In the wake of the Chapel Hill murders, people of Left-wing persuasion have been doing a lot of talking about the double standards which are applied to murder when it's Muslims being murdered by non-Muslims rather than the other way round. All very true. If a Muslim had been the murderer in Chapel Hill, and his victims had been non-Muslim, we'd now be hearing the mainstream media (let alone the conservative media) talking about 'terrorism', the pundits would be giving us their standard reheated 'clash of civilisations' rhetoric, pontificating about the inherently violent nature of Islam, asking Muslim 'community leaders' to address the cancer of extremism in their midst, etc etc etc, ad nauseum, ad infinitum. Hell, Charles Windsor might even open his empty head again to release some more racist platitudes about the need for Muslims to 'conform' to 'our values' (there is no 'us' or 'we' or 'our', Mr Windsor. Please fuck off). There certainly wouldn't be anybody desperately trying to spin the murders as nothing more than a dispute over a parking space, or the product of the singular demons of a lone nut.
But we don't actually need to theorise what might have happened if the skin colours and/or religions of the victims and killer in Chapel Hill were transposed. We've seen it demonstrated for us in the real world, time and time again. You'll have heard of Lee Rigby, the young British soldier horribly murdered by two Muslim men in May 2013. If you were living in the UK at the time, you will hardly have been able to miss it. I think people were actually obliged by law to mention it on TV at least once every half hour. You may not have heard of Mohammed Saleem however, an 82 year old Muslim man who was stabbed to death by a Ukrainian student in Birmingham (I didn't know non-Muslims were even allowed in Birmingham!). It happened the month before Lee Rigby was killed. To put it mildly... it wasn't quite the media sensation that the Rigby murder became, despite the fact that Saleem's killer was later convicted of planting bombs in three Mosques in the Midlands (so it probably wasn't about a parking space). The Rigby murder (which was utterly horrible and senseless, let's be in no doubt about that) unleashed an upsurge of anti-Muslim hate crimes in the UK, despite being roundly and publicly condemned by just about every prominent Muslim, and every major Muslim organisation, in Britain. Needless to say, the wave of violent, anti-Muslim bigotry was not covered in depth by the media.
But I mustn't talk about this stuff. Jonathan Freedland will accuse me of starting a who's-the-most-picked-on 'arms race'. I mean, surely there are higher priorities than the frequent violent Islamophobia in Britain.
Some people still criticise Israel, for instance.
By the way, I do just want to make one observation about the Left reaction to Chapel Hill. If you're on the Left, or a liberal, and you're condemning the Chapel Hill murders, and decrying the double standards of the media, and you're not also at least occasionally speaking out against the wholesale slaughter of Muslims and Arabs by Western governments (chiefly but by no means only the USA), and the support given by Western governments to regimes that violently oppress Muslims (i.e. Saudi Arabia, Israel), and the double standards of the media on these subjects, then guess what... you're a fucking hypocrite! Congratulations!
ideas are icepickproof
Showing posts with label islamophobia. Show all posts
Showing posts with label islamophobia. Show all posts
Friday, 13 February 2015
Tuesday, 19 February 2013
Fall and Rise
There was a fair amount of media chin-scratching last year about a supposed glumness and seriousness creeping into popular movies. The real trend, I think, is not towards the 'serious' but towards the reactionary.
For one thing, there's recently been a spate of popular, lauded films and TV shows re-inflating Islamophobia (again) in a 'nuanced' form acceptable to liberals as well as to outright bigots. The much-lauded Argo depicts a heroic CIA rescue of American hostages in Iran. Always handy, being able to demonise Iran. (Modern Iran's origin is, of course, a long and complex story, and does not present 'the West' in a good light... which is why nobody balanced and objective ever mentions it.) The much-lauded Zero Dark Thirty depicts torture as being both effective and morally conscionable, with the only negative consequence in sight being the discomfort of the torturers. It misrepresents 'enhanced interrogation' as being a valuable technique leading directly to the location of Osama and, by means of ambivalence and ambiguity (disingenuously used as a defence by the director), it effectively sides with the torturers. To be neutral about torture is to be effectively pro-torture. The enmeshing of the torture within a legalistic framework of neutrality and supposed utilitarianism is both very apt - the quintessential facet of torture as it is practiced by modern democracies is that it is steeped in punctilious legality - and very normalising.
These new liberal/Islamophobic popular movies, which also appeal to the criterati and the awards-boards, have come just as the American empire (and its allies) has beeing stepping up its rhetoric about the evils of Iran in particular, and the possibility of intervening in struggles in the Arab world. Clearly, part and parcel of the imperium's cultural reactlash to/against the Arab Spring. This isn't anything new. The previous round of mainstream liberal-inflected movies about the 'War on Terror' and Iraq were similarly punctual in their ideological addresses; as with the Vietnam movies of the late-70s and 80s, they served as an ostentatious display of American culture in the throws of 'painful self-examination' and 'angst' about a military adventure held in increasing public opprobrium. The Hurt Locker was more prompt than The Deer Hunter, but essentially peddled the same assumptions and the same normalising effects.
The buzz lately has been about two big movies from big directors, both tackling the issue of slavery. Spielberg's Lincoln and Tarantino's Django Unchained. Lincoln makes the destruction of slavery seem like the accomplishment of old white guys in government offices. It's not actually that much better than Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter. (Okay, that may be an exaggeration.) Lincoln nods in the direction of black soldiers and black resistance, but the essential story being told is the one long since abandoned by most historians: the story of the abolition of slavery being a legal coup handed down from Washington. The reality is that Lincoln's emancipation proclamation was a recognition of something happening 'on the ground' as the slaves of the South rebelled in enormous numbers, stealing themselves from their owners and joining the Union armies. The film depicts Thaddeus Stevens as a radical who needed to rein himself in so that the real work could be done by the moderate compromiser Lincoln. Spielberg and his writer have both spoken of the film as a paen to political compromise. The subtext is one of support for a moderate, compromising liberal president in time of war. It is, in short, an exhortation to give Obama space to win at home and abroad through his moderate use of drones and kill lists, and his compromise with capital (which involves letting capital off the hook while making the American people pay). Django's racial politics are also hugely problematic, with the rebellious black man depicted as a one-in-a-million phenomenon, with the dynamics of the story defined by white people, with Django freed by a white man instead of through his own struggle. Django is not really about a black rebellion against racism or slavery. It essentially depicts a white man using a black man as a revenge weapon against other white men. Both movies fall into the same category as Avatar, in that they have been painstakingly crafted to appear 'on side' with an oppressed and enslaved ethnic group, while also objectifying them and stripping them of real agency, making their struggle seem like it has been shaped and won by Whitey. Interestingly, Spielberg did exactly the same kind of thing in Schindler's List. His movie about the Judeocide is not a story of Jewish resistance in the midst of one of the most catastrophic moral failures in human history. It's a success story about how some Jews were saved by a gentile capitalist. This is the American movie business for you, which has the heroic white gentile saviour (often exemplifying bourgeois values even if he's not an actual businessman) as one of its most enduring and central narratives. This is one reason why Ayn Rand felt so much at home in Hollywood.
On the subject of the heroic, white, gentile, rich, businessman saviour... we should consider the latest mega-successful iteration of Batman. Bruce Wayne may not disdain conscience and altruism, but in shape and style he is, in many ways, a Randian hero. He takes it all upon himself, becoming the fountainhead of goodness and the Atlas upon which Gotham rests. Tim Burton's movies downplayed Wayne's role as a wealthy businessman (though he gets to play the 'good' capitalist vs Christopher Walken's 'bad' capitalist in Batman Returns). Schumacher gives Wayne Enterprises a profit sharing scheme. These techniques slightly reduce the volume of the pro-capitalist blare inherent in the Batman myth, though without neutralising or forgetting it. Nolan's trilogy, however, turns up the volume to 11. Wayne Enterprises is a force for moral and material good in society. There are 'bad capitalists' and 'good capitalists'. Bruce's father is of the 'good' variety. He prefers to be a doctor, but has his company build monorails to (somehow) help the poor, becoming an example to the rest of Gotham's wealthocracy. The economic crisis in Gotham depicted in Batman Begins is an external event, artificially created and inflicted upon Gotham's capitalism by the fanaticism of the baddies. The social conscience of the domestic rich is all that can save the city from being destroyed by the unleashed evil of the poor. Bruce follows in his father's footsteps in that he offers an example. He becomes - forgive my degrading weakness for puns - the Dark Knight Exemplar. His violent, authoritarian project to beat law and order into people is the stick to his father's carrot - both imbued with the same moral sense. That Bruce has a nauseating line in speechifying about the 'good in people' shouldn't distract us from the quintessentially Randian idea in his heart: capitalism is heroic. Okay, there is bad capitalism (usually illegal) but ultimately the system is synonymous with social wellbeing, steered correctly through the efforts of a kevlar-coated Atlas. In case there's any danger of us missing the point, Nolan gives us panoramas of glittering corporate skyscrapers, lush boardrooms, gorgeous secretaries, morally-minded executives, bad CEOs who ultimately get their comeuppance, etc.
Looking back a bit... Recently, Charlie Brooker (for whom I still have some time despite that embarassing hair and stubble he has now) wrote that The Dark Knight Rises and Skyfall were, essentially, the same film. In both, the hero of a big franchise is stripped of all his power and has to claw his way back up onto his feet. Batman starts his movie a miserable recluse, blamed for things that aren't his fault, unshaven, hobbled and limping on crutches. Later, he gets pulverised in a fight and is left to rot at the bottom of a pit. Bond falls, literally and metaphorically, at the start of his film. Assumed dead, he is in fact in the Bahamas, drinking Heineken, letting himself get unshaven (that motif again) and out of shape. Both films focus on their hero's quest to get himself back in trim and then to defeat the baddie who has made hay in his absence. This seems, to me, an obvious and not-so-subtle metaphor for the state of capitalism. The heroic, formerly all-conquering hero laid low by circumstances beyond his control and needing to climb back up into the light... well, this is essentially the mainstream narrative about where capital is at these days. The same essential formulation holds in many sectors of what we might, for want of a better word, want to call the modern 'left'. Huge swathes of what was Occupy etc held 'the bankers' to blame for the crisis, as though banking and bankers were something extrinsic to capitalism, and as though capitalism was a victim of the bankers and their free-floating, contextless 'greed'... which, as a description of what happened, is an example of accuracy becoming inaccuracy through incompleteness. A bit like saying that a rifle killed JFK and leaving it at that.
It'd be easy to discount my reading were it not for the fact that The Dark Knight Rises goes out of its way to support the established hierarchy of capitalism, and to lay the woes of Gotham at the door of the rabblement. The police and government, whatever their failings, represent order, stability, safety and noble sacrifice. Even the partial repudiation of the lies told to the public (for their own good) by Gordon and Batman is couched in terms of a noble mistake. Meanwhile, the envious unwashed ransack their way ruthlessly through the mansions of the rich, and the revolution is immediately tyrannical, setting up showtrials in a perverse people's court. Gordon, brought to trial, gets to make a speech defending the establishment's virtuous conception of law against the arbitrary and malicious revolutionary justice of Crane. Bane takes on the leadership of the angrily and inarticulately disaffected and, like all leaders of revolts against an established order, he is revealed to be an insincere opportunist, a self-seeking demagogue, simultaneously nihilist and fanatic. The Randian-with-a-conscience-and-bat-ears, meanwhile, has been dumped in a deep hole, from which you can only escape by climbing on on your own, and without a safety harness... which, as Stavvers observed, is a metaphor for reactionary ideas about poverty and welfare dependancy.
