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
(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.
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.
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
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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.
Although Karl Marx and his key collaborator Frederic Engels were politically engaged, active participants in the class struggle as well as being the theoretical founders of Scientific Socialism, neither of them had much to say about what a future Communist Society might look like. It is not true to say, however, as some critics claim, that they gave no indication of how society and the state might function in the immediate aftermath of the overthrow of capitalism. In his book The Civil War in France, Marx made it clear that he saw the form of Direct Democracy exercised by the Communards in the short-lived but heroic Paris Commune, as an indication of how the working class might exercise State Power in a socialist society, a society that he saw as the transitional stage between Capitalism and Communism. The ideas Marx expressed here were later developed by Lenin in his pamphlet ‘The State and Revolution’ as a model for the future Soviet State, although in reality, for reasons that need not detain us here, very few of them were actually put into operation once this state was established.
That neither Marx nor Engels were willing to speculate on how Full Communism might look, once the concentration of power in the hands of the Proletariat under socialism had been long enough established for the state to, in his own terms, ‘wither away’, was more than anything else an indication of how far away such a prospect seemed at the time that they were writing. One thing that they were clear on however was that Communism, a society where class rule, and hence the repressive apparatus of the state had ceased to exist completely, could only arise in a situation where the application of scientific theory and praxis had created an ‘abundance of goods’ that were accessible to all, rather than to a small pampered elite that lived off the wealth creation of others. Once established, such a society would free individuals from the necessity of dedicating the bulk of their lives to maintaining the barest of existences through their work, thus enabling them to take part fully in the running of that society, as well as being able to dedicate themselves to such noble pursuits as Art, Philosophy and Science. An example of how such a society might function was perhaps given, in somewhat primitive form, by the Ancient Greek City states, where those who were fortunate enough to enjoy full citizenship were freed from the prosaic needs of survival by the existence of large numbers of much less fortunate slaves, thus enabling a flowering of creativity and thought that remains influential to this day. Marx and Engels were of course not agitating for a return to slavery, and indeed strongly supported the abolitionist North against the Slave owning South in the American Civil War. Rather, they saw in the rapidly advancing technological marvels of the Industrial Revolution, the outlines of a future world where mechanisation would allow full citizenship for all, and through that developments in the finer elements of human endeavour that would make the achievements of the Ancients, and of the Enlightenment, seem like a mere prehistoric prelude to history. Under Full Communism, every man would be a Renaissance Man.
Marx and Engels resided for a long period in Victorian Britain, which was then the citadel of world capitalism, as well as the birthplace of the industrial revolution; and it was a through a study of this society that much of what we have come to know as ‘Marxism’ was developed. Here, even in the most developed nation on Earth, they found conditions of extreme poverty afflicting the developing working class, as described most graphically in Engels ‘The Conditions of the Working Class in England.’ Given such appalling conditions, speculation about how a future communist society might look once all such poverty had been eliminated, along with the system of class exploitation itself, would have seemed just that: wild speculation best left to utopians and dreamers, and best avoided by those who based their analysis on the application of the scientific method to the study of politics. Of course, It was also axiomatic to the founders of Scientific Socialism that a society of abundance could only be built from the starting point of the highest forms of capitalism. That is why, the clear expectation of both Marx and Engels was that the first socialist society would be established in one of the most developed capitalist nations, most likely in Britain or Germany. The reality, of course, is that the first state in the world that proclaimed itself to be a Socialist State in the process of advancing towards Communism arose in backward, semi-feudal Russia, a fact that has had a great bearing on the development of socialist thought both East and West.
Those who have called themselves ‘Socialists’ or ‘Communists’ in the West since the Russian Revolution of 1917, have tended to place themselves at either one of two extremes: Firstly, those who follow Marx in insisting that the society of the future is almost unimaginable to our puny, capitalist indoctrinated brains, and therefore such speculation is best avoided; and, secondly, those who say that such a society is already in the process of being created, in the Soviet Union, China, Albania, Cuba, Democratic People’s Republic of Korea et al. Both of these approaches have their weaknesses. The former has led to many activists seeming to do little more than ask people to continue to fight the good fight and to have trust in a brighter future, in the way that religious zealots might demand faith in a future paradise that can bring about through good works and/or devout faith. The latter group is all too easily, rightly or wrongly, portrayed by the defenders of the status quo as apologists for Totalitarian Dictatorship and mass murder.
