Summer 2010 - The Quarterly Review

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SA-tirist supreme
An interview with ANTON KANNEMEYER
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POLITICS
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Ideas, Culture & Current Affairs
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CONTENTS
Editorial Derek Turner
SA-tire – the tragicomedy of South Africa
C B Liddell interviews Anton Kannemeyer
The true nature of ‘non-violence’ Frank Ellis
“Jesting Jesus” is no joke David Ashton
Fingers to feminism: the rise of 2D:4D Glenn D. Wilson
The Gulag revisited Gary Cartwright
“White Eagle down!” – the Polish plane tragedy in context
Mark Wegierski
Minimizing Max Leslie Jones
The fatal contradictions of Marxism: a rejoinder Archie Brown
Making room for gloom Mark G. Brennan
Mussolini and the murderous madame Stoddard Martin
Replay – If... Peter Stark
The relative merits of Marxism Derek Turner
Glockenspiel – the BBC’s unsung innovator Stuart Millson
Australia: the way we swig now R. J. Stove
Uncollected Folk Roy Kerridge
Taki’s Universe Taki Theodorocopulos
Postscriptum Ann Stevenson
ISSN: 1751-2506. © Quarterly Review, 2010
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Quarterly Review – Summer 2010
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1
Editorial
The IT Crowd
C
oncerns are increasingly being expressed about the potential long term
effects of information technologies on our minds and our societies.
In a bestselling book of last year, The Shallows: What the Internet is
Doing to Our Brains, Nicholas Carr bemoans internet users becoming
like “lab rats constantly pressing levers to get tiny pellets… hunters and gatherers
in the electronic data forest”.
The Oxford neuroscientist Baroness Greenfield fears that an internet-reliant
world will be proficient at information-handling but deficient in understanding.
The playwright Sir Tom Stoppard is worried about the possible eclipse of the
printed word in favour of moving images. Others worry how our relationships and
ability to empathize may be affected by web pornography, violent computer games
and social networking sites.
New technologies often arouse atavistic opposition, so it is temptingly easy to
disregard concerns like these (even from such sources) as mere scaremongering.
It is fair to say that the evidence on either side of the equation is so far sketchy,
because these are still very new technologies. Yet insouciance may be unwise.
The central problem is not the technology itself. Information technology is
essentially neutral; it is merely a reflection of human beings in the aggregate, and
the regrettable tendencies it undoubtedly emphasizes are latent within us. The real
difficulty is its ubiquity.
Most people in First World countries are now always within easy reach of
others, and an almost unlimited universe of current affairs, culture and reference
materials. The sheer convenience means that more of us are becoming addicted to
being plugged-in. Even holidaymakers often bring their laptops with them, or check
their e-mails in foreign internet cafés – thereby not only imposing their habits onto
their destinations, but denying themselves time for reflection and relaxation. As the
Independent of 19 May suggested, broadband is “fast becoming a human right”.
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Editorial
It has been suggested that web use means our attention spans are becoming
shorter, because data is instantly available and there is no longer any need to
memorize information, or even read long texts. It may seem churlish to raise
concerns about access to data, because intelligence is ipso facto better than
ignorance. Yet because the web appeals to our natural laziness, it will obviously
have the effect of making us lazier – more likely to look at pictures than text, more
likely to think in sound-bites than sentences, more likely 2 snd txt msgs than write
a properly-constructed letter.
Web use has innumerable distractions – images, animations, advertisements,
drop-down menus, hyperlinks, RSS feeds and e-mails that make it all too easy
to navigate away from an item or argument, especially if said item or argument
demands close attention. Eventually, all stories may become tabloidized; politicians
and pundits are already pandering to this new reality, with the result that everything
is infantilized. It seems likely that this process will eventually lead to the withering
away of whole areas of recondite knowledge, and perhaps even have physiological
effects in the atrophy of cerebral functions – although some believe compensatory
neural pathways are already evolving.
It is also germane to consider the quality of the information we receive on-line.
Wikipedia, the default online reference source, is editable by anyone, including
the uninformed and malicious. It is therefore much more vulnerable to passing
political or cultural considerations than, for example, the Encyclopedia Britannica.
A few companies now have unprecedented influence over what we see or do not see,
know or do not know, and therefore eventually how we think and act. Normally,
this might not matter – but sometimes it might. Potentially dangerous distortions
can now be transmitted instantaneously to literally millions. Against this, there are
excellent online reference resources – but these require more effort to find.
The loss of context associated with web use is exacerbated when it comes to
computer games, web pornography and satellite navigation systems, all of which
have the effect of eliding detail and divorcing one from reality. Similar arguments
are made about social networking sites; yet surely these are no more banal, spiteful
or cringeworthy than the users themselves. The strongest argument against social
networking sites is that they may become a substitute for real-life networking. But
again, they do facilitate communication between like-minded people who might
otherwise never have made contact.
Finally, we should remember that the web is changing daily, and it is entirely
possible that ameliorative applications are even now being developed to make the web
less superficial and more serious. For example, many out-of-copyright classic books
are now being published in their entirety on-line, and YouTube features superlative
music and speeches in amongst the Taliban broadcasts and dancing cats.
Information technologies are really only as damaging as we permit them to
become; the problem is that they are so terribly, terribly seductive. n
3
Kannemeyer
SA-tire – the tragicomedy
of South Africa
C B Liddell interviews the cartoonist-commentator ANTON KANNEMEYER
A
nton Kannemeyer is a print artist and cartoonist whose work,
since the early 1990s, has commented on the racial and political
tensions of apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa. Starting
from a liberal position, detesting the apartheid state, rejecting
his Boer heritage, and welcoming the “New South Africa”, his art has
gradually evolved into something darker and more complex as disturbing
trends become increasingly evident in the so-called “Rainbow Nation”.
Why did you focus on print art as your main means of artistic
expression?
My father is a South African writer (mainly Afrikaans literary criticism),
so from a young age I had this idea that I wanted to publish, or at least
make, books. As a student I started an art magazine in our department
(it only ran two issues: 1990 and 1991), but my main aim was to publish
a comic magazine. With my friend Conrad Botes (whom I met as a first
year art student in 1988) I started drawing comics in 1989, and in 1992 we
published our collected work in a magazine called Bitterkomix I. As we
knew a black and white magazine wouldn’t make much of an impact on
its own, we made large silkscreen prints (in colour) of many of the images
in the comic. They were quite popular and often exhibited. It also gave
the magazine a point of sale (we struggled initially to get the magazine
in bookshops, but when sales were consistent that was not such a big
problem any more). Eventually we would also screenprint book covers
(never more than 150), but these were always limited and I guess more
‘art objects’ than anything else.
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Kannemeyer
Looking at the Bitterkomix series, one thing that stands out is the way
you constantly poked fun at the old sexually-repressed Presbyterian
Afrikaner morality, but also mix in a load of racial issues with scenes
of interracial sex – almost always a black man with a white woman.
In Bittercomix, blacks seem to represent an idea of sexual power and
liberation, but this is also mixed with a heavy dose of irony that creates
a sense of degradation. It seems you are equating sexual repression
with apartheid and associating the idea of sexual promiscuity with
the “new South Africa”.
The use (or repeated use) of black men as sexually potent was mainly to
piss off white men. I guess in most instances our work was directed at the
white Afrikaner (the language was also mostly Afrikaans, albeit a kind of
crude slang), and, in this sense and context, iconoclastic. And yes, things
have changed. I like your comment about the “irony that creates a sense
of degradation”. Generally I would not equate the “new South Africa”
with sexual openness (even though now I may say what I want without
being persecuted). Sex is still very much a taboo, especially in the black
communities. And to finally get to your question – I see myself as a
satirist and therefore mostly critical of those in power (both political and
economic power). My use of explicit sexual situations in the comics like
Gif: Afrikaner Sekskomix (1994) were mostly metaphorical, criticizing
conservative Afrikaans values. The impact of that work, however, made
me understand how you can grab an audience’s attention visually, and
simultaneously undermine that initial visual impact with either language,
juxtaposition or other devices. Lately there has been a shift in my work
(over the last three years or so) – and I have been focusing mainly on
politics and race.
How true are the Joe Dog stories? I was looking at “Whatever you
do, stay out of prison in South Africa” about gang rapes in prison,
including an instance of interracial rape in which a white farmer held
overnight in a cell for a minor offence was raped by a gang of 14 blacks
who drowned out his screams by singing the ANC anthem “Umshini
wami, mshini wami!” (Please Bring My Machine Gun). I also wondered
why the white victim has inverted commas around “Mr.”
My ‘true stories’ are normally quite accurate. In the case of “Prison in
Africa” the incidents are based on info found in local newspapers. The
“Mr” in inverted commas referred to something that I now realize would
5
Kannemeyer
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Kannemeyer
not be picked up by an international audience: if the victim had been a
black man, the press would not have placed “Mr” before his name. As the
press is not allowed any longer to identify people by race, there are other
subtleties in text one relies on to in fact determine race.
I get the feeling that in your work, the sexual aspect is also used to
symbolize changing power relations, namely the ‘feminization’ of the
former ‘masculine’ white ruling class. Maybe it’s because your work
is actually so political in this way (using a perfect metaphor in sex)
that you were unfairly dismissed by some as a purveyor of “crude
pornographic depictions”.
You’re right; as a child I felt a huge resentment towards white patriarchs,
and in the new South Africa these men have been despised by all for
quite a while now (and they’re the least likely to be employed as well
in government institutions). This of course gave me many reasons to
celebrate (the irony, of course, being that I’m also just a white male.) And
I’m not too concerned about being dismissed unfairly as a conveyer of
porn – I’ve had a lot of support in the media, especially from women!
And your comment about the sexual content of the work being about
power is quite correct.
As you indicate, your position in the new South Africa has strong
ambiguities – resentment against the Afrikaner patriarchs from
whom you stem. What is your identity? Are you ‘post-racial’ or is
your identity based on something else?
I’m not sure about this. I lived in Germany for two years when I was
18 years old (my mother, who is Dutch, remarried a German) and I was
desperately unhappy there. Back in South Africa (I returned to study) I
felt at home, happy and driven because of the turmoil on political and
social levels, I guess. Life here is/was meaningful because I felt my work
had an impact. But lately I have enjoyed working in other countries (I
have a lot of professional connections in Germany and France especially),
but my partner is pretty tied up with her family here.
I’m not sure that I’m ‘post-racial’ (it sounds such a grand statement).
When I was teaching though, especially in Johannesburg (where I had
about 70% black students), I felt ‘post-racial’: I was just trying to do a
good job. The moment I came back to the Cape (I taught at Stellenbosch
University) where black students only constituted 12-15% of the student
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Kannemeyer
body, I started feeling weird again. And everybody in my department was
so painfully politically correct it almost crippled their logic or behaviour.
There is lots of hypocrisy among liberals, but I’m sure you are aware of
that. But, in the end, I guess I don’t see myself as an Afrikaner anymore
– I still prefer writing in Afrikaans, but most of my friends are English,
and virtually all my work is in English. I don’t read Afrikaans or watch
Afrikaans TV or anything Afrikaans (I don’t go to Afrikaans cultural
festivals anymore – my God, they are annoying!). I really don’t know what
constitutes a South African, to be honest: and in that sense I guess some
South Africans are a bit ‘post-racial’. I sometimes watch cricket: whether
it’s a black, Indian, white or ‘coloured’ sportsman makes no difference.
They just need to perform. That’s the only way I get a sense of nationality
– through sports.
One way to gauge someone’s true identity is by the kind of people they
associate with in their free time. In your case what kind of picture
does this give?
My partner (or girlfriend) and I have two very young children now and
I sort of feel that I do not associate with anyone anymore – it’s just work
and children. But my best friends are all very close to and interested in
all sorts of alternative culture. Are you trying to determine whether my
friends are black, white or coloured?
Yes, because the real test of a multiracial society is the degree to which
race is ‘forgotten’. Your generation is living the multiracial experiment.
How is it going? And, yes, at your own level – who you feel comfortable
associating with, are you effectively post racial? Or do things like
work and family enable you to avoid facing this issue directly?
No, in one way or another one has to face this issue. I have some black
friends – two guys who are quite close with regard to their taste in music,
interest in visual arts, etc. One of these guys, who died recently by
drowning, was my brother’s best friend. But that’s not a lot. What has
occurred, from a very different angle, is that our daughter has made some
black friends at school, and now we see their parents socially. One of her
friends’ mothers turned out to be my partner’s gynaecologist, which is
quite funny: a while ago I made a painting called “Black Gynaecologist”
which was quite popular – unthinkable that a white woman should have
a black gynaecologist, but there you have it: our reality! The thing is
8
Kannemeyer
that our black gynaecologist and her Nigerian husband are looking to
emigrate to Australia or somewhere – who knows, maybe we’ll end up
with a white gynaecologist again.
I’d like to ask about the “Alphabet Series”. With its deadpan humour,
it’s one of the things for which you are best known. Some of the
pieces, like “N is for Nightmare” (house with decapitation), remind
me of Hergé’s Tintin cartoons – nice, clean draughtsmanship and
stereotypical blacks. Why did you choose this Tintin-esque style?
The stylistic reference to Hergé’s Tintin can be traced back to my
Bitterkomix work – I started using it when I made comics of myself at
a very young age. At the time (as a child before I turned 12) Tintin was
the only comic I knew, and the style just seemed perfect to open that
window back into (especially) my pre-pubescent years. I used the clarity
of his style, but added a dark shadow-like atmosphere which seemed
quite truthful to me, quite depressing. The use of the stereotypical black
has several functions, one being that at that age I did see all black people
(whom I didn’t know) as looking the same. In the case of the “N is for
Nightmare” series (there are in fact seven pieces in that series, part of the
bigger Alphabet), I wanted to accentuate this fear of hordes of faceless
blacks attacking white dwellings (and maybe affluent black houses) –
always situated in typical South African middle class suburbs.
The way you exaggerate this fear in these cartoons feels satirical,
as if you are mocking it as ridiculous and out of proportion. But
isn’t fear by its very nature an exaggerated state? Also, in view of
the disparities in wealth and the social and racial divisions in South
Africa, and the experience of much of late 20th century Africa – from
the Mau Mau, the expulsion of the Ugandan Asians, the massacres
in the Belgian Congo, the campaigns against the White farmers in
Zimbabwe, and of course the genocide in Rwanda, etc – might not
these fears of ‘faceless mobs’ be completely understandable?
Sure, these fears are perfectly grounded. In fact, we had a series of very
violent break-ins in the street where I live a year ago: these gangs would
simply smash in the front door and steal as much as they could before the
armed response teams could get there. And in both cases (in our street)
the families were held at gunpoint until the guys left. I was very afraid of
waking up in the middle of the night with my front door being smashed
9
Kannemeyer
down. But one problem is that white people think they are the only victims
in South Africa (oh God, they feel really sorry for themselves). The other
thing has to do with ownership and entitlement: many white people think
they’ve worked really hard for what they’ve got and that it’s really unfair
they’re being victimized. And yes, it’s a complex issue: in a ‘normal’
First World country the government will protect you – in South Africa
(when white people complain – especially about ‘service delivery’) you’re
branded a racist. It’s a very interesting time.
I made a painting recently of a white woman about to be raped by
four black guys; she is shouting at her husband: “These historically
disadvantaged men want to rape me!” Now again there are real situations
like this out there – but the issue I’m addressing is something else
completely. I found an excellent quote by Tony Hoagland: “To really get
at the subject of race, chances are, is going to require some unattractive,
tricky self-expression, something adequate to the paradoxical complexities
of privilege, shame, and resentment. To speak in a voice equal to reality
in this case will mean the loss of observer-immunity status, will mean
admitting that one is not on the sidelines of our racial realities, but actually
in the tangled middle of them. Nobody is going to look good” (from Real
Sofistikashun: Essays on Poetry and Craft, 2006.) I approach this subject
from a satirical perspective, but your question (a good one, by the way)
tries to get behind/underneath the ‘visual’ figure of speech.
I’d like to ask you about the dramatic recent murder of Eugene
Terre’blanche, whose death touches upon so many of the areas
approached in your art. Terre’blanche is the kind of patriarchal
Afrikaner figure that you grew up despising. How do you feel about
his death?
I don’t have much sympathy with Terre’blanche – he was a violent man
and pretty much the embodiment of everything I have always despised.
I do think the murder was political in nature (although the media say it
was about money) and a result of Julius Malema’s endorsement of the
“Kill the Boer” song. We had similar problems in 1994: blacks were
shouting “one settler, one bullet” and more or less exactly the same angst
and issues are still with us. A lot of people say we have come a long
way since apartheid, but the same issues are still the most explosive. I
find it extremely interesting that someone like Malema, who is clearly
uneducated and one of the bluntest pencils in the political landscape, can
10
Kannemeyer
have such a major political impact. He blames the whites for everything
that’s wrong in SA, although the ANC has now been in power for 16
years. What he’s doing is very transparent, and he and Zuma look more
and more like copies of Amin, Mobutu and Mugabe.
I always thought that Terre’blanche was the kind of joke figure that
made satire pointless – a caricature of white nationalism that served
to discredit the very ideas he espoused. I am thinking here of the
three-legged swastika, military fatigues, and even his name which
invokes eugenics and white land. Did he make your job as a satirist
hard by existing as a satire on himself? And isn’t this also true of
many of the other figures in the South African political landscape?
You’re right: it was difficult to satirise him. Even his bizarre death was
satirical. He was my work come to life, but probably better than I could have
executed. He and Malema represent the two extremes on the SA political
landscape: the irony is that both of them represent(ed) extremism.
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Kannemeyer
The way he died is evocative of the fears that your art often touches
on. Is it about unresolved issues of economic inequality (as opposed
to economic justice, which is a different issue), or a nebulous mood of
racial hatred that can easily find a focus?
Apparently a white Boer is killed every 18 hours in South Africa. These
statistics are not released by the police, but by the action groups set up by
the farmers themselves. Now that the ANC has shown us where they’re
heading, now that even the secretary-general of the Communist Party
drives a million Rand Mercedes Benz, I’m very worried about the future
of South Africa. Also, I’m quite surprised by the “nebulous” racial hatred
in SA – I know I’m politically naive, but it has slowly dawned on me over
the last five years or so just exactly how racist people still are. Even Mbeki
is a racist – he was supposed to be our intellectual leader, an enlightened
leftie. You were talking about ‘post-racism’: maybe that’s the privilege of
the upper middle classes and the rich, especially the privilege of those in
white countries. South Africa was supposed to be this country where a
miracle happened – there are so many white liberals who are disillusioned
with the ANC it’s actually rather funny. So no, I do not see Terre’blanche’s
death as an isolated incident, and yes, it is about race and class. And with
the current education system in South Africa (a senior black professor at
the University of Cape Town said recently that education is now worse
for blacks than it was under the apartheid regime), I do not know where
this will end. n
LISTING FROM SIMON FINCH RARE BOOKS CATALOGUE
12
The true nature of
‘non-violence’
Ellis
FRANK ELLIS finds that a survey of global civil resistance movements is both
partial and disingenuous
C
ivil Resistance and Power Politics begins with an overview of
the conceptual issues by Adam Roberts. Detailed studies of civil
resistance and other forms of non-violent action across the world
then follow. I cannot do justice to all 22 contributors in the confines
of a review. So, given that I shall spend more time on some essays than others,
I should at the very least refer to the essays and their themes and note the
authors for those who might wish to read the essays.
