Ken

Dave has got an interview with Ken Livingstone, mayor of London, over at his website. Its a short interview but it is interesting- partly of course to see how far any London mayor has to work around the limitations of his office. Livingstone can't raise redistributionary taxation so has to work in policies of redistribution in other ways. It is also interesting to see how far the campaign is already negative- Ken spends a lot of time answering Dave's questions which mostly invite positive answers with comments about Boris Johnson and Livingstone is getting a fair degree of hate on Tory websites. More than anything though I think this marks the fact that Dave is one of the better Labour bloggers around- to get this kind of interview demonstrates his reach- and his articles are always fascinating and interestingly couched. Its a pity he didn't get longer with Livingstone because its my opinion that people like Dave Cole and David Hill sometimes would ask more interesting questions than the professional journalists.

Francesco, Giullare di Dio

"a monument to stupidity... never before have Christianity and cretinism been so close to one another" Martin Oms

The tale of St Francis is one of the most central of the Catholic saints to Christian life. Roberto Rosselini directed a film based upon St Francis's life in the 1950s- a follow up to his trilogy about the end of the war (Roma citta Aperta, Paisa, Germany Year Zero) took the theme of the Christian renounciation of the world and attempted to create an alternative to the war, greed and genocide which had dominated his era. St Francis and his disciples in this movie are held up as an alternative- a Christian folly- against the worldly wisdom of the dictators who had deformed the modern era. This film is an attempt- like Robert Bresson's work about Joan of Arc- to reclaim the values of a medieval saint and install them in a modern era. It is a utopian film- but its utopia is the utopia of personal spiritual fulfilment- of rebirth through Christ, the utopia of what St Francis calls perfect happiness, the renounciation of everything, even happiness itself for the beatific vision of God acheived through suffering.

In that sense the film rejects the whole basis of modernity. From first to last this is a film that revels in folly and stupidity. Its heroes are the mad and the starving- its power lies in its reinvention of poverty. Similarly to the Christians studied by Peter Brown in his magnificent study of Poverty and the Church, Rosselini wants us to remember that wealth is independent of virtue and indeed can be opposed by it. Possessions in this film are an absolute evil. Villagers who love their pigs and cows not as brother animals but as possessions let them obstruct their own salvation. One of the monks, Ginepro, is so foolish that every time he goes out he manages to lose his habit, or rather he grants someone else the privilege of taking his habit from him. That happens three times- the last time the Monks are being visited by Sister Chiara and they have to drag the naked Ginepro off to a bush to reclothe him using some plant stems and a coat. Ginepro's naivety and his lack of property though are of a piece- worldly wisdom is all about the collection of possessions, Ginepro has no idea about how to function in a world of possessions. Give him a load of wood and some vegetables and you'll find him as likely to allow the wood to be cooked and the vegetables to be used as material for the fire as anything else- indeed you can expect him to not realise that food goes cold and rots with time.

Poverty is a virtue here- but so is laughter. St Francis laughs himself throughout the film- he finds things absurd and funny- the title translates as St Francis, God's jester! The monks laugh repeatedly and joy is something they often express. But its the object of their laughing and their joy that Rosselini wants us to observe. Joy proceeds in this film from comradeship. Everyone is everyone else's brother. Poverty has abolished property and even a sense of individuality. Everyone follows St Francis and Francis himself follows his congregation- allowing them to take major decisions- and of course the living God. Francis declares himself the leader because he is the greatest of sinners and invites, nay orders his own followers to place their feet upon his face and neck because of his manifest and multiple sins. This response to every question is echoed by his followers- when Ginepro is captured by the Barbarian King, he too uses the response, telling the King that he Ginepro has deserved death because of the way that he has betrayed God and submitting to any torture with a stare that signifies his increasing saintliness. Hence Francis in a conversation later in the film tells one of the monks that the only way to Christ is to suffer for him- in suffering man abases himself, wipes himself clean of sin and comes closest to the Christ of the cross. In wordly happiness, man is furthest from that Christ and lives in sin- even if he loves Christ, so long as he is rich or powerful or even content, he cannot acheive full happiness, wallowing in the mud he can.

But that's not to say that pain does not hurt or touch these monks. Rosselini wants us to see that- and in perhaps the film's most important scene which is almost silent he does. In the nighttime Francis prays on his own to God, and as he prays a leper comes along almost silently beside the dwellings of the monk. Francis watches the leper through the trees, observes the man's bloodied and emaciated face, his infected hands and his doomed limp. He moves up to the leper, almost level, the leper slowly moves away. Francis keeps following the man, then deliberately he stands in front of him and hugs him, blessing him in hugging him. Of course we are meant to know what this means. Leprosy in the Middle Ages was the most infectious disease of them all, the most feared disease. The leper moved away to spare Francis, Francis embraced him to remind the leper and himself of the man's common humanity. Perhaps the most important shot of the whole film is at the end of this sequence, the leper moves on and St Francis filled with shame and horror collapses weeping to the floor. As a piece of cinema it is incredibly powerful, not a word has been spoken and yet the central Christian themes of compassion and abasement, of the centrality of morality, the sadness of fallen man and the hope of salvation have all been expressed wordlessly in the actions of a Christian saint and a disfigured human being.

And this is a film that we can take in this way. Originally it was preceded by shots of medieval art work. Even in the form we see it in most normally today- it is a story told like a medieval religious chronicle. There is no story- and the most important aspects of St Francis's life and order- his commission from the Pope and his preaching are left out. This is a story rather about what makes a saint, it is a story whose message is spiritual and not secular or historical. Whereas as a historian my film would concentrate on St Francis, the Pope and the Emperor, this film concentrates on St Francis and his comrades, their charity, their foolishness and comedy. That has a more profound message though for our times- Rosselini's film wants us to refocus. For too long he is telling us we have focussed on politics, for too short a time on ethics. To renew society after the experience of total war it is ethics though- it is the personal and sainthood that can reach something that no ammount of political theorising can. In a sense this is self criticism- Italy had of course sustained a Fascist dictatorship and Rosselini had worked for it- when he talks of sin, Italy's sin must be at the forefront of our minds. But this is a deeper film than a mere examination of a personal and national moment- Rosselini wants us to refocus our attentions, politics is not enough, only ethics can save us now is what he seems to be saying.

Martin Oms considered this film to be the marriage of Christianity and cretinism- his comment missed the point. This film exalts cretinism to be the foundation of a truly Christian life. Such a vision is incompatible with almost any modern philosophy of government- to laud the beggar and the preacher on the street over the responsible member of society, the senile old man over his children who want their cow to build families not be fed to religious simpletons, the monk who robs a peasant of his pig in order to feed a sick comrade over the industrious farmer. It puts all our heirarchies upside down and reminds us of how different the Middle Ages are from our own time in terms of mental outlook. Rosselini was to pass in later films, as Martin Scorsese argues, to considering the Dosteovskyan question, is idiocy truly possible in the society that we have built or is there no place for the holy fool in our world?

Regardless of our answer to that question, this is one of the most powerful portraits of the holy fool in western cinema- there may indeed be nothing else much like it. It is a beautifully shot film- as a non-Christian I do not agree with its message but I cannot but marvel at the power with which that message is expressed.

Britney Spears: the perils of instant judgement

Columns like this one in today's Guardian worry me. For all I know the author may be right- but her argument seems to me to be unrelated to any fact. Basically she asserts that Britney Spears and her decline and fall can be accounted by the society that she lives in. The fact that Britney has problems is a result of our expectations in attempting to control her and our attempts to describe those problems in terms which we would only use for a woman and for a mother. She suggests that Britney does not have problems, its we who have problems, not seeing a rebellion against the celebrity system as a natural phenomenon, but as the psychotic aspect of a woman who has betrayed motherhood. I'm not saying that Lisa Appignanesi is wrong- she might be right. But I would say that I know nothing about Britney's psychology and I don't think that Lisa Appignanesi does either. I don't know why Britney has done the things she has done. I don't know what has prompted her father to take control of her affairs, I don't know the content of her relationships with her husbands or her children. I can only hope that the best things are being done for and by her and her family- but without closer knowledge who am I to say anything.

Lisa Appignanesi seems to me here to be making a real mistake- she has a set of assumptions about the way that psychiatry works, as a tool here for sexual oppression. She then finds an instance and shows that it can be seen as fitting with her thesis- and then she proclaims that her thesis is true. Anecdotal evidence is always hard to assess- but its harder still if there are ways of conceiving of the evidence in a different light- Britney may be a victim of mental illness, we don't know. We don't know why her doctors have made the judgement they have made. Caution is always a good principle when thinking about other people's lives especially when you don't have the fullest information set- scepticism is needed from the writer as well as the readers. I don't think that Appignanesi has demonstrated either scepticism or caution here- and it makes it very difficult to take what she says in the future seriously.