Skyfall, meanwhile, also cast its hero as recuperating from a a fall (really, note the falling and rising metaphor here!) and was noticeably reactionary even by the standards of Bond films. Whereas the almost-universally-loathed-but-actually-quite-good Quantum of Solace strayed as close to a 'realistic' picture of the world as a Bond film could ever get without ceasing to be a Bond film, Skyfall ventured back into the zone of camp jingoism that is Bond's traditonal territory. There is a certain accidental subversion in the depiction of M (Judi Dench) and her agents (Bond included) as ludicrous incompetents - really, they fuck everything up from start to finish, which is quite accurate as a depiction of the British 'security services' - but, overall, the film is a near-grotesque exercise in flag-waving. M gets to smack down the sneering bitchqueen MP at the inquiry (who has the temerity to accurately point out what a clusterfuck M's reign has been and suggest that she ought to be held accountable to the taxpayer) with stirring words about the dangerous world in which we live now (all those evil swarthy people who've been killing British moles) and the need for MI6 to protect the Realm (some hope) and Tennyson and stuff and whatnot and blah. The villain, Silva, attacks the British anti-terrorism effort, and the palaces of the establishment, using his skills as a cyber-hacker. He's al-Qaeda and Anonymous rolled into one. There is not a hint of queasiness over the grotesque way that Bond and M end up, on an isolated farm, menaced by heavily armed men in helicopter gunships, even as the film champions a national state currently doing similar things to people in Afghanistan. Yes, Bardem's character is a shadowy reflection of Bond, but like all such shadowy reflections he is there to emphasize the difference between himself and his heroic mirror image. (Honestly, the Evil Reflection character is almost never there to undermine the good guy's moral status. Belloq is there to show us that Indy is a good treasure-hunter. The Master shows us that the Doctor is a good renegade Time Lord.) The film mirrors its reactionary reassertion of British imperial values in the fractured world of today by being reactionary in terms of the aesthetics of the Bond series itself. QoS took Bond as far as he could go from his political and aesthetic homebases (not that far really, but everything's relative); the post-recession Skyfall brings Bond back both politically and aesthetically. It's very retrograde in every way, ending up with the mantle of sentimental/jingoistic/imperialist Britainishnesshood passed symbolically to Bond in the form of a Union Jack-clad bulldog, and then with Bond slinking back into his trad aesthetics, putting Moneypenny back in her place, recreating the old days of the patrician male M, now played by Ralph Fiennes. This isn't the 'new seriousness'. This is the old crap, still clinging to the bowl.
On the subject of Ralph Fiennes... I was rather startled by the forthright way he makes a small group of swarthy, cynical, disingenuous, manipulative agitators into the main cause of trouble in his film version of Coriolanus. I mention this to indicate that the resurgence of outright reaction in recent cultural production isn't limited to the popcorn-shifting blockbusters. Fiennes' film tries to position itself as an action-film and/or political thriller worked up from the basis of a Shakespeare text - and obviously aimed to be popular, albeit in a smaller-scale way than many of the movies in which Fiennes has recently had big supporting roles (i.e. Skyfall, and the Harry Potter films). But take another recent Shakespeare production - the muched fawned-upon National Theatre revival of Timon of Athens with Simon Russell Beale. Timon is a startlingly strange and subversive play about... well, it's about a huge number of things, but a central concern is the nature of money, both as a metaphor for other things and as itself... indeed, one of the most startling things about the play is that Shakespeare appears to have realised that, in the bourgeois culture emergent when he was writing, money essentially is a metaphor. (This is something that Marx noticed when he quoted Timon's coruscating and corrosive speeches about money at length in his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844... but I digress outrageously.) One of the fascinating things about the NT staging was the way it strove to relate Timon's fall - from splurge-happy wealth to utter destitution - to the recession and its political aftershocks. Tramp-Timon finds himself surrounded by protestors with tents and placards, becoming briefly a hero to an Occupy-style rebellion of the unwashed. Alcibiades, a disaffected general in the text, becomes the leader of Occupy Ancient Athens (there must always, of course, be a single Leader in these bourgeois conceptions of protest and revolution), and his march upon the city becomes an uprising of the tent and placard brigade. What makes this relevant to this essay is the trajectory of the Occupyesque rebellion in the NT staging. It very quickly - automatically - betrays its rhetoric and becomes a cynical exercise, with Alcibiades making a dirty deal in dumbshow with the corrupt Athenian senators, and presenting himself at the head of a new coalition... smartly dressed in the trappings of respectable power.
This is an old, old set of assumptions being utilised... but see how it rides in, as though by magic, on any attempt by even this corner of the culture industry to engage with Occupy and all that it entails. We've already seen how Hollywood responded to the Arab Spring and the demands of Obama's imperial project. The top-level of the artsy British theatrical establishment reacted in essentially the same way to the recession and the Occupy movement. It's no surprise to see poor old Shakespeare being pressed into service as part of an effort to reassert reactionary certainties in time of social strife. This is a time honoured tactic of British cultural and social hegemony. TV is getting in on the act too, with the glossy series The Hollow Crown, which turned the Second Tetralogy (Richard II, Henry IV Parts 1 & 2, and Henry V) into something resembling a cheap version of Game of Thrones, crossed with a self-consciously 'straight' and 'trad' iteration of plays that have usually been presented steeped in heraldry and nationalistic bling. Simon Russell Beale turned up again as Falstaff, leading into a version of Henry V that retreats from the politically ambiguous, grimey, bloody version put forward by Branagh in the late 80s, back to something more akin to Olivier's patriotic version. The Hollow Crown has the guts to leave in the scene where Henry orders the murder of French prisoners (something which even Branagh wimped out on) but also cuts much of the cynical political wrangling at the start, as well as dumping the "upon the King" speech, during which an attentive audience might become squirmingly aware of Henry's disingenuous self-justifications. This Henry V is slanted towards presenting the king as a justified imperialist who will do the dirty work if needs be. It approaches becoming the Zero Dark Thirty version of this deeply ambiguous and ambivalent play.
Of course, none of this is anything new in and of itself. During the trial scenes in The Dark Knight Rises, I was strongly reminded of - of all things - 'Encounter at Farpoint', the first episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. The scene in TDKR that I'm thinking of is the bit where Crane (AKA Scarecrow) conducts rigged show trials of establishment figures in front of a baying mob. It made me think of the scene where Q, dressed up as a judge, puts Picard and his crew on trial in a phantom version of a court from the "post-Atomic horror". (I'd mention the offensively highlighted interracial make-up of both mobs... but that's pretty much par for the course. At least TDKR didn't have an evil oriental dwarf banging a gong). Commissioner Gordon gets his little self-righteous whinge about "due process" (forgetting the wonderful Dent's Law he's been using for years to lock people up without possibility of parole) just as Picard gets to quote Shakespeare (him again!) at Q. The line "kill all the lawyers" comes, of course, from Henry VI Part 2... in which Jack Cade is a cynical, machiavellian revolutionary who is fooling the idiotic mob into following his revolution and subjecting establishment figures to rigged show trials... just like the Judge/Q, and just like Crane, and just like Bane, and not entirely unlike Silva, or the NT version of Alcibiades, or the swarthy revolutionaries who stir the people up against Coriolanus, etc, etc, etc.
As I say, it's nothing new. Coriolanus - on balance, a play that discounts the 'rabble' - was written partly as a response to grain riots. Jack Cade is an Elizabethan cultural warning against the false promises of those, going right back to John Ball and Watt Tyler, who said that "all things shall be held in common". Such techniques are then, obviously, at least as old as the beginnings of Modern drama. They may be highly, even startlingly, consistent... but they are not constant. There are periodic lacunae in their predominance. The timbre and tenor of culture ebbs and flows with the times, with the level of struggle. 1968 penetrated the consciousness of even Terrance Dicks to the point where he co-wrote The War Games. By contrast, the great recession, the Arab Spring and Occupy appear not to have made a dent in Moffat's solipsism... though this is perhaps unfair given that, although the worldwide tide of struggle is great, we (especially we in Britain) don't appear to be experiencing it culturally as anything akin to 1968.
Maybe that's partly why Doctor Who is playing it's part in this upswing in the reactionary content of narrative media culture. The heroes of capitalist media culture - both fictional and real - have been wheeled out onto the battlefield. Bond is defending the empire (what's left of it as an ideal) and Batman is defending private property. Shakespeare is once again defending hierarchy against the placard-wavers, and a feminist CIA officer is torturing Arabs for freedom. Lincoln is showing us all how great things can be when one moral man is in charge. And all of them are enacting a wish-fulfillment fantasy of capitalism once fallen, now rising again. Meanwhile, the Doctor is doing his bit. He's hugging Churchill, palling up with Nixon (and, via his disingenuous rhetoric about slave revolts, effectively confusing him with Spartacus), championing the heteronormative at every turn and teaching clueless workers in high rise blocks how to solve all social problems by being better parents.
Unless it's all just my imagination.
For one thing, there's recently been a spate of popular, lauded films and TV shows re-inflating Islamophobia (again) in a 'nuanced' form acceptable to liberals as well as to outright bigots. The much-lauded Argo depicts a heroic CIA rescue of American hostages in Iran. Always handy, being able to demonise Iran. (Modern Iran's origin is, of course, a long and complex story, and does not present 'the West' in a good light... which is why nobody balanced and objective ever mentions it.) The much-lauded Zero Dark Thirty depicts torture as being both effective and morally conscionable, with the only negative consequence in sight being the discomfort of the torturers. It misrepresents 'enhanced interrogation' as being a valuable technique leading directly to the location of Osama and, by means of ambivalence and ambiguity (disingenuously used as a defence by the director), it effectively sides with the torturers. To be neutral about torture is to be effectively pro-torture. The enmeshing of the torture within a legalistic framework of neutrality and supposed utilitarianism is both very apt - the quintessential facet of torture as it is practiced by modern democracies is that it is steeped in punctilious legality - and very normalising.
These new liberal/Islamophobic popular movies, which also appeal to the criterati and the awards-boards, have come just as the American empire (and its allies) has beeing stepping up its rhetoric about the evils of Iran in particular, and the possibility of intervening in struggles in the Arab world. Clearly, part and parcel of the imperium's cultural reactlash to/against the Arab Spring. This isn't anything new. The previous round of mainstream liberal-inflected movies about the 'War on Terror' and Iraq were similarly punctual in their ideological addresses; as with the Vietnam movies of the late-70s and 80s, they served as an ostentatious display of American culture in the throws of 'painful self-examination' and 'angst' about a military adventure held in increasing public opprobrium. The Hurt Locker was more prompt than The Deer Hunter, but essentially peddled the same assumptions and the same normalising effects.
The buzz lately has been about two big movies from big directors, both tackling the issue of slavery. Spielberg's Lincoln and Tarantino's Django Unchained. Lincoln makes the destruction of slavery seem like the accomplishment of old white guys in government offices. It's not actually that much better than Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter. (Okay, that may be an exaggeration.) Lincoln nods in the direction of black soldiers and black resistance, but the essential story being told is the one long since abandoned by most historians: the story of the abolition of slavery being a legal coup handed down from Washington. The reality is that Lincoln's emancipation proclamation was a recognition of something happening 'on the ground' as the slaves of the South rebelled in enormous numbers, stealing themselves from their owners and joining the Union armies. The film depicts Thaddeus Stevens as a radical who needed to rein himself in so that the real work could be done by the moderate compromiser Lincoln. Spielberg and his writer have both spoken of the film as a paen to political compromise. The subtext is one of support for a moderate, compromising liberal president in time of war. It is, in short, an exhortation to give Obama space to win at home and abroad through his moderate use of drones and kill lists, and his compromise with capital (which involves letting capital off the hook while making the American people pay). Django's racial politics are also hugely problematic, with the rebellious black man depicted as a one-in-a-million phenomenon, with the dynamics of the story defined by white people, with Django freed by a white man instead of through his own struggle. Django is not really about a black rebellion against racism or slavery. It essentially depicts a white man using a black man as a revenge weapon against other white men. Both movies fall into the same category as Avatar, in that they have been painstakingly crafted to appear 'on side' with an oppressed and enslaved ethnic group, while also objectifying them and stripping them of real agency, making their struggle seem like it has been shaped and won by Whitey. Interestingly, Spielberg did exactly the same kind of thing in Schindler's List. His movie about the Judeocide is not a story of Jewish resistance in the midst of one of the most catastrophic moral failures in human history. It's a success story about how some Jews were saved by a gentile capitalist. This is the American movie business for you, which has the heroic white gentile saviour (often exemplifying bourgeois values even if he's not an actual businessman) as one of its most enduring and central narratives. This is one reason why Ayn Rand felt so much at home in Hollywood.
