Munich – The Edge Of War: glossing over the British Empire

Munich – The Edge Of War: glossing over the British Empire
by Ian Sinclair
Morning Star
4 February 2022

A pretty good, sometimes gripping, political thriller, the new movie Munich – The Edge Of War, based on Robert Harris’s 2017 novel, includes a couple of obvious howlers.

First, the film’s Adolf Hitler is so bad it becomes comical. Surely, filmmakers understand Bruno Ganz as the Fuhrer in the 2004 German film Downfall irrevocably raised the bar when it comes to onscreen portrayals of the Nazi leader? Second, amazingly the filmmakers chose August Diehl to play a slightly manic, slightly comic SS officer, after he had played a slightly manic, slightly comic SS officer in Quentin Tarantino’s 2009 movie Inglourious Basterds. Is the pool of decent German actors really so small?

Furthermore, a couple of casting choices seem particularly significant. Cecil Syers, a civil servant in Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s Downing Street, is played by Black British actor Raphael Sowole, while British Asian actress Anjli Mohindra plays Joan Menzies. Initially presented as the best typist in Downing Street, she is – spoiler alert! – later revealed to be the niece of a senior MI6 official.

Whether these are examples of “colourblind” casting is unclear. In a recent interview Mohindra notes “There were lots of South-Asian civil servants working for the British government at that time”, and specifically mentions British South-Asian spy Noor Inayat Khan as an inspiration for her work on Munich.

For the record, I have no problem with Black and ethnic minority actors taking roles that would traditionally be given to white actors. I loved Dev Patel as the titular character in 2019’s The Personal History of David Copperfield; the ethnically diverse cast of playful period drama Bridgerton made perfect sense to me; I was mystified by Laurence Fox’s criticism of a Sikh soldier appearing in Sam Mendes’s epic and brilliant 1917 film (more than 130,000 Sikhs fought in the First World War).

However, there are wider political ramifications connected to these casting decisions in Munich that I think are worth exploring. So while the Nazis are depicted as, well, Nazis, including several obligatory scenes showing the repression and dehumanization of Jews, Sowole playing Syers, and Mohindra as Menzies, suggests Chamberlain’s government, ruling over the biggest empire the world had ever known, was running an equal opportunities recruitment process for top-level “national security” work in Downing Street.

In short, the casting choices arguably work to gloss-over the racism, repression and elitism of the Chamberlain government, and of the whole British ruling class at the time. A similar concealing effect can be seen in 2017’s Darkest Hour movie, which conjures up the fantasy of Winston Churchill getting inspiration after travelling on the tube and swapping lines from a Macaulay poem with a West Indian man.

Indeed, like nearly every British war film, Munich reaffirms a ‘Britain = good, Nazi = evil’ binary understanding of history. With the action shifting to the emergency talks in Munich, one of the film’s two main characters, Paul Hartmann, a translator in the German Foreign Office who is heroically trying to stop Hitler, tells Chamberlain the German Chancellor is “a man who hates everything you stand for.”

The problem with this popular framing of the Second World War, as the comedian Robert Newman argued on his 2005 album Apocalypso Now, is that it’s “based on a very misleading premise: which is just because the enemy you are fighting is evil, that makes you good”.

As then Guardian columnist Seamus Milne noted in 2010, “The British empire was… an avowedly racist despotism built on ethnic cleansing, enslavement, continual wars and savage repression, land theft and merciless exploitation. Far from bringing good governance, democracy or economic progress, the empire underdeveloped vast areas, executed and jailed hundreds of thousands for fighting for self-rule, ran concentration camps, carried out medical experiments on prisoners and oversaw famines that killed tens of millions of people.”

Though it remains pretty much verboten to mention in polite company, the uncomfortable truth is Hitler and Chamberlain (along with a significant segment of the British elite) shared some key values.

“Hitler’s dream was inspired, in part, by the British Empire,” noted British historian Richard Drayton, currently Professor of Imperial and Global History at King’s College London, in the Guardian in 2005. “The British and Americans were key theorists of eugenics and had made racial segregation respectable. The concentration camp was a British invention, and in Iraq and Afghanistan the British were the first to use air power to repress partisan resistance… we forget, too, that British and US elites gave aid to the fascists.”

In addition to obfuscating the reality of the British Empire, the film also ignores the importance of the British Empire to Chamberlain’s decision-making during the Munich crisis.