Garden State

Garden State is a film that everyone wants to hate- there are lots of 'really' and 'like' in it- too many for my comfort. The characters are self referential and not profound- they are awkward and need to make unique moments in human history in order to reassure themselves. They are self important but meandering in the morass of life in the twenties- they are filled with the angst of lives lived in comfort without real problems. But the film still charms. Maybe its Zach Braff the lead who manages to act an impassive mid-twenties young man with utter conviction, maybe its Natalie Portman whose performance in this film puts her yet again at the height of her proffession as an actress, maybe its a wry cast of supporting characters, maybe its Braff's meandering direction- he is filled with the incidental in life- maybe as well its his writing which is equally zany and all over the place. Maybe its the fact that the film knows that it is incidental- that 'real life tragedy' is more important than other things- or that its worth enjoying life to the full no matter what your position. Garden State isn't a major film but it defines the very essence of whimsy.

Nowhere is this clearer than Sam, the character that Portman plays and the main love interest of the main character- Andrew Largeman. Sam is a whimsical character in her very essence. The pretty girl who falls in love with a man that missed a kind of normal kid things: she is willing to sit on the steps with him whilst everyone else goes off leaving them alone. She wants to be original- and so she dances and does a silly noise when she feels too conventional. There is a sense of fun about her- and Portman captures a girlishness which is both appealing, vivacious and also laced with a kind of compassion. She could be cruel- but only through carelessness and ignorance of convention- she would not hurt deliberately and has no calculation in her personality. She naively asks questions because she does want the answers: at one point Braff's character says that she is like a 'little detective'. She gets to the bottom of his character more than anyone of his original friends do, partly because her naivety is laced with compassion.

Compassion is the key to this film- whimsy is made up of it- whimsical comedy is based on having compassion and affection for the characters. Part of the reason that Garden State works as opposed to being irritating is that all the characters are portrayed with an understated affection. Less is said than often could be said and conversations are closed off rather than opening out to revelation. When revelation does come the film becomes clumsy- it was not meant to string out such grand narratives but it conveys incidental detail and the growth of a love, that is not spoken because the characters feeling it do not have the articulacy, but is still very real and based on mutual affection and regard. There isn't so much a meet cute in this movie as a meeting followed by a growth of cuteness.

Cuteness saturates this film- sometimes it irritates but often it charms. Its insubstantial but its basic good naturedness, affection for its characters and the charm of its performers manage to make it a minor, but still fun, film. This is life acted out and not observed- there is a great scene about being disconnected at a party, there are great little moments but also there are mawkish ones which don't work. Its a piece which works if you see it for what it is: a small vignette that means nothing, but is fun and lit up by some good performances. A little slice of indie fun and games amidst the grimness of life.

Taxation in the Early Middle Ages

I know that this does not sound like the most glamorous of subjects- but actually I think that this is one of the more interesting findings that has recently come out of history. Its central to the way that we understand the evolution of the state. The Early Middle Ages see the creation of modern Europe, the division of the meditereanean between Christianity to the north and Islam to the south. By understanding what happened we can understand the reasons why our history looks the way it does. But more than that by understanding what happened we can see how different reactions to the downfall of imperialisation (the process of the break up of Empire) took effect and we can see how in this case tax effected the way that regimes evolved.

Chris Wickham's magisterial study of the later Roman Empire and early Middle Ages is a multi chapter work, each of whose segments deserve separate analysis. He explores so much that its hard to confine a discussion to a single blog post- so I hope that people do not mind me turning this into an intermittant series- given that it is in my opinion one of the more important books I have read recently, especially with regard to what I think is a neglected subject: the transition from the classical to the medieval. Tax in my view is also a neglected subject: its not sexy, but gritty. Regimes are often defined using the traditional taxonomy used by Aristotle- democracy, oligarchy, monarchy, but seldom do political theorists in the classical tradition turn to analysing the way that they produce revenue and use that revenue. Yet since Harrington (and perhaps Polybius and Machiavelli) the taxation basis of a society has been one of the ways that a social analyst can distinguish and understand a system best.

The early middle ages saw a vast change in the taxation systems across Europe. Basically at the beggining of the period- in say 400- the meditereanean and its European, Asian and African shores were dominated by the Roman Empire. From the Severn to the Euphrates, the Rhine to the Nile, a single political entity or two allied political entities ruled the entire meditereanean basin. That had consequences. Firstly a vast system of taxation was used to supply the two main cities of the Empire. Rome and Constantinople depended on the annona- supplies of grain taken from the agricultural lands of Egypt and Syria. Rome's population at its height was around a million citizens- and they received free handouts of food from the state. But food didn't merely move to the two main imperial capitals. Food and goods moved from Gaul and Britain towards the Rhine frontier, supporting a vast army there. From Egypt and Syria it moved to the Euphrates where a vast Roman army faced the Persians. From the Aegean supplies moved up to the Danube to supply the Roman army that faced the northern world over that river. The Empire denominated all this movement in coin and paid its soldiers a salary- it also channelled that emense wealth to the construction of a civil service which supported the Emperor and controlled and applied this complex system.

Everywhere in the Roman world we see complaints about the levels of taxation and even an Emperor, Valentinian III issued a law in 450 curbing the rapacity of his own taxation assessors. Imperial orders required accounts three times a year to be submitted from rural districts and relied on inspections by local governors. We can see from Egypt, admittedly the most economically developed and politically precocious Roman province, that tax collection was a violent and an insistant pressure on especially rural society. This had consequences for the Roman system of government- coup was the most common form of change of government, soldiers might mutiny for higher pay (as any reader of Tacitus will know) and the city mobs were both large and mutinous. On the other hand it also accounts for the Roman world's stability as an entity, it was centralised and subject to a regular bureacracy. The Roman world did not see, until its crisis, pressures to break up, rather as in the 3rd Century, Emperors rose and fell at the centre. The Roman system was not centrally controlled- but the resources it produced were centrally directed and linked up a vast area, making the defence of the Rhine say reliant upon incomes produced in Provence or the defence of the Euphrates on incomes from the Nile. This picture though becomes very different after the crisis of the 5th Century in the West and the crisis of the 7th Century in the East.

The results of these two crises were to unravel the central acheivement of the Roman Empire- its existance over so much territory. This had consequences in that in all the provinces of the Empire, the state turned more and more inwards and became more and more localised. In Africa after 439 for example no grain fleet sailed north to distribute free grain to the Roman population. The same was true of Egypt after the Arabic conquest in the 7th Century. The great armies for example on the Rhine disappeared completely at some time in the 5th Century, on the Euphrates at some point in the seventh. Defence became local: the provinces of Anatolia had to bear the entire burden of defence against the Arabs- the Byzantines even further localised their defence by basing armies in districts or themes whereby fertile parts of Anatolia were connected to an outer defensive rim. The province of Gaul had to maintain the Merovingian state on its own. Even in Arabic Egypt, it is the constriction of horizon that is most evident. You see that Arabic Egypt does not send income out to the other parts of the Caliphate but rather keeps it within itself. The localisation of the Roman world is a trend that militates against the kind of complex regime that had sat on that world beforehand. Simply put in many parts of the Empire by 800 were supporting themselves in a variety of different ways- variety had replaced uniformity.

All provinces though did not find that their rulers responded in the same way. There is an East-West division here- the Barbarion states of Western Europe, Visigothic Spain, Merovingian France and Vandal Africa were substantially different to the Byzantine Empire and Arabic caliphate which preserved more institutional continuity. In the West, the picture that emerges from Wickham's study is that there was no need for Western states to maintain taxation and consequently it fell away as a method of extracting revenue. The armies of the Barbarions were maintained through grants of land- that afterall was why the Vandals, Visigoths, Franks and others had come into the Roman Empire in the first place and consequently rulers felt no real need for the elaborate taxation systems that the Romans had constructed. In Spain for example such structures fell into disuse because of their unpopularity and the fact that they were not required to support an army whose loyalty was based on grants of land. The same picture is true of Merovingian Gaul. The point though about these regimes is that rather than being vulnerable to coup at the centre, they were vulnerable to revolt at the periphery. Carolingian Frankia was subject to massive splits- as was Visigothic Spain. The splits meant that armies were formed to contest and obtain new rewards and new plunder and the system worked. Once a polity had attained its maximum size it could not do anything save for feed on its own factions.

