The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest

My review of Stieg Larsson’s final book is now available at 3:AM.

Manchester Will Eat Itself

Kate Feld says all there is to say about Manchester’s Factory relaunch.

So Peter Hook’s Factory-themed nightclub, FAC251, opens tonight. Whoop-dee-doo.

Sure, everyone’s entitled to their own nostalgia trips, but this particular one has been rammed down our throats for the last 20 years.

Maybe it’s time for us to move on and show some love for the great new music coming out of Manchester? It’d be interesting if this club actually did that, but I’m not holding out much hope after checking out their website. Too much grandstanding and too much Rowetta. There’s something depressing about watching the Factory folk shamelessly attempting to cash in over and over again, with books, reality show slots, second-rate reunion gigs, crap DJ sets and now this. I ask you: Can officially merchandised Joy Division oven gloves be far away?

The horse is dead; the barrel scraped dry.

The Intense Humming of Evil

My review of Emmanuel Faye’s Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy is now available at 3:AM.

Inclusive Preview

I’ve noted before that the Guardian books blog is not always as interesting and fun as it could be. And yet it’s worse than I thought. Check out this trailer for next week’s articles.

- Defensive geek argues that some genre or other is being neglected by the mainstream, which basically means the Booker Prize.

- Five other posts focusing on aspects of the Booker Prize in which our affected cynicism fails to mask our jejune enthrallment.

- Our correspondent read this old book that’s meant to be a classic but she reckons it’s not.

- Flash fiction: turns out it’s not fiction about The Flash. But is it the future?!

- What books do you like to read while paragliding?

- Isn’t it time this antiquated author from a bygone era was rebranded as ‘relevant’ and published in new editions with nice covers and enticing blurbs from contemporary favourites such as Ian McEwan or Nick Hornby? Isn’t it?

In the Company of Men

My review of Natasha Walter’s Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism is now available at 3:AM.

Inside UKBA

Someone at the UK Border Agency has blown the whistle on what appears to be a culture of cruelty and casual racism.

The home affairs select committee chairman, Keith Vaz, has called for an investigation following allegations that officials at one of the government’s major centres for processing asylum seekers’ claims express fiercely anti-immigration views and take pride in refusing applications.

Louise Perrett, who worked as a case owner at the Border Agency office in Cardiff for three and a half months last summer, claims staff kept a stuffed gorilla, a ‘grant monkey’, which was placed as a badge of shame on the desk of any officer who approved an asylum application.

Perrett, 29, also alleges that one official boasted to her that he tested the claims of boys from African countries who said they had been forcibly conscripted as child soldiers by making them lie down on the floor and demonstrate how they shot at people in the bush. One method used to determine the authenticity of an asylum seeker claiming to be from North Korea was to ask whether the person ate chop suey.

She claims the tone was set on the first day when one manager said of the asylum-seeker clients: ‘If it was up to me I’d take them all outside and shoot them.’ Another told her this was to be expected, adding: ‘No one in this office is very PC. In fact everyone is the exact opposite.’

One of her cases involved a Congolese woman who had the right to remain in the UK. Perrett says a superior nevertheless decided the woman and her children should be removed, and asked officials whether there were any grounds to remove them. Frustrated, she approached a member of the legal department. His reply, according to Perrett, was: ‘Umbongo, umbongo, they kill them in the Congo.’

Perrett also says that she was given the power to detain and to make legally binding decisions after just five weeks’ training.

What is there to say – except that there should be a full investigation, and that Perrett should be commended for speaking out.

If her report is true, heads should roll.

(Via Emma Ginn at Medical Justice)

You’ve Been Here Before

At the end of 2009 Seamus Milne wrote a political round-up of the decade in which he claimed that ‘the rise of China’ was ‘the third vital change of the past 10 years’:

[China] has not only taken hundreds of millions out of poverty as the economic gap with the US has halved (China has in fact overtaken the US in domestic capital generation), but also begun to create a new centre of power in a multipolar world that should expand the freedom of manoeuvre for smaller states. Its blithe disregard for free market orthodoxy has only added to its success in riding out the west’s slump.

At that time I wondered if the far left was falling out of love with Islamic fundamentalism. The hammering that the parties of God have taken at the Middle Eastern ballot box plus a growing resistance movement in the world’s premier theocracy may well have given Milne some doubts about Islamism as a viable alternative to Western mixed economy systems. There has to be somewhere else to go and the notionally communist hyperpower in the east can seem an attractive proposition to someone in search of a tyrannical fatherland. I wondered if others on the anti-imperialist faction would follow his lead.

Paul Sagar reports from the recent Progressive London conference:

Ken Livingstone gave a speech in which he declared that the proof that government investment ends recessions lies in China’s staggering rates of state spending, and enormous correlate levels of growth.

Later, John Ross of Socialist Economic Bulletin (and Ken’s former economic adviser) took some time out from claiming that Britain’s national debt didn’t need to be repaid, that the triple-A rating is meaningless, and that all spending cuts are completely a choice and not imposed by brute economic circumstances, to cite China as proof-positive that government-led investment ends recessions. He waxed lyrical about China’s 9% growth in the last quarter, and how the Chinese government simply told banks to lend and – hey presto – they lent.