On the subject of the heroic, white, gentile, rich, businessman saviour... we should consider the latest mega-successful iteration of Batman. Bruce Wayne may not disdain conscience and altruism, but in shape and style he is, in many ways, a Randian hero. He takes it all upon himself, becoming the fountainhead of goodness and the Atlas upon which Gotham rests. Tim Burton's movies downplayed Wayne's role as a wealthy businessman (though he gets to play the 'good' capitalist vs Christopher Walken's 'bad' capitalist in Batman Returns). Schumacher gives Wayne Enterprises a profit sharing scheme. These techniques slightly reduce the volume of the pro-capitalist blare inherent in the Batman myth, though without neutralising or forgetting it. Nolan's trilogy, however, turns up the volume to 11. Wayne Enterprises is a force for moral and material good in society. There are 'bad capitalists' and 'good capitalists'. Bruce's father is of the 'good' variety. He prefers to be a doctor, but has his company build monorails to (somehow) help the poor, becoming an example to the rest of Gotham's wealthocracy. The economic crisis in Gotham depicted in Batman Begins is an external event, artificially created and inflicted upon Gotham's capitalism by the fanaticism of the baddies. The social conscience of the domestic rich is all that can save the city from being destroyed by the unleashed evil of the poor. Bruce follows in his father's footsteps in that he offers an example. He becomes - forgive my degrading weakness for puns - the Dark Knight Exemplar. His violent, authoritarian project to beat law and order into people is the stick to his father's carrot - both imbued with the same moral sense. That Bruce has a nauseating line in speechifying about the 'good in people' shouldn't distract us from the quintessentially Randian idea in his heart: capitalism is heroic. Okay, there is bad capitalism (usually illegal) but ultimately the system is synonymous with social wellbeing, steered correctly through the efforts of a kevlar-coated Atlas. In case there's any danger of us missing the point, Nolan gives us panoramas of glittering corporate skyscrapers, lush boardrooms, gorgeous secretaries, morally-minded executives, bad CEOs who ultimately get their comeuppance, etc.
Looking back a bit... Recently, Charlie Brooker (for whom I still have some time despite that embarassing hair and stubble he has now) wrote that The Dark Knight Rises and Skyfall were, essentially, the same film. In both, the hero of a big franchise is stripped of all his power and has to claw his way back up onto his feet. Batman starts his movie a miserable recluse, blamed for things that aren't his fault, unshaven, hobbled and limping on crutches. Later, he gets pulverised in a fight and is left to rot at the bottom of a pit. Bond falls, literally and metaphorically, at the start of his film. Assumed dead, he is in fact in the Bahamas, drinking Heineken, letting himself get unshaven (that motif again) and out of shape. Both films focus on their hero's quest to get himself back in trim and then to defeat the baddie who has made hay in his absence. This seems, to me, an obvious and not-so-subtle metaphor for the state of capitalism. The heroic, formerly all-conquering hero laid low by circumstances beyond his control and needing to climb back up into the light... well, this is essentially the mainstream narrative about where capital is at these days. The same essential formulation holds in many sectors of what we might, for want of a better word, want to call the modern 'left'. Huge swathes of what was Occupy etc held 'the bankers' to blame for the crisis, as though banking and bankers were something extrinsic to capitalism, and as though capitalism was a victim of the bankers and their free-floating, contextless 'greed'... which, as a description of what happened, is an example of accuracy becoming inaccuracy through incompleteness. A bit like saying that a rifle killed JFK and leaving it at that.
It'd be easy to discount my reading were it not for the fact that The Dark Knight Rises goes out of its way to support the established hierarchy of capitalism, and to lay the woes of Gotham at the door of the rabblement. The police and government, whatever their failings, represent order, stability, safety and noble sacrifice. Even the partial repudiation of the lies told to the public (for their own good) by Gordon and Batman is couched in terms of a noble mistake. Meanwhile, the envious unwashed ransack their way ruthlessly through the mansions of the rich, and the revolution is immediately tyrannical, setting up showtrials in a perverse people's court. Gordon, brought to trial, gets to make a speech defending the establishment's virtuous conception of law against the arbitrary and malicious revolutionary justice of Crane. Bane takes on the leadership of the angrily and inarticulately disaffected and, like all leaders of revolts against an established order, he is revealed to be an insincere opportunist, a self-seeking demagogue, simultaneously nihilist and fanatic. The Randian-with-a-conscience-and-bat-ears, meanwhile, has been dumped in a deep hole, from which you can only escape by climbing on on your own, and without a safety harness... which, as Stavvers observed, is a metaphor for reactionary ideas about poverty and welfare dependancy.
 | |
| British Bullshit. |
On the subject of Ralph Fiennes... I was rather startled by the forthright way he makes a small group of swarthy, cynical, disingenuous, manipulative agitators into the main cause of trouble in his film version of Coriolanus. I mention this to indicate that the resurgence of outright reaction in recent cultural production isn't limited to the popcorn-shifting blockbusters. Fiennes' film tries to position itself as an action-film and/or political thriller worked up from the basis of a Shakespeare text - and obviously aimed to be popular, albeit in a smaller-scale way than many of the movies in which Fiennes has recently had big supporting roles (i.e. Skyfall, and the Harry Potter films). But take another recent Shakespeare production - the muched fawned-upon National Theatre revival of Timon of Athens with Simon Russell Beale. Timon is a startlingly strange and subversive play about... well, it's about a huge number of things, but a central concern is the nature of money, both as a metaphor for other things and as itself... indeed, one of the most startling things about the play is that Shakespeare appears to have realised that, in the bourgeois culture emergent when he was writing, money essentially is a metaphor. (This is something that Marx noticed when he quoted Timon's coruscating and corrosive speeches about money at length in his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844... but I digress outrageously.) One of the fascinating things about the NT staging was the way it strove to relate Timon's fall - from splurge-happy wealth to utter destitution - to the recession and its political aftershocks. Tramp-Timon finds himself surrounded by protestors with tents and placards, becoming briefly a hero to an Occupy-style rebellion of the unwashed. Alcibiades, a disaffected general in the text, becomes the leader of Occupy Ancient Athens (there must always, of course, be a single Leader in these bourgeois conceptions of protest and revolution), and his march upon the city becomes an uprising of the tent and placard brigade. What makes this relevant to this essay is the trajectory of the Occupyesque rebellion in the NT staging. It very quickly - automatically - betrays its rhetoric and becomes a cynical exercise, with Alcibiades making a dirty deal in dumbshow with the corrupt Athenian senators, and presenting himself at the head of a new coalition... smartly dressed in the trappings of respectable power.
This is an old, old set of assumptions being utilised... but see how it rides in, as though by magic, on any attempt by even this corner of the culture industry to engage with Occupy and all that it entails. We've already seen how Hollywood responded to the Arab Spring and the demands of Obama's imperial project. The top-level of the artsy British theatrical establishment reacted in essentially the same way to the recession and the Occupy movement. It's no surprise to see poor old Shakespeare being pressed into service as part of an effort to reassert reactionary certainties in time of social strife. This is a time honoured tactic of British cultural and social hegemony. TV is getting in on the act too, with the glossy series The Hollow Crown, which turned the Second Tetralogy (Richard II, Henry IV Parts 1 & 2, and Henry V) into something resembling a cheap version of Game of Thrones, crossed with a self-consciously 'straight' and 'trad' iteration of plays that have usually been presented steeped in heraldry and nationalistic bling. Simon Russell Beale turned up again as Falstaff, leading into a version of Henry V that retreats from the politically ambiguous, grimey, bloody version put forward by Branagh in the late 80s, back to something more akin to Olivier's patriotic version. The Hollow Crown has the guts to leave in the scene where Henry orders the murder of French prisoners (something which even Branagh wimped out on) but also cuts much of the cynical political wrangling at the start, as well as dumping the "upon the King" speech, during which an attentive audience might become squirmingly aware of Henry's disingenuous self-justifications. This Henry V is slanted towards presenting the king as a justified imperialist who will do the dirty work if needs be. It approaches becoming the Zero Dark Thirty version of this deeply ambiguous and ambivalent play.
Of course, none of this is anything new in and of itself. During the trial scenes in The Dark Knight Rises, I was strongly reminded of - of all things - 'Encounter at Farpoint', the first episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. The scene in TDKR that I'm thinking of is the bit where Crane (AKA Scarecrow) conducts rigged show trials of establishment figures in front of a baying mob. It made me think of the scene where Q, dressed up as a judge, puts Picard and his crew on trial in a phantom version of a court from the "post-Atomic horror". (I'd mention the offensively highlighted interracial make-up of both mobs... but that's pretty much par for the course. At least TDKR didn't have an evil oriental dwarf banging a gong). Commissioner Gordon gets his little self-righteous whinge about "due process" (forgetting the wonderful Dent's Law he's been using for years to lock people up without possibility of parole) just as Picard gets to quote Shakespeare (him again!) at Q. The line "kill all the lawyers" comes, of course, from Henry VI Part 2... in which Jack Cade is a cynical, machiavellian revolutionary who is fooling the idiotic mob into following his revolution and subjecting establishment figures to rigged show trials... just like the Judge/Q, and just like Crane, and just like Bane, and not entirely unlike Silva, or the NT version of Alcibiades, or the swarthy revolutionaries who stir the people up against Coriolanus, etc, etc, etc.
As I say, it's nothing new. Coriolanus - on balance, a play that discounts the 'rabble' - was written partly as a response to grain riots. Jack Cade is an Elizabethan cultural warning against the false promises of those, going right back to John Ball and Watt Tyler, who said that "all things shall be held in common". Such techniques are then, obviously, at least as old as the beginnings of Modern drama. They may be highly, even startlingly, consistent... but they are not constant. There are periodic lacunae in their predominance. The timbre and tenor of culture ebbs and flows with the times, with the level of struggle. 1968 penetrated the consciousness of even Terrance Dicks to the point where he co-wrote The War Games. By contrast, the great recession, the Arab Spring and Occupy appear not to have made a dent in Moffat's solipsism... though this is perhaps unfair given that, although the worldwide tide of struggle is great, we (especially we in Britain) don't appear to be experiencing it culturally as anything akin to 1968.
Maybe that's partly why Doctor Who is playing it's part in this upswing in the reactionary content of narrative media culture. The heroes of capitalist media culture - both fictional and real - have been wheeled out onto the battlefield. Bond is defending the empire (what's left of it as an ideal) and Batman is defending private property. Shakespeare is once again defending hierarchy against the placard-wavers, and a feminist CIA officer is torturing Arabs for freedom. Lincoln is showing us all how great things can be when one moral man is in charge. And all of them are enacting a wish-fulfillment fantasy of capitalism once fallen, now rising again. Meanwhile, the Doctor is doing his bit. He's hugging Churchill, palling up with Nixon (and, via his disingenuous rhetoric about slave revolts, effectively confusing him with Spartacus), championing the heteronormative at every turn and teaching clueless workers in high rise blocks how to solve all social problems by being better parents.
Unless it's all just my imagination.
Tuesday, 15 January 2013
And the award for the most nuanced bigotry goes to...
