Shabcast 6

Shabcast 6 is now available to download or listen to here...

BUT HANG ON!

This Shabcast is an accompaniment to this month's edition of Pex Lives (download or listen here), which features the long-awaited encounter between Phil Sandifer (from off of TARDIS Eruditorum) and 'Vox Day' (from off of fascism and fucking up the Hugo Awards).

Kevin and James have kindly turned the June installment of Pex Lives over to the Sandifer/Vox Day interview, in which Phil quizzes Vox about his attitudes towards two texts, One Bright Star to Guide Them by John C. Wright (which Vox loves and Phil hates) and Iain M. Banks' The Wasp Factory (which Vox hates and Phil loves).

One Bright Star... slid into the Hugo noms on Vox Day's Rabid Puppies slate, by the way.  Hmm.

Shabcast 6 is something in the way of an 'afterparty' for Phil, in which Phil chats with myself, Kevin and James about the Vox Day interview.  Very much necessary listening.  And lots of fun.  After the serious business of the interview itself, the four of us kick back and have a chat which veers from the serious to the plain giggly.

This Shabcast also features frequent and vehement contributions by my elderly, crotchety and extremely loud-voiced bengal cat Quiz.  You won't be able to understand her, but I can... and she's telling me to kill.

You'll need to listen to both podcasts so, once again, here are the links:

Pex Lives/Eruditorum Press - the Sandifer/Day Interview

Shabcast 6 - The Sandifer/Day Interview Afterparty

(Also, here's a link to Shabcast 3 in which myself, Phil and Andrew Hickey chatted about the Hugo Awards fascist fuck-up fiasco not long after it hit.)

Emergency Anti-Fascist Shabcast 3 (Hugo Awards)

Shabcast 3 was supposed to be the second part of my discussion with Josh Marsfelder.  (Here's part 1 of that discussion.)  But events have intervened.  Now, Josh and I will carry on our talk in Shabcast 4 (hopefully out quite soon... so you'll probably get two Shabcasts this month, you lucky blighters).  Shabcast 3, meanwhile, has been devoted to an emergency, hastily-convened discussion between myself, Phil Sandifer and Andrew Hickey on the subject of the recent right-wing incursion upon the Hugo Awards.

Download Shabcast 3 here (thanks once again to the Pex Lives guys for donating their bandwidth).  We do a fair bit of fash-lambasting, and Andrew especially gives lots of background to this particular issue, but we also find time to roam and rove a bit around some related topics, such as modernism and postmodernism and geek privilege and GamerGate and "what is SFF anyway???".

Andrew and Phil have both blogged about the Hugos issue (which is why I asked them to speak to me about it), and here are some more links...

Here's Charlie Jane Anders at io9.

One of the movers behind this business is the utterly reprehensible fascist shithead and 'fantasy author' Theodore Beale (AKA 'Vox Day').  Here's his entry at Rational Wiki.  And here is every post ever about him (there's lots of them) at David Futrelle's excellent MRA-watch blog We Hunted the Mammoth, cataloguing the man's career of saying vile, nazi things.  This is the guy who created a slate that swept the nominations at the Hugos, thanks to him organising his tiny gaggle of reactionary scumfuck fans.  Read, boggle and weep.

(Once again, here is the link to download or listen to our shabcast.  Special thanks to Phil and Andrew for joining me to do it at such short notice.)

NOTE 7/4/15:  I originally included a link to a Bibliodaze article about last years' Hugos.  Thanks to Phil Sandifer for pointing out my stupid mistake.

Voluminous Description

Finally finished Kershaw's biography of Hitler.  I've been working on it - both volumes, unabridged - for years, picking it up for a bit, putting it down for a bit, etc.  (This is how I usually tackle mammoth reading projects.)

Can't help feeling underwhelmed.  I mean, I'm in absolute awe of the scholarship and knowledge and patience and effort involved in such a massive and detailed project... but it fails to live up to the hype from the middle-brow and/or reactionary reviewers - Paxman, Sereny, Hastings, Burleigh, etc - that is splashed so proudly all over the back covers.

Kershaw has produced something that is, at least for long stretches, narrative history.  The narrative history of one protagonist.  This would be fine if the protagonist possessed fascinating and complex (if vile) interiority.  Hitler, however, did not have anything of the kind.  He appears to have been a nonentity, a psychological nullity, a hazy cloud of pedestrian neuroses, a reflex machine made of clockwork prejudices, a lazy fool, a windbag, a crashing bore, a plodder, a cold and self-involved man, a man with little capacity for any passion other than fury, and little in the way of emotional complexity.  His reactions are utterly predictable once you've spent any time (so to speak) in his company.  This leads to endless paragraphs which begin with Kershaw saying something like "Hitler's reaction was predictable", followed by a re-run of something you've already read a hundred times.  Kerhsaw isn't to be blamed for Hitler's personality, but he is - perhaps - to be blamed for taking so much space repeatedly describing it in detail, despite the worthlessness and tedium of such a project.  Kershaw doesn't really have much to add when it comes to explaining how such a man could so entrance so many people.  He makes glancing references to national pride, demagoguery, etc - all the usual explanations - and then seems to get back to the recitation of events.

Kershaw almost apologizes in the preface to Volume One: Hubris, talking about how he has knowingly strayed from his background in social history.  He'd been plugging away at the social history of the Third Reich for years before writing this biography - a more 'popular' type of book - and often brings insights from social history to bear... especially in Vol.1 (which is by far the better book)... but it can sometimes feel like a series of asides in the dull story of a dull narcissist.  The asides can be genuinely fascinating.  Kershaw is good on the mechanics of how the Nazis were levered into power by cynical bourgeois politicians, for example.  The repeated motif of 'working towards the Fuhrer' is cleverly seized-upon by Kershaw to show how much Nazi policy originated at lower levels with ambitious lickspittles and careerists pandering to Hitler, and his perennial attraction to the most radical 'solution' to any problem.  In the second volume, the best bits are about how the haphazardly evolved structure of the Nazi state meant that, with more and more power invested in a man pathologically incapable of countenancing retreat under any circumstances, almost everyone except Hitler knew that the war was lost, yet were unable - often unwilling - to do anything about it.  Kershaw also takes pains to trash any suggestion that Hitler was ignorant of the fate of the Jews.  Hitler was plainly in that swamp of horror right up to his floppy fringe, even if he kept himself out of the detailed running of it (as he tended to keep himself out of the detailed running of anything).

But Kershaw never really connects any of this to an over-arching analysis.  He describes the composite parts of Nazi ideology, yet never explains why a reactionary - yet radical-sounding - scavenger ideology appeared in Germany in the post-WWI era.  He describes the garbled jargon of Nazism - which mixed anti-Semitism and ultra-Nationalism with apparent anti-capitalist rhetoric - but never gets into the fully capitalist nature of the regime, or the reasons why a movement with populist left-wing-sounding slogans could be so essential to saving German capitalism from revolution.  He details cynical bourgeois political manouvering, yet never goes into the ways Nazism formed a continuity - as well as a rupture - with both pre-war German imperialism and modern capitalism.  Imperialism itself appears as a pathological emanation rather than as a world system driven by economic competition; Germany becomes the site of a peculiarly destructive form of this pathology, with no deeper analysis offered.  Etc.

Of course, one risks falling into the trap of criticising an author for not sharing one's own ideological viewpoint... as though that's a flaw or fault, rather than a point of difference... but reading Kershaw is often - all too often - like reading a summary description (albeit a fantastically detailed one) rather than an analysis.  You need Walter Benjamin and Trotsky and Daniel Guerin and maybe even bits and bobs from Wilhelm Reich in your head as you read Kershaw.

Kershaw would doubtless disagree, but then part of the problem with him - in my opinion - is that his view is evidently that of the liberal who sees ideology itself as a primal evil, leading to extremism, leading to utopianism, leading to revolution, leading to disaster (though I should stress, one of the virtues of Vol.1 is Kershaw's detailed fact-based rejection of the idea that Hitler was voted in, or that he staged a popular revolution).  Such normative assumptions are the foundation of the entire book.  Ideology is something that extremists or revolutionaries have, not bourgeois states, mainstream 'democrats' or liberals.  Civilisation and barbarism are opposites (rather than, as a Marxist might say, different sides of the same coin) and the descent of Germany from the latter into the former is a unique puzzle.  If the respectable bourgeois politicians - and other such civilised people - helped or capitulated to Hitler, the answer to this apparent paradox must lie in 'opportunism', 'militarism', and other such extraneous pathologies... and, in this way, like so many liberal historians before him, he always circles back round to find a terrible conundrum that can only be described in detail and bewailed.

Also, he's not much of a prose stylist.  He's okay when he's not trying, but when he gets ambitious he also gets clunky.

I feel rather mean-spirited now, because Kershaw has assembled an amazing description, parts of which are genuinely insightful and useful, and all of which is based on sincere (and appealing) revulsion...

But it is, ultimately, only a very long description.

Snow Job

To me, the most striking thing about the racist Christmas card circulated by the British National Party (or the Keystone Stormtroopers, as I like to call them), is how utterly mainstream it looks.

There is clearly a racist message here because

a) it's being circulated by a racist party of fascist Nazi racist racists,

and

b) because of the oh-so-clever hidden subtext of the phrase 'white Christmas' that Cyclops/Fuhrer Dickibegyourpardonnick Griffin's reichschancellory full of political geniuses have cryptically woven into it.

But, as Metro have pointed out, it's an altered stock image, also used by thoroughly mainstream publications.

The Aryan child - pale and blonde and blue-eyed - is still the vanilla standard of beauty and innocence in the aesthetic system that capitalism calls Christmas.  Mainstream adverts and cards will engage in tokenism so as to simperingly hook in with sentimenal one-world platitudes, and sell to more than just white people, but non-white faces are still the variety sprinkled around the white standard.