The situation in the East is different. What happened in the East was that there was more continuity. Institutionally the Roman Empire survived through the early middle ages in the East- and until 630 controlled pretty much the territories that the empire had controlled in the days of Augustus. After the Muslim conquest of Syria and Egypt, the Byzantine Empire was reduced to Anatolia and was forced to support itself from that province alone. The Byzantine method of coping with this change was dual- firstly the empire switched the places that provided it with goods. The city of Constantinople contracted- but still received grain from the Western provinces particularly Sicily until its conquest by the Arabs. It also though localised its military- Anatolia was divided into themes and those themes supported particular units which were recruited and supplied from them. The Emperors did maintain a central force- the tagmata- from the eighth century onwards- and that was supplied centrally by taxation and the army was still paid but we are getting the formation of a system of localisation. The scale of everything was reduced.

It was in Ummayad Egypt, curiously, that the tax system went under the least change. Here tax was still being paid right up till the end of the period that we are dealing with- and there are records which demonstrate the rapacity of governors and local officials in dealing with taxation. In Egypt, the Arabs invaded as a ruling military caste, refusing to be swallowed by the local population it took them a long time to begin to own land and even for the Egyptians to use Egyptian instead of Coptic or Greek. The Arabs segregated off their religion and their language from the Egyptian subject population and lived off the tax revenue that they could extract. Wickham surmises that this was one of the reasons why in Egypt Islam and Arab cultural identity was so strong, whereas in the West by the end of our period, a Frank was someone just born north of the Loire irrespective of their ancestry or language. The point is that the Arab commitment to a large non landed but salaried army meant that they became a separate elite which was supported by the non-Arab tax payer. Its also interesting that in Egypt this meant that there were few ways for the native population to protest effectively- there was no real aristocracy to appeal to and therefore tax rebellions and tax wars are a frequent feature of Egyptian politics running right up until the ninth century. Syria has a similar profile- though here the situation was more stable because of the fact that there were more Arabs who had been there before the conquest and hence were landed and therefore taxed and therefore could appeal to their brethren. Another facet of Ummayad rule was that the taxes collected in Egypt or Syria did not go outside those regions- this leant the provincial governments great wealth with respect to the centre. Whereas in the Roman world, the outer peripharies and the inner circles had been the places where taxes were collected and spent and consequently where power was, in the Ummayad empire there was more centralisation within a province and less without it.

This change in the direction of the tax yield and in the West, in the nature of the tax yield changed politics. It leant politics according to Wickham a much more centrifugal force. In the West maintaining authority was much harder because the business of tax collection had supplied some of the glue keeping the provinces and particularly armies together- the landed army now only wished for plunder and could easily turn into a local force raised for civil war. If the West tended to division and increased warfare, then in the East the old provinces of the Roman empire became more independent of each other. The Arabic empire was less cohesive than what it had succeeded. Curiously in this new localistic world it was smaller states like Byzantium and Lombardy in Italy which maintained more cohesiveness- they were able to because precisely of the move to localising tax revenues. Keeping societies together had become harder because they were no longer fiscal wholes. What we see therefore in the Early Middle Ages is a succession of attempts to maintain cohesion whether through inventing ceremonies- the Visigothic Spanish kingdom used church councils- or maintaining an intrusive legal apparatus as in Lombardy, the state was preoccupied with its own break up and obsessed with regional autonomy instead of local coup. If that autonomy was different in different regions- that related to the different taxation structures and if furthermore the social structure of Ummayad Egypt was different from Frankia that related to the way that its tax was structured.

Tax is obviously not the whole answer nor does it determine a society's complete history- but as I hope this brief survey of Wickham's work indicates it structures the reality to which rulers responded in the early middle ages. One cannot understand say the judicial activity of western Kings or their ceremony without seeing that they were in part attempting to maintain control over kingdoms that threatened to split apart at any point. In the West royal power was increasingly transferred through the aristocracy, in the East every peasant knew who his taxes went to. Simply put in the West the King moved further away from his subjects. Furthermore throughout the Western world, the state became vulnerable to splitting up. The Roman world of coups at the centre gave way to kingdoms who were liable to breaking up into regions. This was less true in the East where the provinces at least had an integrity thanks to the tax system but even there the lack of transfers between provinces created structural cleavages which could lead to regional independence. In the East the most common form of revolt remained the tax revolt, in the West it was a peasant rebellion against a Lord or a Lord's rebellion against his King. Its an interesting subject- and I will return to Wickham's thesis- I am not competent in reality to criticise it but its worth laying out in full, and my views I'm sure on it will evolve as I read more and think more about the issues involved.

Am I the only person in the world who thinks this...

but Barack Obama's celebrity supporters don't impress me at all. I'd be more impressed by people who know something about politics telling me about their opinions than by Jessica Alba and Ryan Phillipe. I'm sure Ms Alba and Mr Phillipe are intelligent, kind people but they have no recognised expertise in politics, there is no reason why I should presume that they know anything more than my next door neighbour. Politics is not a feel good enterprise, its a proffession which requires emense skill and intelligence. I have no doubt that Barack Obama could make a President of the United States: he has the intelligence and charisma to do the job. But I'd prefer to hear from the Samantha Powers of the world than the Jessica Albas, I'd prefer to hear from people with a cogent argument rather than people telling me that yes I can or citing vague and perhaps unacheivable aspirations for where the United States will be in eight years time. Afterall the business of politics is the art of the possible, to misquote Rab Butler (a man who really did know what he was talking about), the business of celebrity is the art of creating an illusion of glamour- the two proffessions may seem to have a lot in common, but at the cutting edge of them, they don't.

The dottiness of an ex-Cambridge don

The former Chancellor of Cambridge University, Lord Broers, yesterday morning, asked a question in the House of Lords. He said,

My Lords, have the Government considered increasing the age at which young people can buy alcohol to the level in the United States? I have observed in the university world that young American students coming to this country are amazed at the alcohol consumption of our undergraduates.

Lord Broers's solution is daft, just think for a moment about where that would leave the ages of consent. He seems to be saying that you should be able to vote (age, 18), drive a car (age, 17) and even have a child (age, 16) but that raising a pint in a pub at the age of 20 is somehow beyond your ken. Its interesting that Lord Broers seems to want to make childhood extend so long that it takes people into their twenties, thinks that a pint in a pub is a more serious act than voting for a government or even having a kid, and considers the best way to deal with a problem for some is to make something illegal for all. What's interesting about Lord Broer's comments is their paternalism: ultimately irresponsible people voting doesn't matter because voting doesn't matter, but irresponsible people getting drunk at midnight on the street does matter because one might be leaving the opera then. Furthermore if 10% of 19 year olds in the UK can't handle their drink, that's obviously a reason for the other 90% to have alcohol forcibly removed from them.

We will never solve the problem of young people drinking in this way- as the minister noted a prohibition would be deeply ineffective- it would also alienate teenagers rather than persuade them. Public information campaigns- the drink driving campaign is a great one to emmulate- even city centre planning regulations- are likely to be much more successful instruments in dealing with this problem. Raising the drinking age would merely criminalise a large segment of the population who are behaving perfectly sensibly and betrays an attitude of mind where the first response to a problem is what should be the last resort- having recourse to the statute book to ban someone from doing something.

British Foreign Policy

I published an article about British foreign policy over at the Liberal Conspiracy- and the reasons that Britain will inevitably weaken and that it is in our interests to weaken over the next few years. Essentially other countries will grow wealthier, which is a good thing for us as it will make us wealthier- through prices dropping, technical innovation and more demand for our services, but it will mean that absolutely the UK will slip behind countries like China, India, Russia, Brazil, Mexico etc. That's not neccessarily a bad thing but it does mean that the current debate say over the Iraq war is really a redundant one- Iraq is the end of the story not the beggining of one. Its far more likely that British troops will be intervening on a regional basis say in Kosovo or being part of a European effort to curb Russian expansion than to be intervening in the Middle East in the future. That means that a lot of the presumptions about UK foreign policy may have to change- we need to do more cultural and economic diplomacy, rely more on the fact that due to immigration we have great links say with the Indian subcontinent, and do less military activity. Furthermore we need to look at fortifying NATO and strengthening the internal cohesion of the alliance.

Rambo 4: the world's worst movie?

Some people think that there is no objectively bad art: well there is, its called Rambo and at 120 minutes long, it is 120 minutes too long. Put simply, nothing in this film is any good- a better budget means that it just passes the Hills have Eyes 2 in my refuse collection- but apart from that it has no redeeming features. Sylvester Stallone who stars in and directs this movie should be thoroughly ashamed of himself- he has stunningly managed to craft a film without the least shred of a redeeming feature, in which the contest for worst performance is only won by the actors playing the Burmese army because their depictions are comically racist, whereas his of Rambo is just comically crap. The film is awful- do not rent or buy this movie or go and see it- any popularity it gets demonstrates that Western civilisation is truly in trouble and deserves to decline and fall.