Also appearing was Andy Newman, Socialist Unity proprietor and notorious apologist for the China regime. Look at his post celebrating sixty years of the Glorious Republic:

It is easy to criticise China, but much of the criticism doesn’t take into account the historical context of their development, and the urgent requirement for economic growth as a precondition for social justice and progress. Nor do the critics acknowledge the degree to which the Communist Party of China is self-aware of the difficulties and negative aspects of Chinese society – but there are often no easy answers to solve problems overnight.

At Liberal Conspiracy, Sagar asks the question that’s eluded Milne, Newman and Martin Jacques: how has the China regime achieved this staggering economic growth?

The answer, of course, is that it screws its workforce:

[L]et’s remember a key method by which China achieves its phenomenal growth: by systematically denying the civil and economic rights of its domestic population. Chinese workers have no meaningful union rights. They are paid pitifully low wages (averaging around $0.50 an hour in 2006), and have no hope of securing anything better. That’s a key way in which China’s export-manufacturing sector booms: low wages equal low costs, after all.

Another way China grows is by doing what I observed last summer: going to places like 1000-year old Yancheng, raising it to the ground, and erecting a city the size of Chicago in its place. And what do you think happened to the people living in Yancheng who didn’t want to have their homes demolished.

Do you think they were consulted nicely and offered new places to live with guaranteed legal redress? Or do you reckon they were forcibly re-located as is the Communist Party’s preferred approach?

We have been here before on the left.

Classic Books: The Handmaid’s Tale

Considering the great novelists of anti-totalitarianism, the name of Margaret Atwood is sometimes overlooked. I have touched on The Handmaid’s Tale before, but it deserves its own post in this series, because it captures the reality of totalitarianism better than more celebrated dystopian writers. Huxley’s Brave New World is so farfetched and remote that I doubt any contemporary reader can take it seriously. The dictators of Nineteen Eighty-Four generously provide Winston Smith with a book that explains the dictatorship in its entire theory and practice. In this, Orwell’s insight into political theory proved his downfall as a novelist. The flow of a great work is broken by forty pages of academic writing on totalitarianism. Orwell clung to his mistake and insisted on keeping Goldstein’s extract even at a cost of £40,000 in American sales.

Atwood’s narrator is limited. To pick a pun from the book’s forestry of wordplay, Offred is a woman in reduced circumstances. A surrogate mother attached to an influential home, Offred’s life consists of tedious and monitored routine: buying groceries, rehearsed inanities with other Handmaids, viewing the bodies on the wall. Her blinkered veil acts as a symbolic and physical manifestation of her reduced circumstances: a reduction of the circumstances of her life but also her thoughts and dreams. Offred is left foraging in the murk of rumour and propaganda for the grubby silt of truth.

The theocracy of Gilead is a recent thing and, at just thirty-three, Offred can remember life before its rule. But her memories are blurry fragments – news footage of a machine-gunned Congress, the day her bank card was refused, a failed border crossing, blood and motion in the forest. She has no idea what has happened to her husband, her friends, her mother, or her child; her recollections have been diluted by grief and trauma and, we suspect, will eventually fade. At the indoctrination centre the Handmaids are told that ‘Ordinary is what you are used to. This may not seem ordinary to you now, but after a time it will. It will become ordinary.’

This lack of information, Atwood says, is part of the nightmare. And no one brings the totalitarian nightmare alive quite like Margaret Atwood. The book is structured around Offred’s days; chapters are entitled ‘SHOPPING’, ‘HOUSEHOLD’, ‘BIRTH DAY’. A recurring title is ‘NIGHT’ and it denotes the time Offred spends in bed, where nothing takes place except ’sleep; or no sleep.’ The night offers freedom of a kind because Offred is more or less alone. Inside her head she can dream herself into better times: ‘the night is my time out. Where should I go?… Somewhere good.’ At other times, she lies awake grappling to make sense of the horrendous changes in her situation. ’But then what happens, but then what happens? I know I lost time.’ Lines from the Night sequences echoed in my head and heart. No one else can capture what it is like to lie awake in a strange room in a silent land that is watching you. Reading Atwood, you can see the glimmer of searchlight on the mottled window and feel your heart in your throat and listen to the uninterrupted flatline of the sleeping totalitarian night. You are inside the nightmare. Oh my God this is real. How can I keep on living?

Human beings, O’Brien observes, are infinitely malleable, and Offred’s desires become reduced to the small and furtive pleasures that make every nightmare slightly more bearable. The Commander of the household (taking a liking to Offred beyond the grotesque sexual ceremonies instigated under the new laws) makes her a present of butter that she can use as face cream; he also treats her to games of Scrabble and the occasional back copy of Vogue. Although Offred feels affection for the Commander, she resists the delusion that he cares for her, reminding herself that ‘context is all’. She remembers an interview with the mistress of a Nazi concentration guard who insists that ‘He was not a monster’. ‘How easy it is to invent a humanity’, Offred reflects, ‘for anyone at all. What an available temptation’: the Nazi perhaps had ’some endearing trait: he whistled, off key, in the shower, he had a yen for truffles, he called his dog Liebchen’. The inverse manifestation of this invention comes a little later, when a group of Handmaids, goaded by propagandists, stomp an innocent man to death at a public ceremony. ‘He has become an it,’ Offred notes. Totalitarianism grants humanity to monsters and makes monsters of human beings.