To summarise, we have: Gandhi in India (Judith Brown); US civil rights
movement (Doug McAdam); the interplay of violent and non-violent action
in Northern Ireland (Richard English); civil resistance in East and Central
Europe (Mark Kramer); Czechoslovakia and the Velvet Revolution (Kieran
Williams); Solidarity et al in Poland (Aleksander Smolnar); revolution in
Portugal 1974-1975 (Kenneth Maxwell); mass protests in Iran 1977-1979
(Ervand Abrahamian); people power in the Philippines (Amado Mendoza
Jr); mobilizing against Pinochet (Carlos Huneeus); against apartheid (Tom
Lodge); the Baltic States (Mark Beissinger); Tiananmen Square and after
(Merle Goldman); civil resistance in the GDR (Charles Meier); Kosovo
(Howard Clark); taking on Slobodan Milošević (Ivan Vejvoda); rose revolution
in Georgia (Stephen Jones); orange revolution in Ukraine (Andrew Wilson);
and the role of the monks in Burma (Christina Fink). To this list can also be
added a thorough review of the literature by April Carter (chapter 2), and a
concluding essay by the second editor, Timothy Garton Ash.
The critical conceptual and practical issues of non-violent action and civil
resistance are whether they do mark a departure from violence and whether
they can achieve what some of the contributors to this collection claim.
13
Ellis
Roberts informs us that there are those who believe
“that it [civil resistance] could provide an effective means of resisting
all tyrannical regimes; that it could progressively replace violence in
all its numerous manifestations; and that it could be the sole basis of
the defence policies of states”.1
How would civil resistance have dealt with regimes such as National Socialist
Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union? And would peaceful appeals to do the
decent thing have dissuaded Genghis Khan?
Roberts provides a definition of civil resistance but it is too long and too
unwieldy and tries to hedge all possible bets2 and – no surprise – comes
with a marked left-liberal bias. A far more concise insight is to be found in
a passage from Martin Luther King’s Chaos or Community? (1967) which is
cited by Roberts and which goes to the heart of many of the claims made for
civil resistance and non-violence: “Non-violence”, claims King,
“is a powerful demand for reason and justice. If it is rudely rebuked,
it is not transformed into resignation and passivity. Southern
segregationists in many places yielded to it because they realized that
the alternatives could be intolerable”.3
Now, it is by no means certain that “non-violence is a powerful demand for
reason and justice”. There is nothing inherently reasonable and just about
any demand merely because it is not supported by violence. Every child
instinctively knows that and will exploit ruthlessly all psychological ploys to
secure parental love and material goods. With or without the threat of violence,
King’s demands may well be thoroughly unreasonable, unjust, impractical,
and lack substantial support. King’s language implies the threat of violence
(“a powerful demand”): our demands are reasonable and just; and because
our demands are reasonable and just, only unreasonable and unjust people
will oppose them. That being the case, the use of force or its implied threat is
reasonable and just. King’s title also seems to imply a threat: give us what we
want (our version of community) or we will cause chaos (riots, destruction
of lives and property). This is Lenin with his veiled threats to exterminate all
enemies of the revolution or Hitler making ready to crush Czechoslovakia
because, he believes, his ‘reasonable’ and ‘just’ demands on behalf of the
Sudeten Germans are being ignored and his patience is exhausted.
One critical point that emerges from April Carter’s review of literature
(“People Power: The Literature on Civil Resistance in Historical Context”) is
the attempt by Anders Boserup and Andrew Mack to use Clausewitz as the
basis for a theory of non-violent resistance, which was set out in their book,
14
Ellis
BANKSY
War without Weapons: Non-violence in National Defence (1974). It seems to
me that civil resistance, given that its aim is to compel the enemy to submit
can indeed be understood within the doctrinal framework of Clausewitz.
This has a profound and unintended consequence for the advocates of civil
resistance and non-violent resistance. For, if civil resistance and non-violent
resistance can indeed be interpreted and explained with the context of Vom
Kriege (On War, 1832) and are subject to the force of Clausewitz’s observations
– especially the well known view that war is a continuation of policy by
other means – then there are no good reasons why the leaders of any state
should permit themselves to be placed at a psychological and propagandistic
disadvantage by thousands of protestors and demonstrators seizing control
of the streets or individuals who have decided to commit suicide by denying
themselves food (“hunger strikers”). If the aim of the non-violent resisters – as
they would like to be called – is to overwhelm, say, Tehran and demonstrate
to the world that they, the demonstrators control public spaces and not the
government, then this could, in certain circumstances, be construed as an
act of aggression intended to weaken the government’s authority and may
well justify appropriate and proportionate counter measures.
That is not to say that all such massive demonstrations are inherently
insurrectionary or destabilising but neither are all demonstrators and
protestors inherently and morally superior to the police officers blocking
their way. Mass demonstrations are all too vulnerable to being exploited by
15
Ellis
agitators who see their purposes as being well served by chaos and blood on
the streets. In certain circumstances state actors - to use the jargon favoured
by too many of the contributors to this collection of essays – may decide
that concessions and backing down are the best way forward but there will
be times when governments must stand firm and refuse to yield to mass
demonstrations and people power.
The question that bedevils very many of the essays, especially those
dealing with central and eastern Europe and the Soviet empire, is whether
such a thing as civil society is possible in a totalitarian state. Related to this
is whether civil society, having been crushed or co-opted in totalitarian
states, can be reborn or be regenerated. In brief, civil society consists of
those institutions – church, sports’ clubs and charities – which mediate
between the state and the citizen and have traditionally been independent
of the state and its agencies. These institutions, by the very fact that they
owed nothing to the communist parties of eastern Europe, were regarded
as counter-revolutionary. So they existed as party organisations or they did
not exist at all. In fact, the whole point of Stalinist and Maoist terror was to
destroy any capacity among the citizens of their states for spontaneous, selfdirected action that might at some stage threaten the guiding and leading
role of the party. Even within the totalitarian states of communism some
form of the private sphere can exist but it runs the risk of being denounced
and punished. What makes possible the rebirth or birth of civil society is a
progressive weakening of state power and a retreat from some areas of private
and public life. In this regard, the role of Western media, especially radio, was
critical in bringing to the attention of enough people that their communist
masters were not omnipotent and omniscient. A major weakness of Civil
Resistance and Power Politics is the complete absence of any discussion of
the role played by Western radio in helping to stimulate awareness among
the populations of eastern Europe that there is life after totalitarianism and
so helping to nurture the incunabula of civil society.
In some ways the GDR is a special case. Twelve years of National Socialism
was followed by another 44 years of Soviet-style socialism during which
the Stasi did everything it could to destroy civil society. In his essay (“Civil
Resistance and Civil Society: Lessons from the Collapse of the German
Democratic Republic in 1989”) Maier does not face up to the depth of Stasi
penetration of GDR society and its clear implications for civil society. In the
GDR, church leaders tried to secure some private space for their institutions.
Maier plays down the sordid reality:
16
Ellis
“Some of the leading clergy were already caught up in a tissue of
conversations with the Stasi that had learned how to co-involve them
in the providing of information”.4
Decoded and free of the evasive language used by Maier, this means that some
of the clergy willingly, or having been subjected to coercion and blackmail,
betrayed the confidences of their fellows and were left in no doubt by Stasi
interrogators that if they did not agree to spy on their fellows – deemed by
the Stasi to be ideologically and politically incorrect – they or close family
would be punished: a daughter might not get that university place or a son
would be arrested for currency speculation. One has to ask what kind of civil
society could exist in the GDR when about one third of the population spied
on their fellows for the benefit of the Stasi. In such a collection of people there
is no civil society, certainly nothing that bears any resemblance to what one
would expect to find in the West. Maier confirms this when, in a spectacular
gaffe, which ignores both topography and metaphor, he says of the Stasi:
“It was a panopticon without walls”.5
Maier reveals how little he understands of what actually happened, and the
dangers of seeing the end of the GDR regime through the eyes of Western
middle-class revolutionaries:
“Thus to apply Christa Wolff’s question, not to the old regime, but
to the very protest movements that helped dissolved it: Was bleibt?
What remains – not of the discredited Biedermeier utopia of a small
socialist regime, but of the revolutionary fervour of 1989?”6
From Maier’s point of view it is most unfortunate that he should refer to
Christa Wolf (Wolf, not Wolff) since she turned out to have been a Stasi
informer (codename Margarete). Again, discredited the East German state
most certainly is but it is insulting to place it alongside Biedermeier Germany
(1815-1848). Biedermeier Germany did not glorify class war or possess a
massive secret police, and its officials did not kill people who tried to leave.
In “The Interplay of Non-Violent and Violent Action in the Movement
against Apartheid in South Africa, 1983-94” Tom Lodge offers a somewhat
benign view of the African National Congress (ANC) and its fellow travellers.
According to Lodge:
“The authorities’ failure to contain resistance, the increasing
incidence of armed confrontations between the occupation forces and
increasingly militarized ‘comrades’, sometimes trained and equipped
as Umkhonto auxiliaries, and the succession of local victories won
through consumer boycotts all served to stimulate a euphoric
17
Ellis
conviction concerning the state’s vulnerability and the imminence of
national liberation.” 7
The obvious thing here is that the interplay between non-violence and
violence has broken down as it was bound to do in Africa: the emphasis is
now on violence and mayhem. It is noticeable – strikingly so in fact – that
nowhere in Lodge’s essay does he cite examples of ANC racism directed at
whites. Yet inciting race hatred against whites was a core part of the ANC’s
terrorist strategy. Moreover, it is obvious that today the ranks of the ANC
are full of people who wish to see whites either permanently disenfranchised
or even physically exterminated. Lodge’s own language mimics the MaoistLeninist rhetoric of the ANC. If the South African Defence Forces (SADF) are
deemed to be ‘occupation forces’ what place is there for white soldiers once
the ANC has its hands on power? Occupation forces are killed and expelled,
or they return whence they came. Again, all these arguments are implicit in
‘national liberation’. Is there only a black South Africa? And what is supposed
to happen to whites when blacks have been ‘liberated’? Lodge plays down
the violence:
“Even at their peak, however, Umkhonto’s activities scarcely
represented a serious threat to South African security.”8
Well, it was not for lack of trying and, in any case, the SADF proved to be
highly effective in tracking down and killing ANC terrorists in their camps.
In fact, many of these counter-terrorist operations are classics of their kind.
One of the clearest indications that ‘non-violence’ was a tactical ploy is revealed
in an internal document circulated by the ANC to its various subordinate
groups. The title, What is to be Done?, is an obvious and admiring allusion
to one of the main inspirational sources of global and ANC terrorism and
subversion. Written by Lenin, Chto delat’? (What is to be Done?, 1902) is
a blueprint for revolutionary violence which has inspired mainly left-wing
terrorist groups since it was first published. The violent attacks and savage
“necklacing” of perceived collaborators so as to weaken the administration
is standard, left-wing terrorism, the aim being to bring about economic and
administrative collapse. Regarding the current state of South Africa Lodge
seems to be in a state of denial:
“The ANC’s vision of a ‘people’s war’, even if it had succeeded in
forcing the government into conceding a settlement, would have been
unlikely to have produced a robust democracy.”9
Is there such a thing in South Africa today? Again, Lodge claims that the
United Democratic Front (UDF)
18
Ellis
“helped nurture a political culture that favoured debate, consensus
and accountability.”10
Where do we find examples of these in contemporary South Africa?
Garton Ash begins his summing-up by stating that Gandhi launched civil
resistance. (I was under the impression that absolute title to that role belongs
to Jesus Christ). We then return to the central question:
“Non-violent action is therefore about depriving the power-holders of
the deepest sources of their power, outflanking their visible coercive
instruments.”11
Garton Ash and others in this collection talk of non-violent action, yet use
the language and metaphor of violent action. The power-holders are to be
‘deprived’ by the non-violent who will then use the power for the common
good. In order to deprive the power-holders and their supporters in the
population, the non-violent, flower-wearing, would-be power-deniers must
use verbal violence and psychological means (psychological aggression) to
undermine the power-holders.
Power is not just the number of tanks you have: they and other technical
means are just one part of the equation. Power is also the willingness, the
readiness to squeeze the trigger; to give the order to crush the mob, violent
or otherwise. Once the will to use violence has gone or has been severely
weakened all the tanks in the world are of no use: the ‘visible coercive
instruments’ have been well and truly ‘outflanked’ – to borrow from the
great Prussian – ‘by other means’. All this points to the fact that despite the
flowers, the display of people power (the threat of mob violence) and multimillionaire pop stars, the underlying approach is still to compel some leader
or other entity to do the bidding of another leader or entity.
This is the modern revolutionary crowd in action: for Hippolyte Taine,
as Garton Ash points out, they were the “despicable canaille”12; and for Jules
Michelet they were the “noble le people”.13 Garton Ash concludes that we
now need a new study of crowd behaviour, a new explanation, in the 21st
century. Well, to Taine’s canaille and Michelet’s le peuple I suggest we adopt
la racaille, the word used by Nicolas Sarkozy to describe the non-violent
mobs that torched so many French cities in 2005 in pursuit of their just and
reasonable demands.
Civil resistance, people power and non-violent action are struggles for
power. Even Garton Ash concedes that
“non-violent action is itself a significant and distinctive form of
power.”14
19
Ellis
And all forms of power, regardless whether the advocates describe what they
do as non-violent, peaceful or liberal, implies the exercise of violence in all its
forms: verbal, propagandistic; psychological, financial, ochlocratic, terroristic
and insurrectionary.
The use of mass media, especially the internet, is ideally suited to some
of the power struggles described in this collection. Cyber attacks designed to
close down the web site of a government agency or a political party are nonviolent but they can result in massive damage and disruption. Regardless of
whether they are carried out by advocates of people power or states cyber
attacks are still acts of war, asymmetrical, but acts of war nevertheless and,
as such, can be interpreted within the Clausewitzian framework. If they
are to keep ahead of the game, senior police and army officers must study
the conclusions and ideas in Civil Resistance and Power Politics so as to
understand the threat. They should then repair to Sir Frank Kitson’s Low
Intensity Operations: Subversion, Insurgency, Peace-Keeping (1971) in order
to formulate counter strategies. n
Dr FRANK ELLIS is an academic and author, who formerly served in the
Parachute Regiment and Special Air Service soldier © Frank Ellis 2010
Civil Resistance and Power Politics: The Experience of Non-Violent Action
from Gandhi to the Present
Adam Roberts & Timothy Garton Ash, eds., Oxford University Press,
Oxford, 2009, xxi + 390pp, £25
NOTES
1 Civil Resistance and Power Politics, p.1
2 Ibid., pp.2-3
3 Ibid., p.19
4 Ibid., p.267
5 Ibid., p.269
6 Ibid., p.276
7 Ibid., p.220
8 Ibid., p.223
9 Ibid., p.229
10 Ibid., p.229
11 Ibid., p.375
12 Ibid., p.380
13 Ibid., p.380
14 Ibid., p.374
20
“Jesting Jesus” is no joke
Ashton
DAVID ASHTON notes a hitherto largely overlooked aspect of Christian
culture
W
as Jesus of Nazareth “the first Jewish stand-up comic”? This cute
comment from the late Robert Funk1 was poorly received, both
by his scholarly comrades in scriptural scepticism and by faithful
churchgoers who believe the Word made Flesh was “like unto us
in all things” – except fun.
The usual assumption, followed by thinkers as different as Nietzsche and
Chesterton, has been that the crucified hero lacked an ostensible sense of
humour. This supposed deficiency has been ascribed to “strain induced by
the sin of the world” overwhelming the requisite “smiling ease”2.
However, the truth is otherwise. Several writers have noticed sporadic
utterances from the Galilean prophet that seem fairly droll; for instance,
A. N. Wilson cites the now proverbial “mote and beam” as an “extremely
funny” example of his “fantastical imagination” and “sharp wit”3. But hardly
anyone has accumulated and analysed the detailed convergent evidence of a
definite characteristic4.
Modern ignorance and general indifference were exemplified by
journalistic perplexity when the biblical phrase “whited sepulchres” was heard
in Parliament5. This originated of course in a jocular antithesis typical of
Jesus, though the mass-media canaille might have understood it, if expressed
in their own idiom as “they are full of crap”.
To discover common threads we must excavate deep beneath the
brevity of dignified translation into the original cultural context, while also
recognising the timeless techniques of eloquence and drama, and using a
little imagination.
Jesus describes comical people, events and ideas in the “earliest strata
21
Ashton
of Christian tradition”6, though nothing genuinely relevant exists beyond
the canonical gospels in agrapha7. The Babylonian Talmud “quotes” one
dubious epigram8. The small amusing fraction within Islamic lore is scarcely
authentic9.
The “sepulchre” metaphor occurs during his derisive denunciation
of religious hypocrites that occupies an entire gospel chapter10. His train
of thought is traceable therein as it runs from food and drink, to cups
meticulously cleaned but only on the outside, to local tombs whitewashed
externally while containing unclean remains, then to the holy graves of
previously persecuted prophets, and finally to an “apocalyptic” climax about
the fate of the Holy City.
Two features offer an additional clue to his performance. In mocking
purists who painstakingly filter from their drinks any ritually prohibited
miniscule insect, while spiritually swallowing the largest of “unclean”
creatures11, he uses words for gnat, strainer and camel, which make similar
lip-smacking sounds in Aramaic12. Next, the picture of the ruminant anatomy,
from its hairy neck, then its humps, and finally to its padded feet, sliding
down the pharisaic gullet combines “sheer realism with absurdity”13.
With “audio-visual” mimicry in his repertoire, at no cost to personal
dignity, is it any wonder that Jesus attracted large audiences, including
children?
He taught in parables, which are not allegories. These often resemble
“sitcom” plots, making moral points for subsequent commentary incidentally
amid hilarious story lines. In one anecdote a debtor amasses astronomical
liabilities, yet absurdly requests “more time to pay”14. Another tells of a
lazy magistrate, roused eventually to act, not from principle but simply to
stop a whining widow from constantly pestering him. A host sends out
party invitations to reluctant guests who each offer insulting excuses for
non-attendance, one of them that he is occupied with his newly acquired
wife15.
Then there is a father giving his son a pebble or worse still a black scorpion
instead of an egg; a man who leaves a candle alight under his bed; the thought
of threading a rope through the eye of a needle16; and so forth.
In encounters with critics Jesus not only engages in rollicking repartee
but also brilliantly reverses verbal traps. On one such occasion, the joke was
practical, and easily missed in the text where his response to a conundrum
could seem inconclusive. He is asked as an “honest and fearless teacher” in
the Temple to clarify whether it was morally permissible to pay tax tribute
22
Ashton
to the Emperor17. The provocateurs included agents of Herod Antipas, whom
Jesus scorned and who had already killed John the Baptist18. Their plan was
to force him into exposing himself as a rebel against Rome or as a traitor to
his own people, in either case with dangerous implications especially at that
time in Jerusalem.
Let Conrad Noel19 describe the outcome:
“Perceiving their trick, he replied with the only possible answer which
would hold his crowd and give no handle to the spies. He does not ask
his supporters to produce a coin, but his opponents. They produced the
incriminating denarius, and at once he asks: ‘Whose is this image and
superscription?’ And they say, ‘Caesar’s’; and by their answer have put
themselves into the trap they have laid for him….Their embarrassment
was all the greater, for the onlookers knew full well that not only had
they decided the question for themselves by possessing the coin and
trading with it, but that it was a strict rule that…on no account was it
ever to be used in the Temple precincts.”
A final example of humour is a credibly Near Eastern “duel of wit”20 with
someone descended from an historic enemy21. After seeking respite in a
border region, Jesus and his company now face harassment by foreigners. A
pagan woman approaches him with “son of David” flattery to get her daughter
cured. He makes no response to this impertinent stratagem, but his disciples
impatiently pester him to get rid of the nuisance by granting her request. His
first duty is to show that the national mission is orderly in aim and manner.