Rambo 4 tells the story of John Rambo, now out in Thailand strangling snakes for a living, who is hired by a group of Christians to escort them into Burma. He then is joined by a group of hired skinheads to go and rescue the said Christians from the Burmese prison camp in which they have been held. I'm sorry if this breaks the overwhelming suspense but Rambo does indeed rescue the Christians, just before the young pretty female one is about to be raped by an evil oriental (the wording is deliberate- this is a racist movie) and just as one of them is eaten by pigs- all the better to show you some graphic CGI blood, my friend. (Incidentally the budget for CGI blood was really large on this film, there are several wonderful CGI reconstructions of how a human body breaks up, wonderful apart from one fact, that they would be obvious to a one eyed village idiot!)

Sylvester Stallone in the title role acts badly, well that's inaccurate actually, he has one expression throughout the entire movie. When he is happy, Rambo scowls like a tough guy. Sad he scowls like a tough guy. Killing people he scowls like a tough guy. Even going home to a sentimental family reunion he scowls in exactly the same manner. He just scowls and stares- there is no hint here of growth or development in the character- when he, at the beggining of the film, is being unsuccessfully petitioned by the Christian group leader to take them down the river and when moments afterwards he is petitioned by the sexy girl to take them down the river, he looks exactly the same even though the lines show he has much more sympathy with the latter than the former.

Lines, yes, script. Ummm, most Hollywood films employ a scriptwriter. Sometimes they aren't that good. Art Monterastelli and Sylvester Stallone should never work again on dialogue or in films. The dialogue is incredible. Nobody speaks like they speak in this film. This is worse than a school play written by a bunch of five year olds. Poor Julie Benz has to at one point say "Maybe you've lost your faith in people. But you must still be faithfulto something. You must still care about something. Maybe we can'tchange what is. But trying to save a life isn't wasting your life, is it?" The lines don't really get better- but hey it doesn't matter because the quality of the acting would make up for the weaknesses in Sly's performance and the shit script, well they don't. Most of the actors get nothing to do- and when they do they do it badly. I never thought I'd see a worse Cockney tough guy than Vinnie Jones but Graham McTavish manages to make me regret they didn't cast a professional footballer in his role.

And as to the ethics of the film. Matt Sinclair thinks the film is pagan- I think Matt is being too kind by a long way. This film doesn't have an ethic beyond the utility of psycopathic murder- oh and the idea that its so much better to go in and kill people than be nice to them. Its an insult to paganism to describe the cretinous morality of the film as having anything to do with paganism. Mark Kermode got it right on Radio 5 recently- there is a lot of atrocity in order to make you feel happy when atrocious murders happen later on. The Burmese soldiers here have no character- they are just vicious thugs, who strip and rape girls (though only when Rambo turns up- so he can rescue her immediatly). They have no humanity. This is not a pagan film, this is a fascist film. It invites us to reject the other and enjoy the torture of the other. It wants us to enjoy the fact that the Burmese soldiers are killed in horrific ways. Furthermore the Burmese soldiers all have comedy evil sneers- this is racism combined with a revenge movie with the subtlety of a yob chanting insults. The film is filled with dodgy sexual imagery as well: its a paean to homosexual sado masochism (ah we're all brutish thugs together kind of thing) but its one female character is there as a literal adornment. She is a kind of Christian Scherahazde, good at persuading men with her sexy figure, but in battle or even in other scenes just too hysterical to be any use. Every time she is on the screen you can feel the film's sexism, and every time you see Rambo you can feel its prehistoric view of masculinity.

This movie is a disgrace- its the kind of film that did I not support free speech I would support laws against. It perpetuates the worst image of manhood around- the least interesting view of the world, the least interesting cinematographic skill, it is quite simply atrocious and has no redeeming image apart from its budget. This film is quite simply shit.

Crossposted at Bits of News.

The Political Compass

Courtesy of James, I just did this test for fun to see where I come out- this was the result

Economic Left/Right: -1.50
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -5.64

As always with such things, its imperfect but that actually captures my position- at least with regard to my segment- fairly accurately- I am quite surprised. On these kind of things I've ended up being told I beleive in all sorts of things- normally because the questions are badly drafted. Anyway have a go yourself...

There will be Blood: the loneliness of creating a nation.

I am still digesting 'There will be Blood' which I saw last night at the Odeon in Covent Garden. I am not entirely sure about what to say about the film- save that I agree with Roger Ebert's review that it is a portrait of madness. There is something else though that the film really is about: the creation of the United States- and I think those two themes- madness and creation- are tied together in this film in an interesting provocative way. Madness becomes the impulse towards creation- and authority follows the mad lust for gold or for oil.

In Citizen Kane, Mr Bernstein says to his interviewer that 'It's easy to make a lot of money, if that's all you want to do is make a lot of money.' He is talking about the banker Thatcher but also about Kane himself and the way that Kane didn't seek to make a lot of money but rather spent it. Kane afterall is the generation after the great oil profiteers and all of Kane's ambitions from running newspapers to running for office are aspirations within a civilised society. The interesting thing about this film is that it is set in the generation before Charles Foster Kane- the generation who made the wealth upon which Kane lived. The generation who were out in the oil fields and gold mines physically hewing out of the ground what turned into the fuel for the industrial super power that was the United States by 1920. This film begins with the end of the gold rushes of the 19th Century in the 1890s and ends in the great crash of 1929.

Its hero is a character who creates a civilisation therefore. We are in early California- a sparcely populated area of the United States whose population hovered around the million mark at the turn of the twentieth century. We don't see an officer of the government at all- and law out here is a cursory thing enforced merely in the buying and selling of land. Rather what we see is the two great traditional powers of pre-civil states- the Church and the coin. The Church is represented by Eli Sunday- a charismatic preacher who inspires his flock and purports to drive devils out of them and drive their illnesses away. The coin is represented by Daniel Plainview- our hero- whose hands and money are creating oil fields around the town- and in the Sunday ranch. His power is the sucking out of resources from the land- whereas Eli sucks out the inspiration from his parishioners. The two men are involved in a confrontation; a confrontation that takes us through the whole film. But its a confrontation that in many ways merely exemplifies the real underlying theme of the film- both men are utterly vicious and ruthless, both are willing to humiliate the other and both are unpleasant to the extreme- it is that unpleasantness that lies at the centre of the film.

Daniel Plainview is a hero. He is the kind of man who founds towns and schools- but he is also immoral and angry. He hates almost everyone in the world he confesses at one point. He has no friends- he even alienates, abandons and attacks his adopted son. He is also grows in madness through the film- his meglamonia becomes more and more pronounced as the film proceeds. His anger and loneliness reflect each other. This is the type of man who makes a state- the type of man who thrives when everything comes down to his own talents. Plainview is virtu personified- he shapes history by despising all of its frontiers- in many ways he mirrors the Russian oligarchs of today or the British industrialists of the 18th Century. What the film invites us to do is to judge him as a human being- to weigh him in the balance and find him wanting.

But it also invites us to observe his trajectory- as the inspired prospector turns from man into monster. It invites us to see the personal consequences of overbearing wealth- like Kane, Plainview ends up alone in Xanadu, alone in a palace of pleasures, strolling empty corridors and whipping out in drunken rages at subordinates or indeed anyone who comes near. That madness is born of loneliness: Plainview has created a nation, there is none like him. It seems to me watching the film that as the movie progresses increasingly Plainview has less and less to do with lives around him- the world of civility leaves him behind. By 1927 as the film ends, the world is made for men like his son, the Kanes of the world, who have adjusted to civility and its constraints- who don't murder in their rages, who don't drink whisky by the gallon, who don't hate the world and all who live in it. The last scenes of the movie are crucial because- and I won't let on to what happens, they bring Plainview's last rejection of any collegiality, any claim of affection, they show his final decline into madness- like Gloria Swansson at the end of Sunset Boulevard, the lights focus as the character dies.

Plainview's character evolves as the movie goes on- but he is always lonely and never demonstrates wide degrees of affection- possibly he does towards his son but mostly he seems impassive to others but emotional about himself. He is a competitive man- lives for and through competition- and that is his incentive to develop his oil wells. The same goes for the preacher Eli- who is also fueled by rage- a sublimated rage as opposed to Plainview's overt alcoholic rage. Both though are the type of man who forms a world, who creates a nation. This story is their story and it demonstrates the unattractiveness and the neccessity of that type of person. This review is incomplete because my thoughts about the film are incomplete- but ultimately there is something here of the loneliness, rage and hatred that fueled men who wanted to create power, to create states. That rage promoted by some old injustice, or as in this case inequality in settled society, leads to the creation of great things- at great personal costs. This film is not about present society because its not about civil society- it is about the creation of civil society. Its not about the brutality of capitalism or the brutality of evangelical christianity but about the brutality of both before the state- when gold and God are there to reinforce authority instead of existing within the bounds set by authority.

