Tragedy’).

Also been looking at another PBS documentary about what a humanitarian Herbert Hoover was.  This is the guy who basically tricked loads of people into contributing to a charity scam.  People donated to his fund to relieve starvation in wartime Belgium.  But he charged the Belgians for the food and denied relief to areas that couldn't pay. 

He pulled a similar trick with the Russian famine after the Civil War.  The documentary refers to this as a natural disaster exacerbated by the policies of the Bolsheviks.  Of course.  But the famine was the big deal it was, and the Bolsheviks were forced to take some of the measures they did (some of which were disastrous) because the famine came after (and partly as a result of) the Russian Civil War, which was basically a West-sponsored attempt to unseat the new Bolshevik government.  The Americans and the British (largely owing to the agitation of Winston Churchill... who was rather fond of using famines as political tools) not only invaded Russia themselves, but also sponsored the invasion of Russia by a bunch of counter-revolutionaries who were essentially proto-fascists.  They rampaged through Russia using tactics that put the much-more-talked-about 'Red Terror' (which was defensive) in the shade. 

Hoover took advantage of the famine to attack Bolshevik Russia.  He hated the new regime because it had cancelled deals he had planned in Tsarist Russia (along with a British capitalist partner) which would have made him one of the richest men on Earth.  His relief went largely to areas under the control of the White armies.  Even as they massacred Bolshevik-sympathisers, Jews (or just anyone who happened to, in their opinion, need to be made an example of) in horrific pogroms, Hoover's 'humanitarian' aid kept them going.  Hoover's aid sustained the Polish invasion of Russia.

Later, during the Depression, Hoover refused aid to starving Americans, and ordered MacArthur to send in troops against marchers, with deadly results.  Hoover, the great humanitarian, was motivated not only by his private business interests but also by a hatred of socialism (he equated any government aid with creeping socialism) and a fanatical devotion to capitalism.  He once said that the purpose of government was to create conditions favourable to free enterprise.

Fuck you, PBS.

Koba the Ape

Post-Spoilerocalyptic.


I went to see Dawn of the Planet of the Apes.  Banalities first:  A well-crafted film.  Cogent and coherent in terms of aesthetics and plot (though there is a pleasingly bathetic moment when, following lots of atmospheric shots of apes engaged in social interaction, one ape suddenly addresses another in sign language as "Maurice").  Nicely acted by the principles. 

Now.

In The Dark Ape Rises, the 'good' ape leader is Caesar and the 'bad' ape leader is Koba.

Caesar is the reasonable one, the compromiser, who wants peace with the humans.  Koba is the nasty one who can't let go of his resentment of humans, who doesn't trust them, who betrays Caesar and launches an all-out war against the humans.

Thing is, Koba is fucking awesome.  Because, unlike Caesar, he understands that when you have the oppressor on the floor, you don't help him up and dust him down.  No.  You stand on his neck.

Here's Koba, riding straight at the enemy (who are armed with rocket launchers by this point) while simultaneously holding (and firing) two machine guns instead of the reins of his horse.  Caesar never does anything this fucking spectacularly brave and principled in the entire course of the movie.

It reminds me of what Philomena Cunk once said in reference to the revolution advocated by Russell Brand.  She worried about it until she realised that it was a revolution in the mind... which is safer than a real revolution because nothing actually changes.

Revolutionaries are all very well, you see, until they actually start doing anything, or - horror of horrors - winning.  You're allowed to be a radical or a rebel or a firebrand, as long as you are a noble failure.  That's why Rosa Luxemburg - through no fault of her own, may I stress - is sentimentalised, whereas Lenin is the epitome of evil.

There's been much comment from the critiots that this film is good because there are no fully good or bad characters, and everyone means well.  Bollocks.  Koba might be portrayed as doing what he thinks best, at least part of the time, but he clearly becomes the bad guy.  He even dies the traditionally spectacular/poetically-just villain death.

Koba is certainly a bastard.  You see, he immediately turns into a psycho when he becomes a political rebel from Caesar's benevolent dictatorship.  As usual, inhabiting a zone outside moderate compromise with the status quo and the oppressors is an instant ticket into psychological instability and evil.  The radical is, by definition, an 'extremist', and the extremist is, by definition, both a fanatic and a nihilist, a dangerous utopian and a cynic, a zealot and a self-interested machiavel, a demogogue and an autocrat.

Caesar isn't the only ape in the film with a name that recalls a famous political figure from human history.  'Koba', you'll no doubt remember, was a nickname once used by Stalin.  Hence the title of Martin Amis' truculently inconsequential book Koba the Dread.

It will be noticed that, after his insurrection succeeds, Koba immediately sets about herding humans into a gulag, killing any apes who defy his authority, and locking up any potential dissidents who may be too loyal to Caesar's old regime - presumably to await show trials.  His revolt takes on the inevitable contours of any radical change - as told by the drearily predictable liberal view of politics.

Koba is, once again, the revolutionary as maniacal murderer, as traitor and tyrant, as cheerleader for slaughter, as the foaming radical who really just wants power.  This characterisation sits perfectly happily alongside the efforts made in every other bit of the script to indicate nuance and complexity - precisely because, in the mainstream liberal view of politics, the depiction of the firebrand as instant tyrant is considered a nuanced and complex view (instead of, say, a childish, smug, ahistorical oversimplification).

There is simply no need for the text to explain how and why Koba goes from his entirely reasonable mistrust and hatred of humans (see below) to his conspiracy, his bid for power, his betrayal of his old comrade Caesar.  It is so self-evident to this way of thinking that it requires no explanation.  The opponent of 'peace' and 'stability' (i.e. Things As They Are) is, by definition, also the tyrant-in-waiting.  The radical is, by definition, a psychopath.

But, until he fails to die the hero and thus lives long enough to see himself become the villain, Koba is objectively a better judge of what's going on that Caesar... or, apparently, the writers.

We're supposed to be watching a story about 'two tribes' who mistrust and fear each other, with 'extremists' on both sides who hate the other side unreasoningly.  The idea is the standard liberal accounting for inter-group rivalry and violence.  Ethnic differences + fear + extremism x misunderstanding = war.  But in this movie, the equivalence between the two groups and their responses - which we are clearly meant to take for granted - is always false.

On the human side, the warmonger characters hate the apes because they started the Simian Flu which wiped out most of the human race (a view explicitly shown to be wrong and unfair by another human character), or because "they're animals" (thus bigotedly rejecting the apes' claim to fair treatment by disputing their sentience).  That's it.  On the ape side, by marked contrast, the warmonger characters - chiefly Koba - hate the humans because they kept apes in cages (true) and tortured them (true) and mutilated them (true) and experimented upon them (true), and because they're dangerous owing to their enormous stockpile of deadly weapons (true).  The initial contact between Caesar's groups of apes and the human survivors in San Francisco comes when humans trespass upon ape terrirory (albeit unwittingly) and immediately shoot an ape without provocation, nearly killing him.

In measured response to this, Caesar decides upon a show of strength and a warning.  The apes turn up on the humans' doorstep and say "don't come back".  Whereupon the 'goodie' human character - Malcolm (played by some guy who isn't Mark Ruffalo) - goes back into the apes' forest, this time fully aware that he is trespassing and unwelcome.  Okay, he's trying to prevent an attack upon the apes by Dreyfuss (the boss of the survivors, played by Gary Oldman)... but his aim is to get permission for his team to work on the dam situated in the apes' forest, and get power flowing back to San Francisco. Malcom tacitly accepts the premise that the apes must agree to human terms or be annihilated.  He doesn't like it (you can tell because he frowns a lot) but he accepts it.  He never gives any apparent thought to challenging Dreyfuss' authority.  There doesn't appear to be any semblance of democracy in the human camp.  Malcolm certainly never raises the possibilty of asking the people what they think.  The film seems to work on the assumption that the ordinary people are a fearful mass who alternate between mindless panic and obedience to the guy with a megaphone... at least until they get too hungry, whereupon they will tear him to pieces.  (An essential corollary of the 'two tribes' paradigm is that people are 'tribal' in the worst and most racist sense of that term, i.e. a cowering mass of ignorant savages waiting on the word of the Chief.)  So Malcolm undertakes to explain to the apes that they must let humans fix their dam.

Gee, giving humans power.  What could possibly go wrong?

Let me ask you something.  If you were living in the ruins of a planet destroyed by the technology of a specific group of people, and that same group of people had kept you in cages, tortured you, experimented upon you, maimed you, dissected your kids and hunted you almost to extinction (or wrecked the ecosystem to the point where your people found it increasingly hard to survive), and that group of people was powerless... wouldn't you feel safer?  And would you think it a tremendously attractive and sensible idea to let said group of people add a constant source of electrical power to their already existing stockpile of high-tech weaponry?

