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Review: Hate Club By Lucy Brown

September 27, 2025 at 7:15 am · Filed under Books ·Tagged , , , , , ,

Book Review by Anthony C Green

(with a postscript on Unite the Kingdom and the Slaying of Charlie Kirk)

It’s probably not difficult to write a damning indictment of Mr. Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, known to the world as Tommy Robinson. No doubt, it’s already been done in the book ‘Tommy’ by Nick Lowles of Hope Not Hate. I haven’t read it, and have no intention of doing so.  Because it’s by Nick Lowles of Hope Not Hate, and a book from that source on anyone to the Right of Keir Starmer is never going to be anything but a ‘damning indictment.’

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From the off, Lucy Brown makes it clear that her book is not a narrative of redemption by someone who was radicalised by the Far-Right, but was young and naïve and now realises the error of her ways and sees how much our society has been enriched by multiculturalism, and that Diversity truly is our Greatest strength.

It’s not that kind of book at all, and all the better for it.

Lucy’s failure to prostrate herself before the liberal establishment probably explains why Hate Club hasn’t received much media attention.

Although the Tommy who emerges through the pages of her book is one whose failings as a human being are many, she appears to feel no hatred towards him. Her sympathies, as far as I can tell, remain firmly with the Right.

Her failure to repent makes her testimony all the more powerful, despite the resultant lack of publicity and its likely negative impact on sales.

That it is also a well-written, humorous and entertaining read is a bonus.

She worked for Robinson in a variety of roles for a two-year period beginning in 2017: Her duties included the production of increasingly professionalised publicity videos, the management of his online content, the general management of his public appearances and public affairs, and often as a reluctant apologist and provider of excuses.

The book’s timeline begins and ends several years after Robinson first became a public figure of both hate and adoration through his leadership of the EDL, the English Defence League, a period of his life for which he often seems to feel a sense of nostalgia and a keenness to recreate.

But we first meet Lucy shortly before that, as a privately educated, young and attractive but troubled and searching young woman who was still embroiled in a middle-class leftist milieu embittered by the traumatic experience of the 2016 Brexit vote, delivered, in their eyes, by uneducated, unwashed ‘gammon.’

We follow the author as she attends radical feminist groups and Black Lives Matter meetings before BLM became all too well known following the death and subsequent elevation to sainthood of lifelong criminal and drug addict George Floyd.

It was at these meetings that she began to question some of the ‘truths’ that were self-evident to most of her friends and work colleagues: were all men really potential rapists? Should she really feel guilty simply because of her skin colour and the colonial sins of her ancestors? Wasn’t this hatred of all things white itself racist? Was there nothing to be proud of about being British? Was the Brexit vote necessarily a bad thing, and even if it was, shouldn’t the democratic wishes of the British people be respected? Was the Pakistani grooming/rape gang issue really exaggerated or non-existent and little more than a ‘racist dog-whistle’?

The next stage of her journey was the online rabbit hole of Right-Wing influencers, a journey that soon led her to first the periphery, and then the centre of Planet Tommy.

The contempt for the Left (or the version of the Left that existed in Lucy’s world. Other varieties are available) seems well-justified, with much of her ire aimed at Hope Not Hate, an organisation that comes across as much more Hate than Hope.

Lucy makes it clear that she had many good times during her period of working for Tommy. Humorous anecdotes are legion, but I’ll leave the reader to discover and enjoy these for themselves.

Her relationship with Robinson was complex: part employee, sometimes paid, often not, part friend, near one-night-stand drunken lover, another tale that needs to be heard in Lucy’s own words, and part caretaker.

Despite Lucy’s lack of malice, the ‘damning indictment’ thing is certainly there, up front and writ large.

True, there’s nothing we didn’t already know, or at least suspect. What Lucy does is provide detail, and it rings true in a way that a book by the likes of Nick Lowles never could, because she was there and she isn’t writing from a perspective of polarised ideological disdain.

The Tommy of Hate Club is allegedly:

  • A heavy-drinking cocaine addict who craves the limelight and will champion any cause that’s palatable to his fan base, if it helps him to maintain his position in the public eye.
  • A man who will claim responsibility for, or at least exaggerate his role in, exposing issues like the Pakistani rape gangs, which many others, both publicly and privately, played an important role in exposing.
  • Who has sought to involve himself in causes where it’s been made clear he is not welcome, for instance, in the fall-out to the brutal Lee Rigby murder.
  • He has indeed faced some of the state censorship and persecution that takes centre stage in his self-told Hero’s Journey. But at least some of his jail time and online cancellation have happened because of his own stupidity, because of his tendency to act without thinking, a trait common among users of cocaine and other stimulants.
  • Tommy lived/lives an extravagant, luxurious lifestyle, dripping in bling, replete with flash cars, numerous foreign holidays and a succession of houses far out of the reach of his overwhelmingly working-class followers.
  • Lucy does not outright state that this lifestyle was/is funded by the regular appeals for donations he seeks and receives from his supporters, and this may or may not be true. But what is clear from the pages of the book is that, at least during the period covered, no real accounting and auditing system existed for how these donations were used, and I suspect that this remains the case today.
  • Not only was his lifestyle at odds with his public ‘Man of the People’ persona, but so was his claim to be a dedicated family man. In reality, he was an inveterate womaniser who once used the excuse of a ‘sick daughter’ as a means of bailing on an important public engagement, when the truth was that he was driving to Newcastle for a sexual encounter with a woman he barely knew, and didn’t even find particularly attractive.

As with Coke and the opportunity of another moment in the glare of the public spotlight, the offer of sex was something Robinson had great difficulty in refusing.

Unsurprisingly, he is now separated from his wife.

  • He was also incapable of taking responsibility when decisions he had made went wrong, and was quite prepared to throw employees and friends under a bus rather than to do so.

In fact, that’s how Lucy’s involvement with Tommy came to an end, but that’s another story best heard in her own words.

I was going to draw my review to a conclusion here, but because of recent, fast-moving events, I’ve decided to bring matters up to date with an extended postscript.

…

Tommy is now more high-profile and more popular than ever before. He’s been accepted as a member of former Reform UK Deputy Leader Ben Habib’s new Advance UK party, having previously been given a wide berth by Farage’s, Reform, and I’m writing this a week on from his latest big London gathering, the Unite the Kingdom event in London, which included Habib and, by video link, Elon Musk among the speakers.

Musk’s appearance confirmed what’s obvious from anyone who follows such things on his social media platform ‘X’, that Tommy has reached almost the level of a free speech folk-hero among the American Right, most of whom, I think it’s safe to say, have little knowledge of his history.

The police estimated the numbers attending the London march and rally at 110,000. I’ve attended many big demonstrations in my time, and a good rule of thumb is that if you split the difference between the organiser’s claimed attendance and the police’s estimate, you get something approaching reality. From the various online sources I accessed, Unite the Kingdom appeared to be much bigger than the figure claimed by the police, even if Tommy’s figure of three million seemed a tad grandiose.

 I doubt that one million would be a wild over-estimation.

But where does Tommy go from here?

He’s already talking about the next major and similar event. But this type of demonstration/’Festival’ is of a similar character to those described in Lucy’s time as one of his chief organisers, the last of which included the incident that finally led her to walk.

He’d also mobilised decent, if considerably smaller and more yobbish numbers, in his time as leader of the EDL.

But people soon tire of marching around London with their flags, listening to a dozen or so speakers, and then going home. It’s the law of diminishing returns, and in the end, these events, in and of themselves, achieve little.

Arguably, the migrant hotel protests have had more real and likely lasting impact, precisely because they have been localised affairs. Those attending may chant Tommy’s name, but he has played no part in their organisation.

As mentioned earlier, Robinson lacks any ideology beyond his hatred of Islam. But, as valid as many of his concerns are, this isn’t enough to sustain or build a movement.  I’ve watched a few interviews with him recently, and he’s struggled noticeably if the tone has gone beyond allowing him to retell anecdotes of his own heroism and persecution, and his reiteration of the evils of Islam.

In one, he seemed to have adopted the position advocated by open Ethno-Nationalists such as Mark Collett of Patriotic Alternative, of re-establishing a 90- 95% White majority in Britain. But he was soon back to claiming the mantle of ‘diversity’ for himself, embracing all cultures (especially Sikhs, Tommy loves Sikhs), apart from Muslims.

He had no real answer when one interviewer pointed out that illegal immigration from non-Muslims, often from nominally Christian African countries, has now almost caught up with that from Islamic sources.

When it comes to legal immigration, the biggest growth area, via Starmer’s Indian trade deal, is going to be from Hindu Indians, with whom Tommy has professed to have no quarrel. They do, after all, have their own problems with Islam.

We’ve already had a big legal influx, including here in Liverpool, of Hong Kong Chinese, another group Tommy has been conciliatory about.

The point being that if you wished to achieve a white ‘super-majority’, your reach for deportations would need to extend far beyond the Muslim community (and not forgetting that Islam is a religion, not a race. Many of them are also white, as Malcolm X long ago realised. Some are even white British converts.)

We’ll see how matters unfold.  I doubt many of the issues with Tommy Lucy highlights are in the past, even if he is now claiming to be a Christian. Despite a definite swing to the Right nationally, I can’t see Robinson being much of an electoral asset to Habib.

Also, at the time of writing, we are in the aftermath of the public assassination of the thirty-one-year-old American conservative ‘influencer’ Charlie Kirk, about which much was made at the big London event, even though it’s doubtful many of those attending were even aware of Kirk, and those that were, only barely, before his public slaying. That includes Robinson.

 The official narrative is linking the alleged assassin, Tyler Robinson, to ‘Far Left’, Antifa extremism, with the added and helpful element of a ‘trans’ lover.

The murder is being used by the Trump administration as an opportunity for a clampdown on the Left, with the promise of the designation of Antifa as a terrorist organisation, though, as no centralised ‘Antifa’ organisation exists, this might prove more difficult to do than to promise.

We’re also likely to see attempts to criminalise opposition to Israel’s actions in Gaza and elsewhere. This is something we’ve already seen the beginnings of here, with Starmer’s outright proscription of one organisation, though, here too, intent is one thing, and implementation quite another.

I’ve been following developments in the Kirk investigation closely (some might say, obsessively. The only gun I’ve ever held is a 2.2 air rifle bought for me by my dad when I was fifteen. But I now know how long it takes to disassemble a ‘Mauser 98’) and believe there are a lot of issues with the mainstream narrative, as does his close friend and fellow American Christian conservative Candace Owens. But I’ll leave that aside and conclude with a personal anecdote that, in a very minor way, adds credence to the official narrative.

About a month ago, I attended a protest outside a migrant hotel here in Liverpool, partly because I believe the concerns of the protesters to be legitimate, and partly to see for myself how both the demonstrators and counter-demonstrators conducted themselves.

A protest the following week, in the city centre, erupted in violence, if fairly low-level violence, which, as far as I could tell from the coverage on YouTube, seemed to arise largely from the failure of the police to keep the two groups apart.

But the hotel protest I attended in person was well policed, with a solid line of mostly good-humoured officers separating demonstrators and counter-demonstrators, while still allowing passers-by and individuals like me who didn’t look like they were out to cause trouble to pass between the two groups, and to take photographs and video footage, both of which I did.

My observation, and I’m aware that appearances can be deceptive, was that those on what I will call the patriots side were largely good-natured, humorous, normal-seeming types. They were mostly middle-aged, but with a smattering of young people and children, and probably majority female.

On the other side, chanting ‘Nazi Scum Off Our Streets’ at the very un-Nazi looking people facing them, were 90% young ‘studenty’ types, with the usual array of ‘Refugees Welcome’ and, rather irrelevantly, ‘Trans Rights Now’ banners and placards.

I had two overriding thoughts about this. One was that I knew some of the counter-demonstrators, at least by sight, from the regular Sunday marches in support of the Palestinian cause. I found it depressing that the Palestinian flag, many of which were also plentiful amongst the ‘antifa’, is now seen, through a process of guilt by association, as synonymous with the people calling them Nazis.

This has led to a reaction that even goes to the extreme of flying a foreign flag, the flag of Israel, on supposedly patriotic demonstrations, presumably on the basis that my enemy’s enemy is my friend. There were none on this particular demonstration in Liverpool (perhaps due to Scouse exceptionalism?), though I spotted a few in the coverage of Saturday’s London event. I gather a Palestinian flag was even ripped up on stage, though at least one speaker, to his credit, condemned this.

Robinson’s own committed Zionism and his focus on Islam is partly to blame for this. In reality, not all Palestinians are Muslims, anyway, and Israel has ‘accidentally’ bombed churches in Gaza, and Israeli ‘Settlers’ have deliberately torched churches on the West Bank. For me, there is no contradiction in supporting the Palestinian people and supporting the anti-migrant protests. Unfortunately, I doubt many on either side would see it this way if I were to carry an English flag in one hand and the Palestinian flag in the other.

My other primary reflection was how far from the type of serious Marxist analysis I was once schooled in the Left, or at least the type of ‘Left’ that attends this type of counter-demonstration has descended.

In my youthful days in Militant, and not quite so youthful, and much shorter period in the Communist Party of Britain, we could distinguish between different strands of Right-Wing thought, between outright Nazis and Fascists, and for instance, Margaret Thatcher and Enoch Powell, the precursors of the likes of Nigel Farage, Rupert Lowe and Ben Habib today.

Or, for that matter, Tommy Robinson. Lucy Brown doesn’t directly address the question in Hate Club, but in all of her many criticisms of Robinson, nowhere does she give reason to believe that his primary motivation is racial hatred. To call him, as supposedly right-wing ‘Talk’ presenter Julie Hartley-Brewer recently did, a ‘White Supremacist’, is based on precisely zero evidence.

The failure to make distinctions between ideologies is dangerous, and it’s entirely possible, setting aside any problems with the official narrative, that an ideological co-thinker of the Liverpool counter-demonstrators across the pond, where guns are much more prevalent, and where President Trump has been called a ‘literal Nazi’ by even mainstream Democrats, and has himself been the subject of two assassination attempts, could believe that Christian conservative Charlie Kirk was a hateful fascist’ who deserved to die.