The roar and coat of the a lion is beautiful viewed from afar through the prism of history, but come up close and the blood dripping from its fangs and the loneliness of its supremacy are far less impressive.

The Conformist: Fascism's beauty and Liberalism's untidy charm

The Conformist has just been re-released in the UK- it was made in 1970, one of the first films of the Italian director, and now elder statesman of cinema, Bernard Bertolucci. It is about the career trajectory of a Fascist secret policeman in the Italy of the 30s and 40s, the reasons for his Fascism and the things that he has to do- including murder his old Professor- in order to maintain his career in the secret police. Its a fascinating film on many levels- for what it reveals about the cod-Freudianism of the 1970s for example- and it is a beautiful film, with some truly spectacular shots. It is this beauty which actually is the point at which the film reaches profundity and says something which is important about Fascism as a concept and conformity as an ideal. Bertolucci was trying to say something about the aesthetic of the movement in the 20s and 30s and also about the aesthetic of liberalism, he was trying to demonstrate to us something about different kinds of beauty and their political value and through the film, through the use of different shots to deal with different characters and the use of situation, he manages to demonstrate this approach.

The first scenes of the film involve mainly our fascist character, Marcello Clerici, crossing vacant corridors, saluting pristine guards etc. Dressed in a sharp suit, and moving at a comically fast pace, reminiscent of some film noir sequences- the character embodies a certain aesthetic. Bertolucci is keen to photograph Clerici's fascist period at oblique angles- in one sequence a car drive is photographed diagonally upwards from the wheel. He dwells on the long corridors and lines of the Fascist aesthetic. When Clerici meets his future wife, Giulia, she is dressed in a skirt which is crossed by black and white lines. You get the sense that the Fascist aesthetic is about forcing the natural curves of a woman's body into lines, into the strict artificiality of a political system. The point is of course that the same could be said of Clerici's conscience, he too is being forced from curves into lines, from complication into loyalty by dictatorship. You see the image repeated all over the place. Clerici's father confined to a mental asylum repeats a description of freedom endlessly, but repeats it in a stark void. A white prison, sanitised, whose benches stretch out in seemingly endless lines without a break for an individual to sit upon them. The white artificiality of the scene reminds us of the purification that Fascism involves- a single solution to every problem- and a diagnosis of madness for those who do not adhere exactly- for those that maintain their individuality.

However the film does not merely portray fascism, it also portrays liberalism. Clerici is sent by his Fascist bosses to assacinate his old Professor who lives in Paris. When he goes to see his old Professor, he goes with his newly wed wife, Giulia, and meets the Professor's wife, Anna. In reality the meeting with the Professor turns into a complicated sexual game- as Anna seduces Clerici and spiritually seduces Giulia, the Professor spiritually seduces Giulia and the two men fence ideologically. But the key point here is the conception of beauty. Counterposing Anna, in her classical dress- looking very like Anna Karina in Goddard, to Giulia in the first scene she appears in is intriguing and demonstrative (Giulia eventually ends up dressing like Anna more and more, a conversion to liberalism in sartorial form). Anna's dresses are elegant but they run with her body not against it- they emphasize her shape, they don't tyrannise over it. We could mention other things too- the aesthetic of the places that they go in Paris is again different to the aesthetic of the long corridors and lonely saluting functionaries of Italy. Firstly Paris is filled with people- people are always everywhere- even when the Professor's colleagues (and ideological sympathisers) escort Clerici to see him, these are people dressed not in uniform but their own style. Secondly Parisian architecture is not so bleak and linear- but curves and the spaces are confined.

Perhaps the most important element in which Paris and Italy differ in the film is sexual though. In liberal Paris sex is available and emotional. The sexual escape that Clerici finds with Anna is an expression of freedom, desire and emotional commitment. Clerici, Anna tells us is a coward, we know that though already for he is getting married in order to avoid sexual commitment. He is getting married precisely to fulfil the bourgeois ideal, a family uncontaminated with the dirt of sex, with the difficulties of emotional entanglement. For Clerici there is only the relationship with the prostitute and the wife- both of them clean of entanglement- both of which are endorsed by the Catholic priest in confession and both of which are imprisoning. Anna though and her husband offer something different: sex for them is something to be enjoyed, to be sensed and to be welcomed. The liberal aesthetic is liberating literally- and it is hedonistic. The Fascist aesthetic is repressive. Nowhere is this less evident than in a scene at the end of the Parisian phase of the movie. The four characters go to a dance and the two women- Anna and Giulia- dance together in an exceedingly sensual and sexual manner- they then lead a conga off from the dance hall, leaving Clerici and his fascist 'minder' alone together for a moment. Clerici walks into the middle of the hall and the conga returns surrounding him in his confusion. While everyone else in the room is filled with joie de vivre, Clerici is upset and confused by the spectacle of the joy of other people, by the liberating neglect of persona to fulfil personal happiness.

In a sense, Bertolucci offers us an aesthetic commentary on Orwell. Orwell, in 1984, tells us that for Julia and Winston Smith the ultimate act of liberation was no holds barred sex- the act in itself, purged of the misplaced purity that Big Brother granted it, was the ultimate revolution against totalitarianism. For Bertolucci, that much is true as well. But Bertolucci is making a more subtle aesthetic point- the Fascist aesthetic confines and requires conformity. Requires a man to marry a wife he does not love, to abandon the principal of enjoyment for a spurious sacrafice to the desires of society, requires strict linear fashion. The liberal aesthetic is more natural and based on pleasure- like C.S. Lewis's God, the Liberal is a hedonist at heart, promising pleasures evermore. The point of the film is not so much about the origins of conformity- as about its nature. Conformity by its very nature is forced and requires a human being to give up their own desire in pursuit of that which society offers- salutes, huge offices and long corridors. Bertolucci is keen to make us realise that of course this is suppression- the Fascists have mistresses- and it leads to unhappiness and to mental asylums confining those who talk of freedom. What it doesn't lead to is spontaneity, pleasure and happiness, what it doesn't lead to is all the quirky, difficult and different relationships that humans construct in order to help themselves live in comfort on this planet. What it doesn't lead to is the emotional entanglements of actual life- in attempting to reduce life, art and sex to the prism of perfection, it drains them of their meaning and imposes upon the world a falsehood that the world eventually cannot bear. The conformist finds a conga- an expression of undiluted pleasure- a scary revelation of the fact that pleasure is both spontaneous and untidy.

In the film, we see Fascism's endpoint as well as its beggining. The conformist uses that end point of course to reveal to the new authorities- a mob singing revolutionary songs- the Fascist careers of others. But in reality he has not changed- he has not discovered the essence of liberalism- the spontaneous untidiness of life, rather he wants to force people into a new line. Unforgiving he is the puritan inquisitor, the communist show trial prosecutor, the fascist secret policeman, forever worried about what society demands as social or sexual or aesthetic tithe. But he cannot acheive either happiness or spontaneity!

Film Classification

Over at the cornerstone blog, Julian Brazier, the Conservative MP, has called for a tightening of the law on Video Nasties. He describes his bill in this passage

My bill aims to make the British Board of Film Classification accountable to Parliament. It would give a Parliamentary committee the power to review and veto key appointments and the guidelines the BBFC works to. It would also introduce a new Parliamentary appeal against videos - at the moment the only appeals allowed are by the industry in favour of them. In Australia anyone can appeal.

I can see what he wants to do and appreciate why. Films have an effect on their audience- and if they didn't, they wouldn't be made. I have said before that I think we worry far too much about sex and too little about violence in the cinema- but also Mr Brazier needs to worry about context. I've said before that in some films violence is clearly indefensible but in some films, it is neccessary to make a point or to illustrate something that I need to see. For instance, the film Downfall is so powerful because it shows the violence produced as a result of Hitler's unreal refusal to surrender, Saving Private Ryan's realism illuminates the horrors of even a virtuous war, Goodfellas demonstrates the poverty of life as a mafiosi through the use of violence: other films use graphic sexual content to make points- I've just seen the Bertolucci film- the Conformist- where the sexual relations between a man and his wife and mistress illustrate the fundemental realities of Fascism. Context is all important in deciding what kind of violence or sexual image is being used and whether it should be banned.