It's not the young model's fault, of course.  She's just peddled her own image in a system of bodily commodification (as we all must peddle ourselves, one way or another, in order to get by) only to find her image purchased and used by a bunch of evil, twisted, shambolic fascist pisswizards.

(BTW, my derision may reflect the current state of the BNP, but I don't mean to dismiss them as an archaic or dormant threat.  They're still Nazi filth and they still hurt people.)

What's in a Name?

Why do some monsters have names while others don't?

The best place to start may be with the Cybermen.  After all, they went from having names to not having names.  Moreover, they did it more or less within one particular story, 'The Moonbase' (if I remember rightly, they had names in the script but these were not mentioned on screen).

The first thing to mention is that this is the story in which they went from being threatening because they are emotionless and logical to being threatening because they're one of those "terrible things" bred in those "corners of the universe" that "we" have to fight, when they were no longer fighting to save their planet but to steal ours, when they lost their human hands, when they started (so early!) saying things like "Clever, clever, clever!", i.e. when they became overtly and deliberately evil.  But there has to be more to it than that.  After all, vampires keep their names.  Loss of humanity and the acquisition of evil intent are not enough to strip them of their names.

Moreover, the Cybermen are not the only Doctor Who monsters to lose their names.  There's also the Daleks, who lost their names when they stopped being Kaleds (or Dals).

This loss of name is very important.  In the 'Moonbase' Cybermen, it seems more like the final stripping away of individual identity.  It works similarly for the Daleks as for the Cybermen, and has similar wider connotations when it comes to both these races.

(Notice, by the way, how blithely one talks about 'races' in this sci-fi context... a way of putting things that would be wholly unacceptable in Western liberal discourse nowadays if applied to, say, the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians... which isn't to say that the racialist patterns of thought don't still pertain in the attitudes of many, just that they are not usually openly stateable anymore.  This is an example of an entire cultural discourse - in this case, that of racialism - taking refuge in a 'pocket universe' within culture once the wider culture has largely rejected and banished it, or at least talk of it.  The discourse of racialism hides out, in disguise, in the SF 'Recycle Bin' once it has been guiltily deleted from the cultural 'Desktop'.  Sometimes such things even get deleted from the Recycle Bin but, as we know, they remain on the hard drive, waiting to be forensically recovered.) 

Veering back to the point... notice how the conversion of Lytton or Stengos into Cyberman or Dalek involves the loss of identity, thus the loss of name.  When Stengos sees his daughter, his first word is her name.  He remembers her name, and hence his own, which is what launches his psychological struggle against his Dalek conditioning.

The named/nameless distinction maps roughly onto the biological/robot-or-cyborg distinction, and both are really about individuality vs. the loss of individuality.  The Daleks and Cybermen act far more on a kind of groupthink than, say, the Silurians.  The mechanically-augmented Rutans too seem like a hive mind (the individual Rutan refers to itself as "we").  The robot or cyborg is the expression of the non-individual, the impersonal, the standardised.

At one end (the Left end, one could say), this horror of the artificial as bringing the destruction of individuality is connected with the capitalist productive mode, with mass-production, industrialism, alienation of humanity through commodification and the menacing autonomy of the product (i.e. the Autons as gothic emblems of commodity fetishism).  At the other end (the Right end) it is connected with collectivism (i.e. the groupthink mentioned above).  (By the way, this also seeps into the Left end, with the Nestenes being a group entity... though, to me, this seems connected to the way in which 'Spearhead from Space' recuperates its incipient critical convergence upon capitalism by introducing the Weird at the last moment as a scrambling effect, see here.)

The critique of collectivism implied by these monsters of conformity, mechanisation, organisation, groupthink, lack of individuality, etc., connects with the prevailing conception of collectivism as being inextricably bound up with authoritarian statist government, an absence of formal democracy, an official political ideology, regimentation of the individual, the destruction of privacy, the imposition of conformity, etc.  This conception lumps together those two bogus-collectivisms, fascism and communism, in the manner of the influential theory of totalitarianism.

The Daleks and Cybermen are the two great monsters of Doctor Who, a product of the liberal capitalist culture industry in the aftermath of World War II and during the Cold War, and they actualise this set of notions almost too specifically.  Akin but seperate and ultimately opposed, not from moral imbalance but because of their essential similarity, both emerging from differentiated but kindred forms of anti-individualist state control, the Daleks and Cybermen are differentiated but kindred forms of the dehumanised, collectivised, technologised totalitarian robot/cyborg monster. They are the Nazi and Soviet forms of the same totalitarian species.

I guess this is the place for the inevitable 'Cyberia' pun, yes?

The Daleks emerge from a fascist collectivism: the regimented, indoctrinated, Nazi-esque Kaleds in 'Genesis of the Daleks'.  The Cybermen eventually find their own genesis (courtesy of Big Finish) in a snowbound revolutionary emergency government: the policed and surveilled Mondasians in 'Spare Parts' live in a mirror version of the '50s (the high point of the Cold War), ruled by the "champions of the proletariat" who are suppressing private enterprise.  Even the critical nature of life on Mondas, and the Cybermen's onscreen tendency to find themselves fighting for survival as well as attacking people, seems like a haunting half-memory of the fact that the Soviet regime was under external attack for much of its existence (the Russian Civil War and, later, Operation Barbarossa).  The two 'big' monsters of the show seem like echoes of the two great 'cousin' totalitarianisms (as they were seen by people like Carl Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski).

In this light, the confused similarity and interpenetration of these monsters seems as salient as the fact that, until long after the end of the Cold War, they never met.  The Daleks and Cybermen are both races of robots with flesh hidden within them, i.e. bodies augmented and changed by technology.  They are both said, at various times, to be emotionless, dependant upon rationality and logic.  Both have absolute leaders which function like centralised brains (the Cyber Controller, the Dalek Emperor... with Davros, all his Hitlerian attributes notwithstanding, something of an outlier... though, of course, he eventually merges with the Emperor in 'Remembrance of the Daleks').  They both recruit by forcible conversion.  They both employ (body snatcher paranoia style) covert infiltration, brainwashing, mind control and/or replacement of people by 'duplicates'.  They are both aggressive imperialisms that attack secure, human (implicitly Western) structures (the Moobase, the colony on Vulcan, etc.).  They are both defined by regimentation, conformity, unanimity, groupthink, ideology.  They both have absolute political philosophies that motivate them: racial chauvinism (Nazism) in the case of the Daleks, ruthless utopian utilitarianism (Communism, as it was percieved) for the Cybermen... so it's not hard to see the differentiation amidst the similarities, or their referants.  Both alter the mind of the human as conversion takes place (c.f. Lytton and Stengos).  The Daleks are even said to be played "indoctrination tapes" in their infancy according to Ben Aaronovitch's novelisation of 'Remembrance of the Daleks'.

It's surely not hard to see how all this echoes the perceived features of 'totalitarianism': regimentation, conformity, thought control, leader cults, ruthlessly mechanised military utilitarianism, state ideologies, the destruction of individuality and personal freedom, insidious encroachment upon the freedom of others, etc.

So, Daleks and Cybermen are different iterations of the same thing, or at least of intimately similar things.  (Which isn't to say that either always mean exactly the same thing from story to story over their long histories.)  And yet they never meet.  They remain divided from each other by an absence, a gap, a field of silence.  There is a peculiar frisson whenever this silent field is almost breached, as when both races are mentioned and shown in succession at the end of 'The War Games', or when a Cyberman briefly appears on Vorg's Miniscope shortly after he mentions Daleks.

(Interesting, by the way, that near-breachings of the silence occur in those two stories.  The former is about humans as fodder for regimented imperialism.  The latter features a grey-faced, bureaucratic, statist nomenklatura.  And, once again, neither story will permit a qualitative distinction between Right and Left totalitarianism.  The War Lords could be Soviets as much as Nazis.  The Inter-Minorans look like bigoted slavers as well as censorious commissars.  And, being very interesting stories, both can also be read as harbouring some implied criticisms of British imperialist behaviour.)

Of course, when they eventually do meet, the Daleks and the Cybermen come into immediate conflict... just as Nazi Germany and Stalin's Russia ended up at war.  There is even a moment before this happens when the Cybermen moot the idea of a pact - "Together we could convert the universe!" - mirroring the Nazi-Soviet deal often referred to as the 'midnight of the century' (though it is less widely recalled that the Russian willingness to deal with the Nazis stemmed at least partly from a desire to protect themselves from attack by a fascist power that the European democracies were appeasing... interesting, isn't it, that Molotov-Ribbentrop is always called a "pact" while Munich was an "agreement".) 

The story that best expresses the widespread cultural notion of totalitarianism, with its lack of qualitative differentiation between fascism and communism, is 'Inferno', which - irritatingly - has biological monsters (albeit ones which are inextricably linked to machinery because of their origins).  On the whole, however, the totalitarian idea is expressed in Doctor Who via the robot/cyborg monster that has lost its name, and hence its individuality.

Daleks and Cybermen are embedded in the basic assumption - implicit in 'totalitarian theory' and its colloquial and/or revisionist variants - that political forms other than bourgeois liberal capitalist democracy are pretty-much-inherently tyrannical and destructive to the freedom of the individual (the implicit flipside being that liberal capitalism offers the only opposite path and that all challenges to it run the inevitable course into tyranny).

The basic circular chain of associations that mirrors this within the semiotic system of Doctor Who runs like this: robotic/cybernetic = anti-individualist = totalitarian = robotic/cybernetic.  In a superb example of the promulgation of ideology through the culture industries, freedom is thus assumed and asserted to be the freedom of the individual, apparently exemplified by the fundamentally Western 'humanity' of, say, the crew of the Wheel.