By this point in the story Offred has found a friend, her shopping partner Ofglen, who appears to be in touch with the underground resistance to the regime – an association that, if cultivated, could present an escape from Gilead. Offred realises this at first meeting, but is soon distracted first by the Commander’s treats and then by her affair with Nick, the household’s young, virile chauffeur. Sexually fulfilled, Offred loses interest in her comrade’s plans: ‘I hardly listen to her, I no longer credit her. The things she whispers seem to me unreal.’ Context is all – or is it ripeness? After Ofglen’s suicide (’she saw the van coming’) Offred’s window of opportunity appears to have slammed shut: she has sacrificed long-term liberty to short-term satisfaction. Stupid, no? But then, what would you? Who would not give up freedom of speech in an instance for a treat, a drink, a hour of making love?

And yet for all that Atwood is an optimist, and makes it clear that the regime will fall; there is even a hope that Offred will survive to take back her own name. The study of tyranny is not always completely bleak. Shelley was a better observer than any political theorist when he wrote ‘Ozymandias’:

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said – ‘Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half-sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive (stamped on these lifeless things)
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
‘My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.’

Hookline and Sinker?

My old uni occasionally sends out details of opportunities for writers.

Recently it passed on details of something called the Hookline Novel Competition.

Apparently, for just £50 you have the chance of giving up your first rights to a publisher that you have never heard of, and whose distribution is questionable.

Today is the last day for fiction entries. Don’t all rush at once!

I DO NOT ISSUE REFUNDS OR MAKE EXCHANGES

CAVEAT EMPTOR!

Kerbside International Lawyer

Yeah we know we can’t have a better world
But at least we can be right

- The Indelicates, ‘The British Left in Wartime’

Following on from Comrade Denham’s post, I’ve been pondering one of the more confused of the antiwar arguments: the legality or otherwise of the Iraq war. The idea that the invasion was wrong because it was ‘illegal’ is frequently levelled, often by people who have a negligible understanding of international and war crimes law, and sometimes by people who belong to political groups dedicated to the armed overthrow of parliamentary democracy. If the war had been declared ’legal’; if some attorney general had said, ‘Yes, this is okay, go for it’ would the antiwar faction have turned round, admitted fault and supported the war? If we’re going to talk legality, surely war is a crime in and of itself.

But the charge of illegality serves one purpose – to turn an argument about human rights, democracy and the responsibility to protect into an argument about boxes checked, hoops jumped and resolutions passed. It allows you to sidestep the complex issues of solidarity and internationalism and to retreat into a position of abstract judgement. But it can also make you look incredibly silly, as George Monbiot is finding out with his ludicrous ‘Arrest Blair’ campaign, the object being to make a citizen’s arrest of Tony Blair for war crimes. (Why does no one try to citizen-arrest Omar al-Bashir or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad?) Unfortunately the law is a double-edged sword and Norman Geras has passed on words of caution from a legal professor:

What Monbiot is urging would still be a tort. Even though he is not suggesting imprisoning Blair, what he is suggesting would be a tortious battery, as it is an intentional unauthorised touching without consent. (In many day-to-day touchings – e.g. tapping someone on the shoulder to get their attention – there is implicit consent, but not with regard to what Monbiot suggests, as Blair would obviously not consent to it.)

Amusingly, if someone did act in this way as a result of Monbiot’s urgings, Monbiot would also be liable, as he would have procured the wrong and the wrongdoer’s actions would also be attributed to him. I would suggest, as well, that his employer, the Guardian, would be vicariously liable for Monbiot’s wrongdoing.

For the record, I do think there is a case for trying people in the Blair and Bush administrations for war crimes, but it would rest on the complicity in the torture of detainees, rather than the facilitation of a war that, despite everything, got rid of one of the worst fascist dictatorships on the face of the planet, and gave Iraqis the right to vote and hope for better times.

The antiwar faction is currently trying to turn Chilcott into a show trial – it will not happen. Blair is too clever and confident to let this happen. And yet the antiwar movement has won the argument. Liberal interventionism is discredited. It is dead. Pacifists are right to claim that the general public is against going to war. This is not so much out of concern for the welfare of soldiers and civilians, but from a resentful feeling that money should not be spent on foreigners when there are troubles enough at home. (I’ve heard people explain their opposition to government aid for Haiti in these exact terms.)

I repeat, Seamus Milne, George Galloway, Noam Chomsky and all the other isolationists and doctrinaire pacifists have won this argument. There is neither the cash nor the political will nor would there be the public support for an attack on Iran or Sudan, no matter how many times John Pilger says it’s going to happen. R2P is fucked. Leaders of fascist states all over the world can breathe easy in the knowledge that they can do anything they like to people – absolutely anything – as long as they keep it within their borders.