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really liked it
| Kerbaj's history of the Five Eyes sigint system is useful in reminding us how technology is not necessarily liberatory. It can be an agent of surveill Kerbaj's history of the Five Eyes sigint system is useful in reminding us how technology is not necessarily liberatory. It can be an agent of surveillance and control. The story starts not in 1956 when it was created but with responses to earlier Nazi and more concerning Soviet Cold War spy operations. The underlying tale is one of the de facto merging of US and British post-imperial intelligence technologies to counter the 'threat' of Sovietism and other forms of Communism. The three other Five Eyes were the 'white commonwealth' countries of Canada, Australia and New Zealand. De facto but not de jure. Periodically there would be tensions and disputes when co-operation had to be smoothed over because of some (usually humint) blunder by one party or the other or because foreign policies were not exactly aligned. America was never not the dominant partner. In general, however, the two systems were fully aligned and became an asset in the creation of the Anglo-Saxon ideal of the liberal West. As British power declined, Australia became more important but the total system was directed largely by US needs and desires. This is not to say that the Five Eyes became a wholly owned Washington subsidiary but only that the British had to invest heavily in their own capacity and machinery in order to be useful to America and to deter it from thinking that it alone could displace the other Four Eyes. Although not majored on in this book, the intelligence system was part of a greater whole of junior British dependency where its status as an asset was linked to US commitment to NATO, the maintenance of an allegedly 'independent' nuclear capacity and 'global influence'. Of course, this is a structure up for grabs with the latest Presidency but all the indications are that the British have found themselves so trapped in a semi-abusive relationship that they cannot escape. Security is now about to be wrapped up in the economics of trade tariffs and in culture wars. As to the book, it is written by a journalist and not a scholar with all the advantages and disadvantages of this. It is readable and reasonably well structured as a narrative but it is also rather vulnerable to seduction by sources who apparently allowed Kerbaj access to 'secrets'. The critical faculty - though not absent - starts to melt away the nearer we get to our own time to the point that, by the end, we are sensing an official version of history subtly replacing a more critical and historical one. This is inevitable - you do not get access without a little bit of wolf becoming dog. Nevertheless, so long as you retain your critical faculty as a consumer, it is a good read with intelligently presented anecdotes and a broadly coherent narrative that takes us through one very important element in Western security policy, its apparat and the negotiations that sustain it. Finally, I should add that Canada, Australia and New Zealand are not forgotten. Each in its own way plays a significant if temporary role in a narrative otherwise dominated by the Anglo-American relationship. They are lesser but not insignificant players in the game. ...more |
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Apr 24, 2025
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Kindle Edition
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| Oct 27, 2011
| Aug 04, 2011
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it was amazing
| The origins of the crises that might yet turn us all into radioactive ash - Chinese aspirations to acquire Taiwan, Russian concerns about national sec The origins of the crises that might yet turn us all into radioactive ash - Chinese aspirations to acquire Taiwan, Russian concerns about national security to its West- are no more intractable for contemporary understanding than the consequences of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. Most people observing the vicious and unholy assault on Gaza by Israel, the collapse of Syria into quasi-Islamism, earlier collapses into anarchy in Iraq and Libya, the re-emergence of Persia as regional power and so many other phenomena tend to have a fairly primitive black and white view. As always, things are generally more complicated. Each case has its history that can take us back as far as you like but the causes of the modern network of crises in the Middle East are best centred on the near-final clash of empires that took place in the First World War. The full story is far too complex to re-tell in a mere book review but Barr's account of imperial struggle between Britain and France between 1915 and 1948 is almost essential reading for anyone who thinks they should have an opinion on the matter today. The central problem was that two already overburdened and potentially vulnerable empires (rather like the US today) were around to fill a vacuum left by the collapse of an aged and less developed empire (the Ottoman), perhaps the last heir of Rome itself. During the First World War, victory for Britain and France was far from assured (certainly in 1915-1917) when the dumbest and most cowardly document in twentieth century history (the Balfour Declaration) set in motion a horrendous process that is still with us today. A weak Foreign Secretary created the conditions for the incursion of an unnecessary 'Crusader Street' just at the time when other forces in the British Empire (more obviously progressive if self interested) were working to encourage conservative Arab nationalism to win the war and secure India. At the same time (the main subject of Barr's book) a mutually distrustful France and Britain, with totally different conceptions of empire, were almost absent-mindedly carving up the Ottoman Empire (the Sykes-Picot Agreement) well before it had actually fallen. And there we have it - a Palestine gifted to well funded ethno-nationalists over the heads of the local population, the encouragement and creation of a new Arab ethno-nationalism masked as conservative dynasticism and the latter betrayed not just by the first but by imperial ambition. From this point on, it is all down hill as the increasing numbers of Jews in Palestine demand security and protection, Arab greed and disorganisation is always one step behind and France encourages (eventually) Jewish terrorism just as the British encouraged Arab resistance to French imperialism. Barr covers the story in a very readable narrative style with considerable attention to detail. Every move in the local version of the Great Game is presented and explained. Emotion is removed so we can see the players precisely for what they were. The British are their usual self-interested, lazily rational selves spoiled by inept politicians ... so not much change there. Their involvement is fundamentally one of protecting the communications and eventually oil flow across the empire. Egypt and India are what matter. For London, the Arabs are there to be much like any other subservient affiliate of empire protecting a flank and denying rivals (which includes the French) from getting too close to essential interests. This is what the dumb Balfour Declaration totally screwed up. The last period of the British mandate in Palestine shows just how out of its depth Britain was as its empire began the process of complete degeneration. The road to India was, of course, going to be less important after 1947. The surge of British brutality was nasty, desperate and actually out of character. The French are just vicious. Their approach to empire can only be described as thuggish and overtly exploitative, run by officials who gave empire its bad name and who were much more happy working as Vichy than as Free French (a subsidiary story covered well by Barr). De Gaulle was an exasperating narcissistic handful for the British and about as trustworthy as a rattle snake, mostly from weakness. For the French, whatever international law might say, Syria and Lebanon were 'possessions' to be possessed regardless of the natives. The British by the twentieth century actually tried to be pretty decent without questioning that the fundaments of their rule were indecent. The French did not even bother to try. The Americans have proven that hegemony can enforce tolerance of the criminal on supine 'allies'. The Zionists come across as one step from fanatic. In fact, let us call this straight. They were manipulative terrorists who did a right old post war number on the American people with their extremely astute exploitation of 'spin' and celebrity. Actors look stupid then as now. No better than Arafat in his heyday or Hamas, Irgun and the Stern Gang's terrorism, funded and assisted by the French and American Jews, murdered Arabs and British soldiers and administrators alike. This makes the power of the Israel lobby in the UK today all the more impressive. This leaves the Arabs. It is a picture that is not flattering in terms of organisational ability or coherence. Arab intellectuals are great talkers and love grandstanding events but they seem to have a problem organising a clear shared ideology or avoiding flattery and corruption. Constantly out-played by Zionists and what amount to French Fascists (to all intents and purposes), the path to brutal dictatorship or flaccid Western-backed dynasticism or futile terrorism in response to what were masters at the trade is marked out during these years. Certainly the Arab propensity to conspiracy theory and narratives of betrayal is borne out by much of the evidence in the book although much of any British betrayal is as much down to incompetence as deliberation. The French never promised anything in the first place. Meanwhile two stories are unfolding outside this book that will come into play later. The first is the emergence of Islamism as the primary form of Egyptian resistance to colonialism and the second is the exploitation of the resources of Iran which will lead eventually to Mossadeq's overthrow. What a mess! But the book is not a mess. Barr has produced an important narrative account of how we got to where we are today. Nor does it make judgements. It simply lays out the facts. I have my interpretation and yours may be different (if you have the courage to escape your prejudices). And a conclusion? Perhaps that, when desiring the collapse of ramshackle of empires, we should be careful of what we wish for if the successor operations are exploitative, cynical and less-than-competent vampires who hate each other. As to the self-determination which Woodrow Wilson threw into the pot and which the British were pragmatically prepared to concede in order to protect the whole, again, be careful of what you wish for if the ethnic entities involved are ruthless and mad on the one side or ill-formed on the other. There are no solutions in this book. The two main Western empires are now virtually defunct despite their posturings. The great successor empire in Washington is grappling with the chaos with precisely the same mix of incompetencies, barren ideology and self interest. The heir of the Jewish ethno-nationalists is a monster that the West, playing Dr. Frankenstein, refuses to recognise as one. The Arabs in the region of Sykes-Picot are either battered basket cases (Syria, Lebanon) or constantly living on the edge of becoming one (Jordan, Iraq). As to the Palestinians - the poorly led front line victims of all these imperial shenanigans - they are 'busted' with the best on offer being a confined puppet state on the West Bank, humanitarian 'ethnic cleansing' and what many now consider localised 'genocide'. Over a century after Sykes-Picot and the Balfour Declaration, perhaps the biggest loser is the self-image of the 'West' (whatever that is) as the good guy. As the histories are told (and there are many of them now), the old rhetoric looks like a coating of cream on a pile of poo. Traditional narrative history has often got lost in the drive to bore us with critical theory and minor academics wallowing in 'discourses'. Nobody reads that rubbish and so nothing changes. If you bother to read the facts and think for yourself, maybe our elites can actually be brought to account. ...more |
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Apr 19, 2025
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| Feb 06, 2024
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really liked it
| If you are looking for a history of the Russian Civil War, this is not it. Nor does it say very much about the politics and diplomacy of intervention If you are looking for a history of the Russian Civil War, this is not it. Nor does it say very much about the politics and diplomacy of intervention within the Western Powers. It certainly tells us virtually nothing about what Russians, whether Red or White, thought they were doing. No, this is just a fair-minded and well-written account of what the Western Powers (then including, as now, Japan) did on the ground on Russian territory between 1918 and 1920, largely drawn from the testimonies of British and American military participants of all ranks and some civilians. The bias is only that of the evidence which tells a military tale on four broad fronts - the almost accidental involvement of the British out of Murmansk and Archangel, with Kolchak in the East, with Denikin in the South and in the Baltic. The Baltic 'show' was a success insofar as the (temporary) independence of the three Baltic Republics was secured, thanks to some very innovative special operations derring-do by British officers who were at their adventurous best. The High Tory/NATO Baltic Russophobic love fest can perhaps be dated to this intervention, much as can the countervailing affair of the Baltic nationalists with the German Far Right whose walk-on part here is perhaps a little under-reported. The other three interventions were fairly disastrous though they had their moments. The entire interventionary movement had begun with a misunderstanding over the utterly reasonable intention of the Czech Legion to get home and mount their own nationalist revolution. As usual, Western desk warriors assumed that these very capable (indeed, rather admirable) soldiers would willingly become pawns in the Allied game of crushing the Reds, forgetting that the Czechs had no intrinsic interest in doing so. It was downhill from that point on. The recognised White Government was settled in Omsk under Admiral Kolchak. The logic was for the Americans and Japanese to support it from Vladivostok. The Americans concentrated on keeping their role restricted to ensuring supply and good order for aid, including humanitarian support. The Japanese were on a practice run for their later imperial pretensions. They backed a particularly nasty White Russian warlord - the dissolute Semyonov who is assessed to have murdered 30,000 people in one year. Then there was the mad Baron Von Ungern-Sternberg, an unhinged Baltic German ultra-monarchist, who appears to have wanted to create a Mongolian-Buddhist proto-empire but the less said about this figure out of nightmares the better. Other than a bit of adventuring around Baku (oil, dontcha know!), the British were primarily involved on the Ukraine and Archangel fronts which were easily as nasty as the Kolchak Front. In both cases, there were some initial advances until the Reds began to get fully organised. The Northern Front (Archangel) was a miserable business (especially for local peasants) of forest warfare, ambushes and trying to trek along snow-bound rail lines. It got bogged down (literally) and the Front became untenable. Karelian Nationalist aspirations here are interesting. They show that every petty nationalist (in this case, the Finns) is an imperialist at heart. The Finns decided that Karelia was theirs. The Karelians begged to disagree while the White Russians decided that Finland was theirs. British imperialists were somewhat embarrassed by the fact that the Karelians (though probably most peasants or herders had no idea what was going on) took Woodrow Wilson's pledges seriously but they helped the Karelians fight off the Finns without making any 'commitments'. This war was one of ideological chaos with idealistic Americans, the Communist hard boys, every type of competing ideology on the White side, European and Japanese imperialists, petty nationalists and the eternally battered Jews all attempting to pursue divergent interests or merely survive. As to the Ukraine front, the Ukrainians scarcely get a look-in - this is mostly a brutal story of Whites massacring Jews ((who they simply assumed to be Reds) and Reds massacring Whites while British Officers looked on aghast or (in some cases) thinking the Jews had it coming to them. The French intervention was chaotic to say the least and ended with a haphazard evacuation of Odessa as mounted Reds appeared on the horizon. The British ended up undertaking similar evacuations in a more orderly way, bringing many Whites to the West to build new lives from nothing. This is all took place well over a century ago. Yet one reason to read this book is to contextualise what is happening now. Reid is an establishment British writer but she is a good historian. The facts she lays out should give us pause for thought as we observe today's Western adventurism. Whatever we may think of the Communists, the Whites were a pretty vile lot filled with antisemitic obsessions and encouraging the latest round of many pogroms against the Jews. We cannot say that the British were complicit but their attitude was uncannily like that of Pontius Pilate. This was a particularly 'nasty little war'. The Allies blundered into it, achieving little except to create just cause for Russian Red and then national paranoia about the intentions of the West. Initially 'justified' by an attempt to keep Russia in the First World War, it degenerated rapidly. A key figure here is Winston Churchill who I am increasingly inclined to believe was not a little unhinged. Rational politics (represented by Lloyd George) was displaced by a paranoid aggressive anti-communism which still infects British policy-making today as a maniacal Russophobia. Rationally either the West should have decided that Communism was a threat sufficient to throw everything it had into a war of conquest and try to ensure that the neo-Tsarist regime that replaced it was at least superficially liberal democratic ((fat chance of that, I am afraid) ... ... or it should have concentrated on defending the Baltic (the most successful of the interventions) and Poland, grabbed a few strategic assets in the usual imperialist way (Baku, Sevastopol, Vladivostock), helped Whites out of the country and negotiated with the Reds from strength. The first option was dead in the water because Britain and France were financially exhausted after the First World War, the ordinary soldiery wanted demobilisation and the American public (in a genuine democracy) did not appreciate the expense of being a global policeman. The second option or a variant of it would have required imagination and intelligence but also the sort of attention paid to the problem that Western leaders could ill afford given the complexity of the issues that needed to be dealt with at Versailles. The eye was off the ball, giving too much leeway (as so often) to petty militarists and ideologues until the latter got the West in too deep for a quick and honourable extraction. The whole thing turned into an 'Afghanistan', a run for home to escape the chaos turning into too obvious a defeat. The Allies had no strategy, were divided amongst themselves, led by the nose by White propaganda. had a lot of second rate officers on the ground and had neither the political or financial capital to sustain anything worthwhile. Churchill was in full-on Gallipoli mode. As usual, one branch of the American imperial