The supplicant respectfully kneels, and begs again. He says that it is
unfair to take the food promised to the children of Israel and toss it to the
dogs, though moderating in the Greek lingua franca this contemptuous term
for Gentiles. She concurs, but quips that even household puppies are allowed
scraps that drop off their masters’ tables. This neat rejoinder is warmly
appreciated, and reportedly she gets her wish. This exchange proves that
Jesus could take a joke as well as make one.
To be sure, jokes sometimes caused “offence”, as they do. His visualised
slapstick about blind people tumbling into a pit, for example, might today be
denounced as “hate speech”. What matters most is the contribution that the
prominence of humour in his activity and personality, on which much more
can be written, makes to the ongoing discussions about the “real” Jesus.
“How lucky are those of you now in tears, for you shall laugh!” (Luke
6.21). n
DAVID ASHTON is a Norfolk-based research consultant
23
Ashton
NOTES
1. The founder of the controversial Jesus Seminar questioned the literacy but praised
the word-wizardry of a Teacher who engaged in masterly public debate with learned
“scribes”. The proposition that he was trilingual, and literate in Aramaic and Hebrew,
if not Greek, is quite defensible
2. Otto Borchert, The Original Jesus (1968)
3. Jesus (1992) pp.122-3. The author thinks this farcical analogy reveals inexperience
of carpentry – a non sequitur, surely. Though Wilson reasonably regards Jesus as a
scholar instead of a “practical man”, his habitual “hyperbolic utterance” (pp.110-1)
went down well with working folk
4. Rare exceptions amid reverential gloom have been Elton Trueblood, The Humor of
Christ (1964) and Henri Cormier, L’humour de Jésus (1974). The Quaker theologian
lists 30 gospel references and embeds some of them in a disquisition about the
nature of humour. The Catholic priest develops a gentle notion of compassionate
geniality manifested to “the very end”
5. Quentin Letts, Daily Mail, 10 March 2010
6. Jakob Jonsson, The Oxford Companion to the Bible (1993) p.325
7. See e.g. Marvin Meyer (ed) The Unknown Sayings of Jesus (2005)
8. Avodah Zarah 16b-17a. See Peter Schafer, Jesus in the Talmud (2007) pp.41-47
9. See e.g. Tarif Khalidi (ed) The Muslim Jesus (2001), an outstanding work
10. Matthew 23
11. Leviticus 11
12. M-J. Lagrange, Evangile selon Saint Matthieu (1927) p.447
13. T. R. Glover, The Jesus of History (1917) pp.47-48
14. Matthew 18.24-26
15. Rhetorical patterning permits recognition of “innocuous sexual humour.” See Bruce
W. Longenecker, Biblical Interpretation (2008) Vol.16, No.2, pp.179-204
16. Luke 11.12, Mark 4.21, Matthew 19.24
17. Matthew 22.15-22. Despite the resistance of Tiberius to idolatry around the empire,
his “graven image” on currency was problematic for pious Jews
18. Jesus called Herod a “fox” which then implied worthlessness rather than cunning
19. The Life of Christ (1938) p.463. The entire chapter repays study in view of the author’s
critique of finance-capitalism
20. John L. McKenzie, The Jerome Biblical Commentary (1969) Vol.2, p.90. Thorough
exegesis is impossible here
21. Her ancestors were Canaanites (Matthew 15.22) with whom “miscegenation” had
been forbidden (Deuteronomy 7.1-6)
24
Fingers to feminism:
the rise of 2D:4D
Wilson
GLENN D. WILSON charts the rise of a new sociobiological insight
I
n the last decade there has been an explosion of research using digit
ratio (2D:4D) as a biomarker of prenatal testosterone. Hundreds of
papers have been published (at least 30 in the last year) which use
this index to reveal weird and wonderful associations with an array
of behavioural traits. A special issue of Personality and Individual Differences
devoted to digit ratio is currently in preparation. Here I describe how the
index originated out of a lively debate about the origins of sex differences in
the pages of The Psychologist, then known as The BPS Bulletin, around three
decades ago.
In the 1970s I was confronting a radical brand of feminism that seemed to
assume that equality depended upon identity. Their claim was that men and
women are much the same under the skin and the manifest psychological
differences were mainly due to upbringing and social role learning. It was
therefore the duty of “society” to “engineer” them away. Hans Eysenck and
I were among those who believed in the existence of fundamental, evolved
sex differences, rooted in genes and prenatal hormones, which could not
easily be dismantled by “society” (Wilson, 1979). Feelings ran high and some
of our own female colleagues were outspoken in their hostility. One wrote
that my suggestion that women were naturally picky about their partners
was just “an apologia for personal rejection”. An American woman accused
me of “furthering a personal belief concerning social conduct of the sexes”
and trying to “justify and maintain social custom concerning differential
treatment of the sexes” (Biaggio, 1982). Others analysed the grammar and
vocabulary by which I sought, cunningly, to persuade readers of the veracity
of my viewpoint (Watkins, 1980). Understandably, I was on the lookout for
25
Wilson
evidence to confirm the idea that sex differences were biologically based.
In 1977 (together with Mark Cook) I organised an International
Conference on Love and Attraction at Swansea University in Wales. In a
keynote address, Eysenck (1979) argued for the importance of biologically
based individual differences in sexual behaviour. He described the work of
a German physician, W.S. Schlegel, who had latched onto pelvic shape as
an indicator of prenatal hormone influences. Females, being designed for
childbirth more than running, tend to have a broader pelvic outlet than
males, but there is considerable variation within sex. Schlegel (1975) showed
that men and women with pelvic shapes atypical of their sex were more likely
to display cross-gendered behavioural traits and had a higher divorce rate
than sex-congruent individuals. He also observed that lesbian cows (those
that made a practice of mounting other cows) had a more masculine pelvic
shape than other cows. Schlegel apparently upset his students so much that
they invaded his lectures and successfully pressed for his dismissal from his
university appointment in constitutional medicine.
At the risk of similar treatment, I decided to take up this line of research
at the Institute of Psychiatry in London. Initially I sought to replicate
Schlegel’s findings that pelvic shape predicted masculinity-femininity
of personality and marital stability. In a study published after some
delay (Wilson & Reading, 1989), it was confirmed that women who were
“feminine” (and “non-feminist”) on an attitude questionnaire had a broader
pelvis and were more sexually satisfied than masculine/feminist women.
But there had been a problem. Schlegel had used X-rays to measure pelvic
shape but we considered this ethically dubious because of the risk of genetic
damage. Hence we used assessments based on the physical examination of
a Consultant Gynaecologist during routine obstetric examinations. These
were of necessity approximations and, since all our subjects were pregnant
women, the variance was restricted and the effect size low.
Because pelvic shape was turning out to be an intrusive and impractical
index for individual differences research, I decided to look for a skeletal marker
of sex that would be more accessible and more easily assessed. I recalled a
study Phelps (1952), noting the curious fact that men tended to have a shorter
index finger relative to the ring finger, while for women this was reversed.
This sex difference was apparently stable from birth and was presumed to be
genetic. It seemed to me that the digit ratio might be a biomarker of prenatal
sex hormone exposure, so it would be interesting to see if it was associated
with sex-typical personality traits.
26
Wilson
The opportunity to collect some data to test this idea came when I was
asked by the Daily Express to advise on a survey of “changing attitudes of
women in the 1980s”. The editor kindly allowed me to insert two questions
of my own that addressed the issue. One asked respondents to classify
themselves as “gentle and feminine”, “assertive and competitive”, or “fairly
average” by comparison with other women. The other (in a different part
of the questionnaire) asked them to measure, in centimetres, the length of
each finger on their left hand “from the lower wrinkle to the tip excluding
fingernails”. They were told “there is an interesting reason for this which will be
explained later”. Nearly a thousand female readers of the newspaper returned
questionnaires and the results revealed a small but significant tendency
for women with low 2D:4D ratios to describe themselves as “assertive and
competitive” (putative testosterone related personality traits). I concluded
that this “could reflect the simultaneous effect of prenatal hormones on body
and brain” (Wilson, 1983).
It occurs to me that it would be very difficult to do this kind of study
today. If I had sought formal ethical clearance, completing the monumental
(111 page) application form, I would have missed the window of opportunity
for data collection. Permission would probably have been declined anyway,
since committees were taking it upon themselves to evaluate the scientific
worth of proposed studies as well as adjudicating ethical issues, and they
would no doubt have deemed this trivial. I cannot imagine what funding
body would want to support such research so no research assistance would
be forthcoming. Furthermore, the findings would probably not have seen the
light of publication were it not for the fact that Hans Eysenck himself was
virtually the sole arbiter of what went into PAID at the time. He saw it as
his own journal and was suspicious of referees, who he felt often rejected
manuscripts on technicalities, while missing the broad originality of the ideas
contained in them. Many of my colleagues were dismissive of my study but
Hans thought it intriguing and put it forward for immediate publication.
Naturally, with its phrenological overtones, the media had a field day
reporting the finding. People around the nation were exhorted to forget
personality tests and discover their “true self” by applying rulers to their
fingers (the usual media over-reaction, especially given the marginal
significance of the results). I was therefore surprised that, when I met John
Manning during the filming of a BBC documentary, he told me he was
unaware of my study before commencing his own programme of research
on digit ratios some 15 years later. I fully accept his word on this, and it is
27
Wilson
perfectly credible. After all, neither of us were aware of the work of HansDieter Rosler in 1950s Germany, anticipating us both in many respects and
which has only just come to light (Voracek, Dressler & Loibl, 2008). Also,
Manning was not deliberately overlooking my study; indeed he had described
it in detail in his first, very influential book (Manning, 2002).
I am both astonished and delighted by the extent to which research on
2D:4D has caught on after Manning, Breedlove and others took it up in the
last decade. Among the many factors that it has been connected with are
spatial ability, sporting success, musical prowess, success in financial trading,
traffic violations, fertility and sexual orientation (all of which may be found
in a dedicated website).
I have wondered whether there might be more obvious gender markers
that could be substituted, such as height. Of course, the reason I chose not
to use height in the first place is that it is so obvious that critics would have
objected that any connections with personality might be mediated by the
social impact of being tall (tall people becoming assertive and dominant
because of their impressive stature). Finger ratios are much less noticeable
and unlikely to be the “cause” of the personality traits associated with them.
Still, some have argued that the height factor should be partialled out before
the effect of digit ratios is examined, despite minimal correlations between
height and 2D:4D (Manning, Scutt, Wilson & Lewis-Jones, 1998).
Voice pitch is another biological trait that differentiates the sexes and I
explored this in relation to the personality and behaviour of opera singers of
various voice categories (Wilson, 1984). In accord with expectation, lower
voiced singers (basses, baritones, contraltos and mezzo-sopranos) turned
out to be more emotionally stable and sexually predatory than higher voiced
singers (tenors and sopranos), traits typical of men and women respectively.
Voice pitch has been taken up by other researchers as a biomarker of sex
hormones, but the same problem applies; deep voices might predict masculine
personality traits because they sound more authoritative and impressive than
high voices. Digit ratio is relatively free of such counter interpretations.
There are justifiable concerns about the reliability of the digit ratio.
Although it fairly consistently separates men from women in group data,
correlations with target variables are often low, sometimes non-existent
(Voracek, Manning & Dressler, 2007). Indeed, the personality trait of
assertiveness that I first studied in relation to digit ratio has proven to be
a particularly poor correlate (Voracek, 2009). Putz et al (2004) point out
that whether or not a sex dependent trait correlates with digit ratio might
28
Wilson
depend on the timing of sexual differentiation during uterine development.
Establishing such timetables may turn out to be an important application of
2D:4D; traits that correlate with digit ratios are presumably differentiated at
around the same time.
The findings concerning sexual orientation are particularly complex.
Although some researchers have found cross-gender digit ratios in gay men
(McFadden & Shubel, 2002), many others have not. In fact, the consensus is
that the peripheral body traits of homosexual men suggest exposure to more,
not insufficient, testosterone (Wilson & Rahman, 2005; Voracek, Manning &
Ponocny, 2005). This little surprise, revealed by finger ratio research, among
CHARLES NEGRE, 1851
other indices such as penis size and male-pattern baldness, might lead to
important developments in theory concerning the origins of sex orientation.
It seems to support a brain module interpretation of homosexuality, as against
the simple-minded idea that gay men are generally effeminate. Transsexualism
seems to relate to a different brain module; male to female transsexuals
have a female-typical finger ratio (Schneider, Pickel & Stalla, 2006). Digit
ratio may also be useful in distinguishing what is genetic from what is due
to early environment. For example, Hall and Love (2003) found that when
female MZ twins were discordant for sexuality the lesbian twin had a lower
(more masculine) 2D:4D ratio. Because MZ twins share the same genes, their
29
Wilson
discordant sexuality must be down to some aspect of the environment and the
digit ratio finding suggests that prenatal hormones at least contribute.
Autism is another interesting target for digit ratio research. When I
reviewed Simon Baron-Cohen’s first book on autism (Mindblindness) I took
him to task for avoiding discussion of sex differences (Wilson, 1996). Since
the most outstanding fact about autism is its largely male incidence, this
seemed to me an important omission. I went on to suggest that autism might
be construed as “the convergence of mental handicap with a hypermale skills
profile”, an idea previously mooted in my book The Great Sex Divide (Wilson,
1989). This “extreme male brain theory” of autism has since become a major
plank in Simon’s theory and he has found digit-ratio to be a convenient and
accessible testosterone marker (Baron-Cohen, 2003).
As with any field of research, there are many unanswered questions with
respect to digit ratios. Does it matter whether measurements are taken on
the right or left hand? In my own study I used the women’s left hand so
their right would be free to make the measurements, but the right hand may
produce more significant results (Manning et al, 1998). Some researchers fail
to mention which hand was used or they confuse left and right because the
photocopy is a mirror image (Voracek, et al, 2007). There may even be some
value in calculating the degree of difference between left and right hand digit
ratios, since it bears on the issue of “developmental instability”. Is there a
parallel difference in the toes? There is some evidence that this is the case
(McFadden & Shubel, 2002), so the relative predictive power of hands and feet
could be investigated. Are there any other digit comparisons (using fingers
other than 2 and 4) that might be as good or better? Current indications are
that the 2D:4D is the best of the digit comparisons (showing the greatest
effect size) though others may come close (McFadden & Schubel, 2002).
We also need to ask what is the evolutionary function of the sex difference.
Is the stubby forefinger of males better in opposition to the thumb for tool
use, or weapon throwing, or stronger and less vulnerable to being broken?
Does the female pattern have some advantage for female specialised tasks,
like ancestral berry picking? The early work of Han-Dieter Rosler suggested
that female-typical hands were associated with occupations requiring manual
dexterity, while male-typical hands were over-represented in manual workers.
Sex differentiation does not usually occur without some good reason but it is
not obvious at present what that reason might be. Cross-species studies of the
2D:4D index may be informative in tracing its evolutionary origins and such
studies are now being done.
30
Wilson
We have come a long way since those days when many feminists were
hostile to the idea of biologically based sex differences. Most now accept, even
celebrate, fundamental sex differences and recognise that their (thoroughly
legitimate) cause is moral and political rather than scientific. In recent years
evolutionary psychology has gained widespread acceptance as a discipline,
with most introductory psychology texts including a chapter on it. In these
senses, the battle played out in the pages of The Psychologist all those years
ago has been largely won. In addition, I believe that the digit ratio (2D:4D)
has proven a useful tool, not just in demonstrating that uterine sex hormones
exert an influence on human behaviour as well as body morphology, but in
helping to tag more precisely the phase in prenatal development at which
various psychological traits are differentiated. n
GLENN D WILSON PhD, FBPsS is Visiting Professor of Psychology at Gresham
College, London and was previously Reader in Personality at the Institute of
Psychiatry, King’s College, London. His website is www.drglennwilson.com
REFERENCES
Baron-Cohen, S. (2003) The Essential Difference: Me,Women, and the Extreme Male
Brain, London, Allen Lane
Biaggio, M. K. (1982) Sex differences in perspective. Bulletin of the British Psychological
Society, 35, 61-62
Eysenck, H. J. (1979) Sex, society and the individual. In M. Cook & G. D. Wilson (eds)
Love and Attraction: An International Conference, Oxford: Pergamon
Hall, L. S. & Love, C. T. (2003) Finger-length ratios in female monozygotic twins
discordant for sexual orientation. Archives of Sexual Behaviour, 32, 1, 23-28
McFadden, D. & Shubel, E. (2002) Relative lengths of fingers and toes in human males
and females. Hormones and Behaviour, 42, 492-500
Manning, J. T., Scutt, D., Wilson, J. & Lewis-Jones (1998) The ratio of 2nd to 4th digit
length: a predictor of sperm numbers and concentrations of testosterone, luteinizing
hormone and oestrogen. Human Reproduction, 13, 3000-3004
Manning, J. T. (2002) Digit ratio: a pointer to evolution, fertility, behaviour and health.
Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick
Phelps, V. R. (1952) Relative index finger length as a sex-influenced trait in man. American
Journal of Human Genetics, 4, 72-89
Putz, D. A., Gaulin, S.J.C., Sporter, R.J. & McBurney, D.H. (2004) Sex hormones and
finger length: What does 2D:4D indicate? Evolution and Behaviour, 25, 182-199
Schneider, H. J., Pickel, J. & Stalla, G. K. (2006) Typical female 2nd – 4th finger length
(2D:4D ratios in male to female transsexuals – possible implications for prenatal
androgen exposure. Psychoendocrinology, 265-269
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Wilson
Voracek, M. (2009) Lack of association between digit ratio (2D:4D) and assertiveness:
replication in a large sample. Perceptual and Motor Skills, 109, 757-769
Schlegel, W. S. (1975) Parameter beckenskelett. Sexualmedizin, 4, 228-232
Voracek, M., Dressler, S. G. & Loibl, L. M. (2008) The contributions of Hans-Dieter
Rosler: Pioneer of digit ratio (2D:4D) research
Psychological Reports, 103, 899-916
Voracek, M., Manning, J. T. & Dressler, S.G. (2007) Repeatability and interobserver error
of digit ratio (2D:4D) measurements made by experts
American Journal of human biology, 19,142-146
Voracek, M., Manning, J. T. & Ponocny, I (2005) Digit ratio (2D:4D) in homosexual and
heterosexual men in Austria. Archives of Sexual Behaviour, 34, 335-340
Watkins, C. (1980) The socioplausibility of the sociobiology of sex differences. Bulletin of
the British Psychological Society, 33, 153-154
Wilson, G. D. (1979) The sociobiology of sex differences. Bulletin of the British
Psychological Society, 32, 350-353
Wilson, G. D. (1983) Finger length as an index of assertiveness in women. Personality
and Individual Differences, 4, 111-112
Wilson, G. D. (1984) The personality of opera singers. Personality and Individual
Differences, 5, 195-201
Wilson, G. D. (1989) The Great Sex Divide, London, Peter Owen
Wilson, G. D. (1996) review of “Mindblindness” in Personality and Individual Differences,
20, 278-279
Wilson, G. D. & Reading, A. E. (1989) Pelvic shape, gender role conformity and sexual
satisfaction. Personality and Individual Differences, 10, 577-579
Wilson, G. D. & Rahman, Q. (2005) Born Gay: The Psychobiology of Sex Orientation.