Notice how hierarchy, rank, patriarchy, white supremacy, etc., are all essentially supported via the implicit comparison with the featureless Cybermen, i.e. the comparison of the nameless and un-individual with human diversity.  The liberal celebration of gendered, multi-racial and multi-cultural humanity is bounded tacitly by the fact that the white guys remain in charge, high-status professional females remain adjuncts and romantic interests, Oirish people remain comically pugilistic and loquacious, other ethnicities stay down the pecking order and act in stereotypical ways even as they enjoy their place in a fundamentally Westernised (i.e. business-like) power structure, etc.  The humans, with their hierarchical and utilitarian military/scientific structure of position and value, weather the internal challenge of the unstable commander and emerge with their system bolstered by contact with the totalitarian cyborgs.  And bear in mind... I could've used 'Tomb of the Cybermen' to illustrate how this works, so I'm actually pulling my punches here.  The point being that there's no need for a story to be as offensively reactionary as 'Tomb' for it to be promulgating capitalist ideology.  It works with stories that seem to celebrate ethnic diversity (though, to be fair to 'Wheel', it's got nothing on Star Trek when it comes to pushing a bourgeois ideological agenda via lip-service to liberal multi-ethnic casting.)

Between them, the Daleks and Cybermen represent the two flavours of 'totalitarianism' that menaced the free West (i.e. the liberal capitalist order), their innermost and most essential evil being the suppression of individual liberty.

Individualism and liberty are cornerstones of bourgeois democratic ideology.  They are the quasi-truths upon which capitalism has based its prevailing 'optimum mode', i.e. electoral democracy (which leaves the basic class structure intact and untouched by genuine popular sovereignty), property rights, free trade (at least in appearance), a free media (at least in appearance) and the ethical ideology of human rights.  While undoubtedly a great advance on feudalism, or upon capitalism as it originally developed, or upon capitalism as it is still practiced sucessfully in many parts of the world, the above features of the Western capitalist order are all based on a fundamentally 'market' idea of social life, with all of us confronting each other as competitors and dealers, seeking our greatest advantage, freedom, etc.  The individual as the focus of human life (rather than the social) is an expression of bourgeois property relations but presents itself (partly truthfully) as an ideal of freedom, the fruit of progress.  (Of course, such freedom as exists is largely the result not of 'History' or 'Progress' or enlightened leaders or the free market, but of organised popular struggle... but that truth is largely suppressed.)

None of this is to say, by the way, that individual freedom is actually 'bad' or unimportant... on the contrary.  But the best expression of how our culture really views individual freedom is the fact that corporations are legally classed as people, thus entitling them to many personal liberties, while real people are usually far more circumscribed and punished by the law than the corporations they work for or buy from.  As usual, capitalism's boasts are lies.  It is actually a very bad system when it comes to the individual liberty of most people (who have to spend most of their lives working for others just in order to live) while there is nothing inherently destructive of personal freedom and individual liberty in the idea of social collectivism.

Nevertheless, these ideas are cornerstones of liberal capitalist democratic ideology in the 20th and 21st centuries.  Capitalism IS democracy and democracy IS an aggregation of individual liberty... meanwhile, collectivism is inherently undemocratic and will always destroy personal freedom and self-determination.  To be fair, the great self-trumpeting collectivisms of the 20th century were destructive of personal freedom in many ways, but the idea that they were 'socialist' may be evaluated by remembering that 'Nazi' actually stands for 'National Socialist', and the Nazis' favourite early slogan was "Death to Marxism", their central idea being the Bolshevism was a Jewish conspiracy to conquer the world. To think that their (or Stalin's) authoritarian statisms were collectivist or socialist is to fundamentally misunderstand collectivism or socialism... indeed, it is to misunderstand these ideas in the exactly the way that Hitler and other capitalist leaders wanted people to misunderstand them.  The Nazi hatred of Bolshevism, the American anti-communist rhetoric, the banalities and misprisions of 'totalitarian theory', the hollow impostures of the nouveau philosophes and the revisionist historians of revolution, the tendency of the modern U.S. looney-right to call Barack Obama a socialist, the assumption of those in favour of humanitarian interventionism that - unlike Ba'athist bullets - bombs from liberal capitalist countries are somehow humane, the widespread feeling (evinced in 'Inferno' for example) that fascism and communism were so alike in their opposition to individual freedom as not to need differentiation.... these are all (amongst other things) expressions of that over-arching ideological notion: the liberty of the individual is essential to capitalism (which is thus inherently democratic) and inimical to collectivism (which is thus inherently totalitarian).

That, essentially, is what's in a name: the individual human right... to live under capitalism forever.

*

NOTE: There's a lot more to be said about this.  The Cybermen, for example, may stem partly from reactionary conceptions of totalitarianism as the only possible alternative to capitalism... but they also sometimes work as an unflatteringly honest mirror to capitalism.  They are, initially, the dark side of Wilson's "white heat of technology".  As Simon Kinnear once pointed out in Doctor Who Magazine, they can sometimes look and act and think like the psychopathic corporation... indeed, this thought leads to all sorts of other issues.  The extent to which corporations work like authoritarian states, for instance.  It's no accident that the Cybermen have frequently meshed with and emerged from capitalist concerns, from International Electromatics to Cybus Industries.  But going into this would mean going into how the Cybermen (and, incidentally, their cousins the Borg) reflect the ethic of the self-interested rational actor of the mythology of mainstream economics: the unicorn-like utility maximiser of the theoretical equibalanced market, always perfectly well-informed and logical... and, in some versions, morally obliged to be utterly ruthless.  It would also involve going into the way that Communism (as it actually existed after the decline of real revolution) was actualy a form of bureaucratic state capitalism.  All of which would take us well away from our brief for this post.  But don't worry, I'm obsessive enough to write it one day.  Meanwhile... happy new year!

Victory of the Icon 3

I have a massive, endlessly-lengthening list of books, old and new, that I want to get around to reading.  Donny Gluckstein's new book A People's History of the Second World War just went straight in near the top of the list.

Gluckstein's argument seems to be that WWII was actually two wars, fought in parallel.  One was an imperialist squabble between established empires and up-and-coming imperialist nations that were set to clash with them.  Britain, France, Russia and America (which was already a continental empire and was ready to expand globally) found themselves violently competing for hegemony with Germany, Italy and Japan.  Running beneath this conflict there was a people's war against fascism (the form taken by the new empires) underpinned by dreams of freedom and democracy.  The imperialists running the first war knew that had to appeal to the priorities of the people fighting the second war in order to enlist their support, hence the democratic rhetoric.

I mention this here because Gluckstein has done an interview for New Left Project, in which he has some things to say about Winston Churchill, the subject of my irregular 'Victory of the Icon' posts.

Churchill was always very clear that his mission in the war was to defend the British empire, not promote the interests of ordinary citizens. He was not ideologically committed to destroy fascism. He made statements such as the following when he met Mussolini in 1927: ‘If I had been an Italian I would have been with you from the start in your struggle against the bestial passions of Leninism’. During the Spanish civil war he backed Franco (whose survival depended on Hitler and Mussolini’s massive material support), and afterwards he defended Franco when some argued that his regime was the unfinished business of WWII. Churchill also backed the Japanese invasion of Manchuria before the war.

During the war itself Churchill was very resistant to the notion of opening a second front (a landing in France) to relieve pressure on Russia. The focus of British strategy until 1944 was to avoid confronting the Nazis in Europe, and instead defend the imperial routes. That is why the main fighting was in North Africa (Tobruk, El Alamein). When the tide turned on the Eastern Front and it looked like Russia would sweep across Europe Churchill suddenly threw his efforts into the D-Day landings.

For ordinary British people the war had a very different meaning. It was a war against Nazism and fascism, for liberation and democracy. Churchill was fighting to defend the status quo of 1939 which, at home, had meant mass unemployment, appalling poverty and deprivation. The majority were not going to put their lives at risk to continue with that. Nor would they be duped with the sort of propaganda issued in the First World War (such as Lord Kitchener’s famous poster – ‘Your country needs you!’) They had seen what imperialist war meant.

And:

Churchill was an important figure in the sense that the British ruling class was divided about what to do with Germany. One wing thought that there could be a division of spoils – let Hitler have the Continent in return for leaving Britain to its overseas empire. They were therefore in favour of appeasement during the 1930s and for compromise once the war had begun.

Churchill rejected this scenario. He considered, probably rightly, that Hitler would not be content with such a division and that Germany would inevitably be a threat to British imperial interests. He was therefore absolutely determined to see the war through to its conclusion and win. This is the source of his inspirational rhetoric which captivated so many. However, as explained above – he was a great imperialist war leader, not a great leader of the war against fascism.

Churchill’s war record is shocking in many ways. He was responsible for the Bengal famine which cost some 3 million lives because he insisted on forcing India to raise a huge army and blocked efforts to supply food when the demands of that army caused starvation. Rather than open up a second front in Europe he gave himself an alibi by backing area bombing of Germany. This involved the indiscriminate bombing of German civilians which continued in spite of US advice that targeted bombing would be more militarily effective. Even after the D-Day landings, when it was clear the land war would be the means by which Nazism would be destroyed, he backed Bomber Command which was working through its list of city targets, the most notorious being Dredsen.

Winston, you old devil.  Is that a wicked twinkle in your eye, you cheeky chap? 

Still, it's okay.  Gatiss didn't portray him as whiter than white.  He tries to steal the TARDIS keys, after all.  The naughty man.  That'll neutralise any tendency there might otherwise be in the episode to indoctrinate children into the unquestioning admiration of a blood-splattered old reactionary imperialist.