But is Parliament the right place to handle this kind of issue. Mr Brazier forgets, what Conservatives in the past would never have forgot, that Parliament has defects as well as perfections. MPs often react on the basis of an emotive tabloid headline and not from a reasoned appreciation of the issues. Furthermore Parliament is overloaded with business at the moment- it often spends far too little time on major issues- and probably wouldn't have the time to really consider this kind of thing adequately. Parliamentary oversight, if it meant anything, could easily lead to a more puritanical restatement of what we already have- which is not the direction I think we need to go in. I think we need to adjust the balance between violence and sex and also need to adjust the balance against purposeless nudity or violence on screen- Parliament is more likely to keep the balances the same in all instance and tighten up. And furthermore it is likely to do that on an adhoc basis- paying attention only when the media pays attention. There is a whole argument about standards of censorship- but I'm not sure that Parliament is the appropriate place to make decisions about the minutiae or hear appeals.

Furthermore in setting guidelines, I think its right to err on the side of liberty. The problem is that MPs are more likely to err on the side of caution and make the guidelines stricter than they need be. I wonder whether the natural authoritarianism of politicians and the press might create a real problem here of censorship- it would be a real loss if for instance Casino or Goodfellas were not allowed to be shown in the UK because of the decision of various members of Parliament. Of course this is an argument against all regulation- and it doesn't work all the time- but speech is a central and important freedom, without which democracy becomes difficult to secure. It isn't easy to censor speech- that's why personally I prefer a voluntary code that says more about who can watch a film (depending on age) than on what everyone should watch. This is not an easy issue- but I'd prefer that we have to endure a couple Hills have Eyes Two, if the choice is between that and Parliamentary regulation of what can be said on film, lets err on the side of free speech.

Anne Boleyn

I haven't seen the Other Boleyn Girl yet, but as an early modernist I suppose I'm obliged to at some point! I do think though that its interesting that its this aspect of Anne's story that we highlight in drama and in movies- the recent Henry VIII series on the BBC was similar. Anne Boleyn for those who don't know successfully managed the transition from being Henry's queen's lady in waiting to Henry's mistress to his wife and queen. But in a way that's the least interesting thing about her: Boleyn was an incredibly interesting woman in her own right, without thinking about her connection with Henry. She was a patron of the careers of many Protestants at Henry's court- and though we don't know how much influence she had on Henry's policy in the Reformation, there is a good case for saying that she was one of the drivers behind the Reformation. She was also an incredibly intelligent woman- Henry was attracted by her intelligence at first but then repulsed by the fact that she refused to bow to him all the time, by her temper and her sharpness. Her fall which flowed from her character and her enthusiasm for Protestantism in some ways is much more interesting than her rise- pretty women attract compliments and royal patrons all the time- but Anne wasn't just a pretty woman, she was an intelligent, skilful player of the court game, with an ideological coterie around her of radical protestants and a strong temper and sense of herself. I doubt we'll see that in the movie (except maybe as a negative and an adjunct to her charm)- and I do think its interesting that whenever you see this queen displayed on screen, her sexiness is emphasized at the expense of her intelligence. Partly that's because cinema likes a pretty body more than an interesting mind- but partly one suspects a residual sexism in the way that we approach Anne. We don't see the intelligent woman, as much as the sexy schemer.

Artistic Beauty

An interesting article in today's Boston Globe makes me re-think the whole concept of artistic beauty. We often think that artistic beauty is an objective standard: that there are some things, a landscape by Constable or Van Gogh that just have as part of their inherent nature, beauty. That's true to an extent. The article in the Boston Globe though draws attention to research that casts doubt on the status of artistic judgement or rather on what it is actually judging. The study involved people judging the respective merits of various types of wine- the people were invited to rank the wines in order to merit. They did, and the orders of merit followed the prices that they were told that the wine cost, but what the scientists didn't tell them was that all the wine cost exactly the same ammount because they were exactly the same wine. Consequently the right judgement was that the wine had the same degree of merit because it was the same wine.

But why did people judge it differently? Well lets go backwards a little, why do we find anything artistic beautiful. Its quite clear why I find a beautiful woman beautiful (and others might find a beautiful man beautiful)- there is a clear evolutionary reason and though types of beauty change over time, I don't need to be taught that. But I do need to be taught about art, about music and about wine. We all learn about that, whether its through school, the guides at museums or art galleries or even friends and families- our taste is inherited from other people. And our taste is a way of communicating with other people- we tend to respect people who see the same piece of art in the same way as we do. I do it with books: one of my best friends from Oxford is a friend who I realised I had to know when she spoke about how much she loved Jane Austen. Many of my other friends are friends because of what they and I mutually like- that I'm sure is true of some of the readers of this blog and some of the blogs I also visit regularly. Shared appreciation is a means of communication.

So lets come back to the wine. To what extent are we, when we respond to art, responding not so much to the art, as attempting to say something about ourselves. There are genuine likes and dislikes- we all have them. Part of those likes and dislikes are disagreements about what in the real world constitutes a desirable value- your well written sentence and mine may be different entities. You may applaud say William F. Buckley's perambulations through language, I may like the plainer style of George Orwell. The point though is that to some degree our artistic judgements are also social. They are judgements about conventions. In that sense the people, who were studied by the scientists in the study reported by the Boston Globe, acted perfectly rationally. Price is a conventional market of quality- it is what a person will agree to pay for something and the higher the price, the higher the conventional merit assigned. So when I say to you that conventionally this wine is thought to be better than this, there are strong reasons for you agreeing. As recognising artistic beauty is in part a means of showing you 'get it', then recognising the beauty of the higher priced wine and its superiority to the lower priced wine, shows that you 'get it' and are part of the group that 'gets it'.

I'm not suggesting that all judgements like this are social judgements- just that in part they all are. What is interesting about this study is that it shows how far the idea of artistic beauty is a language with which we demonstrate our taste and personality to others. Its a signifier of what we beleive ourselves or want ourselves to be.

Now ain't the time for your tears: Orlando Figes's The Whisperers

Sofia Antonov-Ovseyenko was arrested on 14th October 1937, she wrote a letter to her husband Vladimir, not knowing that he too had been arrested on the same day.

M[oscow] 16/X. Prison
My darling. I do not know if you will receive this, but somehow I sense that I am writing to you for the last time. Do you recall how we always said that if someone in our country was arrested it must be for good reason, for some crime- that is for something? No doubt there is something in my case as well but what it is I do not know. Everything I know, you know as well, because our lives have been inseperable and harmonious. Whatever happens to me now, I shall always be thankful for the day we met. I lived in the reflection of your glory and was proud of it. For the last three days I have been thinking through my life, preparing for death. I cannot think of anything (apart from the normal shortcomings that differentiate a human being from an 'angel') that could be considered criminal either in relation to other human beings or in relation to our state and government... I thought exactly as you thought- and is there anybody more dedicated than you are to our party and country? You know what is in my heart, you know the truth of my actions, of my thoughts and words. But the fact that I am here must mean that I have committed some wrong- what I do not know... I cannot bear the thought that you might not believe me... It has been oppressing me for three days now. It burns inside my brain. I know your intolerance of all dishonesty, but even you can be mistaken. Lenin was mistaken too it seems. So please believe me when I say that I did nothing wrong. Beleive me, my loved one... One more thing: it is time for Valichka (Sofia's daughter) to join the Komsomol (youth Communist party). This will no doubt stand in her way. My heart is full of sorrow at the thought she will think her mother is a scoundrel. The full horror of my situation is that people do not beleive me. I cannot live like that... I beg forgiveness from everyone I love for bringing them such misfortune... Forgive me my loved one. If only I knew that you beleived me and forgave me! Your Sofia

Reading that letter, I do not know of any conceivable human reaction but to weep. But of course the fate of Sofia was the fate of millions of Russians, arrested and taken to Labour camps and some of them shot, during the Stalinist terror of the 1930s and 1940s. Orlando Figes, the British historian of Russia, has produced in his new book an account of their lives, particularly the lives of Russia's 'twentieth century' generation who were born in the twenties and lived into the nineties and 2000s. These children lived through the destruction of their parent's lives through the purges, fought in the Second World War, lived through the resumption of Stalinist terror in the forties, then were disorientated by the Kruschev thaw and retired as the Soviet Union trembled and collapsed in the eighties and nineties. The average age of the people that Figes interviewed in coming up with his latest book- The Whisperers was eighty- and his team interviewed them in 2002.

