The Pit

I want to take a moment to tell you all about some music I love.  I am a devotee of movie soundtracks.  I am particularly fond of two movie scores by Eliot Goldenthal.

Alien 3 (which I've been thinking about lately because of this)



and

Titus



Amazing scores.  Do stick with Titus after the famous bit at the start.  The rest of the score is equally good.

I also adore George Fenton's music for Mary Reilly.



I'm using these scores (on a loop) along with some others (Hans Zimmer's music for The Dark Knight Rises and Nicholas Hooper's gorgeous score for Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince



) while trying to write a fiction project I've currently got on the boil.  I really don't know why I'm telling you this, except that I like to share nice things.

By the way, the films I've mentioned are all particular favourites of mine (apart from The Dark Knight Rises, which is a bloated, pompous, incoherent fascist nightmare of a movie).  Yes, I like Alien 3 and Mary Reilly.  In fact, I love them.  And Half Blood Prince is a genuinely good movie (god knows how they managed to make a genuinely good movie out of a such a wretched novel).

My fiction project is basically a 'serious' reworking of a comic strip called Planet of the Hedgehogs that I wrote - and drew! - between the ages of 9 and 11.

I am about to have a baked potato.

I'm reading a book called Shades of Grey that was recently sent to me as a gift by the lovely Lucy McGough.  No, not 50 Shades of Grey, just Shades of Grey.  So far, it's fun.

Pardon this silly post but I'm clambering out of a bit of a pit at the moment, and this is a way of saying "hello again world".  Bye.

Oh, and R.I.P. (Rest in Perversity) H.R. Giger.

A Present

I created this meme the other day...

...to be used in online debate when someone evades a sincere demand for answers.

Just don't say I never give you anything.

Darwinia

Here are a few of the fortunes I devised during my first week as a writer of fortunes at Trang's Fortune Cookies Ltd:

YOU ARE CURRENTLY BALD.  THIS IS A MISTAKE.

 

OBEY THE WISDOM OF THE FROG.  HE KNOWS.

LOOK NOT TO THE RIGHT NOR TO THE LEFT BUT SIMPLY DO.

 

KEEP IT SIMPLE.  COMPLEXITY KILLS.

 

HAPPY THE MAN WHO KNOWS NOTHING OF CHEESE.

 

STARSKY AND HUTCH, I SUMMON YOU.

I LOVE YOUR EARS, MY LITTLE FRIEND.

 

ABUSE ANTS.

 

Mr Trang speaks no English, but he pops his head round my office door every day and expresses his benevolent interest in my work by means of gestures and facial expressions.  I show him my work book.  I concoct something in the region of 500 fortunes a day.  More, on a good day.  Mr Trang cannot read them but he casts his eyes over my work politely.  He smiles and nods encouragingly.  Sometimes he bows and mimes applause.  I smile back, bow in return and mime modest shrugs.  This appears to please him and he leaves.

I came to work at Trang's after losing my job at the Ministry of Insects.  I was doing quite well at the Ministry.  I'd only been there five months and had already been promoted to Under Secretary For Grasshoppers.  I had my career path mapped out.  I would ascend to helm the Grasshoppers Department and then I would rise to a mid-level position in the related field of Locusts.  Once leadership of Locusts was mine, as it surely would be once I had ousted that fool Ormstead, I would deal directly with the other Heads of Department for the various bureaux in the Agricultural Pests Division.  I would establish a power base amongst Pests and clamber up the greasy pole until I was in a position to become the Pests Oversecretary.  The current Pests Oversecretary, Himmelfarb, would be hard to nobble, but I was confident I would find a way.  From there it would be only a short step sideways to any one of several possible paths.  I could choose which path I wanted to take based upon circumstances at the time.  I might continue to rise in Insects, via a route through the large and complex Flies Department.  I saw potential openings in Trichoptera and Megaloptera.  Progress through this area of the Ministry would be slower but would have the advantage of giving me more experience, which might be an issue that would come up later on.  Or I might jump sideways to the smaller but infinitely more prestigious Ministry of Arachnids.  Or I might even be able to jump over spiders and go straight to Marine Arthropods, depending on Tinkerman's attitude to me.  I found Tinkerman enigmatic, with his cold eyes and his monotonous voice and his habit of breaking things slowly and deliberately.  Chairs.  Desk tidies.  Books.  Paperclips.  Anything that happened to be in front of him, he dismantled and left in pieces.  I wasn't sure he disliked me, however.  It was just a suspicion. And, even if he did, there was a possibility that he disliked everyone equally.  Little did I know.