The online celebrations that took place almost as soon as the news that he’d been shot hit the internet confirm this hate-filled mindset.

This is not to say that even those who really are Fascists or Nazis should be randomly assassinated or attacked. But the tale of how we’ve moved incrementally from ‘No Platform for Fascists’, which I never supported, anyway, to ‘Punch a Nazi’, to where we are now, which can be summarised as ‘Kill all Nazis and anyone who disagrees with us on anything, be it immigration or trans rights, is a Nazi’, is a long and complex one, and I’ve digressed way too-long already.

 To conclude, Tommy Robinson is clearly a deeply flawed human being, and Hate Club does a superb job in capturing the essence of his failings at a particular moment in time, which, as I’ve said, I doubt has much changed. It’s an enjoyable read and, having watched Lucy on a recent podcast appearance, where she came across as likeable, genuine, and humble, I’d guess her personal memoir captures her own essence as much as and as well as she does that of Mr Yaxley-Lennon.

A Five Star recommendation.

Anthony C Green, September 2025

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Exploring ‘Exterminate! Regenerate!’: A Unique Doctor Who Analysis

May 19, 2025 at 2:31 pm · Filed under Books, Doctor Who ·Tagged , , ,

Book cover of 'Exterminate! Regenerate!' by John Higgs, featuring a colorful spiral background and a Dalek in the foreground.

557 words, 3 minutes read time.

I read Higgs’ The KLF Chaos Magic and the Band Who Burned a Million Pounds some years ago. It was a fascinating read that led me to a brief, and unsuccessful, flirtation with Chaos Magic. The book featured a very interesting chapter on Doctor Who, my all-time favourite television show, so I was delighted to discover that the writer had now written a whole book on the subject.

It didn’t disappoint, expanding on the main themes of the chapter in his earlier work, arguing, to simplify, that the show has enjoyed such longevity that it has taken on the form of a living entity, changing and adapting to new conditions, and evolving in such a way that it creates the conditions for its own survival.

That might sound weird and artsy-fartsy, and I suppose it is. It does, however, make sense, though it would be impossible to do the author’s thesis justice in a short review. All I can do is urge people to read it, be they fans of the show or those with a more general interest in British popular culture.

You’ll gather from this that this is no ordinary Doctor Who book, and I suppose I should qualify my recommendation by saying that if you’re looking for a mainstream history of the show, with detailed production notes on the now close to nine hundred episodes in nearly sixty-two years, then look elsewhere. This is essentially a work of cultural criticism, written from an unusual and esoteric point of view.

It does present its analysis in a conventional structure. That is, it begins with the pre-history of the show and takes us chapter by chapter, Doctor by Doctor, from Hartnell the First in 1963,  through McCoy the Seventh, the last Doctor of the classic era that ended in 1989, and onwards through the ‘Wilderness Years of the nineties, McGann’s movie Doctor and the modern incarnation from Eccleston the Ninth in 2005 right up to the present day with Gatwa the Fifteenth/the Disney Doctor. Higgs’ Left-field analysis flows beautifully from this familiar structure.

There are many sub-themes to enjoy here. But I’ll mention just one. That is, the idea that the relationship of the BBC to the franchise is analogous to that of the Time Lords to the Doctor within the show’s lore and canon. Again, this might sound a bit ‘out there’ for some, but it really does work.

I don’t agree with the author on everything. He’s more of a liberal than I am, and his progressive views sometimes collapse into a form of cultural relativism where, in this context, one Doctor is every bit as important as every other. That’s not really a criticism. Higgs has chosen his path, and it’s a valid one that I thank him for sharing with us in such a thought-provoking and entertaining manner. However, there should also be a place for value judgment when discussing art/pop culture. Readers may be interested in checking out my reviews of the current ‘season 2’ of Disney Who. There are plenty of value judgments to be found there.

That aside, I have no hesitation in recommending Exterminate! Regenerate! It’s a book that’s well worth reading, from an author who is rapidly establishing a place among my favourite non-fiction authors.

Anthony c Green, May 2025

Exterminate/Regenerate

By John Higgs

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Promotional image for the novel 'Special' by Anthony C. Green, featuring the title in large red letters, the author's name in smaller text, and a call to action 'BUY NOW'. The background shows a dimly lit corridor.

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Exploring David Peace’s ‘Red Or Dead’: A Theatre Review by Anthony C Green

April 7, 2025 at 6:26 am · Filed under Books, Drama ·Tagged , , , , , ,

2,207 words, 12 minutes read time.

I’m a big fan of David Peace, the author whose novel of the same name this play is based. The Damned United, his fictionalised account of Brian Clough’s il-fated 44-day tenure at Leeds United (a day less than Liz’ Truss period as Prime Minister, as many journalist and online wags pointed when her disastrous period as Prime Minister ended), is the book he’s best known for. I loved it, and the film adaptation starring Steve Coogan, though much lighter in tone, was still a worthy effort. I also read his GB 1984, a novelisation of the miners’ strike written from the viewpoints of Messrs Scargill, Heathcliffe and McGahey. That’s pretty good too. Time prevented me from reading all of his Red Riding trilogy, set in Yorkshire during Peter Sutcliffe’s murderous rampage against girls and women. But what I read was good, and the television adaptation on Channel Four was a powerful, gritty, violent drama that’s well worth revisiting.

I purchased Red Or Dead, Peace’s second legendary football manager based novelisation, this time with the great Bill Shankly as its subject, almost as soon as it came out, hoping it would match or even exceed the Damned United.

It was a huge hardback tome of over seven hundred pages in length. I found it to be almost unreadable, and gave up on it about one-tenth in.

I wasn’t alone in my opinion, as a skim through the Amazon reviews makes clear, and for a book originally retailing at £20 plus to be available for £2.99 in The Works within a few months of publication is not a sign of success.

I could see what Peace was trying to do. He was attempting to demonstrate how Shankly’s success was based on repetition, on doing the same things over and over, ingraining good habits in mind and body until a state of perfection is reached, in the manner that a classical musician will repeat scales or certain musical pieces over and over until they can be performed on demand almost unconsciously. This was the methodology Shankly sought to instil in his players and the teams he managed, in the fifteen years he spent in charge at Liverpool FC, THE team he managed.

Statue of Bill Shankly at Anfield stadium in Liverpool (England)

Peace’s attempt to mirror the Shankly method in a literary fashion was a bold, admirable idea. But page after page of ‘Bill Shankly goes into the kitchen and makes himself a cup of tea. The first cup of tea of the morning. Strong with a splash of milk. Two sugars. Stirred clockwise three times. Bill Shankly sits at the table and opens his notepad. Bill Shankly drinks his tea and looks at the notepad. The notepad with the team sheet for Liverpool’s game against Arsenal. On Saturday. At home. At Anfield. Bill Shankly thinks about Ian St John. Ian St John who was injured in the match against Leeds United. Last Saturday. Away. At Elland Road. Bill Shankly thinks about Liverpool’s game next Wednesday. Against Real Madrid. In the first leg of the European Cup quarter-final. Away. In Madrid. Bill Shankly picks up a pencil. Bill Shankly writes a question mark next to Ian St John’s name. On the team sheet. The team sheet Bill Shankly had written. In the notepad. The team sheet for the game against Arsenal. On Saturday. At home. At Anfield…’

And so on, and on, and on.

And on…

How can anyone make of such source material an entertaining play?

Such were my thoughts as I headed for the Royal Court theatre.

The Royal Court theatre in Liverpool.

The month-long run at the Royal marks the world premiere of the production, and the theatre was packed by the time the doors closed and the lights dimmed.

The audience tended towards the middle to upper age register, though with a smattering of younger men and women, with quite a few couples.

I’d guess that most of those in attendance were working class, likely to be long-term Liverpool FC supporters, and with many of them not being regular theatre goers, though maybe that’s too many assumptions.

As is my usual practice, I read no reviews beforehand and so genuinely had no idea of what to expect as the cast assembled on the minimalist, suitably vintage stage.

I’m happy to report that Philip Breen did a superb job in adapting such seemingly unpromising source material for the stage, demonstrating that not only could it be done, but that it could be done in such a manner that it has a genuinely populist appeal.

As narrated by the multi-talented Alison McKenzie, in the guise of Shankly’s beloved wife Ness, Peace’s words were revealed to possess a poetry that had failed to escape my notice as dry words on the page.

 As well as narration, we get plenty of great dialogue too, sometimes in dramatic re-enactments of key moments in Shankly’s life and career, from before, during and after those momentous days at Liverpool FC, and sometimes in well-crafted interactions between Shankly and his players, coaching staff, groundsman, supporters, club chairman, fellow managers (including Clough), and Ness, all written and designed to illustrate the character and philosophy of life of the man.  

There’s plenty of nostalgia to be had for those who lived and followed football in this period, with cameos from the likes of Kevin Keegan and Emlyn Hughes (with a sly did at the latter for being an irritating Tory), and there are also some genuinely heart tugging moments, such as when we are informed that the troubled club chairman Jimmy McInnes, who first brought Shankly to Liverpool from Huddersfield Town was found hanging under the Kop.

The play has a large cast of fifty-two, drawn, aside from the lead actors, from a local community theatre group, almost all of whom occupied the stage throughout the performance.

The size of the cast gives the play an appropriately democratic and collectivist style and form, with those who don’t have a speaking part still able to play an essential role as representatives of the Anfield crowd on match days, as well as being a rousing choir in the production’s several musical numbers.

The first rendition we get of the inevitable You’ll Never Walk Alone is at the point in the story when it was adopted as the club anthem by the Kop, one Saturday afternoon in 1963, as Merseybeat swept the nation and Gerry and the Pacemakers took this little remembered number from the musical Carousel to the top of the Hit Parade. The recreation of that moment began as a solo rendition by McKenzie, soon to be joined by the full cast. They in turn were augmented by the archived, echoic, full-throated surround-sound of the Kop itself, and not a small number of the audience, until it felt as though the whole theatre was shaking through sheer volume and raw emotion.

Musically, we also get She Loves You, again as a full-cast plus Kop number, and Cilla the Singer in full peak-Cilla dress and hair, standing alone in the spotlight on a raised platform at the back of the stage, giving us Anyone Who Had a Heart, as copied from Dionne Warwick.

This musical interlude, despite being beautifully performed by Jhanaica Van Mook, was one of the play’s few missteps. Every other musical component served to illustrate key moments in the story. This felt like pure cabaret, though audience reaction suggested that mine was a minority opinion.

Some more or less good natured audience hissing at the first mention of a defeat by Liverpool’s arch nemesis’ Manchester United early on, was beautifully undercut by Shankly movingly relaying the moment he learned of the tragic event of the Munich Air Crash of 1958, his words accompanied by symbolic snow falling onto the stage, of how he got down on his knees and prayed ‘harder than I’ve ever prayed for anything’ for the survival of his friend and fellow Scot, United’s manager Matt Busby.

As we know, Busby did survive, unlike twenty-three of his fellow passengers on that ill-starred and ill-advised return flight from Belgrade, including eight of his young team, the Busby Babes.

The close relationship between the two managers remains an important theme throughout the rest of the play.

After the interval, the performance resumes with archival newsreel footage of shocked, and often disbelieving, real-life Liverpudlians’ as they reacted to the news of Shankly’s retirement in 1974, one of several intelligent uses of ghostly period film projected onto the back of the stage.

This second half was a half-hour or so shorter than the first half. This made sense, given that life for Shankly after football would last a mere seven years, until his death at the relatively young age of sixty-seven.

But for Shankly, who was only half-joking when he famously said that ‘Football’s not a matter of life and death, it’s more important than that,’ there could never really be a meaningful ‘Life after football.’

The difficulty that many working men, and Shankly never ceased to consider himself a ‘working man,’ have in finding meaning in life once the daily routine of work is over, is in and of itself a great topic for drama. But here, the great man’s failure to adjust to retirement was played a little too much for laughs, and this made the second half of the play weaker than the first, though that’s not to say it was weak per se, or that it significantly lowered my estimation of the whole.

For some considerable time after his decision to step down, Shankly continued to turn up at Liverpool’s training ground, to impart the benefits of his wisdom to players and staff, to ‘keep himself in shape’, to ‘help out’, to be around in case he was needed, but really just to be there because there was nowhere else that he needed to be.

 In the end, it was politely requested that he stay away, because his presence was at risk of undermining new manager Bob Paisley, previously his long-term assistant, at a time when he needed to ‘make his mark’.

Soon, of course, he did indeed make his mark, building upon the essential foundations Shankly had laid to lead Liverpool to even greater heights, to add the European Cup, the one triumph that had alluded his predecessor, to the already impressively stocked Anfield trophy cabinet.

 We do see all this in the play, but the over-concentration on the comedic in this second half downplayed the key, tragic essence of Shankly’s final years, an essence well encapsulated by the Ian St John in his remark that, ‘Shanks died of boredom, of not being the manager of Liverpool Football Club.’

That’s not to say, to paraphrase the cliche beloved of football commentators, that this was ‘play of two-halves’. The level of performance was never below excellent, and the comedy provided the audience with plenty of laugh-out-loud moments.

Shankly believed footballing success was predicated on individuals working as one, as a collective towards a shared goal (or, more correctly, towards the opposing team’s goal). In one of his most iconic statements he described this as a form of socialism, ‘real socialism in action.’ He always recognised that the collective extended well beyond the eleven players on the pitch to incorporate everybody connected with the club, from the boardroom down to the supporters, with the players and the manager, those who most obviously receive the glory and the accolades of success, being but parts of a much greater whole.

Much the same, with appropriate linguistic amendments, can be said of a successful theatre production, and of much else in life.

Almost everything about this play serves to powerfully illustrate this truth.

This being said, it seems almost a contradiction to single out individuals for praise. Nevertheless, it would be remiss not to mention Peter Mullan’s superb performance in the lead role, though perhaps we should expect nothing less from such an experienced and accomplished actor. He had Shankly’s mannerisms and accent down pat. But his performance never descended into mere impersonation, and although he is the ‘star’ name, there are no star moments, no grandstanding attempts to dominate. Clearly, he understands his subject and the nature of the production well.