“By the mid-1930s Britain was defending a vast and vulnerable empire encompassing a quarter of the world’s territory and population, with the dismally depleted military resources of a third-rate power”, historian Robert Self noted on the BBC News website in 2013. He goes on to quote Sir Thomas Inskip’s defence policy of December 1937, commissioned by Chamberlain: “it is beyond the resources of this country to make proper provision in peace for defence of the British Empire against three major powers [Germany, Japan and Italy] in three different theatres of war.”

The 1985 Granada Television documentary End Of Empire explains what this meant for the UK government: “Britain’s leaders feared the empire would not survive a war on both sides of the world at once, so desperate for peace at almost any price, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain flew to Munich and appeasement.”

To be clear, I support more Black and ethnic minority-centred stories and actors on our TV and film screens. For example, I consider Steve McQueen’s monumental Small Axe film anthology one of the most important British cultural events of recent times.

There is no shortage of historical events and stories centred around the experience of Black and ethnic minorities that could be mined if mainstream Western filmmakers were as open minded and progressive as they thought they were. How about a period drama about the brutal British repression of the Mau Mau uprising in 1950s Kenya? Or an epic film about the largely nonviolent national movement that forced the British to grant Ghana independence in 1957? Why hasn’t there been a television series about the British arming recently surrendered Japanese troops in 1945 to put down a nationalist uprising in Vietnam? Or about Greek resistance fighter Manolis Glezos, who was moments away from killing Winston Churchill in Athens on Christmas Day 1944, after Britain had turned against the Communist-led insurgents who had helped defeat the German Army? Or a political thriller about all the dirty dealings and repression the UK has carried out and supported over decades to keep all their favoured despots in power in the Gulf?

Follow Ian on Twitter @IanJSinclair.

Blood Brothers? Bruce Springsteen and Barack Obama

Blood Brothers? Bruce Springsteen and Barack Obama
by Ian Sinclair
Morning Star
13-14 November 2021

Having released a joint podcast earlier this year, US music superstar Bruce Springsteen and former President Barack Obama have just published those conversations as a book – Renegades: Born In The USA.

The podcast was hugely popular, and no doubt the book will be a bestseller this Christmas and beyond.

As a Springsteen fan, I’m very uneasy about this partnership.

First, I was surprised Springsteen decided to do it. Since President Ronald Reagan’s attempt to appropriate his epic Born In The USA song in 1984, The Boss has been wary of intervening in party politics. As he explained in 2012, “I don’t write for one side of the street … normally I would prefer to stay on the sidelines.”  This general stance shifted in 2004, when he campaigned for Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry, and then Obama in 2008. However, it’s worth noting he told Channel 4 News he didn’t “have any plans” to campaign for Hillary Clinton during the 2016 presidential election, just three weeks before he did exactly that. Beyond these endorsements, there is a sense Springsteen thinks very carefully before acting in the political arena, aware the more he campaigns the less power each intervention has.

Second, though both men are Democrats, arguably Springsteen is further to the left than Obama, and certainly the 2008-2016 Obama Administration.

Springsteen’s concern about the lives of Americans stretches back decades. In October 2016 he told Channel 4 News “The past 40 years, as the deindustrialisation and globalization has affected a lot of work lives, the issues that matter to a lot of hardworking folks haven’t been addressed… neither party has really addressed their concerns.” Note the timing of his criticism of all US political leaders – the tailend of Obama’s supposedly paradigm-shifting presidency.

Speaking about his 2012 album Wrecking Ball, his angry response to the financial crisis and its effects on Mainstreet USA, Springsteen told the Guardian “What was done to our country was wrong and unpatriotic and un-American and nobody has been held to account.” Of course that’s because Obama didn’t take any significant action to punish or reign in Wall Street. Meeting the US’s top thirteen financial executives in March 2009, according to Politico Obama told them “My administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks,” He continued: “You guys have an acute public relations problem that’s turning into a political problem. And I want to help… I’m not here to go after you. I’m protecting you… I’m going to shield you from congressional and public anger.”

During a 2012 press conference in Paris Springsteen praised Obama for keeping General Motors alive and killing Osama Bin Laden. However, though he noted Obama “got through healthcare” he said it was “not the public system I would have wanted… big business still has too much say in government and there has not been as many middle- or working-class voices in the administration as I expected.”  