The book takes the form of a series of thematic chapters based around time periods or types of experience under Stalin. What Figes has done is to leave the contemporary accounts to speak for themselves. This is as much a collection of documents as a history- it is a history because Figes provides a compelling narrative, but the long quotations and Figes's approach which is to provide personal stories and accounts of moments of the Soviet past, gives that historical account a wonderful vividness. Again and again, you think that you cannot see a grimmer reality, time after time the barbarity of the Stalinist regime stuns you. For example, at one point during the war, those who turned up 20 minutes late for work were prosecuted for desertion from the domestic front. Tragic stories multiply and following families through the Soviet era you see how unending suffering repeated generation unto generation. Particularly sad though is not the direct destruction of lives: but the realisation that around everyone who went into the machinery of death left behind them mothers, daughters, sons, husbands, fathers, wives and other family members. Family members who immediatly acquired a stigma to their names- but who also lost their family member. Children in particular were left as orphans, often waking up one morning without parents and struggling to continue in schools. Teachers emerge as the heroes of Figes's story. Ida Slavina lost her mother and father, within five months both were arrested. From then on, she was passed round between the families of her classmates, eventually she found a job as a cleaner and worked there in order to raise the money to rent a small room. She was assisted by her teacher Klavdiia Alekseyeva. Klavdiia stopped anyone denouncing 'enemies of the people' in the classroom and noone was expelled for their parents' arrest at school, she sought to inspire her pupils by telling them their parents wanted them to continue at school. In some cases she directly supported them, for example she paid eleven children's school fees so they could continue to stay at school.

Relationships between people changed as a result of the terror. Many prisoners when eventually released just could not come back to families. The terror went on as the pace of urbanisation was raised. Often several families were packed into small living quarters. There was effectively no privacy and the realisation that anyone might inform on you, meant that families kept themselves to themselves. Guarding their portion of the kitchen sink intensely and not speaking to each other about anything that might give them away. In a society where you might be arrested for an anti-Soviet joke, it was not worth saying anything to anyone else. Children were brought up implicitly to keep secrets about their parents, conversations would stop or change direction if someone not from the family came into the room. Figes shows how people were thrown back on their families: for fear that others might hand them into the secret police. Though even families might split- he has stories of children being sent away as their parents were arrested and seeing aunts and uncles shut doors in their faces, terrified of being seen as an enemy of the people. The society of whisperers that was created- hence the title of the book- was a society where private life had to retreat. Everything according to the state was public: and that meant that people withdrew into their internal world- sometimes scribbling diaries in code- in order to protect themselves from being arrested.

Figes's book is a masterpiece because it sketches the unknown, to me, dimensions of this totalitarian silence. But he also sketches its development. The Second World war brought a new kind of liberty and solidarity. The state had to relax its controls. Priests for example were allowed to function once more and prisoners in the Gulag had their conditions relaxed slightly. Many children of enemies of the people were permitted to take up key jobs in order to aid the war effort. Those who had been purged felt useless and suddenly the war gave them a sense of purpose- their contribution they often said was to work hard in the Gulag, to work hard in the army. This kind of sentiment made the war a uniquely liberating experience for the Soviet population- whilst of course being horrific in its other effects. But the forties saw another burst of repression as again people were rounded up and taken into the Gulag. Figes wonderfully creates through the testimony of the individuals who he documents the sense that persisted right through to the present day, that someone was following them and that somehow any period of grace would be ended. Its something that endures today. It definitely effected the population's understanding of the Kruschev thaw as well- and the population were right because under Brezhnev Stalin was rehabilitated. The Soviet state was also very keen not to rehabilitate those it had arrested unjustly. Rehabilitation did happen in the 1950s, and many especially Communist party members desired it fervently: to have a clean passport was something that everyone wanted, because it was a signal that they would not be arrested again. But even then the sense persisted- a population lived with a paranoia about the state, about everyone else in their society sometimes even about their own children.

'One death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic', that quote is attributed to Stalin, and it sums up something that is actually very true. What I found particularly poignant about Figes's book is that he brings alive some of those individual stories- some of those tragic stories. Bob Dylan's song about the death of Hattie Carroll told us repeatedly that now ain't the time for your tears as his story dived further into tragedy, this book feels like on every page it has written that now ain't the time for your tears. The stories just stand on each other, one after the other, and the immensity of Stalin's crimes is demonstrated because though we only have a fraction here of the estimate of his effects, we can see the devastation of what he did. Bringing to life these personal stories creates for me at least a much more real sense of what those statistics mean. It also creates a sense of the historical scale of what happened- for the consequences of the Stalinist terror doubled and redoubled down the generations. Millions were imprisoned which meant that millions of children grew up as orphans effectively, millions of relationships were damaged, millions of lives were destroyed, millions of families were left with a traumatic memory of fear and terror. A French psychologist travelling to Russia in the 1970s said he had never seen a population with so many facial tics- he wasn't wrong, I suspect just as the effect of the first and second war endures in the rest of Europe, the effect of the terror endures in Russia. But much more profoundly because the tyranny which created the terror lasted right up until the 1990s- though there were thaws, the Communist party remained in control till Yeltsin and under President Putin efforts are being made to rehabilitate Joseph Stalin and deny the purges. (One reason why I cannot abide or support Putin, is the thought that he wants Russian textbooks to under report the Terror, having read this testimony I'm not sure what words can convey how objectionable Putin's comments about exageration of the Stalin regime's evil are.)

I don't think I can convey the immense nature of what this book does- Figes's reporting isn't central to it, he has done a good job but its a self effacing job. Ultimately the quality of the book is in the collection of primary evidence about the Terror and how it effected people- there are so many other aspects to it as well- he concentrates on the Kulaks and the way they were stigmatised for no reason, on the role of women and the Spartan lives of the early Bolsheviks compared to the new generation of Bolsheviks coming through in the thirties. I just don't have space. But I do have space to say this- go back and read the letter with which I began this review, reread it and remember that millions of Russians in the 1930s could have and did write letters like that. Many of them like Sofia who were committed communists, others who weren't but all incredulous that they had been arrested because they were not guilty. Some of them though lied, they told their children as they went that they weren't guilty so that their kids could fit into Soviet society. Remember that, oh and remember that many Russian citizens only found out what had happened to their arrested family members in the eighties and nineties when the archives were finally opened: wives waited twenty or thirty years for husbands who had been shot the night that they were arrested. Remember and remember that every time you remember, now ain't the time for your tears, there is so much more to remember and to weep over.

Unproductive work

James Higham rightly points to some ludicrous research investigations- into whether men and women differ evolutionarily in the ways that they perceive colour or into the ways in which owning a cat reduces heart disease or an over consumption of marzipan leads to death- in one of his latest articles. I do agree with James that there are some areas of research, particularly in the humanities that I don't understand, but it is worth remembering that research that often looks useless can turn out to be anything but. Much research activity in the sciences and arts that has looked useless in the past actually turned out to be very useful in the end. One of the inventors of chaos theory for example, used to love taking planes to random places, just in order to look out the window and sketch cloud formations. Fractals, an underlying part of current mathematics, were invented in 1917 before they could ever actually be used or tested. Research is a fairly hit and miss activity and an anomaly, which seems trivial, may be a way into a subject which leads eventually to the discovery of a new way of thinking. Take the cat research that James laughs at, he might well be right to laugh at it, but say that I generated through that a way of understanding companionship to have physical and neurological results which ultimately saved people's life and enabled us to understand the human organism in a better way, would he be laughing then?

I am not saying James is wrong to question all this, just its worth bearing in mind the ways that research can often be productive even when to an outsider it seems stupid or perverse. There are every day things which once established- say the chemicals inside marzipan and what it is that kills a human being when over consumed- that can help us in solving other more inaccessible problems. Going from a different angle, often elucidates things that others don't understand and its always worth asking why a certain piece of research is being done before rejecting it immediatly.

Eastern Promises

David Cronenberg is one of Hollywood's leading figures at the moment. The History of Violence, his last film, is a truly astonishing piece of work that stars Viggo Mortensen and Maria Bello. It examines the ways that people are not what they seem and family life masks all sorts of compromises between violence and civility. Eastern Promises is another film about the dark underbelly of life- again Mortensen is a figure trapped between civility and darkness, violins and violence- and again Cronenberg wants us to examine the way that we live our lives and what lies just beyond our vision, round the corner, out of sight, behind our backs, in the dark crannies of consciousness. He wants us to remember that everywhere you go, a rat is only 6 metres away from you, despite the cleanliness of the surfaces you are eating off, there are rodents in the dark chewing at the things you throw away.