Okay, so I get that the human survivors in San Francisco are not specifically the same humans who are personally responsible for all that stuff... but the logic of the film depends upon that 'two tribes' thing I was just talking about, and thus depends upon the idea that we're seeing two groups with essentialised and generalised features who face each other across a chasm.  By that logic, Koba's mistrust of humans as a group, or a race, is entirely reasonable.  It's not how I look at humans (balls to collective responsibility - most of what's wrong with this planet is the work of a minority and their system), but it seems to be how the filmmakers do - and Koba has, quite reasonably, picked up on this facet of how his world works.

At the point where Koba tries to kill Caesar, Caesar is handing the humans access to electricity.  Caesar is himself a despot, albeit a benevolent one from 'our' point of view (i.e. he is sympathetic to humans and wants peace... or, to put it another way, he's a reasonable negotiating partner 'we' can get round the table with... because that's all 'we' ever want, right?).  When Koba shoots Caesar, it isn't like he's stepping that far out of the established ape custom of settling disagreements over status through fights.  Yes, he's violating the commandment 'APE NOT KILL APE', but then Caesar is endangering the lives of the apes by helping the humans.

Let's be honest here.  The humans, at this point, have a huge stockpile of deadly weapons, no semblance of a liberal democratic political structure, urgent needs for land and food, a miserable track record when it comes to apes, newly restored electricity and - as is soon shown - contact with other groups of armed humans!  They are, by any sane definition, a deadly threat to the apes.  It's ludicrous to pretend otherwise, even within the schema of the text.  (Outside the schema of the text, such pretence depends upon complete ignorance of how armed modern Westerners behave towards small groups whom they consider 'primitive' and who happen to live on land they want.)  Koba is, sadly, absolutely right in his judgement.  It's all very well to shake one's head and say, echoing the movie's familiar tagline, "it was our last hope for peace"... but that view depends upon the idea that a few compromisers on either side can efface that fact that one group is the long-established historical oppressor and now, once again, has access to overwhelming strength.

In the end, Apefall is just another new reiteration of a very old American story: the struggle over land, with the role of Americans taken by humans ("there's humans and then there's Commanches") and the role of 'Indians' taken by apes.  In the old days, the narrative was fairly simple and crude.  Manifest Destiny meets scalping parties.  These days we're more nuanced.  Now it's Guilt-Ridden Manifest Destiny meets scalping parties, some of whom are almost as reasonable as 'us'.

(BTW - if you think I'm being racist when I compare the apes to, say, Native Americans... well, it was the film that started it.  I'm just running with their logic.  And you should note that it is a racial logic deeply embedded in the franchise.  The original Charlton Heston movie is a 'satire' of the civil rights movement - via an employment of the 'world turned upside down' trope - in which black people are implicitly represented as apes.)

In yet another way, the idea that the two sides are balanced is untrue.  The film tries to put roughly equivalent characters on either side of the human/ape divide.  But Caesar's counterpart is Malcolm and Koba's is Dreyfuss.  So on the ape side we have a well-meaning leader, and on the human side we have a well-meaning subordinate (thus effacing the important reality of power in favour of the value of intentions - a classic liberal mistake).  On the ape side we have a psychopathic killer driven by personal ambition versus a human warmonger who is actually shown to be a well-intentioned leader.  Dreyfuss wants to save the human race and is humanised via a scene where he cries over photos of lost sons.  Thus an evil revolutionary is pitted against a misguided patriot - we even see Dreyfuss' old photos from his army days in the desert.

Even as the film strives to create a morality play about the road to hell being paved with good intentions, and there being faults on both sides, etc, it falls back into ideology.  It falls back into the classic ideological demonology of fearful liberalism: those who strive stumblingly for compromise versus the vicious zealot.

Koba is outnumbered.  He has to shoulder all the burden of radicalism, and thus become a monster, while the rest of the protagonists - even the most bastardly of the humans - get at least partially absolved.

In Ape Trek into Darkness, as always, the oppressed are held to a higher standard of morality, forgiveness and forbearance than the oppressors (or, in this case, the erstwhile oppressors).

Koba's great crime is that he refuses the onus of greater moral responsibility foisted upon him by his former oppressors (and the filmmakers).  He quite rightly tells them to go fuck themselves, and the pleas for peace they bring too late to the table, alongside their quest for back-up and juice.  And then he starts fighting against what is, as I say, by any sane definition, a proven and deadly threat (I'm sure someone, if the roles were reversed, would call it a 'clear and present danger' and authorise drone strikes against it).

I bow to no-one in my loathing of Stalin.  He was arguably the most despicable human being who ever lived.  He is a smear of blood and shit on the good name of socialism.  But he was the embodiment of class forces, and rose to power on his opportunistic co-optation of those class forces, not on a wave of charisma and evil stemming directly from his ideology or fanaticism.  He was the most ruthless and well-placed representative of the bureaucratic layer in the Soviet government which filled a gaping hole in the power structure after the Russian Civil War (which was forced on the Bolsheviks by Western capitalist aggression) decimated the Russian working class, thus gutting the soviet system.  He wasn't the bogey man.  He wasn't Bolshevism in its true and terrible form, or any such ahistorical nonsense.  He was the head of a bureaucratic state capitalist government (in which capital still existed, but as an exploitative relation between the worker and the state) which put Russia through a speeded-up and concentrated form of capitalist development and industrialisation.  Russia did in the space of a couple of decades what the European capitalist powers had taken a couple of centuries to do.  Stalin matched them point for point.  All the horrors of primitive accumulation (the early stage of capitalist development) are represented in the Stalin years.  In the West they were called the enclosures, in Stalin's Russian it was called 'collectivisation'.  It was essentially the same thing: the state-enforced destruction of feudal property and the peasantry - and its transformation into capital of one kind or another - leading to dispossession, famine, the theft of common lands, the severing of people from direct access to agricultural production, and the forcing of people into wage labour.  Stalin engineered terrible famines.  The British Empire did exactly the same thing in Ireland and India.  In Stalin's Russian you had the horrors of the Gulag; in Europe and America you had the horrors of plantation slavery, child labour and the industrial revolution.  The state owned and controlled all capital in Russia, and it was administered by a class of bureaucrats.  In rising European capitalist formations, the state played a less direct but no less crucial role in enforcing the 'rights' of private capital, and financially supporting the new system.  Both Russia and the West engaged in ruthless imperialism to acquire territory, manpower and resources to feed into the system.  If Russia was 'totalitarian', the Britain of Pitt was no democracy. Stalin was a monster because he was the dictator of a state engaged in industrialisation at breakneck speed.  All the horrors of emergent capitalism were squeezed into the tight space of the rule of one man.  Stalin is horrific because he is Russia's version of all the capitalists and prime ministers of Europe, fused into one bloated personage.  That isn't to excuse him, any more than to point out that capitalism is a systemic evil is to excuse Rupert Murdoch, but it does put him in context.  He may have been a psychopath, but millions didn't die solely because he was, and it wasn't Bolshevism that made him one.  It was the logic of capital, albeit state capital.  Industrialisation, squidged into a sliver of historical time, because - as Stalin himself pointed out - of the need for the Soviet Union to compete militarily and economically with the Western capitalist powers.  (This, by the way, is why I find it beyond comprehension how anyone can fail to see the state capitalist nature of Stalin's Russia - if it competed economically with capitalist powers in a capitalist world system, how can it possibly have been anything other than some form of capitalism?)

(Quite apart from anything else, if we allow Koba the Ape to stand for Koba the Dread, this does the Dread a massive favour.  Stalin was a nonentity and a workhorse in the early Bolshevik party, who played little significant role in the Russian Revolution, contrary to his own subsequent mythmaking.  He certainly never charged at rocket launchers.)

It is, by the way, explicitly capitalism that the humans want to bring back.  The dam is a symbol for holding back the tide of untamed and destructive nature (and/or time), and a vast engineering project of modernity that reshapes the natural world to human needs, and a way of providing water and power to settlements and thus making 'civilisation' possible.  By 'civilisation', in Planet of the Apes 2.2: Age of Extrinction, we are to understand capitalism.  The humans explicitly talk about wanting to bring back the life they once had.  In other words, they want our world back - the very world that caused its own downfall in the first place.  The film makes it aesthetically explicit that the return of capitalism is aimed at.  When the humans manage to get their dam working again, and thus get power to flow back to San Francisco, they celebrate in the reactivated shell of a petrol station, and people dance through a relit shopping mall.  Dreyfuss celebrates by turning on his expensive Apple rectangle for the first time in years and looking through his My Pictures folder.

It's only to be expected.  Popular movies are currently absolutely stuffed with the motif of the hero and/or the world fallen and trying to arise.  You don't need to be a particularly subtle critic to work out what that's all about (though, needless to say, it escapes most of the professionals).  It stretches from Bond and Batman recovering their mojos, to the de rigeur device of the fallen paradise that must be reclaimed (Oblivion, Elysium, The Hobbit, etc).  It is a current inflection of the perennially-popular apocalyptic or post-apocalyptic movie.  The Apeit: The Desolation of Koba is no exception.  It fits into the currently popular trope in a way similar to Game of Thrones, with its mantra "Winter is coming".  A great crisis has come or is approaching (Game of Apes manages to at least make the crisis something of our doing... though there is something to be said for GRRM's great inevitable cycles of boom and slump that helpless people get caught in).   In both, the legions of the disavowed will swamp us along with the glaciers or germs of doom.  We squabble about the political organisation of structures that will soon be rendered obsolete by waves of inexplicable and uncanny and unappeasable apocalypses that steadily approach.  The White Walkers are the unknowable shock troops of the big freeze that will paralyse the clockwork and the engines that we currently rely on.  The apes, similarly, are the post-apocalyptic hordes, resentful and out for revenge.  Again, in the midst of the biggest recession since the 30s, none of this is especially hard to parse.