This is an accurate analysis. Obama stuffed his administration with Wall Street insiders. Larry Summers, who as Deputy Treasury Secretary under Bill Clinton played a key role in the deregulation of the finance sector that led to the 2008 financial crisis, was appointed Chief Economic Advisor, Timothy Geithner, a protégé Summers, was made Treasury Secretary, and Mark Patterson, a former lobbyist for Goldman Sachs investment bank, Geithner’s Chief of Staff.  

On healthcare, Springsteen is in agreement with Obama circa 2003, when as a state senator he supported “single payer” (universal public healthcare), though explained its introduction would require Democrats to take back the White House and Congress. By 2009 Obama was in the White House and the Democrats controlled Congress. However, the Obama Administration “worked to deliberately marginalize the idea” of single payer, according to Tim Higginbotham, writing for Jacobin in 2018. For example the White House held a summit on healthcare reform in March 2009 where “every voice has to be heard” and “every idea must be considered”, according to the president. But as always with Obama, it is best to attend to his deeds, not words. The idea of creating a single-payer programme had already been rejected, it seems. Asked at the start of the summit why Obama was against single payer, the White House press secretary Robert Gibbs answered “The President doesn’t believe that’s the best way to achieve the goal of cutting costs and increasing access.”

The Affordable Care Act (AKA Obamacare) was eventually passed in 2010, expanding health insurance coverage to around 20 million people but it wasn’t the public option Springsteen favours. As Matt Taibbi explained in Rolling Stone in 2009: “Even though [Obama] and the Democrats enjoy a political monopoly and could have started from a very strong bargaining position, they chose instead to concede at least half the battle before it even began.”

While it is important not to exaggerate the differences but Springsteen and Obama, the former is probably best described as a New Deal Democrat, giving a voice to politically and economically dispossessed Americans on albums like The Ghost of Tom Joad and Nebraska. In contrast, in 2008 US writer Paul Street described the first African American president as a “relatively conservative, capitalism-/corporate-friendly, racially conciliatory and Empire-friendly centrist”. As US journalist John R. MacArthur said in 2013: “He never stops serving the ruling class.”

Listening to the eight-episode podcast series the lack of time given to hard politics is noticeable, with no serious discussion about Obama’s actual record in office.

Turning to US foreign policy, a survey of Springsteen’s albums suggests it’s a secondary concern for the New Jersey native. And largely only of interest when it negatively impacts Americans. His epic Born In The USA song, for example, refers to “Viet Cong” and the “yellow man” but is far more interested in the dark days facing the returning Vietnam veteran. During his recent Broadway show, he introduced the song as a “G.I. blues.” Ditto Youngstown from 1995, which mentions wars in Korea and Vietnam, and alludes to the forces of globalisation (“now sir you tell me the world’s changed”) but is primarily concerned with how industrial decline impacted the American worker. And I think his 2002 album The Rising – made in the wake of 9/11 – is a great record, but its lack of interest in what the US had been doing around the world – when the national political debate cried out for exactly that – was telling.

This disinterest (or should I say ignorance?) likely suits their friendship: Obama’s murderous foreign policy record wouldn’t be the best fit with the relaxed atmosphere of the podcast.

As Peter Bergen, then CNN’s national security analyst, wrote in 2014: Obama is “one of the most militarily aggressive American presidents in decades”, bombing seven Muslim countries – Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen and Syria. Obama embraced drone warfare, conducting ten times more air strikes in the so-called war on terror than President Bush, according to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism. In a Council on Foreign Relations blog, Micah Zenko and Jennifer Wilson note the Obama Administration dropped 26,172 bombs in 2016 – an average of 72 bombs a day.

Infamously, “Obama embraced a disputed method for counting civilian casualties” for air strikes, the New York Times explained in 2012. Citing several Obama Administration officials, the report noted this approach “in effect counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants… unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent.”

Tellingly, Springsteen recently told US talk show host Stephen Colbert that it was Obama who approached him about doing a podcast. It seems Obama, a master of dazzling, criticism-muzzling presentation and PR, still has an expert eye for engagements that will burnish and improve his image.

But what does Springsteen get out of it? Over his more than 50-year music career he has built up a perhaps unprecedented level of respect and trust with his audience. Why risk endangering this?

Personally, I’m all for more political interventions from artists – just not a close collaboration with a former Imperial Administrator who is up to his neck in the blood of thousands of men, women, children and babies from the Global South.

Follow Ian on Twitter @IanJSinclair.