system was trying to outwit another while the Japanese were already experimenting with their own strategy of brutal imperial plunder. The Lord knows what the French were supposed to be doing there. The effect of it all sits with us today. The pogroms were to fuel the mentality that has emerged in radical Zionism. Russians were taught not unreasonably to see Western imperialism as something very material as a threat - British soldiers in particular lodged for two years on Mother Russia's soil. Communism was radically militarised as not merely a struggle between ideologies within Russia but as a no-holds-barred struggle with imperialists determined to destroy it. Churchill's ideological loathing for Moscow would eventually translate into the Iron Curtain Speech and the Cold War. The testimonies are what makes this book worth reading, not only for what is said but for what is covered up only to be revealed more honestly later (especially about what amount to war crimes). No one comes out of this with particularly clean hands and certainly not on 'our side'. The Americans, barring the policy wonk nutters who still infest that country's upper reaches, come out of this best, being restrained and more concerned with maintaining supply lines, humanitarian issues and good civilised order in East Asia and in not acting as if Russia was just the Raj with snow. The British officers were a varied lot - some nasty anti-semites with anger management problems, some incompetent, some straight out of P G Wodehouse, some effective and competent but the overall impression one gets is of no strategic direction and a lot of soldiers busking it. The White Russians could be monstrously arrogant and stubborn but we are getting our testimonies here from the British. I have no doubt that British NATO advisers will be as patronising in their memoirs about the Ukrainians they are currently advising. It is books like this that make me wonder how us British, a bunch of chancers if ever there was one, managed to create the largest empire (territorially) the world has ever known but not how they kept losing chunks of it until nothing was left. The answer lies, as it does with the US today, in the sheer scale of capital accumulation coming out of first the slave trade and then industrialisation. This meant that there was plenty of cover for the blunders of men like Churchill ... until all that capital was thrown away on those blunders. The disturbing thing about this book is that it suggests just how much our elites cannot think outside their own history. Even today, these fools are wasting resources on trying to 'contain' other empires instead of dealing with them and their concerns on equal terms. What is Russophobia today was only the mania of the few in 1919. Today it is general. Turning a blind eye to the murders of Jews might be seen in the context of distance and impotence. Today, Western weapons can be seen by everyone delivered in real time to Israel as children are burned in Gaza. Our political elites on all sides are certainly not masters of history or of themselves and so of their nations. They come across as sad, ignorant and self-destructive creatures. This book gives us just one tiny part of a pattern of delusive behaviour that echoes down the decades. ...more |
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| 9781787385900
| 1787385906
| 3.64
| 55
| Feb 01, 2022
| Mar 03, 2022
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really liked it
| When a regime collapses, it leaves a lot of political detritus, men unwilling or unable to knuckle down, accept defeat and build again under new condi When a regime collapses, it leaves a lot of political detritus, men unwilling or unable to knuckle down, accept defeat and build again under new conditions. The collapse of the Nazi regime allowed no opportunities to wait (as old Soviet warriors might have) for more propitious times for its ideology. First, the victors over the regime were absolute in their victory, occupiers, quite capable of setting the terms for recovery. Second, the old regime had committed awesomely brutal crimes that should have brooked no forgiveness. Third, the regime was not decadent like Sovietism but fanatic in its last days. Orbach's 'Fugitives' is about those war criminals, fanatics, psychopaths, cynics and opportunists who had to deal with collapse and build new lives in confused circumstances, what they did, why they did it and what happened to them in the end. He is not interested in the escape routes ('rat lines'), those who ended up in South America or those who buried themselves and hoped for nonentity within the German Democratic Republic. He has very little to say about those who chose to join the Soviet cause (simply for lack of sources). He has had exceptional access to the archives of the German and Israeli intelligence services. Although these will have their own biases, this is sufficient to tell some remarkable stories that shine a new light on post-war espionage and the 'politics of the dark side'. If a Nazi of some notoreity or prominence did not decide to go quiet and try to become a businessman or minor bureaucrat in the new German democracy, he would have four broad choices. He could hold on to the Nazi faith in the belief that he could play the allies off against each other. He could choose the Soviet path (if he got past the initial risk of the firing squad) on the basis that the Soviets were the enemy of Jewish capitalism. Or he could join the Western cause (if his crimes were not too obvious and he was not too high-ranking) because it was the enemy of Jewish Bolshevism. The fourth option was not to give a damn about ideology or politics (and perhaps never to have given a damn in the first place) and look to old contacts to earn some money through political means - as military or police adviser, as arms dealer or perhaps in what might amount to organised crime. Orbach looks at all these options and how they played out amongst a surprisingly small group of people, mostly chancers and sociopaths, over the few decades following the Second World War in a story that is highly complicated but is well presented here. The author is a professional historian. He does not allow himself to get over-excited by his subject matter. He is diligent. He has excellent and (I believe) reliable sources. He writes well and clearly. It may not be the whole story but the story is interesting enough. The first section concentrates on the oft-told story of Reinhard Gehlen and the compromises entered into in order to create the Gehlen Org, the precursor of the BND (the German State Intelligence Service). It is a revisionist tale, shattering Gehlen's own carefully cultivated legend. The truth is that Gehlen was a lucky opportunist, that American weakness when it comes to interagency co-operation rather than anything more malicious allowed his rather bungling organisation to continue as long as it did and that it became riddled with Soviet infiltration. The Soviets come out of this as rather clever, exploiting the Nazi old boy network with Nazis of their own to create a scandal that was highly disruptive of German politics as the German Establishment tried to avoid exposure of the rum ex-Nazi, Hans Globke, Adenauer's Chief of Staff, to world gaze. To be charitable, German democracy could not have secured itself without accepting the services of some who served under the previous regime and who had 'mains sales'. The chaos of collapse appears to have allowed the new system to avoid the worst of the Nazis only by taking the most weaselly. The first part of the book leads into the second with its strong Middle East focus by telling the story of the Gehlen Org's attempt to build a Middle Eastern intelligence network using old regime sympathisers while West Germany simultaneously tried to build a positive relationship with Israel. The second part of the book then deals largely with those ex-Nazis who embedded themselves in the world of Arab nationalism and took a more political view of things - that the war against the Jews was a war against Israel and the West. Ex-Nazis turned up in Nasser's Egypt and in Syria as it went through regime change after regime change, touting themselves as military, police and interrogation advisers and introducing the techniques of the Gestapo to Nasserite and proto-Baathist officers. The two main stories here are those of the vicious and murderous war criminal Alois Brunner who embedded himself in the Syrian security state and the Nazi arms trading operations such as OTRACO which ran guns, not always competently, to the Algerian rebels against French rule. Brunner is another well known story except that, here, because of his access to Mossad files, Orbach can give us a fuller picture of his adventures. One is gratified (spoiler alert) that he ends up a victim of the Baathists who clearly despised him, eventually languishing in a cell no better than a Gestapo one. What is more interesting are the insights into Israeli policy towards Nazi holocaust perpetrators. It is not quite what one may think. Although it was vital for Israel to trigger global awareness of the Holocaust, this was also a State with limited resources and other priorities. The capture and trial (1961) of Eichmann, which, of course, led to a classic text, Arendt's 'Eichmann in Jerusalem' which spoke of the banality of evil, satisfied that primary aim. Judgements then had to be made on use of resources once that core end had been achieved. Mengele (never captured) was never not going to be on the 'forever' list of Israel (with full justification) but other existential concerns of the nation pushed punishing war criminals to the back of the queue once the Eichmann Trial had had its effect. The Eichmann kidnapping unnerved old Nazis. The myth of Israeli 'justice' by any means was sufficient to drive some into hiding but, after an attempt to assassinate Brunner (rather than attempt his kidnap for trial), he was ignored for two decades. The FLN arms trading operation naturally brought into play the thoroughly murderous and ruthless French security services who conducted a campaign of car bombs against Neo-Nazi arms dealers, on German soil if necessary which was not good for Franco-German relations. The arms dealers were not particularly adept at either field craft or business. Some of the 'deals' appear almost comically inept in retrospect. The French scored a nice own goal by harassing the second rate Nazis out of existence only to create space for far more efficient Soviet suppliers. The strategic incompetence of security services seems to be a theme of this book. Gehlen and French intelligence are soon matched in the third and final part by the story of Israeli intelligence's poor analysis and diversion of resources into yet another murderous campaign. In this case, it was triggered by panic over Nasser's hiring at enormous expense of West German rocket scientists (not necessarily Nazis) who were presumed to be building a missile capable of dropping a nuclear bomb on Israel. The fear is understandable. Concern about nuclear weaponry led Israel into its own nuclear weapons programme and it has guided its foreign policy ever since. However, on this occasion, the evidence was there that these rocket scientists were second rate and there was no threat. The 'justice' agenda was dropped but the scientists were assumed to be Nazis seeking a second holocaust (they were not Nazis, just hired hands). Israeli intelligence went down the rabbit hole and undertook a violent programme of assassination that destabilised Israeli-German relations. In the end, Nasser's missile programme got nowhere for reasons that had little to do with Israel's efforts but simply because his team was not up to the job. The project was too expensive to be maintained. Again, to be fair, Cairo in the late 1940s and 1950s, was a hotbed of pro-Nazi and anti-Jewish sentiment but we are now well into the early 1960s. Nazis were getting old and tired in any case, past any serious usefulness to local Arab regimes if ever they were very useful in the first place. In the end, the West Germans and Israelis settled the matter far more intelligently by simply buying off the rocket scientists in 1964. The irony of it all is that the deal was partly enabled with intelligence acquired by Israel with the help of one of the most prominent Nazis of all - Otto Skorzeny. Skorzeny, as a foot note, in this context is interesting because, untainted by war crimes yet the hero of European Neo-Nazis, he comes across here as a pragmatic opportunist hinting at the first emergence of Far Right admiration of Israel as a plucky national socialist State in its own right. This might be puzzling but if there were Nazis committed to 'extermination', other Nazis were more inclined to forced emigration (like the forcing out of the Moriscoes of Spain) so the existence of Israel might not present such a problem. This has been a division within the Far Far Right ever since. There was another brief burst of 'justice' attempts at creating an assassination programme directed at elderly Nazis under Begin in the late 1970s but it did not get very far. Brunner lost some fingers because of a letter bomb attempt on his life in 1980. This book is a fairly detailed account of the history of post-war Nazi mercenaries yet it is readable. The overwhelming effect is one of despair at our species, not because of its crimes but because of its blundering ineptitude whether Nazi, the sponsors of Nazis or their enemies. We are watching a criminal circus of surprisingly few people either 'busking' their way through life or engaging in extreme measures that would have been less necessary with a little forethought and closer attention to intelligence analysis. The Nazis come across as losers in a struggle for survival that simply results in them doubling down on their earlier criminal or sociopathic behaviour. Their enemies come across as tending to panicked paranoia which perhaps marks out active service units today then as now. History never repeats itself precisely but we are left with a suspicion that the shenanigans of excitable security apparats from Moscow to London, from Warsaw to Kiev, are likely to exhibit much the same tendencies nowadays as French, German and Israeli intelligence in the two post-war decades. On the other hand, and more positively, it is equally probable that amateur banditti arising from regime collapse may be disruptive but have no serious means of changing history while, on the few occasions that the big boys of politics intrude into the game, problems can be resolved rationally. An excellent historical work on a neglected part of post-war espionage, Orbach's use of his limited but important resources is exemplary. We can only hope that, one day, the Russian, Syrian and Egyptian Governments will give him access to their archives to fill out the story. ...more |
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| Jan 01, 1981
| Apr 01, 1982
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liked it
| Clive Cussler's 1981 thriller, another exercise in implausibility, follows the formula of Vixen 03 but where the political background of the 5th novel Clive Cussler's 1981 thriller, another exercise in implausibility, follows the formula of Vixen 03 but where the political background of the 5th novel was the freedom struggle in South Africa, this 6th outing for Dirk Pitt is about the fate of Canada and, more tangentially, the energy crisis of the time. Cussler is nothing if not imaginative. As a Brit myself, it was quite a pleasant change to find the main antagonist of Dirk to be the British in the person of a suave and aging James Bond-alike with, at one point, a crew of tough Royal Marines invading Upper State New York. A lot happens (which is one of the markers of a Cussler). The British angle nicely dovetails with a nineteenth century railroad crime gone wrong and the ruthless internecine state politics of Canada in the age of Quebec Libre. The Soviets get only a very small, merely implied, walk-on part. The open sea also plays only a small part in this tale. Most of the action is on land or close to shore in riverine, estaurine and subterranean waters. As in Vixen 03, the story is as much an investigative historical detective story as 'contemporary' thriller. The sex stuff is there but is much more restrained if still more than a little a ridiculous. Heidi from Book 5 turns up as a likeable naif allowed to make girly mistakes and be patronised by the boys. The denouement (no spoilers) is sweet and romantic and fits the character we saw in the previous book. Dirk's team plays much less of a role in #6 - Giordano is scarcely seen. Even Pitt himself seems to take second place to no less than three sociopaths and the Canadian political shenanigans. The title is explained very late and only in passing. Still, for all that, it is an accomplished and enjoyable bit of nonsense. Although its politics are somewhat dated (like its gender relations), it is reasonably fast-paced and filled with 'incident' (which is generally what you want in a popular thriller). ...more |
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liked it
| Innes' sixth thriller is, as are so many adventure thrillers, predicated on an absurdity - in this case, the existence of a multi-million pound secret Innes' sixth thriller is, as are so many adventure thrillers, predicated on an absurdity - in this case, the existence of a multi-million pound secret U-Boat base located on the Cornish coast making use of old mine workings. Once you get past this block to rational thought, what you get is a reasonably well crafted early wartime thriller (published at the very beginning of 1940) which has the virtue of having an authentic feel as far as the psychology of the time is concerned. Late 1939 was a time of deep anxiety about both Nazi espionage networks and fifth columnists and the threat to British naval power of German submarine warfare. Britain was also a nation still reeling from the Depression, psychologically insecure even if still determined to take on the Nazis. Even at this early stage, we see the division (later to be expressed in the Rommel legend) of the honourable military enemy contrasted with the thuggish and cowardly boot-boys of the Nazi Party - another absurdity only to be uncovered when the history could finally be written. There is nothing truly remarkable about this book but Innes writes with verve. His action sequences would be easy to translate into a 'war film'. He has a good eye for character and scenery so it ends up an easy and likeable read once you have drifted backwards in time to late 1939. One interesting note though. The young narrator who becomes the hero of the hour is not afraid to express his fears about war or his doubts about the consequences of heroism. This vision of young male anxiety, with only WWI as a measure of what war may be like, feels thoroughly authentic. The book feels like an act of psychological catharsis, of the writer forcing himself into the line of duty through his hero. The latter's undoubted selfless heroism and that of his working class comrades is the transformation of a weedy intellectual (a drama critic) into a potential officer and leader of men. All thrillers are male power fantasies but this is one where you can taste the fear of and anxiety about death in a greater cause at a particular moment in history. The educated middle class prep school boy does what he did in 1914 - take his natural social place as leader of men by overcoming his fears. ...more |
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really liked it