Of course, by enjoying Koba's brave rebellion, I am only really doing something the text wants me to.  The moral rhetoric of the narrative may not support him (even though the facts of the plot do), but the whole aesthetic logic of the film is predicated upon him and his war.  We go to see films like this for the same reason that we recessionitizens go to see so many zombie films.  We want to see the world smashed up by the monsters in a state of riotous assembly and insurrectionary carnival.  It connects with a deep-seated desire to see the world turned upside down.  Of course, the dominant ideology demands that the carnival of the oppressed be curtailed in salutary fashion.  But even so...

I wrote here about how attractive villains are, about how they often appear to have an objectively better moral and political position than the goodies (who are often only good by default because they represent established power structures and their violence is institutionalised), about how seeing the monsters rip the world to bits can be very thrilling if you're not keen on the world as it stands, about how the villains shoulder the burden of perpetual defeat so that we can learn our lesson of obedience... but also so that we can get a charge from their rebellion against the status quo, and about how the evil objections of the villain often represent a garbled form of protest against the established order.

For instance, Lord Voldemort in the Harry Potter franchise represents - like so many villains - the distant and distorted echo of the snarl of radical anger.  He is himself thoroughly unsympathetic, as Koba comes to be when he starts murdering other apes.  However, even thoroughly unsympathetic villains like Voldemort (who, as the snobbish fuhrer of the magic-Nazis, is not someone I’d vote for) tend to represent the - to use a hackneyed phrase - ‘return of the repressed’.  And repression is political.  That which is oppressed is also repressed in mainstream discourse.  Voldemort can ascend because he takes advantage of faultlines in Wizarding society that reveal deep, structural injustice and hypocrisy, ie the ethnic cleansing of the giants, the economic ghettoisation of the Goblins, the resolutely undemocratic and unaccountable nature of Wizarding government, the enslavement of the Elves, etc.  Now, J.K. Rowling never really addresses these problems.  She occasionally has goodie characters display a bad conscience about them (ie Hermione’s patronising SPEW campaign and Dumbledore’s occasional remarks to Harry about how badly Wizards have treated other races) but the addressing or remedying of these injustices is NEVER made crucial as a precondition of saving the Wizarding World.  The Wizards never really have to face the consequences of these injustices, or change them.  Harry & Co fight to reinstate the status quo that includes all these structural injustices.  The happy ending involves no emancipation of the Elves, no change in Wizarding attitudes to giants (indeed, Rowling makes it clear that the Wizards are essentially right about the respectively servile and primitive nature of these races!)  The happy ending involves no real tackling of the deep strain of racial prejudice about bloodlines.  The happy ending involves one of the goodies being ‘appointed’ the new (unelected) Minister of Magic.  Etc.  It’s clear what this means.  The only person fighting to change the Wizarding World was Voldemort.  The baddie.  The goodies were all fighting to, a few tweaks aside, keep it exactly the same.  This is why I have a sneaking sympathy even with Voldemort.  He was, at least, trying to change things.  Like Koba, he represents the deep-seated assumption in capitalist media culture that any attempt at radical social change must be, by definition, evil: fanatical, twisted, dangerous, pathological, selfish, etc.  Voldemort doesn’t espouse values I’d embrace… but I do feel a certain kinship even for him, as a figure within the text.  Because he’s the guy who says ‘this society is broken and we need to radically change it’.  His ideas about how it’s broken are noxious, but that’s because he’s a bourgeois echo - distorted and distant - of anyone who wants radical change.  It’s like with Shinzon: he’s personally vile, but - being the leader of a slave rebellion which confronts the oppressing empire - he’s also a reflection (in a shattered mirror) of Spartacus.

Similarly, in Koba and the Deathly Humans, Koba is the only one fighting to radically change the status quo, the only one with a practical grasp of what needs to be done to keep the apes safe from the danger they clearly face, and the first one with the guts to pick up weapons and fight.  If he has to trick the rest of the apes into following him, that just shows that the filmmakers are working on the same assumption about the 'ordinary' apes as they made about the 'ordinary' humans: they're sheep.

The passivity of the masses is a theme right the way through the film.  There are a quartet of Alpha Males (of different styles) making all the running.  The climax of the film depends upon two seperate sets of Alpha Males duking it out between them.  (Incidentally, the only women in this film are... well... incidental.  Malcolm has a girlfriend who is there to give people antibiotics and look sad and be supportive; Caesar has a mate who is there to have babies, be ill and then get better - much to his relief.)

It's possible that the Alpha Males, the submissive Beta Males and the Obedient Females are there on both sides as part of the declared strategy of showing the humans and apes mirroring each other, of showing how much they have in common.  If so, its not really exceptional in terms of being reactionary and reductionist and biological determinist - these sorts of assumptions are widespread, especially in narrative culture - but it is noticeable how they do it without so much as whispering about evolution or common descent.  Presumably this is from fear of incurring the wrath of America's Christian Creationist hordes (just goes to show how seriously they take ideological sensitivities when they sense box office impacts). 

On a related issue, I personally found it irritating how undecided the filmmakers were about how to present ape culture.  On the one hand they want the apes to be 'advanced' and human-like in their social organisation, yet they also want them to act like stereotypical apes.  So you end up with a mish-mash.  The apes are shown to have a literate culture, with written words and sign language alongside the few who can speak, and with a school for the little 'uns - complete with anachronistic lessons in chalk on an improvised blackboard (insert blackboard jungle joke here).  They have midwives, buildings in their settlement, etc.  Yet they have none of the broadly egalitarian social structure that you tend to see in real hunter-gatherer groups untouched or unmenaced by exterior threats.  Of course, they're apes rather than human hunter gatherers... but then, with such intrusions of human social structure into the apes' society (including such wholly anachronistic ones as school and the nuclear family), why not also bring in egalitarianism?  The answer lies in the overarching view of people as 'tribal' in the negative sense.

It's this view that ultimately underwrites all the stuff about Koba the demagogue, swaying the apes to become his whooping pawns in a race war.  If people - hairy or smooth - are hierarchical, sheeplike, aggressive, fearful, passive, prone to obedience, naturally separated into Alpha Males and their subjects... and if they're prone to this because of their essentially apelike nature... then no wonder attempts to rebel against the status quo always end up with someone like Koba taking charge and becoming the New Boss, Same as the Old Boss.

This is the logic of the work, and it has never been more necessary for the capitalist culture industries to peddle this message than at times of crisis.  If you think I'm being paranoid, then you're missing neoliberalism's skill at regulating opinion using marketised ideology.

I hear that Andy Serkis (who plays Caesar in this film via motion capture) is going to be doing a CGI/mo-cap version of Animal Farm.  Another retelling of that simplistic fable that puts an allegorical revolution into the world of the beasts, showing the inevitable course of that revolution from liberation to tyranny, from the charisma of the leader to the totalitarian rule of the dictator.  In the film I just saw, the animal/tyrant is indirectly named after Stalin.  In Animal Farm, the animal/tyrant who represents Stalin is called Napoleon.

Caesar, Napoleon, Stalin.  The inevitable gravediggers of revolution* - as long as you ignore all context and look upon them as ahistorical bogeymen.

You see, you animals, where trying to change the world gets you every time? 



*It's actually a bit more complicated than that in the case of the real Julius Caesar.

Déjà bloody vu

I was going to do this post all over again... (this is what we do with Palestine: say the same bloody things over and over again, because the same bloody things keep happening over and over again)... but Richard Seymour has already done it for me, very succintly.


(EDIT: I originally posted a screencap of Seymour's tweet of a screencap.  But Seymour has now posted the original screencap itself on his blog.  So it seems only fair to remove my screencap of his tweet and just link to him.  Not that he needs hits from me.)

UKIP SURGE AHEAD ON SHABOGAN GRAFFITI

The main headlines today.

THE BBC NEWS DIVISION HAS TAKEN OVER OWNERSHIP OF OBSCURE DOCTOR WHO BLOG SHABOGAN GRAFFITI

"The blog will now be run according to proper BBC guidelines of impartiality," said that lying Zionist shitsack James Harding, head of BBC News.

In other news...

UKIP SURGE FORWARD AND ONWARDS TO CERTAIN FORWARD MARCHING MARCH OF ONWARD SURGING SURGENESS AHEAD ON SHABOGAN GRAFFITI.

The BBC Newsroom is reporting that despite there being no sentiments ever expressed on Shabogan Graffiti that a Ukipper would ever find acceptable, UKIP have broken through with a breakthrough on Shabogan Graffiti and are now surging forward and ahead to breakthroughs and surges on the unpopular blog.