Book review: Collateral Damage by Steve Howell

Book review: Collateral Damage by Steve Howell
by Ian Sinclair
Morning Star
15 April 2021

FROM Reagan-loving Republican Tom Clancy, to the Conservative Frederick Forsyth and Jonathan Freedland’s rose-tinted views of Democratic presidents, political thrillers are often underpinned by some unpleasant, power-friendly politics.

Which makes Steve Howell’s Collateral Damage a welcome addition to the genre.

The book’s politics are perhaps unsurprising when you consider the author’s position as Deputy Director of Strategy and Communications in Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership team during the 2017 UK general election.

However, more pertinent is Howell’s activism in the late 80s – along with being Secretary of UK Local Authorities Against Apartheid, in 1987 he attended a conference in Tripoli, Libya to mark the first anniversary of the US air strikes on the country.

With the US warplanes taking off from UK bases – the first US combat operation launched from British soil since the Second World War – Howell believes the attacks mark the beginning of the era of regime-change wars.

Accordingly, the novel begins with the death of British peace activist and journalist Tom Carver while attending a conference in Tripoli in 1987. Suspecting foul play, Carver’s partner Ayesha, a Palestinian exile, works with young London School of Economics lecturer Hannah and lawyer Jed to uncover the truth.

Fast-paced and carefully-plotted, it’s a short and punchy read, which I devoured in a couple of sittings. While Clancy and Freedland fantasise about grand presidential politics in Washington D.C., Howell’s canvas is much more modest. The action does shift to Libya at one point, but most of the events occur in and around London. He provides some authentic period detail, including passing mentions of Edward Said’s Orientalism, Spycatcher and the unsolved murder of private investigator Daniel Morgan. Of course, there were no mobile phones in the late 80s, with the characters making copious use of phone boxes on the street.

And while the novel’s central twist is very much of its time, unfortunately it continues to have painful relevance today.

Echoing films from the period like 1986’s Defence of the Realm and Ken Loach’s Hidden Agenda from 1990, there is a foreboding sense of the British secret state working to protect the powerful in the name of “national security”.

With former Head of MI6 Sir Richard Dearlove branding Corbyn a “present danger to our country” just before the December 2019 general election, the struggle between the general public and established power continues, it seems.

Collateral Damage is published by Quaero Publishing, priced £8.99 https://www.steve-howell.com/collateral-damage/

Book review: The Media Manifesto

Book review: The Media Manifesto by Natalie Fenton, Des Freedman, Justin Schlosberg and Lina Dencik
by Ian Sinclair
Peace News
December 2020

A product of the Media Reform Coalition – a group of academics, activists and journalists working for progressive media reform in the UK – The Media Manifesto is a tightly-argued, inspiring call to action.

One of the book’s central arguments is that the misinformation underpinning developments like the rise of Trump, and the media’s failure to adequately challenge power, shouldn’t – as many liberals would have you believe – be blamed solely on fringe ‘fake news’ elements and the right-wing press. All this actually ‘reflects the insulation, complacency and commercial interests of our major legacy news organisations’.

The authors note that ‘levels of concentration of press power are actually increasing’ in the UK.

In 2015, three companies controlled 71 per cent of national newspaper readership. By 2018 it was 83 per cent.

The authors also have little time for the idea that social media and the internet have disrupted and fragmented traditional media power. Instead, they argue that established news organisations dominate the online space, ‘reproducing and intensifying existing patterns of agenda-setting power’.

This has huge repercussions for how journalism addresses our most pressing problems.

Frameworks and solutions that run counter to the establishment will likely be marginalised – see the pro-City coverage of the financial crisis and the ferocious press assault on Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour party – while the existential threat of climate change is rarely seriously grappled with.

In its current form, Freedman argues, the BBC is part of the problem: ‘far too implicated in and attached to existing elite networks of power to be able to offer an effective challenge to them’.

However, in the last chapter, the authors highlight the importance of independent and devolved public service media, alongside other proposals, including laws to reduce concentration of ownership and alternative ownership models, such as the pioneering media co-op, The Bristol Cable.

Indeed, there are many brilliant media organisations in the UK today – Declassified UK, Novara Media, Media Lens and, yes, Peace News among them.

Historically, though, Left media have been very weak. Arguably, the independent media were incapable of defending the most anti-imperialist leader of a mainstream party since the Second World War from an entirely predictable media onslaught, let alone able to go on the offensive and decisively shift the national conversation on key issues such as climate change, nuclear weapons or UK foreign policy.

There is much work to be done, then. With its unashamedly socialist politics, The Media Manifesto will no doubt become an important primer, perhaps even a foundational text, in the struggle for media justice.