Beyond Redemption

I think there is something inherently dodgy about the notion of 'redemptive readings'.  It seems to imply a determination to look at a text in a positive way that is at odds with what could be called 'proper scepticism'.  This objection is itself open to the objection that it's silly to approach a piece of entertainment product with 'scepticism', especially when it is part of a series of which one is supposedly a fan.  But, this loses sight of context and agency.  There are various ways of choosing to watch the same thing.  When you sit down to enjoy an episode of a show you like, for fun, you're a bit odd if you're not expecting, hoping and trying to like it.  When you're watching it with the express intention of analysing it and then writing about what it means, proper scepticism becomes appropriate.  Trying to like what you're watching becomes a somewhat iffy strategy in that context.  Besides, doesn't the necessity of trying to find ways of praising what you're analysing tell us something in itself?  This muddle also loses sight of the distinctions that are always to be found within the concept of enjoyment, distinctions that are all too often spuriously aggregated.  You don't have to think something is politically or morally correct in order to like it (though, in practice...).  No more do you need to think that something is aesthetically sophisticated or beautiful in order to relish its aesthetic.  Conversely, you may dislike a beautifully made piece of art which offers praiseworthy political or moral analyses.  Or you may take enjoyment from the act of hostile reading itself.  I, for instance, very much enjoy hating and criticising certain things, and I don't see anything wrong with this.

This is by way of a preamble to talking about 'The Two Doctors', which has been subject to an attempted rehabilitation from the charge of being reactionary on the issue of race.  The re-evaluation of the story has been pioneered and best expressed by Robert Shearman in About Time 6.  The essence of his argument is that the Androgums are a comment on the concept of the monster as employed by Doctor Who.  They are characterised as generic monsters but it is disarming when people treat them as such because they do not look like monsters.  They are treated the same way as the Sontarans - all of them racially evil and hateful - but, because they do not have potato-heads or eye-stalks, this poses a problem.  We notice the inappropriateness, even tastelessness, of generalising about the evil of an entire race when they look like us.  We don't blink when the Doctor describes the entire Jagaroth race as vicious and callous but it bothers us when the same racial villainy is implied about aliens who look human.  Philip Sandifer recently summarized and expanded the case admirably, here.

I'm enormously tempted by this reading... and, maybe, if I'd approached 'The Two Doctors' with the express intention of finding a 'redemptive reading', I would've happily seized upon it.  Apart from allowing me to enjoy 'The Two Doctors' (a story that, in many respects, I rather like) with a lighter heart, it would also address an issue that I have criticised in Who in the past.  The issue is best demonstrated in 'Resurrection of the Daleks', in which the Doctor appears blithe about slaughtering Daleks using biological weapons but cannot make himself gun down Davros because he's a humanoid (just about).

However, with all due respect to Shearman (which is a lot of respect), I think the 'redemptive' argument for 'Two Doctors' misses something very important: the Androgums are - in a way - made-up and costumed as monsters.

They are the jumbled ethnic 'other' as monster.

They are clothed in garb that is inflected with the 'ethnic' and/or 'exotic' and are given physical characteristics - red hair, heavy features, florid complexion, warts, etc - that directly connect with very old stereotypes that have been used against several groups to indicate lowness from birth (in very much the same way that David Lynch's movie version of Dune had recently used similiar characteristics to represent the Harkonnen kinship group as biologically evil).

To be sure, the Androgums are not consistently reminiscent of any particular group of stereotypes.  To a certain extent they chime with stereotypes about Scottish people (think, for instance, of the roughly contemporaneous MacAdder from Blackadder the Third... a violent, lecherous, orange-faced, ginger-haired lunatic).

Similar stereotypes - red hair, violence, dissoluteness, primitiveness - have long been used in the representation of the Irish and Irish culture.  There is also something reminiscent of the Arab in the Shockeye mix.  He seems to be wearing a hat that is somewhere between a turban and a 'Tam O'Shanter'.  He wears harem pants under a decoration hanging from his belt that is halfway between a plaid (it's hard not to see an echo in Jamie's tartans) and a rug.  He has a curved, scimitar-like blade.

It will be noticed that all these stereotypes suggested by Shockeye represent groups - the Scots, the Irish, Arabs, etc - who have historically been victims of English/British imperialism.  As usual, the imperial culture derides, demonizes, vilifies and appropriates the culture of its victims.

Above all, however, if the Androgums recall any set of stereotypes, it is stereotypes about Jews... very, very old ones at that.

It's hard for us to imagine now but, when depicted on the Renaissance stage, Jewish villains like Shylock and Barabas would probably have worn ginger fright-wigs and huge comedy noses (which is disconcerting in the light of so much effort by more modern actors and producers to emphasize the complex and sympathetic aspects of Shylock). Here is some background, courtesy of Peter Ackroyd in his book Shakespeare - The Biography:

...we must never forget the stridency of the Elizabethan theatre.  Shylock would have been played with a red wig and bottle nose.  The play is, after all, entitled the 'comicall History'. 

... 

...the stage image of Jews essentially came from the mystery plays, where they were pilloried as the tormentors of Jesus.  In the dramatic cycle Herod was played in a red wig, for example; it represents the origin of the clown in pantomime.  It was the costume of Barabas in Marlowe's The Jew of Malta.  It is, in effect, the image with which Shakespeare was obliged to work.

Shakespeare refers somewhere to Judas as red-headed, something often found in Italian and Spanish art.  Judas was always painted as 'more Jewish' than the other apostles, for obvious reasons.  As Michaelangelo asks the Pope in that Monty Python sketch: "Are they too Jewish?  I made Judas the most Jewish."

Even hundreds of years after Shylock, Dickens was obsessing over "red-headed and red-whiskered Jews" in Sketches by Boz and The Pickwick Papers.  Here he is in Oliver Twist, likening Fagin to the Devil by emphasizing his red beard and toasting fork:

In a frying-pan, which was on the fire, and which was secured to the mantel-shelf by a string, some sausages were cooking; and standing over them, with a toasting-fork in his hand, was a very old shrivelled Jew, whose villanous-looking and repulsive face was obscured by a quantity of matted red hair. He was dressed in a greasy flannel gown, with his throat bare; and seemed to be dividing his attention between the frying-pan and a clothes-horse, over which a great number of silk handkerchiefs were hanging. 

Interesting that Fagin is cooking meat the first time we see him.  Also interesting that Shockeye too has a fondness for silk.

Shockeye - which, I can't help notice, doesn't exactly sound unlike Shylock - is greedy, gluttonous and cannibalistic, recalling many anti-Semitic stereotypes including the ancient blood libel, which asserted that Jews would use the blood of murdered Christian children to make their unleavened bread.  (It might be objected that since Shockeye and his victims are supposedly of different races, he cannot be called a cannibal, but this concentrates too much on the sci-fi rationales of the text and ignores the visual impact of a person preparing another person for butchery and consumption.)  Shockeye menaces Peri in a way that is half cannibalistic and half lecherous, hardly a million miles away from endless anti-Semitic tropes about Jewish men preying upon young gentile girls.

It's also worth noting that, in the story, the Androgums are shown to be playing both the Sontarans and the Third Zoners off against each other in an attempt to seize power themselves... exactly the kind of triangulating conspiratorial machiavellianism imagined by the forger of the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, or by the Nazis, who fantasized that 'the Jews' were behind both capitalism and communism.

In light of all this, it is deeply unfortunate - to say the least! - that the Doctor should end up killing Shockeye with, of all things, cyanide gas.

I'm not saying that Bob Holmes, or the make-up designer, or anybody involved was being deliberately anti-Semitic (or, for that matter, anti-Scots, anti-Irish, anti-Arab, etc). I don't believe that.  But the visual references got in there anyway.  These stereotypes - the red hair, the coarse features, the 'ethnic' trappings, the scimitar, the libels of blood lust and cannibalism, etc. - are so well established as signifiers for primitivism and inferiority in the cultural discourse of Western imperialist societies that they get rehearsed unconsciously, unthinkingly, naturally, as a matter of course.

Mind you, I do sometimes wonder if Holmes was deliberately drawing on the Jewish villains of the Renaissance stage.  Shockeye seems to have been meant to work rather like Shylock or Barabas, i.e. in the way Shakespeare and Marlowe were starting to re-use the old theatrical character known as the Vice. They both recoded the Vice - the stage embodiment of a vice or vices - in the figure of a villainous Jew... who nonetheless acted as a kind of dramatic highlighter, showing up the often less than pure moral condition of the gentiles around him. Shylock conforms to stereotypes, but his plight also shows up the materialism, hypocrisy and prejudice of the Venetians. Barabas is less complex, but even his outrageous villainy can be read as a satire of the emergent capitalist culture of the Christians around him.  Something similar is at work in Shockeye and, to this extent, I think Shearman and others have a point when they identify the Androgums as an attempt to interrogate some of the implicit values of Doctor Who.  Shockeye's behaviour seems - at least, at first - to show up the hypocrisy of the Third Zoners, the Sontarans, the Time Lords... not to mention the prejudice of the Doctor. Holmes really does seem to be doing this deliberately. Otherwise why go to all the trouble of having a scene where the Doctor is upbraided for not being progressive in his attitudes, right after he makes an odious remark comparing a minority to monkeys!

The Androgums seem to have been deliberately crafted as an exaggerated reflection of those they satirise. They are considered primitive yet consider humans primitives. They are power-hungry, as are the Sontarans. They assume the right to travel in time, as do the Time Lords. They are very much like Shylock and Barabas. They satirise a culture that despises them by sharing its values and turning them against those who have oppressed them.