"Apparently the vast majority of the British electorate do not read Shabogan Graffiti," said a hairdo on top of a suit behind a desk, "but even so, the fact that UKIP have now broken through and surged across the blog shows clearly that the British public think UKIP are a force to be reckoned with and a reckon to be forced with and surging and breaking through and getting the mainstream establishment parties running scared."

Finally...

BBC ANNOUNCES NEW SERIES OF POSTS ON SHABOGAN GRAFFITI, TO BE ENTITLED 'IMMIGRATION: ASKING THE DIFFICULT QUESTIONS THAT MOST WHITE WORKING CLASS PEOPLE WANT ANSWERED BUT WHICH THE POLITICAL CORRECTNESS NAZIS REFUSE ANY OF US TO TALK ABOUT'.

Andrew Marr is 412 years old.

9

Wow.  Single figures.  Okay, time for some fun.


"I'm asking you to help yourselves," says the Doctor. 

Revolution isn't about everyone suddenly becoming altruistic and angelic.  It is, as Marx saw it, "the movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority".

"Nothing will change round here unless you change it," says the Doctor.  Here is 'freedom and necessity'.  It must be done, but they can choose to do it or not to do it.

"What will we do with two guns against all those guards?" asks Veet.

"You can't do anything, but there are fifty million people in this city. Think how the guards will react to that number."

"It's crazy talk," says Goudry, "Rebellion? No one would support you."  Capitalist realism.

"Given the chance to breathe clean air for a few hours, they might. Have you thought of that?"

The Company pumps a chemical fug into the air that makes people anxious and weak.  That's how it works on Pluto.  Here we call it ideology, or hegemony.

The Doctor and Bisham discuss ways of knocking out the gas pumps.

"I was a B grade in Main Control," says Mandrell, "The Doctor's right. It could work."

Until now, nobody has been more cynical.  But Mandrell has, in a sense, just been given the chance to breathe clean air.

The Doctor isn't stinting on the revolutionary optimism.  He suggests taking over main control.  Mandrell thinks it could be done.

"What have we got to lose?" he asks.

"Only your claims," says the Doctor.

Everyone is quite impressed by this.  It's a sign of the times that we, the audience, are evidently expected to recognise and relish the reference.  The Doctor knows full well what he's saying - and he's not just punning.  Workers don't usually have to wear chains these days, but they still have nothing compared to the Companies of this world.  They have their 'claims' of course - claims upon democracy and human rights, etc... But the Company never gives refunds unless forced to, so the workers' 'claims' are essentially the same as 'nothing'.

"Anything's worth trying," says Cordo, a man who was trying to kill himself that morning, but who is now frantic with revolutionary confidence, "If only we could win. Just think, if we could beat the Company!"

"There's no 'if' about it, Cordo," says the Doctor, "We will."

There's 'the actuality of the revolution' for you.

Robert Holmes is often called a cynic... but he was at least as much a romantic.  This story is a full-on romantic political drama of revolution.  The cynical and self-seeking drop-outs turn strike-leaders.  The cowed and suicidally-miserable worker is transformed by revolution until he's a whooping, gung-ho, gun-toting freedom fighter.  (Revolution changes people even as they change society - one reason why waiting until we've all changed ourselves for the better is functionally the same as accepting the status quo.  You change yourself by changing society, and vice versa.)  The workers collectively overthrow capitalism and set up a workers' state in about a day.  Much to the blinking incomprehension of many who have tried to understand this story, the Gatherer's final flight is treated unequivocally as a joke and an inspirational achievement.  It's not Robert Holmes being cynical about revolution; it's Robert Holmes getting infected with rebellious fervour.  Even Synge and Hacket, intially forced to aid the revolution at gun-point, gradually get swept along and start helping willingly.  Marn cynically switches sides to save her own skin... but, as with so much Holmesian cynicism, that should make us ask: who and what is this cynicism really about?  This is cynicism about the powerful.  If we just call it, in general terms, 'cynicism', then we're conceding that the actions of the powerful define politics and society.

'The Sun Makers' is often said to be a right-wing 'satire' of the UK tax system.  But I have a question:  how much tax does the Company pay?

It's a sign of how utterly the Right has set the agenda that criticising taxation is seen as an inherently right-wing thing to do.  There is, astonishingly enough, a left-critique of state taxation in capitalist states.  The Right attack taxation because they want, in this neoliberal age, to effectively abolish any penalty or restraint upon big business.  They call this 'liberty'.  They've already managed it to an astonishing degree.  Meanwhile, regressive taxation - combined with deregulation, privatisation and the erosion of the social wage - disproportionately penalises those on lower-incomes.   That is not a concern of the right.  In fact, it's a priority.

This idea that the Right hate tax is related to the idea that the Right hate the state.  But the Right is, essentially, a coalition around the defence of class privilege, and in capitalist society class privilege is defended by the state.  What the Right hates is the idea that the state can be used for any purposes other than their own.  The social-democratic idea that the state should provid services in return for taxation is too much for them.

As Terry Eagleton has written, nobody was more hostile to the state than Marx.  He saw it as an emanation of class society.  It was pure alienation of human 'species-being'.  Engels called it little more than "a body of armed men" tasked with repression.

One of the quintessetial traits of neoliberalism is anti-state rhetoric combined with the heavy use of the state to further the interests of the ruling class.  You 'roll back the state's frontiers' while also using it to fund military imperialism, police repression, bail-outs for banks and corporations during times of crisis, etc.  State funding of the welfare state is restricted and curtailed while largesse flows freely to corporations.  The US government gets taken over by oil-executives who talk about how much they hate the state while using it to plunder oil-rich countries.  Even as the state supposedly gets downgraded, it becomes ever more violent and monomaniacal in its determination to support capitalism.

In 'The Sun Makers', the state has basically been bought out and taken over by a private concern.  The Gatherer's state exists to pour profits into the Collector's Company.  The state gathers and the Company collects.  They call these profits "taxes" but they actually amount to charges for services, i.e. the production of air for breathing, the construction of suns, the provision of time for sleeping.  You have to pay to be euthanased, to be buried, to be employed, to take pills, to go outside.  The social wage and the welfare state have been abolished - privatised in all but name - and every aspect of private and social life has been commodified, marketised.  The state charges you for everything and invades your life and watches everything you do and punishes you when you disobey... but it does all this as a private contractor for a monolithic block of predatory capital.

As so often, Doctor Who expresses anxieties about capitalism in terms of aesthetics that recall Stalinism or 'totalitarianism'... but this isn't just confusion.  The essence of Stalinism was the functioning of the state as capital.  This would have been no surprise to Marx, who wrote primarily of capitalist relations and of the property form as just a social expression of such relations, one form among possible others.  Marx knew how central the state was to supporting the rise of capitalism.  The Soviet bureaucrats were no less directors of capital (or exploiters of workers) for the fact that they didn't formally 'own' any factories.

We only have to look around us today to see how prescient it was for Doctor Who, in 1977, in the early years of neoliberalism, to see the total privatisation of the state leading to pervasive state intrusion, regressive taxation, carrion-feeding austerity and social authoritarianism.

And it's quite breathtaking that, in 1977, as the tide of struggle called 'the 60s' faded into memory, Robert Holmes romantically and unrestrainedly suggested workers' revolution as the solution.



Well, I had fun.

10

"We waited here in the dark space," booms the Dalek Emperor, "damaged but rebuilding. Centuries passed, and we quietly infiltrated the systems of Earth, harvesting the waste of humanity. The prisoners, the refugees, the dispossessed. They all came to us. The bodies were filtered, pulped, sifted. The seed of the human race is perverted. Only one cell in a billion was fit to be nurtured."

So, In Russell's rewrite of 'Revelation of the Daleks' (which would be a better title for this story than it was for Saward's script), the Daleks are no longer harvesting the elite.  Brought to the brink of extinction, they have been forced to resurrect themselves from the 'dregs'... which seems to be synonymous with the contestants who lose game shows.  The Daleks take the people who get knocked out before the finale.  Because the Daleks have become TV producers.  They've become the people who run Big Brother and Trinny & Susannah and The Weakest Link.  They've become the bosses of reality TV.  They've become Simon Cowell.  (Which is kind of an insult to the Daleks, if you ask me.)

Big Brother, in our polity, in our system of media signs, is no longer Orwell's omniscient totalitarian leader; he's now the eternal, ever-watching viewer.  He's us.  Just like the Daleks are now us.

"So you created an army of Daleks out of the dead," says the Doctor.

Again, the gothic, the monopoly, and the zombie labour.

"That makes them half human," mutters Rose... as always, she is straight to the quick.

"Those words are blasphemy!" bellows the Dalek Emperor.

The Daleks chant in unison...

"Do not blaspheme!  Do not blaspheme!  Do not blaspheme!"

"Since when did the Daleks have a concept of blasphemy?" asks the Doctor.