Speaking of things I didn't know, I had also entirely reckoned without Fotheringhamgaymortontonford at the Ministry of Long Names.  I never saw him coming.  I never knew that he harboured such animus towards me, such venom.  I never knew that a desire for vengeance burned in his rotten heart, like sulfur in a cess-pit.  I never knew how closely he was watching my every move, calculating my every thought, waiting for his opportunity, preparing his strike against me... a strike that would destroy my prospects, send me tumbling from my high perch down to the depths of ignominy and reduce all my exalted dreams to ashes in my mouth.

My work here at Trang's has gone through several stages. At the start, I made an effort to make my fortunes seem like predictions.  I found this hard so I would buy newspapers and plagiarize the horoscopes.  I was careful about it.  I would use the horoscope I had selected as a template and subtly alter it so that it became unrecognisable while still retaining that ineffable flavour of prediction which I found so hard to synthesize myself. So, for instance, I might take the following horoscope (which, as it happens, was published in the Evening Standard on 19th May last year, addressed to Sagittarius)...

You were born with great energy and drive.  However, you worry about hurting others as you push for what you want.  Partly, your worry is justified.  Take stock of your recent achievements and try to think how they might have put noses out of joint.  Saturn is settling down in the next few weeks, so this is an excellent time to think about being conciliatory.  But beware of compromising your ideals and goals.  

...and use it as the raw material from which to fashion the following fortunes:

DRIVE NERVOUSLY AND ENERGY WILL BE BORN.

 

YOU WILL HURT PEOPLE IF YOU PUSH THEM.

 

TAKE STOCK OF NOSES.

 

SETTLE DOWN ON SATURN.

 

YOUR GOALS WILL BE OFF SIDE.

 

Excuses, excuses...

Things have been weird for me lately.  In a bad way.  Personal stuff.  Worries.  Health issues.  Melancholia.  And other obsessions, plans, dreams... including a recurring one that I really should've abandoned by now...  but haven't.  In short: no time (and not much inclination) to blog.  The promised Skulltopus post on 'Image of the Fendahl' is stalled, swollen to vast and unruly size, stuck at an impasse, erupting out of the Skulltopus category into all sorts of other genres (appropriately enough).  Bear with me, Reading Few.  I will rally.

Tygers & Horses

"The tygers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction" said William Blake in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, and on lots of European walls in the 60s, and under the cover of an Eighth Doctor Adventure by Kate Orman.

I disagree.  I think you need the horses of instruction just as much as you need the tygers of wrath.  The thing about the tygers is that they chase you.  The thing about the horses is that you have to chase them.  If you've got a horse ahead of you and a tyger behind... well, that's not comfortable, but it's the better way round.  It gives you both a strong impetus and a goal.

Of course, horses can be wild and tygers can be calm.

I'll stop there.  All analogies can be pushed to breaking point.  Even the ones invented by geniuses.

Categorically Speaking

Kant's categorical imperative is an expression of the bourgeois liberal ideas of the 18th century, expressed as morality.  It is progressive in the sense that it attempts to derive morality from Reason.  It is part of the Enlightenment.  It also expresses the new, universal promises of the bourgeois revolutions in that it universalises (i.e. "All men are created equal").  It is based on the principle of universality.  What you do must apply to all people or it fails to be truly moral. 