Alison McKenzie, I’ve mentioned, but Les Dennis was so convincing as Tom Williams, who took over as the Liverpool club chairman after the suicide of McInnes, that ‘Les Dennis’ disappeared entirely and I didn’t even realise it was Les Dennis until I checked the cast list on the bus home.   

Breen’s direction should also be commended. Two-and-a-half hours is a fair old length for a play, but never for a moment did it drag.

Some prior knowledge of the life and times of Bill Shankly would certainly enhance enjoyment of the production. But those who lack such knowledge would almost certainly leave the theatre wanting to rectify this deficiency.

I wouldn’t recommend that they head straight for Peace’s novel, although I left tempted to dig it out from the darkest, most neglected corner of my book collection.

Red Or Dead continues at the Royal Court, Liverpool until April 19th, but will surely be coming to a theatre near you at some point.

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The Mirror by Tim Bragg: A Dystopian Novel of Human Resilience and Artistic Redemption

May 17, 2024 at 4:22 pm · Filed under Books, Fiction ·Tagged , , , , , ,

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631 words, 3 minutes read time.

Tim Bragg is an engaging writer, novelist, poet and multi-instrumentalist singer-songwriter and musician with an impressive bibliography of both fiction and non-fiction works and recorded albums to his credit, the very latest being the cyber gothic slow burner and critically important ‘The Mirror’ (Sycamore Dystopia 2023).

The Mirror is a dystopian novel set in a not too distant future – 2073 – where humanity is held captive in a society completely run by a system of artificial intelligence and technocracy similar to that envisaged by both one-time Fabian socialists Aldous Huxley (Brave New World) and George Orwell (1984), both of whom portrayed ‘one world’ collectivist states run by an elite of central planners where life, language, media and ‘entertainment’ are completely regulated and controlled. Bragg here offers a very compelling and highly relevant take on this theme for the contemporary times but with perhaps a story more reminiscent of the film ‘Blade Runner’ (itself based on the novel ‘Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?’ by the gnostic Philip K Dick) and Mary Shelley’s classic ‘Frankenstein’, but with a much more uplifting and positive affirmation of the human capacity for self- transcendence through the essence of creativity and art; the nature of art being one of the central themes of the book but also how art can be captured and simulated by technology (witness now how AI can itself write poetry and paint images of incredible complexity etc.).

There is a cryptic relevance in the story to how the world changed in 2030. Some of the characters in the book who hold positions of power have names that appear rather ‘hipster’ or eco-themed although the world they inhabit is anything but ‘natural’ – cloning, eugenics, genetic engineering and mass surveillance. Even personal reproduction, itself reduced to life inside something resembling a panopticon, is closely screened in the name of ‘mother earth’.

Given that Tim Bragg is connected with the excellent ‘Off The Left Eye’ YouTube channel having composed music for some of its broadcasts and podcasts which serve to popularise the esoteric Christian spirituality of the 18th Century Swedish mystic Emmanuel Swedenborg, it was no surprise to see space given in the book to themes of human immortality in the face of individual extinction, particularly as one central character has a near-death experience, this theme being central to the novel’s central premise – do humans and nature have a Soul or Spirit? Are we Soul and Spirit, or merely biological machines with neither? Does consciousness actually exist independently of the mind? Do we think thoughts or are thoughts thinking us? What does it mean to be human? (Another work worthy to be mentioned in this context here would be C.S. Lewis’s ‘That Hideous Strength’, an anti-transhumanist classic.)

Tim Bragg has succeeded in writing a highly readable novel depicting what the world would look like should Klaus Schwab’s vision of the Great Reset and Agenda 2030 actually come to fruition and succeed in reducing all of humanity to automatons. Given the indefatigable spirit of humanity though, Bragg gives us much inspiration to suggest that a single blade of grass could cut through concrete given time and genuine human values like compassion, friendship and love and the redeeming capacity of art to transcend and ennoble life which will win through in the end somehow.

This is a multi-layered work with good characterisation and many textures and tones which slowly draws the reader in, with twists and turns in the tale amidst a mounting fear that builds to its shocking conclusion. A gripping polemic against transhumanism which succeeds without either preaching or condemning but clearly displaying the author’s obvious empathy and sensitivity to the human condition.

Reviewed by Wayne Sturgeon

Promotional image for 'Lyrics to Live By 2' by Tim Bragg, featuring a vinyl record with a white sleeve and yellow background, inviting readers to buy the book.

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A Parent’s Frantic Search: The English Dragon Book Review

January 5, 2024 at 8:13 am · Filed under Books ·Tagged , , ,

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582 words, 3 minutes read time.

A toddler goes missing at a London railway station on a Friday evening.  This causes massive disruption to his parents’ lives over that fateful weekend.  During this period of frantic searching and waiting, the inner thoughts of Ben’s parents – Oliver and Rowan Holmes – are laid bare in this astute novel. 

Oliver, a reasonably well-off songwriter, believes that English society has gone to hell in a handcart.  In moments alone and in contemplation of discussions in his university days, he muses on these things and occasionally jots down his thoughts; thoughts for his lost son. 

The paradox of modern English society is that all cultures are valued equally, except for the English one.  People have to struggle to be English in a quiet way.  “Our freedom is being eroded.  Those bastards in government are taking it from us stealthily and insidiously.  Our culture is being eroded.  You can’t be English anymore.  They’ll make it illegal.”  And the strangest part of this paradox is that the movement against freedom is being brought about by woolly minded ‘nice decent people’.  If, please God, he and Rowan get Ben back, what kind of country is he going to grow up in? 

A country where the institutionally busy police is paralysed by institutional incompetence.  A country where freedom of thought and expression are stifled by a language of impoverished ‘authorised words.’  A country where indigenous English “values [are] overridden and laws amended to suit the needs of newcomers” whereas, in a healthy society, it would be “up to settlers to show respect and awareness of the indigenous people’s homeland.” 

Oliver has a place in hell for all those responsible for the parlous state of England.  In the lowest circle, he’s place writers, artists and film makers who censor themselves; in the second circle, editors and publishers; in the third circle, self-serving academics; in the fourth circle, cowardly politicians; tin the fifth circle, TV presenters; and in the sixth circle, busybody social workers who tear families apart for dogmatic reasons.

Rowan waits by the telephone at home in a little English village cottage while Oliver goes to London to see if he can find Ben.  He tries to gee-up the indifferent police.  He hands out leaflets at the railway station in order to jog the memory of commuters who may have seen the child.   Both are frantic with worry – fearing the worst, contemplating the disintegration of society but still daring to hope that they will be re-united with Ben.

This novel looks at the characters in an interesting way as the chapters switch from one to another.  We see the innermost thoughts of Oliver and Rowan tumble out as if we are reading their ‘streams of consciousness’.  Ben, bizarrely, reports his experiences at the hands of his abductors in the first person!  Well, it seems a little offbeat at first, but Ben’s innocent descriptions of modern urban England with all its absurdities, double standards and little hypocrisies really works for the reader. 

This compelling page-turner proves the old saw about never judging a book by its cover.  Behind the uninspiring plain green cover is an attention-grabbing, thought-provoking quest.  The story line is riveting.  The reader will really care how this book ends.  Will Oliver succeed in getting his son back?  What motivates Ben’s abductors?   Is Oliver’s opinion of today’s England accurate?  Can anything be done about it?  Read it and see! 

Reviewed by David Kerr.  

Reprinted with the kind permission of and acknowledgements to Ulster Nation

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Julia by Sandra Newman: A Page-Turning Feminist Perspective on Orwell’s Classic

December 3, 2023 at 11:18 am · Filed under Books, Fiction ·Tagged , , , ,

2,928 words, 15 minutes read time.

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Written with the full approval of the Orwell estate, Julia is a retelling of George Orwell’s dystopian classic Nineteen Eighty Four from the point of view of Winston Smith’s lover, the eponymous hero of this novel, rather than of Winston himself. As a long-time fan of Orwell’s book, which even three-year’s membership of the Communist Party of Britain didn’t dissuade me from, this was a book I knew I had to read as soon as I became aware of its existence a few weeks ago. It’s to the novel’s credit that even though I rarely read fiction nowadays, and at four hundred pages it’s of a fair length, I got through it quickly. It is a real page turner, and though not without reservation, it’s one I strongly recommend.

I did approach it with some trepidation. Whilst reading it, I purposely avoided any reviews. I have however looked at a few since finishing it. Some of these have recommended it be read as a companion piece to the book Wifedom by Anna Funder, which is a biography of Orwell’s first wife Eileen O’ Shaughnessy nee Blair (Orwell was Christened Eric Blair). This apparently portrays Orwell as an insensitive misogynist, possibly a closet homosexual, who took many of his best ideas from Eileen, without acknowledging her contribution. Eileen died in 1945, four years before the publication of Nineteen Eighty Four, but it seems written a poem of this name several years earlier. She also suggested he write his planned satire on the degeneration of the Bolshevik revolution in Russia as an allegorical a fable. This book of course became his second most famous novel, Animal Farm. Funder alleges that Orwell’s dislike of women, or at least his belief that they were of little political importance, was embedded in his writings, in his novels, his essays and his letters, which is not something I personally have noticed, despite having read virtually everything he ever wrote by the end of the 1980’s. To be fair to Funder though, I’m not a woman, and wasn’t looking for such things.

Clearly, Orwell is not immune to cancel-culture, and this was my fear with Julia, even before I’d hear of or read anything about Wifedom, that it would be a ‘woke’ retelling of his masterpiece, and one that may even end up replacing it as required reading for the youth of today.

Fortunately, my fears in this regard proved unfounded. Naturally, women, Julia herself of course, but also women in general, do play a more important role than is to be found in Orwell’s original. That is to be expected and is essentially it’s point of the novel. Female sexuality, in particular plays a role that is, as you’d expect of a novel written in the late ‘40’s, almost entirely absent from Orwell, and is subtly handled. But none of this change of perspective was done at the expense of the male characters, who remain much as we remember them. There is a tendency today in fiction, in books, in films and television, to make all women into strong women, and portray all men as being weak and/or stupid. I didn’t find this the case in Newman’s work, where the male characters, principally Winston but others too, are not only recognisable from Orwell’s novel, but are also given an extra dimension through being seen through feminine eyes.

I will try to review, as is my general policy for book reviews (for films I tend to assume the reader has most likely already seen the movie), without giving away too many spoilers.

First, I suppose I should answer the question as to whether this book could be read without familiarity with Orwell’s original. Here, I’d have to say that the answer has to be, in general, ‘no.’ I suppose it would be possible to read this and then to go back and read Orwell’s source material. But then a re-reading of Julia would I think also be essential. At the very least, a reasonable knowledge of the world Orwell created, of its main themes, concepts and chronology, is essential for the fullest enjoyment of Julia.

Indeed, spotting where you are in relation in relation to the original was a big factor in my own enjoyment of the book: ‘Ah, this is the shop where Winston buys the paperweight’, or ‘Yes, this is the Prole woman who Winston watched singing and decided was beautiful.’ Thoughts like this were frequent occurrences for me, and to not have that background knowledge as a guide would be a huge handicap for a reader.

Of course, some aspects of Nineteen Eighty Four, have become such a recognisable aspect of modern culture and politics, Big Brother or Newspeak etc, that they would be understood by any reasonably intelligent, politically aware reader. Indeed, the very term Orwellian has become a part of modern political discourse, denoting anything perceived as a further step towards a totalitarian society.

I’m pleased that the author has remained faithful to the world that Orwell created. This was a world that, although set in what must have seemed to readers, and perhaps to Orwell himself, as a far-flung future date (though the real ‘1984’ is now further away in our past than it was in Orwell’s future!), it was still clearly based very much on his own time. The ‘Thought Police’ were obviously influenced by Stalin’s then still highly active KGB, and to a lesser extent the recently defeated Hitler’s Gestapo; and the general shabbiness, shortages and rationing of ‘Airstrip One’, the modern name for England in the novel, was very much influenced by  Britain under the 1945-51 Labour government of Clement Attlee, a government rightly revered on the Left, particularly for its creation of the NHS, but which presided over a nation ravaged and bankrupted by war, a grey, decayed country of enforced austerity.

(Orwell chose the even more austere atmosphere of the remote Scottish island of Jura, then sparsely populated, and now devoid of all human presence other than hardy travellers, for the actual writing of the novel).

I very much enjoyed the way the author filled out Orwell’s world, giving us more detail of how people lived in Airstrip One, be they the Proles, the Outer-Party, to which both Julia and Winston belong, and the elite Inner-Party, the elite to which their soon to be interrogator O’Brien belongs, and which has at its apex, omnipresent on the ‘tele-screens’ (which are now a reality in all but name in our own world), the infallible Big Brother himself.

There are, however, problems with such detail, and this where the novel, in my opinion, reveals its weak points. Surely, the main takeaway from Orwell’s book, is that this is a totalitarianism that is indeed total in almost every respect. ‘A boot stamping on a human face, forever’, to quote O’Brien, from which there seems no possible escape.

In Julia ‘Airstrip One’ often resembles a run-of-the-mill ‘Peoples Democracy,’ the official, Soviet approved names for the East European one-party communist states which were in the process of construction at the time Orwell was writing. It wasn’t a surprise to me to discover that one of Newman’s previous books is called Stasiland, and is a work of none-fiction about life in the former German Democratic Republic.