It is to these historical weaknesses in the case for Socialism/Communism that Aaron Bastani’s book Fully Automated Luxury Communism is addressed.
His essential thesis is that a future of material abundance is now far from unimaginable. The technological advances made since Marx’ time, and particularly in the period since the Second World War, have been literally astonishing, calling to mind the dictum that ‘if technology is sufficiently advanced it becomes indistinguishable from magic’. Marx was around at the time of the invention of the telephone by Alexander Graham Bell: what would he have made of our modern mobile phones, devices through which we hold in our hands virtually the sum total of all human knowledge? The primary mode of transport in Victorian London at the time of Marx’ period of residence in our capital city was the horse-drawn carriage, and the world’s first Railway network was still in the process of being created through the brute labour power of overworked and underpaid itinerant Navies, the ‘precariat’ of their day. Today, the motor car is king, human beings have walked on the Moon and have developed the ability to send crafts, albeit unmanned, well beyond the confines of our own Galaxy.
And yet, as Bastani shows in clear, easy to read, accessible prose, our astonishing technological advance has been and still is used in the service of a tiny elite, rather than utilised for the benefit of the many; and to make this state of affairs even worse, the ceaseless pursuit of private profit by a few techno-corporate giants threatens, even sans nuclear warfare, to destroy our planet, our habitat, our home, the environment upon which our very survival as a species depends.
Bastani is able to show that a society of post-scarcity is both possible and necessary, as well as to give an indication of how such a society might be achieved and might look. Those of us who are actively engaged in the struggle for a radically different, fairer world, whether we call ourselves Communists, Socialists, Anarchists or Ecologists, be we Trade Unionists and/or campaigners for peace and climate justice, need to absorb, to treat with seriousness, and to make use of the kind of analysis and agenda that Bastani and his co-thinkers are currently advancing. If we don’t, if we ignore such developments and merely implore activists to stick to a study of the classics of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Mao, Enver Hoxa, Kim Il Sung, mix and match as you see fit, and if we continue to re-fight the battles of the past rather than becoming proselytisers for an incomparably brighter and entirely realistic future, then we will confine ourselves to perpetual life on the political margins. The revolution will remain, as one wag put it, ‘just around the corner, the same place it has always been.’
Sadly, too many on the political Left have decided to dismiss Bastani’s work as worthless ‘hipster communism’, often it seems to me without having even bothered to read the book, let alone to engage seriously with the ideas put forward within its pages.
Here, in defending Bastani from his ‘Leftist’ critics, I will confine myself to two main points.
The first of these is the contention that FALC is essentially a ‘Reformist’ project. This is a point that is easily dealt with. Of course, the ideas in the book are indeed reformist, reformist in the sense that it contains a set of proposals to be implemented by a future radical government. That is, it is reformist in the same way that Labour’s 2017 and 2019 Election Manifestoes were reformist, in the same way that the 1945 Labour government was reformist. Reforms are important. Reforms, before Thatcher and Blair between them made the word ‘reform’ mean the opposite of its former political definition, have given working people much. But the reforms contained in Bastani’s book, if implemented in full, would amount to a revolution in the way we live more radical than anything ever previously seen.
In one badly argued ‘Left’ critique of FALC, from John Sweeney of the Communist Party of Britain (Morning Star, July 1st, 2019), Bastani’s assertion that the revolution won’t come about through a storming of the Winter Palace was written off disparagingly: why? Leaving aside the point that there was a lot more to the Russian Revolution than the storming of the official residence of the Tsar by an armed detachment of the working class led by the Bolshevik Party, how many on the Left in Britain today seriously believe that the British revolution will come about through a storming of Buckingham Palace? Does Sweeney himself believe this? If he does, then that is indicative of a very narrow understanding of the form and meaning of the socialist revolution.