Thing is... the production fumbles it. And fumbles it badly. The scene where Chessene can't help lapping up the gore shows that she's inherently, biologically, inescapably low and savage... thus justifying all the prejudice shown against the Androgums, removing any chance that they might represent a condemnation of slavery as lowering and degrading the slaves, announcing (in the, so to speak, authorial voice) that they deserve to be enslaved and/or killed, and so disspating any satire of the Third Zoners, Sontarans, Time Lords, etc.  So the Androgums end up working very much like Barabas (we're never meant to be in any doubt that he's worse than the Christians) and less like Shylock (who remains, until the end, irresolvably ambiguous).  After all, in 'The Two Doctors' even those 'generic' Sontarans are shown to be concerned with honour and to seethe at accusations of cowardice... noble attributes entirely lacking in the crude, philistine Androgums.

The story even compromises its own deliberate aim to poke at the meat industry. If the Androgums are meant to represent that aspect of humanity that is callous about farming and killing animals for food (which they clearly are - just look at the scene where Shockeye is 'tenderising' Jamie and saying that "primitive creatures don't feel pain the way we do") then this also is compromised by Dastari's specific comparison, when he says "and he calls humans primitives!" So even we heartless, meat-munching, human carnivores are better than Shockeye.

Moreover, the idea that, as generic monsters in human shape, the Androgums represent a rebuke to the assumptions of the programme is simply untenable.  The more one compares them to such generic monsters, the less of a fit they appear.  They are not generic monsters in their behaviour or outlook any more than they are in appearance.

Okay, since Grendel (no, the other one) many monsters have wanted to eat people... but this has hardly been a major preoccupation of monsters in Doctor Who, which has largely drawn its quintessential ideas of the monstrous from the nightmares of modernity (fascism, biological racism, industrial genocide, technological warfare, nukes, the autonomous product, etc).  And the Androgums are not just carnivores that prey on humans like, say, sirens or werewolves or zombies.  They are gourmands (their very species name is an anagram of this word), obsessed with food generally.  Since when has an obsession with culinary pleasure been a trait of the 'generic' monster?

Moreover, the Androgums are more even than just amoral gourmands.  They are ideologically devoted to the maxim that "the gratification of pleasure is the sole motive of action".  They are remorseless nihilists; parodic hedonists.  They cleave to the definition of the ethics of Satanism offered by Aleister Crowley: "do as thou wilt shall be the whole of the law".  They are, in a sense, Satanists.

Added to this is their status as slaves.  Since when has the 'generic' Who monster been a slave?  Since when has the 'generic' Who monster been generally considered, by all other characters, to be inherently inferior and in need of genetic enhancement?  On the contrary, the more usual strategy in Who is for the villainous monsters to be the ones that think that way about everybody else... which, as noted above, would mean that 'Two Doctors' pulls off a nice bit of satire by ultimately painting the Third Zoners and the Doctor as akin to Daleks, were it not for the fact that the text backs them in their assumptions about the Androgums!  It'd be like if the Thals turned out to be evil at the end of 'The Daleks', or all Silurians were shown to conform to Miss Dawson's prejudices, or the Mutts in 'The Mutants' really were mindless and infectious brutes.

Jews, on the other hand, were a bullied, subjected, exploited and constrained people for centuries in Christian Europe.  And, at the same time, centuries of official Christian church-sanctioned anti-Semitism in Europe equated the Jews, either directly or as allies, with the Devil - as did Dickens (see above).  The Androgums are far from a perfect fit with anti-Semitic stereotypes... but they fit them much better than they fit the behaviour patterns of the standard Doctor Who monster.

In order to interpret the Androgums as a satire on the concept of the monstrous in Who, one must also - for instance - see the Celestial Toymaker the same way.  One must be able to see him simply as a humanoid who displays the villainy of a monster, thus satirising the usual assumption that a monster looks monstrous.  However, as has been irrefutably argued by Philip Sandifer (here), the Celestial Toymaker carries unavoidable connotations of China and the Chinese.  I don't think you can argue that he is the racial 'other' construed as monstrous without also having to concede the same about the Androgums (with the caveat that they are far less straightforwardly about one specific group).

Most damaging to the Shearman/Sandifer reading is the scene where, upon her death, Chessene reverts back to her 'true' form, the original self from which she was unable to escape even with those genetic upgrades.  Her racial biology trapped her into villainy.  This is not only the crudest kind of biological determinism, it also destroys the idea that the Androgum's human appearance makes their status and treatment into a mordant comment on Doctor Who's usual way of demarcating the evil by way of alien ugliness.  Chessene's 'true' and underlying alien ugliness reasserts itself at the end.  Her evil inner core is thus represented by the red eyebrows, the heavy features, the warts... just as it was earlier represented by her inability to resist tasting the sacrificial blood of someone outside her own race.  Even if you don't buy the connections I've drawn between these features and anti-Semitic stereotypes, it remains impossible to argue that the Androgums are not visually represented as monstrous.  If anything, their monstrousness is more clearly and deliberately visually represented than that of the 'generic' monsters they fail to resemble.  Chessene is the test case.  When she looks more or less exactly the same as Dastari, she is treated more or less exactly the same.  Her false 'human' appearance (apparently good) is explicitly contrasted with her 'true' Androgum appearance (bad).  The moment of her reversion from the former to the latter is also the moment when her irredeemable monstrosity is finally revealed.

In this moment, her racial 'otherness' is her evil.

Amnesia Day

I don't wear a poppy.  Laurie Penny has written a very good article, expressing many views that I agree with, here.  I don't engage in the silence at 11 o'clock either.  I know that most ordinary people who do observe the silence and wear the poppy do so for sincere reasons.  But I myself cannot stomach it.  I think my reasons are less intellectual and more to do with the sheer, physical revulsion I feel at the hypocrisy on display in images like this:

What's the collective noun for warmongers?  A troop?  A collateral?  Well, whatever.  There they stand, doing their best sincere and sombre faces.  All guilty of sending people off to fight and kill and die and maim and be maimed in order to protect the interests of the American empire and neoliberalism's access to markets.  And wrapping it all up in the rhetoric of 'sacrifice' and 'freedom'.  The poppy, the cenotaph, the silence, the 'Ode to Remembrance'... I can't help but see it all as cynical and calculated.  As ideology.  As an attempt by a warmongering, imperialist state to normalise the idea of war, to appropriate our memories of loved ones lost or ruined in wars fought for the interests of others, to associate the wars that 'our' country is currently fighting with wars from the past that we've been carefully taught to perceive as 'moral' and 'necessary', to control our responses to the latest news from Iraq and Af-Pak.

Mind you, it's more than just a straightforward bit of reactionary spin; these days people are more anti-war (at least in broad terms) than just about ever before, so the old rhetoric of patriotism is, while not dead, certainly less user-friendly than it used to be.  Remembrance Day still carries jingoistic connotations for many, but for many more there is a need for a different perspective.  There are several different social and political perpectives overlaid upon each other in our cultural understanding of Remembrance Day.  A common variety of liberal spin on it is to remember the 'pointlessness' of, say, World War I.  To tut and shake one's head at a war now culturally understood by many to be a kind of outbreak of mass insanity (see the last episode of Blackadder Goes Forth), or an illustration of how bad our system used to be, or a bleak but romantic tragedy about sensitive poets.  It's the great noble failure... perhaps with some cynical, port-swilling, incompetent generals to sneer at and blame for the whole thing.  (It's been packaged and sold to us in this way, as has Vietnam to Americans.)  And, of course, there's the redeeming moral clarity of the 'good war' that followed it, the anti-Nazi war, the war that stopped the holocaust, etc.

What's lost in all this is real history.

Both wars were brutal squabbles between rival imperialisms, competing for territory and markets.  WWI wasn't a failure by the criteria of the British ruling class at the time; it was a success.  The British empire ended up with more territory than ever before.  WWI didn't end because sensitive poets made the generals and politicians see the light, nor did it end because of an Allied military victory.  It ended because the Russian and German people rose up in revolution, smashed their ruling monarchies, demanded peace and - all too briefly - started to create workers' states.

The conditions for the rise of German fascism were created by the vicious carve-up at Versaille, combined with the crisis of capitalism called the 'Great Depression'... but there might well have been another imperialist war waged by Germany, even without Hitler and the Nazis.  Germany had been squeezed out of the increasingly balkanised world financial and currency markets.  But Hitler - like Franco and Mussolini - was well-liked by many members of the British ruling class as a bulwark against Bolshevism, and appeasement was still what most of them wanted, even after the war started.  Halifax congratulated Hitler on his achievements.  The British ambassador to Nazi Germany was considered by the foreign office to be almost a Nazi himself.  Members of Churchill's cabinet - most particularly Rab Butler - were involved in trying to arrange a surrender to Germany.  Before the war, Czechoslovakia was abandoned to the Nazis despite having been promised British protection.  British and American businesses did good trade with Nazi Germany, even during the war.  Britain only declared war once it was realised that Hitler represented more than just a continuation of what was percieved as a normal and reasonable German ambition to dominate Mitteleuropa.

Democracy wasn't what Britain entered the war to protect.  When Britain declared war, it declared that its empire was at war too, including vast swathes of colonial subjects who were not consulted.  The British ruling class never questioned its own right to possess an empire, even while trying to stop Germany from having one.

Meanwhile, our disinterest in the persecution of the Jews was near total.  And even well into the war, the Allies refused to lift a finger to impede the frenzied mass-murder of the holocaust.  Auschwitz was never bombed, nor were any of the railway lines used in transporting murder victims, despite the fact that the Allies knew perfectly well what the lines and camps were being used for.  Meanwhile, German civillians were punished with horrific aerial bombardments... while the factories owned by American companies were carefully left intact where possible, to the point that German civillians twigged and started to use them as air raid shelters.  Such companies were never prosecuted for treason.  In fact, a lot of them recieved compensation from Allied governments after the war for accidental damage to their property done by Allied bombs.