| The fourth Dirk Pitt novel 'Raise the Titanic!' (1976) is enjoyable even now and even if Cussler is not very good at handling the female side of the g The fourth Dirk Pitt novel 'Raise the Titanic!' (1976) is enjoyable even now and even if Cussler is not very good at handling the female side of the gender equation or the complexities of non-heroic human psychology. The novel was made into a notorious blockbuster film by Lew Grade which cost $40m to make and took only $7m at the box office. Grade later said that it would have been cheaper to lower the Atlantic but none of that is Cussler's fault. As to the story, it is, of course, absurd at so many levels yet the suspension of disbelief is a happy one. Cussler offers us sufficient twists and turns and red herrings to keep us fully engaged. As an adventure story it survives its Cold War setting with its hint of Reaganite Star Wars to come. ...more |
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liked it
| Written almost immediately after 9/11, this 'very short introduction' cannot do much more than give us a basic history of what we like to place under Written almost immediately after 9/11, this 'very short introduction' cannot do much more than give us a basic history of what we like to place under the term 'terrorism' and to express a barely hidden frustration with the war on an abstract noun (Terry Jones of Monty Python fame). There are two major points being made here. The first is that there is no satisfactory definition of what terrorism actually is except in terms of its political purposes. And the second is that media-driven hysteria around the subject threatens the very fabric of liberal society. The book also debates whether terrorism as tactic (by whatever definition) is efficacious or not. The author suggests not and yet his examples sometimes tend to tell us the opposite especially if we take the long view. We can agree that most socialist or anarchist terror within liberal democracies was a waste of energy but then the later manifestations of it in the Red Army Faction and similar organisations were somewhat narcissistic and even patronising expressions of middle class outrage on behalf of others. However, the cases of the Soviet Union, Cuba, China, Venezuela and others tend to show that terror as a tool designed to eliminate opposition in the sea in which revolutionaries must swim did work and that national/socialist regimes did emerge and survive for decades - right up until the present day. This, of course, is very different from the attempt at an 'ethical' terrorism by the Narodniki although anarchism descended into very unethical behaviours before too long. Whether ethical or unethical, these types of political excitability without a greater strategy certainly failed. It could be argued, of course, that the failure of the Social Revolutionaries constructed the conditions for Communist ruthlessness as, if we want a symbol of this, Lenin's ideology emerged out of the State murder of his brother. This would certainly be taking the long view. Townshend does himself great credit by not shying away from the existence of state terror and not only of the communist type. The Western empires have not been averse to it, again as part of a wider strategy of warfare, even if they like to cover it up as 'counter insurgency'. Townshend could have gone further and deeper down this route but the danger would have been that the purchasing punter might have got confused if this commissioned attempt to explain what was then a new phenomenon to some had moved into Chomskian territory. He is certainly right that terror within a revolutionary struggle that does not have a national resistance aspect is likely simply to mobilise the resources of the enemy into counter-strategies of great brutality (as in Chile and Argentina) and alienate populations uncommitted to the struggle. Each case is different but Townshend is particularly good and honest on the cat-and-mouse terror tactics of Israel and the Palestinians where he unravels the self-serving Netanyahu narrative that drives American congressional opinion, a legislature of surpassing lack of sophistication. In fact, Israel is an example of terrorism working because it was primarily ethnic and capable of being integrated into the survival strategies of an emerging ethnic State. That Jews never truly repudiated the massacres committed on Arab villagers as ethnic cleansing is a blot on their moral reputation. He also looks at the IRA and ETA as national liberation movements making use of terror as a tactic and he judges, prematurely in the case of the IRA, that they were failures. This is probably true in the case of the Basques with the Basque territory still well locked into the Spanish State mechanism. However, the Whitehall sell-out by stealth of the Unionists in a trajectory that was perfectly happy to abandon aspects of UK sovereignty in collaboration with the Irish in return for Washington's little scheme to get Ireland into NATO was also partly driven by Irish terrorism. As each decade goes by the inveigling of Northern Ireland into an eventual referendum to get the Province off the back of the British budget and secure Ireland so that it was no longer a neutralist strategic risk factor in a European War could rely on Irish terror to make that job easier. If the purpose of Irish terror was to unite Ireland then, although Irish terror did not in itself bring the unification about, the conditions it created have enabled the possibility of their aspirations to be met just as Unionist terror has slowed the process down. In that respect, terror works. Terror, in other words, is a tool within a much wider political or military game. This is something the Israelis never forgot. When the Nazis called the French Resistance 'terrorists' they were strictly correct if we look at the term neutrally as a description of a 'practice'. The FLN in Algeria will have watched French terrorism 'working' in this way - as a process linked to politics and conventional or guerrilla war - just as the OAS blunderingly tried to do the same and the Islamist insurgents of the 1990s even more brutally did the same again. The claim that the 'terrorist' is someone else's 'freedom fighter' is trite because it separates the two as moral categories whereas the actual moral categories are a) the killing of 'innocents' on the one side set against b) the greater aims of, say, national self-determination on the other. We live with this every day. Ukrainian car bombs are called partisan activity and their terrorist nature is glossed over in the Western media and yet these same Editors froth at the mouth when the same tactic is used by Afghans or Hezbollah on their own soil. Townshend was also writing at that point where nearly all commentators found themselves thoroughly confused by the emergence of what appeared to be a nihilistic (from a liberal humane perspective) form of radical religious terrorism that looked to a supernatural end. As always throughout the book he is sensible here, if possibly overly non-committal. Research into Islamic terror was in its early days. Western observers were no more successful in getting into the mind-set of the Islamist than they are today in getting inside the mind-set of a Russian or Chinese. The overwhelming characteristic of the average Western policy wonk is a staggering lack of imagination which leads to simplistic and disproportionate, indeed hysterical, responses to what is generally far less of a threat to a population than exhausted doctors and truck drivers. However, Townshend's wise insights into the tactics of Hezbollah suggest that even Islamist fanatics (if we can only get to understand how they think instrumentally) are instrumental in their approach with attitudes no different in this respect from the Narodniki or the Tupamaros. One of the lessons of the book is that terrorism continues to have its instrumental logic and that we can soon begin to divine when it might be used ineffectively or effectively to achieve very long range ends in association with other strategies - military, political and economic. The liberal moral outrage at the tactic is justifiable in the abstract but the liberal rarely sits where the 'damned of the earth' (Fanon) sits and easily turns a blind eye to state terror when it acts in his interest. Morality is a tool like any other in the brutal game of power. Terror strategies tend to emerge when power is disproportionate so it was always likely that America as hegemon would face it because American power was and is disproportionately greater than anything else on the planet. We should really be surprised that there is so little of it. We might go further and say that, while national liberation strategies (for all the nonsense talked about a Terrorist International in Washington during the Cold War) were located in specific territories, globalisation has created a new West/Rest dichotomy that increases the risks of terror. Russian analyses of the nature of American power are far from incorrect. Russia has not been entirely isolated because non-Western elites connect with that analysis. The blocs that emerge in fact reduce the chances of terrorism because a countervailing non-Western bloc can imply sufficient resistance. However, if the resistance bloc is eliminated as a traditional network of powers striving not to be subsumed within the Western imperium, Western dominion creates the opportunities for asymmetric 'terrorist' resistance amongst the powerless and not only overseas. The same threat exists in the heart of the West from those who feel excluded from the imperium at home. So long as populist ideas and feelings have leg room, terrorism as a tactic is counter-productive but it becomes productive if the national populist or the deprived feel their back is to the wall. Similarly, the potential unravelling of the cosy consensus between the corporate sector, states and eco-politicians over green issues because of crude energy security and more urgent socio-economic requirements might also threaten the system with what might be called a Green Army Faction, The point here is that terrorism as a tactic is always a potential threat and increases to the degree that Western society behaves more like the old Russian Empire than the liberal democracy it purports to be - surveillance, social control, hunting down whistleblowers and so forth. Townshend notes something important - the grim dialectic between terrorism and the media and the way that the media's excitability and hysteria drives public panic far beyond what reason would dictate and so creates inappropriate political decision-making and manipulation. It could be argued (I would) that the most socially destructive force in Western society is not the potential terrorist but the Editor with his propensity for 'stories', fast news cycles, high emotion, moral posturing and attempts to manipulate power by the back door. There is nothing we can do about this because liberal democracy defines itself in part by the freedom given to the Press. The benefits of good journalism (where it exists) should theoretically always outweigh the disbenefits although increasingly they do not as serious journalism decays. Although now out of date by about two decades (especially in regard to Islamic terror), this very short book (139 pages) packs in a lot of information. If it does not do a great deal to help us define what the phenomenon is then that is because the phenomenon is not easily definable at all. ...more |
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| Mar 22, 1989
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really liked it
| Alongside Trevor-Roper's 'Last Days of Hitler' and Crankshaw's 'Gestapo', this book was one of the earliest attempts (1956) to come to terms with the Alongside Trevor-Roper's 'Last Days of Hitler' and Crankshaw's 'Gestapo', this book was one of the earliest attempts (1956) to come to terms with the then very recent experience of the horrendously chaotic and destructive national socialist experiment in Germany. We have to remember that the period from the Nazi seizure of power to the collapse of the regime in 1945 was just twelve years ... which is no more than three Presidential terms and only two years more than Tony Blair's 'reign'. Reitlinger was writing only a decade after the regime collapsed. In other words, a historian's objectivity was likely to be difficult in such circumstances. Reitlinger was, in fact, an historian and specialist in Asian ceramics who just wanted to tell this particular history and, in another book, that of the holocaust. He also had to rely on a limited range of sources - unreliable media and Nuremburg process documentation and self-serving memoirs from former German officials and soldiers with a great deal of important evidence locked up in the closed Soviet system. From this perspective, his achievement - even if only preliminary and overtaken by other researchers - was significant. Although his emotional responses to what were recent events come through, the work is nevertheless a work of history albeit a provisional one. There is a bias towards the story of the chaotic concentration camps uncovered by the Western allies rather than the extermination process uncovered by the Soviets. This would be corrected by later writers. His horrified emotional responses are, of course, understandable regardless. His holocaust study had underestimated deaths in the extermination camps by a significant number. It took two decades more for academics to expose the scale of what happened in the East. From that perspective, giving slight primacy to Belsen over Auschwitz is of its time. He expresses a righteous disgust at the ease with which so many SS mass murderers got off lightly and you sense anger that the German State at the root of the crimes was too ready to try and forget what was done. However, he does not mention the Cold War context enabling this leniency. As an interim assessment of the role of the SS in the Hitlerite imperium Reitlinger's account remains useful today even if those emotional qualities to the book now look unnecessary and more polemical than academic. Yet the horrible facts still stand. Reitlinger has a polemical point and it is a fair point. In contemporary terms he wants to knock on the head the dangerous myths surrounding the SS as competent or idealistic or the sole monsters of the Nazi regime. He wins his point on the evidence then available. The story is also the story of Heinrich Himmler (where perhaps the account is sometimes less satisfactory as psychology) and of the SS as just one important element in the fragmented one person rule of that brilliant monomaniac Adolf Hitler. The SS starts off as a personally loyal death squad to deal with Hitler's problem with his own Party embodied in the SA as a potentially revolutionary armed force. To understand Hitler, one must understand that he was not a revolutionary but concerned only with the seizure of the State. The Nazi State was not like the Communist State - the arm of a Party - but the German State owned and guided by the Fuhrer who exercised control through not only the Party but the traditional organs of state power (the civil service) and, after its personal oath, the Army. Hitler did not give a damn which bit of the system he used so long it was directed at his personal ideological ends - effectively, a throwback to Wilhelmine imperialism combined with an existential loathing of the Jews and Bolsheviks. Each of his gangster barons was granted personal leave to exploit a segment of the machinery for these ends and their own. Each was allowed to compete ruthlessly for territory knowing that the Fuhrer could dispossess any one of them at any time to the advantage of another. Goebbels incorporated the revolution into Hitler's mainstream and came to control the nation qua nation. Goering was responsible for the economy and air power until his failings saw his influence crumble, largely in favour of Speer. Bormann rose to rule Germany as administrative machine through the Party Gauleiters. Others ruled segments - whether foreign affairs (Ribbentrop), the navy (Doenitz), occupied territories. 'justice' (meaning state control of society) or whatever. Himmler was both immensely powerful and an outsider with an emerging two-fold brief to police the Nazi State and act as brutal agent of Germanisation and social control (and obviously anti-semitism) in the grey area between Germany itself and the front lines of war. Hitler was a creature of his own history. He feared a 'stab in the back' while he pursued his warrior ambitions. Himmler's job was in part (alongside those of Goebbels and Bormann) to make sure that German dissent could not rise from below and snatch victory away. This helps to explain the viciousness of Hitler's reaction to the July Bomb Plot. One of the three great arms of Hitlerite power (the Army) had gone over a line and stabbed Germany, represented by him, in the back. The SS' importance rose accordingly but still not above that of the Army. When Himmler in the last days tried to negotiate futilely with the West to create an anti-Bolshevik front (we see a pale version of this today in the East European nationalist-NATO alliance against Russia), Hitler saw another betrayal under conditions where the personal was the political. The SS may have started life as a death squad-cum-personal protection operation for the Party Leader and it may have poddled along for some years accumulating power and numbers as a slightly potty ideological avant-garde with influence but war made it. It was charged with implementation of the Commissar Order (the slaughter of captured Soviets) and then of Jews (brought to a fine industrial art in the camps) and expanded as an economy in its own right as well as an auxiliary generally brave but variably competent military force. It 'grew like topsy' to the point where it was to become clear that Himmler himself could no longer cope. The last months of the war in 1945 show a man constantly on the edge of personal mental breakdown. The overwhelming impression is not of some dark lord of inherent evil but of someone without a traditional moral bottom who was led by circumstances ever deeper into the mire so that one wonders whether his eventual suicide may not have been a relief. Reitlinger's contempt for him may be deserved but two decades in corporate life taught me that there but for the grace of god would go not a few people I have worked with given perks, status, pathways to the top and a carefully cultivated ignorance of the consequences of their actions. From this perspective, Reitlinger wins his implicit polemic point that the attempt by modern (1950s) Germans to put all the blame for the evil done on the SS was criminally self-serving. The SS was the implementation agent for evil acts in which the German State as a whole was complicit. I do not agree, however, with Reitlinger's attempt to blame the German nation as a whole - like many people even today, he cannot draw the correct distinction between a nation and that filthy but necessary thing we call the State. I tend to believe Doenitz when he said that he did not know of the miserable horrors of the last days of the concentration camps which were largely the product of regime chaos and neglect let alone the extermination programme. Many if not most Germans would have been insulated from all this. He is right that the SS, evil though its actions were, cannot be allowed to be an alibi for Germany but we should be specific that we are talking about Germany as an elite State operation made up of a forced alliance of Party, civil service and military. A lot of that State survived 1945. It took all these forces working together to murder Jews, engage in imperialistic wars and create widespread mayhem and carnage - the SS was simply given the dirty jobs to do and it is clear that many of them did not enjoy it. It was just a job in a system. Because of sourcing problems the period before the war is less well served than the war. The account then starts to come alive but this reflects the relative unimportance of Himmler in the grand scheme of things until he is commissioned to deal with the occupied territories. What is very useful is the picture that the book develops of the bureaucratic rivalries under Hitler and within Himmler's own network. These demonstrate just how circumscribed Himmler could be by the machinations of others. His fear of Hitler lasts to the very end. The figures of Heydrich, Canaris, Schellenburg, Ohlendorf, Kaltenbrunner, Wolff and many others weave in and out of the story as what amount to Divisional Directors of National Socialism, Inc. of Bertlin and its offices across Europe - competing, conniving, sometimes dying. Sometimes the machinations become so abstruse and complex that the general reader may have difficulty in following what is happening but, at its best, incidents such as the Night of the Long Knives (1934) or the July 20th Bomb Plot (1944) can be positively exciting. Reitlinger is also good on weakening substantially myths about the SS's competence and even idealism which still hold the attention of popular culture three quarters of a century later. There were competent bureaucrats and idealists but the total system was a shambles. Although they tried hard, the SS were not professional soldiers in general. By the last eighteen months of the war, Himmler was commanding a motley group of 'racial Germans' (from outside Germany proper) and anti-communist occupied forces with weak military skills. This is not to say that they did not often fight bravely but it is to say that they were no substitute for the fully trained regular Wehrmacht once their numbers exceeded the original German core of dedicated Nazis and some of those were more enthusiastic than capable. As to the idealism, this could certainly be found in fanatic Nazis and in the dreamy 'Europeanists' in the Divisions raised in the West (the starting point for the European ideal now represented by Ursula Von Der Leyen) towards the end of the war but this was a minority if a dangerous one. Perhaps sometimes Reitlnger overstates his case but the case is there on the evidence he has to hand. Further analysis would in due course refine the picture, remove some of the emotion without losing the values and balance the picture out a bit but this still remains a useful history. Himmler and the SS should definitely not be let off the hook. They engaged in horrendous crimes in a horrendous age. However, the buck does not stop with them. They were part of a total system and this book makes it hard to accept claims that Hitler knew nothing of these crimes. There may be no incriminating piece of paper fingering Hitler but we can be sure that the SS was an agent more than it was a principal and that it was only one part of a much more complex criminal enterprise that encompassed almost every significant part of the German State System. ...more |