London: Peter Owen
PREHISTORIC CAVE PAINTING FROM BORNEO
32
The Gulag revisited
Cartwright
GARY CARTWRIGHT says there are still many unanswered questions about
Russia’s notorious prison system
I
n the immediate aftermath of the Bolshevik revolution of 1917,
the Russian penal system went through a radical reformation.
The traditional “hard-labour” sentences were replaced by a twotier system: the Vechecka “special purpose” camps, and those that
were openly used for “forced labour”. Although not on the scale of those
that would appear during the Stalin era, the purpose was the same; as well
as criminals, “enemies of the state” such as aristocrats, businessmen and
political opponents were incarcerated, often summarily.
In July 1921, the Council of People’s Commissars (SOVNARKOM) issued
a secret decree defining the use, and the purpose, of “corrective forced labour”.
It had already been acknowledged by the state that the camps were of little use
in terms of rehabilitation of prisoners, but were merely a means of obtaining
very cheap labour. The decree of 1929 effectively institutionalised the concept
of slave labour in the Soviet Union, and laid the ground for the subsequent
Stalinist atrocities. By April 1930 the system was officially established and in
operation, and in November that year the word Gulag was first used.
During the early 1930s, the camp network grew rapidly, and the numbers
of prisoners rose as new offences were dreamt up by Stalin and his cabal.
Article 58 of the Soviet penal code (1927), which was intended to criminalise
political opposition, was updated in 1934 to include a number of new crimes,
including “contact with foreigners” (article 58-3). After the Second World
War, this article was used to imprison released Soviet POWs, on the grounds
that their failure to fight to the death was an “anti-Soviet” act. In July 1937,
the NKVD, the forerunner of the KGB, issued special order No. 00447, under
which tens of thousands of inmates of the Gulag were executed for “continued
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Cartwright
anti-Soviet activity”. This category of offence included such treasonable acts
as becoming ill, or failing to work hard enough.
Following a decline in the camp populations during the Second World
War due to high mortality rates – 25% of inmates perished from starvation
in 1941 alone – numbers swelled to almost 2.5 million by the time Stalin
died in 1953. Many of the new inmates were from territories newly annexed
by the Soviet Union, and many more were former citizens who were forcibly
repatriated after fleeing in the pre-war years. A tightening of property
ownership laws also created a whole new range of offences, and new categories
of enemies of the state.
An amnesty followed Stalin’s death, and the camps went into numerical
decline. In January 1960, the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD) issued an
order officially liquidating the Gulag.
The former Soviet Union is now littered with mass graves. To take just
a few examples, at Kurapaty, near Minsk, as many as 30,000 citizens were
executed by the NKVD between 1937 and 1941. At Bykivnia, on the outskirts
of Kiev, as many as 225,000 “enemies of the state” were buried in at least
210 mass graves. At Butovo, in the Moscow region, at least 20,000 political
prisoners were shot, and buried near the village of Drozhino.
The Gulag, although somewhat different to the Nazi concentration
camp system, was equally heinous, and although its raison d’être was not
extermination, the results were too often the same, and the penal system
killed untold millions. Although precise figures are impossible to come by, the
estimated number of deaths in captivity of 1.7 million is “officially tolerated”.
This fails, however, to take into account the common practice of releasing
inmates close to death, nor does it take into account the prisoners and
families who perished in the penal colonies. The highest estimate available
is a massive and somewhat speculative 50 million, but it is unlikely that the
truth will ever be known.
Prisoners as pawns
The transfer of Soviet POWs to the penal system following their release from
Nazi prison camps is well known; what is rather less talked about is the fate
of tens of thousands of Allied servicemen who were to disappear into the
system – as many as 30,000 British and Commonwealth soldiers ‘liberated’
by the Soviets from German POW camps ended their days in the Gulag.
A 1992 book, Soldiers of Misfortune: Washington’s Secret Betrayal of
American POWs in the Soviet Union by James D. Sanders, Mark A. Sauter,
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Cartwright
and R. Cort Kirkwood, claimed that 20,000 US servicemen were also taken
by the Soviets, and that
“Starting in 1945, the Soviet Union became the second-largest
employer of American servicemen in the world.”
A Congressional Select Committee Report, dated may 23rd 1991, puts the
figure at 25,000 US personnel being held captive in the Soviet Union after
the war. The report also referred to testimony from a former inmate of the
Gulag who claimed to have been imprisoned with as many as 900 US POWs
in the mid 1970s.
A Senate Select Committee had found that whilst 76,854 Americans were
estimated to be in German POW camps as of 15 March 1945, the actual
number of Americans recovered from German POW camps was 91,252.
This suggests that amongst the numbers of those who were missing in action
(MIA) and subsequently presumed killed, were many thousands who were
in captivity, but whose status had not been reported by the Germans to the
International Red Cross. It is these discrepancies that make it difficult to
arrive at any reliable figure.
It has been speculated that the retention of personnel by the Soviets was
in retaliation for the failure of the Allies to repatriate large numbers of Soviet
POWs that had been identified as having anti-communist tendencies. For
35
Cartwright
example, Home Office papers released in 2005 revealed how more than 7,000
Ukrainians from the 14th Waffen SS “Galicia” Division were allowed to settle
in Britain, many becoming agents and returning to their home country. The
remnants of this community can still be found today, centred around the
Ukrainian centre in London’s Notting Hill Gate.
Other Soviet POWs liberated by the allies, of course, were to meet a
terrible fate. Forced repatriations, illegal under the Geneva Convention,
led to the deaths of thousands of Cossack and Yugoslav prisoners. In 1989
allegations against Lord Aldington that he had personally signed the orders
that led to the slaughter resulted in a celebrated libel action. Aldington won
record damages against his accuser, Nikolai Tolstoy, although he was never
to see the money (Aldington died in 2000).
Vietnam and the Cold War
A US Department of Defence press release dated 9 Dec 2003 revealed that
Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defence Jerry Jennings had visited Moscow
as part of a commission set up in 1992 (the US-Russia Joint Commission,
or USRJC) to explore the question of whether Americans were held in, or
transported through, the former Soviet Union during WWII, the Cold War,
the Korean War and the Vietnam War. The cases of more than 200 airmen
who went missing during the Korean War were initially discussed, and 140
of these were subsequently fully or partially resolved. It is widely held that
downed American fliers, especially electronic warfare officers, were routinely
sent to Moscow for interrogation and then execution. This issue was not one
that the US government appeared willing to discuss, however, and the official
line was that this never happened. But then the floodgates opened...
Speaking in the House of Representatives on 29 October 1991,
Congressman Bill McCollum, now Attorney General of Florida, presented
evidence that seemed to prove the case. A retired National Security Agency
analyst and air-defence specialist, Terrell A. Minarcin, had been employed
on intercepting enemy communications during the Vietnamese war. In a
subsequent affidavit, sworn in November 1991, he claimed that 200-300 US
POWs were shipped to the Soviet Union, some as late as 1983.
On 4 November 1991, the Moscow-based journal Kommersant carried
an interview with retired KGB Major General Oleg Kalugin, a former head
of Soviet foreign counter-intelligence, who had already confirmed that after
preliminary interrogations in theatre by Russian and Chinese personnel,
POWs were flown to Russia. “In my time in intelligence” he stated “we did
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Cartwright
participate in the interrogation of American prisoners”. The article concluded
that the eventual fate of these servicemen was “unknown”. Kalugin, however,
was to claim in an interview with Associated Press in 1992 that he had
personal knowledge of three cases of interrogation – a pilot, a Naval officer,
and a CIA operative – following which the men concerned were returned to
the United States.
In a 1994 autobiographical essay, “A little more about myself”, written
by General Dmitri Volkogronov, acclaimed historian and defence adviser to
President Boris Yeltsin, reference is made to a document, dating from the late
1960s, assigning the KGB the task of “delivering knowledgeable Americans
to the USSR for intelligence purposes”. This alleged document has been the
subject of considerable discussion, and Russian authorities deny the existence
of any such plan.
The then Chief of the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service, Yevgeny
Primakov, however personally told General Volkogronov that the plan
was never implemented, suggesting that it did exist, if only as a proposal.
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Cartwright
President Yeltsin was soon to indicate that if it were not this plan that was
implemented, then perhaps it was another.
During the period of the Yeltsin government, Moscow had begun to open
its files, and American investigators were given access to these documents,
and also to Russian veterans who been involved in, or had knowledge of, the
handling of prisoners. In fact, whilst Captain John P. Gay, director of the
Asia/Pacific Division of the J-5, Joint Staff stated in 1991 that he
“found no evidence that any previously unacknowledged Americans
had been captured and imprisoned during the Cold War period by
the Soviet Union, China or Korea”
Yeltsin admitted in 1992 that a number of US airmen ‘lost’ during the Cold
War had actually been captured and imprisoned in the Soviet Union. In June
of that year he stated that some of these servicemen “might be still alive”.
Subsequent investigations have found no evidence of this latter assertion,
but the issue was “kept open”. Also in 1992, officials in Kiev confirmed to
investigators that ten files concerning US servicemen, including at least one
of whom went missing on Ukrainian territory, were turned over to Moscow,
according to a report issued by the Senate Select Committee. There is no
suggestion that any of these personnel were moved to labour camps, unlike
those taken to the Soviet Union after the Second World War.
In 2006, all US access to documents and papers was withdrawn. In
December 2007, General Robert H. “Doc” Foglesong, who had been Chairman
of the USRJC on POWs, visited Moscow in an attempt to restore relations
and resume co-operation. Although it had originally been proposed by the
Kremlin, a planned meeting with President Putin was inexplicably cancelled,
and he was also denied access to a Deputy Prime Minister and the Minister
of Defence.
The USRJC has resolved numerous questions relating to missing US
servicemen, and has also helped the Russians determine that some 450,000
of their citizens presumed missing after WW2 had in fact moved to other
countries within the Soviet Union and abroad. There is a feeling amongst the
US investigators that the Russians now feel that all that can be done has been
done, and it is time to lay the matter to rest. But the Americans will clearly
not rest until every man is accounted for, and they understand that this is
likely to take some time.
In the Russian camp, whilst the political elite would like to bury the past
as quickly as possible, amongst the military hierarchy there is great sympathy
for the American position. During his 2007 trip, General Foglesong met
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Cartwright
with General Ruslan S. Aushev, Head of the War Veterans Committee of
the Governments of the Commonwealth of Independent States. Aushev was
supportive of USRJC’s efforts, and even suggested that the US should produce
a short documentary film which could be broadcast in the peripheral regions
of the former Soviet Union, where he was confident that local people would
know of the whereabouts of graves of former Gulag prisoners.
This tactic has worked in the past. In 1993, a retired maritime border
guard named Vasili Saiko heard of the work of the USRJC, and contacted
them with information concerning the shooting down of an RB-29 over the
sea to the north of Japan on 7 October 1952. Saiko had witnessed the incident
from the deck of his cutter, and helped to recover the body of one airman, John
Robertson Dunham. Saiko was also able to hand over Robertson’s wedding
ring to investigators. On another occasion, investigators were given access to
a former MiG-17 pilot, 1st Lt. Viktor Lopatav, who took part in the shooting
down of a C-130 Hercules over Armenia on 2 September 1958. During the
Cold War there had been literally thousands of such reconnaissance flights
over Soviet territory. There were numerous losses, with ten flights being
totally unaccounted for. The openness of the Yeltsin era has helped to account
for many of the lost airmen.
The “Gulag” today
Although the Gulag was officially disbanded in the 1960s, so-called “freelabour camps” remain in operation in Siberia, as a part of the Russian penal
system, to this day, accommodating up to one million inmates.
The Russian word etapirovanie literally means “transport by stages”.
In 2005, Valerii Abramkin, head of a liberal NGO, the Moscow Centre for
Prison Reform, was quoted in the Moscow Times as saying the time during
which prisoners are in transit is used to “shock them and break their spirit”.
Unable to communicate with the outside world, with up to 20 prisoners in a
six-berth compartment, they are at the mercy of their guards. Abramkin told
the newspaper that during stops, prisoners are often pulled out and made to
lie down or kneel in the snow or dirt for hours while being beaten.
A labour camp in the far northern Siberian Yamal peninsula (Yamal
means “end of the world” in the language of the indigenous Nenets) near
the Arctic Circle, remains in service. It has been rumouted that Mikhail
Khordokovsky, the oligarch who fell out with the Kremlin after he sponsored
pro-democratic political parties, has served part of his sentence there, and in
October 2005 Kommersant reported that he was in labour camp YaG-14/10.
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Cartwright
Relatives have the right to know where loved ones are incarcerated, but
there is no time-frame laid down within which this information must be
imparted, so in reality many prisoners simply disappear into the system.
Traditionally, NGOs would fight for the rights of such individuals, but
Vladimir Putin has shut down many of these under legislation signed in
January 2006, aimed at stopping foreign influence in Russian civil society.
Memorial, the Sakharov prize-winning human rights campaign group,
which has fought to publicise the treatment of Khordokovsky, has seen its
own offices raided. In December 2008, masked men entered their premises
and took away documents, including many personal testimonies of abuses
perpetrated during the Stalin-era.
Rather disturbingly, as recently as 2001 the St Petersburg Times reported
that North Korea was sending prisoners to Siberian labour camps as a means
of paying off its Soviet-era debt to Russia. This continued breach of human
rights appears to be conveniently overlooked by the European Union, as it
allows itself to become ensnared in an asymmetrical relationship in which
the Kremlin pulls all the strings. Whilst the US pursues the matter of its
missing servicemen, EU states, particularly the UK, remain silent, fearful
that Moscow may cut off the energy supplies on which they are now almost
totally dependent. Political expediency often requires that a blind eye be
turned to the facts, but the scale of the atrocities surely require the Russian
state, which has accepted much liability, to follow a course of reform and
transparency in which the west has a moral right to expect to be involved.
The openness of the Yeltsin-era was replaced by the Putinist concept of
Sovereign Democracy under which the state regained many of its Soviet-era
powers. Dmitry Medvedev has stated his intention to work more closely with
the US, the EU, and most recently the new British government. He has also
softened considerably the sanctions against NGOs. Against this new political
background, and with the Russian President keen to obtain the support and
largesse of the West as he prepares to fight Putin for the presidency in 2012,
renewed pressure, this time from the EU, may yield results. Russia should be
helped to understand that this is not about retribution, it is about resolution.
Maybe it is a good time now to reopen the files. n
GARY CARTWRIGHT is a writer and researcher based at the European
Parliament in Brussels. His book Putin’s Legacy: Russian Policy and the New
Arms Race is available from Amazon, or from www.cartwright.eu.com
40
Wegierski
“White Eagle down!”
– the Polish plane tragedy
in context
MARK WEGIERSKI remembers a terrible day, and asks what it means for
Polish politics
E
arly on 10 April, Poland’s “Air Force One” left Warsaw airport
carrying the Polish President and a host of important state
officials, including the highest-ranking military commanders.
They were planning to land at the Smolensk military airport in
western Russia, to proceed to the 70th anniversary commemorations of the
Katyn Forest massacre. As a result of circumstances which may never be fully
explained, the Soviet-era plane crashed disastrously near the airport, killing
all 96 people aboard, including the Polish President and his wife. The heavy
fog and the possible stubbornness of the Polish President to land in difficult
conditions have been offered as possible explanations for the crash.
As news of the disaster spread, many Poles could not help but notice
the bitter irony of so many of Poland’s key leaders dying on their way to
commemorate an event of 70 years ago, when over 20,000 of Poland’s
national elite (military officers and other state officials) had been massacred
on Stalin’s orders.
A brief re-telling of the history of Poland since 1918 indicates the
historical importance of the removal of President Lech Kaczynski and of so
many genuine Polish patriots from the current Polish political scene.
In 1918, an independent Poland re-appeared on the map of Europe after
123 years of partition and harsh foreign occupation. At its birth, the Second
Republic had to fight a series of wars to establish its frontiers – the most
important of these against Bolshevik Russia. The Bolsheviks thought they
could advance into the heart of Central Europe “over the corpse of Poland”.
In the battle at the gates of Warsaw, called “the Miracle of the Vistula”, the
revered Marshal Jozef Pilsudski beat back the Red tide. As the Bolshevik
41
Wegierski
armies reeled back eastward, the hatred of the Soviet leadership for the
“insolent” Poles intensified, and many of them doubtless felt that they would
‘pay back’ the Poles when an opportunity presented itself.
The Second Republic inaugurated an era of Polish national restoration.
Then, in 1939, Hitler and Stalin attacked, united by the Molotov-Ribbentrop
Pact, whose secret clauses included provisions for a new partition of
Poland. The policies of the German and Soviet occupiers towards the
Polish population were savage and genocidal. Nazi Germany aimed at
the extirpation of the entire Polish national elite and the reduction of the
remaining population to menial slave-labour for the German “settlers”. In
the winter of 1939-1940, Stalin ordered the deportation of millions of Poles
deep into the Siberian and Arctic wastelands of the Soviet Union, where
they could expect to be worked to death. Also, in a few short weeks in April
to May 1940, over 20,000 Polish officers and other state officials being held
in Soviet custody were massacred by Stalin’s secret police, at various sites,
including Katyn Forest. After Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union in June
1941, Stalin’s policy towards Poles perforce changed.
Poles fought Nazi Germany in virtually every theatre of conflict – the
Polish pilots in the Battle of Britain, the Polish Second Corps at Monte
Cassino in 1944, the Polish First Armoured Division at Falaise and the
Polish First Parachute Brigade at Arnhem. Polish intelligence work was
of enormous value to the Allies – for example, the Polish contribution to
the deciphering of Ultra-Enigma. The Poles’ ‘reward’ was betrayal by their
Western allies at Yalta, along with the westward displacement of the Polish
frontiers, which amounted to a net territorial loss of almost 20%. The new
frontiers were crafted by Stalin to bind Poland forever to Russia because of
Poles’ fear of German revanchism.
The so-called People’s Republic of Poland (PRL) was proclaimed in 1944.
Over 100,000 Poles died resisting the Sovietization of Poland in the period
1945-1949, in a civil war with the emerging Communist security apparatus
and the occupying Soviet army and secret police.
After the nightmare of Stalinism, Wladyslaw Gomulka came to power
in 1956, essentially “Polonizing” the regime, inaugurating the period of “the
Thaw” and “national communism”. Then following the disturbances of 19681970, Edward Gierek inaugurated a period of considerable prosperity, and
even national pride. The election of a Polish Pope in 1978 galvanized the
opposition, leading to the emergence of the Solidarity independent tradeunion movement in 1979-1980. Brutally suppressed by the declaration of
42
Wegierski
martial law by Communist General Wojciech Jaruzelski on 13 December
1981, the Solidarity movement went underground and endured until the
collapse of Soviet rule in 1989.
Nevertheless, the “post-Communists” (clustered in the Democratic Left
Alliance – SLD) assured themselves a soft landing. During the ‘privatization’
process, they or favoured former dissidents friendly to them were able to
seize most of the economic and media assets of the newly-proclaimed Third
Republic, under the permissive hand of Lech Walesa, who was President
from 1990 to 1995. (Once acclaimed as a Solidarity hero, Walesa is now
disdained by Polish patriots.) The patriotic Jan Olszewski premiership was
brought down in 1992 (by a hostile coalition in the National Assembly or
Sejm), when the minister of the interior, Antoni Macierewicz, had attempted
to expose the secret networks of the former Communist security services,
with which Polish state institutions were apparently enmeshed. For most of
1993 to 2005, the post-Communists were ascendant, holding the Sejm as
well as the Presidency from 1995 to 2005 (under Aleksander Kwasniewski).