However, it is also based on a bourgeois notion of rights.  The concept of 'rights' is a product of the rise of bourgeois property/trade relations.  One brings one's rights to the market place and, on that basis, one participates in the putatively level playing field.  For Kant, one negotiates the conflicts between these rights on the basis of contractual clauses.  If the Party of the First Part undertakes to do such and such, the Party of the Second part will be understood to be obliged to do so and so.  It is this which finally inverts the universality of the notion into an entire bourgeois conception of individualism.  Through this embedded notion of contractual obligations, the decision as to universal moral actions rests with the individual's willingness to enter into a personal contract regarding his conduct, his willingness to be bound.

The sting in the tail lies in the fact that different people will always have different notions as to what is or isn't universally desirable.  One individual may consider it highly desirable that theft be considered universally immoral because they have a great personal interest in the institution of private property (i.e. because they own lots of it).  Another (who perhaps owns little) may be prepared to risk universalising the permissability of theft if he thinks he can steal what he wants and then protect his stolen goods by force.  Alternatively, there may be those who feel that there are worse prospects for the future than the fall of private property.  And, in practice, the guardians of morality will always be ready to claim the universality of laws that they themselves break, simply because they take a more pragmatic view of Reason.

The R/reasonable promises of bourgeois liberalism and Enlightenment will always have such loopholes in their social contracts and, as a result, will always find themselves in full or partial, official or unofficial abeyance.  The Enlightenment declared that all men were created equal, but oversaw (and, indeed, was partially built upon) all black men (and women) being crated equally... for shipping.  Why should a white man who profits from the slave trade care if 'enslave black people' became a universal moral maxim?  He knows the colour of his own skin will exempt him from the chains, and the inequality of property and opportunity will protect him from universal business competition.

Sport, sport, masculine sport, prepares a young man for society...

The Olympics really depresses me. 

Not just the horrendous waste of money and the revolting jingoism and the all-pervading ideological reinforcement... but it represents a boat I missed. 

Sport.  Games.  I hate them.  But I strongly suspect that I hate them because school trained me to, through social punishment. 

In school, sport is a dark ritual soaked in hierarchy and humiliation and hatred and contempt.  Win or you're rubbish.  Understand and like and care about the right things or you're 'gay' (horror of horrors).  Be thin and athletic or know that you are subhuman. 

All school is like that.  A huge pyramidal structure of power in which the establishment trains its next generation to be drones or managers or lumpen failures salutary for the rest of us.  Meanwhile, the kids compete for popularity and cool and acceptance.  Learn, children, straight away, that life is a race and the losers are scum.  It's all built on the shaming and degradation of anyone different or overweight or awkward or sad or bookish or unattractive or poor or clueless or weak. 

That was the context in which I was exposed to sport and games for the first time.  I don't remember ever being taught about it.  I was just thrown in and expected to prove my aggressive masculinity (at age 7 or whatever!), to jeer at anybody who wasn't as good as me, or accept that it was my place to be jeered at if I didn't have any aptitude or skill. 

Inevitably, I reacted against it and became not just useless but actively hostile.  I started to define myself in opposition to things like healthiness and outdoorsiness and athleticism.

But I don't really believe that sport is inherently bad or worthless.  I was just made to take on that rationalisation because sport in school made me feel bad and worthless.

Reimagined Moments #1

"Hurr hurr... You think this is the real Quaid?"

Well it might be, thought the guard.  Then again it might not.  It might be Quaid using his hologram thingy... or it might actually be Quaid pretending to be a hologram in order to trick us.  I have no way of knowing, really... unless I wait to see if it flickers in that way that really makes the hologram projector next-to useless as a weapon.  But that would take time.  Time in which I might get shot if it turns out not to be a hologram.    So I think I'll shoot it anyway.  Just in case. After all, better safe than sorry.

Luckily for the guard, this train of thought only took him a split second.  What with him having been highly trained and everything.

How Curses Work 3.5: Mythoimperialismo

Imperialism lies not just in the physical violence of invasion, domination, exploitation and subjugation, but also in the cultural violence of the appropriation and representation of the subjugated.