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| Nov 13, 2007
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really liked it
| Third in the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen series, this is a tour de force parading the breadth of culture of the two authors Alan Moore (writing) Third in the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen series, this is a tour de force parading the breadth of culture of the two authors Alan Moore (writing) and Kevin O'Neill (illustration). It is also very self-indulgent and expects a lot from the reader. The framing story sets Mina (survivor of an encounter with Dracula in Volume I) and Allan (Quatermain) in a glum early 1950s Britain just coming out of the wartime and post-war tyranny of a socialist state in a narrative that references 1984. They recover a 'black dossier' of documents which purport to tell the history of the League in its many incarnations in time and in space (meaning witty German and French versions involved in the machinations around the origins of the First World War). This becomes the excuse for a whole set of literary parodies and many other often cheeky treats, a few of them downright pornographic where O'Neill and Moore parody many popular cultural icons, including the iconic London Underground map and the wartime cartoon Jane. It is almost too much of a rich feast. The parody of an American beatnik novel is literally unreadable (which is the joke) and Bertie Wooster's account of his experience alongside Gussie Fink-Nottle of dealing with his Aunt's dabbling with the Cult of Cthulhu is ... well, you get the picture. At one level it is a romantic picture of a Britain that lasts in the imagination despite its national decline since the loss of its 'faery' nature with the death of Gloriana. At another it is the vehicle for an anarchic individualist assertion of the freedom to imagine, a very Moore theme. There are innumerable 'in' jokes. James Bond is a slimy sexist government thug of weak intelligence. Sir Basildon Bond is Gloriana's 'intelligencer'. Fanny Hill's adventures with Gulliver and in the Venusberg are illustrated with stylish erotic parodies of Franz von Bayros' work. But ultimately it gets ridiculous especially with the arrival of our heroes in a trans-dimensional faerie toyland on a flying ship captained by a Golliwog. This requires special 3D glasses to appreciate. Moore, as I do, will remember these as giveaways in the comics of our youth. The magician Prospero (there is, of course, a bawdy lost Shakespearean work in the dossier) reepresents the final victory and primacy of magick and imagination over the prosaic reality of the grimy Britain of 'today' - probably actually 'today' today after the latest economic news. Part of the comic's charm is that it can provide almost endless fun attempting to identify not only the obvious derivations from popular and high literature (such as the sex-shifting Orlando) but transpositions of name (so Dr Dee becomes both Prospero and Dr. Suttle). All very clever, a work of immense labour and carefully constructed to fit into the universe of League comic books (there are six of them counting the Nemo trilogy), this is certainly worth enjoying in conjunction with the rest of the series. ...more |
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it was amazing
| Philip Short demonstrates his integrity by starting with the demolition of a conspiracy theory about Putin. He then gives us a sensitive and intellige Philip Short demonstrates his integrity by starting with the demolition of a conspiracy theory about Putin. He then gives us a sensitive and intelligent account of the personality of Russia's leader based on in-depth research of his early years and his time in St. Petersburg. A good chunk of the rest of the book is a little less impressive because, once Putin enters the Presidency, it becomes quite clear that the author does not have, perhaps cannot have, the access to close sources that he needs. Still, with caveats about his later sources (which often are, as he notes, witnesses for the prosecution), the account of Putin's Presidency, if somewhat too close to the standard Western narrative, is still valuable and (as far as the sources allow) factual. It may not be the last word on Putin but it largely displaces all previous words on the man and his times. It should be the first point of call for someone coming to the subject for the first time. The notes are also excellent and revealing. So where does the book take us? Short has already upset a lot of people by bothering to understand where Putin is coming from and the role of the West in driving him to decisions that may be good or bad but are logical and almost inevitable. In fact, what comes out of the book are the unsurprising conclusions that the current crisis is very much the creation of confused, narcissistic and often inept policy-making in the West and that Putin has an analytical mind often much superior to that of his opponents. What may surprise people more is the evidence that Putin was very much a pro-Western politician for much of his career although always placing Russia first (he saw no necessary incompatibility between those two positions until quite recently). Russians I know have told me that he was often regarded as both excessively pragmatic and rather weak in defending Russia's interests for many years. In some respects we might see Putin as a man who feels badly let down by the West and who is now hitting back hard in frustration. The warts of Putin are demonstrated (as one would expect in a largely Western narrative by an honest journalist) although perhaps there is a lack of full explanation and understanding of the political economy that he is trying to manage. Russia is dysfunctional but it is dysfunctional because Western management of the fall of the Soviet Union was destructive and negative. It was always going to be a slow process getting a busted nation back to a creditable status as a workable economy and society. Almost every action taken by the regime (albeit frequently crossing Western 'red lines') is only a reflection of behaviours undertaken by the West itself. What the West cannot forgive is the inability to revolutionise the State into a non-corrupt, legalistic liberal democracy. Russia is more interested in recovery and survival where economic recovery and survival competes with concerns about national security. Russian fears about the latter are often justifiable even if we find it tragic that smaller Ukraine has become the pawn in a greater game. To Western politicians, severe provocation is no justification but there is an air of the small boy picking on a smaller boy under the protection of the playground bully. Severe provocation is what it was and the Western bully, merely throwing a cosh to the smaller lad, must take some of the blame. Putin himself is a very interesting man. If he has had an analytical fault, it has probably been one of ignorance of Western arrogance and of American ignorance of Russia and so a rather naive belief in the possibility of Russia being treated as an equal by the hegemon. The analytical skills are those of an intelligent boy from the wrong side of the tracks, an outsider, who is trained under the old regime and learns life by doing, avoiding mistakes and learning from the mistakes when he cannot avoid them. Do we like Putin? Well, oddly, one finds oneself in some sympathy for him despite his faults. He learns fast and seems to have an inner ethical core often overwhelmed by the balance of interest involved in surviving what he rules. What we do see is consummate political skill in holding together the potential for chaos that was post-Soviet Russia and building sufficient prosperity and national security to feel able to claim once again something like great power status. This delusion may be a delusion shared by two other nations on the winning side of the Second World War - France and Britain - to the effect that the hegemon would ever truly treat them as equals. They would all be favoured 'free' satrapies with pre-set 'values' or nothing. Russian pride and exceptionalism, the sacrifices of industrialisation and war, the realisation that the old regime they once believed in was an inept, corrupt lie have conspired to create the noble but existentially dangerous view that it is better to die on your feet than live on your knees. It is all a matter of timing. Russia has got trapped. Whereas China can afford to wait and let the hegemon slowly decline, Russia has had either to live on its knees like Britain or find that its nemesis would drive it to die on its feet. That is why the current war is existential. Although Washington back-tracked from regime change as a proxy war aim, there is little doubt that it wants a Russia run from the centre by liberal Muscovites prepared to impose Western values on the smaller towns and rural areas in a modernisation that would unravel a culture. Putin evidently believed both in the efficacy of the market and in the cultural importance of Russia. At a certain point a Russian leader was going to have to choose between the two. Putin's gamble is a low key version of the German gamble in the 1930s - can a targeted culture, good or evil, survive? At the time of writing, it is hard to see who will win in Ukraine. The West has the money and is sending substantial military support to Ukraine but it is also finding it difficult to cope with the consequences of its economic war on Russia. Ukraine is technically bust already. Russia has achieved a temporary victory for the ideology of national self-determination in taking the bulk of the Donbas and Kherson (as well as holding Crimea) but at considerable cost. If it dies on its feet, it will also have opened up space for a resentful global anti-colonialist ideology. The US is not going to lose entirely because it is too rich to lose and, for China and for the US, techniques and ideas are being tested for a very different end-game - will the Chinese elite bend the knee to the world order or structure itself to be resilient for a new existential struggle? The posturing and sabre-rattling over Taiwan are really about trying to work out which path China will choose - the early Putin strategy of accommodation and de facto submission or the late Putin strategy of defiance and potential isolation from the core of the global economy. Europe, meanwhile, has been turned into even more of an unstable satrapy, its energy dependence on Russia merely exchanged for one on the US and its Gulf allies and dodgy African states. Europe is being forced into global imperialism despite itself and to spend billions on guns to boot. The next few months (August 2022) are going to be very interesting. Although the cards are stacked against Russia, its recent resilience is part of that story as well as the fact that it still sits on vast natural resources and last resort nuclear weaponry. Vladimir Putin, a frustrated and angry if pragmatic man in his late sixties, backed largely by his own people, is key to what happens next and what happens next could be a global disaster if the West continues to push and prod as it has done since the 1990s. But there is another factor in all this. The US President has an approval rating around 38%, the hawkish British Prime Minister has been ousted, the Italian Government is in disarray and the German Government is talking about energy rationing. The economic war unleashed by the West may present serious medium to long term issues for Russia requiring it to be more authoritarian to survive as a culture but that same economic war has delivered high inflation, disruption and possible recession in sensitive democracies. Personally, I think both Russia and the West will survive this but both will be much weakened in the long run to the benefit of the growing network of non-Western nations prepared neither to be re-colonised not dragged into a new Cold War. That is a worse result for the West than Russia since the latter can turn in on itself but the raison d'etre of the West is expansion and hegemony. There is a real possibility of a period of implosive politics within the West starting with the US Mid-Terms in November. The key question left by this book is that of succession. Russian liberals have been knocked sideways. They are as secondary to the big picture as more rational populists like Orban are to the big picture in the West. Lone voices with an alternative vision have been shunted aside by history. There is almost certainly no leading candidate for the Presidency after Putin who is not going to be approved by Putin and share the view that existential survival of Russian political culture is prior even to participation in the global system. Medvedev speaks like a Russian hawk nowadays. Wise counsel in the West would have long since negotiated with Putin on sphere of influence lines but there is no wise counsel left. Raw emotion on both sides has taken over. Men, money and material are going to be poured into Ukraine until one side or the other breaks. Whatever the outcome, this book is a highly recommended account of at least part of how we got into the mess we are in and why no one deep in the hole is going to stop digging - in Washington, London, Berlin, Ky'iv/Kiev, Donetsk, Warsaw or Moscow. Whatever the slight faults of taking some sources at face value, relying too much on Western sources after 2000 and perhaps failing to explain some of the less contentious aspects of Kremlin administration, Short provides a sad but fair account which should be more widely circulated. It should certainly make Westerners stop and think about their own moral compass, about their geo-political narcissism and their arrogance before throwing so many (often rightly thrown) stones at Putin's glass house. His regime is partly dysfunctional, still too inefficient, undoubtedly corrupt and increasingly authoritarian but it is also hard done by, bullied and trying to save some things worth saving. Neither side comes out of this book smelling of roses. As to poor battered Ukraine, it has become both target of an attack by an older brother on a younger and the battle ground of a far more serious (potentially) proxy war between competing system. It is hitting back hard but it is just a pawn in a bigger game. Much resides on the outcome of this war and, having been defeated in Afghanistan, having left the Middle East in a two decade mess and desperate to deter its real enemy China, the US is playing this to win over the bones of Ukrainians and bank accounts of Europeans alike. Putin too is not going to give way - based on this book, he will do what it takes to hold 'Novorossiya' at the least and has got used to long brutal wars of attrition which he mostly wins simply by pragmatically accepting least worst outcomes. So, read this book, despair at humanity, watch the horror unfold and ask why we should place our trust in the people who got us to this point. As to Russians, they must make up their own mind about Putin and it seems the bulk of them have. ...more |
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it was amazing