(As an only partially reconstructed Tankie, I still don’t see everything as negative about those societies, something that is also true of many people who grew up in the Soviet Union or in one of these ‘People’s Democracies’, and is also true of my own wife, who had what she remembers as a very happy childhood in ‘Communist China.’ The lack of emphasis on consumerism and individuality, the social solidarity, and the hope and joy many experienced through collectively working to build what they were convinced would be a better future has an almost spiritual dimension to it that is often overlooked. Would the citizens of modern Cuba or Vietnam, or indeed China be better off if a successful, western-orchestrated ‘colour revolution’, brought them liberal-democratic ‘freedom’ of the kind we ‘enjoy’? This is a discussion for elsewhere, but I doubt it. Already, I’ve digressed too long, but although I never bought into the ‘Party-line’ on Orwell, I do regret how his two most famous books, Nineteen Eighty Four and Animal Farm, although both were indeed heavily influenced by Stalinism, are routinely utilised in the service of capitalist propaganda. After all, hasn’t modern corporate-capitalism already taken us a long way down the road to absolute totalitarian control? Google/You Tube/Facebook, the Big Tech giants, already have greater and more absolute powers of surveillance than Stalin or Mao, or indeed Orwell, could ever have imagined).

Having said that bleakness and an absence of any hope of beneficial change is generally regarded as the main takeaway from Nineteen Eighty Four, I have long seen more than a glimmer of hope in Orwell’s book. This hope lies, not with the ‘proles’, to quote Winston Smith, but with the ‘Appendix on Newspeak’ which concludes the novel. This is clearly written from the perspective of a future-point where Big Brother, Ingsoc (English Socialism, the guiding ideology of Airstrip One) and it’s trilogy of ‘principles’, ‘War is Peace’, Freedom is Slavery’ and ‘Ignorance is Strength’, and indeed Newspeak itself, are relics from a nightmare era that no longer exists.

Orwell died soon after the publication of the novel, and I’ve never seen the text of any interviews where he discuses it (surprisingly, considering he made so many broadcasts for the BBC during the war, not a single audio clip of his speaking voice has ever been unearthed either), so we will likely never know his intention. But I’m pretty sure that the insertion of this Appendix was a conscious, artistic decision, designed to suggest that ultimately, the human will to freedom will always eventually triumph, over even the most seemingly perfect tyranny.

However, the Appendix aside, there is no doubt that within the main text of the novel, Orwell does indeed create a system that appears to have no weaknesses through which the human spirit might begin to assert itself. In this world, language, and through language thought itself, is being reconstructed in such a way that concepts such as freedom and justice will eventually become impossible, even in the abstract.

They are not quite there yet in Orwell. People like Winston and Julia can still hope and dream, but it is strongly suggested that even these hopes and dreams are creations of the elite: Does the Brotherhood, supposedly led by Emmanuel Goldstein (clearly based on the Soviet renegade Leon Trotsky, and the object of the daily ritual ‘two-minute-hate’ sessions) really exist? O’Brien suggests that they too are creations. Do Eurasia and Eastasia, with whom Oceania, of which Airstrip One is a part, is permanently at war, first with one then the other, with history suitably amended to show that today’s enemy is also yesterday’s enemy, even exist as separate entities?

Orwell suggests they do, though their ruling ideologies (‘Obliteration of the Self’ and ‘Neo Bolshevism’ respectively) are in any case indistinguishable from Ingsoc, thus making their ‘separateness’ irrelevant.

If they didn’t exist, the implication is that it would be necessary to invent them. Because every tyranny needs not one, but two enemies: One is internal, as represented by the Brotherhood/Goldstein, and the other is external, represented by whatever foreign power it is currently expedient to be at war with.

(The benefits of ‘Forever Wars’ seems to be a lesson our own elite rulers have learnt well.)

In fact, O’Brien suggests that even Big Brother himself may be an invention. He is a face on the posters and on the telescreens, seemingly immune to the normal human process of aging, a voice booming through the loudspeakers, an object of the people’s love, gratitude and devotion whose physical existence as a living, breathing human being doesn’t matter one way or another.

This is another area where, in my view, Julia falls short as a novel. Somehow, we need this world to be something far worse than perhaps East German was between the late forties and the late eighties, even as seen by its biggest critics. There are too many gaps in the totality of control of the party in Julia, too much hope within its text. For instance, there is a suggestion at one point that help, maybe eventually even liberation, might come from America. Yes, this could be more false hope engineered from above, but the Inner-Party in Orwell’s book would never have allowed even the idea that, somewhere, alternative, freer models of society might exist. The ideologies of Eastasia (presumably America is part of this bloc or is it independent of all three blocs? This is not made clear), and Eurasia and their identity with the ideology of Oceania, is never mentioned.

In any case, the idea of America as a force for liberation has been exposed as a Neocon fantasy/propaganda exercise in or own, real world. It’s importation to the fictional world of Nineteen Eighty Four seems curious and out of place. I doubt Orwell would have approved, even if, like most British citizens, he acknowledged the invaluable role the United States had recently played in the defeat of Nazism (though of course their level of suffering was much less than that of the Soviet Union).

But in addition to this flaw, by the end of Julia, much of the mystery of life in Orwell’s world has been unnecessarily de-mystified. We know the answers to questions as to such as whether the Brotherhood and Big Brother really exist.

Personally, I would sooner be left with the mysteries.

The book also, though I stand by my earlier assertion that it’s a real page turner, goes on too long. Orwell’s original, again leaving aside the Appendix, ends with the desultory meeting between a broken Winston and a broken Julia, before Winston is quietly dispatched with a bullet to the head, his last thoughts being that he did, finally, love Big Brother, in a way that was every bit as real as the Party demanded.

I have no problem at all with Newman choosing to end the book differently from Orwell, and there was nothing in the original, as far as I remember, that ruled out the possibility that Julia’s fate might have been different to that of Winston. But I do think that, in chronological terms, it would have been better to have ended the book at the same point in time as Nineteen Eighty Four.

The author made a mistake similar to those that have been made in recent television adaptations of classic books. For example, one of my favourite novels is The Man in a High Castle by Philip K Dick. Amazon produced what was a very good adaptation of this for the screen a few years ago. Or at least, that was very good for two seasons, at which point they’d reached the end of Dick’s original source material. Because of the show’s success, they chose to continue anyway, the story becoming ever more fantastical and further away from the spirit of the original novel. The same could be said of Channel Four’s adaptation of Margaret Attwood’s novel The Handmaiden’s Tale which, again, was good for a couple of seasons, until the writers reached the end of the material the writer had originally created, at which point the plot became increasingly unhinged and unbelievable.

I’m sure there are purely literary examples, but Julia definitely, in my view, becomes much less recognisably a part of the world Orwell created, once she continues the story on beyond the point where Orwell chose to end it.

One review I’ve read since I finished the book described it as ‘superior fanfiction.’ That’s not a world in which I’ve ever immersed myself, either as a reader or a writer (though I’ve had a Doctor Who story knocking around my head for years, which I might get around to writing one day), but I think it’s better than that, and of course the approval of the Orwell estate elevates it above that world anyway.

It is however a valid, and perhaps the best way of looking at Julia. It’s a good idea, that of taking a classic novel and re-imagining it through the eyes of a different character to that of the original; and in Newman’s hands, the possibilities of the idea are, for the most part, very well executed.

I was never bored or tempted to give up on it, and the ‘woke’ element I feared was almost entirely absent.

But the novel, if not quite ‘fanfiction’, is best not seen as canonical. Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four is one of the best, and most important novels ever written. It stands alone, without need of addition or extension, or prequals or sequels. Writers are free to write them, and if they can get official approval, all power to them. Readers though, should not, and do not, have an obligation to regard them as an official or essential part of the story.

Read Orwell’s original if you haven’t already done so, learn something of the environment within which it was created, and the ideas that influenced it. Think about it, absorb it, consider its relationship to our own world, and then, at some point, when you’ve a mind to, give Sandra Newman’s Julia a read. I’m pretty sure you’ll enjoy it.

Julia By Sandra Newman

(Granta Books, 2023, 400 pages)

Reviewed by Anthony C Green

Anthony C Green, November 2023

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Barbarossa: The Russian German Conflict 1941-1945

June 23, 2023 at 3:58 pm · Filed under Books ·Tagged , , , , ,

By Alan Clark

(Published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1964, 1995, 2001)

As we pass the 22nd of June 2023,  and the 82nd anniversary of the launch of Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union by Nazi Germany, an event that sparked the most bloody, barbaric and titanic military struggle in world history, I thought I would share a few reflections on my recent reading of Alan Clark’s history of the conflict, which was first written in 1964.

Clark was that very rare beast, a Tory M.P who I liked and respected. I well remember enjoying the 1993 television documentary Love Tory, which included details, with the full compliance of Clark and his long-suffering wife Jane, of his tangled sex-life, including dalliances with the wife of a top South African judge, as well as their two daughters, a trio referred to as ‘The Coven’ by Jane. The posthumous television dramatisation of his diaries, for along with Tony Benn, Clark was perhaps the greatest British diarist of the post-war period, starring John Hurt, was also highly entertaining.

As regards his private life, I suppose he had much in common with Boris Johnson, though he was much more likable. Plus, he lived in an actual castle, complete with drawbridge and moat. No ‘man of the people’ affectations from Alan. Though not a fully-fledged aristocrat, he was certainly, like Johnson, born with the proverbial silver spoon, his father being the leading art historian Sir Kenneth Clark, who wrote and presented, the 1969 BBC series Civilisation, a comprehensive history of western art, which is rightly seen as a landmark of British television. Henceforth, he would always be referred to by the impressive sounding title of Lord Clark of Civilisation.

Again, like Boris, Clark Jr often had a tangential relationship with the truth, his admission that he may have been ‘economic with the actualite’ temporarily bringing a whole new Anglo-French term into popular usage, following some dodgy dealers during his time at the Ministry of Defence. Somehow, his natural charm allowed him to get away with these personal and political misdemeanours. Clark was also a genuine maverick and free-thinker in a way that the arch-globalist Johnson would like to think he is, but simply isn’t.

I love the story of how, after Thatcher, who he, to his detriment greatly admired, (and to the point of sexual attraction: he once compared her to Eva Peron, though I can’t see it myself), had narrowly failed to secure enough votes to prevent a second ballot when challenged for the Conservative Party leadership and thus the post of Prime Minister, by Michael Heseltine in the autumn of 1990, he was one of the long parade of Tory dignitaries who were called into Number Ten Downing Street one by one to offer advice as to her future course of action. Almost to a man (and they were almost all men) they told her that her support amongst the parliamentary party, at a time when Conservative M.P’s alone decided who should lead the party, was collapsing, and she should therefore resign immediately. Clark, looking at the issue as a historian rather than as a practical politician, offered a contrary view: ‘You should stand,’ he told her. ‘Of course, you shall lose, but it will be magnificent!’ Sadly, Thatcher ignored this advice, and we were thus denied the enjoyment of Maggie’s final bunker-like denouement.

Even more, I will always love Clark for his very last speech in the House of Commons in 1999 when, after fruitless surgery, suffering from a brain tumour he knew would soon kill him, he was one of the few voices in British politics to denounce the then ongoing NATO bombing of Belgrade (and those who tell you that the current Russo-Ukraine conflict is the first major war in Europe since the 1940’s conveniently forget the deliberate destruction of socialist Yugoslavia by the western powers), calling the Serbs ‘a brave Christian people who have never injured, nor so much as threatened a British citizen.’

He was also an active supporter of animal rights, and thus opponent of blood sports, again, a rarity amongst members of the upper echelons of the Conservative Party.

So, I’ve long been a fan of Clark. I was, however, only dimly aware he was an accomplished military historian; and I admit that military history is not and never has been my usual reading matter. I therefore approached the 474 pages of Barbarossa, not counting Appendices, with some trepidation, fully accepting the possibility that it may join the list of the books on my bookshelves that sit there for years with a makeshift bookmark placed somewhere between their pages, before it becomes time for another space-creating cull and a trip to the near-by charity shop with a series of bin-liners attached to our shopping trolley.

But finish Barbarossa I did, and I found it to be a gripping read from first page to last. In fact, I enjoyed it so much that I intend to seek out a copy of his earlier, and more widely-known book, The Donkeys: a history of the BEF in 1915, about the struggle on the Western Front in World War One, a book that has done much to shape our view of that conflict.

When it comes to mass casualties, the figures for the battles for territory between the Allied and the Central Powers from 1914 to 1918 pale into virtual insignificance when compared against the war between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, which began less than a quarter of a century after Revolution had led to Russia’s early exit from ‘The War to End All Wars.’ This latter war was not so much a war for territory, though the Red Army and Soviet people were of course defending their homeland from invading forces, but a war of annihilation. Hitler’s racial theories, which treated the Slavic peoples, like the Jews, as under-mensch, literally sub-humans, whose fate and suffering was therefore of no consequence, made this inevitable. Their lands, including those of the highly fertile Ukraine, and it’s worth noting that Barbarossa is replete with the names of battlefields which are once again regularly appearing on our news outlets, were, once its inhabitants had been erased from the face of Earth, to be re-settled by those of the best National Socialist racial-stock, by the members of the SS and their families, with their head Heinrich Himmler openly musing that within a few generations nobody would care, or perhaps even know, that these geographical areas had ever been anything but Germanic/Nordic settlements.

Clark is unstinting in his descriptions of the brutality of the conflict, for which he rightly blames, primarily, Nazi racial theories. Like others before and since, he notes that their fanatical anti-Slavic views probably hampered rather than helped the German war effort. A more compassionate attitude to the inhabitants of the newly conquered territories during the first six months of the war as the Wehrmacht swept all before it, and seemed destined for the early victory that Hitler expected, may have won over large sections of local populations hostile to Stalin. In Ukraine, the Holodomor famine, which, rightly or wrongly, was widely perceived as being the result of a deliberate policy of the Soviet government as part of Stalin’s drive to ;‘eliminate the Kulaks as a class,’ was still a recent event, having occurred barely a decade earlier; and the Baltic countries, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, had only, forcibly, been incorporated into the Soviet Union a year before the Nazi invasion. Of course, some members of the population did voluntarily sign up for the National Socialist cause, and in some areas the advancing German forces were initially welcomed as liberators. But the Nazi treatment of the peoples’ of these seemingly vanquished nations, the casual destruction of entire villages, the rape and murder of women and children, the use of the men-folk as slave labour for the Reich, ensured that in the main the Nazi advance was met by fanatical resistance, from both the Red Army and from rapidly formed ‘Workers Battalions’, resistance that within a few months, as shown in letters home that are referenced by Clark, already had the rank and file of the Wehrmacht opining that they were fighting not under-mensch as their leaders had promised, but rather uber-mensch, supermen (and women) who were prepared to continue to fight on fearlessly with hands, feet and teeth, even after their last round of ammunition had been spent.  