This is how exploitation and domination always works.  Patriarchy's domination of women is expressed in the marginalization, infantilization and suffocating sexualization of the female image in culture, the relentless portrayal of the woman as secondary, as an adjunct, as a commodity, as a servant or helpmate, as a source of male pleasure and satisfaction.  So the violence of imperialism is also expressed in the representation of the subjugated peoples as inferior and/or dangerous, by the plundering of their stories, histories, images, ideas, practices, customs, languages, discourses, art, architecture, etc., and their transformation into aspects of the dominant culture of the imperialist.

The subject culture is usually thus shown to be inherently deserving of domination, inherently savage, childlike, irrational and sinister.  If the subject culture is not demonized, it is usually infantilized, fanaticized (even their bravery is not real bravery but rather fanatical zeal from savages who do not feel pain or fear death the way we civilized people do), or shown as shambolic, idiotic and comic.  Needless to say, any resistance to imperial domination, or violent reaction against it, is generalised and used as evidence of the fanaticism and savagery of the dominated.

The imperialism of the modern age - beyond the brutal reality of bullets and plunder, and beyond the underlying system of states competing globally when their geopolitical priorities converge with those of their national concentrations of capital - is a system of myths.  It is as important to promulgate myths among the people of the imperial nation as it is to foist them on the victims.  One of the most enduring myths of imperialism is that the victims are to blame for their own plight.  This, together with a whole raft of inferiority complexes, is internalized by colonized people.  But it is also internalized by the colonizing nation.  This manifests itself in various versions.  There is, for instance, the 'it's for their own good' version, which says that the colonized benefit from colonialism, because colonialism brings them the benefits of 'civilization' (i.e. white Anglo-Saxon Christianity or modern secular liberal democracy, depending on which era the ideology comes from) to people who desperately need it.  This is closely related to the demonizing of the colonized.  The dual nature of the 'native' in all colonialist ideology is that they are "half-devil and half-child".

Our imperialism needs its ideological myths, just as much as the imperialism of the past... the really scary thing is that we keep coming up with the same myths about the same people... probably because we keep needing those myths as a cultural blindfold to stop ourselves seeing imperialism for what it is.

These are the merest banalities.

How Curses Work 3: That Whole Rabbits/Tennis Connection There

I always dimly assumed that Stephen Harris - whatever combination of real people he may pseudonymically represent - got the idea for a story about pyramids on Mars from all that guff about there supposedly being pyramids and giant monkey faces on Mars.

However, I learn that the 'face' and 'pyramids' on Mars were not 'discovered' until the NASA Viking missions, which didn't snap pictures of the region of Mars known as Cydonia (where all the pyramids, town squares and giant useless chimp portraits are said to be) until after 'Pyramids of Mars' was broadcast.

The whole pyramids / Mars thing is alive and well today, beyond Who-dom.  Viz, this species of utter balls:

This kind of drivel has not been stopped - or even slowed - by better and more detailed images taken by NASA since.

Here, for instance is an image of the 'pyramid', taken by Mars Global Surveyor in 2001:

Self-evidently NOT an artificial, architectural structure, I'm sure you'll agree.  (If you don't, you have no business reading this blog.  Go away immediately.)

Here, is the spooky 'simian' 'face' on Mars, imaged by Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter in 2007:

Looks exactly like Roddy McDowell in Planet of Apes, doesn't it?

And yet, despite the fact that we now have very detailed images of this LUMP OF ROCK clearly showing it to NOT be a sculpted face, a brief (and depressing) googling session will turn up wonders such as this...

Sometimes, scientists must wonder why they bloody bloody bloody-well bloody bother.

But, yet again it seems, good old Who may claim to have 'got there first'.  Hinchcliffe and Holmes did the pyramids / Mars thing before anybody thought there were any Martian pyramids.  That's almost as good as predicting a woman Prime Minister and the existence of Jim'll Fix It... and it tops Bob Holmes' previous best of satirising Star Trek: The Next Generation before most British people had even seen Kirk and Spock.