The Solidarity Electoral Action coalition (AWS) which held a shaky majority
in the Sejm from 1997 to 2001, proved ineffectual.
In his 2005 book, The Strange Death of Marxism, Paul Gottfried has
43
Wegierski
argued that insofar as eastern European ‘post-Marxists’ embraced ‘alternative
lifestyles’ and multiculturalism, as well as consumerist capitalism, they could
actually be considered as less, not more conservative. They became even
more anti-national, anti-patriotic, and anti-traditional than in earlier years.
Anti-nationalist and anti-traditionalist ideas that some older Communists
would not have dared to voice – or would have found quite repugnant –
became increasingly common in Poland.
Finally, in 2005, Lech Kaczynski, a staunch anti-Communist, won the
Presidency of Poland, while his party (Law and Justice – PiS – led by his twin
brother, Jaroslaw) won the largest number of seats in the Sejm. It signaled
a period of national renewal that was ferociously opposed by most of the
media and state structures.
In 2007, two smaller coalition partners of the Law and Justice party –
the ultra-Catholic League of Polish Families (LPR), led by Roman Giertych
and the populist Self-Defence of the Republic of Poland (Samoobrona), led
by Andrzej Lepper – withdrew irresponsibly from the coalition, triggering a
parliamentary election. In the subsequent election, both parties were swept
out of the Sejm, and Donald Tusk’s Civic Platform (PO) party came to power,
and began to move the country in a more left-liberal direction, especially in
conformity with the European Union. Kaczynski’s party had preferred the
earlier vision of the European Community as a union of sovereign states
– rather than a superstate. Notwithstanding the sincerity of some members
and supporters, the PO had become the preferred vehicle for those hostile
to Polish patriotism.
Although all Polish parties suffered in the plane tragedy, the removal
of Lech Kaczynski and his allies was a savage blow for Polish conservatism.
Poland has been among the few European societies where a genuine
conservative movement exists and can compete credibly in elections.
The damage to Poland as a result of the plane tragedy can be grouped
into four main categories – although these are by no means exhaustive.
First, there was the death of the President himself, who would have been
a credible candidate for a second term. The death of his wife precluded the
possibility of his wife carrying on her husband’s legacy.
Secondly, there was the loss of the head of the central bank, who had
argued for the continuation of the Polish currency, the zloty. Slawomir
Skrzypek had clearly understood that the maintenance of the zloty was a vital
aspect of true sovereignty, and could be an instrument for real prosperity.
Thirdly, there was the demise of the heads of the institutes of national
44
Wegierski
remembrance which defend the cultural sovereignty and historical memory
of the Polish nation. Especially important was Janusz Kurtyka, the head of
the Institute for National Remembrance (IPN), which holds the archives of
the former Communist secret police. The PO has tried to undermine the
IPN, as it impedes the post-Communists’ quest for moral legitimacy.
Another important loss was Ryszard Kaczorowski, the last President
of the Polish Government-in-Exile, who had conferred added legitimacy to
the Third Republic when he had conveyed the Presidential insignia of the
Second Republic to Poland in the early 1990s.
Fourthly, there was the loss of key military men, plus the head of Poland’s
security service.
Given the political, cultural and administrative vacuum now created,
the future of Polish conservatism seems uncertain. It will take time for the
shocked conservative parties to reorganize, and for effective new leaders to
emerge.
Poland has endured enormous blows before and survived, and sometimes
even thrived. But the death of Lech Kaczynski and his allies has made things
more difficult for those who espouse a traditional conception of Poland. n
MARK WEGIERSKI is a Canadian writer and researcher of Polish descent
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45
Jones
Minimizing Max
LESLIE JONES reviews two recent studies of ground-breaking sociologist
Max Weber
B
ecause of his mental breakdown and ensuing fragility, Max Weber
did much of his pioneering work, notably the research for The
Protestant Ethic, as a private scholar, albeit professor emeritus
and joint editor of the Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik (Social
Science and Social Political Archives)1. In Max Weber: a Biography Joachim
Radkau considers how Weber’s psychological problems influenced his
scholarship. Professor Radkau, an authority on the history of Nervosität in
Germany, identified so closely with his subject that he developed some of his
symptoms.
Weber’s mental meltdown began in 1898 but was a long time in the
making. It constituted what Radkau calls a “life style crisis”2, a life style that
contained some manifestly discordant elements. As a child, he had meningitis,
then usually a fatal condition. One consequence of childhood meningitis is
an inability to remember the period of the illness and the author conjectures
that this lacuna laid the foundations of Weber’s subsequent troubles. The
solicitations of an over-protective mother also played their part. Weber
learned early on that “illness compels loving attention”, although some
“salutary hardening” was applied by dropping the screaming infant into
the sea3. Radkau traces Weber’s reportedly masochistic tendencies to this
formative period when pleasure (maternal attention) and pain (meningitis)
were inextricably linked.
As a law student at Heidelberg University, Weber joined the Burschenschaft
der Alemannen in which duelling and drinking bouts were de rigueur. He
avoided exercise and could consume a pound of raw minced beef and four
46
Jones
fried eggs in one evening. Subsequently during his military service and then
again on becoming a full Professor at Freiburg in 1894 there were further
opportunities for heavy drinking which continued until his breakdown. Indeed,
in her still indispensable Max Weber: Ein Lebensbild, Marianne Weber recalls
that at Freiburg, her husband was as famous for his drinking ability as for his
academic achievements4. Weber himself eventually blamed his psychological
difficulties partly on alcohol abuse and came to deplore Germany’s culture of
Gemütlichkeit (cordiality) and its lack of an ascetic tradition.
In 1898, the psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin diagnosed Weber’s condition as
“neurasthenia due to years of overwork”5. For Weber, as he acknowledged
in revealing letters to his wife, study was a way of fending off depression, a
“talisman”. This compulsive pattern of behaviour became established early
on. As a student he would draw up a daily plan during exams to minimise
any loss of time. The budding scholar eschewed what he considered frivolous
pursuits like dancing and flirting and remained chaste. During his military
service, likewise, he deplored the wastage of time that could have been
devoted to acquiring knowledge.
Ascetic Protestantism clearly had significant “points of contact with
Weber’s own experience”6 and The Protestant Ethic (1904-1905) has been
characterised accordingly as Weber’s most personal book. For devout
Calvinists like the Presbyterian divine Richard Baxter (1615-1691), as for
Weber in the years leading up to his breakdown, time-wasting was a deadly
sin. And sexual self-discipline, as recommended by Benjamin Franklin, and
work as a prophylactic against sexual temptation were Puritan tenets with
which Weber would then have identified7. On a more speculative note, Radkau
infers that because of Weber’s brittle state, he overstated the loneliness and
anxiety that must accompany belief in predestination.
Like other workaholics, Weber found holidays challenging and perhaps
not surprisingly the first signs of his disorder appeared during holiday trips
in 1897-8. Radkau contends contra Kraepelin that it was the lack of a really
demanding workload at Heidelberg (where he became Professor of Economics
in 1896) and a growing conviction that his life was without purpose that was
ultimately Weber’s undoing. The family history of mental disturbance should
also be noted8.
Referring to the onset of her husband’s psychosis, Marianne Weber
makes a pregnant observation, “Nature, so long violated, was beginning to
take revenge”9. One instance that she surely had in mind was her husband’s
impotence and their asexual marriage. The prospect of the sexual side of
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Jones
married life had, it seems, both nauseated and frightened him. His mother
Helene Weber (née Fallenstein) suspected that her first born son was sexually
repressed and had even warned her future daughter in law, “Child, you don’t
know yet how hard it will be”10. Nature’s “revenge” also took the form of
the nightmares accompanied by nocturnal emissions that caused Weber’s
insomnia.
Whence Weber’s sexual maladjustment? Marianne Weber implies that
Helene in her youth was sexually abused by her “uncle” and teacher, the liberal
historian Georg Gottfried Gervinus. Henceforth she (Helene) allegedly “…
regarded physical passion as guilt-laden and sub-human”11 and in due course
implanted “indestructible inhibitions against a surrender to his drives”12
in her eldest son. But was Marianne trying to shift the blame elsewhere
for her husband’s sexual block, as Professor Radkau suspects? Indicatively,
Max’s younger brother Alfred (or “Minimax” as he was contemptuously
nicknamed by the students in Heidelberg), albeit depressive, was well
adjusted sexually. And it transpires that although pious (a devotee of the
Unitarian theologian William Ellery Channing) Helene Weber considered
sex a natural function.
Weber himself evidently blamed his impotence on his father Max Weber
senior, sometime head of the Berlin building department, on the somewhat
tortuous grounds that the mother’s sexual inhibition “stemmed in part
from her husband’s importunate manner”13. This helps explain why Helene
Weber’s right to travel alone became such a contentious issue in June and July
1897. Contemporaneous letters to his brother Alfred indicate that in Weber’s
opinion the real reason why his father accompanied his mother on family
visits was his insensate “need for pleasure” i.e. for sexual gratification14. In the
event, Weber expelled his father from his house in Heidelberg and they were
still estranged when the latter died unexpectedly on 10 August 1897. Not
surprisingly certain commentators, including Arthur Mitzman in The Iron
Cage, have discerned here “…an inordinately strong Oedipus situation”15.
To compensate for his sexual inadequacy and to shore up his masculine
identity, Weber adopted a “he-man” posture in the 1890s, according to
Radkau16. He views Weber’s “Gospel of Struggle” and his unqualified
endorsement of the national power state in the Freiburg Inaugural Lecture of
13 May 1895 as part of this posture.
On this question of the origins of Weber’s political philosophy, the author
is on weak ground, however. Social Darwinism, which informed the Freiburg
Lecture, was prevalent at this juncture, although Weber questioned the
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Jones
racial science that usually accompanied it. As for reverence for the state, the
other salient feature of the lecture, “The state exerted considerable, perhaps
decisive, influence on German political thought…”, as Troy R. E. Paddock
reminds us in Creating the Russian Peril17. For Weber, whose credentials as a
German nationalist are underlined by Professor Paddock, only the state could
ensure the security and prosperity of the national community in its struggle
with other nations. Economics must therefore be a “political science” and
economic policy subordinated to national goals18.
From 1872, Weber had attended the Empress Augusta Gymnasium
in Berlin. Paddock points out that in the German school system prior to
the Great War the curriculum was tailored to instil loyalty to the ruling
order. History and geography text books emphasised the exemplary
national character of the Germans (hard working, well educated and peace
loving etc). Russians in contrast were depicted as generally drunken, lazy
and ignorant. And whereas the new German Empire was characterised
as a constitutional state (Rechtsstaat), Russia was invariably described as
tyrannical and expansionist, an Asiatic empire.
Weber’s political ideology, as distinct from his sociology, is eminently
explicable in terms of “the dominant cultural assumptions of Wilhelmine
Germany”19. His view of Russia, in particular his notion of the Slavs (including
the Poles) as a backward population and of Germany’s mission to defend
Western culture against the Russian threat, were part of an established
paradigm. The latter was first inculcated in the German school system and
then reinforced in newspapers, journals and academic literature.
The Weber portrayed in these two scholarly volumes is a somewhat
diminished figure, a “giant with feet of clay”, to quote his own description of
post 1905 Russia20. Professor Radkau, for one, even regards Weber’s present
fame as a “puzzle”21, arguing that the main ideas associated with him either
do not withstand empirical scrutiny (the connection between Calvinism
and capitalism) or were not originated by him (the concept of charisma) or
are simply invalid (the feasibility of a value-free social science). He proposes
that we view Weber’s rise to pre-eminence as something analogous to “The
construction of Russia as the “Slavic peril””, posited by Paddock22. For Radkau,
The Protestant Ethic, for all its faults, provided critics of Marxist materialism
with an invaluable propaganda weapon during the Cold War.
In On Heroes, Carlyle complains “That a true King be sent them {the
people} is of small use; they do not know him when sent”- ditto Weber’s latest
exegetes23. n
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Jones
Dr LESLIE JONES is deputy editor of the Quarterly Review. © Leslie Jones
2010
Max Weber: a Biography
Joachim Radkau, translated by Patrick Camiller, Polity, Cambridge, 2009, hb
683 pp, £25
Creating the Russian Peril: Education, the Public Sphere, and National Identity
in Imperial Germany, 1890-1914
Troy R.E. Paddock, Camden House, Rochester, New York, 2010, hb 263 pp,
£25
NOTES
1. Weber was officially excused teaching duties in 1899 and formally released from
academic service in 1903. He did not give another university lecture until 1918. In
1908, his wife inherited somewhere between 300,000 & 350,000 marks from her
grandfather Carl David Weber
2. Radkau, p 375
3. Ibid., p 11 & p 18
4. Ibid., p 119
5. Kraepelin quoted ibid., p145
6. Ibid., p 182
7. See Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic, in Weber: Selections in Translation, edited by
W. G. Runciman, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1978, p 144
8. See From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, eds. H. H. Gerth & C. Wright Mills,
Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1957, p 28
9. Marianne Weber, quoted Radkau, p 2
10. Ibid., p 40
11. Marianne Weber, Max Weber: a Biography, translated & edited by Harry Zohn,
Transaction Publications, New Brunswick, New Jersey, 2007, p 21
12. Marianne Weber, quoted in Radkau, p18
13. Ibid., p 65
14. Ibid., p 66
15. Quotation from H. H. Gerth & C. Wright Mills, op. cit. p 29
16. Radkau, p 121 & p 125.
17. Paddock, p 12
18. Ibid., p 75 & p 76
19. Paddock, p 226
20. Max Weber, quoted in Paddock, p 77
21. Radkau, p 96.
22. Paddock, p 16
23. Professor Radkau, p 3, questions the idea of a “great man”
50
Brown
The fatal contradictions of
Marxism: a rejoinder
ARCHIE BROWN takes exception to Frank Ellis’s review of his most recent
book on communism
A
nti-Communist rants are understandable, but ten a penny. Serious
examinations of Communism, in its various manifestations
and drawing on the archival evidence now available, are less
common. In his QR review essay on my book, The Rise and Fall
of Communism (Bodley Head, 2009; Vintage paperback, 2010), Frank Ellis
seems to want a polemical denunciation of Communism rather than an
explanation of its relative longevity (as compared with fascism, for instance)
or an understanding of how significantly different variants of Communisms
emerged over time and across space. Thus, for example, János Kádár in the
1960s, 1970s and 1980s (as distinct from the earliest years after the crushing
of Hungary’s 1956 revolution) presided over a highly authoritarian rather than
totalitarian political system, one which was a far cry from the mass terror of
Stalin’s Soviet Union or Mao’s China, not to speak of Pol Pot’s Kampuchea/
Cambodia. Survey research a decade after the fall of Communism in eastern
Europe showing that “58 per cent of Hungarians took a positive view of the
Communist era, a markedly higher figure than that for Slovaks, Czechs and
Poles”1 is the kind of fact that requires some explanation.
Frank Ellis is too inclined to take a sentence at random from my book and
impose his own interpretative gloss on it, while omitting my own elaboration
of the point. Often that is not so much at variance with Ellis’s judgement
as the reviewer implies, although I pay more attention to the historical and
intellectual context. Thus, Ellis takes exception to my statement that
“Marx sincerely believed that under communism – the future society
of his imagination which he saw as an inevitable, and ultimate, stage of
human development – people would live more freely than ever before.”
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Brown
Ellis expresses incredulity that Marx could possibly believe this, adding the
non-sequitur that if you wanted to leave Honecker’s GDR in the 20th century,
you were liable to be shot dead. Marx certainly cannot be absolved of all
responsibility for what was constructed partly in his name, but actual 20thcentury Communist systems (with a capital C) were not, it should go without
saying, what Marx had in mind when he wrote about “communism”, that
supposedly “higher stage of socialism” after the state had withered away. That
I regard Marx’s entire notion of full communism as illusory should be clear
to any serious reader of my book. That does not mean that Marx did not
hold the view I attributed to him and to which Ellis takes objection. Scholars
as knowledgeable about Marx, yet notably anti-Marxist, as Karl Popper and
Leszek Kołakowski are in no more doubt than I am that Marx held that belief,
although equally convinced that he was dangerously wrong.
In a book which aspires to be as comprehensive an account of Communism
as is possible within a single volume, attention needs to be paid to the actual
ideas of its intellectual progenitors as well as to what happened under what
Communist leaders later called “real socialism”. I noted in The Rise and Fall
of Communism that “Marx had a strong capacity for wishful thinking and
even the utopianism which he scorned in others” and that he failed to address
“the question of the political and legal institutions which should be formed
following the revolution”, assuming, apparently, that those things “would
take care of themselves”.2
I am also, according to Ellis, “far too lenient” on Lenin and do not devote
enough space to his revolutionary tract, What is to be Done? In fact, the index to
my book mentions four different pages in which I refer to that work. That was as
much as it was worth and that could be justified in a book about Communism
worldwide and over time. In any case, it is easy to argue that What is to be
Done? provided a justification for dictatorial rule. It is often contrasted with
the much more ‘libertarian’ or ‘democratic’ later work of Lenin, The State and
Revolution. Thus, I devoted rather more space to showing that this work of
Lenin (written in 1917) which has been portrayed by some as showing that
Lenin was a ‘revolutionary humanist’, and even described as ‘the crowning
achievement of Lenin’s political thought in the latter period of his life’, was
utterly at odds with any kind of political pluralism. I wrote that “Lenin was
oblivious to the fact that freedoms depend on institutions capable of defending
them” and cite approvingly on the same page A. J. Polan’s contention:
“The central absence in Lenin’s politics is that of a theory of political
institutions … Lenin’s state form is one-dimensional. It allows no
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Brown
distances, no spaces, no appeals, no checks, no balances, no delays,
no interrogations and, above all, no distribution of power.”3
When it comes to Stalin, your reviewer imputes a view to me which is the
opposite of that I have been arguing for the past 45 years (since I began
lecturing on Soviet politics at Glasgow University in the mid-1960s and from
1971 at Oxford). He quotes the following sentence from The Rise and Fall of
Communism (p. 77):
“Stalinism thus became a distinctive form of Communism, one whose
excesses had devastating consequences for Soviet society and whose
extremes incorporated much more than was required to maintain a
Communist Party in power.”
Ellis comments:
“The trouble with this assessment is that it comes too close to the
often deployed Stalin-was-a-bad-man evasion.”4
As should be clear enough from the previous paragraph of this rejoinder, I
am very far from absolving Lenin of responsibility for what followed in states
ruled by Communist parties. In my recent book I write of “the system Stalin
had developed on foundations laid by Lenin”, and I note that Gorbachev,
unlike Khrushchev, broke with Lenin “by recognizing that means in politics
are no less important than ends, and that utopian goals, which are always
likely to be illusory, will be all the more of a chimera if pursued by violent and
undemocratic means.”5
Finally (although there is more I could dispute), I cannot but note the
misleading way in which Ellis takes my reference to Michael Lessnoff’s
definition of socialism as “democratic control of the economy” out of the
context in which I cite it, turning it into an apologia for dictatorship when
the paragraph in which I quote Lessnoff makes abundantly clear that his
argument was the reverse of that. There have been a great variety of socialisms
– the concept embraces a far wider range of political parties and political
phenomena than Communism, although even the latter also contains
some variations – and still more definitions of socialism. It is an essentially
contestable concept and agreement on what is meant by it is never likely to be
reached. However, many non-Communist socialists did aspire to something
which could be described as “democratic control over the economy”. If that
is to be the criterion of socialism, then, Lessnoff argued in 1979, states such
as the USA and Britain “are undoubtedly more socialist than the USSR or the
People’s Republic of China”.6 My comment immediately after that quotation
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Brown
was: “They were certainly more democratic, and if democratic control of the
economy is to be the main criterion of socialism, Lessnoff’s conclusion may
be paradoxical, but it is not illogical.” 7
Ignoring Lessnoff’s (and my) elaboration of that possible definition of
socialism (although one among many), Ellis writes that
“Socialism as ‘democratic control of the economy’ belongs to the same
order of deception and mendacity as the Soviet ideological view that
the workers could not go on strike against their own best interests.”8
Since the whole point of my using the quotation is to show how far from
socialism in any democratic sense were Communist systems, your reviewer’s
selective quotation, omitting the elaboration of the point, amounts to
misrepresentation.