As well as thrilling, and disturbing, Clark’s account is well balanced. For one thing, he openly admires the fighting qualities and courage of the ordinary soldiers on both sides of the conflict.  And as well as powerfully invoking the atrocities committed by the Nazis, he also, towards the end of the book, addresses the issue of the violent excesses of the Red Army, particularly when it breached the borders of the Reich itself from 1944 onwards, including the well documented mass rape of German women. But, as he points out, these excesses were an ad-hoc, though brutal affairs, where individual soldiers and units did what conquering warriors, filled with the adrenalin of victory in battle have always done, took their fill of revenge and the spoils of war. This is not, Clark makes clear, to excuse these actions. But it was of a different order to the actions of the Nazis, whose ideology led them to see the destruction of entire races of people as not only justifiable in times of war, but as desirable in and of itself. There was no ideological; justification for the rape of German womanhood by Soviet soldiers, and we at least have instances, though not enough, of such departures from the norms of socialist morality being swiftly and severely punished by the political commissars of the CPSU, when and if such actions became known to them.

Without explicitly stating the case, which might have proved difficult for such a firm believer in Thatcherite ‘free’ market economics, Clark’s account of the vital industrial dimension of the conflict reveals the superiority, at least in times of war, of Soviet centralised planning over the rather chaotic mish-mash that operated in the Third Reich, at least until the belated, too belated, embrace of ‘Total War’ which was signalled by Goebbels following the catastrophic defeat at Stalingrad in early 1943. Despite massive early losses, in machinery as in human life, the Soviet Union, with workers often dismantling entire plants and transporting them eastwards as they were forced to retreat, were soon turning out weapons of war on a scale that the German economy was never able to match, even with the vast resources of slave labour that their victories afforded them access too. It is also a historical fact, though it is beyond the scope of Clark’s book, that the British coalition government under Churchill succeeded in committing more of the industrial capacity of the UK to the needs of war than was managed by the Nazi regime in Germany, largely because Churchill sensibly left economic matters mainly to his temporary Labour Party partners. Hitler’s ideological aversion to the idea of women working, still less fighting, again until too later in the war, was also a factor, albeit one of many, in their eventual defeat.

It wasn’t only a question of bare numbers when it came to the Soviets production of the material needs of war either. These were weapons of a very high calibre. Clark shows very well, from the point of view of the ordinary German soldier as well as of the military High Command and the Nazi leadership, the initial shock when their seemingly invincible Panzer divisions first encountered, during the first great Soviet counter-offensive of December 1941, the brand-new Russian T-34 tanks. For a Wehrmacht whose morale was already being sapped by their first Russian winter, for some of them the first of four, for which they were ill-prepared both psychologically and in terms of clothing and equipment, this was final confirmation, if any was needed, that the USSR was not France.

Indeed, Clark expresses the opinion that even if there had been no Western Front, if this had been a straight fight between the Soviet Union and Germany, such was the terrain, the climate, and the vast reserves of manpower and resources at the disposal of the former, ultimately the Red Army and their civilian axillaries would still have triumphed, or at the very least fought the Wehrmacht to a bloody stalemate.

If he were alive today, I believe Alan Clark would, as German tanks once more burn on the Steppes of Ukraine, be strongly warning Europe of the folly in following the United States in risking an escalation of the current war in the into a wider conflict between Russia and NATO.

The Donkey’s was seen as ‘Revisionist’ history when it was first published, though its central thesis of brave warriors being needlessly slaughtered through poor leadership, on both sides, is now standard. Barbarossa too does not always follow the received wisdom, either of the time it was first published or of the present day. This is particularly true in Clark’s assessment of Hitler as a military leader. Most historians see the German Fuhrer as an untrained dilettante whose military meddling’s severely damaged the cause of the Wehrmacht’s campaign in the East, perhaps even costing it victory through his decision to divert the main thrust of his forces towards the oil fields of the Caucuses, rather than making straight for Moscow late in 1941. Clark’s view is that military commanders are generally more cautious than they need to be, that Hitler’s contrary elan was usually more successful than would have been the actions advised by his Field Marshal’s and Generals, and that in disputes between the Nazi leader and the German High Command, Hitler was in general more often right than wrong. On the question of Moscow, he points out that such was the level of resistance mounted by almost the entire population in the major cities of Russia, there is no guarantee that German forces would have triumphed there any more easily than they triumphed at Leningrad or Stalingrad. All that can be said with certainty about an early Battle for Moscow, according to Clark, is that its result, whichever way it went, would likely have ended the war much earlier than it did eventually end.

Clark also addresses the standard ‘Mad Dictator’ thesis, showing through excerpts from the regular, eventually nightly, military conferences, that apart from in the very last weeks of the war, when he had become completely delusional, moving now largely none-existent Divisions around his map in his bunker conference room, Hitler remained completely rational throughout hostilities. He wasn’t always right, but based on the available transcripts, the military decision-making of Hitler, that ‘terrible-titan’ as Clark describes him, was based on rational, understandable, sound logical reasoning.

There is less about Stalin in the book, I suppose because less is known, or at least was known at the time it was written, about Stalin’s role in the leadership of his armed forces. He does praise the Soviet leader’s foresight and guile in keeping back reserves for future use even when it seemed there would be no future in which to use them. But all in all, it seems, despite his purge of the leadership of his armed forces before the war, once it began, unlike Hitler, he was prepared to leave military matters to the experts. Any political threat his Generals might pose could be dealt with as and when required, as of course happened with the Soviet Union’s greatest of all military leaders, Marshall Zhukov, who was initially acclaimed a Hero of the USSR, then disgraced, then rehabilitated, before finally ending his days quietly and modestly, once more out of favour with the Soviet leadership. In the Soviet Union, unlike in Germany, no old-school military establishment managed to sustain itself through the years of totalitarian dictatorship. A Soviet equivalent of the July 1944 bomb plot against the head of the Party and the Nation, would have been unthinkable.

The conflict which began on June 22nd 1941 was, as already stated, the most brutal and titanic conflict in the history of warfare. It takes a great book to covey, even in the smallest way, some inkling of what it must have been like to have been involved, and even to live through it was to be involved, in that conflict. It also takes a great book to make the minutiae of military tactics and the hardware produced and deployed in pursuit of victory exciting to a reader, like me, who has little experience of reading of such matters. In Barbarossa Clark succeeds on both counts, as well as conveying superbly the vital and fascinating political and industrial dimensions of the struggle.  Magnificent, to use one of Clark’s favourite words.

And for anybody who has fond memories of the author as a political speaker, the voice throughout these thrilling pages is unmistakably that of the late, great Alan Clark.

Anthony C Green, June 2023

Barbarossa: The Russian German Conflict 1941-1945

By Alan Clark

(Published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1964, 1995, 2001)

As we approach the 22nd of June 2023,  and the 82nd anniversary of the launch of Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union by Nazi Germany, an event that sparked the most bloody, barbaric and titanic military struggle in world history, I thought I would share a few reflections on my recent reading of Alan Clark’s history of the conflict, which was first written in 1964.

Clark was that very rare beast, a Tory M.P who I liked and respected. I well remember enjoying the 1993 television documentary Love Tory, which included details, with the full compliance of Clark and his long-suffering wife Jane, of his tangled sex-life, including dalliances with the wife of a top South African judge, as well as their two daughters, a trio referred to as ‘The Coven’ by Jane. The posthumous television dramatisation of his diaries, for along with Tony Benn, Clark was perhaps the greatest British diarist of the post-war period, starring John Hurt, was also highly entertaining.

As regards his private life, I suppose he had much in common with Boris Johnson, though he was much more likable. Plus, he lived in an actual castle, complete with drawbridge and moat. No ‘man of the people’ affectations from Alan. Though not a fully-fledged aristocrat, he was certainly, like Johnson, born with the proverbial silver spoon, his father being the leading art historian Sir Kenneth Clark, who wrote and presented, the 1969 BBC series Civilisation, a comprehensive history of western art, which is rightly seen as a landmark of British television. Henceforth, he would always be referred to by the impressive sounding title of Lord Clark of Civilisation.

Again, like Boris, Clark Jr often had a tangential relationship with the truth, his admission that he may have been ‘economic with the actualite’ temporarily bringing a whole new Anglo-French term into popular usage, following some dodgy dealers during his time at the Ministry of Defence. Somehow, his natural charm allowed him to get away with these personal and political misdemeanours. Clark was also a genuine maverick and free-thinker in a way that the arch-globalist Johnson would like to think he is, but simply isn’t.

I love the story of how, after Thatcher, who he, to his detriment greatly admired, (and to the point of sexual attraction: he once compared her to Eva Peron, though I can’t see it myself), had narrowly failed to secure enough votes to prevent a second ballot when challenged for the Conservative Party leadership and thus the post of Prime Minister, by Michael Heseltine in the autumn of 1990, he was one of the long parade of Tory dignitaries who were called into Number Ten Downing Street one by one to offer advice as to her future course of action. Almost to a man (and they were almost all men) they told her that her support amongst the parliamentary party, at a time when Conservative M.P’s alone decided who should lead the party, was collapsing, and she should therefore resign immediately. Clark, looking at the issue as a historian rather than as a practical politician, offered a contrary view: ‘You should stand,’ he told her. ‘Of course, you shall lose, but it will be magnificent!’ Sadly, Thatcher ignored this advice, and we were thus denied the enjoyment of Maggie’s final bunker-like denouement.

Even more, I will always love Clark for his very last speech in the House of Commons in 1999 when, after fruitless surgery, suffering from a brain tumour he knew would soon kill him, he was one of the few voices in British politics to denounce the then ongoing NATO bombing of Belgrade (and those who tell you that the current Russo-Ukraine conflict is the first major war in Europe since the 1940’s conveniently forget the deliberate destruction of socialist Yugoslavia by the western powers), calling the Serbs ‘a brave Christian people who have never injured, nor so much as threatened a British citizen.’

He was also an active supporter of animal rights, and thus opponent of blood sports, again, a rarity amongst members of the upper echelons of the Conservative Party.

So, I’ve long been a fan of Clark. I was, however, only dimly aware he was an accomplished military historian; and I admit that military history is not and never has been my usual reading matter. I therefore approached the 474 pages of Barbarossa, not counting Appendices, with some trepidation, fully accepting the possibility that it may join the list of the books on my bookshelves that sit there for years with a makeshift bookmark placed somewhere between their pages, before it becomes time for another space-creating cull and a trip to the near-by charity shop with a series of bin-liners attached to our shopping trolley.

But finish Barbarossa I did, and I found it to be a gripping read from first page to last. In fact, I enjoyed it so much that I intend to seek out a copy of his earlier, and more widely-known book, The Donkeys: a history of the BEF in 1915, about the struggle on the Western Front in World War One, a book that has done much to shape our view of that conflict.

When it comes to mass casualties, the figures for the battles for territory between the Allied and the Central Powers from 1914 to 1918 pale into virtual insignificance when compared against the war between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, which began less than a quarter of a century after Revolution had led to Russia’s early exit from ‘The War to End All Wars.’ This latter war was not so much a war for territory, though the Red Army and Soviet people were of course defending their homeland from invading forces, but a war of annihilation. Hitler’s racial theories, which treated the Slavic peoples, like the Jews, as under-mensch, literally sub-humans, whose fate and suffering was therefore of no consequence, made this inevitable. Their lands, including those of the highly fertile Ukraine, and it’s worth noting that Barbarossa is replete with the names of battlefields which are once again regularly appearing on our news outlets, were, once its inhabitants had been erased from the face of Earth, to be re-settled by those of the best National Socialist racial-stock, by the members of the SS and their families, with their head Heinrich Himmler openly musing that within a few generations nobody would care, or perhaps even know, that these geographical areas had ever been anything but Germanic/Nordic settlements.

Clark is unstinting in his descriptions of the brutality of the conflict, for which he rightly blames, primarily, Nazi racial theories. Like others before and since, he notes that their fanatical anti-Slavic views probably hampered rather than helped the German war effort. A more compassionate attitude to the inhabitants of the newly conquered territories during the first six months of the war as the Wehrmacht swept all before it, and seemed destined for the early victory that Hitler expected, may have won over large sections of local populations hostile to Stalin. In Ukraine, the Holodomor famine, which, rightly or wrongly, was widely perceived as being the result of a deliberate policy of the Soviet government as part of Stalin’s drive to ;‘eliminate the Kulaks as a class,’ was still a recent event, having occurred barely a decade earlier; and the Baltic countries, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, had only, forcibly, been incorporated into the Soviet Union a year before the Nazi invasion. Of course, some members of the population did voluntarily sign up for the National Socialist cause, and in some areas the advancing German forces were initially welcomed as liberators. But the Nazi treatment of the peoples’ of these seemingly vanquished nations, the casual destruction of entire villages, the rape and murder of women and children, the use of the men-folk as slave labour for the Reich, ensured that in the main the Nazi advance was met by fanatical resistance, from both the Red Army and from rapidly formed ‘Workers Battalions’, resistance that within a few months, as shown in letters home that are referenced by Clark, already had the rank and file of the Wehrmacht opining that they were fighting not under-mensch as their leaders had promised, but rather uber-mensch, supermen (and women) who were prepared to continue to fight on fearlessly with hands, feet and teeth, even after their last round of ammunition had been spent.  