Back before Viking, if Mars had structures (an idea which the Mariner missions had already dented), they were supposed to be canals... even though the guy who first talked about Martian canals was being metaphorical.  In Italian.

Of course, most of 'Pyramids of Mars' is a concentrated rip-off of Hammer's The Mummy with some von Daniken-esque seasoning... but still, it seems to have done something original.  "Egyptology and Mars", as Lawrence Scarman put it, before such a connection had appeared elsewhere.

(If anyone knows of previous connections, please do let me know.)

Even some of those who take the pyramid/face stuff seriously seem happily aware of Doctor Who's prior claim:

So - without wanting to become like one of those pompous bumholes like David Aaronovitch (yes, a relation) who write smug, chin-scratchy things about conspiracy theorists and homeopaths - what does this all mean?

After a cursory glance at many of the sites where people pick over photos of Mars looking for evidence of alien buildings, I'm very tempted to wonder about the readiness of our culture to associate Mars with the motifs of the ancient East.

Much of this stuff is just turgid von Danikenism.  But von Daniken was himself a practitioner (at the wacky end) of a patronising attitude towards ancient, non-European cultures... all of it based on the implicit assumption that there is something inherently puzzling about the idea that 'primitives' in Africa, Asia and pre-Columbian America could possibly create great art or architecture or technology out of their own culture without the intervention of alien astronauts.

This is strangely mirrored in the Nigel Knealey way in which 'Pyramids of Mars' essentially obviates the claim of ancient Egyptians to having created their own culture.  Apparently, they just copied all their gods and stuff from... you guessed it... from alien astronauts.

This sort of thing pops up again and again.  'Death to the Daleks' invokes the Exxilons to explain how Peruvians could possibly have built their own temples.  In 'City of Death', Scaroth claims that he "caused the pyramids to be built".  Meanwhile, he never claims that he gave Leonardo any ideas... apparently the white European fella from the early modern period can achieve his feats of cultural greatness without any help from old wormface.

Of course, there are an awful lot of social scientists who harbour Eurocentric assumptions that are, in their way, hardly a million miles away from such stuff... so I think I'll stop laying into soft targets like people who really think there are monkey faces on Mars, or dead TV script writers.

A New Hope?

Rewatching Star Wars is an odd experience.

It's surprisingly dirty, grimey and grotty.

It doesn't introduce the hero until about 15 minutes in.

Loads of the first reel is one-sided bickering, followed by silent wandering around in the desert.

Han is really very seedy... and a murderer.

Leia is a sarcastic, bossy, combative dominatrix; a far cry from the sexual-harassment-victim / soppy-girlfriend she later became.

The tone suddenly veers from deadly serious to comic/quippy as soon as the Falcon arrives at the Death Star.

The Stormtroopers hang around and chat.

The Rebels are an unprepossessing bunch - skinny, scrawny, tubby, greasy-haired, snaggletoothed, etc.

The droids are CLEARLY slaves to the humans.

The Sandpeople are CLEARLY evil Arabs.

The backstory as explained by Ben is much better than anything in the sequels, let alone the prequels: Ben and Annakin go and become Jedis, their protege Darth kills Annakin, Ben buggers off home. Clear, simple and emotionally resonant.

Darth is clearly a first name and is clearly NOT Luke's dad, no more than Leia is Luke's sister.  Luke and Leia clearly fancy each other.

The funny thing is that, if we take the prequel canon as applying to the original film (which can be done without inflicting emotional damage upon oneself as long as its only a temporary thought experiment) then the lovechild of Luke and Leia would be absolutely LOADED with midichlorians... thus making it, in all probably, the most powerful Jedi in history. The only problem is that a lightsabre would probably be harder to wield effectively with webbed fingers.

Darth Vader, by the way, is a henchman to Tarkin... and god only knows how he comes out of the whole let-Leia-escape-with-the-plans clusterfuck with a PROMOTION!