If your readers wish to know my arguments concerning the rise and fall
of Communism, and the evidence supporting them, I hope they will go to the
book rather than rely on an essay in which the reviewer appears more intent
on providing his own context for the passages he cites than in attending to
the views of their author. n
ARCHIE BROWN, CMG, is Emeritus Professor of Politics at Oxford University
and an Emeritus Fellow of St Antony’s College, Oxford. He was elected a
Fellow of the British Academy in 1991 and a Foreign Honorary Member of
the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2003. Among his books, apart
from The Rise and Fall of Communism, are The Gorbachev Factor (Oxford
University Press), which won the W J M Mackenzie Prize and the Alec Nove
Prize, and Seven Years that Changed the World: Perestroika in Perspective
(Oxford University Press, 2007)
NOTES
1. Roger Gough, A Good Comrade: János Kádár, Communism and Hungary (I. B. Tauris,
London, 2006), p. 25
2. Archie Brown, The Rise and Fall of Communism (Bodley Head, London, 2009), p. 20
3. Ibid., p. 57. The quotation from Polan is from his Lenin and the End of Politics (Methuen,
London, 1984), p. 11
4. Frank Ellis, “The fatal contradictions of Marxism”, Quarterly Review, Vol. 4, No. 1, p. 56
5. Brown, The Rise and Fall of Communism, pp. 485 and 596
6. Ibid., p. 102
7. Ibid.
8. Ellis, Ibid., p. 57
54
Making room for gloom
Brennan
MARK G. BRENNAN admires a book that seeks to revive traditional
conservative pessimism
B
ook reviewers only pretend to be objective. Editors normally
appoint reviewers based on their expert knowledge of the field with
which the text deals. But I pride myself on being the master of no
particular field other than superhuman negativity. I greet sunny
days the way a cat greets a bath. I fear winning the lottery lest it increase my
taxes. And I eat a high-fat diet with no concern for my health because I foresee
my interpersonal life becoming increasingly unlivable as those around me
sink deeper into their anti-social, Blackberry-induced trances.
After John Derbyshire came to my apartment to present the propositions
of his latest book to a small group of like-minded friends, I contacted the
Quarterly Review’s editor and sold myself as just the man to comment on his
ominous screed, We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism. While
I still consider myself the avatar of pessimism, Derbyshire’s book should
bring thousands of latent pessimists out of the closet – as long as they don’t
swallow their cyanide capsules after reflecting on his masterly arguments.
Derbyshire warns conservatives to eschew the perpetually upbeat outlook
toward life encoded in the American genome. Happy talk and mindless
optimism will only delay our reckoning with reality. “Legions of fools and
poseurs wearing smiley-face masks” have tricked conservatives into believing
that increased public expenditures, more government regulation, and positive
thinking will produce greater equality (finally!), eradicate our problems, and
allow us to overeat without gaining weight. A more sensible policy, or at least
one with a higher probability of success, might be a congressional declaration
of “Group Hug Day” or shipping a puppy to every destitute resident of the
Third World.
55
Brennan
Instead, a pessimistic outlook – which Derbyshire qualifies as based on
“the low expectations of one’s fellow men” – would help the conservative
movement to forget its recent dalliance with liberal attempts at creating
utopia on earth. The American efforts toward nation-building in both Iraq
and Afghanistan highlight the futility of engineering the lives of those whose
culture and history Americans have largely ignored to their own economic
and military peril. George W. Bush’s pie-in-the-sky educational policy, No
Child Left Behind, as well as Barack Obama’s revolutionary destruction of
the American healthcare system, both exemplify their authors’ hubristic
beliefs that expert tinkering will solve the unsolvable. Echoing Tocqueville,
Derbyshire writes that conservatives’ natural pessimism teaches them
“that most of the improvements that can be made in human affairs must
be made…by individuals and small voluntary associations.”
While traditionalists recognize that such thinking flies against Obama’s
deepest philosophical beliefs, we are left to wonder if George W. Bush has ever
heard of such basic conservative principles. Only intellectuals and mainstream
conservatives are foolish enough to believe that federal education bureaucrats
and lobbyists for the healthcare industry can fix the world through their
skullduggery and bribery. A Boy Scout troop will do a better job of cleaning
up a local park than a federal environmental regulation designed with the
best intentions. Pessimistic conservatives should embrace small institutions
like Boy Scout troops and stop pleading with Washington to fix their local
problems. Unfortunately, this warning has gone unheeded too long. Behind
every piece of federal legislation lurk armies of bureaucrats ready to wreak
mayhem on the natural order of society in the present. And their unfunded
pension liabilities guarantee financial destruction in the future.
But not every proposition in We Are Doomed will find a welcome
reception among traditionalist conservatives. Derbyshire’s disdain for
religion, evident throughout the book, will irritate those with transcendent
beliefs. Arguments against religion abound in the popular press. Although
he has yet to present a reasoned case for religious scepticism, Christopher
Hitchens in one of his many puerile rants deemed organized religion the main
source of hatred in the world. Another well-publicized atheist, American
neuroscientist Sam Harris, has judged religion “one of the most perverse
misuses of intelligence we have ever devised.” These two mountebanks pose
as much threat to the Abrahamic religions as a newborn lamb poses to
a pack of starving wolves. But at least the lamb would instinctively know
when to shut up.
56
PEDRO MEYER
Brennan
Sadly, we can only wish that the erudite Derbyshire had presented a cogent
argument to challenge conservatives’ inherent religious beliefs. He rules
religious matters “outside the purview” of his book. Yet how can an author set
out to explain “the communal arrangements of a particular social mammal
on a particular planet” and simultaneously declare religion out of bounds?
Religion has determined many, if not most, of history’s social and communal
arrangements. An intelligent student would never praise a textbook on
aerodynamics in which the author asked readers to ignore gravity for the
purposes of his argument. Derbyshire is too powerful an intellect for such
facile simplifications. On the contrary, his reasoned and undoubtedly witty
arguments against religion might have challenged the complacent beliefs of
many conservative readers.
Furthermore, religion plays a major role in what Derbyshire identifies as
one of the world’s most daunting threats – renascent ethno-nationalism. As
the United States and Europe open their borders to any and all comers, the
seeds of ethno-nationalism get sown in fields fertilized by Western education,
technology and religion. The potential for world historical disaster rises by
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Brennan
the day. While Pollyanna utopians interpret North Africans immigrating to
France and Spain as just another chapter in the history of migrants looking
to improve their lot in life, pessimists see Islamic hordes overrunning
Christendom.
As these Muslim immigrants reach critical mass throughout Western
Europe, their ethno-nationalist claims will be grounded first and foremost
in religion. Their transnational religious bond will contrast sharply with the
European Union’s fantastical notion that Portuguese Catholic cork farmers
and Swedish Lutheran auto designers will support each other based on
some idiotic document housed in Brussels. Readers will further struggle to
reconcile the author’s request to ignore religion as a historical driver with
his later suggestion that Muslim refugees be resettled in majority Muslim
nations. Islam is a religion, not a country – at least, not yet.
Americans have watched Islam’s incursion into Europe with mixed
emotions. On the one hand, Americans see the exploding Muslim populations
of Western Europe as a portent of their own future should immigration
without assimilation persist. On the other hand, Americans view the changing
religious makeup of Europe with a false sense of security, insisting that any
such transformation would have no impact at home under the theory popular
with neoconservatives that the United States is a “proposition nation”.
Under this mistaken hypothesis, anyone who spouts a few platitudes
from the American Constitution while wading across the Rio Grande is
by definition an American. Forget, as Peter Brimelow has instructed, that
the word “nation” is rooted in the Latin nascere (to be born) and therefore
implies blood links among compatriots. According to the proposition nation
theory, a Yemeni dirt farmer who believes in the right of a free press and the
removal of monarchical shackles is just as American (provided he can afford
the airfare to New York) as a fifteenth generation, native-born New Yorker
whose ancestors fought in the American Revolution.
In light of the last three decades of teeming Mexican immigration
to the United States, Derbyshire points out the suicidal insanity behind
accepting the notion of the United States as a proposition nation. America’s
riches have attracted Mexico’s poor with their dreams of better economic
opportunities. More importantly, Mexican irredentism has impelled
these emigrants northward to prosecute La Reconquista of the American
Southwest, the territorial booty resulting from the Mexican-American War
of 1846–1848.
While most Americans remain indifferent to the Mexican takeover of all
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manual labor within their own borders, Derbyshire sounds the tocsin against
such insouciance. “What if the Hispanics get attitude?” he asks. Venezuela’s
Hugo Chavez has gotten quite a bit of anti-American attitude of late. But
Americans have ignored his anti-imperialist rantings. Imagine the ensuing
chaos if some fraction of the 12–20 million illegal aliens resident in the
United States heeded Chavez’s destructive left-wing rhetoric.
Many of South America’s poor are doing just that, not just in Chavez’s
Venezuela but in Brazil and Bolivia too. Derbyshire warns readers that
Bolivian president
“Evo Morales is to your cheery, obliging indigenous-Peruvian childminder as Robert Mugabe is to Aunt Jemima.”
Since Americans refuse to mount any defence of their borders, at least the
author gives us pessimists a reason to laugh while the invaders take over. If
this warning were to be the only lasting effect of Derbyshire’s book, he will
have done more than any elected official to alert Americans to the ethnonationalism festering under their own front porch.
Readers will be both amused and enraged as Derbyshire enumerates the
areas in which American conservatives have refused to take a sceptical, if not
cynical, view of society. His comments on diversity, education, and culture
edify as much as they enrage – ditto for his comments on American jingoism,
sex, and popular media. But Derbyshire slips into unwarranted optimism
even as he relentlessly cautions readers against the same. While he notes
that Americans have “lost our republican virtue,” he turns nostalgic when he
warns us that we “shall lose our republic, unless we return to the unillusioned
view of human nature subscribed to by the Founders”. Traditionalists do not
need to be reminded that Americans long ago lost their republic, thanks to
Abraham Lincoln’s designs during the American Civil War.
Derbyshire’s editors will have to amend subsequent editions of this book.
New York City’s last classical music radio station, 96.3 WQXR, which the
author clings to as a vestige of a once better social order, now broadcasts
under the motto “La Mezcla de Nueva York.” The newly converted station
serves up New York’s Hispanic population a steady diet of salsa and merengue
music from their native countries, accompanied by Spanish-speaking disc
jockeys. Perhaps we can expect live call-in segments from Evo Morales and
Hugo Chavez as a precursor to the final collapse. n
MARK G. BRENNAN is the American editor of the Quarterly Review
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Mussolini and the
murderous madame
STODDARD MARTIN digs amongst the undergrowth of a Fascist-era
controversy
A
ssassination was a traditional political tool revived in the neoBorgian epoch of Fascist Italy. Precursor of its dramas, in which
Mussolini played heldentenor, was decadent writer and famed
lover of Eleanora Duse, Gabriele D’Annunzio. His apotheosis as
political hero came during World War I when, with financial assistance from
the French1, he helped persuade Italy to dump the Triple Alliance and support
the other preeminent Latin power. Creating Greater Italy v ‘twin threats of
pan-Germanism and pan-Slavism’ was his cry; dropping leaflets from planes
over Trento and Trieste made him ‘the best propaganda instrument Italy
had’; being shot down and blinded in one eye increased his celebrity. When
Italy was ‘betrayed’ at Versailles by not receiving her ‘left lung’ – Adriatic
territories once held by Venice but assigned by Woodrow Wilson to a new
‘Jugo-slavia’2 – he led irredentist Arditi in a coup at Fiume and propagandized
for a government based on a ‘contract’ of universal suffrage, schools free of
state and religious propaganda, free press, free trade unions and ‘a kingdom
of the human spirit’ encouraged via music and poetry.
Socialist as well as nationalist, D’Annunzio remained popular in Italy even
after Rome was obliged to relocate him to a villa at Lake Garda once occupied by
a stepdaughter of his early idol Richard Wagner3. ‘De-Germanizing’ the place,
he recast it as the Vittoriale, a Bayreuth-like shrine to his own ideals of art and
heroism. Despite nights marked by “attacks of lycanthropy”, the ex-soldier-offortune settled into relatively mild days of editing his oeuvre and entertaining
mistresses. His continuing clout concerned Mussolini, who had kept a low
profile during the Fiume affair; praising him in public, the Duce was hardly
perturbed when, shortly before his March on Rome, D’Annunzio fell from a
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window during a party at which a Fascist agent was present, nor when rumours
spread that the writer had been groping the sister of his mistress while out of
control on cocaine4. Once in power, Mussolini sent him gifts at the same time
as squadristi beat up his supporters. In a year when four attempts on his life
helped establish full dictatorship, the Duce made pilgrimage to the Vittoriale
and declared it a national monument, assisting the chronically indebted
writer and buying his complicity. Privately he remarked that D’Annunzio was
“a broken tooth which had either to be eradicated or covered in gold”. The
gilding may have been inadequate. Ever Francophile and hostile to Germans
who “treated Italy like a museum, a hotel, a place for vacationing, a horizon
painted Prussian blue”, D’Annunzio mocked Hitler. Though aging and ill, he
travelled to Verona to meet Mussolini’s train on its way back from Munich to
warn against the “Pact of Steel”. Did this hasten his end? A young Tyrolean
woman serving at the Vittoriale vanished into his bedroom for days at a time,
doors locked. When one of these supposed sex-and-drug sessions went on for
too long, the room was entered and D’Annunzio found dead but she nowhere.
Mussolini and Co arrived from Rome within hours; the body was buried
with small ceremony, no inquest made. Weeks later the braided Tyrolean was
spotted in Berlin, working in the offices of von Ribbentrop.
It was an era of Mata Haris. A different incarnation was Violet Gibson,
subject of The Woman Who Shot Mussolini. After Who Paid the Piper?, which
scrutinized CIA operatives in the cultural Cold War, and Hawkwood, which
assayed an archetype of rogue mercenaries such as we know via Blackwater, it
is apt that Frances Stonor Saunders should turn to this third type in a timeless
theatre of political skulduggery: the apparently lone fanatic willing to martyr
himself for a ‘higher’ cause. Gibson was younger daughter of Lord Ashbourne,
onetime Lord Chancellor of Ireland and familiar of George V before he
became king. Though privileged, her youth was a weary trudge through
turn-of-the-century Anglo-Irish frustrations, political and otherwise. One
beloved brother became a casualty of the trenches; another grew active in the
Gaelic League. Conventional marriage unavailing, she took up Theosophy
and feminism before converting to an edgy Catholicism, illumined by lives of
the saints. Spinsters like her might occupy themselves with the religious or
human rights charities springing up; Violet instead chose to travel to Europe,
adopt the faddish extremity of a Zeitgeist and like Nijinsky or Virginia Woolf
descend into mental vagary. She spent time in confinement but was not ill
enough to remain. Ideas of killing the Pope morphed into shooting Mussolini
as he emerged from a meeting in Rome, April 1926. Had she been induced
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by Marxists? “Premature anti-fascists”? Dissident moderates like the Duke
of Cesarò, whom she claimed to have been in love with and received signals
from? The complex of pathologies and motives surrounding her act offers no
assured truth, but that may be just the point. In weird anticipation of what
happened to Silvio Berlusconi on the eve of Saunders’ book’s appearing, the
Italian leader escaped with a grazed nose, spurting a dramatic quantity of
blood and evoking national sympathy.
New opportunities arose in the era of Freud. Culture was now willing
to see personality as erratic, potentially damaged, blocked into patterns
incapacitating right thought. Individual culpability was at question, even in
its own terms and to itself. Acts once ascribed to evil or ‘possession’ – the
devil made me do it – yet nonetheless punishable could now float into a realm
as if magically beyond judgment or blame. With inception and motive buried
under shards of a putatively fractured psyche, Gibson’s act could be called
‘mad’. Was this so? Did she simulate rage and delusion to evade punishment
for what had been coolly thought out? Did it suit others for her to fake
lunacy? Was her “diseased will” strong enough to keep up an act through
unpredictable years of incarceration? If so, for whom? Those who might profit
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from Mussolini’s end? Or was her attempt only ever meant to wound; in which
case, cui bono? Britain’s establishment feared Bolshevism; in the year of the
General Strike, it favoured all anti-communist movements. As early as 1916
Samuel Hoare had urged the Treasury to funnel money into Mussolini via
his paper Il Popolo; Foreign Secretary Austen Chamberlain treated him with
something like homoerotic awe. It was essential to Britain that this high-born
lady’s act not be allowed to stir Italian hostility. Conversely Mussolini needed
to stay in Britain’s good graces during a period when opponents were being
liquidated and all actions against him co-opted to secure dictatorship. Both
sides, in short, had reason to spin Gibson as mad, bad, sad, deserving to be
sent home and confined.
Forms had to be observed. Conspiracy theories abounded. Investigation
by Superintendant Epifanio Pennetta5 moved rapidly to unearth what
underlay Gibson’s deed, his eagerness shared by both the Crown Prosecutor
and Intransigenti, enthusiasts of a harsher, swifter fascistizzare, led by
Roberto Farinacci. Dictators need outriders to restrain, out of an appearance
of superior magnanimity or reason. Hitler had the Strassers, too socialist;
Röhm, a threat to traditional military; finally Julius Streicher, too antiSemitic. As in many touches, Mussolini anticipated his Austrian imitator:
to show clemency to Gibson was to rise above petty rancour; but it had to be
done deftly and to milk maximum benefit. Pennetta pondered Gibson’s odd
excursions before her attack, suspect encounters, unusual sums of money in
her account; but when interrogation produced her claim of contact with the
Duke of Cesarò, who had served in Mussolini’s first, not fully Fascist, cabinet,
it was dismissed as fantasy. Gradually investigation was sidelined in favour of
psychologizing. Enrico Ferri was brought in to argue that a person might be
sane and insane at the same time. A sudden flare-up in prison – Gibson took a
hammer to a fellow-inmate’s skull – assisted a ‘defence’ that she was unfit for
trial. A hearing was called before a set tribunal; motions were gone through,
the result foregone. Afterwards, on assurance from Gibson’s family that she
would be locked up in England, Mussolini’s agents secured her deportation,
though not revealing the day or the train lest overzealous squadristi might
wish to practice vigilante justice.
Gibson fuses two seemingly incompatible types: the would-be martyr/
assassin and the Englishwoman of privilege who normally withdraws to an
Austenian life of small pleasures, even if in “quiet desperation”. Deviance
in the latter may for generic reasons interest Saunders more than a larger,
contemporary world; it may also constitute a good publishing wheeze,
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attracting female readers to what may
otherwise seem history of a repugnantly
masculine era of Machiavellianism and
mass murder. Should we take it as more?