One of the most exciting ideas that Bastani advocates is that of using technological development in order to advance towards a society of ever-increasing free Universal Basic Services, or UBS, a method he prefers to that of Universal Basic Income, UBI, (UBS rather than UBI), the latter which he rejects as little more than a trick to further enhance the capitalistic notion of ‘personal responsibility’ at the expense of the socialist imperative of collective security, as well as a way of further shrinking what remains of our actually existing Welfare State. Even at the present level of technological development, Bastani argues, it would be possible, once the capitalist class has been dispossessed, to rapidly advance to a system of UBS in the provision of energy, of high-speed broadband and other means of communication, in transport, in housing as well as in education and health care.
As well as UBS, Bastani advocates worker’s ownership of the means of production, to be administered in differing and varied forms (e.g. state ownership, municipal ownership, cooperatives), and the virtual abolition of all intellectual copyright and patent laws, so that the fruits of the sum total of human knowledge truly become the property of all.
Contrary to the impression given by Sweeney and many other ‘Left’ critics, Bastani doesn’t shy away from the need for political struggle if such a radical overhaul of society is to come about. The Red-Green Populist mass movement he calls for might not in and of itself be sufficient to bring about the changes he advocates. But is it really any less realistic than the idea of a shrinking industrial working class being led to power by a ‘vanguard’ party of the type Lenin first advocated in his ‘What is to be Done’ pamphlet way back in 1903?
This leads me to my second main point: the idea that Bastani is a Techno-Determinist who believes that Full Communism will emerge naturally through technological advance, without the need for political struggle at all. In reality, this is a weak caricature of Bastani’s thought, about as accurate as the common misconception that Marxism is an ideology of Economic Determinism which believes that socialism and communism are inevitable, whatever we as human beings do or don’t do.
In fact, the main thread that runs throughout the pages of Fully Automated Luxury Communism is that the potential for modern technology to liberate the whole of humankind from the evils of drudgery, poverty, and alienation, as well as to reverse climate change through ending our dependence on the rapidly diminishing supply of oil, is severely and quite deliberately limited by the physical and intellectual ownership of this technology by a tiny corporate, globalist elite. In short, Bastani’s work is wholly compatible with the Marxian analysis that under capitalism the capacity of the Forces of Production to liberate mankind will always, so long as capitalism exists, be limited by the Relations of Production, the ownership of the means of production by a tiny elite who then use that ownership to enrich themselves rather than to benefit the many.
A single quotation from the closing pages of the book should forever refute the idea that Bastani believes that political struggle is unnecessary in order to bring about revolutionary change:
‘There is no necessary reason why they (scientists and corporations currently leading technological advance – T.G) should liberate us, or maintain our planet’s ecosystems, any more than that they should lead to ever-widening income inequality and widespread collapse. The direction we take next won’t be the result of a predictive algorithm or unicorn start-up – it will be the result of politics, the binding decisions on all of us that we collectively choose to make.’
I am by no means a Bastani fan-boy. I have my own criticisms of his book. I’m not keen on the use of the word ‘Luxury’ for a start, a word that to me conjures up images of indolent decadence rather than of the unleashing of the creative potential of the masses that I believe would arise in a society built on abundance for all. There is also a strong case for dispensing with the word ‘communism’, a word that has, again rightly or wrongly to have much more negative connotations than its original Marxian meaning. And I agree that Bastani doesn’t say enough about the form that the sort of movement he believes needs to be developed should take: for instance, a new political party, work through the existing parties, a Gramscian long march through the institutions, mass street protest, Trade Union action, or all of the above? Would such a movement, and/or a government committed to implementing Bastani’s ideas be prepared to use violence in order to defeat resistance that would inevitably be mounted by a threatened ruling elite? I would also add ‘Democratic’ and ‘National’ to Bastani’s ‘Red-Green-Populist triptych. ‘Democratic’ because, contrary to the sectarianism that has plagued the Left since the time of Marx himself, it really would be better if we let as many flowers bloom as possible, and ‘National’ because the political struggle is still fought primarily at the level of the Nation-State, and I believe that history has demonstrated that the Nation-State remains the largest form of political organization possible for the operation of a truly democratic culture. In addition, I wouldn’t be as quick as Bastani to dismiss the revolutionary/reformist potential of UBI, dependent on how it is implemented and by whom. There is no contradiction between the ideas of UBI and UBS. The two are twins, not opposites.