This article - from Rachel Shabi in The Guardian - is really great. It's about the Islamophobia encoded in the recent spate of much-lauded movies (and a TV show) about Americans, Arabs, terrorism... and all that kind of stuff. Argo, Homeland, Zero Dark Thirty - all recently rewarded at the Golden Globes. Supposedly nuanced and complex, they peddle the same old lies... just in a way acceptable to liberals.
Here's a snippet:
Funny how the culture industry obediently steps up when the imperium is trying to relaunch (yet again) a rinsed-clean project of Muslimcidal 'humanitarian intervention'. I'm all for complex, structural analyses of these synergies between policy and popcorn... but I can be a bit of a vulgar Marxist on this subject too. I can't help noticing just how thoroughly integrated Hollywood is with the fucking Pentagon (told you I was vulgar). See this excellent book for a brief, persuasive documentation of the phenomenon.
Oh, by the way, here's blogger Matt Cornell with a roundup of Twitter reactions to the 'nuanced' Zero Dark Thirty. Like this 'nuanced' response, for instance:
Nothing like 'nuance' is there?
(Actually, I've blogged once before about the strange way that modern drama's aim to be all, like, morally ambiguous yeah? leads to reactionary effects - here. Essentially, because some truths about the world are too damning and radical to seem neutral, they can not be allowed to play any part in dramatic ambiguity and complexity. It works similarly to how some realities about the world cannot get into the news because the properly educated responsible journalist feels like she's not being neutral or balanced when she mentions them.)
Why do I care about movies and TV shows? *Sigh* Look, fiction matters. In many ways, it matters more than non-fiction when it comes to influencing people's opinions (and I include myself in that).
Ayn Rand never proved anything as a 'philosopher', but as a best-selling and influential novelist she proved that popular fiction needs to be ruthlessly politically critiqued. Fiction is such an enormous part of our daily cultural and social diet that to critique it is to critique the world as it is.
*
ADDITIONAL:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/dec/14/zero-dark-thirty-cia-propaganda
http://www.juancole.com/2013/01/torture-illegal-really.html
http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2012/12/20/dark-d20.html
*
YET MORE (27/01/13):
"This awareness of the torturer's hurt sensitivity as the (main) human cost of torture ensures that the film is not cheap rightwing propaganda: the psychological complexity is depicted so that liberals can enjoy the film without feeling guilty. This is why Zero Dark Thirty is much worse than 24, where at least Jack Bauer breaks down at the series finale." - Žižek, http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jan/25/zero-dark-thirty-normalises-torture-unjustifiable (Pretty good, though he wobbles at the end.)
Here's a snippet:
The three winners have all been sold as complex, nuanced productions that don't shy away from hard truths about US foreign policy. And liberal audiences can't get enough of them. Perhaps it's because, alongside the odd bit of self-criticism, they are all so reassuringly insistent that, in an increasingly complicated world, America just keeps on doing the right thing. And even when it does the wrong thing – such as, I don't know, torture and drone strikes and deadly invasions – it is to combat far greater evil, and therefore OK.
Funny how the culture industry obediently steps up when the imperium is trying to relaunch (yet again) a rinsed-clean project of Muslimcidal 'humanitarian intervention'. I'm all for complex, structural analyses of these synergies between policy and popcorn... but I can be a bit of a vulgar Marxist on this subject too. I can't help noticing just how thoroughly integrated Hollywood is with the fucking Pentagon (told you I was vulgar). See this excellent book for a brief, persuasive documentation of the phenomenon.
Oh, by the way, here's blogger Matt Cornell with a roundup of Twitter reactions to the 'nuanced' Zero Dark Thirty. Like this 'nuanced' response, for instance:
Nothing like 'nuance' is there?
(Actually, I've blogged once before about the strange way that modern drama's aim to be all, like, morally ambiguous yeah? leads to reactionary effects - here. Essentially, because some truths about the world are too damning and radical to seem neutral, they can not be allowed to play any part in dramatic ambiguity and complexity. It works similarly to how some realities about the world cannot get into the news because the properly educated responsible journalist feels like she's not being neutral or balanced when she mentions them.)
Why do I care about movies and TV shows? *Sigh* Look, fiction matters. In many ways, it matters more than non-fiction when it comes to influencing people's opinions (and I include myself in that).
Ayn Rand never proved anything as a 'philosopher', but as a best-selling and influential novelist she proved that popular fiction needs to be ruthlessly politically critiqued. Fiction is such an enormous part of our daily cultural and social diet that to critique it is to critique the world as it is.
*
ADDITIONAL:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/dec/14/zero-dark-thirty-cia-propaganda
http://www.juancole.com/2013/01/torture-illegal-really.html
http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2012/12/20/dark-d20.html
*
YET MORE (27/01/13):
"This awareness of the torturer's hurt sensitivity as the (main) human cost of torture ensures that the film is not cheap rightwing propaganda: the psychological complexity is depicted so that liberals can enjoy the film without feeling guilty. This is why Zero Dark Thirty is much worse than 24, where at least Jack Bauer breaks down at the series finale." - Žižek, http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jan/25/zero-dark-thirty-normalises-torture-unjustifiable (Pretty good, though he wobbles at the end.)
Saturday, 15 September 2012
Murder is Murder
The terrible killings of Americans in Libya have provoked an entirely foreesable reaction. Loads of smug conservatives and equally smug liberals have found common cause in singling out Islam as violent and intolerant.
That cartoon in The Onion is a good example. 'Nobody Murdered Because of This Image' reads the headline, above a cartoon of several non-Muslim religious figures engaged in an explicit gang bang. Because only Muslims kill people for bigoted reasons, you see.
It's interesting to witness the implicit hierarchy of human value. The (entirely deplorable) murder of Americans by Libyans elicits howls of outrages. The (equally deplorable and far more common) murder of Arabs and Muslims in Libya, Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Palestine etc by the American and British militaries - and/or NATO, and/or the Israelis - doesn't provoke any such widespread and sustained spluttering horror. It's for 'them' to die at our hands. That's just routine. And 'they' mustn't draw any conclusions from this (i.e. the West despises them and values their culture at nothing) because if they do then that's the medieval intolerance of Islam talking.
Of course, nobody who died at the Embassy deserved to die, nor would they have deserved to even if they had been involved in creating the disgusting, hateful, maliciously provocative film that everyone is talking about. Most Muslims would agree, I'm sure... even those who were insulted and shocked by hearing about the film.
Meanwhile, our Western response (the response of those who are supposedly living in the civilised, liberal, modern, progressive, democratic world... as opposed to the lands of the backward, whom we take it upon ourselves to slaughter in the name of freedom) will probably be to massacre yet more Arabs and Muslims.
And all those people who chortle over the religious touchiness of Muslims will immediately go blind and deaf.
That cartoon in The Onion is a good example. 'Nobody Murdered Because of This Image' reads the headline, above a cartoon of several non-Muslim religious figures engaged in an explicit gang bang. Because only Muslims kill people for bigoted reasons, you see.
It's interesting to witness the implicit hierarchy of human value. The (entirely deplorable) murder of Americans by Libyans elicits howls of outrages. The (equally deplorable and far more common) murder of Arabs and Muslims in Libya, Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Palestine etc by the American and British militaries - and/or NATO, and/or the Israelis - doesn't provoke any such widespread and sustained spluttering horror. It's for 'them' to die at our hands. That's just routine. And 'they' mustn't draw any conclusions from this (i.e. the West despises them and values their culture at nothing) because if they do then that's the medieval intolerance of Islam talking.
Of course, nobody who died at the Embassy deserved to die, nor would they have deserved to even if they had been involved in creating the disgusting, hateful, maliciously provocative film that everyone is talking about. Most Muslims would agree, I'm sure... even those who were insulted and shocked by hearing about the film.
Meanwhile, our Western response (the response of those who are supposedly living in the civilised, liberal, modern, progressive, democratic world... as opposed to the lands of the backward, whom we take it upon ourselves to slaughter in the name of freedom) will probably be to massacre yet more Arabs and Muslims.
And all those people who chortle over the religious touchiness of Muslims will immediately go blind and deaf.
Friday, 30 March 2012
How Curses Work 2: This Fez is Loaded
The utility to Western imperialism of depicting Arabs with the kind of culturalist discourse of modern vs. pre-modern, secularism vs. cultish religion, democracy vs. theocracy, civilisation vs. medievalism, rationalism vs. fanaticism (translated out of code: good Westerners vs. bad Arabs) that followed in the wake of the "war on terror" is obvious.
This way of constructing Arab and/or Middle Eastern cultural identities in Western art, literature, media and ideology, is very old.
Edward Said's seminal book Orientalism outlines the way in which the West has constructed the East as an exotic, romantic, cruel, sensuous, decadent, fanatical, inscrutable Other. (...though it is occasionally weakened - in my presumptuous and insignificant opinion - by the problems underlying Foucault's notion of 'discourse', which Said utilises.)
Jack Shaheen's book Reel Bad Arabs reveals how Hollywood has vilified and dehumanized Arabs. Here's a great short documentary demonstrating his thesis. It's central message may not come as a surprise to you, but it's still salutary to see the evidence collated and concentrated.
Such representations of Arabs pop up in the Doctor Who story 'Pyramids of Mars' (1975) as part of the show's tactic, at that time, of raiding the motifs of the pop-gothic... with Hammer as a major influence. The Hammer version of The Mummy is the place, above all others, where the Egyptian Fanatic (that character we were talking about in the previous post) is best seen. The character in that film, played by George Pastell, is the template for Namin in 'Pyramids of Mars'.
Namin is a murderous, raging fanatic. He goes one better than Pastell's character in the Hammer Mummy: he actually takes over the English country mansion of the Explorer, invading it using forged (or coerced) letters of authority from the Explorer, taking up the Explorer's place, raging at the Explorer's servant, barring the Explorer's brother, insulting and shooting the Explorer's friend, etc. Inverting real history, the Egyptian invades England, violently taking over. Terrance Dicks' novelisation makes it clear that Namin is the last in a long line of fanatical worshippers of the old gods, as per standard stereotypes. At one point, Namin even insinuates that Dr Warlock is being racist - or at least xenophobic - in suspecting him of nefarious activities, asking sarcastically if Warlock will report him to the police for being "a foreigner". Warlock then gets to smash such petty and self-serving nonsense aside. Don't bring up racism; I only suspect you because you're a wrong'un. Thus is the depiction of the Arab as a sinister, fanatical invader self-alibied, self-excused... with all criticism automatically and pre-emptively effaced in a "Political correctness gone mad!" moment avant la lettre. It's a moment when Doctor Who itself says "bloody minorities, coming over here... and then squealing about 'racism' when we complain about what they get up to!" It's one of the ugliest moments in the history of the show.
But Namin isn't just an evil Arab. He's an evil religious Arab. In the original version of his essay about 'Pyramids of Mars' at his TARDIS Eruditorum blog, Philip Sandifer (while, it should be stressed, criticising the use of nasty stereotypes) accidentally referred to Namin as a Muslim... and got taken to task for it in the comments. With good grace, he admitted and corrected the slip. Thing is... was it really so off the mark? Okay, Namin worships Sutekh not Allah... and, by extension, he believes in the other Egyptian deities, making him a polytheist... which puts him well outside 'really existing Islam', which is clear about there only being the one god, Allah. I'm not saying that Namin's beliefs or practices, as they appear in 'Pyramids of Mars', bear any relation or similarity to Islam. They don't. Quite the contrary, in fact... which is kind of the point.... because, despite being so self-evidently NOT a Muslim, Namin as a character is still semiotically depicted in terms which carry connotations of Islam in Western Orientalist discourse. His very fanaticism is itself a signifier often used to connote Islam in such representations. His fez, which the text directly and explicitly connects to the ethnic and religious identity of the character - i.e. Arab Fanatic - is a cultural artifact of the Ottoman Empire, an Islamic political entity. He does a lot of kneeling and bowing, a lot of raging at unbelievers who dare to trespass upon his private religious practices... all while being a fez-wearing Arab. And, at the time 'Pyramids of Mars' was made, 'Muslim terrorism' was a much-hyped fear in the West. (Nothing changes, does it?) At that time, as now, the word 'Muslim' was frequently taken as more or less synonymous with 'violent religious fundamentalist with an axe to grind' in the media culture of the West. (The only real difference nowadays is that, unlike most forms of racism, it's more or less acceptable to openly practice Islamophobia.)