| 'Resistance' is an encyclopedic account of the varied resistance movements across occupied Europe between 1939 and 1945. It is not about political res 'Resistance' is an encyclopedic account of the varied resistance movements across occupied Europe between 1939 and 1945. It is not about political resistance to the Axis powers (of Italy only after Mussolini was ousted) nor of resistance to Axis empires overseas (Abyssinia and Libya are ignored). It is more conventionally Eurocentric than, say, Overy's recent account of the Second World War but still covers some 14 countries (Luxembourg is forgotten and the last days of the Axis-allied regimes in Eastern Europe are included) in 180 pages is no mean feat. If I have a gripe, it is not about the patronising abandonment of resistance to the expansion of the Italian Empire, but the equally and currently fashionable Westocentric weaker coverage of the Soviet partisan resistance. It is covered but as if it was a sideshow to the work of SOE. But these limitations do not make the book any the less invaluable as a single volume compendium of resistance experiences under very different national circumstances. It is for someone else to write the more awkward story of the other side of the coin - collaboration. Perhaps what does not come across in current historiography is that the Second World War was not only a war of empires (Overy) and a war of liberation (the preferred narrative) but a European Civil War eventually settled by a non-European and two barely European outsiders. If we look at Europe as a whole (no country was precisely like any other in its experience) we can break the story down into regional zones of similar experience, assuming we exclude both the neutrals and the Axis core of Germany and Fascist Italy. There were the highly politicised resistance activities in France and Italy where the forces of order and socialism contested the right to determine the nation's destiny along lines that perhaps were only diverted from civil war on the Spanish model by the skill of the occupying powers. To the north a line of North Atlantic states sullenly disliked occupation, were broadly obedient to the dictates of allied strategy and faced (as did the French resistance) various forms of ideological collaboration negotiating its way to political power not always with the assistance of the Nazis. In Europe's south east, resistance was sometimes tantamount to local warlordism with ethnic cleansing and social violence just below the surface when it was not manifest - Yugoslavia, Albania and Greece. Again, international war enabled civil war which the allies could not control or avert. Above them was a bloc of often reluctant Axis allies from Bulgaria through Romania and Hungary to Slovakia where pragmatism and some very real material benefits dictated compliance until the Soviets started to arrive on their borders and priorities shifted. Then, to their north, are the very different cases of Bohemia-Moravia and Poland where nationalist feeling often pushed resistors into traps where they misjudged their own capability. Further to their north, of course, the Baltic States and Finland had their nationalisms recognised by Germany. Finally, there are the 'bloodlands' (still bloodlands today) where the Soviets had moved to take over Western Poland, been pushed back and then returned in force over the heads of the non-Russian identities, notably Ukrainian, to find themselves eventually masters of all Eastern Europe. The European Union is still dealing with these very different experiences - France as balance to Germany, an unstable Italy and Balkans, the liberal democratic Atlantic, nationalism in Poland and the Baltic States, the 'bloodlands' now in a state of localised war in Ukraine. It is thus very difficult to find something common to say about 'resistance' under all these different scenarios (just as it would be if we tried to pigeon-hole all forms of collaboration) but Kochanski gives us all the facts we need to theorise and suggests thoughts of her own. The first general point to make is that, in general, resistance was, in military terms, fairly futile except as an affiliate operation providing intelligence and targeted sabotage for the Allies. The destruction of the heavy water facilities in Norway might have been decisive but little else was. One exception might have been the partisan operations in Russia and Belarussia but, even here, the Germans under Bach-Zelewski and others soon learned techniques of anti-partisan activity that made behind-the-lines operations mostly an irritant rather than decisive. More useful, as sabotage operations, were the destruction of rail supply lines in West and East as the Allied armies advanced although the Germans seem to have been adept at work-arounds. The Russians use missiles to do what resistors did and the Ukrainians no doubt work around these. The intelligence role was vital. The Allies were wise to ensure that intelligence-gathering circuits were generally separated from active service units although the Germans seem to have been skilled at breaking these circuits. As to the 'home armies' these were likely to be valuable only as irregulars or affiliates when Allied armies were nearby. Indeed, the tendency of over-enthusiastic resistors to demand weapons from the air to undertake premature operations seems to have been a thorn in the Allied side. Often we find local resistance forces, keen to act out of emotional national pride, misjudging the situation and shooting off their war bolts far too soon, eliciting vicious reprisals that may have encouraged a stronger attitude of resistance but deterred much further direct action. As the story unfolds we see a narrative in which the majority of Europeans were 'attentistes' rather than collaborators or resistors. A temporary soft form of collaboration was often encouraged by governments-in-exile in order to maintain the structures of government and avoid reprisals. This enables us to see the Nazi regime as 'interesting' because its brutality was of two entirely different types that might be called Nazi and military, both of which centred on the permission granted to it by Adolf Hitler himself. The first was racial-ideological and the second pragmatic. The resistance (other than the Jewish resistance) appears to have been quite detached (relatively) from the racial-ideological process of deportation and extermination although the treatment of the Jews undoubtedly contributed to decent distaste for the occupiers as time went on. Resistance was primarily about restoring the nation and/or restoring a very particular form of the nation (monarchical, democratic-bourgeois or socialist). It was a minority sport (as was formal collaboration) while the majority simply tried to survive. Often times, the particular form of the nation dominated the agenda to the point that the Germans could pass through a war zone while 'resisters' were more interested in killing each other. Old regime military types were also in constant tension with civilian irregulars. Several times we come across popular resentment at over-enthusiastic irregulars bringing down on the heads of the population horrendously brutal German reprisals - massacres of whole villages, executions of hostages, mass deportations. This was simply 'technique' to the Germans. The situation is fluid everywhere with the resistant authorities (generally in exile but still with infrastructure at home) advising restraint and as often disturbed as the Allies at premature operations of no strategic benefit. Over time, the dynamic of growing resistance and increasing reprisals destroyed the German ability to hold the middle ground in the West (there was no middle ground in the East). Populations grew more eager for Allied victory rather than (as might have been the case) a German peace. It could be argued that the various resistances were not so much important in deciding the Second World War as in deciding the destinies of the nations that emerged after the war (at least in the West since the Soviets were to decide the destiny of the East regardless of resistors). Kochanski closes by suggesting that the importance of resistance should be seen as something that I might perhaps call 'spiritual' - an expression of the desire of a small and then a growing minority of a nation to 'act' and to 'be' and not simply accept conditions from outside. It may be no accident that the philosophical school that emerged in France during and after the war was 'existentialism', a philosophy, if ever there was one, of choice and action, ironically drawn largely from two German philosophers more closely associated with the 'enemy'. The Western allies showed much skill such as permitting France to become an accredited Ally despite it not honestly earning the right. It used what it could of the resistors, was often exhausted and frustrated by them but it engineered them into a new national democratic mythology. This new mythology of direct participation by the people (even if a minority in practice) in their own liberation (despite the fact that the actual liberation was down to the hard power of the three Allied empires) allowed democracy to settle in again and fascist alternatives to be marginalised. A European Civil War takes two sides. Fascist ideologies were either dominant or growing across much of Europe in the interwar period. The war of resistors against collaborators (which sadly often turned into civil war between resistors) was central to eliminating this European 'norm'. Indeed, to the sensitive modern mind, the conduct of some resistors in victory (at least in Italy, France and the Balkans) might leave a lot to be desired ethically with extrajudicial killing a norm. The treatment of women who had sexual relations with the occupiers was deeply perverse. But generalisms are not helpful in history, not with so many diferent national histories to deal with. There are exceptions to every possible general statement but the primacy of hard power over civil resistance in war does not diminish the role of civil uprising in setting the terms of peace. Kochanski is a historian of Poland. This helps to explain the depth of coverage of Polish conditions where her narrative is often eye-opening about the Polish determination to resist against all the odds. The final uprising in Warsaw was an attempt to pre-empt Soviet hard power that failed. The Paris Rising in 1944 on the other hand only succeeded because Allied hard power, much to its own strategic frustration, felt it had to intervene where Stalin clearly did not think he had to. There was, in fact, a certain brutal logic to the behaviours of all the Allies. Warsaw and Paris were about national re-assertion in the face of the Allies. The difference was that Stalin, as an internationalist communist, did not want a strong national Poland on his Western flank whereas the Allies wanted to restore a self-confident democratic France. Both sides (Soviet and democratic) were perfectly aware that the United Nations rested on fragile ground and that imperial spheres of influence would replace the crushing of the Axis empires. Churchill explicitly recognised this by abandoning much of Eastern Europe for Greece. One aspect of the book is worth emphasising - the importance of SOE and the British effort to mobilise and manage European resistance. The OSS played its role but far less even if it was to become the seed from which the CIA grew. In this narrative, the SOE and other similar British organisations (SIS, SAS and others) were ubiquitous, playing roles (albeit smaller for logistical reasons) as far as Bohemia and Poland. Being British, there are, of course, blunders alongside the triumphs. Kochanski can barely repress her revisionist disgust at British support for Tito at the expense of Mihailovic in Yugoslavia. The Cairo Office seems at times to have been particularly stupid on occasions. British spycraft could be naive in the early days. But the general story is one of remarkable engagement by an organisation learning the arts of subversion and the management of secret armies from the ground up. An exhausted Britain was to pass on this experience to the Americans later. Although they recognised they could not charge Germans with war crimes related to the execution of spies, the sheer persistence of the British at Nuremburg in hunting down perpetrators of orders to kill captured commandos in uniform indicates that 'secret war' was regarded as legitimate. Kochanski's book has merit in not hiding the blunders and the self-defeating actions of the resistance movement but only as part of a very complex and confused picture where there would never have been a perfect solution to any problem. From the point of view of liberal democracy in Europe (whether you believe in it or not), the British commitment to building national resistance movements was almost selfless, expensive in resources and operatives and prejudiced in favour of the effective resistor regardless of their ideology. Although it can get bogged down in detail and it is not easy to keep track of so many narratives in so many different location amidst impossible tactical and strategic complexity, the book is well worth working through. You are much wiser by the end of it. Resistance can, and this is wisdom, be futile and not futile, destructive and constructive. It cannot win against entrenched hard power prepared to take off its gloves and do what it takes to retain power. It can, however, win the peace if it can bring external forces into play. But deeper than that, in a world where most people are political puddings, sitting there waiting to see which way the wind blows and accepting the opinion of the last person who spoke to them (often the media), resistance demonstrates that imposed systems will find their rule costly. Over time, the wind changes direction, the costs of maintaining rule on the puddings becomes too great and the men, women and ideas that represent the resistance may come to dominate discussion of what the nation is to be when the old order collapses. I suppose the lesson, therefore, is that resistance is not futile after all. If our order is collapsing under second-rate leaders who cannot manage the economy and are detached increasingly even from their own puddings, then those with a language of resistance, though few, may yet triumph. ...more |
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| Feb 28, 2013
| Jul 06, 2013
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liked it
| Published as recently as 2013 as a novel, this has an old-fashioned feel to it - perhaps because it is the extension of a novella submitted to John W. Published as recently as 2013 as a novel, this has an old-fashioned feel to it - perhaps because it is the extension of a novella submitted to John W. Campbell for Analog back in 1968. Campbell suggested it be turned into a novel. Years later, here it is. Apparently this is only the first volume of two although it stands alone. I am going to admit that I struggled to review this initially because it is an odd mixture of the obscure, the well written, the hackneyed and the highly imaginative. Most science fiction novels of a certain generation start with something mundane that draws the ordinary reader in and then will spend most of the rest of the book in increasingly unrealistic space opera, fantasy and bug-eyed monsterdom. Burkett is better than this. He does the opposite. He takes us to a completely alien environment, starting with a 'twon' hunt that is an adaptation of the earthly duck hunting much loved by the author, before spending the bulk of the book in what amounts to an earth-bound espionage novel. Even his alien world and culture is made to be something we can relate to as the story proceeds, with parallels, if more technologically advanced, to human emotions and thought patterns. The aliens are presented, in fact, as types of 'human'. They are not us but they are very like us. Again, unlike so many scifi authors, Burkett gives us his back story of galactic competition between super powers with alien agents contesting for the destiny of Earth (or Dirt as it is translated in the main protagonist's language) in only a few paragraphs. This saves time and boredom, to be honest. Burkett gets straight down to business by presenting the competing espionage agents and their ideologies as operating in the field on lines that show the story's origin deep within the ambience of the Cold War of the 1960s. It is a story of dedication, paranoia, suspicion and interrogation in which all the tropes of the 1960s espionage novel (but more Le Carre than Bond) are re-interpreted to fit within a science fiction framework. Even an apparent absurdity involving Star Trek is presented as a rational tactic. Burkett apparently drew on his own experience as a military policeman in Germany during that period for local colour (the sequel looks as if it will take us into the 1970s) and what we have here is a surprisingly plausible and grounded hybrid of the espionage and space opera genres. He also does not take the easy way out by making his aliens villains. They have a sense of ethics and of the value of life as well as respect for the Dirtlings. But it also turns out that the ultimate policy of the apparently 'good' side could be pretty evil for earth. The side our protagonist contests wants to develop Dirt towards a space warrior future as free ally within a federation of planetary cultures whereas 'our side' (from where we sit reading the novel) would strategically blow up the Earth to deny them that possibility. The opposition (Slattery) comes from a culture of space-faring authoritarians defeated in a revolt of its planet-bound evolutionary cousins. Our protagonist ('Michael') contests their attempt at re-conquest through defensive measures that could mean the death of us all on Dirt. Cleverly, the average (certainly American) reader will ideologically tend to be on side with Michael for all his alien ways only to find that the logic of his ideological position would mean his own destruction in the cause of a freedom to which he would himself aspire if he had the choice. It is a lesson in perspective because the interest of us Dirtlings is almost certainly to allow the manipulative 'other side' to help us to get to the stars - at least if your way of seeing is that of the average pro-space exploration American sci fi fan. So why do I not give this a higher rating since I acknowledge that Burkett mostly writes and micro-plots well, is good at characterisation and ambience and holds the attention with his narrative of secret services with countervailing telepathic and high empathic skills? Everything stacks up for a higher rating and yet I can't give it. The reason is because I have to care about how things hangs together, how consistent the book is in its plausibility and how clear it is in its exposition of the more difficult alien aspects of the story. Periodically the book fails in just those aspects, in the glue, if you like, that holds everything together. Several times the transition from novella to novel fails because the author has not made the pieces quite fit - as literature. He is reminiscing through genre and his mind wanders. Burkett adapts what might be scenes from his own life into his science fiction fantasy. He can plot a cold war espionage novel as well as evoke alien-ness that is not so alien as to eliminate our empathy and understanding but these things just do not seem to have been tied together well. This is a shame because I wanted the book to succeed for its many virtues. I am harsh in my critique but I would not want to discourage anyone from reading it. Take its components and wonder at the periodic imaginative brilliance of the author. Enjoy it for what it is. ...more |
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| Dec 18, 2007
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really liked it