But at the very least FALC offers a hopeful vision of a future worth fighting for, and of how that future might look, something that, as I have already suggested, has been sorely lacking from Socialist discourse from its inception. Admittedly, I’m no scientist; and therefore, I’m not in a position to comment on the feasibility of asteroid mining, of nano-technology, of quantum computers, to give but a few examples of the many technological wonders of the future that Bastani believes can lead to a life of meaningful, healthy leisure for all. Nor do I know if the capacity of renewable energies can be expanded to the point that everyday energy usage can be made free for all, whilst at the same time making a huge contribution to reversing climate change, as quickly and as easily as Bastani suggests. But I doubt that many of the True Communist critics of the book are in any better position as regards such matters than I am.
Aaron Bastani advances a vision that inspires me, and can I believe be used to inspire others, to show the disillusioned and the dispossessed that, contrary to the fatalism and pessimism that is deliberately fostered by the ideologues of capital, that another world, a world for the many, not the few, a world that sees nature as a home in need of repair and protection rather than as a resource to be exploited, is indeed possible.
It is time to leave our self-constructed Far Left ghettoes; time to dream; time to allow the imagination to take power.
Anthony C Green. Anthony C Green is a social care worker, novelist, Trade Unionist, and political activist living in Liverpool. His latest novel Special, based on his experiences as a social care worker, is now available: https://www.troubador.co.uk/bookshop/contemporary/special/
Fully Automated Luxury Communism: A Manifesto Hardcover – 11 Jun. 2019
Hardcover: 288 pages
Publisher: Verso Books (11 Jun. 2019)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1786632624
ISBN-13: 978-1786632623
• Paperback: 320 pages
• Publisher: Faber & Faber; Main edition (2 Mar. 2017)
• ISBN-10: 9780571234875
• ISBN-13: 978-0571234875
Reviewed by Anthony C Green
The Vanishing Futurist is a novel that I stumbled upon by accident whilst browsing in Liverpool’s excellent News from Nowhere left-wing bookshop. It is set in Russia in the period immediately prior to, during, and after the revolution of 1917.
The story is told from the perspective of Gerty Freely, a young English governess who works for a wealthy Moscow family. It is told in the past tense, from an unspecified point in the future, although it is clear that it is a point at which the Soviet Union is still in existence. References to a Soviet film of The Vanishing Futurist being made in the nineteen fifties, and other snippets of information, make it appear as though we are dealing with real, historical events. The appearance of real-life individuals such as the great Constructivist architect, designer, and artist Vladimir Tatlin and early Soviet Commissar for Education Anatoly Lunacharsky add to this sense of realism.
As the revolutionary upheavals of 1917 intensify, the Kobolev family by whom Gerty is employed, decide to leave Moscow, for the warmer and safer climate of the Crimea. Finding it more and more difficult to support herself through the teaching of English, and also partly out of ideological commitment, Freely ends up becoming a member of the Institute for Revolutionary Transformation (IRT), a small community which is established in order to practice a radical form of collectivist living, where all goods, including clothes, are held in common. The Communities increasingly meagre supplies of food are all shared equally, all work is collectively undertaken without distinctions of gender, and all diversions from the inner and outer struggle to reinvent oneself as the perfect Socialist Man/Woman are either frowned upon or banned outright.
Sex is regarded as one such diversion, though the proscription on physical relationships between commune members is tested early in the novel when Gerty falls in love with an avant-garde artist, scientist, and fellow IRT member Nikita Slavkin.