A portent of how English womanhood
might behave in times of decadence
and activism? Saunders does not state
this. What she does argue is that her
composite type, like both its halves,
found in Mussolini the perfect monstre
sacre; further, that in capacities for
fanaticism and “living dangerously” at
least, his type represented their perfect
obverse. This veers close to the position
of Ferri, which she mocks: that there
are “borderlands of the mind” on one
side of which a Darwinian supertype
may appear, capable of “superior
expression of political thought and action”, while on another a possessor
of “sick will power” may fall prey to “slow invasion of the homicidal idea”
– ie, the exceptionality which led to heroic leadership in Il Duce could in a
lesser personality produce Violet Gibson-ism. In accepting this, the tribunal
prorogued further inquiry, dismissing the assailant as too unreliable to follow
up clues she gave as to motive, preparation or sources of “slow invasion”. It
was, as Saunders says, in any case self-evident that “nobody in their right
mind could want to stop Mussolini in his historic tracks”.
Such arguments could pass in Italy, 1927. That they should have
impressed official Britain to the extent that London made sure the Gibsons
institutionalized Violet may be understood best on hoary grounds of ‘national
interest’. But why then no change after 1936, when invasion of Ethiopia lifted
scales from the eyes? Wasn’t her act from that point on prescient? After Italy’s
entry into the Axis and opportunistic invasions of Nice, Albania, Greece and
Tunis, mightn’t she have been embraced as a heroine? In 1943, when the
Fascist council deposed its leader, or 1945, when his Salò Republic collapsed
and he and his mistress were strung up by the heels, couldn’t a septuagenarian
heart-patient have been released? Was she simply victim of a grand family’s
urge to keep embarrassment hidden, akin to five maternal cousins of the
Queen whom Saunders notes, shut into asylum and effaced from Burke’s?
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That would be, relatively speaking, the easy answer. Larger questions may
have to do with how regimes deal with unstable persons who might once
have been useful for covert policy or national hedging-of-bets. We know how
literary apparatchiks persuaded Ezra Pound to plead insanity to evade trial
for his support of Fascism; he too was locked away and freed to return to
beloved Italy only when a snag-toothed oldie descending towards cryptic
silence. Saunders wondered in Who Paid the Piper? to what extent James
Jesus Angleton, “legendary” counter-intelligence chief of the CIA, had a hand
in Pound’s sequestration and release (6). Was Angleton interested merely
because he read poetry, or had the author of Jefferson and/or Mussolini long
been someone the powers-that-be kept in sight, lest fortunes should change
and realpolitik dictate new directions? Could Violet Gibson have been in
an analogous position, if in relation to Fascism reversed? If so, why did her
minders not let the harmless bird fly? Carelessness, or did some inconvenient
old truth make it seem risky? n
STODDARD MARTIN is the author of books on Nietzsche, Wagner and Byron
The Woman Who Shot Mussolini
Frances Stonor Saunders. Faber & Faber, London, 2010, 384pp, hb, £20
NOTES
1. See John Woodhouse, Gabriele D’Annunzio: Defiant Archangel. Oxford: Clarendon,
1998, pages 273-89. D’Annunzio left Italy in 1912 to evade debts and settled near
Paris. In 1915 the French government ‘restrained his creditors’ and encouraged him
to return to Italy, along with a battalion led by the grandson of Garibaldi
2. It was widely believed that Italy had been promised these lands in 1914 by a secret
Treaty of London
3. D’Annunzio’s longest and most important novel, Il Fuoco (1899), pivots around
Wagner’s death in Venice
4. Saunders mentions the event in The Woman Who Shot Mussolini, pages 103-4, but
unlike commentators at the time and since sees nothing sinister in it. In general she
is not interested in D’Annunzio, whom she dismisses with a quote from a secondary
source as an “unreadable” writer, producing “trashily plotted novels about supermen
figures who are transparently the author himself”. In his day international literati
felt somewhat differently, as essays by Henry James, Arthur Symons, James Joyce
and Ezra Pound inter alia would attest
5. Surname resembling that of the present CIA Director, as readers of Who Paid the
Piper? might find piquant
6. London: Granta, 1999, pages 248-51. Saunders moves into her speculations via Allen
Ginsberg’s 1978 fantasia “T. S. Eliot Entered My Dreams”
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If... (1968)
F
orty-two years after it was made, If… still seems immediate and
modern, retaining its ability to arrest and hold the viewer’s attention,
both by its acerbic script and by its outstanding photography, even
.
if some of the film’s surreal episodes might seem at times just to be
devices to bypass problems of continuity.
In the film’s opening sequence, Mick Travis, played by the subtly offensive
Malcolm MacDowell, returns to his public school at the beginning of term,
wearing a cloak, a large black hat and with a muffler concealing his face.
“Who do you think you are? Guy Fawkes?” someone asks, a hint at the
film’s theme. When Mick removes his scarf in the bathroom, it is to shave
off a Mexican bandit moustache he has grown in the holidays, symbolising
freedom as he reverts to an existence of routine repression. His room is
decorated with posters of counter-culture heroes and film stars. Meanwhile,
the prefects (“the Whips”), arrogant and domineering, are in the corridors
directing the frightened new boys (“the Scum”) to their new quarters.
Problems between Mick, his friends and the prefects rise almost at once to
the surface, the prefects feeling their power base in their minor kingdom
threatened by the unwelcome message Mick brings from the wider world
– that they are an artificial creation of shrinking power that will soon be
eclipsed and irrelevant. One of the prefects says to Travis:
“There’s something indecent about you. The way you slouch about. You
think we don’t notice you with your hands in your pockets.”
In a following lyrical scene, Mick Travis and a friend, Robinson, escape
by motorbike to a transport cafe where the beautiful waitress [Christine
Noonan] and Mick fall in love and where in the first example of full frontal
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nudity passed by the British censor, she rides standing on the back of the bike
through the countryside like an updated vision of bare-breasted revolution,
hair streaming in the wind, half painting by Delacroix, half Boudicca.
When Mick and Robinson return, the prefects pounce on Mick to punish
him for his crime of wrong attitude. He and his two allies are first forced
to take cold showers when they refuse to have haircuts. They are caned by
the prefects, Mick with especial brutality. Later, they fire into a vending
machine during a school corps military exercise. Mick shoots the school
padre. The headmaster, unable to imagine anything morally more significant
than the continued smooth running of the school, shrugs the episode off
and sentences them as punishment to clean up some cellars. Among the
debris of old trophies, mounted antlers and assorted memorabilia, they find a
cache of arms and grenades, perhaps intended to be symbolic of the residual
aggression that had once lain, buried and dormant, at the core of empire.
On Founder’s Day, while an Old Boy general is pontificating to the assembly
in the school chapel, a fire starts under the podium and the thick smoke,
which seems to have been generated by the words of the general, drives the
congregation out into the open, where Mick and his friends open fire with
Bren guns from the roof opposite. Under the direction of the general, the
congregation procures weapons from the school armoury. The headmaster
fumbles forward, reasonable to the end, shouting “Cease fire” and trying to
initiate a negotiation, but the girl at Mick’s side draws a revolver and calmly
shoots him through the head. The firing re-commences and the film ends,
guns blazing between two irreconcilable camps.
Director Lindsay Anderson (1923-1994) attended Cheltenham College
as a boarder, where If... would later be filmed. He went on to Oxford and
then returned to India to work for military intelligence in Delhi in 1945. On
his return to England he co-founded the cinema magazine Sequence, later
writing for Sight and Sound. He made documentaries, one of which won
an Oscar in 1954, and also became a respected theatre director. His This
Sporting Life (1963) was among the principal “New British Cinema” films,
(along with 1960’s Look Back in Anger by Reisz and 1962’s The Loneliness
of the Long Distance Runner by Tony Richardson), but it was both a
commercial and critical failure. It was only in If… that all the elements fused
for Anderson into his single masterpiece, a film which won the 1968
Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival and is still critically acclaimed.
It was in this film, too, that he addressed most successfully his chief
preoccupations – the abuse of power and society’s hostility to unsanctioned
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experience, even if the film’s revolutionary posture is perhaps fatally
undermined by its unconscious nostalgia for the security of imperial power
and the now despised British Empire, which had once been supplied with
functionaries by just such public schools. What made If… additionally radical
was the sheer hatred manifested by the director and the script writers for the
establishment figures, who were ripe not merely for ridicule but for slaughter.
Mick Travis says:
“One man can change the world with a bullet in the right place…
Anderson divides the film into eight episodes, introduced by titles, to assert
a distinction between cinema and reality. It is the Brechtian device of
Verfremdungseffekt (alienation effect), a borrowing from Brecht’s theory of
drama applied to cinema, and had been used in a similar way by Jean Luc
Godard, equally influenced by Brecht, in Vivre Sa Vie as early as 1962. The
chronology of these chapters might almost be interchangeable initially, but
they portray the drift towards rebellion.
This deliberate dissociation is, however, in another of the film’s inherent
contradictions, in conflict with its surreal undercurrent, which flows so deeply
on a subconscious level that it is frequently impossible to distinguish between
what is real and what is imagination – a distinction that Lindsay Anderson
anyway maintained did not exist. The battles that Anderson posited had
already been won in a way. By 1968, the Empire was little more than a memory,
as was the regimentalisation its continued operation had for centuries
required of the English.
Many, especially the young, seemed to feel themselves part of a wave
of liberation that had risen to sweep away the suffocatingly conformist
world that Anderson depicts so mockingly. Popular culture had become
increasingly iconoclastic with an indiscriminate appetite for the destruction
of principles once revered. In England, this was expressed in rock music,
film or a sardonic, mechanical art influenced by Pavlovian theories of reflex
gratification, expounded by Warhol and others.
The film suffers from this sense of being tugged simultaneously in two
directions, hovering additionally between the drug-enhanced spirit of the
1960s and the perspective of an earlier generation of leaden, implacable
revolutionaries who supported Stalin unwaveringly and believed that Europe
was ready for its own communist revolutions. Anderson, though not exactly a
Stalinist, was of this earlier generation and may have been uncomfortable with
the more hedonistic aspects of the 1960s. The story is a parable, seen in similar
forms in contemporary films such as One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, La
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Dolce Vita, Easy Rider or Truffaut’s Les Quatre Cent Coups, to name just four.
It is the tale of the intelligent hero marooned in a mental exile, overcoming
seemingly insuperable odds by the exercise of skill and cunning.
It is additionally the location of a film about rebellion in a public school,
with all its mediaeval ritual, that makes the film so distinctively English. Jean
Vigo’s 1935 film, Zéro de Conduite (“Zero for Behaviour”) clearly influenced
If… but is entirely different in tone. In Zéro de Conduite, the film ends with the
pupils bouncing insultingly over the roofs after pelting the local dignitaries
with harmless debris, whereas in If… the rebels use bullets and grenades.
They are playing for keeps.
Yet there are certain underlying assumptions in the film that might seem
less than revolutionary. One may be the unstated hypothesis that revolution
is an affair best left to the ruling classes. Perhaps the choice of the school as
allegorical headquarters has something in it, too, of the traditional English
escape in times of stress to the nursery. One thinks of Graham Greene always
packing his childhood teddy bear when travelling to some new haunt of terror.
But, if it goes without saying in the film that revolution is best left to those
born to rule, the film’s prime motif is also a sort of aestheticism, appalled
by the crudeness of the ancien regime. Its battle hymn would have been
more likely to have been written by Shelley than Mayakovsky [Editor’s Note:
Vladimir Mayakovsky, 1893-1930, was a Russian Futurist poet and playwright
who supported the Soviets before being driven to suicide by them – if it was
suicide].
Why the title If…? Like Kipling, Lindsay Anderson was born in India but
educated in an English public school, which they both loathed equally. Is it
a reference to the poem (still cited as the most popular poem in England) by
this critically neglected, though frequently irritating, poet, who articulated
the vision of a just imperialism where all in the Empire, of whatever colour
or creed, had equal protection under the law? The title might equally be an
ironic commentary on England’s diminished status or a sarcastic plea for
Kipling’s anachronistic precepts to be applied to the revolution yet to come.
Mick Travis says in the film,
“What stands if freedom fails? Who dies if England lives?”
Forgetting the rhetoric, it might just have been a plea for the radical future
that Lindsay Anderson foresaw, or hoped for, in the last colony left still
standing after the collapse of the British Empire – England itself. n
PETER STARK is a London-based poet
69
Turner
The relative merits of
Marxism
DEREK TURNER struggles to like a congenial columnist’s less congenial kin,
but admires his evocation of a lost Zeitgeist
A
ll novels are semi-autobiographical, although novelists will
often demur and claim their characters are composites. But Roy
Kerridge is unapologetic about plucking real people from his
.
family’s past and serving them up for public degustation, with
only the most cursory of disguises to differentiate fiction from family tree.
There are dangers in such brazen borrowing – first, that the author’s surviving
family might not appreciate such a blaze of halogen into their antecessors
– but so strong-minded a clan is presumably inured to public attention.
The second peril is that the ancestors held up for us to examine coolly
and from all angles may not appeal to us. This would be immaterial if the
book’s purposes were either confessionalism or character assassination,
designed for bulk purchase by viewers of Oprah Winfrey. But laundrywashing is not the purpose of the self-published Triumphs, which bears all
the Kerridge trademarks of keen observation plus kindliness, impishness but
also intelligence and countervailing compassion. Even where the author does
not agree with what his forebears did, which is more often than not, he wants
us to understand why they did it.
Reviewing so personal a book is also risky for reviewers who have
a high regard for the author; there is always the possibility that they will
inadvertently offend the author by misreading or failing to appreciate some
cherished ancestor.
So permit me to place on record here that I regard Roy Kerridge as a
brilliantly off-beat thinker, writer and folklorist, a latter-day John Betjeman
who is also eminently civilized and clubbable. I concur fully with the Salisbury
Review that Kerridge is “a worthy successor to Defoe, Cobbett or Priestley”
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Turner
and with the much-missed Michael Wharton that Kerridge is a “genius”.
I feel the need to make these prefatory remarks because try as I might I
could not bring myself to admire a single one of the author’s relations, at least
as they are portrayed in Triumphs. Even those who manifestly meant well
I found at best annoying. The essential problem for me is that they were all
more or less Marxists, some of them prominent Bolsheviki – and for someone
who has never been drawn to socialism such a multi-generational tic seems
at best perverse.
By far the most sympathetic figures are Adolf Frankel and his daughter
Thea. (The author’s ancestors on one side of his family are vaguely east
European Jewish – Adolf turns to Marxism mostly out of his “inherited fear
of pogroms”.) These two appear to have been utterly good-hearted and welladjusted, with a genuine desire to help others and improve the world. Yet even
these two relative paragons are guilty of shocking political naivety and, in the
case of Adolf, the grossest hypocrisy – given the choice of living in Middlesex
or Moscow, he opts to continue preaching the wonders of Marxism from a
comfortable villa in Wembley. Other relatives are simply atrocious – whether
as aides to Trotsky and Parvus Helphand or mere domestic tyrants, like
Adolf’s wife Magda, who comes across as being utterly without redeeming
features. The only good thing about these progenitors is that through some
inexplicable alchemy of genes-plus-history-plus-culture-plus-reactionagainst-his-parents there has somehow resulted the incomparable Roy
Kerridge, a blinking, balding, diminutive, dishevelled dispatcher of dragons
and celebrant of the irrelevant and outmoded.
Kerridge has written and drawn cartoons for many publications, writing on
a bewildering array of subjects in a direct and sometimes even childlike style
(the loathly word “tummies” makes an appearance in Triumphs, as does “Up
tails and away! was the rabbits’ motto”) that masks mischief and astuteness.
Thus the Webb siblings were “preposterous”; thus the unsatisfactory nature
of leftwing history, “in which things happened for no reason because wars
and kings had been excluded”; thus the selfishness and treachery of many
Marxian intellectuals; thus the incongruous intellectual nexus between
“Bloomsbury and Free Love” and Stalin’s “Russian Paradise”, in which latter
utopia floppy-hatted aristocratic ladies and bisexuality would have met with
little encouragement.
This book makes abundantly clear that the Triumphs of Communism
were not triumphs at all but trials, which not only harmed the world greatly
(and are still harming the world) but also the author’s family, too many of
71
Turner
whose members were soured and uprooted through obstinate adherence to
nostrums as tedious as they were terrible, and as idiotic as they were almost
inevitable for a transplanted Mitteleuropaïsch, middlebrow family during
that period. (Old habits die hard amongst the Kerridges; his mother married
again, this time a West African activist in thrall to an almost identical brand
of socialism.)
There are too many miscellaneous insights and good descriptions to
enumerate – such as the strange similarities between communism and
capitalism, the advantages of grammar schools, what interwar England felt
like, and the way in which Britain’s anti-communists were systematically if
subtly excluded from influence. But most of all this is an enlightening enquiry
into the roots and fruits of a family’s alienation from orthodoxies, including as
a subtext the author’s own alienation from his family’s and society’s leftwing
orthodoxies.
As a kind of genealogical Pilgrim’s Progress, and also because someone
as unique as Roy Kerridge should not have to resort to self-publication,
Triumphs of Communism merits the attention of all who wish to understand
the fatal attraction of communism to so many talented people at a critical
juncture in our history, whose ancient actions are still reverberating to our
detriment. n
DEREK TURNER is the editor of the Quarterly Review
Triumphs of Communism
Roy Kerridge, Custom Books, 2009, 208pps, £23 hardback, £9 paperback
Quarry Printing
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72
Glockenspiel  the BBC’s
unsung innovator
Millson
STUART MILLSON is absorbed by an appreciation of the too little known
William Glock
D
uring the early 1950s, it was said that music in Britain had
become dull and unadventurous. The Henry Wood Promenade
Concerts (run by the BBC since 1927) had, during the post-war
.
period adopted something of a routine: an overture, concerto and
symphony – or, when an evening was devoted to a choral work, a well-known
biblical cantata, or Coleridge-Taylor’s Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast... usually
conducted by Sir Malcolm Sargent. It could also be said that the performers
(although very fine indeed) represented a somewhat narrow range of music,
and provided a predictable repertoire of the great, but greatly-overplayed,
classics. Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto may have been performed for the
100th time at the Proms, but it was not until 1966 that a Russian orchestra
appeared at the festival – the first ensemble from beyond the shores of
England to be included in a season. It was even something of an occasion
when Sir John Barbirolli’s Hallé Orchestra travelled to South Kensington
from the faraway Free Trade Hall, Manchester.
From 1959 until 1972, a complete transformation of the staid British
musical landscape took place – an upheaval in the world of classical music
every bit as remarkable and, perhaps, unsettling as developments in the wider
society. And it was one man who was responsible for this unlikely revolution
– a mild-mannered, highly intellectual, powerful BBC functionary and arts
administrator, Sir William Glock. To the general reader (especially today)
Glock’s name may mean very little, and the world he inhabited – essentially
the world of concert and radio programme planning – seems of interest
only to particularly dedicated followers of classical music. But it was Glock’s
actions in these years that brought the European modernists and avant
73
Millson
garde – Schoenberg to Stockhausen, Dallapiccola and Boulez – into the
mainstream, and which provided (what was to become) a permanent platform
for their British followers and imitators. Glock changed our music, brought
new standards into the concert hall, and set a cultural ‘correctness’ which few
have had the courage to challenge.
But there is also another side to the story, and these years of upheaval
and innovation have been brought back to life in a genial, informative, yet
cautious memoir by Leo Black, a writer on musical matters and programmes
producer who worked for Radio 3, rose under Glock’s tutelage, and who
came to know some of the most famous performers and composers of the
1960s, 70s and 80s. And I mention the 1980s here for a reason, for although
a successor had been appointed by this time, Glock’s work and beliefs lived
on; his legacy – and the path of the future – firmly and clearly established.