The Clit Test: changing the sex script

The Clit Test: changing the sex script
by Ian Sinclair
Peace News blog
8 November 2020

Coined by cartoonist Alison Bechdel in 1985, what has become known as The Bechdel Test – whether a movie includes at least two women who talk to each other about something other than a man – is now widely discussed by consumers and creators of popular culture.

But just as we have got our heads around one necessary and very welcome feminist-driven test, along comes a shiny new challenging feminist-driven test: the Clit Test.

Dreamt up by Frances Rayner and Irene Tortajajada, the test is a product of the wealth of research which shows the vast majority of women don’t orgasm from penetrative sex alone. This creates a huge “orgasm gap”. After asking more than 50,000 US adults if they usually or always orgasm during sex with another person, a 2017 study published in the Archives of Sexual Behavior journal found heterosexual men were the most satisfied group, with 95 per cent agreeing, while heterosexual women were the most dissatisfied group, with only 65 per cent agreeing.

Frustratingly, this reality is not reflected on screen, with heterosexual sex scenes usually representing or implying penetrative sex followed by a When Harry Met Sally-sized orgasm for the woman.

“In both Hollywood films and porn, the sex act is portrayed so it represents only about 6-10 per cent of women’s response”, Professor Elisabeth Lloyd, author of The Case of the Female Orgasm, told Vogue magazine in July. “That’s how many women have orgasm with plain intercourse, without additional clitoral stimulation.”

In contrast “the clit test celebrates sex scenes that reflect that the clitoris is a central part of sexual pleasure for most women”, the dedicated website explains. “Any time you acknowledge that the clit exists you pass the test. This could be showing, mentioning or even heavily implying clit touching, cunnilingus (oral sex for women) and women masturbating.”

From fighter pilot Maverick (Tom Cruise) bringing his instructor (Kelly McGillis) to ecstasy in Top Gun (1986) to Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet getting steamed up in the car in Titanic (1997), movies  are littered with examples of hugely problematic sex scenes that fail the test. Consider the decades-long James Bond franchise: the secret service agent has slept with hundreds of apparently very satisfied women but has never once deigned any interest whatsoever in their clitorises, as far as we know.

More recently, the first sexual coupling in 2019’s Long Shot between Seth Rogan’s speechwriter and Charlize Theron’s Secretary of State, in which both orgasm simultaneously from penetrative sex within 30 seconds, caused quite a stir online. Rogan himself replied to a viral tweet questioning the scene, and Vulture did a series of vox pops in Greenwich Village asking people about it. Interestingly, the second sex scene in the film, which includes Theron’s character asking to be choked “a little bit”, doesn’t seem to have caused any controversy.

However, perhaps the most surprising test result is from the TV series Normal People (2020). Lauded by critics and viewers for its explicit and loving sex scenes, it nevertheless fails the Clit Test – all of the sex scenes focus on penetration.

But we shouldn’t get downhearted. The Clit Test website lists plenty of passes too, including the films Booksmart (2019) and Ladybird (2017), and the TV series Feel Good (2020) and the Obama-inspired wanking in Fleabag (2016-19). It’s only just been broadcast, so doesn’t appear on the Clit Test website, but judging by the enthusiastic cunnilingus shown in the first episode Love Life (2020) should be a safe pass. Special mention should also go to British actress, screenwriter and director Michaela Coel for the sexually honest and hilarious Chewing Gum (2015-17) – “dick-centric sex sucks” – and I May Destroy You (2020).

There are, you may have noticed, some common themes here – recently made women-centred movies and television, usually written or directed by women.

But as much as we should celebrate new, enlightened talent, let’s not forget they stand on the shoulders of giants. In the Willy Russell-penned Brit flick Shirley Valentine (1989), the aforementioned Liverpudlian housewife runs through an earth-shattering monologue. “I think sex is like Sainsbury’s – you know, over-rated”, she explains. “It’s just a lot of pushing and shoving and you still come out with very little in the end”. She then recounts a conversation with her belligerent oaf of a husband. “Have you ever heard of the clitoris?”, she asks. “Yeah”, he replies. “But it doesn’t go as well as the Ford Escort”.

And, of course, there was the paradigm-shifting Sex in the City (1998-2004), which expertly and amusingly refocussed attention on female pleasure and concerns. “Look at this”, Charlotte, who is having very unsatisfactory sex, says as she watches a sex scene on TV in one episode. “He climbs on top of her, next thing you know, she’s coming. No wonder they’re lost, they’ve no idea there’s more work involved.”