It is Slavkin who is the hero of the novel, and the Futurist referred to in its title. He brings his sexual relationship with Gerty to an end not long after it had begun, although his claim that he has done so for ideological reasons is strongly undermined when he quickly becomes physically involved with Sonya, another female member of the commune.
Life in the IRT mirrors developments in the world outside as the young Soviet Worker’s State battles for survival against the combined forces of Imperialist intervention, internal counter-revolution, and endemic poverty and backwardness which has been worsened by the wasteful brutalities of the First World War. Thus, as the original revolutionary spirit of experimentation in art comes up against the austere and harsh requirements of War Communism, a split emerges within the commune itself, between the radical followers of Slavkin on one side, and those who side with Fyodor, an IRT member who stresses the importance of discipline and efficiency as the key to the building of socialism. The original radical impulse of the IRT is further weakened when the leadership of the local Soviet decrees that in order to help cope with the acute housing shortage in Moscow it must open its doors to people who do not necessarily share the ideological fervour of its founders.
This aspect of the novel can be read as an analogy for the way that the revolutionary spirit of Russia’s small but class conscious industrial working class was severely diluted by an influx of more politically and culturally backward elements from the countryside, who were needed to replace workers who had joined the newly established Red Army in order to fight the White Counter-Revolutionaries and imperialist interventionists. This struggle also mirrors the tensions within Russia between on the one side the Slavic/conservative/traditionalist elements and the Westernised/ liberal/modernisers, a tension that dates back to at least the 19h century and is still unresolved within today’s Russian Federation.
It is on two of Slavkin’s radical inventions that the novel hinges. The first is called the PropMash, an abbreviation of Propaganda Machine, which is a form of sensory overload capsule that, by bombarding people with sights, sounds and smells designed to promote socialism, can supposedly rapidly break down individualistic conditioning and raise political consciousness to the required level of the new revolutionary man or woman.
The PropMash has mixed results, and Slavkin’s attention is soon diverted to an intense study of the newly emerging theories of Quantum Physics. These studies lead him to adopt what has become known as the Many Worlds/Multi-verse interpretation of quantum reality, essentially the idea that every decision we make creates a new universe; that an infinite number of parallel universes therefore exist, and that within this plurality of worlds everything that can possibly happen has happened, is happening, or will happen. Although seemingly straight out of a Philip K Dick novel this scientific theory, first postulated by the American Physicist Hugh Everett in the late nineteen fifties, has now become almost mainstream.
Slavkin’s logical deduction from the Many Worlds’ theory is that although Communism, the highest and final form of socialism and thus of human development, may not be possible here and now in the conditions of the backward and impoverished Russia of 1918, there must exist an infinite number of alternate universes where Full Communism has already been achieved. This revelation leads him to invent the Socialisation Capsule, which is essentially a vehicle for the transportation of individuals, beginning with Slavkin himself, from the harsh reality of his own material existence into a dimension where one of these utopian, communist parallel realities exists.
Slavkin’s public questioning of the possibility of achieving communism in present-day Russia quickly brings him to the attention of the local Cheka, the forerunner of the KGB. When he disappears from the experimental laboratory where he has been taken, a disappearance that apparently occurs after the facilities’ housekeeper had heard his new device whirling into action, the central mystery of the novel is posed: has Slavkin actually disappeared into one of the alternate communist futures that he believes must exist or, more prosaically, have his radical scientific theorising and experimentation led him to pay the ultimate price under the increasingly harsh excesses of Soviet Communism? It’s a question that Gerty, who has by now found that her brief physical relationship with Slavkin has left her pregnant with his child, sets out to discover the answer to.
I was not entirely satisfied by the ending to the book, but that may be no more than saying that, as a writer myself I would have chosen to conclude it differently. That aside, I thought The Vanishing Futurist was excellent. it is part Historical Fiction, part Science Fiction, and it deals with big questions, about how we should live, about our capacity to imagine different, better worlds, about high ideals, and how such ideals often come into conflict with the material practicalities of brute survival.