As well as thrilling, and disturbing, Clark’s account is well balanced. For one thing, he openly admires the fighting qualities and courage of the ordinary soldiers on both sides of the conflict.  And as well as powerfully invoking the atrocities committed by the Nazis, he also, towards the end of the book, addresses the issue of the violent excesses of the Red Army, particularly when it breached the borders of the Reich itself from 1944 onwards, including the well documented mass rape of German women. But, as he points out, these excesses were an ad-hoc, though brutal affairs, where individual soldiers and units did what conquering warriors, filled with the adrenalin of victory in battle have always done, took their fill of revenge and the spoils of war. This is not, Clark makes clear, to excuse these actions. But it was of a different order to the actions of the Nazis, whose ideology led them to see the destruction of entire races of people as not only justifiable in times of war, but as desirable in and of itself. There was no ideological; justification for the rape of German womanhood by Soviet soldiers, and we at least have instances, though not enough, of such departures from the norms of socialist morality being swiftly and severely punished by the political commissars of the CPSU, when and if such actions became known to them.

Without explicitly stating the case, which might have proved difficult for such a firm believer in Thatcherite ‘free’ market economics, Clark’s account of the vital industrial dimension of the conflict reveals the superiority, at least in times of war, of Soviet centralised planning over the rather chaotic mish-mash that operated in the Third Reich, at least until the belated, too belated, embrace of ‘Total War’ which was signalled by Goebbels following the catastrophic defeat at Stalingrad in early 1943. Despite massive early losses, in machinery as in human life, the Soviet Union, with workers often dismantling entire plants and transporting them eastwards as they were forced to retreat, were soon turning out weapons of war on a scale that the German economy was never able to match, even with the vast resources of slave labour that their victories afforded them access too. It is also a historical fact, though it is beyond the scope of Clark’s book, that the British coalition government under Churchill succeeded in committing more of the industrial capacity of the UK to the needs of war than was managed by the Nazi regime in Germany, largely because Churchill sensibly left economic matters mainly to his temporary Labour Party partners. Hitler’s ideological aversion to the idea of women working, still less fighting, again until too later in the war, was also a factor, albeit one of many, in their eventual defeat.

It wasn’t only a question of bare numbers when it came to the Soviets production of the material needs of war either. These were weapons of a very high calibre. Clark shows very well, from the point of view of the ordinary German soldier as well as of the military High Command and the Nazi leadership, the initial shock when their seemingly invincible Panzer divisions first encountered, during the first great Soviet counter-offensive of December 1941, the brand-new Russian T-34 tanks. For a Wehrmacht whose morale was already being sapped by their first Russian winter, for some of them the first of four, for which they were ill-prepared both psychologically and in terms of clothing and equipment, this was final confirmation, if any was needed, that the USSR was not France.

Indeed, Clark expresses the opinion that even if there had been no Western Front, if this had been a straight fight between the Soviet Union and Germany, such was the terrain, the climate, and the vast reserves of manpower and resources at the disposal of the former, ultimately the Red Army and their civilian axillaries would still have triumphed, or at the very least fought the Wehrmacht to a bloody stalemate.

If he were alive today, I believe Alan Clark would, as German tanks once more burn on the Steppes of Ukraine, be strongly warning Europe of the folly in following the United States in risking an escalation of the current war in the into a wider conflict between Russia and NATO.

The Donkey’s was seen as ‘Revisionist’ history when it was first published, though its central thesis of brave warriors being needlessly slaughtered through poor leadership, on both sides, is now standard. Barbarossa too does not always follow the received wisdom, either of the time it was first published or of the present day. This is particularly true in Clark’s assessment of Hitler as a military leader. Most historians see the German Fuhrer as an untrained dilettante whose military meddling’s severely damaged the cause of the Wehrmacht’s campaign in the East, perhaps even costing it victory through his decision to divert the main thrust of his forces towards the oil fields of the Caucuses, rather than making straight for Moscow late in 1941. Clark’s view is that military commanders are generally more cautious than they need to be, that Hitler’s contrary elan was usually more successful than would have been the actions advised by his Field Marshal’s and Generals, and that in disputes between the Nazi leader and the German High Command, Hitler was in general more often right than wrong. On the question of Moscow, he points out that such was the level of resistance mounted by almost the entire population in the major cities of Russia, there is no guarantee that German forces would have triumphed there any more easily than they triumphed at Leningrad or Stalingrad. All that can be said with certainty about an early Battle for Moscow, according to Clark, is that its result, whichever way it went, would likely have ended the war much earlier than it did eventually end.

Clark also addresses the standard ‘Mad Dictator’ thesis, showing through excerpts from the regular, eventually nightly, military conferences, that apart from in the very last weeks of the war, when he had become completely delusional, moving now largely none-existent Divisions around his map in his bunker conference room, Hitler remained completely rational throughout hostilities. He wasn’t always right, but based on the available transcripts, the military decision-making of Hitler, that ‘terrible-titan’ as Clark describes him, was based on rational, understandable, sound logical reasoning.

There is less about Stalin in the book, I suppose because less is known, or at least was known at the time it was written, about Stalin’s role in the leadership of his armed forces. He does praise the Soviet leader’s foresight and guile in keeping back reserves for future use even when it seemed there would be no future in which to use them. But all in all, it seems, despite his purge of the leadership of his armed forces before the war, once it began, unlike Hitler, he was prepared to leave military matters to the experts. Any political threat his Generals might pose could be dealt with as and when required, as of course happened with the Soviet Union’s greatest of all military leaders, Marshall Zhukov, who was initially acclaimed a Hero of the USSR, then disgraced, then rehabilitated, before finally ending his days quietly and modestly, once more out of favour with the Soviet leadership. In the Soviet Union, unlike in Germany, no old-school military establishment managed to sustain itself through the years of totalitarian dictatorship. A Soviet equivalent of the July 1944 bomb plot against the head of the Party and the Nation, would have been unthinkable.

The conflict which began on June 22nd 1941 was, as already stated, the most brutal and titanic conflict in the history of warfare. It takes a great book to covey, even in the smallest way, some inkling of what it must have been like to have been involved, and even to live through it was to be involved, in that conflict. It also takes a great book to make the minutiae of military tactics and the hardware produced and deployed in pursuit of victory exciting to a reader, like me, who has little experience of reading of such matters. In Barbarossa Clark succeeds on both counts, as well as conveying superbly the vital and fascinating political and industrial dimensions of the struggle.  Magnificent, to use one of Clark’s favourite words.

And for anybody who has fond memories of the author as a political speaker, the voice throughout these thrilling pages is unmistakably that of the late, great Alan Clark.

Anthony C Green, June 2023

Cover of 'The Angela Suite' by Anthony C. Green, featuring legs and feet in the foreground with a cityscape in the background and the text 'BUY NOW' prominently displayed.

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RELIGION, RIOTS AND REBELS the incredible history of Brown’s Square, Belfast

February 13, 2022 at 7:23 pm · Filed under Books, History ·Tagged , , ,

Francis Higgins. Belfast Lad Publications 2020

Reviewed by Sam Halliday

If you shop in the huge CastleCourt mall in Belfast city centre, you are only a few hundred metres away from one of the city’s historic areas,;  Brown’s Square.  Bounded by Millfield, Peter’s Hill and the sunken Westlink dual carriageway, this small area has been a significant player in our city’s history. Francis Higgins – a Brown’s Square resident himself – tells the story of his area in this fascinating book.

A valuable social and oral history book

The author gives a glimpse of the prehistory and the topography of the area from the end of the Ice Age to the first human settlements. He explains how the Norman conquest changed everything; they built a corn mill at what is now Millfield.

Owing to the influence of Arthur Chichester, Belfast received a Royal Charter from King James I as a borough,; a proper town. By the early 1700s the mill dam was a source of clean piped water for the growing town.

John Brown, a descendant of a former supporter of King Charles I during the English Revolution, moved to a house on Peter’s Hill. Brown was a bit of a property speculator who bought leases on land on the Lodge Road and Old Park.

As High Sheriff of Belfast, he laid the foundation stone of the White Linen Hall in 1783. He was a strong supporter of the British Crown, a freeholder of Belfast, a captain in the Belfast Volunteers and a prominent Freemason. Brown’s loyal contribution was recognised by Belfast Corporation which granted him the plot of land that still bears his name today.

Other local masons didn’t share Brown’s loyalty to the Crown.  They used the cover of a couple of Masonic lodges to conceal their membership of another secret society – the United Irishmen. They met in a tavern in Brown Street. One prominent member was Jemmy Hope, a Presbyterian weaver; one of the ‘men of no property’ destined to be betrayed by middle class poseurs.

The Industrial Revolution had begun to transform Brown’s Square. Small weavers’ cottages disappeared and industry moved in:; a bottle glasshouse, two linen mills and a National School.

Growing industrialisation, slum housing, wage cuts and poverty led to civil unrest in the area. People moving into the town for work brought their sectarian attitudes with them. Protestants settled mainly in Brown’s Square, whereas Catholics moved to the other side of the Farset in the Pound. Attitudes to one- another hardened, causing Catholics to leave Brown Street School for a new Catholic one in Donegall Street. From 1813 onwards, sectarian rioting and inter-communal violence became common, fuelled by cheap booze, slum housing and grinding poverty.

Churches began to move into the area:; St Stephen’s in Millfield, Townsend Street Presbyterian Church and a Methodist chapel in Melbourne Street. To keep public order, a Royal Irish Constabulary barracks was built on the site of John Brown’s former home in the mid-1860s.

By the start of the twentieth century, 620 households were spread over 28 streets. Some of the housing stock was the worst in Belfast. The area hosted ten pubs, six local schools, a chippy, a billiard hall and a variety of local shops.

The author gives a potted history of the Ulster Crisis at the start of the twentieth century which was temporarily set aside with the outbreak of the First World War. His meticulous research tells the individual tragic stories of the Brown’s Square men who fought and died in that dreadful conflict.

The interwar years didn’t see peace or prosperity in Belfast. Despite promises, the postwar slump didn’t allow for either jobs or homes ‘fit for heroes’. Brown’s Square was now an overcrowded slum. Working hours were long and conditions were hard for those with jobs. Labour unrest grew. Added to this was the violent overspill from the War of Independence and subsequent civil war in the South of Ireland that led to the emergence of the Irish Free State there and Northern Ireland in the northern six counties. Again, Brown’s Square residents found themselves in the front line.

In these times, your only chance of finding work was often on a ‘who you know rather than what you know’ social network; often through membership of the Orange Order.

Unemployed workers had to be assessed by the demeaning Outdoor Relief system. Local people were so annoyed by this that they elected an independent Unionist candidate, Lieutenant Colonel Phillip J Woods at a local bye-election. The ‘Fighting Colonel’ championed ex-servicemen. Woods was a veteran of the Somme and Messines battles. He had been awarded the DSO for bravery. He brushed aside easily the lies and smears of the Official Unionist establishment. He only lost his seat after Craig’s government abolished Proportional Representation in local elections.

Growing discontent with the contemptuous way in which poor people were treated by the Belfast Board of Guardians, many churchmen and the political establishment – they were called ‘wastrels’ and ‘parasites’ – led to a strike in 1932. One of the strikers was Walter Smith, the author’s uncle. His story shows one of the best things about Higgins’s book; the amount of personal touches and connections he has to his district’s story.

Such was the Unionist Party’s paranoia, anyone demanding better living conditions was regarded as attacking the State and the Protestant religion. Protests were broken up by the RUC who shot two men dead,; one a Protestant and the other a Catholic. However, by 1935, more ‘traditional’ rioting had returned. This pattern has continued, off and on, into the twenty-first century.

During the Second World War, Brown’s Square had become known as ‘the oasis’ as it boasted at least 22 pubs or ‘drinking establishments’ and three dance halls. This reviewer wonders where they managed to put them all! Housing was still squalid and unfit, divided on sectarian and class lines. Catholics lived on the west end of the area by the Farset and the better off lived around Townsend Street.

Higgins sketches out the wartime recollections of some residents. One lady he interviewed lived to 103 and received both a telegram of congratulations from Queen Elizabeth and a letter of congratulations and cash from the President of Ireland.

Belfast had very poor air defences, so much so that the author’s mother witnessed a Junkers Ju88 reconnaissance plane flying unchallenged low over Royal Avenue. Using the recollections of local interviewees, Higgins gives a vivid account of the devastation caused locally during the infamous Easter Tuesday air raid of 1941. His report of the death and destruction caused by the collapse of the air raid shelter in nearby Percy Street is still heartrending to read, over seventy years later.

Many local people served in the armed forces during the war. Once again, drawing on personal reminiscences of his interviewees, Higgins gives brief sketches of the lives of some of these men. One, the author’s uncle Francis Higgins, was one of the first men involved in the liberation of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.

The author’s assiduous research is one of the great strengths of this book. He unearths some wonderful recollections of the social mores of the time in his chapter on the 1950s; a time of growing postwar affluence, elaborate Orange arches, backstreet abortionists, childish street gangs, but also increasing segregation on sectarian lines. One straw in the wind was the emergence of a local chapter of a group called ‘Ulster Protestant Action’. Some of its members were later to found the Democratic Unionist Party as an alternative to the then dominant ‘Official’ Unionist Party.

The 1960s opened optimistically. That soon changed. As in the best oral history books, Higgins records the experiences of quite a few longtime residents as the area was blighted by the controversial Belfast Urban Area Plan and a renewed outbreak of civil disorder towards the end of the decade.

This plan envisaged wiping out areas like Brown’s Square and relocating the displaced populations to the ‘new city’ of Craigavon and towns like Antrim and Carrickfergus, where new companies, attracted by government grants, had set up factories. Extended family networks where several generations of each family lived close to one-another were casualties of this plan. Brown’s Square and other inner city working-class areas stood in the way of a planned Belfast Urban Ring Road.

The Protestant Unionist councillor Eileen Paisley was one of the only unionist members of the Belfast Corporation to object to the plan, but the vote was lost. Higgins explains the full enormity of a plan that would have driven an elevated six-lane motorway thirty feet above the blighted wasteland it would have left behind. Check out the part of York Street between the Westlink and Yorkgate Station even today for an idea of what that would look like. No wonder that another author, Ron Weiner, called this the ‘rape and plunder of the Shankill’.

The great shame was that loyalists were reluctant to criticise the Official Unionist establishment and run the risk of accusations that they were in league with the only other party to object to the Corporation’s plans; the left-of-centre Republican Labour Party.