"I reached into the dirt and made new life. I am the God of all Daleks!"

The Daleks chant in unison...

"Worship him!  Worship him!  Worship him!"

Bringing back the Daleks in 2005, four years after 9/11 and the start of the 'War on Terror', two years into the conquest and occupation of Iraq, Russell T. Davies makes them religious fundamentalists.  The world is in the middle of an apparent 'clash of civilisations', with religion as the supposed organising logic.  But are these new fundamentalist Daleks - 'Fundamentaleks' - supposed to be Osama and Al Qaeda?  Are they Bush and the neocon Christian crusaders?  Both?  Two sides of the same coin?

To me, they look more like another kind of fundamentalism, a more prevalent and destructive kind.

They run a massive media system based on ruthless competition.  The housemates who lose the battle for popularity get ejected into nothingness.  The Trinny & Susannah bots encourage people to carve into their own flesh in order to look right.  The weakest links get zapped, and the strongest link is the one who most effectively and ruthlessly competes, who must callously fucks over his competitors.  Society has become "a charnel house" in which people compete in competitions of spectacular triviality which are framed as epic battles.  You have to step on the other poor schlubs in order to win.  This system is publically fronted by celebrities reconfigured as hollow, inhuman monsters.  It is run by ordinary people who do evil things not because they're personally evil, but because they are employed by a systemic evil.  And it's all owned and controlled by Daleks who have absorbed a feverish and callous determination that can best be described, at least as far as RTD is concerned, as fanatical religion.

The Daleks have become neoliberals.  Capitalist crusaders, ruling a resurgent yet insane system, presiding over a world divided between the starving and the obese who "just watch telly", absorbing the working body utterly and assimilating it into themselves.  And the logic behind it all has penetrated human culture to the extent that TV runs the world, and relentlessly pushes an ideology of total competition, total dog-eat-dog.  (That this is, essentially, the world we live in is obvious since RTD uses shows of the present day, projected into the future.)  Survival has finally been formally and openly marketised.  The spectacle is omnipresent and it brazenly expresses the relations at the base of society: compete with each other so that your rulers can profit.

The Daleks have become market fundamentalists.

14

"I've known many times," says the Doctor, "some of them much more pleasant than others."

"Well, I quite like it here, I must say," interjects Jo to cover the awkward moment, "Everyone's been most kind."

The Controller (what a giveaway that title is) nods in appreciation of her remark.

The Doctor, however, is unimpressed.  He swills more wine.  He looks like an sozzled, opinionated guy at an unsuccessful party, spoiling for a fight.

"Well, I met some people today who were far from kind," he says.  He spent the earlier part of the day taking a forced tour of the Controller's utopia, being subjected to the tender mercies of a surprisingly well-sketched terror state.

"That was a simple mistake, Doctor, I assure you," says the Controller, his voice as smooth and silvery as his strange, quasi-robotic face, "You must not jump to conclusions."

"Better than jumping from the crack of a whip from some security guard," snaps the Doctor, "Do you run all your factories like that, Controller?"

We have been granted an unusual thing earlier in this episode: a glimpse into the productive centres of a Dalek-ruled regime.  It looked like a gulag.  People in rags lugged grain while being monitored at every moment.  At one point, we cut straight from that to the Controller handing Jo a plate full of grapes.

Grapes make wine, of course.  Wine is strangely present in this story.  Back at the start, the Doctor raided Sir Reginald Styles' wine cellar.

"That was not a factory, Doctor," returns the Controller mechanically.

"Oh? Then what was it?"  The Doctor looks still more like a half-cut guy, up for some aggro.

 "A rehabilitation centre.  A rehabilitation centre for hardened criminals."

"Including old men and women, even children?"

"There will always be people who need discipline, Doctor," says the Controller, as though the point is beyond debate... but then, to people like him, it always is.

"Now that's an old fashioned point of view," says the Doctor "even from my standards."

I love that line, but it makes me feel sad.  It dates this story far more than the mullets and flares and glam rock facepaint.  I mourn a long lost time, before neoliberalism got to work on popular culture, when it was a mainstream assumption that we could dispense with crusty, reactionary stuff about some people basically being indolent animals who needed to be forced to work... so much so that even the Third Doctor could come out with it.

"I can assure you that this planet has never been more efficiently, more economically run," says the controller.

Note that.  It's never been more efficient and more "economically run" than when the bloody Daleks are in control.

"People have never been happier or more prosperous," he continues.

"Then why," asks the Doctor, "do you need so many people to keep them under control? Don't they like being happy and prosperous?"

This cuts right to the quick.  It cuts to the delusion - still widespread on the left at that time - that 'really existing socialism' was in some meaningful way an improvement.  But if it was so great, why was there a dirty big wall keeping people in East Germany?  As Mark Steel once put it:

If you had a party, and discovered some of the guests secretly building a hot air balloon in an effort to escape, you wouldn't say, "Well that was a successful night."

In many ways, 'Day of the Daleks' is a story about the failure of socialism or communism in the 20th century, and it confines itself to the predictable liberal assumptions.  The Dalek economy looks like a gulag system.  The terrible new world was brought about by the Chinese and Russians starting World War Three.  Some revolutionary guerillas in fatigues try to change history with bullets and bombs and just make things worse (natch).  Some of these "fanatics" (as the Doctor calls them) even have Che moustaches.  (And let's not even get started on the racefails and politicsfails that come with having stupid, grunting, dark-skinned, low-browed aliens recycled from Planet of the Apes.)

And yet... as has been mentioned on this blog before, 'really existing socialism' or 'communism' were actually authoritarian and bureaucratic variants of state capitalism that arose for complex and contingent historical reasons.  So you can ask the Doctor's question about social control in our society too.

I'm not an anarchist, though I have much sympathy with many anarchist ideas.  One of the founding fathers of anarchism was Joseph Proudhon.  I have my issues with him, but he did say something I love:

To be governed is to be at every operation, at every transaction, noted, registered, enrolled, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished. It is, under the pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, to be placed under contribution, trained, ransomed, exploited, monopolized, extorted, squeezed, mystified, robbed; then, at the slightest resistance, the first word of complaint, to be repressed, fined, despised, harassed, tracked, abused, clubbed, disarmed, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed; and, to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, outraged, dishonoured. That is government; that is its justice; that is its morality.

This is all still pretty much true where I am.  I dunno about you.  I expect the NSA knows you're reading this.  The British government is currently engaged in a concerted effort to make public protest effectively illegal.  And yet we live under capitalism, which we are constantly told is the best of all possible worlds.  Even the recession is getting better, we're told.

What's the matter with us?  Don't we like being happy and prosperous?

16

The Doctor is confusing an angel to death.

Light came to our world to count and quantify all life, to create a set and definitive catalogue.  Light sent its Survey out into the world to sample each form.  But our world corrupted the Survey with the delicious possibilities of evolution.  Light was locked away so the Survey could inherit the Earth.  It became a Victorian gentleman, a man of property.  It enacted a ruthless Darwinian takeover of the house above Light's ship.  A colonizing mission.  A merger and acquisition.  This being Victorian England, the wife and daughter and maids came with the house like fixtures and fitting.  The Survey locked its secrets away, just like any Victorian gentleman, and set about dreaming of empire.  It adopted the cultural logic of its new society and new position: the ideology of 'the survival of the fittest'... meaning, supposedly, the dominance of the best.  With its inbuilt assumptions about the place of 'lesser races' and 'lower orders' and women, Victorian social-Darwinism was perfect for the Survey's purposes, as it shed its insectile and reptilian skins and became Josiah, the pink of respectability.

But then the Doctor came and let Light out of the cellar.  Just to see what would happen.

Light turned out to be the reductionist ghost in the bourgeois social machine.

To Light, we're merely walking bowls of "sugars, proteins and amino acids".  Light killed and dismembered one of the maids, saying "I wanted to see how it worked, so I dismantled it".  That's just how reductionism works.  To understand something, you take it to pieces.  But what happens when you can't put the pieces back together again?  Do you forget that the original thing was more than just the sum of its bits?  Reductionism can do a lot of heavy lifting as an analytical tool, but it is the map not the territory... and mistaking it for the territory leads to vulgar materialism and determinism.  A river cannot be understood as just an aggregation of water molecules.  Aside from all the other natural and material processes involved, it is also a social phenomenon.  It is something people experience, think about, wade in, swim in, sail upon, fish for food in, divert and ford and dam and befoul.  It is something people name, and build towns around.  Water can be used to quench thirst or drown people.  It can be freely shared or owned and monopolised, or stolen.  Likewise - more so - people are not just aggregations of limbs or genes (selfish or not).  Looking at them that way makes it possible to inherit them and use them like property.  Contrary to the assumptions of bourgeois political economy, societies are not just aggregations of individuals, all acting from their own self-interest. That's part of how you end up saying that some people just have to be left to starve, or be put in the workhouse, or be ruled by a Viceroy, all for the good of the economy and progress.  It's partly how you end up with the idea that people starve or work or serve because they have failed to compete, or because it was their destiny as a unit of inherently inferior stock.  Inspector Mackenzie has imbibed this view of things, sagely pronouncing on how "gypsy blood" makes for "lazy workers".