If that makes it sound as though it might be hard going, it isn’t. Its light and easy to read style make it a novel that is accessible to all reasonably intelligent readers. I would, however, add the caveat that although prior knowledge is not essential to the enjoyment of the book, the readers who will get the most from it are those with some background understanding of the main events and themes of the Russian Revolution, and perhaps also of the artistic movements that came to prominence and flowered briefly during this period of history, movements such as Futurism and Constructivism. The writer has clearly done her own homework in these areas, and her novel is highly recommended.
Anthony C Green is a social care worker, novelist, Trade Unionist, and political activist living in Liverpool. His latest novel Special, based on his experiences as a social care worker, is now available: https://www.troubador.co.uk/bookshop/contemporary/special/
Special is essentially the fictional biography of Annie Carter, born in Liverpool to a white mother and Jamaican father, told from the (her own) perspective of someone with an IQ of 70. The author uses his own experience of working within the field of Social Care for more than 20 years to reconstruct her life-story seen through her eyes. It provides an authentic insight into what is often a largely hidden world.
Annie was born in 1963 a (not “in the late 1950s” as stated on the back cover). The distinction is important. Philip Larkin`s poem Annus Mirabilis rings true to anyone who lived through the period:
“Sexual intercourse began In nineteen sixty-three Between the end of the Chatterley ban And the Beatles` first LP”
The Chatterley ban ended in the autumn of 1960 and the Beatles` first LP came out in the spring of 1963. Larkin`s point is that there really were enormous changes in social attitudes between 1959 and the mid-1960s. In 1959-60 I taught children like Annie, from families who had moved from the Manchester slums of Collyhurst and Harpurhey to a nearby overspill housing estate. They were designated E.S.N. (Educationally Sub-Normal) but were taught in the lowest stream of Primary Schools. Special is set in Liverpool only a few years later, in an environment I found almost unrecognisable from my own experiences.
That said, the book is a gripping read. Jennifer, Annie`s mother, was only 17 when Annie was born. Two siblings arrived at intervals before her father was murdered in a racist attack (the racial element, although apparent throughout the novel, is largely incidental to its main theme) when Annie was 6. Two years later she was sent to an institution some 20 miles away from home. Her mother was an infrequent visitor. The heart of the book is Annie`s reaction to her new situation and how she coped with it. She was always aware of what was going on, unlike some of the other inmates who lacked her level of intelligence. She was sexually abused by staff and even, on a home visit, by a step-father. She ran away when she was 15 and worked as a prostitute in Wigan before being “re-captured”.
The author recounts these experiences with great sensitivity and understanding. He succeeds in the difficult task of empathising with Annie`s situation without either being patronising or under-stating the problems she sometimes caused for others, even for those she instinctively liked. He made one feel sympathetic both to Annie and to her mother Jennifer, who was torn between her love and responsibility for Annie and her need to serve the interests of her other children. And maybe if Annie`s father had not been murdered her life would have turned out differently. Her father doted on her and would surely never have acquiesced in her being sent to Mandlestones, the institution to which she was sent when she was 8. She clearly treasured his memory. I recommend the book warmly. It made me feel on Annie`s side throughout all of her difficulties. In describing the pitfalls which could befall a vulnerable child and adolescent in the 1970s he pulls no punches. Kindness wasn`t absent, but neither was exploitation. In that sense, it is also a piece of social history, the reality of which we have become increasingly aware. It also chronicles an increasingly progressive and humane approach on the part of the authorities.
The Prologue also serves as an Epilogue and should be re-read if its contents have been forgotten during the course of the book.
Robin Bury, The History Press Ireland, Dublin 2019. 20.00
ISBN: 978-1-84588-880-0
Robin Bury, a member of the Church of Ireland, who grew up in East County Cork in the 1950s and 60s, has examined the long and troublesome experience of the Protestants in what he calls ‘Southern Ireland’. He uses this term rather than the ‘Irish Free State’, or the ‘Republic of Ireland’ as he covers the period from before the foundation of the independent Irish state until the present day.