Also... isn't destroying an entire planet, just to make a point, a bit of a fucking waste? Did Alderaan have no resources, no wealth, no strategic value, no military, industrial or economic significance to the Empire? None at all? It's a bit like Hitler saying: "just to prove how powerful I am, I'm going to completely destroy Belgium".

And ponder Luke's lack of concern over the slaughter of his adoptive parents - "ah, fuck 'em, they made me do farm work" - not to mention Leia's brusque dismissal of the destruction of her entire planet.

Weird.

Strange Matters

There is something very gothic about Doctor Who, in the hauntological sense.  I mean that the show keeps on doing monsters that represent, in various ways, 'the return of the repressed', monsters that represent buried anxieties, or anxieties that we have attempted to bury.  But the monsters tend to be steadfastly material in quite straightforward ways... and to embody material, social, historical nightmares (fascism is a big one that immediately suggests itself).

It's important to stress that this isn't a contradiction, as such.  Indeed, in many ways, it's 'business as usual' for the gothic.  You can't get more hauntological than vampires, but they tend to be interpreted as representing deeply materialist concerns, from veneral disease to monopoly capitalism (and, these days, teen romance... which is about as materialist as anything gets).  However, while they may represent material, social, historical anxieties, vampires are not straightforwardly material.  They are, like most classic gothic/hauntological monsters, profoundly spectral - or at least ab-physical.  They dissolve in sunlight, cast no reflection, can appear and disappear at will, can physically transform into bats or wolves, can reverse physical time by becoming young again after feasting, can defy gravity by crawling down sheer walls, etc.  And vampires are at the more solid end of the hauntological spectrum.

However, Doctor Who has tended to (rather spuriously) consider itself a champion of an empiricist, scientific approach rather than one which has any truck with the supernatural, making vampires into alien races or mutations created by pollution, for example. (This is, as I say, rather spurious, partly because the writers of the show have usually been less interested in scientific accuracy and more interested in telling stories, often reiterations of myth - and quite right too.)  But the thing to notice here is that, despite the very gothic/hauntological method of many of the show's monsters (haunting us with our repressed anxieties), the show does not usually represent them as spectral or phantasmic or undead in the full supernatural sense.  They may appear and disappear, but its because they've got transmats, not because they're immaterial, undead things that flit in and out of tombs.

In other words, the show wants to have its cake and eat it.  It wants to have hauntological monsters that are alive, that are physical, that are hard and material things, that are organisms or robots.  This is not a denial of the hauntological-as-supernatural, but a recoding of it.  Like much SF, Doctor Who is immensely concerned with myth-reiteration, with retelling legends in the idioms of the age of science and technology and industrialisation.  I'm not here going to go into the various ways that Doctor Who's conception of reality is fundamentally magical.  What I'm trying to tease out is the way that, despite its repression of magical thinking, magical thinking keeps returning to the show and sneaking its way in.  It does this (if I may briefly anthropomorphise a concept) by disguising itself in a materialist form, and by inserting the hauntological method into narratives that are fundamentally about materialist concerns.  The inner logic is magical, the language is materialist.  The thematic preoccupations are drawn more from the language than from the inner logic.  Doctor Who uses the language of materialism to tell magical stories about nightmares of modernity.  This is why the show repeatedly tells stories about monsters that haunt us in a material way with the repressed knowledge or fear of modern nightmares like fascism, industrial genocide, high-tech war, nukes, imperialism, etc.

This is partly why there seems to be something of the trad gothic... something vampiric, zombieish, Frankensteinian, demonic... about so many monsters that, on paper, are straightforward automatons or war machines. Again and again, monstrous flesh lurks within the clanking technological enemy.  A webbed claw emerges from a Dalek casing.  Androids per se are always just the tools or weapons or foes of other races... they are never the main enemy.  The main enemy has to be more gothic.  It has to be Davros, awakening from death and covered in cobwebs.  It has to be Cybermen: walking techno-zombies with cloth faces and empty eye-holes that make them look like bandaged skulls.  When robots are the star threat, a big deal is made of them being like "walking dead".

Eyepatch on the Left?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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