The above merely scratches the surface of the cynicism and collusion which gets smothered by our day of 'remembrance'.

Similar murky realities are obscured by the poppy day rhetoric when it's applied to our current dirty military activity in Iraq and Afghanistan... not to mention what British troops have gotten up to in Somalia, Sierra Leone, etc.  This isn't lack of 'support for the troops'.  I protested against their being sent and I demand that they be brought back right away.  That's more supportive than any sentimental platitude which leaves unchallenged the wars in which they are fighting.

Platitudes leave unmentioned and forgotten too many important facts, too much vital context, and too many dead people.  How about the fact that thousands of Allied troops were deployed to Soviet Russia immediately after being withdrawn from the frontlines of the First World War?  How about the fact that our democratic governments immediately attacked and invaded the new worker's state, also aiding the Whites in the civil war, a bunch of Tsarist and bourgeois gangsters who rampaged through Russia with savagery and ferocity that both eclipses and contextualizes the much-more-talked-about Red Terror?

Poppy day obscures the fact that even when fighting Hitler, we were fighting an enemy who was produced by the same system of capitalism and imperialism upon which our own nation was based.  Poppy day doesn't represent the kids who were murdered by the army during WWI for desertion and 'cowardice'.  It doesn't represent the victims of British and/or American imperialism, past or present.  It doesn't represent the genocidal wars inflicted by America upon the Phillipines or Nicaragua.  It doesn't represent the people we kicked off the island of Diego Garcia.  It doesn't represent the Iraqis killed by that helicopter while trying to surrender.  It doesn't represent the innocent people slaughtered at Hiroshima and Dresden and Fallujah.

Remembrance Day isn't what it should be called.  When you remember one vital thing and forget hundreds more, that isn't 'remembrance'.  That's amnesia.

I've just realised what the collective noun for warmongers is: a lie.

Victory of the Icon

In the course of preparing myself [to play Churchill in a biopic]… I realized afresh that I hate Churchill and all of his kind. I hate them virulently. They have stalked down the corridors of endless power all through history…. What man of sanity would say on hearing of the atrocities committed by the Japanese against British and Anzac prisoners of war, ‘We shall wipe them out, every one of them, men, women, and children. There shall not be a Japanese left on the face of the earth’? Such simple-minded cravings for revenge leave me with a horrified but reluctant awe for such single-minded and merciless ferocity.

- Richard Burton. (He got banned from the BBC for writing that. Which must’ve really burned him as he lounged around in Hollywood with Elisabeth Taylor’s head in his lap.)

In ‘Victory of the Daleks’ by Mark Gatiss, Winston Churchill is depicted as a wiley and cantankerous old fox, as a twinkly-eyed yet determined fighter against the Nazi menace, as a moral force, as an impish and roguish but unequivocally good man. This is very much the mainstream view of Churchill, in both ‘pop culture’ and in much of the trash that masquerades as history in our society.

Moreover, Churchill is an old mate of the Doctor’s. They go way back. In other words, he gets the endorsement of Our Hero, the narrative and moral locus of the series.  Here is Gatiss' reasoning:

I think in the end it came down to sort of printing the Churchill of legend, because Doctor Who is not the place, really, to examine those sorts of things, except wherever possible, as it were, in the gaps, in the shadows, you can suggest his pragmatism. So in this episode when the Doctor, despite the fact that the Doctor's telling him that the Daleks are the worst thing in the entire universe, he thinks 'I can end the war quicker, I can save lives'. So that sort of thing was interesting to play with. But I did, you know, it just isn't the place to try and have those conversations, because it's an adventure series.

This reminds me of a page at the BBC website about whether Churchill was “as good as we think?”. As ever, “we” is left undefined. The page lists Pros and Cons. The best Cons they can come up with are a couple of military blunders, the return to the gold standard and Yalta. In other words: was he as marvelous as “we” apparently all believe or did he sometimes make mistakes? The big one on the list is Yalta, so the worst thing he can be accused of is handing much of Europe over to the real evildoers. Pravda would have been proud of such framing.

(The Yalta thing seems especially unfair to Churchill. He assumed that Russia would renege on the agreed post-war frontiers of Europe and advocated ‘Operation Unthinkable’, a lunatic plan to launch an unprovoked attack upon Russia as early as July 1945, thus starting a new war against one of his own allies.)

For Gatiss, Churchill’s “shadows” consist of this kind of “pragmatism”. The closest the man had to a dark side was a ruthlessness about allies and tactics… but even this was all about wanting to “save lives”. Thus, even the “shadows” we are allowed to see make him look noble.

This is from a telegram that Churchill sent to the British Chiefs of Staff and the Chief of the Air Staff, 28th March, 1945:

It seems to me that the moment has come when the question of bombing of German cities simply for the sake of increasing the terror, though under other pretexts, should be reviewed. Otherwise we shall come into control of an utterly ruined land… The destruction of Dresden remains a serious query against the conduct of Allied bombing. I am of the opinion that military objectives must henceforward be more strictly studied in our own interests than that of the enemy. The Foreign Secretary has spoken to me on this subject, and I feel the need for more precise concentration upon military objectives such as oil and communications behind the immediate battle-zone, rather than on mere acts of terror and wanton destruction, however impressive.

Note that this memo frankly acknowledges that the firebombings were calculated and carried out as acts of terrorism. Note that the main reason for stopping seems to be the fear that “we shall come into control of an utterly ruined land”.

This, presumably, is what Gatiss means when he refers to Churchill’s “absolute pragmatism”.

(On the subject, it might be observed that many of the ostensible ‘military targets’ that are frequently trotted out as justification for the Dresden atrocity still stand today, since they were quite a way out of the city itself… and many of the RAF pilots dropping the bombs didn’t have proper maps in any case.)

In the end though, for Gatiss, Doctor Who isn’t the forum for investigating Churchill’s ‘flaws’… and yet, somehow, it is the forum for celebrating his greatness. It is obviously considered somehow neutral (i.e. unpolitical or apolitical) to depict Churchill in an entirely positive light (i.e. as “the legend”), whereas introducing a critique of the man would be inappropriate, presumably because it would be seen as evidence of a political agenda. The positive depiction is seen as neutral and acceptable to peddle to kids, whereas a negative or critical depiction would be out of place, probably precisely because it would be perceived as harbouring political valences that a forthrightly positive depiction is somehow supposed to lack!

This is the properly educated orthodox mind at work. This is heavily ideological thinking which perceives itself as non-ideological, precisely because it hugs the doctrinal orthodoxy, which is perceived as normal and mainstream and neutral, and hence appropriate. I’ve even read critics of how Churchill is depicted in this story describe the problem as one of the writing being “apolitical”. But there is nothing neutral or “apolitical” about praise, about approval, about presenting a politician in terms of his “legend”. In any other context, this would be obvious. Would we be happy if a Russian children’s programme portrayed Stalin in terms of his “legend” and excused this on the basis that a critical approach would be inappropriate? Hopefully, we’d call that what it was… and what it is when “we” do it with “our” leaders and their legends: propaganda.

Mind you, I’m not accusing the Doctor Who production team of consciously taking on the roles of ideological commissars. That would be to credit them with too much self-awareness. In the minds of the production team, foremost seems to be the issue of Churchill’s status as a “British icon” (this being assumed to be self-evidently good and implicitly appropriate subject matter). The various interviewees on the ‘Victory’ Confidential episode do a lot of blithering on about how Churchill and the Daleks are both “British icons”. Indeed, so steeped in this kind of thinking is Gatiss that, when commenting approvingly on the redesigned Daleks, he describes them as looking “like Minis”.

This kind of ideological thinking covers itself in the supposedly ‘self conscious’ ‘irony’ (it’s actually the opposite of self conscious or ironic) that revels in Bond films because, as Gatiss himself put it, they’re one of those things “you’re not supposed to love”. It’s only a short step from such thinking to the delusions of Daily Mail columnists who imagine that people who dare to express patriotism are hounded by the Political Correctness police.

At another point in the Confidential episode, Gatiss says that the horrors of the Blitz are “the sort of thing that you simply can’t imagine today… the idea that you would see someone like this and then, the next day, maybe everyone else in this room is dead.” Unimaginable, huh? Well, no… not to the people of, say, Iraq. They can imagine what it is like to have their friends and neighbours and family wiped out by bombs in the space of seconds. Many of them can remember such things happening in their own lives. And such things continue to happen in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Libya.

What’s any of this got to do with Churchill? Quite a lot actually.

I do not understand this squeamishness about the use of gas. We have definitely adopted the position at the Peace Conference of arguing in favour of the retention of gas as a permanent method of warfare. It is sheer affectation to lacerate a man with the poisonous fragment of a bursting shell and to boggle at making his eyes water by means of lachrymatory gas. I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes. The moral effect should be good… and it would spread a lively terror…

- Winston Churchill, on how to treat Iraqis, 12 May 1919.

In his thuggish way, he has a point. Why commit mass murder with bombs and then flinch at a bit of gas? In the end, gas doesn't appear to have been used against the "uncivilised tribes". Bombs were good enough to teach them who was master, or pulverise them if they failed to learn the lesson. But we can forget those slaughtered victims of imperialism, because they were slaughtered by "us" rather than by the officially-sanctioned baddies.

Mind you, "we" didn't always think they were baddies. Churchill certainly didn't. In fact, he admired the fascists greatly for their refusal to brook any unpardonable challenges to the state from workers.

What a man! I have lost my heart!... Fascism has rendered a service to the entire world... If I were Italian, I am sure I would have been with you entirely from the beginning of your victorious struggle against the bestial appetites and passion of Leninism.

- Churchill on Benito Mussolini after his 1927 visit to Fascist-run Rome.