This view of the world depends upon snapshots of reality at best, all fixed in place like moths displayed behind glass, like catalogued specimens in the Natural History Museum.  There is something about this static view that makes it tesselate perfectly with hierarchy, and thus work for whoever rules.  That's why the classic depiction shows a lowly ape gradually growing up to be a white gentleman.  It depends upon forgetting the revolutionary implications of Natural Selection, which shows us a world of variation in dialectical unity, everything effecting everything else in one great network of feedback loops, all species constantly on their way to being something else, all forms transitional, all races related to each other, no hierarchy of blood, no separation of individuals from each other, no dividing line between individuals and the rest of the world, every tiny alteration in quantity gradually leading to an alteration in quality, all negations ultimated negated, everything containing its own contradictions within it... just as every apple contains the potential to nourish or rot.

In truth, as Light realises to his horror...

"Everything is changing. All in flux. Nothing remains the same."

The mercurial Doctor has reminded Light that even he, Light, changes.  Everything does.  The catalogue can never be complete, by definition.  The Doctor cruelly hammers home the word "change" at every opportunity.  He bamboozles Light with a list of mythical and fictional creatures, human creations, inherently social things that can never be quantified as part of any static, reductionist system.  Even the Gryphon gets a mention, that creature of Victorian lassitude and melancholy, yearning for the old days before everything changed.

Even Nimrod, whose people once worshipped Light, won't help him.  Nimrod has dumped his allegiance to both Josiah and Light, both the new boss and the old.  He can't be fixed in subservient place because he's a social creature who thinks and learns and makes his own history, if not in circumstances of his own choosing.

"I will not change," says Light.  And he turns to stone rather than permit himself to become part of the great flow of fluctuation, contradiction and transformation.  He's that reactionary.

"Subject for catalogue," announces the Doctor with weary contempt, "File under: Imagination, comma, lack of."

17

Ms. Kizlet is using the wi-fi signal to control people in the coffee shop.

 “I do love showing off,” she says through a waitress she has made her puppet. “Just let me show you what control of the wi-fi can do for you,” she adds through the mouth of a young girl.

It’s a tech demo. Here’s what this latest version of the operating system can do. Upgrade now. The iconography is all ruthlessly current. Particularly fitting: Kizlet and her crew are playing around on iPads as they do their little Steve Jobs routine. You almost expect her to reveal that they’ve captured Clara with an “oh, and one more thing.”

Kizlet explains that they’ve “released thousands” of base stations into the world, blanketing the whole of humanity in their Worldwide Web of Fear.

Meanwhile, Clara’s on her laptop. She recognizes the vulnerability in every grand system: people. With just a bit of clicking around she’s figured out where Kizlet is transmitting from. The most obvious spot in London, really. Kizlet's client loves using grand projects for his own purposes. It’s what he did in the Underground, and it’s what he’s doing now. But it’s 2013 now, and London’s grand projects aren’t for the little people anymore. Now they’re for the elite.

So it's the perfect place for Kizlet’s operation. The prestigious tallest building in London, to be filled with high-paying businesses. The metaphor is straightforward: the grand prestige project, like the Olympics and the Jubilee from the same year, is literally eating people alive. Construction is consumption. It even consumes and annexes the protests against it. Its name comes from the complaints about its design - the fear that it would be “a shard of glass through the heart of historic London.” Of course, the objection, like the vision itself, is concerned with the abstract form of London, as opposed to with the lives of those within it. Heritage London or the modern corporate state. It’s all the same: an aesthetic to show off. A system for control.

And yet, architecturally, the building is designed to be invisible - to blend into the clouds around it. Control is always supposed to be invisible, after all. Just something in the air, like the wi-fi signal itself. The spectacle is always showing off and remaining invisible at the same time. As with any demo, it’s not just technology being shown off. It’s ideology. Dressed up, inevitably, in the rhetoric of upper middle class consumption. The Great Intelligence wants “healthy, free-range, human minds.”

 “The farmer tends his flock like a loving parent,” Kizlet says.

“The abbatoir is not a contradiction,” she insists.

“No one loves cattle more than Burger King.”

So the Doctor smashes into the side of the building and tears it all down.

20

For March Against the Mainstream Media Day


The Editor (apparently he edits the whole of human society) has uncovered Suki's true identity.  Instead of being just another inoffensive wannabe employee, she's actually...

"Eva Saint Julienne, last surviving member of the Freedom Fifteen. Hmm, self declared anarchist, is that right?"  His tone is patronising.  Non-mainstream political principles are a quaint and amusing affectation.

"The Freedom Foundation has been monitoring Satellite Five's transmissions," says Suki, pulling a gun on the smug bastard, "We have absolute proof that the facts are being manipulated. You are lying to the people."

"Ooo, I love it," he giggles, still in the same tone of amusement, as though he's listening to hilariously naff dialogue in a period drama, "Say it again."

"This whole system is corrupt. Who do you represent?"

The Editor is self-aware enough to know that, for all his power, he's a slave himself.

"I answer to the Editor in Chief.... If you don't mind, I'm going to have to refer this upwards."

Suki looks up, to see what the Editor is referring to.

"What is that?" she asks.

"Your boss. This has always been your boss, since the day you were born."


Lower down Satellite 5, the Doctor is quizzing Cathica, who has lived all her life on one level.

"I don't know anything," she says proudly.

"Don't you even ask?"

"Why would I?"

"You're a journalist."

"What's that got to do with anything?"

She genuinely doesn't understand him.  She doesn't know what is on the floors above her... except that on the executive level, the place she's been trained to yearn for, "the walls are made of gold".  She doesn't know why "immigration has tightened up".  Forced to guess, she flails around and suggests some vague notions, all based on the random 'shit happens' model, none of which point any blame at anybody powerful or any powerful structures.  And this is a member of society in which people are surrounded by 'News', in which they have holes carved into their own heads so information can be beamed directly into their brains.  For all the 'news' and 'information', they don't know what's going on or why.

"This society's the wrong shape..." says the Doctor.


When the Doctor and Rose reach the top floors, the walls aren't made of gold, they're made of frosted steel, and the workstations are manned by zombies - including Suki.

"I think she's dead," says the Doctor.

"She's working," says Rose.

In capitalism, mindless labour transforms you into the walking dead... or, in this case, the sitting at a desk dead.

"It may interest you to know," smarms the Editor, "that this is not the Fourth Great and Bountiful Human Empire. In fact, it's not actually human at all. It's merely a place where humans happen to live..."

There is an angry snarl from the ceiling.

"...yeah, sorry..." the Editor corrects himself, jumping at the growl of his boss, "It's a place where humans are allowed to live by kind permission of my client."

His client (he's a banker) is a gigantic slab of meat.  The whole system of Satellite 5 is set up to keep it cool and fresh, to stop it turning and rotting.  The Empire is system of air conditioning; designed to stop zombie meat from spoiling.  But the creature is also a huge, roaring, slavering mouth.  At the centre of the Empire, yet again, there is consumption, insatiable hunger... but this mouth also speaks.  It speaks its version of truth directly into the brains of the human race. 

"Create a climate of fear and it's easy to keep the borders closed,"explains the Editor, "It's just a matter of emphasis. The right word in the right broadcast repeated often enough can destabilise an economy, invent an enemy..." (it seems redundant, but I'll mention the word: Iraq) "... or change a vote."

"So all the people on Earth are like, slaves," says Rose, cutting straight to the quick as usual.

"Well, now, there's an interesting point..." returns the Editor, "Is a slave a slave if he doesn't know he's enslaved?"

"Yes," says the Doctor simply.  He won't debate the issue, despite the Editor's more-grown-up-than-thou goading.  If you just concede that it's even up for debate, the Editors of this world have already won.  It becomes Question Time.  It becomes safe.

Perhaps a slave is even more a slave if he just takes it for granted that he's free.

29

Midge walks into the Gym.  You get the sense that it's not the sort of place the old Midge would've visited.  The old Midge would've been scared of the self-defence crowd.

The new Midge is all swagger, in his shades and his shiny jacket.

"Waiting on the Sarge?" he asks the room full of silent, watching, bemused, singlet-and-sweatpants-wearing blokes.  "He's been held up. He asked me to have a little chat with you."

This is a lie.

"I learned a secret today. The secret of success. Thought I'd share it with you."

Midge has been learning all sorts of things.  He's been quarry in a quarry, hunted through a rocky wilderness on another world, stalked by carnivorous beasts.  He chose to survive at all costs.  He killed... not just to survive but for fun, for revenge, for a feeling of power that - one senses - is entirely new to him, a new experience in a stunted and powerless dead-end life.  Of course, in the process, he adopted the viewpoint of the beasts.  The logic of tooth and claw.  The logic of 'fuck you, I'm all right'.  The logic that makes you escape the lions by feeding them your friends.

"It's common sense, right?  It's just the way of the world, right?  Survival of the fittest."