Admittedly, 'terrorism' in the 70s was as associated with the IRA and Baader-Meinhof, etc... but there was also the PLO and the memory of Black September... all endlessly condemned in the Western media without anyone bothering to go on at equal length about much-greater Israeli and Western atrocities committed against Muslims. The heyday of 'Muslim terrorists' in Western pop-culture was still in the future, of course... it arose in the 80s and 90s, along with the need to demonize post-revolutionary Iran, paint Libya as the ultimate rogue state and discredit Palestinian 'peace offensives'... and reached its apogee after 9/11 for obvious reasons.
Even so, there is no doubt what Namin - a fanatical, fez-wearing, gun-wielding, Westerner-killing, religiously-observant Arab - MEANT in 1975. The fact that his stated religious beliefs and practices are about as far from Islam as can be imagined only adds insult to... well, insult.
To be honest, I find it amazing that George Pastell wasn't cast as Namin. He was the go-to guy for such characters. I suppose they didn't want to draw too much attention to how derivative of Hammer's first Mummy film 'Pyramids' really was.
Pastell, of course, had already done Who duties, playing a fanatical, generic foreigner who schemes to open ancient tombs and release hideous, stomping, undead zombies who will - he thinks - do his evil bidding, in 'Tomb of the Cybermen'.
Klieg may not be an Egyptian (it's hard to say what he's supposed to be, apart from a generic 'foreigner'), but the presence of such a character, played by an actor who had played the Egyptian Fanatic for Hammer in the past, is part of that story's recoding of the Curse of the Mummy's Tomb-type tale.
I've looked elsewhere at how 'Tomb of the Cybermen' takes on all sorts of racist connotations by recycling, in terms translated into sci-fi, the tropes of colonialist gothic horror, tropes that were augmented forever in popular awareness by 'Tutmania' during the 20s and 30s, in the wake of the 'discovery' of Tutankhamun's burial chamber.
Wise words from me there.
The casting of Pastell is part and parcel of this very same recoding. I'm not dismissing his abilities as an actor, but all actors know that there's a lot more to getting cast than just how good you are. Pastell was drafted in to play the Fanatic in 'Tomb' because he'd already played Fanatics in things with 'Tomb' in the title. In short - because he looked right.
This way of constructing Arab and/or Middle Eastern cultural identities in Western art, literature, media and ideology, is very old.
Edward Said's seminal book Orientalism outlines the way in which the West has constructed the East as an exotic, romantic, cruel, sensuous, decadent, fanatical, inscrutable Other. (...though it is occasionally weakened - in my presumptuous and insignificant opinion - by the problems underlying Foucault's notion of 'discourse', which Said utilises.)
Jack Shaheen's book Reel Bad Arabs reveals how Hollywood has vilified and dehumanized Arabs. Here's a great short documentary demonstrating his thesis. It's central message may not come as a surprise to you, but it's still salutary to see the evidence collated and concentrated.
Such representations of Arabs pop up in the Doctor Who story 'Pyramids of Mars' (1975) as part of the show's tactic, at that time, of raiding the motifs of the pop-gothic... with Hammer as a major influence. The Hammer version of The Mummy is the place, above all others, where the Egyptian Fanatic (that character we were talking about in the previous post) is best seen. The character in that film, played by George Pastell, is the template for Namin in 'Pyramids of Mars'.
 |
| "Where 'dem infidels at???" |
But Namin isn't just an evil Arab. He's an evil religious Arab. In the original version of his essay about 'Pyramids of Mars' at his TARDIS Eruditorum blog, Philip Sandifer (while, it should be stressed, criticising the use of nasty stereotypes) accidentally referred to Namin as a Muslim... and got taken to task for it in the comments. With good grace, he admitted and corrected the slip. Thing is... was it really so off the mark? Okay, Namin worships Sutekh not Allah... and, by extension, he believes in the other Egyptian deities, making him a polytheist... which puts him well outside 'really existing Islam', which is clear about there only being the one god, Allah. I'm not saying that Namin's beliefs or practices, as they appear in 'Pyramids of Mars', bear any relation or similarity to Islam. They don't. Quite the contrary, in fact... which is kind of the point.... because, despite being so self-evidently NOT a Muslim, Namin as a character is still semiotically depicted in terms which carry connotations of Islam in Western Orientalist discourse. His very fanaticism is itself a signifier often used to connote Islam in such representations. His fez, which the text directly and explicitly connects to the ethnic and religious identity of the character - i.e. Arab Fanatic - is a cultural artifact of the Ottoman Empire, an Islamic political entity. He does a lot of kneeling and bowing, a lot of raging at unbelievers who dare to trespass upon his private religious practices... all while being a fez-wearing Arab. And, at the time 'Pyramids of Mars' was made, 'Muslim terrorism' was a much-hyped fear in the West. (Nothing changes, does it?) At that time, as now, the word 'Muslim' was frequently taken as more or less synonymous with 'violent religious fundamentalist with an axe to grind' in the media culture of the West. (The only real difference nowadays is that, unlike most forms of racism, it's more or less acceptable to openly practice Islamophobia.)Admittedly, 'terrorism' in the 70s was as associated with the IRA and Baader-Meinhof, etc... but there was also the PLO and the memory of Black September... all endlessly condemned in the Western media without anyone bothering to go on at equal length about much-greater Israeli and Western atrocities committed against Muslims. The heyday of 'Muslim terrorists' in Western pop-culture was still in the future, of course... it arose in the 80s and 90s, along with the need to demonize post-revolutionary Iran, paint Libya as the ultimate rogue state and discredit Palestinian 'peace offensives'... and reached its apogee after 9/11 for obvious reasons.
Even so, there is no doubt what Namin - a fanatical, fez-wearing, gun-wielding, Westerner-killing, religiously-observant Arab - MEANT in 1975. The fact that his stated religious beliefs and practices are about as far from Islam as can be imagined only adds insult to... well, insult.
To be honest, I find it amazing that George Pastell wasn't cast as Namin. He was the go-to guy for such characters. I suppose they didn't want to draw too much attention to how derivative of Hammer's first Mummy film 'Pyramids' really was.
 |
| "Where 'dem Anglo-Saxon fools at???" |
Klieg may not be an Egyptian (it's hard to say what he's supposed to be, apart from a generic 'foreigner'), but the presence of such a character, played by an actor who had played the Egyptian Fanatic for Hammer in the past, is part of that story's recoding of the Curse of the Mummy's Tomb-type tale.
I've looked elsewhere at how 'Tomb of the Cybermen' takes on all sorts of racist connotations by recycling, in terms translated into sci-fi, the tropes of colonialist gothic horror, tropes that were augmented forever in popular awareness by 'Tutmania' during the 20s and 30s, in the wake of the 'discovery' of Tutankhamun's burial chamber.
In 'Tomb', the ancient subterranean stone burial chambers of Mummy films become technological freezers. "Abandon hope all ye who enter here" becomes the electricity coursing through the big doors. The curses upon those who disturb that rest of the Pharaoh / Princess / High Priest become a long-ago formulated Cyber plan to snare new recruits. The buried treasures become the power that Klieg and Kaftan hope to co-opt. The faded, dusty friezes become the Cyber icons that decorate the walls. The sinister hieroglyphics become the cryptic patterns of symbolic logic. When Klieg (with the inexplicable assistance of the Doctor) manages to work out the logic sequences which open the doors, he is also translating the magic "open sesame" contained in the sacred, arcane symbols of a tattered scroll.
Wise words from me there.
The casting of Pastell is part and parcel of this very same recoding. I'm not dismissing his abilities as an actor, but all actors know that there's a lot more to getting cast than just how good you are. Pastell was drafted in to play the Fanatic in 'Tomb' because he'd already played Fanatics in things with 'Tomb' in the title. In short - because he looked right.
Friday, 16 March 2012
How Curses Work
We've all seen him. He's swarthy, usually (though not always) with a dark beard. He's often wearing a fez (no, I'm not going to say it) and robes of some kind.
Sometimes, he leaves his home desert and comes to England. He may be dressed in Western clothes and live in a house with Western furnishings, but he's got a secret room, or a shrine, or a sanctum behind a billowing curtain, in which he keeps his infernal idols amidst clouds of suffocating incense.
He's...
(cue dramatic music)
...the Egyptian Fanatic!
When he comes to England, he becomes the mirror image of the English Explorer Who Has Just Returned from Egypt (henceforth, the Explorer). This man goes to Egypt for the love of antiquities and discovery, and comes back enchanted and bewitched by the place (by the place, mind, not the people); filling his big, wood-panelled home with Egyptiana. The question of whether the Explorer has any right to this Egyptiana is raised only by the Egyptian Fanatic in England (henceforth, the Fanatic).
The Fanatic has come to England from his native land in search of something, some inscrutable justice, some devilish retribution. He nurses a grudge. He clothes himself in Anglo, middle-class normalcy. He speaks impeccable English, albeit in a heavy accent. (It doesn't have to be an 'Egyptian accent', just a generic foreign one will do.) He is usually treated with courtesy (at first) by the bemused English middle classes amongst whom he mixes by default because of his wealth. These people may come to suspect and despise him, but they're often tolerant enough at the start, though a working class or yokel character may get to utter some ignorant dislike of "strangers". The middle class characters may even initially tut at this sort of hostility (what with them being so open minded and everything) but it will turn out that the yokel's xenophobia was (accidentally) quite justified.
Because the Fanatic is there to cause trouble. To raise the mummified body of a long-dead Egyptian High Priest from its slumber inside a sarcophagus and set it the task of killing all those infidels who dared to trespass upon the sacred resting place of the Pharaoh, etc. The Explorer will be the target of the Fanatic's superstitious rage (it will continue to be looked upon as superstition, despite the fact that the spells work and the mummy really does come to life). The Explorer was just trying to further the cause of science and knowledge, to preserve the ancient Egyptian past, perhaps to delve into mysteries Better Left Undisturbed... sometimes the Explorer has been arrogant in his treatment of the Egyptians, sometimes he was rude and dismissive to the particular Egyptian Fanatic who is now persecuting him, usually when said Egyptian Fanatic turned up and begged him not to open the pyramid / break the seal on the scroll / disturb the body / take the mummy to display in England. In some cases, the Explorer is shown to be greedy for gold or glory or knowledge... sometimes he is even a touch fanatical himself.
But, at the end of the day, it is the Egyptian who is the real Fanatic. It is he who has devoted his life to the single-minded cause of revenge, of worshipping the evil Egyptian deity, of seeking out all desecrators and having them strangled by a rotting corpse. Sometimes he has fanatically loyal henchmen or assassins who will kill for him, with dirty great curved swords. If ordinary Egyptians see these men (you know ordinary Egyptians by their muteness, cowardliness and by the fact that they do the donkey work at the Explorer's dig) they run away in terror. Maybe the Fanatic is the last in a long line of priests, acolytes of a cult that has lasted for centuries, devoted to passing the task of protecting their god down through the generations. He is bound to savagery via fanatical superstition and cultish tradition. And the Explorer is the victim. The Explorer's home is violated, the Explorer's wife (who is sometimes the reincarnation of the mummy's Queen / High Priestess / lover) is menaced, the Explorer is attacked... etc.
The wife thing is interesting because it adds the anxiety of the Caucasian woman desired, possibly symbolically ravished, by the Arab... and, it goes without saying, the woman is depicted as property that the men fight over. The theft of her from her husband is usually a perverse echo of the noble thefts committed by the Explorer. You take our treasures in the name of science, so we take your women in the name of... well... heh heh heh heh hehhhhhh!