| A well curated Penguin Classics collection of 25 short stories linked to the British experience of the First World War. It ranges from Machen's overra A well curated Penguin Classics collection of 25 short stories linked to the British experience of the First World War. It ranges from Machen's overrated romantic supernatural account of the Angel of Mons to late twentieth century works by Muriel Spark, Robert Grossmith and Julian Barnes. Roughly a third of the stories are by the big guns of English literature, not always their best work in some cases, although each adds something, but the bulk are by contemporary writers or writers 'processing' the experience in the decade or so following it. Literature is not reality. A lot of guff can be spoken or written about art expressing some higher truth when what it often does is create a barrier between us and reality especially when it is a reality which we can never hope to experience. Most of the stories are, therefore, not always very useful in describing the actual lived experience of war for most but they are effective in taking facets of the whole bringing them into focus as part of a cultural experience that helped to define 'Britishness/Englishness' to subsequent generations. One of the dissonances between 'culture' as it unfolded after 1918 and the war itself is that the war became a set of negatives that obscured the enthusiasm for war and victory at the time and only one story reminds us that for most of the war for most men it was actually quite dull. Literature is not interested in the dull. It concentrates on incident (like news bulletins), amplifies them, mythologises them and then spreads them further as interpretations that then become the received ideas of a society. So this book is about culture and not history. Having noted that (and so long as we do not confuse interwar culture or the culture of the baby boomers with the reality of events between 1914 and 1918), then this is an excellent compendium of artistic reflections on the human and specifically British experience of war. The most obviously authentic are those from men and women who experienced the conflict directly. Secondarily from those who observed the effects on their own generation after the war. The least, self-evidently, are those who merely imagine the past. In the first case, you have Aldington, Borden, Graves, Holtby, Somerset Maugham (as a spy), Montague, Sapper and Walpole. In all of these, except Holtby who embeds her story in a later period, stories are grounded in some military experience even when detached from reality. Somerset Maugham stands out, of course. Graves looks back in 1962 to have an old soldier backing the nuclear deterrent as a means to peace. Borden captures something of the exhausted adrenalin high of dealing with death and destruction as a nurse albeit in a mannered modernist idiom. The others all add something to the picture but the most interesting from a psychological point of view (though perhaps not from a literary point of view) is Hugh Walpole's attempt to describe the loss of the self in some of those who came back from the trenches. Walpole's attempt is not as successful in portraying disassociation in 'Nobody' as perhaps we might have liked but at least he was making a serious effort at describing something extremely hard to express in the conformist society of the interwar upper middle classes. The second category includes older literary lions trying to come to terms with the scale of the tragedy and its moral complications (Kipling, Conrad, Galsworthy, Buchan) or maintain a propaganda line from duty (Machen, Conan Doyle). Kipling is as masterful as you would expect. Conrad raises an uncomfortable moral choice, albeit in a somewhat stilted way, that showed how traditional morality might come under pressure in a total economic war but the most moving, because understated, entry is from Galsworthy. His simple tale simply told, from the point of view of a school teacher, of a young farmworker who lies about his age to fight, 'marries' his local love and then deserts the trenches when he finds out she is pregnant. When he is found out, he is, of course, shot. The boy is placed into the machine of war in part because the schoolteacher failed to blow the whistle on his underage status before the kid was ready to make serious judgments and that war machine had no choice but to shoot him once he was in its grip. Galsworthy was one of the patriots but changed his attitude to the war over time. This 1927 story may express some of his own guilt at not acting with more circumspection at the time. Buchan too has a nice story about discovering that his character's 'loathly opposite' in the German intelligence system was far from what he expected when they met. A repeated theme (Buchan, Graves, Aumonier, A. W Wells) is that the 'other side' were not in fact monsters but like us. DH Lawrence provides one of the odder but excellent stories in the collection 'Tickets, Please' (1919) which is very much about the liberation of women from social constraints because of the war effort. From a male perspective, he delivers a fascinatingly castrating sexual horror story. The role of women is rightly not neglected. A third or so of the stories are primarily about women or where women play a significant role and not one of these stories is some politically correct makeweight. Every single one has its purpose in the whole. Slightly less than a third are by women and not all the women want to write about women. One who does is unsurprisingly Radclyffe Hall. Her story is, in fact, somewhat ridiculous in the round but, as with Walpole, the literary failure hides a psychological success about war and lesbian aspiration. The effect on many women of the First World War is now well understood but stories like those by Mary Borden, Radclyffe Hall and Winifred Holtby all express the degree to which the end of the war was experienced as a loss. The war was a defining moment for women as much as men. As to the women who can write about men, Katherine Mansfield (the only writer to get two entries) produces one of the few examples (surprisingly) in the book of intense grief expressed in a very small and hopeless and perhaps repressedly cruel and angry way. Grief is, of course, present elsewhere but, being English, so much of it is expressed elliptically, drawn out and unassuaged,with a reluctance to share it. If there is one national characteristic discreetly present throughout, it is the national preference for Stoic silence. The only example in the book of outright cynical humour - and brutally sharp it is too - is the playwright Brighouse's 'Once a Hero' which is a satire on the cultural appropriation of war heroes by 'society'. Maybe Sapper's 'Captain Meyrick - Company Idiot' might fall into the same category. Stacy Aumonier is one of the wider group of lesser known writers who helped shape our cultural responses to the war and he provides what I think is the best story in the collection 'Them Others'. What is remarkable about it is that it was published as early as 1917. Burning with a fundamental humanity and an authentic feeling for working class life and sentiment, it has a simple soul of a mother coming to terms with not only the war but the fact that on the other side other mothers had sons in as dangerous a position as her own. The central fact is that this working class family had had pre-war German neighbours who had become friends and so could feel a common sympathy with them as fellow human beings - it is why I made a point of not abandoning my Russian friends as we sank into a Russophobic swamp. This leaves us with the post-Second World War responses to the First World War. Authenticity is replaced with literariness. One feels a touch of grief at the arrival of men and women who are telling tales as part of a mythology already established rather that being at its creation. The one dreadful, almost embarrassing, story is Muriel Spark's 1975 story 'The First Year of My Life' which, no surprise, appeared in the 'New Yorker'. It is snide, too-too-clever, obvious and rather stupid and best passed over in silence. The remaining three stories include two genre tales (a mystery story set in the trenches and ghost story) by Anne Perry and Robert Grossmith which both earn their place by being well written and indicative of how the war enters modern genre fiction today. The final entry is Julian Barnes' 1995 tale of an elderly woman obsessively 'remembering' (as we are told we must do) yet aware that some day the remembering may end. A well crafted tale, it has its point but one soon wants to get out from under the mythos and go back to the original. I suppose I am suspicious of 'literature' distant from its time and place unless it presents itself as genre fiction (the honest historical romance in one direction and the science fiction space opera in the other). This collection helps to confirm that prejudice but with caveats. First of all, all testimonies and memories are flawed. This is just part of the human condition. Second, literature (the artistic interpretation of the world through language) may be invention but it can reach into processes and situations hidden during the ordinary business of living. While things are happening, these processes and situations tend to be reduced to 'stories', tools for immediate ends, and when things are no longer in the memory of anyone, they become mythologised and detached from the truth of that time they represent. There is an intermediate period during which 'writers' are able to process their past experiences and convey some aspect of them that will resonate with others and which can be passed down the generations. There are exceptions - Kipling, Lawrence and Aumonier spring to mind and Walpole and Mansfield still strike while the iron is hot in 1921/1922 - but the best and most authentic literary expressions of a traumatic event seem to come within ten or perhaps twelve years of its ending. Thus, in this collection, the most interesting material tends to come from people 'processing' after the events they experienced, but not so long after that literary invention starts to take over and the formation of the mythos is replaced by a framework of expectations that define the mythos. Anything written after about 1928/1930 starts to look consciously literary, either moving well away from events during the war (sometimes to good effect in the stories by Holtby and Barnes) or using an established mythos as backdrop to a 'story' without the actual experience of, say, Sapper. There is a useful, sensible and mercifully short and unacademic introduction and, curiously, detailed maps of the Western Front and glossaries as well as good notes to the stories and biographical summaries of the authors. Discovering Aumonier alone made the reading worthwhile. ...more |
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| Ostensibly about mind control in the round, this is, mostly, a rather confused if well written set of chapter-by-chapter case studies on various aspec Ostensibly about mind control in the round, this is, mostly, a rather confused if well written set of chapter-by-chapter case studies on various aspects of 'brainwashing' as well as an extended essay on interrogation with a fairly set 'rationalist' and sceptical view of most claims of mind control. Certainly Streatfield has worked hard. He has done valuable independent research to add to his reasonably broad reading in the subject but what starts well as a history of Cold War fears about brainwashing starts to fall apart so that early promise remains unfulfilled. It is hard to be too critical (because the work seems mostly sound) about this book yet it lacks a coherent narrative even if it has a coherent message that all the work undertaken by 'spooks' aimed at controlling our minds does not amount to hill of beans. To a great extent, Streatfield proves his point by showing us that, time and time again, claims about the mind in society (truth serums, subliminal advertising, alleged messages in heavy metal music, cult behaviours, satanic abuse) do not stand up to much scrutiny. But in this worthy work, where the case studies are often truly horrific and often show humanity at its most stupid as much it shows it at its most cruel, the interspersing of these tales with the 'spook' stories and history of interrogation (I prefer the term torture) adds little. Most of the spook and drugs material is better told elsewhere although there are important new insights especially about Anglo-American 'bad psychiatry' and its links to the Western security apparat. Dr. Ewen Cameron is up there with Mengele on the 'evil doctor' lists. But, while there is new insight into the story of Cold War evil, the book soon veers into case studies that might cause outrage and shock but are somehow not connected to make a whole. What do they tell us that is coherent - not much more than that we can be a pretty dumb and cruel species. This has all the marks of journalistic writing . It is no surprise to find that Streatfield's main profession is as a documentary maker which lends itself precisely to his short form case study method. Having been critical (based on expectations), we have to say that he writes well and humanely. The case studies are well reported. His judgements seem sensible. We should be horrified by these stories. And his showing how stupidity combined with lack of moral compass does harm is vital. However, in his eagerness to demonstrate the natural scepticism of the evidence-based investigative journalist, one clearly determined to expose horrors rationally rather than emotionally, he sometimes seems not to see the wood for the trees. He fills gaps in the data with rational extrapolation of rational expectation when an even more sceptical mind might point out that a documentary investigative journalist is scarcely going to be told everything that needs to be told. We know how much documentation gets destroyed and we also know that sources that brief a journalist secretly will generally have an angle of some kind. If they are in office (even if not), they would have a quiet word with someone in their system on what any co-operation should achieve. The case that mind manipulation is less than the sum of its popular cultural parts sounds at times like that determined attempt of the urban liberal intellectual to deny the existence of all conspiracies because they have been unnerved by the Protocols of the Elders of Sion fraud. The same caution one should have in denying the possibility of conspiratorial behaviour when we know that these are sometimes, if accidentally, evidenced to rational people should apply to claims that mind control is ineffective and has been abandoned by those who rule us. He may be looking in the wrong place since it is as convenient for those who rule us to deny socialised control of consciousness nowadays as it to deny the existence of conspiracies (of a sort). Yet he is right that interrogation has no magic bullets and is much as it was under the Inquisition. But 'mind control' (meaning the deliberate manipulation of consciousness in the context of power relations) should not be so easily dismissed or at least should be investigated more thoroughly. After all, the vast sums being spent on psychological warfare operations require more scrutiny. Of course, we know that ridiculous sums were spent on futile and cruel research in the Cold War and it is possible that the ridiculous sums being spent on psychological operations may be equally amoral and stupid but that is the investigation we need - not of what was but of what is. We are in the middle of a massive global information war in which journalists are witting or unwitting combatants as much as priests or pastors in a religious war - believing themselves to be sacred, they are, in fact, players in the game and so targets. Interrogation only happens when the manipulation of minds has failed and real war of some sort has broken out. Interrogation is the easy and material part of this game, a matter of pain and cruelty as well as fear and manipulation. The case studies about 'spooks' and psychologists out of control - sociopaths sanctioned by a claim of existential struggle - show us 'intent', the intent to control consciousness. It is the history of this intent and its methodologies that needs its coherent history, now more than ever. In this book, we see case after case of 'methodology' by 'bad' psychiatrists and secret warriors alongside social paranoia that sees badness where there is no badness to be seen yet we do not see much of the deep 'why' of all this except as sets of responses to specific incidents. The deep 'why' is not the functional approach that says that such-and-such sought to get such-and-such to admit this-or-that but the question of how entire structures can exist that believe either that they can manipulate minds or are in the midst of a programme of manipulation. It probably comes down to deep instinctive paranoia based on a fact on the ground - we cannot know other minds. Power requires that it knows the minds over which it has power. The impotent are easily led to believe that minds can be manipulated in ways that must be simple to understand. A correct scepticism is sceptical about scepticism insofar as the urgency of power's desire to understand in order to control minds must be accepted and analysed and the fears and paranoia that lead to belief in non-existent mind control need to be understood and corrected. Streatfield does some of what is required in exposing the absurdity and cruelty of passionate or stupid people refusing to believe that mind control is not going on or believing in too much that they have themselves unwittingly created (as in the truly shocking satanic abuse chapter). He should get credit for exposing much. We should be horrified by the treatment of innocent Irish Catholics in Northern Ireland in the 1970s, the almost-plan for total sensory deprivation as an 'experiment' and the simple policeman destroyed by his own disturbed religious community. But I was not persuaded that elite or state mind control has not gone beyond failed experiments to improve interrogation methods or create better agents. I may sound excessively conspiratorial to Streatfield but I suspect there is lot more to this story and that it is even darker than we think. ...more |
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| Amy Knight's biography of Beria, who Stalin referred to as his Himmler, was written at a transitional point in the historiography of the Soviet imperi Amy Knight's biography of Beria, who Stalin referred to as his Himmler, was written at a transitional point in the historiography of the Soviet imperium between the Cold War history created out of guesswork and propaganda and the post-perestroika opening up of Russian archives. It is an excellent book in that context. Beria the man is not very interesting. He is the type of the intelligent corporate psychopath who helps keep complex and otherwise chaotic systems in place but Beria as part of the construction of a unique form of totalitarian governance is fascinating. The weakness of the book is that Knight still had to rely on a number of very unreliable 'testimonies' (whether Khrushchev's, Svetlana Alliluyeva's, Sergo Beria's and many others) for lack of data at key periods and still cannot entirely escape the preconceptions of 'her side' in the 'war'. This can, however, be put to one side to a considerable degree because she was able to access important original research in the Soviet archives that added considerably to our picture of how the Soviet regime operated and the undoubted crimes perpetrated to ensure its survival. She was perhaps one of the first to demonstrate that the Soviet regime could not be reduced to the tyranny of one man (Stalin), any more than you could explain national socialism by reference only to the Fuhrer. It was also a system with surprising stability of personnel between purges. Similarly she argues cogently for Beria as an eventual reformer along the lines of Andropov when he was able to acquire serious power, arguing, though this is not quite demonstrated, that both men could see the flaws in the Soviet system precisely because of their intelligence role. The first 'discovery' has tended to be confirmed as the years have gone by. Men like Kaganovitch or Malenkov were not mere cyphers but exercised, alongside others, a form of collective leadership centred on intermediation between party and state that operated independently of Stalin. Stalin would, of course, have the last word, could trigger decisive policy change, could remove anyone at any time, demanded total loyalty as head of state and party and would play people off against each other but the system was run by a surprisingly stable collective after the 1930s. Beria entered this collective as one of the 'new men' after the purges of the 1930s had destroyed the potential for a collective in which Stalin was only one member rather than ultimate arbiter. He was rapidly positioned as one of the top two or three - in charge of state security and so much else. He entered as a loyal brute who had shown his mettle in handling purges in Transcaucasia (notably Georgia, Stalin's original homeland), first against Menshevik resistance to Bolshevik rule and then those designed to consolidate Stalin's power. He knew how to handle 'intellectuals'. During these years he established what can only be described as a propensity towards 'evil', not merely doing the corporate psychopath's job of implementing what his boss wanted but exceeding instructions to (by all acounts) satisfy private Georgian vendetta claims and sexual desires. The book is limited on the context for the criminality which is down to the necessity for authority to be not too choosy about the sort of men it would make use of in meeting political and ideological needs and then turning a blind eye to their methods. Success was what counted. Beria was successful. Transcaucasia was turned