Writing on the Clit Test website, Rayner and Tortajajada explain the important ramifications of representations of sex on screen: “The sex script on screen is one of the main reasons there is such a big orgasm gap between cis men and women. When we get together, we tend to perform what we believe is expected and desirable.”

Here’s hoping the Clit Test reaches the same level of cultural saturation and impact as the Bechdel Test.

Visit https://www.theclittest.com/. Ian tweets @IanJSinclair.

Book review. Humankind: A Hopeful History by Rutger Bregman

Book review. Humankind: A Hopeful History by Rutger Bregman
by Ian Sinclair
Peace News
October 2020

The basic argument of this book is very simple. Contrary to the ‘persistent myth that by their very nature humans are selfish’, Dutch author Rutger Bregman argues that ‘most people, deep down, are pretty decent.’

The assumption of human selfishness underpins huge portions of mainstream political and economic thinking, including the influential veneer theory – ‘the notion that civilisation is nothing more than a thin veneer that will crack at the merest provocation’. Bregman believes the opposite to be true: ‘It’s when crisis hits… that we humans become our best selves.’

He considers the notion that humans are innately good to be a ‘radical idea’ with huge ramifications, because ‘to stand for human goodness is to take a stand against the powers that be’, for whom ‘a hopeful view of human nature is downright threatening.’

Framing the book as a personal journey of discovery, Bregman ranges far and wide to construct and prove his proposition. He engages with thinkers and ideas from archaeology, anthropology, biology, philosophy, psychology, sociology, politics and history. The book’s plentiful references are similarly diverse, and provide a great guide for those interested in going deeper into particular subjects.

There is much here that will interest peace activists, including a discussion of SLA Marshall’s claim that only a minority of US soldiers in combat in the Second World War fired their weapons at the enemy in any given encounter, a passage looking at the ineffective Allied bombing of civilian areas in Germany in the 1940s and an inspiring account of the 1914 Christmas Truce.

Bregman is particularly keen on slaying a number of sacred cows, including two famous social psychology experiments that seemed to prove human beings’ darker nature: Stanley Milgrim’s 1960s work on obedience to authority and Philip Zimbardo’s 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment.

Fittingly, the book ends by highlighting a number of hopeful initiatives from around the world that assume human beings want to do good, such as Universal Basic Income in Alaska, Norway’s progressive prison system and participatory budgeting in South America.

Bregman is a great storyteller, which makes for a really enjoyable and engaging read. Even though he approvingly quotes Bertrand Russell about not letting wishful thinking get in the way of the truth, the book is very much a polemic, with the nagging feeling of being guided down a particular path using carefully selected evidence and argument.

For example, while the many criticisms of Zimbardo’s work leads to Bregman dismissing the academic’s findings, when it comes to Marshall’s also heavily-criticised research, Bregman is happy to broadly accept his results, which happen to back up his argument.

But even if you aren’t completely persuaded by Bregman’s argument, Humankind is nevertheless a welcome rebalancing of the scales in the age-old ‘human nature’ debate in favour of co-operation, compassion and nonviolence – something that can only help peace activists and the struggle for a better world.

Humankind is published by Bloomsbury, priced £20.

Documentary review: COUP 53

Documentary review: COUP 53
by Ian Sinclair
Morning Star
13 August 2020

Speaking to the BBC in 2011, Noam Chomsky explained “the West has an extremely ugly history” in the Middle East. We may not pay attention to this history, the US dissident noted, but the people in the region negatively impacted by Western military and economic interference don’t forget.

A good example of Chomsky’s truism is the 1953 coup in Iran, the subject of Taghi Amirani’s brilliant new documentary. After Iran’s parliament voted to nationalise the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company in 1951, the CIA and MI6 played a leading, covert role in toppling Iran’s democratically elected prime minister Mohammad Mossadeq, installing the autocratic Shah (King) Mohammad Reza Pahlavi in power.

Much like the best political thrillers, the film has a real momentum. It is anchored around newly discovered testimony from MI6 officer Norman Darbyshire, found after some serious detective work by Amirani. Interviewed for Granada Television’s epic 1985 documentary series End of Empire, Darbyshire’s firsthand memories were mysteriously missing when the programme was broadcast on television. However, the transcript of his interview survived. And from this we find Darbyshire, suavely played by actor Ralph Feinnes, admitting to being involved in the kidnapping and killing of the Iranian police chief and, more broadly, confirming the UK’s central role in the coup – a historical fact which has never been officially recognised by the UK state.