While planners plotted the extinction of Brown’s Square and the dispersal of its residents and small businesses, a newer and more vicious strain of violence emerged. The author himself witnessed the RUC using water cannons against Protestant rioters in 1966. By 1969 large-scale violence broke out. The RUC couldn’t cope, so British soldiers were brought on to the streets. They set up a ‘peace line’ on Townsend Street. As Higgins notes, it’s still there today. That peace line as far as Northumberland Street was drawn up at a meeting by an army officer on a map on his family’s coffee table. His great uncle, Johnny McQuade MP, was one of the participants.

Higgins sketches out how the plan blighted the area and how the early phase of the Troubles halted the proposed ring road. Belfast Corporation itself dissolved under Direct Rule from Westminster, but not before large swathes of Brown’s Square, Divis Street and Peter’s Hill were flattened.

Brown’s Square became a focal point for inter-communal violence. To cope, the army set up temporary barracks in local church halls, factories and the RUC station. A massive loyalist protest at the bottom of the Shankill led to the death of an RUC constable at the hands of a loyalist sniper, despite attempts by local clergy to calm the situation. After this, Higgins asserts, quoting Weiner’s seminal study as authority, that military considerations were taken into account in all future town planning. So when the sunken Westlink replaced the proposed elevated ring road, the security forces only had two easily controlled motorway bridges over Peter’s Hill and Divis Street to contend with.

It’s a good reminder to those folk in the loyalist community today who lionise the Parachute Regiment that its members shot dead two innocent Protestant civilians on the Shankill Road, Richie McKinney and Robert Johnston in 1972; – the same year as Bloody Sunday in Derry. The author meticulously documents all the sectarian murders locally, whether committed by the IRA or loyalist groups.

Higgins – rightly so – is scathing in his denunciation of the despicable treatment of Brown’s Square and its settled community, “at the hands of Belfast Corporation, the Ulster Unionist Party, Army HQ at Lisburn and developers who saw Brown’s Square simply as cheap land close to the city centre and therefore ripe for exploitation.” From 1900 to 2006, businesses were reduced by 99% to six, houses by 82% to 111, streets by 65%, all the bars and pubs disappeared as did all youth and social groups and five out of six schools.

Despite all this, the author remains optimistic for the future of Brown’s Square after new residents move into the new apartments currently under construction in Gardiner Square. The area will change, but it will survive and grow.

Francis Higgins deserves credit for the labour of love he has spent in putting this valuable social and oral history book together. It’s well researched and referenced and definitely worth reading. He has put his heart and soul into telling the story of the urban village that his family has called home since at least 1803. It really shows. That said, he could have done with a good proofreader and editor to remove irritating errors and inconsistencies in the text and references. He tells us that the area is “Brown’s Square” not “Brown Square” but often switches between the two, sometimes on the same page.

However, don’t let these minor irritations put anyone off reading this book. If you have any interest in the social history of Belfast at all you should read this book.

Available here.

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Book Review: “SIX OF THE BEST” – A Pantheon of Great British Heroes By Sean Brunton

January 5, 2022 at 7:07 am · Filed under Books ·Tagged ,

This book might accurately be sub-titled “An Antidote to `Woke`”. A passage in the introduction reads “Great Britons deserve great heroes, not manufactured myths nor tinsel-town trash. And if we pause for a minute and think beyond the chat shows and the chat rooms, then we find them scattered through our nation`s rich history in abundance”. The book`s message is further re-enforced by its cover – a Union Jack and a multiplicity of British Lions. All six of the heroes are white, male military figures. The book would have fitted comfortably into the library of the kind of prep school in which most members of the current cabinet were probably educated.

And yet… maybe a publication of this kind is overdue, the pendulum having swung too far the other way, with historical figures being judged by the fashionable standards of the present rather than those which prevailed in their own day? As L.P. Hartley wrote in his novel “The Go-Between”, “`The past is another country; they do things differently there.” And the `Great Man` theory of History, made fashionable in the nineteenth century by the writings of Thomas Carlyle, does indeed still have its place.

Of the six heroes in question, one (Richard Coeur de Lion) was Norman-French, another (William Wallace) a Scot. Two are English and famous (Horatio Nelson and the Duke of Wellington) and the others (Albert Ball and Roger Bushell) virtually unknown English heroes of the First and Second World Wars respectively. All are included more for their actions than the importance of their contributions although Nelson and Wellington, via Trafalgar and Waterloo, qualify on both counts, as does Wallace through his impact on subsequent Scottish Nationalism (“Braveheart” etc.). Of neither Ball nor Bushell can it be said that their actions had any bearing on the outcome of either War. And Richard Coeur de Lion was a disaster in almost every respect save his own bravery, playing his part in the problems which are the scourge of the Middle East to this day as well as paving the way for Bad King John at home. (Incidentally Brunton does find space for one of the best jokes in “1066 And All That” – “Whenever he returned to England he always set out again immediately for the Mediterranean and was therefore known as Richard Gare de Lyon`).”

No doubt if asked to name our own six heroes we would come up with a variety of answers based on sometimes widely differing criteria. And one cannot help but wonder whether the elevation of Mary Seacole`s reputation, for example, is totally unconnected with her sex (or should I say gender?) and colour; certainly there`s no way in which she would ever have made an appearance in this book. But it`s a good read, only 140 pages and does something, albeit extreme, to redress the balance.

Reviewed by Henry Falconer

Click here to purchase ‘Six of the Best’ on Amazon

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Archeofuturism/ Archeofuturism 2.0 Reviewed

June 25, 2020 at 12:09 pm · Filed under Books

Archeofuturism/

Archeofuturism 2.0

-Guillaume Faye

Reviewed by Anthony C Green

Archeofuturism is a work of political theory/prophecy written by Guilaume Faye and published in 1998 which ends with a Science Fiction Short Story. Archeofuturism 2.0, first published fourteen years later, is a work of eleven interlocking Science Fiction Stories that serve to further illustrate Faye’s Political Philosophy.

I read them back to front, on the basis that as a long-standing fan of Science Fiction 2.0 would be an easier ‘in’ to Faye’s ideas.

 Would I have enjoyed 2.0 as pure SF, had I not known that it was written as an addendum to a work of political philosophy, and had not at least had a minimal acquaintance with the strand of thought of which Faye is a key representative?

The best political, or as it’s more usually known ‘Social’ SF, Jack London’s The Iron Heel, almost all of the books of Ursula Le Guin, Orwell’s Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty Four, Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, the novels of the Soviet novelist Boris Strugatsky, read as though the story came first: the political philosophy flowed naturally from the story. That is as it should be. The danger with the approach of Faye, who was clearly writing fiction as a means of putting across a political message, is that the writing becomes unnecessarily stilted and didactic.

Had I begun with Archeofuturism, then I almost certainly wouldn’t have bothered with 2.0. That is because the single piece of fiction which closes the original book, definitely fits the description of being stilted and didactic, faults to which we can also add that of an unforgivable overuse of cliché. As a writer myself who spends much time, no doubt some of it fruitlessly, on combing my own writing to find over-used word-combinations in order to ruthlessly exterminate them, I instinctively recoil from any writer that uses phrases such as ‘fit as a fiddle’ or ‘stubborn as a mule.’

 There is still a tendency towards the didactic in 2.0, but the writing is far from stilted and I spotted no obvious, glaring examples of cliché. My decision to read 2.0 first was thus vindicated. Taken purely as a work of Science Fiction, this second book features a decent collection of stories that form a cohesive whole in a more or less consistent universe

Before moving on to a discussion of Faye’s ideas themselves, ideas which seem to have hardly changed in the two decades between the two books, I should perhaps give a short introduction to the author himself.

Faye was born in 1949 and died in 2019. He was involved with the French Nouvelle Droite (New Right) movement, along with Alain De Benoist from its inception in 1968. This movement was founded out of the remnants of the old, more traditionally Fascistic, Action Francaise, and was primarily a response to the revolutionary student/workers ‘events’ of May of that year. In 1970, still under the leadership of De Benoist, Faye was part of the attempt to develop the ideas of Nouvelle Droite beyond France into a European wide phenomenon. The movement that emerged was called GRECE (translated as ‘Research and Study Group for European Civilisation’). Faye remained a leading figure within both ND and GRECE until 1986, after which, until the publication of Archeofuturism in 1998, he dropped out of politics in order to establish a successful career in the media. Though political differences with De Benoist were by this time longstanding, Faye did not formally break with GRECE until the year 2000.

GRECE have correctly been described as ‘Gramscian’s of the Right’. Unashamedly elitist in nature, they eschewed the street activism normally associated with the European Far Right in favour of gradually influencing mainstream culture in the direction of a rebirth of European identity and civilisation. Archeofuturism and the Identarian movement which it has given birth to, can in part be seen as an attempt to marry the ‘Long March of the Institutions’ approach of GRECE with a more populist movement with appeal beyond an intellectually inclined elite.

In addition to Gramsci, the influences of both GRECE and Archeofuturism are similar, if not identical, and pretty much as you would expect: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Spengler, Evola, Carl Schmitt, Ernst Junker and other Conservative German Revolutionaries of the twenties. There are also substantial if not entirely acknowledged debts to the Post-War ‘Europe a Nation’ project of Sir Oswald Mosely.

One of the major differences between Faye and De Benoist concerned the issue of Paganism. Although Faye is not personally big on Christianity, he believes that De Benoist’s commitment to Paganism as the ‘True’ religion of the European peoples’ is unnecessarily alienating. On this at least, I am with Faye. It is of course true, as De Benoist and his co thinkers maintain, that Christianity was originally imported onto European soil from the Middle East, the birthplace also of the other two leading monotheistic religions of the world, Judaism and Islam. It is also correct to maintain that religious beliefs were held and practiced in Europe long before the arrival of Christianity. But Christianity has been around in Europe for a long time now. It was in the First Century AD that the first, mainly plebian-soldier Christian Roman converts arrived. It became the official religion of the continent following the conversion of the Roman Emperor Constantine in the Fourth Century. Many would argue that European civilisation, such as it is, has largely been built upon the principles of Christianity, and compared to other religions, at least in the terms of self-identification, it still remains dominant. These numbers may have dipped a little since they were published, but in 2010 over 76% of Europeans still described themselves as ‘Christians; and although only a small portion (and this is highly variable from country to country) of those self-defined Christians are active in the sense of regularly attending a place of worship, it is fair to say that almost certainly a majority of them believe literally in the existence of their monotheistic God, and this probably even includes a reasonable proportion of Anglican Vicars. I doubt that many of our modern-day Pagans believe in the literal existence of Odin or of the pantheon of Ancient Roman and Greek Gods in the manner that their ancestors almost certainly did. Paganism today is little more than a Post-Modernist conceit; and if we believe that European Civilisation needs to be united and reborn, wouldn’t it simplify the task of unification and rebirth if it was based upon a revival of the religion that the majority of its inhabitants already express some belief in?

So, we move on to the basic tenants of Archeofuturism. In essence, it is the marrying of ‘Archaic’ values, such as tradition, family, tribal belonging, natural hierarchy, with its naturally accompanying rejection of the Enlightenment values of Liberalism and Egalitarianism, with scientific-technological advance past, present and future. That is, whilst drawing heavily on the traditionalism of Evola, Archeofuturism does not follow him in an absolute rejection of the modern world. In fact, aspects of it, particularly of the possibility of accelerated technological advance, are positively embraced. This embrace constitutes the ‘futurism’ of Archeofuturism. Faye though adds a strong proviso: that modern technological society will exist only for a minority of the Earth’s population, a figure he puts at approximately 17%. The rest of the world will essentially return to a subsistence means of living roughly equivalent to that of the Middle Ages. The Euro-Siberian Empire which he sees as an essentially development in our own part of the world, will naturally be amongst the most technologically advanced civilisations.

 We will arrive at this two-tier socio/political/economic world of tomorrow through what Faye terms a ‘Convergence of Catastrophes’, a key phrase/concept in the Archeofuturist  world-view; and the prediction of which has led some to regard him as a prophet, heralding the coming of the world that we have seen rapidly taking shape around us over the last two decades.

 The ‘catastrophes’ that Faye predicted would soon converge into one single, world-changing catastrophe are: economic crisis’ that are ever more deep and ever more sever in their consequences; increasing conflict between the richer Northern part of the world and the poorer South (Faye doesn’t like the artificial conceptual division of the ‘West’ and the rest); the increasing movement of peoples from South to North, which Faye regards as no less than an invasion, a haphazard but no less very real process of colonisation; an upsurge in expansionist, militant fundamentalist religion, by which he cites almost exclusively the example of Islam; the increased likelihood of life-threatening health pandemics; and perhaps most importantly of all, because unlike many on the Far or ‘Alt’ Right, Faye is no climate change sceptic, devastating environmentalist change.

The events of 11th September 2001 (‘9/11), which occurred three years after the publication of the original Archeofuturism, the financial crash of 2008, the current Coronavirus health crisis, increasing evidence of dramatic climate change, and the acceleration of migration from South to North have on the surface at least leant credibility to Faye’s predictions.

However, we should stress that as a prophet, Faye is a little out with his dates. By the reckoning of his 1998 book, ‘convergence’ should have happened by now and we should already be living through the apocalyptic convergence through which the new Archeofuturist word order will emerge. I recognise though that this is more of an aesthetic than a political criticism. Futuristic writers, whether they are writing fiction or none-fiction, need to be ultra-cautious when specifying dates. The year Nineteen-Eighty-Four might have seemed a long way ahead when George Orwell was writing his classic novel, but the actual year 1984 is now as far in the past to us as it was in the future to Orwell.

Faye is in no doubt about the cause of each of the catastrophes taken in isolation, and the convergence of these catastrophes which will lead to the destruction of the socio-economic-political order, the order that only a relatively short period of time ago seemed to be an ever expanding monolith which would come to dominate the entire planet, for the befit of all.

This cause is Globalisation in the sense of the attempt to spread a single, interlinking economic system, free market capitalism, and a single system of political governance, liberal democracy, across the entire planet.      