So we see how the Mummy story stems from European (particularly English) anxieties about the morality (or consequences anyway) of raiding other people's ancient tombs and carrying their ancient artifacts and corpses away with you, back to England to recieve the fame and the fortune and the prestige. More broadly, we see how stories like this stem from European anxieties about their empires, about their pith-helmeted sons swaggering around other people's countries like they owned them. It isn't that these stories try to make the Explorer come to terms with what he's done wrong... it is that his behaviour (however dodgy it may occasionally be acknowledged to be) is absolved by the disproportionate and grotesque response of the inscrutable, pre-modern, occult, emotionally deranged, immature, vindictive, fanatical, fez-wearing brown person who comes after him, wielding fetishes, chanting invocations to obscene deities (our own images of tortured hunks nailed to crosses are never questioned), burning incense, reading horrible curses from scrolls and sending his decomposing henchman out to do his murderous dirty work for him.
Thus, as always in the stories told by imperialist cultures, is the imperialist absolved by the inhumanity of his own victims. This task may be best accomplished by tales of the uncanny precisely because it requires such a massive leap outside the realms of reality.
The Fanaticism of the West
It's quite something, the way our popular culture has managed to associate Egypt almost entirely with curses, fanaticism, evil and the theft of white womenfolk, given the nature of actual European relations with that country. Egypt, after all, has never invaded Britain. Britain, however, has invaded Egypt. A lot.
In July 1882, British warships began bombarding Alexandria. Supposedly, this was done because the Egyptians refused to surrender some coastal forts. In reality, the forts were no threat, as the British knew at the time. By the end of the shelling, much of Alexandria lay in ruins. This was blamed on rioting mobs by the British but the evidence shows that a huge amount of the damage was done by British shells. Estimates of Egyptian dead and wounded range from about 600 to 2,000, many of them civilians. Gladstone, who was always ready to push aside his tearfully-proclaimed moralistic scruples about empire when the time came to protect British imperial interests, told one queasy colleague in the Liberal cabinet that they had taught "the fanaticism of the East that the massacre of Europeans is not likely to be perpetrated with impunity".
Gladstone was referring to riots that had claimed the lives of 50 Europeans (and of 250 Egyptians at the hands of Europeans) before the shelling. The riots were an expression of outrage over European interference in and domination of Egypt.
The construction of the Suez Canal, in the decade from 1859, benefited only Britain. It was the principle waterway leading to the glittering jewel in the imperial crown: India. It secured British strategic and trade domination. It led to the bankrupting of the Egyptian economy. The Egyptian government had to go to European shareholders and banks for loans to pay for its share of the construction costs. Through ruinous terms, huge interest demands, siphoning off of money in commissions, payment in overvalued bonds, etc. - fraud, in other words - the Europeans bilked Egypt into bankruptcy, whereupon the defaulting government effectively fell into receivership to European bondholders. Gladstone himself - the great, principled, lachrymose humanitarian - was a bondholder. Egypt came under the effective control of European creditors and governors. Payments were extracted from Egypt with utter ruthlessness. The fellahin - the peasants - suffered most. They were subjected to terrible brutality, whipped and tortured and imprisoned into paying up even during years of failed harvests and famine.
The Khedive, Ismail, made some efforts to frustrate Euro control of his country, but when he became too intransigent, Ismail was simply removed by the British and replaced by his son Tewfik. The Europeans in Egypt, aside from the arrogant racist contempt they showed the Egyptians, lived high on the hog even as the Egyptians sank into greater poverty. Opposition grew, much of it Islamist in character - understandable, given what Christians were doing to Egypt - but also largely of a nationalist and democratic character. This was the "fanaticism of the East".
When the British and French started reducing Egypt's army to help pay the debts, many people feared that this was a prelude to a military occupation... understandable, given the French occupation of Tunisia. The Army - under General Urabi - went over to the nationalist side. It's been said that Egypt fell under Army dictatorship, but this is false. The Army programme was surprisingly moderate, demanding an end to the autocracy of the Khedive and an economy not entirely yoked to debt repayments. But this was not acceptable to the European bondholders. With neither side backing down, force would inevitably decide. Anglo-French warships were dispatched to intimidate the nationalists. The anti-European riots - quite understandable, given the years of intense provocation - provided the Europeans with a self-righteous cause. The coastal forts provided an immediate pretext. And so, Alexandria was shelled. Civilians were crushed, blasted, blown, burned and smashed to pulp.
Gladstone, with the overwhelming support of the Commons, ordered a full invasion. In the early morning of the 13th September 1882, a British expeditionary force launched a surprise attack against the Egyptian army at Tel-el-Kebir. The British techniques of colonial warfare were well honed. The result was an easy victory and a pitiless slaughter. 57 British soldiers were killed and nearly 400 wounded. Nobody bothered to count Egyptian dead (they didn't do body counts then either) but estimates range from 2,000 to 10,000. Gladstone was delighted and rushed to make political capital out of his great victory. It should go without saying that the subsequent British occupation of Egypt had the character that all imperial domination inexorably assumes. The prisons filled, the secret police ran rampant. Torture and military terrorism became institutional and systematic.
If, by the way, a lot of this sounds depressingly familiar to you, eerily reminiscent of imperial adventures in our own recent times, then stand by...
In 1916, the British forced 1.5 million Egyptian men to work for them - and 'requisitioned' (i.e stole) huge amounts of crops, animals and buildings - in aid of the British war effort in the Middle East... which took the form, essentially, of an invasion and occupation of Iraq (or Mesopotamia as it - essentially - was then). One of the big causes of WWI was the race between the British and German empires to control Iraq (they'd both recently switched their major railroads over from coal to oil). That's another story... suffice it to say that the first British regiments in 1914 were sent to Basra and, by 1917, the British had invaded Iraq wholesale. The point here is that this process further worsened the terrible impoverishment and suffering of most of the Egyptian people. This, together with insulting British refusals to allow Egyptian nationalists to put Egypt's claim for independence to the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, lead to a nationwide rebellion. Initially, the British lost control of much of the country... but they machine-gunned, bombed, burned, hanged, flogged and beat the Egyptians back into line, killing more than a thousand in the process. Unrest continued and, by 1922, the British granted Egypt formal independence. It was very formal indeed, and left Egypt a financially-dominated, militarily-occupied client state. Resistance and repression continued.
By 1946, the British were forced to withdraw to the Canal zone. The British knew that the Canal was still vital to their trade and strategic interests. However, the Egyptian government demanded full British withdrawal. Showing their customary dedication to democracy, the British instead poured more troops into the country and threatened a renewed national occupation. Winston Churchill increased troop numbers again and, under his watchful eye, British forces started bulldozing whole villages in retaliation for guerrilla attacks. Eventually, heroic resistance to ferocious British repression brought the country to the point where, with massive rioting in Cairo, a powerless puppet king and an entirely rebellious Egyptian army, Egypt had become ungovernable. British elites backed down, realising that they could not risk a reoccupation of the whole country.
After a CIA-sponsored army coup in 1952, Nasser took over Egypt. He began trying to renegotiate with the British over the Canal Zone. Churchill told Eden that the Egyptians should be driven back "into the gutter from which they should never have emerged". But Churchill was forced to agree to withdraw British troops from the Canal by 1956. Nasser wanted Egypt to tow an independent course. Seeking protection from Israeli aggression and getting no help from Eisenhower, he turned to the Soviets and nationalised the Suez Canal.
The French, who hated Nasser because he was supporting the Algerian bid for independence from France, offered to cut the British in on their alliance with Israel. Together they came up with a secret, illegal conspiracy. The Israelis would attack Egypt and occupy the Canal area. Britain and France, posing as peacemakers, would demand that both sides withdraw from the Canal. Obviously, it would be impossible for the Egyptians to agree. The British and the French would then invade the Canal area, ostensibly to separate the warring sides. Once in, the European invaders would overthrow Nasser and end his irritating attempt to run Egypt for Egyptians rather than for the benefit of European imperialists. Aside from the moral repugnance and hypocrisy, it was a lunatic scheme; a last and desperate roll of the dice by two declining empires. But I'm not giving you a 'conspiracy theory'. Of course, Eden, Macmillan, Kilmuir and the rest lied their heads off until their dying days, denying the whole thing... but it's a matter of historical record.
The Israelis launched their unprovoked surprise attack. French collusion was more or less open. Nobody was fooled by the pretence. The Egyptians, quite reasonably in my view (call me nutty), refused to withdraw from their own territory. So, the British began bombing Egypt. Again. Soon, British troops were invading Port Said, where they put down resistance using the usual ruthless violence. About a thousand Egyptians died at Port Said. They were mostly.... it gets depressing having to say this over and over.... mostly civilians.
The Americans, however, were not prepared to tolerate this half-arsed attempt by the detumescent powers of Europe to impinge upon their own ascendancy. They condemned the invasion and launched sanctions. The British and French had to agree to a ceasefire without having achieved any of their war aims.
With typical self-deception, we remember this sordid and bloody affair as the Suez 'Crisis'.
The Brits were out of Egypt by 1956. For once, the British had to keep their word.
So why do we keep on telling stories about Egyptian curses, when it's clear that we have been the curse upon Egypt? Looking at the reality of Anglo-Egyptian relations - i.e. decades of swindling, abuse, domination, invasion, oppression, impoverishment, repression and slaughter of them by us - it's a little hard to understand why we keep telling stories about how sinister and frightening Egyptians are, about how their culture and heritage and history is an uncanny minefield of curses that threaten to destroy us.
Or...
(cue dramatic music again)
...is it?
 |
| A fanatic. And friend. |
Sometimes, he leaves his home desert and comes to England. He may be dressed in Western clothes and live in a house with Western furnishings, but he's got a secret room, or a shrine, or a sanctum behind a billowing curtain, in which he keeps his infernal idols amidst clouds of suffocating incense.
He's...
(cue dramatic music)
...the Egyptian Fanatic!
When he comes to England, he becomes the mirror image of the English Explorer Who Has Just Returned from Egypt (henceforth, the Explorer). This man goes to Egypt for the love of antiquities and discovery, and comes back enchanted and bewitched by the place (by the place, mind, not the people); filling his big, wood-panelled home with Egyptiana. The question of whether the Explorer has any right to this Egyptiana is raised only by the Egyptian Fanatic in England (henceforth, the Fanatic).
The Fanatic has come to England from his native land in search of something, some inscrutable justice, some devilish retribution. He nurses a grudge. He clothes himself in Anglo, middle-class normalcy. He speaks impeccable English, albeit in a heavy accent. (It doesn't have to be an 'Egyptian accent', just a generic foreign one will do.) He is usually treated with courtesy (at first) by the bemused English middle classes amongst whom he mixes by default because of his wealth. These people may come to suspect and despise him, but they're often tolerant enough at the start, though a working class or yokel character may get to utter some ignorant dislike of "strangers". The middle class characters may even initially tut at this sort of hostility (what with them being so open minded and everything) but it will turn out that the yokel's xenophobia was (accidentally) quite justified.
 |
| I'm a racist stereotype. Racist stereotypes are cool. |
The wife thing is interesting because it adds the anxiety of the Caucasian woman desired, possibly symbolically ravished, by the Arab... and, it goes without saying, the woman is depicted as property that the men fight over. The theft of her from her husband is usually a perverse echo of the noble thefts committed by the Explorer. You take our treasures in the name of science, so we take your women in the name of... well... heh heh heh heh hehhhhhh!