Indeed, so enamoured was Winston of this new, blackshirted "way to combat subversive forces" (i.e. striking workers and communists) that he called Mussolini the "Roman genius... the greatest lawgiver among men."

Later, he learned to be slightly more circumspect in his open admiration for jackbooted, union-busting, chauvinist dictators:

One may dislike Hitler’s system and yet admire his patriotic achievement. If our country were defeated, I hope we should find a champion as indomitable to restore our courage and lead us back to our place among the nations.

- Winston Churchill, “Hitler and His Choice” The Strand Magazine, November 1935.

This from the man who, according to Gatiss, was “vehemently opposed to the Nazis from very early on, and never wavered from that.”

There’s no mystery here. No contradiction. Churchill was an enemy of the working class, of unions and of all attempts by working people to challenge hierarchies that exploited them. Fascism, to him, before it began to threaten the hegemony of the British Empire, was to be applauded as a counter-revolutionary, anti-union, anti-left force.

Even after the war, Churchill’s attitude to fascists was still ambivalent, to say the least. They were still better than socialist or communist workers in revolt. He authorized more than 200 Nazi troops to assist British soldiers putting down the partisans who liberated swathes of Greece from Fascist control. That wasn’t the kind of liberation Churchill wanted at all.

He didn't, as it happens, order troops to quell the Tonypandy miners; that's a myth. He stopped the troops and was criticised for it by colleagues. But he was a class warrior who saw the General Strike of 1926 as... well, let’s let him speak for himself again:

An industrial dispute about wages, hours, conditions etc., in a particular industry ought to be settled in a spirit of compromise, with give and take on both sides…But a general strike is a challenge to the State, to the Constitution and to the nation. Here is no room for compromise.

- Churchill in the West Essex Constitutionalist, December 1926.

Yes, I mean... how dare workers challenge the State? The nerve. Don't they realise they should simply be grateful for being permitted to ask for compromises over conditions?

Churchill was clear on how to respond to any profound challenges by workers or commies or darkies to the system of privilege and empire and property that he rested his fat behind on so comfortably for so long: violence.

Churchill was a vociferous cheerleader for what is always called the "Allied intervention" in Russia after the 1917 revolution, i.e. unprovoked military aggression and terrorism against a workers' state that had attacked no foreign power. Churchill was perhaps the prime mover in persuading the British cabinet to authorise British troop deployments to invade revolutionary Russia, so fervent was his hatred of any threat to capitalism and privilege. Britain had to destroy “a poisoned Russia, an infected Russia of armed hordes not only smiting with bayonet and cannon, but accompanied and preceded by swarms of typhus-bearing vermin.”

The invasion of the new Soviet Union by 14 capitalist powers, together with the West-supported "white terror" (which was far, far worse than the defensive "red terror"), succeeded in doing what Churchill hoped: Bolshevism, as a force for working class self-liberation, was "strangled in its cradle", leading to the near annihilation of the Russian working class, the degeneration of the soviet system into a hollow Party-run bureaucracy and the subsequent ascendancy of Stalin.

Even after British troops were finally pulled out of the "Russian Civil War", Churchill was still funneling money to the Poles for their invasion of the Ukraine.

Bolshevism, for Churchill, was an International Jewish conspiracy. Here he is, writing on the subject, in an article which one can nowadays only find on neo-Nazi and far-right websites, mysteriously enough. For Churchill, there were the good Russian Jews (i.e. the nationalist ones, the “liberal and progressive” ones, the “bankers and industrialists”, the “upholders of friendship with France and Great Britain”) and then there were the bad Jews, the “International Jews”:

The adherents of this sinister confederacy are mostly men reared up among the unhappy populations of countries where Jews are persecuted on account of their race. Most, if not all, of them have forsaken the faith of their forefathers, and divorced from their minds all spiritual hopes of the next world. This movement among the Jews is not new. From the days of Spartacus-Weishaupt to those of Karl Marx, and down to Trotsky (Russia), Bela Kun (Hungary), Rosa Luxembourg (Germany), and Emma Goldman (United States), this world-wide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilisation and for the reconstitution of society on the basis of arrested development, of envious malevolence, and impossible equality, has been steadily growing.
…

There is no need to exaggerate the part played in the creation of Bolshevism and the actual bringing about of the Russian Revolution by these international and for the most part atheistical Jews. It is certainly a very great one; it probably outweighs all others. With the notable exception of Lenin, the majority of the leading figures are Jews. Moreover, the principal inspiration and driving power comes from the Jewish leaders.

The solution was to support Zionism.

Zionism has already become a factor in the political convulsions of Russia, as a powerful competing influence in Bolshevik circles with the international communistic system. Nothing could be more significant than the fury with which Trotsky has attacked the Zionists generally, and Dr. Weissmann in particular. The cruel penetration of his mind leaves him in no doubt that his schemes of a world-wide communistic State under Jewish domination are directly thwarted and hindered by this new ideal, which directs the energies and the hopes of Jews in every land towards a simpler, a truer, and a far more attainable goal.

Meanwhile, Churchill’s real priority in supporting Zionism was to create a Brit-friendly settler-colonial statelet in the strategically vital Middle East. We can see his attitude towards the people already living there in his authorization, when British Colonial Secretary, of the use of brutal force to suppress Palestinian resistance to the Mandate.

This was consistent with his racist conception of imperial ‘progress’:

I do not agree that the dog in a manger has the final right to the manger even though he may have lain there for a very long time.  I do not admit that right.  I do not admit for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America, or the black people of Australia.  I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher grade race, a more worldy wise race to put it that way, has come in and taken their place.

- Address to the Palestine Royal Commission, 1937.

His contempt for colonized people who dared to think they should govern themselves is found in his sneering comments on Gandhi:

It is alarming and nauseating to see Mr Gandhi, a seditious Middle Temple lawyer, now posing as a fakir of a type well known in the east, striding half naked up the steps of the viceregal palace, while he is still organising and conducting a campaign of civil disobedience, to parlay on equal terms with the representative of the Emperor-King.

- Commenting on Gandhi's meeting with the Viceroy of India, 1931

Note the way that ‘sedition’ against and “disobedience” to the Empire is assumed to discredit Gandhi; note the incredulity that he should dare to “parlay on equal terms” with the British colonial ruler.

Churchill’s determination to preserve British imperial hegemony was impressive and ruthless. He said "I will not preside over a dismemberment." He diverted troops from the war effort to put down colonial problems in Africa and the Middle East. He sent troops to quash the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya, where they indulged in a horrific rampage of terror and torture that our government is still now trying to cover up. He sent troops – at one point as many as 35,000 - to crush the rebellion against British rule in Malaya, a country that had evidently become ‘ungovernable’ as a colony.

Churchill’s post-war care for British interests is clearly seen in Iran. In the early 50s, the elected government of Iran, under Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh, decided to nationalize Anglo-Persian Oil, majority owned by HM Government. Britain placed a worldwide embargo on purchases of Iranian oil. Later, Britain froze all Iranian assets in sterling and banned the export of all goods to the country. Atlee was all for storming in and seizing Iranian oilfields by force (I wouldn’t, by the way, be any happier if we ever got a Doctor Who episode in which Atlee were presented whiter than white). However, Churchill’s new government put together a coup plan – ‘Operation Ajax’ – which Churchill backed enthusiastically. The Americans were talked into it after Churchill put up $1.5m of British money (which was a lot of money in those days) and agreed that the coup could be run by Kermit Roosevelt, nephew of former President FDR.

The coup goes ahead on 15th August 1953. Black ops undermine Mossadegh, spread fears of a communist takeover, confect street riots (featuring CIA-hired local mobsters) and bring down the democratically elected government in four days.

The CIA got the Shah to sign off on Mossadegh’s dismissal and appoint Nazi collaborator General Fazlollah Zahedi (newly sprung from jail by the plotters) the new PM of a new military government. Mossadegh was thrown in jail. Many of his supporters were rounded up, tortured and/or executed. This ultimately lead to the dictatorship of the Shah, which lasted until the Iranian revolution of 1979. Under the Shah, Iran was terrorized by the SAVAK secret police, an organization that systematically tortured, imprisoned and liquidated opponents of the Shah’s absolute rule.

Of course, the new regime quickly came to heel over the matter of oil. A consortium of foreign oil companies – AIOC, Royal Dutch Shell, Standard Oil (NJ), Standard Oil of California, Socony, the Texas Company, Gulf Oil and Compagnie Francaise des Petroles – secured their control. Meanwhile, Iran paid compensation (!) to Anglo-Persian totaling $70m. Anglo-Persian is now called British Petroleum (or BP).

So, another victory for democracy and human rights, conceived and supported by the Doctor’s old buddy.

There is much made in the Confidential episode about the Daleks being a bit like Nazis. Indeed, Gatiss even has them use the phrase “master race” in the story itself, just in case we missed it. Gatiss’ remarks in Confidential on this subject lead, by the way, to the following voiceover link, which deserves a chapter to itself in any yet-to-be-written history of the crashingly inappropriate: “…and the concept of total Dalek racial purity leads to a new paint job…”

However, there is little or nothing in the episode which connects Dalek ideas to the ideas of Fascism. This is a shame because I’ve always thought it would be good to have a story in which Nazis meets Daleks, in which the Nazis were confronted by their own values, espoused by people with bigger guns.

‘Churchill vs. the Daleks’ was the way Moffat supposedly described his requirements to Gatiss. So Gatiss delivers a story in which the evil Daleks deceive and then fight the good Churchill. The evil “British icon” vs. the good “British icon”.

The unintentional and unconscious irony is that Churchill was – though this story hides it from us, in line with mainstream ideas of propriety – an imperialist, a racist, a bigot, a fascist sympathizer, a subtle anti-semite, a man given to eliminationist rhetoric, a ruthless defender of unaccountable power, an anti-democratic conspirator, a gangster, a warmonger, a terrorist and a mass killer.