from a potential centre of insurrection against central authority into a secure asset valuable as centre of the oil industry, barrier to Turkey geostrategically and, of course, as no threat to the reputation of the Georgian-origin Soviet leader. The rest of the story is one of Beria's rise to power and dramatic fall in Moscow as he solved practical problems - including the creation and oversight of Russia's equivalent to the Manhattan Project - until he 'got too big for his boots'. Whether he was instrumental or not in the curious story of Stalin's death by medical neglect or not, his shift from problem-solving under policy direction to becoming a policy-maker for six months alienated the 'collective' (or at least part of it) that succeeded Stalin. For a brief period (the comic film 'The Death of Stalin' is, of course, a travesty of history even if it is very very funny) Beria pursued policies related to East Germany, Yugoslavia, the West and economic reform as well as the nationalities question that undermined 'collective' orthodoxy. Knight seems to think that Beria redeemed himself somewhat (though not too much) by adopting policies that would have brought the Soviet Empire into more alignment with Western norms but that is the special pleading of an American academic. The truth is that the Soviet Union still saw itself in an existential struggle for survival based on ideological positions for which huge amounts of blood had been spilled. Beria was beginning to threaten the consensus in a way that might create a 'split in the ruling order'. Led by Khruschev, whose nerve at taking on the monster with his security state resources, must be regarded as courageous, a faction of the 'collective' persuaded the rest to collaborate in a 'coup' that would result in Beria's swift arrest and extra-judicial (to all intents and purposes) murder. Khruschev had at his disposal a closer connection to the Party and brought the military into play as well as greater Russian feeling at the risks of letting loose the nationalities and weakening control of Eastern Europe in the middle of the Cold War. The American view was and seems to be (if Knight can represent the post-Cold War present) that Beria got what he deserved but for the wrong reasons and that he should have been tried and shot for his murderous role in the transcaucasian and subsequent purges and the Gulag. The list of crimes is tremendous - the deportation of peoples, purgation by quotas dictated by Stalin personally, the murders of the Polish elite (of which Katyn Wood is the one that we are all aware of), extra-judicial arrests and executions. To that extent, the 'Americans' are right. The 'collective' post-Stalinist leadership were also no angels and were all complicit in the events of the 1930s and toleration of the Gulag slave labour system (very similar to Himmler's) so their list of crimes charged against Beria carefully avoided that era. However, we can say that, although Beria should have been charged with all those crimes in any decent and stable society and that some of the charges against Beria invented by the Kruschev gang were absurd, the deeper substance of the charge against Beria was probably correct. For Knight, the destruction of the Soviet system looked inevitable because of what happened in 1991. Therefore, the centrifugal tendencies of the empire looked equally inevitable because that is what happened in stages after the fall of Ceaucescu and the Berlin Wall. But that is not how it looked in 1953 and it might have been reasonable to believe that centralised authority could deliver the economic goods under communism in peace time after the destruction of revolution, civil war, consolidation of power and invasion. Beria's position on the nationalities question (especially given his own favouritism to his Mingrelian minority group and the ambiguity of his quasi-nationalist-communist approach to transcaucasia), then on East German reform, might have looked very threatening. It might have suggested a major new policy turn. Much as Trotsky had promoted the export of revolution in one direction, Beria might have been suggesting in some eyes a complete abandonment of the revolution in favour of a collective of national communisms. We have to remember the time scales here. The great purges took place only two decades after the revolution (that is, the time from now to the Millennium) and Stalin's rule ended only 36 years after it. In other words, people could still remember a time before communism. Communism was extremely vulnerable to memory, especially nationalist memory carried through family or clan lines. Think of South Yorkshire communities still nursing grudges over pit closures today. The regime was not actually as secure as the totalitarian narrative likes to make us believe. There is not enough information in this particular book to make a judgement here but it is fatal, in our view, to assume any inevitabilities in the trajectory of history because the final fall of the Soviet Empire was to be more complex than a simple failure to 'reform'. Perhaps we should look more at an unintended consequence of the Khruschev coup - the introduction of the military into Soviet politics alongside party and executive. This shifted expenditures into a wasteful military-industrial complex and economic promises were not met. Knight's book is already thirty years' old and a great deal of work has been done since but it remains an excellent starting point for an understanding of the Soviet system (almost certainly flawed and doomed from inception) through the biography of one of its leading figures. The research into Beria's network within the Soviet security apparat. The close attention to its origins within Georgia is exemplary and builds a picture of a totalitarian security system that managed to be simultaneously oppressive and chaotic. Overall, the biography continues to contain many of the unfortunate prejudices of American historiography but it remains an achievement in outlining the reality of the psychopathic exercise of 'corporate' power in the Soviet Union and something of the complexity of its ruling system. The 'Soviet experiment' was a disaster but a disaster constructed out of the incompetence of the previous Tsarist regime and of the 'bourgeois' revolutionaries who succeeded it, compounded by the insistence of Western interests in interfering and creating a siege mentality. It was a tragedy of epic proportions as a new ideological elite seemed to have no alternative for their survival than Chekist terror and the employment of ruthless 'new men' to enforce its will while trying to maintain the administrative capability to defend the country and feed the people. Beria was a creature of this system - a ruthless and rather vile opportunist of undoubted natural intelligence, hard-working, socially skilled, manipulative and ambitious. He is a symbol of the moral degradation that inevitably follows from inherent system weakness. For the point here is that all this terror and totalitarianism designed to show strength was actually a sign of an inherently weak regime that had no room for manouevre if it was to survive. The only existential alternative to its survival at all costs was its total destruction. When it crashed in 1991, it crashed because of that inherent weakness and Beria's 'reforms' would simply have crashed it earlier. Maybe it would have been good if Beria had crashed it but only if you assume that what would have replaced it would have been preferable by then. That is unclear. ...more |
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| [Written entirely in a personal capacity and not to be construed otherwise] I must confess to finding this book a disappointment but then I was disappo [Written entirely in a personal capacity and not to be construed otherwise] I must confess to finding this book a disappointment but then I was disappointed by Kim Ghattas' 'Black Wave' which I reviewed in June 2020 and for much the same reasons. I think there is a general problem emerging with senior journalists moving from reportage to analysis. I will try not to repeat that general critique (I refer you to the earlier review) but will be very specific about this book whose faults and problems cannot be entirely laid at the door of a journalist who has been severely circumscribed in his access to sources and the subject he is covering. Too much of what analysis there is depends on sources who are not close to the centres of decision-making in the Kingdom (which, as I say, is certainly not Hubbard's fault) or who have reason to resent or be disappointed by MBS' approach to policy. I have another problem (mine not his) in that, unlike the Middle East as a whole where I can say what I like, I am limited in the comments I can make on Saudi Arabia (and perhaps two or three other nations) because of my professional interests. I have to respect these. My reviews usually try to do two things - critique constructively a book and draw wider conclusions from the critique - but I am afraid that those professional interests mean that I cannot comment on MBS, the Saudi dynasty, Saudi Arabia or even Western relations with the Kingdom in any depth. So, let us stick to the book and be straight up front by saying that Hubbard, who is a conscientious journalist covering a wide beat, will admit to only restricted access to the Kingdom and, when he is there, will tend to meet representatives of his own cosmopolitan class. This is the Kim Ghattas problem again - a class of commentators who operate as subaltern critics of their own order which they implicitly believe as having universal moral value and who tend to associate with upper middle class like-minded people in exile or, more guardedly, in-country. I certainly cannot criticise Hubbard for trying. The American elite market in particular was crying out for a coherent explanation of the phenomenon of MBS. It incidentally desperately wanted to understand the post-election 'volte face' of the man they most like to hate - ex-President Trump. Somebody had to do it and, as an honest journalist, Hubbard could only do this by taking his sparse sources (no other mainstream Western journalist could do it better) and constructing a sufficiently plausible narrative which met with the moral expectations of his audience. As a result, although there is some new material, the book is essentially one of taking the news stories of the last few years and binding them into that plausible narrative, adding some nuggets of experience from dealing with similar Saudi subalterns to create the whole. It is thus a reasonably reliable account of the facts of the case as they are available (our Western intelligence services almost certainly do not know much more than Hubbard) but one suspects it is merely a temporary paradigm. It is certainly not an analysis. If one wants a working model of the Saudi conundrum that will 'do' to be going along with, the book is definitely worth getting. Indeed, the Saudi leadership should read it because, true or false, it is what most influential Americans tend to think of their country and of their Crown Prince. However (I am definitely not trying to pull rank because I have seen Saudis from the inside during crisis situations), the book does not manage to communicate the complexity of the situation or be fair about the reasoning that leads to what Americans and many Europeans think of as blunders. Perhaps because of its audience or perhaps because of the material available, Hubbard concentrates on Khashoggi and female human rights activists in a way that distorts the total picture. These are stories engaged liberal Americans care about but they are not central to calculations in Riyadh. There is a form of implicit neo-imperialist assumption that countries like the Kingdom should care about what East Coast Americans care about. That assumption gets confused with the 'realpolitik' involved in arms deals, oil, strategic regional influence and trade. What matters is the nexus between moral fervour (bad things must be punished) and the realities of power. The tragedy for the East Coasters is that the terms of political trade no longer connect the two so readily or as they had hoped. Their ideological triumph comes as American power wanes. US power is still substantial but has materially declined in recent years. The last real hold that the liberals have over states like the Kingdom is the threat of investor or consumer revolts over inappropriate dealings or perhaps an ending of arms sales. The first means the French Chinese, Russians or Turks will try to fill the gap in a competitve market. The second (as Trump liked to point out implicitly in praising the value of arms deals) means job losses and business failures in an economy over-tied to military-industrial production. Similarly, we do not know if the Saudi opening up of the country to foreign tourists will work or not but there are signs that the sports industry and its customers do not give a stuff about 'sportswashing' - the acquisition of Newcastle United by the Saudis was welcomed locally. East Coasters want to be both rich and moral or rather powerful and moral because the fantastic rise of the US to global power has also been an exercise in morality. Where the US has not been moral (frequently), its intelligentsia have forced it to become moral or at least appear to be so. This 'beacon on the hill' approach to foreign affairs (exemplified by the sponsorship of the United Nations and the Nuremburg War Crimes Tribunal) has been influential, limiting barbarism elsewhere, not least in the collapse of the European empires and even within Communism. It is, as Sellars and Yeatman might put it, generally a 'good thing' but sometimes it takes on a life of its own, becomes detached from reality and seems to ignore the fact that the beacon sheds poor light on problems at home and that sometimes brutal realpolitik is also what Democrats do. Forget Saudi Arabia for a moment and consider the position of any country faced with an America (or increasingly Europe) that mixes real tradeable advantages over power and resources with ideological or moral fervour. That country is likely to be get puzzled and resentful. The Russians today sit puzzled as the Europeans seem to want to undermine their sphere of influence in Belarus and seek regime change (with Navalny) in Moscow yet have some 40% (roughly) of their core energy supplies dependent on Russian gas reserves. The result is as we see it today. Not that the Russians are actually doing anything to restrict gas supplies (on the contrary, they religiously meet contract and want to supply more through NordStream 2) but that 'anti-Russianism' led to a failure to contract. It may be that the alliance of greens and liberals in Europe may create an own goal where their 'morality' results in inflationary pressures that start to grant ammunition to populists. Moral foreign policy is always risky when it comes to dealing with resource or trade dependencies. Look outward from such countries and they get confused because America has, during the war on terror, been ruthless (with the approval of its liberal elite) towards its enemies - which include people like Assange about whom there are reliable reports of a least a discussion of a kidnapping. Extraordinary rendition was normalised (as, briefly, was torture) during the War on Terror and drone and missile attacks (currently and rightly a subject of criticism in Yemen) once routinely destroyed wedding parties in an Afghanistan in a war that proved futile. They also see regular reports of excessive force used by American police against 'black' citizens even if they are not fully aware of the scale of America's prison population. It is not that 'liberals' do not also protest against such things but foreigners get confused as to who speaks for the West. This is also not to be anti-Western or anti-American (quite the contrary - I consider myself a British patriot and god help any Russky who attempts a landing on our shores) but simply to say that analysis requires analysis not of what should be but of what is to get to what should be. This is also not to justify or condone anything by anyone (Russian, Saudi, Chinese) but only to suggest that long-lasting reform in any national situation comes from a realistic, almost Machiavellian, understanding of the political reality and social forces that reformers have inherited. Thus, a book must be either an advocate for liberal reform, sharing the values of its expected readership and friends in the region, or be an analytical description of the socio-political reality of the world of its subject matter. It cannot easily be both. If the latter, then more time should be spent on the nexus of power between international capital and the Gulf and on the dynamics of the relationship with the US at a strategic level and less on a single influential depressed journalist or the radical wing of feminism in a conservative culture. In fact, Hubbard does us a service by giving us some important new background on why Khashoggi was potentially more of a threat to the regime than simply 'speaking out for reform'. The evidence shows that he was being drawn heavily into a Turkic-Qatari network anathema to Riyadh. He was also toying (although one suspects naively by 'friends') with engagement in what would amount to an electronic warfare operation against the regime. Only the most naive would not understand that, today, cyberwarfare of all types is a form of warfare implying 'treason' to some. Similarly, there is perhaps insufficient understanding on the US East Coast (this applies to situations elsewhere in the world) that dissent is also a serious game. It is interpreted, rightly or wrongly, as representing foreign influence and destabilisation. This is not an argument against dissent (on the contrary, intelligent dissent is the agent of socio-political transformation) but that dissenters without a strategy who concentrate on single issues are likely to get ground down because that issue may unravel complex negotiated settlements. This is especially so when dissent appears to represent class or special interests and is not argued for in terms of the national or general interest. The best argument for feminism in Saudi Arabia at the moment is not 'rights' (a Western concept) but the unleashing of female power in the economy. So, for lack of any other sound single volume account of the rise of MBS from the perspective of the West, I can recommend this book but as a 'true account' of the politics I have my doubts - too much concentration on the defeated elements in the elite and the views of moneyed cosmopolitans. As to MBS himself, whether he will ascend the throne, whether he will settle the atrocious Yemeni War through some form of rapprochement with Iran, whether he will transform the Saudi economy (Hubbard is too downbeat on this) are matters I cannot comment on. I will also not comment on US-Saudi relations except to say that many countries like the Kingdom can afford to play a long game because American politics tend to be a succession of short games. For the 'liberal' view of the universe to become the new global norm, the US has to see liberals win the mid-terms and then the Presidential for 2024 and then see the Republican opposition swing back to the centre and become bipartisan again. Here in the West, we seem to be coming to the end of our public health crisis but we are already entering an economic one (more one of uncertainty than deterioration) and economic crises invariably lead to socio-political tensions and almost certainly some form of class conflict. That gives the 'illiberal' part of the global world order good reason to be cautious about kow-towing to liberal norms too quickly or not on their own terms. In fact, most 'illiberal' leaders have modernisation strategies of a sort that ultimately lead to liberalisation ... but perhaps not yet. All in all, get this book if you want a basic run-down of the facts in a clear and well-written narrative or if you want your liberal prejudices given a bit more useful ammunition but you may have to wait a little longer for the information that will give you a definitive picture of MBS. ...more |