So we see how the Mummy story stems from European (particularly English) anxieties about the morality (or consequences anyway) of raiding other people's ancient tombs and carrying their ancient artifacts and corpses away with you, back to England to recieve the fame and the fortune and the prestige. More broadly, we see how stories like this stem from European anxieties about their empires, about their pith-helmeted sons swaggering around other people's countries like they owned them. It isn't that these stories try to make the Explorer come to terms with what he's done wrong... it is that his behaviour (however dodgy it may occasionally be acknowledged to be) is absolved by the disproportionate and grotesque response of the inscrutable, pre-modern, occult, emotionally deranged, immature, vindictive, fanatical, fez-wearing brown person who comes after him, wielding fetishes, chanting invocations to obscene deities (our own images of tortured hunks nailed to crosses are never questioned), burning incense, reading horrible curses from scrolls and sending his decomposing henchman out to do his murderous dirty work for him.Thus, as always in the stories told by imperialist cultures, is the imperialist absolved by the inhumanity of his own victims. This task may be best accomplished by tales of the uncanny precisely because it requires such a massive leap outside the realms of reality.
The Fanaticism of the West
It's quite something, the way our popular culture has managed to associate Egypt almost entirely with curses, fanaticism, evil and the theft of white womenfolk, given the nature of actual European relations with that country. Egypt, after all, has never invaded Britain. Britain, however, has invaded Egypt. A lot.
In July 1882, British warships began bombarding Alexandria. Supposedly, this was done because the Egyptians refused to surrender some coastal forts. In reality, the forts were no threat, as the British knew at the time. By the end of the shelling, much of Alexandria lay in ruins. This was blamed on rioting mobs by the British but the evidence shows that a huge amount of the damage was done by British shells. Estimates of Egyptian dead and wounded range from about 600 to 2,000, many of them civilians. Gladstone, who was always ready to push aside his tearfully-proclaimed moralistic scruples about empire when the time came to protect British imperial interests, told one queasy colleague in the Liberal cabinet that they had taught "the fanaticism of the East that the massacre of Europeans is not likely to be perpetrated with impunity".
Gladstone was referring to riots that had claimed the lives of 50 Europeans (and of 250 Egyptians at the hands of Europeans) before the shelling. The riots were an expression of outrage over European interference in and domination of Egypt.
 |
| A fanatic. |
The Khedive, Ismail, made some efforts to frustrate Euro control of his country, but when he became too intransigent, Ismail was simply removed by the British and replaced by his son Tewfik. The Europeans in Egypt, aside from the arrogant racist contempt they showed the Egyptians, lived high on the hog even as the Egyptians sank into greater poverty. Opposition grew, much of it Islamist in character - understandable, given what Christians were doing to Egypt - but also largely of a nationalist and democratic character. This was the "fanaticism of the East".
When the British and French started reducing Egypt's army to help pay the debts, many people feared that this was a prelude to a military occupation... understandable, given the French occupation of Tunisia. The Army - under General Urabi - went over to the nationalist side. It's been said that Egypt fell under Army dictatorship, but this is false. The Army programme was surprisingly moderate, demanding an end to the autocracy of the Khedive and an economy not entirely yoked to debt repayments. But this was not acceptable to the European bondholders. With neither side backing down, force would inevitably decide. Anglo-French warships were dispatched to intimidate the nationalists. The anti-European riots - quite understandable, given the years of intense provocation - provided the Europeans with a self-righteous cause. The coastal forts provided an immediate pretext. And so, Alexandria was shelled. Civilians were crushed, blasted, blown, burned and smashed to pulp.
 |
| British humanitarian interventionists gallantly save Egypt from the fanatical Egyptians. |
If, by the way, a lot of this sounds depressingly familiar to you, eerily reminiscent of imperial adventures in our own recent times, then stand by...
In 1916, the British forced 1.5 million Egyptian men to work for them - and 'requisitioned' (i.e stole) huge amounts of crops, animals and buildings - in aid of the British war effort in the Middle East... which took the form, essentially, of an invasion and occupation of Iraq (or Mesopotamia as it - essentially - was then). One of the big causes of WWI was the race between the British and German empires to control Iraq (they'd both recently switched their major railroads over from coal to oil). That's another story... suffice it to say that the first British regiments in 1914 were sent to Basra and, by 1917, the British had invaded Iraq wholesale. The point here is that this process further worsened the terrible impoverishment and suffering of most of the Egyptian people. This, together with insulting British refusals to allow Egyptian nationalists to put Egypt's claim for independence to the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, lead to a nationwide rebellion. Initially, the British lost control of much of the country... but they machine-gunned, bombed, burned, hanged, flogged and beat the Egyptians back into line, killing more than a thousand in the process. Unrest continued and, by 1922, the British granted Egypt formal independence. It was very formal indeed, and left Egypt a financially-dominated, militarily-occupied client state. Resistance and repression continued.
By 1946, the British were forced to withdraw to the Canal zone. The British knew that the Canal was still vital to their trade and strategic interests. However, the Egyptian government demanded full British withdrawal. Showing their customary dedication to democracy, the British instead poured more troops into the country and threatened a renewed national occupation. Winston Churchill increased troop numbers again and, under his watchful eye, British forces started bulldozing whole villages in retaliation for guerrilla attacks. Eventually, heroic resistance to ferocious British repression brought the country to the point where, with massive rioting in Cairo, a powerless puppet king and an entirely rebellious Egyptian army, Egypt had become ungovernable. British elites backed down, realising that they could not risk a reoccupation of the whole country.
After a CIA-sponsored army coup in 1952, Nasser took over Egypt. He began trying to renegotiate with the British over the Canal Zone. Churchill told Eden that the Egyptians should be driven back "into the gutter from which they should never have emerged". But Churchill was forced to agree to withdraw British troops from the Canal by 1956. Nasser wanted Egypt to tow an independent course. Seeking protection from Israeli aggression and getting no help from Eisenhower, he turned to the Soviets and nationalised the Suez Canal.
 |
| Another fanatic. |
 |
| #stopnasser |
The Americans, however, were not prepared to tolerate this half-arsed attempt by the detumescent powers of Europe to impinge upon their own ascendancy. They condemned the invasion and launched sanctions. The British and French had to agree to a ceasefire without having achieved any of their war aims.
With typical self-deception, we remember this sordid and bloody affair as the Suez 'Crisis'.
The Brits were out of Egypt by 1956. For once, the British had to keep their word.
So why do we keep on telling stories about Egyptian curses, when it's clear that we have been the curse upon Egypt? Looking at the reality of Anglo-Egyptian relations - i.e. decades of swindling, abuse, domination, invasion, oppression, impoverishment, repression and slaughter of them by us - it's a little hard to understand why we keep telling stories about how sinister and frightening Egyptians are, about how their culture and heritage and history is an uncanny minefield of curses that threaten to destroy us.
Or...
(cue dramatic music again)
...is it?
To Be Continued...
Wednesday, 30 November 2011
Balanced and Objective
The BBC doing what it does best: "In Iran's iconography of villainy, Britain holds a special place. The UK is seen as the mastermind behind the overthrow of previous Iranian governments. Conservative hardliners believe Britain has in its blood the desire to decide who rules Iran." Textbook stuff from James Reynolds "BBC Iran correspondent".
Make it all a matter of opinion: "is seen as". Put it down to someone at the so-called 'extreme': "hardliners". Pathologise the unacceptable view, make it sound like childish paranoia, sneer at it under your hand: "Iran's iconography of villainy".
Fact is, if people in Iran feel that way about us, they are justified. The British government, lead by Winston Churchill, were the original movers in the plot to overthrow the democratically elected government of Mossadegh, because he wanted to nationalise the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, which funnelled oil profits out of Iran to Britain (in other words, he had the temerity to think that Iranians should benefit from Iranian resources). Churchill put up the money. The CIA took over the plot. They hired mobsters and Nazi collaborators in Iran. CIA agents started riots. They started a coup which lead to the ascension of the Shah's dictatorship and the reign of the SAVAK secret police, described by Amnesty as the worst human rights violators in the world. Murder, terror, torture, tyranny. But Western oil companies kept their revenue, so that's okay (though the Americans elbowed Anglo-Persian - now BP - out somewhat in favour of an international consortium in which they had hegemony).
Now we and the Americans are once again gearing up to attack this country that we have already harmed so badly. For the hegemony of the American empire and the desperate, clawing need of the tottering neoliberal system. I don't know what shenanigans have lead to our closure of the British Embassy in Tehran and the expulsion of Iranian diplomats from the UK... but you can be sure it's got less to do with outrage at Iranian protestors and more to do with imperialist scheming.
And why? Because Iran has a nuke program? Well, maybe. But why, precisely, are we allowed to have nukes, the Americans are allowed to have nukes (they're the only people who've ever used them on another nation, remember) and Israel (a brutal, racist, apartheid state) is allowed to have nukes... but we mustn't let barbarians like Iran have them... because they'd impinge on Western imperial domination. Why are we the ones who can be trusted? Because we're the good guys. We - the ones who nuked Hiroshima, organised that coup I was just talking about and have bankrolled the horrific treatment of the Palestinians - we are the civilised people. This is the objective and balanced assumption underlying the BBC's coverage.
Well, truth is not balanced or objective.
Make it all a matter of opinion: "is seen as". Put it down to someone at the so-called 'extreme': "hardliners". Pathologise the unacceptable view, make it sound like childish paranoia, sneer at it under your hand: "Iran's iconography of villainy".
Fact is, if people in Iran feel that way about us, they are justified. The British government, lead by Winston Churchill, were the original movers in the plot to overthrow the democratically elected government of Mossadegh, because he wanted to nationalise the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, which funnelled oil profits out of Iran to Britain (in other words, he had the temerity to think that Iranians should benefit from Iranian resources). Churchill put up the money. The CIA took over the plot. They hired mobsters and Nazi collaborators in Iran. CIA agents started riots. They started a coup which lead to the ascension of the Shah's dictatorship and the reign of the SAVAK secret police, described by Amnesty as the worst human rights violators in the world. Murder, terror, torture, tyranny. But Western oil companies kept their revenue, so that's okay (though the Americans elbowed Anglo-Persian - now BP - out somewhat in favour of an international consortium in which they had hegemony).
Now we and the Americans are once again gearing up to attack this country that we have already harmed so badly. For the hegemony of the American empire and the desperate, clawing need of the tottering neoliberal system. I don't know what shenanigans have lead to our closure of the British Embassy in Tehran and the expulsion of Iranian diplomats from the UK... but you can be sure it's got less to do with outrage at Iranian protestors and more to do with imperialist scheming.
And why? Because Iran has a nuke program? Well, maybe. But why, precisely, are we allowed to have nukes, the Americans are allowed to have nukes (they're the only people who've ever used them on another nation, remember) and Israel (a brutal, racist, apartheid state) is allowed to have nukes... but we mustn't let barbarians like Iran have them... because they'd impinge on Western imperial domination. Why are we the ones who can be trusted? Because we're the good guys. We - the ones who nuked Hiroshima, organised that coup I was just talking about and have bankrolled the horrific treatment of the Palestinians - we are the civilised people. This is the objective and balanced assumption underlying the BBC's coverage.
Well, truth is not balanced or objective.
Tuesday, 12 July 2011
Asylum, UK
A rejigg of something I wrote for the old site on the subject of 'Turn Left', the best episode of series 4.
The alternate world that Davies conjures up in ‘Turn Left’ is not so far removed from our own. We might not (yet) see British soldiers patrolling our streets and pointing automatic weapons at unarmed women (though the recent behaviour of the police towards student protestors has been pretty savage)... but that sight would not be so unfamiliar to the people of Baghdad. Or Belfast, for that matter.
The nightmarish, decaying, dystopian Britain in this episode reflects aspects of our current social predicament… indeed, as Simon Kinnear pointed out in DWM, the episode seems prescient of the years ahead of it, of (to put it my way) recession/cuts torn Britain.