In place of this, Faye sees the Convergence of Catastrophe as leading to the development of seven distinct blocs in a multi-polar world. These blocs will be: the Euro-Siberian; the Sino-Confucian; the Arab-Muslim; the North American; the South American; the Black African, and the Pacific Peninsula Asian. Only in three of these blocs, the Euro-Siberian, the Chinese led Sino-Confucian; and the North American, will the Scientific-technological way of living remain dominant, and it is only between these blocs that there would continue anything resembling our current level of world trade.

There will however be no strict dividing lines. Even within the primarily scientific-technological blocs a significant amount of the population, perhaps a majority, would live at a level pretty close to that of subsistence. Science and Technology would very much be the province of an elite, and because of this, according to Faye, scientific advance would actually be much swifter and more profound than it has been in a world that is, on paper at least, committed to the values of Egalitarianism.

Faye doesn’t fall into the globalist trap of attempting to prescribe a single ideal way of governance for all peoples. How each bloc conducts its political and economic affairs will essentially be a matter for them, though he uses the term ‘Empire’ to describe the Euro-Siberian bloc, a term which sometimes appears to be in conflict with his talk of ‘direct’ or ‘organic’ democracy.

This is probably the best place to mention Faye’s analysis of the Actually Existing European Union. His criticism of it is that it is neither one thing nor the other: its existence has undermined the power of individual nation-states, whilst failing to replace it with a centralised unifying body that has the power and the will to act. In the Euro-Siberian Federation of the future, which will essentially be a union of the current EU with Russia and its neighbouring countries, democracy of a sort will be retained through the use of regular referenda, but governmental officials within each constituent part of the bloc, will have the authority and the means to make and execute decisions rapidly and decisively when necessary. On today’s EU, Faye’s viewpoint is remarkably close to being a mirror image of that of Diem25, a ‘remain and reform’ movement, though of the Right rather than of the Left. In his view, although the present-day EU is nowhere near fit for the purpose of the future, the very fact of its existence makes the task of forging the necessary European unity much easier than it would otherwise have been.

This is one of the key differences between Faye’s Archeofuturism, and the main thrust of the National Populism that has gained ground throughout Europe in recent years. The new Populism of the type that is on rise in France, in Italy, in Germany, Hungary, Poland and elsewhere are with Faye in their opposition to multi-culturalism, they may even, like Faye, talk sometimes of a common European identity. But their chosen vehicle through which to oppose ethnopluralism and decadent liberal decay remains the nation-state.

Faye had little time for this. In his view, such nationalism is now outmoded. Indeed, for a French political activist, whether of Left or Right, Faye was very muted in his critique of the ‘Americanisation’ of French and European culture. For the Nouvelle Droite, opposition to the plastic, throw-away, pseudo-culture of America was and remains key. De Benoist even announced at one point his electoral support for the PCF, the French Communist Party, on the grounds that this party was the most consistent available defender of French culture in the electoral field. Faye on the other hand believed that American culture triumphed in the West simply because it is superior to anything that modern European nations are now able to produce. As an example, he compares the cinematic grandeur of the big Hollywood blockbusters to the pretentious and puny Arthouse efforts of most French, and other European cinema. Only when it is united under a strong, centralised leadership founded on the archaic values of our ancestors will European culture reach the level of, and finally exceed the achievements of the United States.

In place of outdated nationalism, Faye proposes, as well as continental unity, a rebirth of Regional identity. Thus, the citizen of tomorrow’s united Europe will be a partisan of the Euro-Siberian Empire, but also of Bavaria, Lombardy, Bretton, Cornwall, Yorkshire and so on.

Here, I will raise my first major criticism of Faye’s vision/project; and that is that I just don’t believe it will happen, and if it did, I don’t believe it would long survive. Yes, regional identity is strong. But national identity remains stronger. A United Europe is possible, possibly even including Russia, one day. But it could only be possible through a highly centralised, technocratic leadership with a strong European army able and willing to enforce its will; and that could only be achieved against the mass opposition of the peoples of the existing nation-states of Europe. This is true I believe even in a period of catastrophe. As I’ve mentioned, Faye died just before the outbreak of the Coronavirus. But hasn’t this (comparatively) mini-catastrophe demonstrated that, yes as Faye argued, the current EU has neither the power nor the will to act decisively, but also that it is to their own nation states and their own national traditions that people instinctively turn at a time of crisis? Faye’s United Europe would, even if it were to come about through a series of crisis’, which in itself is highly doubtful, would be inherently unstable because it would lack the consent of the people. I simply don’t believe that a new order could be built on strong regional identity plus loyalty to a new continent wide super power, whilst somehow cutting out the middle man, the nation-state. That middle man remains strong and popular, and continues to my mind to be the most sensible unit upon which to establish and maintain a system of government.

What is true of Europe is also true of the other nascent blocs Faye postulates. It is probably true that the Islamic countries of the world have much more in common with one another, as Faye argues, than that which divides them. It’s also true that a singular Arab-Islamic state, even in the present world order would be a force to be reckoned with, and could even be a pole of attraction that would prompt Muslim migrants to the West to head ‘home’ voluntarily, rather than to be forcibly driven out as is implied would be inevitable in the Archeofuturist world of tomorrow. You would expect that the dominance of a single language, that of Arabic, throughout most of the Arab world would make the cause of unity much easier to achieve than it is in our linguistically fractured Europe. And yet, despite the efforts of impressive enough leaders like Nasser and Gaddafi, Pan Arabism has been a failed project. What is true of Pan-Arabism is also true of Pan Africanism, despite the efforts of such inspiring exponents as Thomas Sankara, Nelson Mandela and, once again, Gaddafi. The attempt to forge distinct, more or less autarkic blocs will fail for the very same reason that multi-culturalism is everywhere in retreat. People are different; attachment to distinctive cultures and to nation states is strong, and crisis tends to strengthen rather than weaken those attachments.

Faye stresses many times that he is in no way arguing for the superiority of the technological-scientific way of living. He believes that people in the advanced technological nations of the modern world are no happier than were our ancestors living a much simpler agricultural way of life pre the Industrial Revolution, or than we were back in our primitive hunter-gatherer days. He is perhaps right.

However, Faye assumes without offering any compelling argument for his assumption, that the techno-scientific elite of the future would simply leave their farming/hunter-gathering brethren to live their simple, happy lives in peace. Does the historical record really suggest that this is likely? His reasoning for limiting science and technology to relatively small groups of people is primarily environmental. Even without the huge game-changing environmental disasters that Faye expects to happen, the resources of our planet are finite. Globalisation will fail, because the notion that every country in the world can raise itself technologically to the level of the most advanced countries of the wealthy nations of the North, will prove to be nothing more than a short-lived utopian fantasy. The Earth simply doesn’t have enough ‘stuff’ for everybody to live in such a way.

My counter-argument to Faye is that in a world where we have rejected even the pretense of a commitment to equality and freedom for all, why would the elite simply leave the rest of us to live happily ever after on our plots of land within our tight knit tribes and clans? Wouldn’t the technological elite simply use their power to do what elites have done ever since elites first appeared as a historical force, that is use their power to enslave others and plunder whatever increasingly scarce and valuable resources remain to be plundered, regardless of historic ownership? In a world were equality, liberty and fraternity are ridiculed as outdated notions of deluded idealists, why would a super-powerful technologically advanced elite (for Faye doesn’t shy away from the issue of Trans-Humanism) of the future simply accept that a rural-hunter-gatherer existence is as equally valid as their own way of life, and therefore vow not to interfere with the natural lifestyle of the more primitive members of their species? Given enough time, would these technologically-enhanced-superman even continue to see these primitive ‘others’ as members of the same species as themselves at all?

In his 2016 book Four Futures: Life After Capitalism, the writer Peter Frase offers up four possible future scenarios that he sees arising from continuing technological advance. These range from something very close to the Fully Automated Luxury Communism (which I’ve already reviewed on Counter-Culture-UK) of Aaron Bastani at one end of the spectrum, to what he terms ‘Exterminism’ at the other. His argument is that, although we currently live in a world where we are becoming increasingly superfluous to the needs of the elite as far as productive labour goes, we are still, fortunately for the majority of us, needed as consumers of the products that the owners of the means of production need to sell in order to maintain their life of luxury. What if, in the future, technology has advanced to the point where everything the elite could possibly need or want is produced for them directly by a super advanced technology that only they have access to, without the mediating factor of the need to create profitable surplus products? Without any commitment to egalitarianism, or any secular or religious reason to value human life for its own sake, wouldn’t it make sense for this super-elite to simply exterminate or leave to die out through hunger and disease the superfluous population, maintaining the existence only of those who can in some way prove useful to them, for reasons of their particular expertise say in maintaining and repairing the robot/slave army at their command, or for reasons merely of entertainment or lust?

The Archeofuturist world would not in my view be the happy, multi-polar world that Faye depicts at various stages of development in the series of short stories that comprise Archeofuturism 2.0. It could well a be Heaven on Earth, with perhaps even death itself having been conquered, for a tiny minority, the 1% as it is sometimes called today, though in reality the real super-rich are much less numerous than that. But for the majority it would be a dystopian nightmare beyond the wildest imagination of even our darkest creators of Science Fiction, something very much akin to the ‘Exterminism’ of Four Futures.

Before moving on to my own conclusions regarding Archeofuturism, I will first say something about those who have decided to (mostly in a virtual fashion, it has to be said) march behind the banner that Faye first raised. Generation Identity is primarily a youth orientated movement, and I’ve also read the short book of that name that serves as their manifesto. The book raises some of the central issues facing the people of the richer nations, particularly the younger people. Not only are these young people the first in many generations who can have no real expectation of a materially easier life than that of the parents. They are also perhaps the first generation in recorded history to live without a grand, unifying vision, a grand narrative beyond that of passive consumerism by which to live their lives. Their book is essentially a cry of rage against the ‘68ers’ deconstruction of all values, a nihilist enterprise that has left them adrift in a world devoid of meaning. They have latched onto Archeofuturism in a desperate attempt to restore such meaning. Their plight is a real one, but surely our brightest young minds can do better than commit themselves to a vision of a world where the future becomes the province of a tiny elite, with the rest of us sent backwards into a world we’d thought we’d long left behind?

In the grown up world, the European New Right, the Nouvelle Droite, has had some success in their Gramscian project of influencing mainstream politics. Parties like the National Rally in France, Jobbik in Hungary, Lega in Italy, Law and Justice in Poland have clearly been influenced by De Benoist, particularly through their combining of policies generally associated with the Right, especially in opposition to mass immigration, with more or less Leftist economic policies. These parties can’t be simplistically dismissed as ‘Fascists’ or Neo Nazis as easily as could the old British NF or BNP, the German National Democrats, or the MSI in Italy, though that of course doesn’t stop the more extreme factions of the Antifa from doing so. The Archeofuturist Front, which along with the youthful Generation Identity is the main organisational representation of Faye’s ideas, aren’t fascist either But take a look at their social media pages. Who are the heroes they champion? Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and Boris Johnson seem to figure prominently. As a working class socialist I can well understand why many, mainly white, working class Americans voted for Trump rather than for the Globalist Hawk Hilary Clinton in 2016; I can even understand why many will do so again, against the equally hawkish, equally globalist Biden, despite the breathtaking ignorance that Trump has displayed throughout his Presidency. I can understand also why Labour’s promise to overturn Brexit through a rigged second referendum led to the collapse of the so called Red Wall and the handing of a substantial majority to Johnson in December 2019. But to hold up these individuals as posing a genuine threat to the globalist order; to see in them a radical foreshadowing of the future?

The AF don’t stop there either. They also seem to idealise the rainforest destroying, free market fundamentalist Bolsonaro, the President of Brazil. Trump; Johnson; Bolsonaro, the leaders of the three countries with the highest death rate from Coronavirus in the world; and as if that wasn’t enough, they also supported the failed coup of the American backed nobody Guaido against the socialist Maduro government in Venezuela. 

Thus, far from representing a strand of opposition to globalized capital, the AF seem to have latched on to some of the most reactionary expressions of it.

By your idols shall you be known.

By way of conclusion, I’d simply reiterate that Archeofuturism 2.0 is worth reading purely as a work of Science Fiction. The original Archeofuturism is also worth reading, if only as a means to familiarise yourself with an ideology which seems, through a convergence of coincidence, including a televised Zoom appearance on Michael Gove’s bookshelves, to be enjoying a brief period of notoriety. But as a political philosophy and a prophecy of the future, I think it is neither plausible nor desirable.

 We are certainly living through, as Faye predicted, a period of perhaps unprecedented crisis. But we do have choices as to how we respond. I’d personally be happy to see a return to traditional values in the sense of seeing stable families and cohesive communities as the foundations of a decent society. But traditional is a different beast to archaic.

 I’m all for Futurism also, for making full use of technological developments past, present and future. But if the techno-scientific world we aim to create is to be closer to a Utopia than to a Dystopia, then we must not abandon our commitment to egalitarianism. In fact, we must strengthen it. This needn’t mean an egalitarianism where everybody has exactly the same, because such a world is either possible nor desirable. But egalitarian in the Social Democratic sense of ensuring equal opportunities for all, and through maintaining the commitment to a level below which no one is allowed to fall. Even with finite resources such a world is possible, but only if we retain egalitarianism as an ideal.

So, read Faye, but also read Bastani and Frase; and although it was written before the digital revolution, Murray Bookchin’s ‘Post Scarcity Anarchism’ is probably worth digging out too, as are the writings of many non-conformist Marxists, Anarchists and Utopians. The novels and the non-fiction of Bogdanov and his fellow Russian Cosmists are perhaps also worth revisiting. We need to base the future on what has worked for the most people in the past, but also on what some of the finest minds of past and present times have dared to imagine. Archeofuturism, in reality, does little more than to dress up the dead ideologies of Divine Right and Imperialism in the clothes of Science Fiction. It’s a good name, but Its vogue moment will prove mercifully short.

Anthony C Green, June 2020.

Archeofuturism, published by Arktos Media LTD, 1998

Archeofuturism 2.0 Arktos Media LTD 2016, 2012

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