As well as interviews with US and UK experts such as intelligence specialist Stephen Dorril and Stephen Kinzer, author of the 2003 book All The Shah’s Men, the film includes fascinating testimony from key members of Mossadeq’s inner circle and other Iranians involved at the time. Look out, too, for some innovative and effective animation telling key parts of the story.

With events involving President Eisenhower, Prime Minister Winston Churchill, oil and corporate interests, a nefarious BBC and the British secret services, Kinzer is surely right to argue the coup was “a decisive historic episode” of the twentieth century that deserves to be much better known.

The coup strengthened the voices of those in the US government pushing for more US covert action (e.g. Guatemala in 1954). More importantly, it wrecked attempts to build a more democratic Iran. “As a result of that the Shah of Iran came in, a terrible dictator”, US Senator Bernie Sanders educated viewers during a 2016 Democratic Party presidential debate. “And as a result of that you had the [1979] Iranian revolution”.

Essential viewing.

COUP 53 is being screened online on 19 August, the 67th anniversary of the coup. Visit https://coup53.com/screenings/ to buy a ticket.

Book review. The Home Stretch: Why It’s Time To Come Clean About Who Does The Dishes by Sally Howard

Book review. The Home Stretch: Why It’s Time To Come Clean About Who Does The Dishes by Sally Howard
By Ian Sinclair
Morning Star
27 April 2020

HOUSEWORK, and who does it, was a key concern of the Second Wave Feminism of the 1970s, the time of the international Wages For Housework movement and Ann Oakley’s influential Housewife study.

Since then the issue has dropped off the agenda of mainstream feminism, Sally Howard, a London-based journalist, argues in her brilliant new book.

Certainly men do more domestic labour than they used to – an average of just one hour 20 minutes in 1971 compared to 17 hours a week in 2016, according to the UK Office for National Statistics. However, even this improvement lags far behind the 36 hours women spend, on average, doing household chores today. Indeed, the unfair distribution of work persists even when both partners are working (I should say we are talking about heterosexual partners – same sex relationships seem to result in different outcomes).

This “second shift” that women have to work is exacerbated by marriage and having children – what Howard calls “the Parent Labour Trap”. These key life events tend to reinforce traditional gender roles, she explains, with tasks defined as female usually daily, monotonous and menial, and so-called male tasks, like gardening and DIY, usually “occasional and dispensable”.

Understandably, many privileged women have sought to escape the unequal workload by employing domestic labourers – usually poor non-British women – something Howard opposes. She notes, incredibly, “there are more live-in domestic workers in London today than there were in the 1890s.”

It’s a wide-ranging treatise, with fascinating explorations of the history of Home Economics, how technological changes have impacted women’s’ lot (spoiler: not much) and the rise of “cleanfluencers” and “instamoms” on social media today. The chapter on utopian visions and alternative communities is particularly interesting – I had never heard of self-taught architect Alice Constance Austin and the feminist, socially-egalitarian Californian city she was commissioned to design in 1915. It was never built but the plans featured a radical layout of “kitchenless homes… connected by a system of underground tunnels used for commuting, laundry and hot meal collection and delivery (from a large centralized city kitchen and laundry).”

Turning to how we might “reboot the stalled domestic revolution”, Howard argues “many of the great successes of feminism have come in moments when boots were on the ground”. For example, the legendary 1975 women’s general strike in Iceland, in which 90 percent of adult women left their jobs and families to march in the streets, led to equal gender pay rights being enshrined in Icelandic law a year later.

Inspiring, smart and wryly humorous, The Home Stretch deserves to become a landmark Feminist text.

The Home Stretch is published by Atlantic Books, priced £14.99.

Book review. Don’t Hold My Head Down: In Search Of Some Brilliant Fucking by Lucy-Anne Holmes

Book review. Don’t Hold My Head Down: In Search Of Some Brilliant Fucking by Lucy-Anne Holmes
by Ian Sinclair
Peace News
February-March 2020

‘If feels like we’re always talking about it, but never really talking about it’, British author Lucy-Anne Holmes observes about sex.

After reading her very funny and very explicit sex memoir, I can safely say no one will ever accuse Holmes of not discussing sex ever again!

The book starts with Holmes, circa her mid-30s, coming to the realisation her whole sexual history has been full of usually drunken, sometimes painful, ultimately dissatisfying sex – what she calls ‘normal, slightly porny sex’.