While it doesn’t get specific, or touch economics much, ‘Turn Left’ seems like the closest thing to a direct political attack on crisis-wracked British society that any mainstream TV show could possibly get away with. Let’s just recap: in an episode of that highly commercial kid’s romp known as Doctor Who, Russell T. Davies suggested that, in a time of crisis, the British state might institute a program of racist slavery, if not extermination. At the very least, we see people herded and treated like animals while patrolled by armed guardians of the state. Moreover, the people being treated that way are the poor, the dispossessed, the helpless. Brits get the kind of treatment meted out to refugees once they too become scapegoatable dependents.
I’m not sure that Davies intended the title as direct political advice (though it wouldn’t be bad advice) but it surely can’t be entirely an accident that Donna’s apocalyptic turn is a turn to the right, a turn that results in “England for the English”.
The Donna in the car at the start of ‘Turn Left’ might vote that way. She’s the same thoughtless, selfish Donna we met at the start of ‘The Runaway Bride’. She’s exactly the kind of self-involved, complacent brat who hardly notices as society crashes around her… until she is touched by it. Davies pulls no punches. We see her obsessing over stationary and offices grudges as the rest of Chowdry’s staff watch the TV, horrified, for news of the hospital. We see her asking “What’s for tea?” as news of Sarah Jane Smith’s death flashes on the screen.
I know people like that. Indeed, speaking as someone who lives in southern England – surely the global epicentre of reactionary complacency - it is very hard indeed not to derive a massive and delicious jolt of schadenfreude from the way Davies manages to turn the (surviving) population of the Sun and Daily Mail reading world into despised, harangued, jobless refugees. “Who’s going to listen to us?” asks Donna’s Mum, “Refugees. We haven’t even got a vote. We’re just no-one Donna. We don’t exist.” To put it another way: seek asylum and you’ll be locked up in one.
It’s ironic that as Donna’s society disintegrates, she suddenly discovers other people. With a little help from Wilf, Donna’s experience of privation brings her closer to society, to her fellow humans. She barges in to tell Rocco to shut up, calling him Mussolini (ironic, given that it’s now her country turning fascist), but ends up singing ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ with him. When he and his family are taken away, she needs Wilf to tell her what it really means (is Bernard Cribbins incredible in that scene or what?), but when she realises, she chases the truck and demands to know what’s happening. She has woken up from her isolation and self-involvement.
Also, there is a highly encoded but still discernible protest against Islamophobia in that scene. Rocco and his family are not Muslims or from the Middle East, but it was simply impossible (for me anyway) to watch the rounding-up scene in 2008 without thinking of Guantanamo Bay, Jean Charles de Menezes and Jack Straw’s seeming addiction to demonising Muslims. People might object that this is an arbitrary and subjective reading… but plenty of reviewers were happy to interpret this scene as referencing the holocaust, despite the fact that Rocco and his family are not identified as Jews anymore than they are as Muslims. Given that the episode as a whole seems so determinedly current, I think my reading is more apt.
As for the bug? Well, it looks (when we eventually see it) very much like a rucksack designed by David Cronenberg. But what does it mean?
I think it’s a self-doubt monster. It doesn’t really feed on the changes it causes in history, it really feeds on Donna’s lack of self-worth, on her willingness to believe that her Mother is right about her, that she’s useless and helpless, a disappointment, a failure. The right turn it convinces her to make is a capitulation to her Mum. Donna’s own goals, at this point, might still be selfish, but they are based on confidence. The right turn, the turn to the safe option, is the turn towards her Mum’s view of her, towards the easy assumption that she’s nobody and nothing, that life is an uninspiring chore. “A life never loved,” as Rose puts it. And am I reading too much into the fact that ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ contains the lyrics “Nobody loves me” and “Mamma Mia, let me go”?
When first reviewing ‘Turn Left’ I made some connections between Donna’s self-doubt and the state of the society depicted. Those connections now seem rather tenuous to me. I don’t nowadays feel comfortable asserting that societies round up minorities because they suffer from free-floating neurosis. However, Donna’s fateful moment of self-doubt can be read as a capitulation to power, to the judgements of another who has power over her, as well as to a feeling that her horizons are bound by her background… even, with a little extrapolation, her class.
All in all, I adore this episode. If ‘Midnight’ is the anti-‘Gridlock’, this is ‘Midnight’s redeeming coda. Perhaps just as bleak in its way, but with hope lying in social solidarity and resistance to power.
The sci-fi elements might power the story, but the story is about human choices, personal and political. The kind of enjoyable sledgehammer metaphor underwriting, say, ‘Aliens of London’ can work as critique and/or satire but also, if taken literally, can create a distancing effect. The aliens or the mad computer get the blame for our social failures. This is undermined in ‘Turn Left’. The “Emergency Government” might exist because a Titanic-shaped spaceship fell on London, but there’s no hint that their policy of “England for the English” (and labour camps for the rest) is actually being fed to them by the evil, mind-controlling Zargoids. Moreover, they’re the sort of policies that might yet take hold on British soil in years to come, especially if the current government is allowed to push through its radical programme of neoliberal class-war shock therapy, which is amounting to a wanton and wholesale demolition of much-needed social safety nets.
You can't extrapolate every detail of this into a coherent political thesis (thank goodness) and so it can be subjected to multiple interpretations (much more interesting). The jist is pretty clear though.
Shame about the orientalism on display in the ‘bookend’ sequences, which use ethnic diversity and Eastern ethnicity as semiotic vehicles for the uncanny, the threatening and the predatory. On the whole, though, with its depiction of racial inequality (not least in the sequence where Donna and family are served by a hotel maid who is clearly implied to be a migrant worker) this episode is clearly on the side of the angels, without also indulging in too much liberal sanctimony.
This is Doctor Who's version of The Children of Men (the film). It's atonement for 'The Unquiet Dead'. Borderline miraculous.
The alternate world that Davies conjures up in ‘Turn Left’ is not so far removed from our own. We might not (yet) see British soldiers patrolling our streets and pointing automatic weapons at unarmed women (though the recent behaviour of the police towards student protestors has been pretty savage)... but that sight would not be so unfamiliar to the people of Baghdad. Or Belfast, for that matter.
The nightmarish, decaying, dystopian Britain in this episode reflects aspects of our current social predicament… indeed, as Simon Kinnear pointed out in DWM, the episode seems prescient of the years ahead of it, of (to put it my way) recession/cuts torn Britain.
While it doesn’t get specific, or touch economics much, ‘Turn Left’ seems like the closest thing to a direct political attack on crisis-wracked British society that any mainstream TV show could possibly get away with. Let’s just recap: in an episode of that highly commercial kid’s romp known as Doctor Who, Russell T. Davies suggested that, in a time of crisis, the British state might institute a program of racist slavery, if not extermination. At the very least, we see people herded and treated like animals while patrolled by armed guardians of the state. Moreover, the people being treated that way are the poor, the dispossessed, the helpless. Brits get the kind of treatment meted out to refugees once they too become scapegoatable dependents.
I’m not sure that Davies intended the title as direct political advice (though it wouldn’t be bad advice) but it surely can’t be entirely an accident that Donna’s apocalyptic turn is a turn to the right, a turn that results in “England for the English”.
The Donna in the car at the start of ‘Turn Left’ might vote that way. She’s the same thoughtless, selfish Donna we met at the start of ‘The Runaway Bride’. She’s exactly the kind of self-involved, complacent brat who hardly notices as society crashes around her… until she is touched by it. Davies pulls no punches. We see her obsessing over stationary and offices grudges as the rest of Chowdry’s staff watch the TV, horrified, for news of the hospital. We see her asking “What’s for tea?” as news of Sarah Jane Smith’s death flashes on the screen.
I know people like that. Indeed, speaking as someone who lives in southern England – surely the global epicentre of reactionary complacency - it is very hard indeed not to derive a massive and delicious jolt of schadenfreude from the way Davies manages to turn the (surviving) population of the Sun and Daily Mail reading world into despised, harangued, jobless refugees. “Who’s going to listen to us?” asks Donna’s Mum, “Refugees. We haven’t even got a vote. We’re just no-one Donna. We don’t exist.” To put it another way: seek asylum and you’ll be locked up in one.
It’s ironic that as Donna’s society disintegrates, she suddenly discovers other people. With a little help from Wilf, Donna’s experience of privation brings her closer to society, to her fellow humans. She barges in to tell Rocco to shut up, calling him Mussolini (ironic, given that it’s now her country turning fascist), but ends up singing ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ with him. When he and his family are taken away, she needs Wilf to tell her what it really means (is Bernard Cribbins incredible in that scene or what?), but when she realises, she chases the truck and demands to know what’s happening. She has woken up from her isolation and self-involvement.
Also, there is a highly encoded but still discernible protest against Islamophobia in that scene. Rocco and his family are not Muslims or from the Middle East, but it was simply impossible (for me anyway) to watch the rounding-up scene in 2008 without thinking of Guantanamo Bay, Jean Charles de Menezes and Jack Straw’s seeming addiction to demonising Muslims. People might object that this is an arbitrary and subjective reading… but plenty of reviewers were happy to interpret this scene as referencing the holocaust, despite the fact that Rocco and his family are not identified as Jews anymore than they are as Muslims. Given that the episode as a whole seems so determinedly current, I think my reading is more apt.
As for the bug? Well, it looks (when we eventually see it) very much like a rucksack designed by David Cronenberg. But what does it mean?
I think it’s a self-doubt monster. It doesn’t really feed on the changes it causes in history, it really feeds on Donna’s lack of self-worth, on her willingness to believe that her Mother is right about her, that she’s useless and helpless, a disappointment, a failure. The right turn it convinces her to make is a capitulation to her Mum. Donna’s own goals, at this point, might still be selfish, but they are based on confidence. The right turn, the turn to the safe option, is the turn towards her Mum’s view of her, towards the easy assumption that she’s nobody and nothing, that life is an uninspiring chore. “A life never loved,” as Rose puts it. And am I reading too much into the fact that ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ contains the lyrics “Nobody loves me” and “Mamma Mia, let me go”?
When first reviewing ‘Turn Left’ I made some connections between Donna’s self-doubt and the state of the society depicted. Those connections now seem rather tenuous to me. I don’t nowadays feel comfortable asserting that societies round up minorities because they suffer from free-floating neurosis. However, Donna’s fateful moment of self-doubt can be read as a capitulation to power, to the judgements of another who has power over her, as well as to a feeling that her horizons are bound by her background… even, with a little extrapolation, her class.
All in all, I adore this episode. If ‘Midnight’ is the anti-‘Gridlock’, this is ‘Midnight’s redeeming coda. Perhaps just as bleak in its way, but with hope lying in social solidarity and resistance to power.
The sci-fi elements might power the story, but the story is about human choices, personal and political. The kind of enjoyable sledgehammer metaphor underwriting, say, ‘Aliens of London’ can work as critique and/or satire but also, if taken literally, can create a distancing effect. The aliens or the mad computer get the blame for our social failures. This is undermined in ‘Turn Left’. The “Emergency Government” might exist because a Titanic-shaped spaceship fell on London, but there’s no hint that their policy of “England for the English” (and labour camps for the rest) is actually being fed to them by the evil, mind-controlling Zargoids. Moreover, they’re the sort of policies that might yet take hold on British soil in years to come, especially if the current government is allowed to push through its radical programme of neoliberal class-war shock therapy, which is amounting to a wanton and wholesale demolition of much-needed social safety nets.
You can't extrapolate every detail of this into a coherent political thesis (thank goodness) and so it can be subjected to multiple interpretations (much more interesting). The jist is pretty clear though.
Shame about the orientalism on display in the ‘bookend’ sequences, which use ethnic diversity and Eastern ethnicity as semiotic vehicles for the uncanny, the threatening and the predatory. On the whole, though, with its depiction of racial inequality (not least in the sequence where Donna and family are served by a hotel maid who is clearly implied to be a migrant worker) this episode is clearly on the side of the angels, without also indulging in too much liberal sanctimony.
This is Doctor Who's version of The Children of Men (the film). It's atonement for 'The Unquiet Dead'. Borderline miraculous.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)