And he's right, in a way.  It is the way of the world.  Everyone in his sleepy little home town, his pokey little corner of Thatcher's Britain, is obsessed with the survival of the fittest.  It has seeped all the way through society, into every nook and cranny.  It's in the shops, where Hale and Pace are scared of being driven out of business.  It's in the suburbs where the net curtains twitch.  It's in the Territorial Army training sessions where the Sarge says young men have to be taught to fight.  It's in the housing estate where Midge comes from.

It doesn't matter that it's one logic among many in nature, or that sometimes we see it in nature where it isn't because we often mistake mirrors for windows, or that it may be fitting for the beasts but applying it to people is vacuous and specious and destructive.  Truth is: for the purposes of the people who benefit from it, the more vacuous and specious and destructive it is, the better. 

"Get rid of the deadwood, let the wasters go to the wall, and the strong will inherit the earth. You and me."

Why do I suspect that some of the lads in this room used to bully Midge when they were at school with him?

"Do you hear what I'm saying?" he demands, furiously, enraged by their failure to respond to his glib soundbites, "Do you know what I'm talking about?"

He takes off his shades.  Beneath them, his eyes are the yellow, mindless eyes of an animal.  But that's what he chose.

The Master is there.  A stalking, diseased old man, seething with resentment and malice.  Through Midge, his slavering pet, he casts his hypnotic spell over the young men in the room.  They'll do as they're told.

When the Sarge gets back, he'll find plenty of fighters, as ruthless as he always said they should be, none of them unwilling to send the weak to the wall.  He should be proud.

37

A flying ship has plunged into a tall public building, causing panic.

Outside 10 Downing St., the media have been sat around for hours with their cameras trained on the closed black door, waiting for someone official to come out and hand them their version of events... which will, of course, be repeated verbatim as The Story. 

Luckily for these relentless seekers after truth, a politician comes out to give them a press conference.

"Our inspectors have searched the skies," he tells the journalists, "and they have found massive weapons of destruction, capable of being deployed in 45 seconds.  We face extinction unless we strike first."  He goes on to beg the UN for "an emergency resolution" which will give them permission to launch this pre-emptive strike.  His words are relayed on the TV news without comment... except by the Doctor and the other people watching.

As satire, this isn't subtle.  It's like a sledgehammer to crack a nut... because that's what the WMD story always was: an easily cracked nut.  But in a world in which barely anyone in the global media is capable of cracking nuts even with a nutcracker, maybe it's time to get out the sledgehammers... if only to make a sarcastic point.

As a satire of US/UK foreign policy in the wake of 9/11, it's crude... but then US/UK foreign policy in the wake of 9/11 was crude.  It didn't need to be anything else.  The media could be relied upon to discount the idea that respectable politicians in 'democracies' might have cynical or imperialistic motives.  They could be relied upon to train their cameras at closed doors.  They could be relied upon to accept the contents of press conferences as basic common sense, and then amplify those press conferences and call them The Story.

This is the aspect of RTD's satire that is so often overlooked: what we might call 'the Andrew Marr aspect'.  Marr did a cutesy little cameo in this episode, in which he stands outside 10 Dowing St., wittering about personalities and process, while the government within - which now comprises evil, sniggering babies hidden inside the fleshsuits of respectable, well-groomed, sincere professionals - plots mass murder in order to make a killing on fuel profits.  Again, about as subtle as the truth.

On April 9th 2003, as the invasion of Iraq proceeded, beginning a process which would lead to the takeover of Iraq's economy and perhaps more than a million Iraqi deaths, Andrew Marr stood outside 10 Downing St. and said this:

Well, I think this does one thing - it draws a line under what, before the war, had been a period of... well, a faint air of pointlessness, almost, was hanging over Downing Street. There were all these slightly tawdry arguments and scandals. That is now history. Mr Blair is well aware that all his critics out there in the party and beyond aren't going to thank him - because they're only human - for being right when they've been wrong. And he knows that there might be trouble ahead, as I said. But I think this is very, very important for him. It gives him a new freedom and a new self-confidence. He confronted many critics.

I don't think anybody after this is going to be able to say of Tony Blair that he's somebody who is driven by the drift of public opinion, or focus groups, or opinion polls. He took all of those on. He said that they would be able to take Baghdad without a bloodbath, and that in the end the Iraqis would be celebrating. And on both of those points he has been proved conclusively right. And it would be entirely ungracious, even for his critics, not to acknowledge that tonight he stands as a larger man and a stronger prime minister as a result.

46

The committee want to know about Vorg and Shirna's 'ritual'. 

Shirna tries to explain.  "We're entertainers."  She does a little dance.  "Understand?"

Pletrac regards her, his face blank.

"No," he says.

Vorg jumps in.

"Our purpose is to amuse, simply to amuse... nothing serious, nothing political."

Who is he talking to?  The committee?  The BBC?  Us?

In any case, the commitee retire - scandalised - into secret session.

"Amusement is prohibited," gabbles Kailk in cold panic, "it's purposeless."

"Zarb is considering lifting that restriction," says Pletrac.  Zarb is their leader.  "The latest thinking is that the latest outbreak of violence among the functionaries is caused by lack of amusement."

The 'functionaries' are their slaves.  (Sadly, they are portrayed as rudimentary and stupid.)

The committee members are caught between two possible choices, both of them extremely attractive to any ruling class: stop the 'functionaries' thinking about anything but their function, or amuse the 'functionaries' and thus keep their mind off the fact that they are slaves.

So it turns out that amusement is pretty serious and political after all.

Meanwhile, inside Vorg's silly, apolitical machine, white English imperialists complain about the idleness of the "madrasis".

"Won't have 'em on the plantation," says Major Daley.

Damp Little Ideas

Phwoar, look at the imperialist symbolism on that!

That bit in 'The Empty Child' when the Doctor talks about the "damp little island" standing alone against Hitler... when I first saw that I hurled a coat-hanger I happened to be holding at my television.

Okay, so: patriotism as progressive, yeah?  "Don't forget the Welfare State" or whatever he says.

Hmm.  You will unsurprised to learn that I have doubts.


1.

There is sometimes an unwarranted elision of the idea of 'patriotism' with the idea of 'loving one's home'.  This is an elision that many left-wingers have been guilty of, from Orwell to Billy Bragg.  But it confuses distinct concepts.  Moreover, it acquiesces in the ideological project of confusing these concepts, a project of immense utility to ruling classes going back to the very birth of the state.  Patriotism isn't just a cynical scheme of the rulers... though it is  that, amongst other things.  The point here is that it is an ideological construction and a form of social practice which cannot be simplistically overlaid upon personal affection for one's origins and surroundings.

I love London.  In order to get sentimentally misty-eyed about this, I'd have to forget that the city is a concentrated site of racial discrimination, police repression, social cleansing, centralised state bureaucracy, drastic inequality; that it's the hub of the organisation and enforcement (physical and ideological) of a neoliberal and neo-imperialist power, strewn with monuments to one of the most savagely aggressive colonial empires in modern history.  And on and on and on.

The love of one's home is one thing.  'Patriotism' and 'nationalism' are both, finally, ideological notions mapped-onto it.  They both immediately elide the flexible and contextual concept of 'home' with the political category of 'country'.  Even the term 'homeland' starts to do this.  We should never let ourselves become deaf to the shades of meaning imported by extra syllables. 

The idea that patriotism can be a 'way in' to a larger feeling of social involvement is similarly dubious.  To the extent that patriotism makes the individual feel connected to something larger than him-or-herself, the connection is a masochistic one.  It is the sublimation of oneself into a dominating framework, not the integration of oneself into a genuinely collective endeavour, whatever the rhetoric.

Besides, this sublime idea of ecstatic sublimation is not only unduly R/romantic, but is also so vague, and so applicable as a description of so many varied and mutually-exclusive things, that it loses all substantive content. It can refer to mysticism, chauvinism, trade union activity, identity politics, family, etc.  Richard Dawkins feels 'part of something greater than himself'; so does the Pope.  For the idea of personal integration into wider structures to be meaningful, it must be individuated... whereupon we start to see patriotism as a distinct phenomenon, quite separate from, say, social work or progressive activism.  The mooted connection collapses.

Ideas of 'national community' are largely ideological constructions which artificially smooth-out hugely contradictory social arrangements riddled with class antagonisms. The idea that 'the nation' is a space where we can work for 'the public good' is similarly panglossian. In societies divided into social groups of mutually-exclusive interests that are constantly in material conflict, is there such a thing as a 'public good'?  Any concept of 'public good' is always, consciously or unconsciously, an expression of class interest, because it always ends up being an assertion that the interests of one class are synonymous with the interests of all classes.  This is simply impossible, barring something extreme like the immediate threat of a massive nuclear explosion.  Given that even imminent environmental catastrophe has not been enough to convince the bourgeoisie that they share a common interest with humanity as a whole, it's fair to say that 'the public good' is a last, temporary and remote possibility... at best.