What was it that turned the once strong and thriving southern Irish Protestant community into an ‘isolated, pacified community’ living an isolated parallel existence from mainstream society? How did the section of Irish society that produced some of the nation’s greatest writers; Jonathan Swift, Oliver Goldsmith, Oscar Wilde, WB Yeats, J M Synge, George Bernard Shaw, and Samuel Beckett; international brands like Guinness, Jacob’s Biscuits and Jameson whiskey decline from 10% of the population in 1911 to less than 3% in 2011? What happened? Was this decline natural, or was it helped by human intervention in some way?
The decline began to accelerate in the period 1919 – 1923. Bury examines carefully the statistics from this period in his first chapter taking into account the number of people directly or indirectly connected with the Royal Irish Constabulary and the British armed forces, those who died in the Great War and the postwar Spanish flu epidemic and natural decrease. Excluding the approximately 64,600 people included in these categories, Bury estimates that 41,856 southern Irish Protestants left the country; whether by direct intimidation, or their own apprehension and fears of being trapped in what was quickly becoming a conservative, Catholic, Anglophobic state.
The newly formed Irish Free State certainly had no policy of driving the Protestants out. This was certainly not the case with the IRA ‘irregulars’ who – in east Cork at least – targeted a large number of Protestants; small farmers, businessmen, shopkeepers and one Church of Ireland clergyman. They were seen as the enemy; ‘land-grabbers’, ‘landlords’, ‘Freemasons’, ‘Orangemen’, ‘Imperialists’, ‘informers’; all to justify their killing.
Things got so bad, that the Archbishop of Dublin and two other leading southern Protestants had a meeting with the Free State leader, Michael Collins after thirteen Protestants were murdered in the Bandon valley. They wanted to know if the Protestant minority should stay on in the county. Collins assured them that, “the government would maintain civil and religious liberty”. However, Collins wasn’t in much of a position to do much to help. IRA irregulars assassinated him a few months later.
This is a period that many people, especially in today’s modern Ireland would wish to bury; hence the title, Buried Lives. The author is meticulous in his documentation of this tragic, overlooked, and often deliberately ignored aspect of Irish history. The second chapter records some survivors’ harrowing stories; many given as evidence to the Southern Irish Loyalists Relief Association and the Irish Grants Committee to try to win some compensation for their loss. These personal stories show the genuine terror these survivors experienced.
Bury shows how southern Protestants adapted to life in DeValera’s Free State by living quiet, but largely separate lives, rarely socialising outside their own communities; they ‘kept their heads down’ and got on with things in a virtual parallel universe. Until recent times, the mainstream Irish attitude in the South was deference towards the Catholic Church and a romantic rural nationalism. The Protestants survived because they became an insignificant minority.
Bury also looks at the influence of the infamous Ne Temere decree issued by Pope Pius X in 1907. Before 1926, only 6.1% of Protestant brides were marrying Catholic men; by 1971 the figure was 30%. Today, it’s closer to 50%. Children of couples married since Ne Temere are brought up in the Catholic faith, further contributing to the decline of the Protestant communities in the State.
Bury looks at the notorious Fethard-on-Sea boycott of 1957 where all Protestant-owned businesses, farms and even individuals were boycotted after the marriage of a local couple broke down and the Protestant wife, Sheila Cloney, took her children away from the Co Wexford town. The boycott was organised by the local parish priest, Fr William Stafford and lasted for nine months.
Happily, the Southern State has changed a lot in the last sixty-odd years since the Fethard-on-Sea boycott. This is not due to the silent minority – the marginalised Protestants – but people, mainly women, brought up in conservative, Catholic Ireland – who said, we’re not going to put up with this anymore. Strict censorship has gone; Article 44 of the constitution, which gave a special place in society to the Catholic Church, was removed, divorce and contraception were legalised, homosexuality was decriminalised. There is still a long way to go, people are still assumed to be at least culturally Catholic, but perhaps the Southern Protestants may yet find a place in the sun. The rise of Sinn Féin electorally in the Republic may stymie this; it may not. Time will tell.
This book is a useful introduction to a difficult and painful period in Irish history. It has an appendix on the victims of the Bandon valley massacres and extensive notes and a bibliography for further research for any reader wishing to examine the author’s case in detail.