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really liked it
| John Hands was staggeringly unlucky in the timing of this Cold War thriller which is centred on the ideological and political conflict between a neo-t John Hands was staggeringly unlucky in the timing of this Cold War thriller which is centred on the ideological and political conflict between a neo-traditionalist Vatican and an allegedly 'reforming' communist regime in the age of perestroika. The book appeared in 1990 during the Gorbachev era - only a year or so later Gorbachev fell and so did Sovietism, turning a 'feasible' political thriller into an exercise in alternative history. As we all know, those who read Cold War thrillers are not the same people as readers of alternative history. The book disappeared down the historical cracks and yet it should not have done because it has considerable merit as a political thriller where the details of Vatican and Moscow psychogeography take the place of the loving description of weaponry in more conventional fare. Hands really did understand the respective ideologies that he was portraying in plausible (in 1989/1990) dynamic tension and, although perhaps 'worthy' in building its platform in the first half, quickly takes off into a sophisticated thriller at half way point. The outcome is a genuine surprise. Hands avoids the predictable throughout. If he gets the 'big prediction' wrong, I think he should get praise for seeing ahead of time some of the underlying issues affecting West-East relations that have more recently emerged in the Ukraine. What I most liked about the book was that the author had escaped taking sides. Rather he describes process with useful neutrality. His two 'protagonist-victims' are not there to be rescued by the author but to remind us that history is not very concerned with the fate of individuals. Not taking sides does not mean not expressing human sympathy or comprehension of how the different players in the game see the world - whether Ukrainian national catholics, dedicated Communist church-haters, committed communists or catholic traditionalists. Part of the moral problem for the reader is going to be trying to decide whether what is apparently evil from one perspective is evil from another. The hoary old business of ends justifying means raises its monstrous head once again. Each reader will respond differently. The author still 'cares' but he cares about those who try to play a straight game based on their perception of the facts only to find that ideologies are not interested in the same facts as they are and can make the world of facts into their own image if they so choose. The bleakness of his world of manipulation by people playing a grand game with small people, justified by historical idealisms, is true to life. The sanity and blood of innocents are merely the oil that greases the historical machine. It was also a welcome surprise to find a Cold War thriller that gave only bit parts to Western interests - liberal catholics, the CIA and European diplomats are present but they do not dominate procedings and that is how it should be in this tale. Here, they are spear carriers and red herrings. The book is hard to fault in terms of 'possible facts' even if history turned out very differently. Hands takes great pleasure in giving us historically-minded plausible detail. It does all hang together as possibility. This suited me but it may not be for everyone. I would like to think the book could be rediscovered by a later generation but I think its moment passed quickly except for those with a real interest in recent European history. I was not surprised to read that my old teacher Professor Norman Stone had praised it at the time. Still, if you can get it on E-Bay and are interested, read it. When I last looked it was free on Kindle Unlimited though I recommend the feel of the hard back. ...more |
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Jul 17, 2021
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Mass Market Paperback
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| B0DT37Y6CN
| 4.00
| 1
| 1954
| Feb 02, 2019
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really liked it
| Gardner Fox is well known to comic book aficionados as the creator of many of the most 'significant' DC Comics characters. He introduced the idea of t Gardner Fox is well known to comic book aficionados as the creator of many of the most 'significant' DC Comics characters. He introduced the idea of the multiverse to the comic book world but was also a science fiction, sword and planet and sword and sorcery writer. 'Woman of Kali' is a genuine surprise and much more enjoyable than I expected when I picked it up from a charity shop as a 1960 British reprint of a 1954 American bit of pulp fiction with a lurid and obscure illustration by Herman Bischoff. It is, in fact, still in print. It is essentially a romantic orientalist fantasy set in the India of Clive with a hero straight out of then-contemporary Hollywood epics and a plot that stands up in its adventurous and fast-moving simplicity. It is certainly not politically correct but then that is partly why it is enjoyable. On the other hand, while the characters are simple cases of good, cunning and evil, Fox gives us an Indian princess with as much fighting guts as our young British officer and inter-racial sexual shenanigans and he ensures that the opponents of British rule are not in the least patronised. This is heroic imperialism as if Kipling had gone downmarket and wanted to produce a pulp potboiler for the money. Indeed, some British officers prove as treacherous and greedy as any 'native' and others stupid or weak. The book is about the struggle for mastery between equals. I found it hard to believe that the book was not written by a Briton since Fox's 'simpatico' approach to empire-building is not exactly what Americans tend to think of as appropriate. No questions are asked of the process ... it is just a tale of business between competing 'companies'. He has also done his research. He liberally throws around Indian-derived words and is good on local colour so that, whether it is all true or not, we believe that we are watching a tale unfold in a real eighteenth century India with its landscapes, customs, modes of warfare and intrigues. It is also charmingly if mildly erotic, allowing the reader to imagine rather than be told explicitly what Captain Pritchard and the Princess Muhreen get up to (apparently quite frequently) and what Captain Pritchard might have been getting up to in the Temple of Kali with the dangerous Sharita. Filled with incident and fast-paced, it even treats the French Officer D'Arcourt with respect although no tears can be shed for the treacherous British Officer who will remain unnamed here so as not to provide a spoiler. Well written and exciting, if nonsense historically, 'Woman of Kali' represents the best of American pulp writing - unpretentious, determined to entertain, offering fantasy and release from the quotidian, well plotted and solidly researched where it needs to be. Basically, it is fun. ...more |
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May 01, 2021
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Paperback
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| 0806525312
| 9780806525310
| 0806525312
| 3.61
| 410
| Dec 1994
| Jan 01, 2004
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really liked it
| This is the 2004 'upgrade' of a 1995 book that had 70 rather than 80 'conspiracies' and was originally published at the peak of the X-Files era's popu This is the 2004 'upgrade' of a 1995 book that had 70 rather than 80 'conspiracies' and was originally published at the peak of the X-Files era's popular fascination with secret government. Between the two editions, 9/11 took place and the tone changes somewhat. The two authorial voices are hard to distentangle. One is straight-talking and shows no particular political bias. The other sometimes adopts a slightly irritating 'gonzo' style and is clearly prejudiced in direction of liberal narratives. Clinton seems to be taken off every possible hook. Perhaps the authors or an author matured over a decade and started to worry about the monster they had played a part in unleashing. The final post-2001 mood is more sombre, irritated with 911 conspiracy theorising that (in their view) detracts from serious 'parapolitical' analysis. One can play conspiracy theory in a number of ways - as a form of fictional entertainment that descends into its own abyss of lunacy, as legitimate political expression of impotence and ignorance or as sincere analysis of the very odd and nasty things governments get up to. The book tends to smile or laugh at the first, ignore the second and be unreliable yet thought-provoking on the third. Few writers on conspiracy adopt the necessary 'constructively critical' approach that gives us a methodology to be taken seriously. This book is no exception. Vankin and Whalen want their cake and to eat it, to entertain and sell the book and to purport to be seriously considering the lengths to which the so-called deep state will go to cover its tracks. As a result, the worthy latter project flounders in a grey area of uncertainty and sometimes nonsense. Still, the relatively short but full chapters give source books and clues for further reading. Even a cursory catch-up on the internet will modify their theorising in constructive ways. And they raise questions that still need to be answered and where state villainy is fairly obvious to all but an idiot. I suspect most such stories are generally more tales of bungling than of adroit plotting but it is clear that the American State's discovery of itself as a superpower with an existential enemy in communism and a will to domination created many opportunities for fanatics and sociopaths. The book closes with a rather moving account of Frank Olson son's attempt to uncover the truth about his death: Frank implausibly threw himself out of a window under the influence of LSD but was just as likely (more likely in my view) to have been a victim of interrogation or murder. This and other stories create a picture for us of the malfeasance of the so-called 'deep state' having a considerable basis in reality as unaccountable sociopathic parts of an unwieldy and ill-administered state that consider themselves beyond ordinary morality and the law. It is plausible to see the fringes of these networks being seduced into the violent anti-communist Right or into co-operation with organised crime networks under conditions where it might not be clear who was using whom. The system then has to cover up group blunders and crimes. There are certainly nodal points where many conspiracy theories start to come together and where there is no smoke without fire - the early post cold war panic about brainwashing blowing back into domestic experimentation, the obsession with Cuba, the Iran-Contra fiasco. There seem to be lineages of collusion and relationships that go well beyond the coincidental and which create overlaps between the security apparatus and politics. This is not peculiarly American. The British have a similar nodal point in the Troubles. The Russians probably many more. Books like this are fun. They will even make you think but they 'conspire' themselves to obfuscate even when, as in this case, they make considerable efforts to draw a distinction between the silly, the possible and the probable. We seem to have two absurd wheels in motion culturally. One wheel turns on the tales of Illuminati, a reptilian House of Windsor, the priory of Sion and alien intelligences. The other wheel turns on tales of conspiracy theory being extremist and neurotic fantasies with no connection to reality. The first offers us paranoid fantasy to such an extent that it discredits all parapolitical research to the point where it becomes legitimate enquiry to ask how much of our entertainment is created harmlesly and how much has been 'seeded' by psychological operations to confuse matters further. Certainly the known scale and complexity of psychological operations in international relations and the facts of media manipulation mean that it is unlikely that so much secret resource is designed to tell us nothing but the truth or that it does not engage in imaginative games to peculiar ends. The second approach - denial (usually cast as a moral tale of the invention of the Protocol of the Elders of Zion as if this settled the matter of JFK or MLK's assassinations) - is equally absurd because, even if flawed, there is now plenty of proven evidence of state dodginess. What is required is something in the middle - an abandonment of pseudo-archaeology, pseudo-history and pseudo-science but a realisation that human actors will both conspire to meet their ends and get into hot water by following the logic of their unthinking institutional trajectories. So, it is possible that JFK and MLK were both assassinated as part of much more far-ranging plots, that Olson was murdered, that the attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II was part of a 'strategy of tension', that the Japanese Far Right and Yakuza were collusive and so on and so forth. The book is 'fun', usefully rubbishes a lot of stuff that needs to be rubbished, opens lines of enquiry (even if we find that other resources soon close them again as may be the case with the mysterious 'Raoul' in the James Earl Ray case) and demonstrates that 'something is up'. What is 'up' is the existence of a repeated pattern of unaccountable power in the struggles between security and intelligence networks. These spill over at the margins into amorality, criminality and politics and make these networks subversive of the values they seek to defend. Sometimes elected politicians (as in the 1970s investigations into the CIA) get somewhere in exposing crimes, sometimes they are collusive. It is not enough to dismiss the charges laid against unaccountable secret warriors as mere 'conspiracy theory'. A book for the shelves but not the book we really needed and which may never have. Certainly we may need a final encyclopedic sceptical review of idiot conspiracy theory on the one hand wherever and whenever it starts to cause people to believe in it as 'truth' but most of this is just fun. What is needed far more urgently is a definitive and provocative history of the role of state funded secret organisations in both the actuality and cover up of incompetence, freeloading, criminality and murder in every nation since the emergence of intra-state ideological competition. Such a history would give due place to the possibilities of collusion in a world of shredded documentation, private unminuted meetings, deniable hirings, secret funds, misperceptions of reality and special interests with men on the inside. Above all, what is required is the sustained exposure to domestic populations not so much of secret wars against others (which might be justifiable) but wars against we who pay for this nonsense with our taxes (and lives) and wars against the values that the State purports to be defending. I tend to the view that incompetence and subsequent cover up is generally more likely than malice. After all, major state crimes (like the bombing of civilians) are generally not secret at all. But I am prepared to accept that malice and sociopathy are to be found within our state machines. Above all, it is the leaching into politics of the conduct of secret organisations and special interests that need exposure, especially when they go over a line and enable the deaths of elected officials and ordinary citizens and plunder the Treasury for their hobby horses. Why worry? Many might be happy to turn a blind eye if the apparat protects us. Perhaps because, if we are employing idiots and sociopaths, we need to know this is so in order to replace them with more intelligent and mentally balanced people who will do a better job of preserving our values. ...more |
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Apr 24, 2025
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| 4.06
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it was amazing
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Apr 19, 2025
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| 3.89
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really liked it
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Oct 29, 2024
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| 3.64
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really liked it
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Jul 22, 2023
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| 3.92
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Jun 20, 2023
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| 3.63
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liked it
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Feb 19, 2023
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| 3.99
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really liked it
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Dec 27, 2022
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| 3.34
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liked it
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Nov 11, 2022
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| 3.67
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really liked it
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Oct 08, 2022
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| 3.47
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really liked it
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Aug 05, 2022
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| 4.30
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it was amazing
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Aug 02, 2022
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| 4.07
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it was amazing
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Jul 02, 2022
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| 4.25
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May 06, 2022
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| 3.74
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really liked it
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Apr 23, 2022
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| 3.90
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liked it
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Nov 13, 2021
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| 3.60
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really liked it
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Oct 23, 2021
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| 4.15
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liked it
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Oct 17, 2021
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| 3.48
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really liked it
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Jul 17, 2021
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| 4.00
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really liked it
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May 01, 2021
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| 3.61
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really liked it
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not set
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Dec 30, 2020
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