The heart of capitalism is the antagonism between the interests of those who produce surplus value and those who pocket it. That makes me very suspicious of 'the nation', which in its modern form, is an integral part of global capitalism. Patriotism, similarly, is an ideological buttress of this system. It is also intimately bound up with imperialism rather than just being an unfortunate side-effect.  Patriotism has always been linked to the competition of states.  Viz the rise of patriotism alongside the rise of the modern state in Early Modern Europe, viz the patriotism of Roman senators, etc, etc.


2.

Does patriotism ever do any good? Well, as far as I can see, only when it's bound up with other ideas that actually conflict with it (which happens, of course).  The great post-war national liberation struggles against European colonial domination, for example... something Orwell never lived to see, leading him to rather simplistically seperate patriotism (good) from nationalism (bad).  Back 'home', many crusading socialists who laid the groundwork for the Welfare State, many Chartists etc., stressed the common welfare of 'the people' of 'the nation'.  Left-wingers such as Michael Parenti still assert that they are the real patriots for opposing America's wars in favour of social programs to benefit ordinary Americans.  This is a widespread strategy.  But it rings hollow.

We can't put the credit for the British Welfare State onto 'Britain' because it was a product of currents within the British polity (i.e. the labour movement, socialism, reformism, and yes even aspects of liberalism, etc) which had to fight long and bitter struggles against other groups in order to achieve any such gains.  (Now, of course, patriotic we'reallinthistogetherness is used to justfiy the wanton dismantling of these gains... which only goes to demonstrate that the patriotic idea is, at best, a tool that can be used by both sides... rather like a blunt instrument that can be snatched back and forth between mugger and muggee... except that the mugger brought it with him and knows how to use it.)

That the NHS happened is no reason to be proud of 'the nation', no more than one person's beauty is reason to praise the attractiveness of everyone on the bus... especially if a significant portion of the people on the bus are actively trying to disfigure the pretty one with knives.  (This is without pushing the analogy further by pointing out that 'beauty' is subjective, means different things to different people, and that praising it is by no means obviously a proper thing to do.  Apart from anything else, praising the beauty of strangers on buses would usually be tantamount to sexual harassment.  Something of the same combination of self-serving motives, arrogant presumption and abuse of privilege - all lurking beneath ostensible nobility - is usually to be found in patriotic waffle.  Even putting this aside, patriotism is an inherently dubious idea, not just because it relies upon a spurious lumping together of hugely disparate groups with hugely disparate interests, not just because it is bound up with the ideological hegemony of powerful interests, but also because it relies upon lazy assumptions that certain things are always positive, always worthy of public pride.)

As ever, we end up with the problem of 'we'.  Is there any word more abused in political discourse than 'we'?  It is abused by all sides, by David Cameron and Tony Benn.  'We' bomb Pakistan.  'We' created the Welfare State.  'We' had an empire.  'We' produced Shakespeare.  What obfuscatory nonsense this rests on.  A lot of those national liberation struggles I mentioned were waged against my very own 'damp little island'.  That this island has wildlife, literature, theatre culture and BBC sci-fi shows that I love, as well as an inspiring history of working class resistance, doesn't make it any less an imperial culture soaked in blood.  If we go along with the essentially patriotic idea of the island as a community, the idea that the material nature of the island creates a meaningful 'national identity' or something like that, then we end up with the dubious idea that, for instance, 'we' unleashed terror and torture against the Mau Mau rebellion. This is the flipside of saying that 'we' fought Hitler.  If the first isn't fair or true, neither is the second.

The only way to efface this is to simply not mention one side or the other.  In the interests of the patriotic mainstream, we never mention the Mau Mau.  This is the time-honoured and constant technique of capitalist media culture, 'The Empty Child' not-excepted: what cannot be said within the confines of mainstream ideological discourse must be passed over in silence... and because it always is  passed over in silence, it stays forever out of the hegemonic mainstream discourse, that discourse being composed of only those notions which can be spoken about without any awareness of breaching the 'common sense' consensus.  A self-perpetuating echo chamber which endures because it has, in many ways, won a kind of Darwinian battle of methods for containing discourse in capitalist societies, winning out over both extreme censorship and over genuine freedom of speech.

To breach this silence is to become political or 'controversial' (while the political valences of those things which *can* be said are not noticed... they simply become the ideological equivalent of wallpaper).  We forget the imperial crimes of Britain and leave it at saying 'we fought Hitler'... but again, the spurious 'we' does its work.  'We' fought Hitler. My grandad, Beaverbrook, Churchill, RAB Butler, Edward and Mrs Simpson... all in it together. It's obvious what's wrong with that, I'd hope. Large swathes of the British ruling class were sympathetic to the fascists as bulwarks against communism.  Unlike Churchill, my grandad ended up with shrapnel in his body for the rest of his life.  It might be objected that 'we' often means 'we the people'... but, as I said, we mustn't be deaf to the syllables.  Even the ones that pointedly aren't there. And even if we are  talking about 'the people'... who are they?  How do you get to be part of 'the people'.  Our latterday English narodniks indulge in this kind of vagueness at best; at worst they indulge in fascist sentimentalism.  The EDL talk about 'the people'.  There's nothing in the term to stop them.  As Walter Benjamin realised, cultural artefacts should be unusable by fascists if they are to be relied upon.

On this subject... I flat-out disbelieve that 'national culture' entails respect for diversity, given the sustained assaults upon diversity that are utterly mainstream in British culture.  We're always hearing about how 'British values' (presumably what is meant are not those values which permit Britain to bomb the shit out of civillians in the Middle East) are under threat from multiculturalism, Islam, etc.  On the ground, some people cling to fictions like 'British fair play' as a way of expressing tolerance and democracy, but at least as often (far more often, I suspect) such notions are employed by xenophobes, ressentimental Tories, Dailymailistas, and those fascist sentimentalists already mentioned). I don't even think that the aggregation 'national culture' is actually possible.  Such aggregations are highly selective ideological fictions.  But even if it were true, it leaves us with the problem of respect for diversity *outside* the artificially/ideologically-constructed idea of 'the nation'. This is especially problematic when the nation being talked about/celebrated is also an empire, or a former empire, or run by 'humanitarian interventionists'.


3.

Of course, in the mainstream, all this isn't even a blip. In the near-constant drip-drip-drip of popular culture, Britain is a collective hero (a crusty John Bull, flawed and old-fashioned, but coming-out-swinging for freedom) fighting evil German imperialism. Our own imperialism is effaced, eternally.  In this context, the true history of the British ruling class' role in tolerating fascism, comforting fascism, enabling fascism, and finally fighting fascism only when their own imperial hegemony was threatened, must be left out because it strays out of the mainstream 'common sense' and into the 'political' or 'controversial'.  And so we end up with the Doctor praising the damp little island.  Somebody pass me a sick bag.

Another favourite example of mine is in Agatha Christie's Poirot , in an adaptation of 'The Clocks'.  Poirot is confronted by a German spy motivated by appeaser-sympathies who sneers at "weak, liberal England".  Poirot angrily retorts that "weak, liberal England" gave him a home when the Germans overran Belgium during the First World War.  What isn't mentioned, amidst all this moving drama about standing up to tyranny, is the teensy-weensy little business of Belgium's utterly murderous and racist imperial domination of the Congo, which King Leopold initiated in order to compete with the imperialism of other European powers such as Britain, and which was immensely profitable because of trade with Britain, amongst other countries.

'We' all know about German imperialism... well, about bits of it.  As has been said elsewhere, the real problem with German imperialism (the problem that makes it exceptionally memorable) is that they tried standard European methods of violent colonial landgrabbing, repression and racial mass-murder in mainland Europe rather than in Africa... after all, nobody in mainstream media-culture remembers the Kaiser's genocide of the Hereros and Namaquas in Namibia.  'We' also remember German imperialism for another reason: it is the imperialism that excuses, effaces, blots out our own.  The writer of the Poirot episode knew that Nazi Germany was bad, and that Britain 'stood against it'.  He knew Poirot was the hero, and so had to give voice to these uncontroversial notions.  He probably didn't know much about the Belgian Congo, about Mark Twain's King Leopold's Soliloquy , about Tintin in the Congo... after all, we don't get morality plays about how dreadful Belgian imperialism was rammed down our throats in constant TV/film dramas.  Nothing in it to make 'us' brits feel good about 'our' heroism. 

This is not, by itself, a huge problem within the confines of a TV show... and, indeed, The Empty Child is probably Moffat's best work precisely because it manages a certain scepticism towards the idea of an untroubled national community, albeit mediating its issues with this notion through the free-floating conduit of sexual repression. The last refuge of the scoundrel, however, leaves a nasty taste in my mouth when it makes its appearance in a quite good piece of work like 'Empty Child'.

We might ask why it was possible to do a WWII Who story in 1989 that did not embrace the concepts of patriotism or 'the nation' uncritically, but it no longer seemed possible in 2005. The degeneration of our 'national' political discourse since 1989 surely has a fair bit to do with it.  Maybe Moffat shouldn't shoulder all the blame.  Thanks be to many, but perhaps especially to Blair.