Blake Nelson’s latest adult novel The Red Pill (2019) describes how a liberal advertising exec is slowly sucked into alt-right circles after accepting dating advice from his truck driving brother-in-law, Rob. Martin Harris, newly divorced at 40, is an advertising exec with roots in New York. However, hapless Martin has been out of the dating scene for a while and now has trouble meeting women in the current feminist ‘me too’ climate. Martin fumbles about the dating pool and when Tinder fails, he cautiously accepts advice from his Trump-supporting brother-in-law, Rob. Martin is unconvinced by these ‘go-for-it’ dating strategies, however, he soon finds that his dating life is improving as he starts to utilize the techniques set out by Pick-up Artists in the ‘manosphere.’ Martin thrilled in his new successes, soon finds that Trump’s astounding victory in the elections is putting a damper on his newly found dating successes. The Red Pill addresses the chasm between feminism and the sexual revolution of the past.
Blake also addresses what it means to be ‘Red Pilled’. Red Pillers prefer the gritty, painful, ugly truth; and a popular theme with this crowd is the idea that men who want sex should “just go for it” set against a world of resistance and ‘me-too’. The red pill sector tends to be more radically right.
So much for Martin’s clumsy attempts at dating. Martin himself is offended by the blogs as he begins to peruse these for dating techniques. The Red Pill term describes a loose group of political activities with extremist leanings that focus on men’s rights, and this is the world Martin stumbles into. This community feels oppressed by the left-liberal society and sees feminism as a myth. Sat at his desk at work, he quickly turns off the computer and clears the browser history, trying to make sure that all offensive material has been erased. Once he is sure it is clear, he feels he can safely leave the room and heads to the loo to wash the stench off. Martin’s social life then gets thrown a spanner in the works due to the recent conflict between Left-liberal feminism and Trump’s America, and it is this conflict that results in his world view becoming no longer sustainable in his own mind.
Martin falls deeper and deeper into the manosphere where he is making gains sexually by employing their techniques for dating and leans ever further toward right-wing views from this predominantly male blogging community. Juxtaposed with this is the radical left-liberal feminism of the young women, he is attempting to connect with, particularly predominant in a place like hipster Portland. Blake balances this dissonance, against the backdrop of the Trump Presidency, which threw a large proportion of the left feminists and other ultra-liberal groups into full panic mode, depression, anger, and shocked disbelief as they stood on the precipice of this disturbing abyss. It is this split that occurs very much down male/female lines, where the majority of women, angrily stand hand in hand, dead set against Trump’s misogynistic worldview.
While Nelson normally writes in the young adult genre, generally locating these stories in or near Portland, a city he is well acquainted with, this book is more focused on adult themes. It perceptively addresses dating in the current socio and political climate in a society that is very divided. This fiction is based on the hostile socio-political world of Trump vs the ‘Woke,’ which Martin is drawn into and affected by, ultimately to his cost.
Although Karl Marx and his key collaborator Frederic Engels were politically engaged, active participants in the class struggle as well as being the theoretical founders of Scientific Socialism, neither of them had much to say about what a future Communist Society might look like. It is not true to say, however, as some critics claim, that they gave no indication of how society and the state might function in the immediate aftermath of the overthrow of capitalism. In his book The Civil War in France, Marx made it clear that he saw the form of Direct Democracy exercised by the Communards in the short-lived but heroic Paris Commune, as an indication of how the working class might exercise State Power in a socialist society, a society that he saw as the transitional stage between Capitalism and Communism. The ideas Marx expressed here were later developed by Lenin in his pamphlet ‘The State and Revolution’ as a model for the future Soviet State, although in reality, for reasons that need not detain us here, very few of them were actually put into operation once this state was established.
The Vanishing Futurist is a novel that I stumbled upon by accident whilst browsing in Liverpool’s excellent News from Nowhere left-wing bookshop. It is set in Russia in the period immediately prior to, during, and after the revolution of 1917.
Buried Lives: the Protestants of Southern Ireland
Counter Culture 