She pledges to seek out better, ‘beautiful sex’, centred on her own sexual pleasure and not that of her male partners. This journey takes her to sex festivals and sex parties, workshops on Pussy Worship and Female Erotic Leadership, navigating an open relationship and exploring BDSM (bondage and discipline, dominance and submission and sadism and masochism).

Accessible and hugely relatable with many laugh out loud moments, Holmes deftly weaves practical sex tips and serious arguments and concepts around the often Bridget Jones-level farcical situations she gets into, including complex ideas of consent (‘an ongoing conversation, liable to change at any point’) and Betty Martin’s Wheel of Consent.

She rarely mentions the word, but feminism – the liberal, ‘sex-positive’ kind – underpins the whole book. Holmes was, after all, the founder of the successful No More Page 3 campaign in the early 2010s. For example, she links her body hatred and low-confidence to growing up in a patriarchal society, and ends with a humorous, though pointed potted Herstory of Women and Sex.

While many feminist activists will love Don’t Hold My Head Down, I think the book is most useful in  introducing feminism and feminist framing about sex, relationships and society to those who might not see themselves as being activists, or even politically active.

She makes her aim clear in her conclusion: ‘If telling this story inspires just one young woman not to feel she has to compare herself to the images she sees in magazine, or take part in sex that she feels uncomfortable with, or it inspires her to start a petition and challenge something that makes her feel small… then I feel it is a story worth telling.’

I would add one thing – men, too, have much to learn from this brilliant book. File alongside the equally vital Girl Up from Everyday Sexism’s Laura Bates.

Don’t Hold My Head Down: In Search Of Some Brilliant Fucking is published by Unbound, priced £14.99.

Best books of 2019

Best Books of 2019
by Ian Sinclair
Morning Star
6 December 2019

“It is worse, much worse, than you think.” From its first sentence The Uninhabitable Earth: A Story of the Future (Penguin Books) by US writer David Wallace-Wells is a deeply frightening book chronicling the existential threat the climate crisis poses to humanity.

He notes all the commitments made at the 2015 Paris United Nations climate summit by the 195 signatories would still mean a deadly 3.2oC of warming by 2100. If this isn’t terrifying enough, he explains that as of 2018 “not a single major industrial nation was on track to fulfil the commitments it made in the Paris treaty”.

Answering Amitav Ghosh’s call for more fiction devoted to climate change, John Lanchester’s allegorical novel The Wall (Faber & Faber) considers how British society and politics could react to a climatic event called “the change”. Giving a nod to George Orwell’s 1984, Lanchester imagines a dystopian near future in which a colossal wall has been built along the entire coastline of the nation, manned by conscripted soldiers (“Defenders”) tasked with keeping out climate refugees (“The Others”) trying to get into the country.

Two other novels made an impression on me this year. Set in Chicago, Halle Butler’s The New Me (Orion) is a cutting, pathos-filled exploration of millennial work and social life, the bored and depressed female narrator is full of loathing for her work colleagues, so-called friends and, most of all, herself. Comic novelist Sam Lipsyte’s Hark (Simon & Schuster) also has a laser-like focus on the foibles and hypocrisies of contemporary Western culture, brilliantly skewing self-help gurus, hipsters, liberal parenting and mid-life crises – hell, pretty much everything and everyone is a target for satire. Rarely have I read an author where each sentence is so full of rich, imaginative language. And like the New Yorker’s 2010 novel The Ask it’s also hysterically funny, often in the most dark and delicious ways.

The new Glasgow Media Group (GMG) book Bad News for Labour: Antisemitism, the Party and Public Belief (Pluto Press) is an essential read for anyone interested in the accusations of antisemitism directed at the Labour Party. In addition to showing how the media have played a key role in massively exaggerating the scale of the problem, the authors provide some welcome advice on how Labour can communicate much more successfully to the general public on this crucial issue. Heavily influenced by the GMG tradition, Mike Berry’s The Media, the Public and the Great Financial Crisis (Palgrave Macmillan) highlights how the British print and broadcast media, including the BBC, played a key role in narrowing the national debate after the 2008 financial crisis in ways that suited elite interests.

Taken together these two books have much to teach about contemporary British politics and the hugely negative role played by the media. As US media analyst Robert McChesney succinctly put it, “So long as the media are in corporate hands, the task of social change will be vastly more difficult, if not impossible.”