As sacred as Clause 4 of the Labour Party constitution, pre-Blair, the creed of
modernism has scarcely been altered – even in this age of brandings, ratings
and accessibility. In 2010, a BBC commission at the Proms can mean only one
thing: atonality (or watered-down atonality) from an inner circle of modernist
initiates. Or so it sometimes appears to the outsider. It could be argued that a
second revolution or blowing away of the cobwebs might be necessary.
Leo Black’s recollections help us to acquire an understanding of this
subject, because they tell us how the Glock-era changes came about. For
example, the author introduces us to a remarkable group of personalities,
chosen by the BBC’s Controller of Music (a title which says a great deal in
itself) and who gravitated toward his court, deep within the labyrinth of
Broadcasting House. A host of European émigrés, most notably the somewhat
Svengali-like Austrian intellectual, Hans Keller (or Hans Killer as he became
known in Private Eye) bolstered Glock’s enthusiasm for modernism, and
possibly even intensified the BBC’s revolutionary new approach to music.
But the memoir also disproves some of the myths about Glock and his
associates – not least the idea that all traditional, symphonic music, especially
by English composers, was undermined or blacklisted. The author mentions
that the Controller of Music was at pains to point out to his critics that in 1961,
Radio 3 had broadcast 26 performances of works by that symphonist of the
Chiltern Hills, Edmund Rubbra, as against just three pieces by Pierre Boulez
and one by Stockhausen. (Leo Black might also have noted the inclusion in
the 1960s’ Proms seasons of music by William Alwyn, and commissions
from Sir Malcolm Arnold – not to mention the stimulating juxtaposition of
early English music alongside the visionary choral works of Sir Edward Elgar
74
BANKSY
Millson
– Glock highlighting a “narrative” or evolution of music, not just a repetition
of the certainties associated with the main European 19th-century classics.)
Above all, the memoir shows what a stimulating career its author enjoyed
– and there are rare, informal pen-portraits of famous, even legendary
performers such as Dame Janet Baker, John Shirley-Quirk, and Robert Tear;
the composers Robert Simpson (himself part of the BBC staff) and Hugh
Wood; and professional friendships with broadcasters in foreign radio
stations which resulted in Radio 3 audiences hearing fine performances from
Orchestra Hall, Chicago and a British music festival in Milwaukee. Yet the
reader will also be struck by the deeply intellectual culture (élitism in today’s
language) which existed in this section of the BBC. This alone must be Glock’s
enduring epitaph. For despite the bias he showed toward atonality, the BBC
Controller of Music from 1959 to 1972 created new horizons for music and
concert programming.
It is, perhaps, difficult to review Mr. Black’s book without passing a final
word on the figure who dominates its pages, and on the contrast between
the BBC of the 1960s and the Corporation with which we are familiar today.
Whatever one’s opinion of Glock’s sympathies and passions, there can be
no doubt that this remarkable and controversial man left something for us
of a somewhat higher nature than the 24-hour-a-day, high-definition drivel
which constitutes much of the radio and television output of these glittering
yet empty times of the early 21st century. n
STUART MILLSON writes on literature and music for a variety of
publications
BBC Music in the Glock Era and After
Leo Black, Plumbago Books and Arts, London 2010, 190pp, pb, £17.99
75
Stove
Australia:
the way we swig now
R J STOVE downs a recent history of Antipodean booze consumption
I
t was at Rome, on the 15th of October 1764, as I sat musing amidst the
ruins of the Capitol, while the barefooted friars were singing vespers in
the Temple of Jupiter, that the idea of writing the decline and fall of the
.
city first started to my mind.” Thus, of course, Edward Gibbon.
It was at Melbourne, on the 26th of January 2010 (the Australia Day holiday),
as some of us sat musing upon an outer suburban train heading to the city centre,
that we had our own quasi-Gibbonian insight. The journey cannot have begun
later than 10:15 am, but the carriages were already packed overwhelmingly with
flag-brandishing teens in near-terminal stages of screaming alcoholic elation.
Alcoholic elation at 10:15 am – on a public holiday when, hitherto, the main
challenge for most Australians had been to stay awake.
Whence such a 180-degree cultural reversal? It endowed with extra
relevance the already terrifying conclusion to Evelyn Waugh’s Put Out More
Flags: “There is a new spirit abroad. I see it on every side.”
Enter Ross Fitzgerald, the Queensland professor and self-confessed
alcoholic primarily responsible for this new history of Australian booze,
although his collaborators Trevor L Jordan, Anna Blainey and Christine
Ravkin must also be acknowledged. With Australia’s Prime Minister Kevin
Rudd issuing repeated warnings about intoxication’s perils (and threatening to
re-impose a legal drinking age of 21), the book could not be timelier.
Particularly for youth. Alcohol accounts for one-quarter of all Australian
hospitalisations in the 15-24 age range. It kills, in a typical week, four Australians
under 25. Professor Fitzgerald does his research thoroughly (as anyone who
has ever had a book reviewed by him will know), writes briskly, and tells a tale
all the more devastating because of its statistics-laden even-handedness.
It could be argued that Australia was doomed to have, shall we say, ‘issues’
76
Stove
with drink from the very first convict’s initial footstep on Australian soil in 1788.
Successive governors of New South Wales battled, mostly in vain, to control
drinking. Philip Gidley King, Governor 1800-06, told his botanist friend Sir
Joseph Banks that he wanted spirits ‘totally done away with’ in the colony. In
this, as in much else, King (himself an enthusiastic toper) failed. Under The
Influence asks:
“Why did early New South Wales have so much trouble with spirits,
when the use of spirits was in decline in Britain at the time the colony
was founded?”
Whatever the answer, the trouble persisted, though the spirits themselves
differed. Rum ruled, beer-addiction came later.
From the start, severe restrictions on drinking of rum existed; from the start,
they were merrily flouted. Sydney’s 1808 Rum Rebellion – which drove from the
governor’s office the post-Bounty Captain Bligh – was planned, though not led,
by a teetotaller: John Macarthur, pioneer of the national wool industry.
This ambiguous Antipodean relationship between drinkers and non-drinkers
would prove typical. In 1977, Governor-General Sir John Kerr – who two years
previously had dismissed the Federal cabinet led by Gough Whitlam – incurred
yelling-headline disrepute, and had to resign, when he appeared at a Melbourne
racetrack after over-imbibing. Yet most of the journalists who excoriated Kerr
would themselves have drunk far more copiously than he.
Is it that Aussies drink more than others do, or simply that drinking
preoccupies them more? Actually, their per capita grog intake is less than might
be supposed. The Irish, Danes, French, Belgians, Czechs, Germans, and Finns (as
well as, yes, the English) leave Australians far behind. Then why is drunkenness
– not drinking per se, but drunkenness – almost inescapable in Australia, in
a way that it has never recently been on most of the Continent? Why are the
downtown areas of Sydney and Melbourne as infested with spewing lads and
ladettes (they manifestly were not ten years ago) as London and Birmingham?
Sex differences counted immensely, no doubt of that. Even the heartiest
male Australian drinker used to regard inebriated women with repugnance.
And women dominated Australian temperance movements, which in practice
were mostly teetotal movements.
‘Until the nineteenth century,’ Under The Influence reveals, ‘total abstinence
from alcohol was not a common demand.’ In the 1880s, that changed. One
pledge card read “We bind ourselves that others may be free”. The gamble
paid off. National drinking (except in Western Australia) declined between
1885 and 1908, spirits by more than 50%, beer substantially though much less
dramatically.
77
Stove
America’s ‘noble experiment’ had its supporters – sometimes parliamentarians – Down Under. Canberra banned strong drink for its first year
(1927-28) as Australia’s capital. Between the wars every Australian state held
at least one referendum on whether alcohol should be outlawed. No state did
outlaw it; and Australia’s individual dries – unlike their US counterparts –
shied at opposing home distilleries. Nevertheless, even in rough-and-tough
Queensland with its Tammany Hall political culture, 40% of voters wanted
prohibition. In more genteel Victoria it was 42%.
Protestant-versus-Catholic antagonism has always been edgier in Victoria
than anywhere else in the nation, and such edginess undeniably affected the
alcohol issue, among Victorians as among other Australians. The Women’s
Christian Temperance Union tended to be Presbyterian-CongregationalistMethodist (and very censorious of any Anglicans who even sipped alcohol).
Among local Catholics, the rise of Chesterbellocian beliefs – “beer for beer’s
sake”, as Bernard Shaw put it sarcastically – led to much mindless quaffing,
with a specific ‘at least we’re not puritans’ ideology. Neither the quaffing nor
the mindlessness has altogether died out. As late as 2002, a middle-aged male
soak told one student at a Melbourne catechetics class:
“When you become a Catholic, you can get as pissed as we are!”
What Australia has never possessed is the USA’s persistent notion of
public male drinking being inherently disgraceful. (Strange, in this context,
to learn that the iconic Foster’s Lager was actually devised by two Americans.)
After World War II, mass drinking – which amid the Depression had tapered
off – revived with a vengeance. In pubs until 1967, we had the nightmarish
phenomenon of the ‘six o’clock swill’. As closing time approached, “men would
actually urinate while waiting to get six or seven or eight glasses of beer at
the one time”. Drink-driving, today a faux-pas among most Australian adults,
retained two generations back a complete social respectability. (With the
Australian young, alas, it flourishes unchecked. Last January in Mill Park, a
Melbourne suburb, one car accident killed five blind-drunk teenagers. )
Re-examining the glamorous 1950s booze adverts which Under The Influence
helpfully reproduces (analogues to the ‘Marlboro Man’ smoking commercials),
we may well marvel that every Australian did not spend dawn to dusk shickered.
One much more recent photo in the book (1998) stands out for its horror. The
horror’s cause lies not in Brisbane Broncos rugby league star Kevin Walters
– who appears holding a half-strength beer in a perfectly dignified style – but
in the stance of his drinking companion, who sculls a full-strength beer with
his head thrown back at an angle of almost 90 degrees from his neck, like any
lager lout. His name is … John Howard, former Prime Minister.
78
Stove
Some modern youthful Australian binge-drinking could be a reversion to
late 18th century attitudes. Unfortunately fashionable spirits have virtually
no taste of alcohol. Thus, the young airhead can knock back stupendous
quantities without realising it. What is new, and odious, is the female bingedrinking constituency. Twice as many young women binge-drink now as did
in 2000. (Melbourne’s Age newspaper, in 2009, ran the characteristic headline:
“Drunk chicks: the accidental feminists?”) Even in 1980s Sydney, hardly a
byword for Singaporean oppression, female binge-drinking remained unheardof. Females wanting to lap the sauce did so behind closed doors.
To set against this civilisational decline, a few hitherto accepted forms
of behaviour are no longer generally sanctioned. Booze-propelled domestic
violence was, within the memory of any Australian forty years old or more,
widely considered trivial. Now it would destroy the career of any white
Australian husband even suspected of attempting it against his spouse. (On
Aboriginal reservations, this cannot be said with any certainty.)
There are even signs that governmental crackdowns on youthful booze
intake will work, if only through actually enforcing regulations already on the
statute books. This enforcement is still too rare. No 14 year old Australian girls,
unless they looked as immature as did Shirley Temple in her heyday, would
have problems obtaining any spirits from an urban bottle shop. So the laxity
prevailing in rural Australia must be almost beyond comprehension.
As always, we need to trust that enough people appreciate the need to change
philosophies rather than laws. No law was passed which suddenly prevented
men from thrashing their wives; instead, social moeurs shifted. Child-molesters
behaved every bit as illegally 30 years ago as now; yet public awareness of their
antics has hugely increased. Accordingly, perhaps, the high-school trollop who
now ejects half her innards into the nearest gutter at Melbourne’s Flinders Street
railway station will eventually seem to her boon companions as uncool as a dogtorturer, or (possibly worse still) a 1980s video clip. We can but hope.
Under The Influence should emphatically assist readers in grasping The
Way We Swig Now. Sadly it suggests that little extra curative insight has been
gained since MAD Magazine published – circa 1971 – its cautionary winebottle label: “Continuous drinking may lead to continuous drinking”. n
R J STOVE is author of The Unsleeping Eye (Encounter Books, San Francisco,
2003). He lives in Melbourne and is a Contributing Editor of The American
Conservative
Under The Influence, Ross Fitzgerald, HarperCollins, Sydney, 325 pp, Aus$35
79
Uncollected Folk
Uncollected Folk
I
n the last issue, I quoted several children’s playground rhymes
heard at a Sussex village school in the 1960s. My sisters attended
that school; later they moved to London, and had children of their
.
own. One of these children is a girl called Omalara, who went to
a comprehensive school with a strong tradition of girls’ playground songs
and games.
When Omalara was 15, four years ago, I found that she was still singing
and playing with the other girls at “break”. English rhymes had by now
become merged with those of Jamaica. I think that the Jamaican influence
caused the girls to play ring-games long after all-white playgrounds had
given them up.
I asked my niece to sing the songs and mime the actions, and this is what
I heard.
“Arty, Arty, I can do karate!
Arty go whoops! I’m sorry.
Arty, Arty, go in, go out.
Go side, go side, go.
In our side, side let me…”
This is really a young girl’s game, and I don’t know it. I’ll do a clapping one,
Mary Mac.
“Miss Mary Mac, Mac, Mac!
All dressed in black, black, black!
With silver buttons, buttons, buttons
All down her back, back, back.
80
Uncollected Folk
She cannot read, read, read.
She cannot write, write, write.
All day she smokes, smokes, smokes
Her father’s pipe, pipe, pipe.
She fell down stairs, stairs, stairs
And banged her head, head, head
And then next day, day, day
She was dead, dead, dead!”
Here’s another one.
“Tweet, tweet and away we go!
So rocking and tocking all day long
Rocking and tocking and singing a song.
All the little girls from JBC,
Rocking little robin go tweet, tweet, tweet.
So rock your body, tweet, tweet, tweet, tweet
So rock your body, tweet, tweet, tweet, tweet
So freeze! Don’t skin your dutty teeth at me!”
That means ‘Don’t suck your teeth with that scornful noise’. No, I didn’t
know there was a record a bit like that.
This one’s the best – it’s a ring game.
“Here comes Mrs Marley in the ring, oh cha cha!
Here comes Mrs Marley in the ring, oh cha cha!
Here comes Mrs Marley in the ring
And she opens the door and lets herself in!
She does er am cha, cha om cha, cha in the ring!
She does er am cha, cha om cha, cha in the ring!
And she opens the door and lets herself out…
…Wait a minute, are you going to put these in a book? You can’t do that! It’s
stealing! Give me them back!”
Looking deeply troubled, Omalara tried to grab at the writing, but I
escaped and here it is. Her reaction was exactly the same as that of an old
lady who sang ballads to Sir Walter Scott. n
ROY KERRIDGE is a freelance writer and novelist. A review of his novel
Triumphs of Communism appears on page 70
81
Taki’s Universe
W
hich evokes a romantic memory better, a fragrance or a melody?
The latter, I am sure, despite the times I’ve felt a tug at my heart
when some sweet young thing breezed by me followed by the
aroma of Chanel No 5, the favourite scent of my first great love
back in the Fifties.
Music and lyrics are a hell of a combination for nostalgia nuts like myself.
In fact they are as lethal as a left-right combination from the great Ray
Robinson, the original Sugar Ray, whose boxing during the 40s, 50s and even
60s turned a brutal sport into what’s known as the sweet science. I recently
purchased a book, a catalogue really, about the complete lyrics of Johnny
Mercer, to go with my other books on Cole Porter’s words, Irving Berlin’s,
Lorenz Hart’s and Oscar Hammerstein II. Mercer is less well known than
Porter or Gershwin, but he was more prolific and he outlived most of his
famous fellow lyricists.
The reason I buy these books is because they remind me of my youth
and the girls I went out with. It is as simple as that. Each tune reminds me
of a girl and a certain time of my life, just as certain quartiers in Paris do.
Take for example Mercer’s “In the Cool, Cool, Cool of the Evening”. I was in
school, frustrated as hell, if you know what I mean, and my parents took me
out to a restaurant in Greenwich, Connecticut for dinner. A beautiful 17 or
18 year-old was dancing with her beau to that song. I was 15 and fell madly
in love. She never gave me a glance, but her memory stayed. So every time I
hear Johnny’s “Cool, Cool, Cool in the Evening” song I’m back being 15, in a
beautiful New England restaurant watching “Daisy Buchanan” fox trot.
“And the Angels Sing” saw Mercer at his most chameleonesque, but to
me it meant one thing only: Juan Les Pins, 1952, and Mary, who was 18 to my
82
Taki’s Universe
16, but it was my first time in the South of France and first time lucky, as they
say. Mercer was not as witty as Porter or Hart, but knew how to incorporate
the slang of the day into his songs. “Jeepers creepers! Where’d ya get those
peepers?” caught the mood of a victorious America and the emerging Negro
jive. He was also the master of the economical line, with “Laura” and “Autumn
Leaves” being prime examples.
The latter used to bring instant depression. Autumn meant only one
thing. The summer was over and I had to go back to boarding school.
But there were other songs that made one dizzy with happiness. “That Old
Black Magic”, which Billy Daniels made his own, referred to Mercer’s romance
with Judy Garland, including a concealed allusion to her sexual preference,
but to me it meant one thing only: the first time I was free to drink in a
nightclub in New York, and a free swinging blonde model that came with me
once I had told her I was 30 and independently rich.
Mercer collaborated successfully with my great hero, Hoagy Carmichael,
a jazzman from Indiana, whose wife, Rita, I fell madly in love with when I was
20 and she was in Miami Beach waiting for her divorce from him. “Why do
you want to divorce a man whose music you listen to non-stop?” I asked her
one day. Rita told me I wouldn’t understand, being just a kid. She was part Red
Indian and so sexy I couldn’t play tennis when she watched me. I never saw
her again after that great winter of ‘56 in Miami, but every time I hear Hoagy
at the piano I think of her and suffer as no one has ever suffered before.
So, all you romantics out there. Stop listening to what I call “vuvuzela”
sounds, that cacophony which young people today refer to as pop music. It
has no melody, no romance, no tune, no quiver, no mood, no love, no nuthin’,
as they used to say down south. More important, however, is the disconnect
with love and that long-lost girl from one’s past. What kind of woman would
she be if you remembered her from a Mick Jagger noise? Or that ghastly Alice
Cooper or the even ghastlier John Lennon?
Music stopped for me when the Beatles arrived in the early Sixties, as
did my nostalgia for anything past those years. Stick to “On the Atchison,
Topeka and the Santa Fe”, “Blues in the Night”, “One for My Baby”, “Come
Rain or Come Shine” and other great favourites of the 40s and 50s and the
girls you were in love with will come back to you, as fresh as they were back
then. Trust me on this. Nostalgia is the neatest trick of all. No one gets old,
it’s Shangri-La all over again but you can travel. And if any of you are younger
than me, which most of you are, then use your imagination and follow Johnny
Mercer’s song which said: “Ac-centchu-ate the Positive”. Good luck. n
83
Stevenson
POSTSCRIPTUM
Now I am dead,
no words,
just a wine
of my choosing.
Drink to my
mute consent,
my rite of
dissolving.
Over my chalk
eyelids and wax skin
let a wild
reticence in.
Not a tear
or false look.
Poems, stay there
in your book.
Should passion
attend me,
let it flow freely
through Messiaen’s
End of Time Quartet:
unendurable riddles
for the clarinet,
resolved in a fiddle’s
remorseless,
forgiving ascent.
ANN STEVENSON is the author of Poems, 1955-2005 (Bloodaxe)
84

Summer 2010 - The Quarterly Review

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