A man who wrote this:

The unnatural and increasingly rapid growth of the feeble-minded and insane classes, coupled as it is with a steady restriction among the thrifty, energetic and superior stocks, constitutes a national and race danger which it is impossible to exaggerate ... I feel that the source from which the stream of madness is fed should be cut off and sealed up before another year has passed.

Churchill vs. the Daleks? Churchill was a fucking Dalek.

Eyepatch on the Left?

Perhaps the most interesting thing about 'Inferno' (interesting to me anyway) is the way that the fascist world of the Brigade Leader is distinguished by only a very few differences – mainly in terms of attitude and levels of state violence – from the ‘democratic’ capitalist world of the Brigadier and 70s Britain. There are more similarities than differences. There’s very little to distinguish a state-funded project in a ‘democratic’ world and one in a fascist world; very little distance between the basic jobs of a Brigade Leader and a Brigadier. The people behave differently but the essential structure of society is the same, albeit with very different levels of official repression. This reflects – probably accidentally, if we’re honest - the fact that fascism is not a fundamentally different form of economic system but a different way of running a capitalist state.

Actually, I’ve been calling them “fascists”… but the casual reference to the execution of the royal family, the fact that the Brigade Leader is a member of something called the “Republican Security Force” (the Nazis planned to reinstall Edward VIII as their puppet monarch when they took over Britain, not set up a ‘republic’), the Orwellian poster and the fact that a government official can happily go by the name of Sir Keith Gold, all tends to suggest that this might be a ‘communist’ tyranny rather than a ‘Nazi’ one. (By the way, I don’t mean to suggest that Jews always had a lovely time of it in Stalinist dictatorships, merely that anti-Semitism wasn’t a central part of ‘communist’ doctrine the way it was with the Nazis.)

There are indications that work for either a fascist or ‘communist’ world… and that was probably the idea: the notion that both are essentially the same, or very similar. Okay, so does that work? Well, the idea that Nazism and ‘communism’ (and other similar systems, like Baathism in Iraq) are all akin to each other and best described as ‘totalitarian’ is still a very common and popular one. The concept of ‘totalitarianism’ is certainly useful to an extent, as it expresses a fundamental difference between a repressive state that attempts to simply force obedience and one that also attempts to impose orthodoxy in all aspects of life. Ultimately, however, it’s probably a bit of a millstone. It allows people like the ‘anti-totalitarian’ left and the French ‘New Philosophers’ to argue for imperialist wars waged by America, the UK and NATO, on the grounds that their opponents are ‘totalitarian’ and are therefore akin to the powerful states that created the Gulag and the death camps. It’s arguable how many societies have really that closely resembled the totalitarian model as represented by Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (which, in popular consciousness, is a bit like the Platonic ‘form’ of totalitarianism). We should never forget that Orwell’s book is a satire, and as such contains a great deal of exaggeration… and that the representative of Oceanian ideology in the book specifically states that the world of Big Brother has gone further than the Nazis or communists did. The most relevant objection to the term 'totalitarianism’ here is that it elides all sorts of states that are ultimately as different as they are (or were) alike.

Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, for example, shared various similarities, some superficial (like the reduction of all art and culture to crashingly bland kitsch) and some far from superficial (like powerful internal secret police forces)… but, in the end, to call them both ‘totalitarian’ and imply that they were essentially the same is misleading. Nazi Germany may have been ‘state capitalist’ in the loose sense (i.e. there was nationalisation, state direction of industry, etc… and this was a general trend in capitalism at the time, also to be found to varying degrees in Britain and Roosevelt’s America) but private industry and property wasn’t suppressed in the same way as in Soviet Russia, where the class of private capitalists was ultimately replaced by a new bureaucratic class of state managers. The Nazi state may have been highly bureaucratic and statist, but the bankers, factory owners and industrialists weren’t expropriated as a class. Thyssen, for example, wasn’t nationalised until Thyssen himself – a reactionary and, hitherto, a supporter of the Nazi regime, anti-Semitic discrimination included – expressed opposition to the war. Indeed, many members of the German capitalist class enthusiastically funded, supported and helped the Nazis into power, hoping that they would (amongst other things) act as a bulwark against labour unrest (which they did, immediately abolishing trade unions) and destroy the communists (which they did, throwing all left-wingers into concentration camps).

If many people nowadays can’t see a difference between ‘fascist’ and ‘communist’ states, then many powerful and rich people in the 30s certainly knew that they liked Hitler and disliked Stalin… Lord Rothermere, for instance, made his Nazi sympathies clear in the Daily Mail, and also published the fraudulent ‘Zinoviev letter’. In more recent times, America has been happy to support skull-crushingly brutal dictators like Suharto and Pinochet and Saddam Hussein in order to contain and decimate communist parties and/or movements, while attacking nominally ‘communist’ nationalists like Castro… not to mention Reagan’s funding and arming of the horrifyingly violent Contras in an effort to destroy the Nicaraguan Sandinistas, a broad movement of nationalists who included communists and who unseated the US-backed dictator Somoza.

None of this should be taken as a defence of Castro or Stalin, by the way. I shouldn’t have to say that but weary experience tells me that I do.

What makes the difference in how this or that regime gets treated by America and her allies is usually to do with the amount of control exercised by the state over private capital, and particularly over foreign (i.e. U.S.) access to desired investments and/or commodities. William Randolph Hearst liked Nazi Germany (even allowing Nazis like Alfred Rosenberg to write articles for his newspapers) because they were no barrier to business and free trade. Indeed, IBM did nice business with the Nazis, devising and installing the information card systems that enabled the German state to keep track of all the Jews it was murdering. Kissinger and Nixon disliked self-described ‘Marxist’ Salvador Allende (and connived to have him and his elected government destroyed and replaced by Pinochet) because he was fighting to improve the lot of his country and people at the expense of entrenched vested financial interests, not least those of American corporations like PepsiCo.

But, to veer slightly back in the general direction of the point, I was saying how the fascist… er, totalitarian?… umm, shall we settle on authoritarian? world of the Brigade Leader is not really all that different in structure to our world. And this is because all these tyrannies – fascist or communist, with all the very real variances between them – were essentially capitalist, like our society. That is to say that they are (or were) all based on private ownership and/or control of the industrial means whereby everything is made, distributed and exchanged; on the work being done by a mass of propertyless people who have to make a living by selling their labour power; and on the appropriation of the surplus created by their labour into the hands of the employers and owners, be they private businessmen or state managers. (Disclaimer: this is to simplify heavily because many capitalist economies were, and are still, composed of non-capitalist elements like agrarian peasant labour, etc.)

Nazism and Fascism were statist and authoritarian forms of capitalist society that resulted from petty-bourgeois movements in reaction to high levels of working class struggle. By contrast, Stalinism... leaving aside the question of how it arose (which is another distinction in itself)... was a bureaucratic form of extreme ‘state capitalism’ in which the private capitalist class had been expropriated only to be replaced by a newly risen nomenklatura who came to control state-owned industries, but who still exploited labour for surplus value and who still engaged in competition, albeit with rival foreign states rather than domestic rival firms. (Whatever you think of the SWP, I personally am fairly convinced by Tony Cliff’s analysis on this subject.)

It’s interesting (to me at least), in light of all this, that ‘Inferno’ is centred upon a government project, staffed by lots of state-employees (or state slaves in the alt-version), to obtain new sources of energy. This will work as a reflection of 70s British oil rigs in the North Sea, Nazi-era private and nationalised companies mining in the Ruhr or Stalin-era state-run industrialisation in Magnetogorsk. They’re all expressions of the same thing in different forms: the integration of industrial capital with the state, to differing degrees and in different social forms.

Of course, if you believe today’s neoliberal snake-oil salesmen, all state involvement in (or control of) the economy is a form of tyranny that will lead to serfdom. Better to relax all controls, abolish all regulation, relieve the rich of their tax burdens, privatise everything in sight, etc. But these are the same people whose policies have brought the world economy to the brink of implosion. Who cares what they think anymore? Well, actually, we'd better care because there's a gang of the bastards running our government at the moment.

And, let’s not forget that many of the supposedly amazing achievements of the free market are actually attributable to state funding of projects that are just too expensive for profit-oriented private industry to develop. Nonetheless, the state (i.e. the taxpayer) pays the bill for the prohibitively expensive outlay and/or R&D, and then, ultimately, the resulting caboodle starts making profit for private individuals. That's one of the essential roles of the Pentagon: to be a huge, state funded research and development project for technologies that will then end up being manufactured, utilised and/or sold by private companies. Want a good example? You're surfing it at this very moment. (So much for free enterprise.) If Stahlman’s gas had ended up being safe and profitable, pretty soon the British Stahlman’s Gas Company would end up bringing in profits for people other than the poor schmoes who had to spend every day in the noise and heat and dodging the green slime. And then it would’ve been privatised in the 80s, along with BAX (British Axonite).

I find myself imagining the "Don't forget to Tell Sid!" style advertising campaign for the sell-off of shares in Stahlmann’s gas and Axonite. And I imagine that Axonite stops working properly in the 90s when it's become Bax PLC. They forget how to make it work and, suddenly, they can only make frogs one milimetre bigger. Then Branson buys it and the frogs actually start getting smaller. Or swell to the size of home counties and crush loads of people. Leading to public inquiries which absolve the government of all blame for the thousands of giant-frog-crushing deaths. Meanwhile, Stahlgas PLC is running adverts (designed by a high-flying PR firm, natch) in an attempt to convince people that growing werewolf hair, a snout and fangs (because you’ve stood too near your gas cooker for too long) is actually a fashion statement.