Cronenberg's canvass is wider in Eastern Promises. It is London- the city of immigrants- in many ways the defining city of our era. London is my city- and its wonderful to see a director use it as his canvass, without needing to provide Big Ben and the monumental architecture of neo-Gothic Victorians. Rather Cronenberg focuses on London as it really exists- or it really exists alongside that other existance in Westminster- the London of the East End, of Brixton and of suburbia. Its this London, filled with resturants, bars, drab barber shops and costcutter supermarkets, windy and rainy and dirty that he focuses on. Its a London filled with immigrants from every nation on earth, selling their own food and drink, socialising amongst themselves, talking in their own languages, and communicating with the wider society as well.

The sense of this city's social architecture and the way that so many groups co-exist on its fringes owes something to films like Martin Scorsese's Goodfellas. Here, as in Goodfellas, we see a family involved in the mob from an ethnic minority that essentially runs that community inside London. There is a patriarch, Semyon and his objectionable son Kiril. Into this world comes Naomi Watts's Anna. Anna turns up in their world because as a midwife in a hospital she delivered a child from a mother- this child was different though because the mother died without providing any data to recover who she was. And Anna therefore embarks on a search to find out who the baby is and where its relatives live- a search which takes her directly into the world of the Russian mafia and into the lives of these three characters, Semyon, his son Kiril and his driver (played by Mortensen).

The stage is set, and it would be unfair to tell the rest of the plot, suffice it to say that several murders are involved, that there is copious reference to the illegal world of smuggling and of prostitution and that the solution to it all is complex and allows us to reevaluate at least one of the major characters. Its a stunning film. The acting in particular is good. Mortensen has never been better- or rather if you have only seen him as Aragorn in the Lord of the Rings, you have missed out on his extraordinary work for Cronenberg. He has such presence on screen that its difficult to take your eyes off him and he inhabits his character entirely. Watts again is an actress of real class, she has done it before (Mullhulland Drive is one of the best performances by any actress for years) and though the part doesn't require extraordinary work, she does what she is required to do.

In my judgement this isn't up there with the History of Violence, there is something slightly more random and slightly more normal about this film than about that masterpiece where an innocent world just blew up in front of you. But its still well worth seeing- this film shows us a real cinematic intelligence striving with a very contemporary issue. The way that our societies have become fractured and separated and the way that even in a small space like London, stories of unbelievable brutality may be happening just next door or down the street without you knowing. In part this is a fable of urban life- a Jack the Ripper de nos jours- reminding us that these are mean streets and the key to this film is that you have to be mean in part to walk down them yourself.

The Peshawar Spring?

There has been a lot of euphoria about Pakistan's election results- see for example here. And there is lots to be euphoric about- the extremists have been routed as have the military and liberal democratic parties seem to have won the polls. But lets not get over exuberant. Pakistan still has a long way to go before it becomes a liberal democracy- and furthermore we have been here before with all the parties involved. Both Nawaz Sharif and Benazir Bhutto (now dead whose husband, Asif Ali Zardawi, nicknamed Mr. 10% for his corrupt activities when she was last Prime Minister) had had goes at ruling Pakistan and neither made a particularly good fist of it before. It was under Benazir that the Taliban seized power in Afghanistan, it was under Sharif that they cemented that power. Furthermore both parties have until now, hated each other, accusing each other, rightly, of corruption. We should not imagine such attitudes are going to be dropped.

Pakistan's problems go much further than a one-off election can resolve. Good government is a part of liberal democracy as well democratic institutions. Take one example, last year when the earthquakes hit northern Afghanistan, the effort, as File on 4 (the radio 4 documentary program) found to help many of the poor caught in the tragedy was organised by religious charities with political connections to terrorist organisations. Radical Islam was being spread by aid. That's a function of the fact that the Pakistani state is weak in many parts of its territory. Under 50% of the population are literate and under 40% of women are literate (according to the CIA). Debt is still over 50% of GDP. Its terrifying to think of the prospects for a democratic regime where only 49% can read election literature and in some regions that will be far lower. Furthermore the government to come faces real problems- how to diminish public debt, how to cope with a fall in the US economy (a fifth of Pakistan's exports go to the US, a twentieth go to the UK, so a fall in those two economies could prove disastrous), how to cope with the Taliban and the tribal areas? Furthermore what will any future administration's relations be with the army and with President Musharraf? Sharif was not a success as Prime Minister- and the leadership of Bhutto's old party is still confused.

I'm not saying that the elections in Pakistan weren't a good thing- they were. But lets reign back on the euphoria. Pakistan is going to need a hell of a lot of luck and help and aid to acheive a proper stable democracy any time soon. Furthermore its going to need patience from its allies- should we as Senator Obama reccomended invade to kill militants, then we could risk making any government in power even more unpopular. Pakistan is a vast place. There are areas which are incredibly peaceful. There are other areas where it is less so. Part of the problem for us as Westerners looking at Pakistan is to remember how vast and how complex it is- and also to try and keep sober. Not everything in as disastrous as it seems, not everything is as great as it seems. There are signs of hope in Pakistan, but to turn this into a real Peshawar Spring will require many more years of luck yet.

Action Aid

A mate of mine who runs an advertising company is working for someone called Action Aid- who campaigns to regulate the places that supermarkets buy food. Anyway the campaign's objectives are good- to regulate the way that supermarkets treat their suppliers and in particular the way that the workers for those suppliers are treated. Anyway here is me, Tiberius Gracchus, explaining it in a funky banana costume (so much better than a page of print!)...

Action Aid's website is here, and other videos are here.

Debasing the Currency: the Decline of Political Journals

Don Paskini is right when he says that in general British political weeklies are not in an amazing state. My own view for what it is worth is that only the Economist, for its breadth, and Prospect (occasionally), for its depth, are worth reading (I disagree on the first with the Don)- the New Statesman is the same standerd as what you get in the Comment section of the Guardian every day, and the Spectator is about the same with respect to the Telegraph. One cause, as Paskini rightly argues, is that comment is now truly much freer. The internet allows you to surf sites that will beat the regular journals out of the ground- just by reading Matt Sinclair, James Hamilton, Chris Dillow, Vino Sangripillai, Unity, you can easily read as many quality articles in a day as are put out by the major journals and on as wide a variety of subject. I chose the five bloggers above to reflect what I mean- just take a brief look across them, Matt gives you political thought, James takes one area of society and provides rigorous analysis, Chris is one of the best economists out there in the blogosphere, Vino looks at all sorts of stuff briefly but often interestingly and Unity is the man for sweeping long investigations- by reading those five and more like them, you get everything you would want from a magazine that costs you a fiver (and that's in the immature British blogosphere, in the American the mind boggles as to the ammount of quality stuff)! Competition has drained the unique nature of the magazine and makes the Olympian look less austere.

But the magazines are less austere in themselves. You see ultimately all of us have day jobs, whilst the writers from the journals don't and therefore could be distinguished by specialist knowledge and research and to some extent in the Prospect and Economist that is what you get. But that is not always true. Journals have been killed in many ways by their own successes. Its interesting for example to read Byron York's essay on the American Spectator and wonder about the applicability of its doctrine more generally. York argued that the American Spectator had been killed by getting a burst of readers from a set of scoops about President Clinton: the journal bet that the scoops would continue and that the increased numbers would continue and it changed its nature and eventually it was destroyed by that change, in spectacular ways. Now noone in the UK publishing industry is being so foolish, but sometimes I wonder if in a more minature version that kind of thing is happening to the New Statesman and the Spectator in particular.

Take for example the most recent episode at the New Statesman. The journal published a poorly researched article from a journalist under the thesis that global warming had stopped: shortly after it published a rebuttal from its environmental editor. But that wasn't before the original article had caused a storm on the net and furthermore had undermined the magazine's reputation. You can imagine though the thought which led the editors to want to publish the original flawed piece- even though it was awful, it would create a buzz and a buzz is what leads to journals getting readers and hence money. The business plan seems to be to shock someone into buying the magazine in question. That means that often the quality of the article in question is neglected in the cause of its shock value. Whether that is a successful longterm strategy, I'll leave others to consider, but essentially the Spectator and New Statesman have sought to create larger readerships or to stop the decline in their readerships by getting people to sit up and notice. And its not a recent phenomena: the reason I decided never to buy the Spectator again was when they carried an item at some point in the nineties about the political preferences of the Spice Girls. The intrusion of more competition means that for the journalist its easier to rely on what they have (and what others definitely don't have- with a few exceptions) the story and to neglect analysis which its harder to be good at. In a sense the reason to read the journal becomes the inside knowledge that the journalist has, that none of us has. Whereas analysis is found elsewhere. Journalists do that because its easy in part, and because its an easy distinction to spot. I have never met Tony Blair, they have.

You see when I and Don Paskini complain about the major journals, I suspect we are really talking past their editors. What I want from a journal is something I cannot get from a blog- an involved, well written, thoughtful analysis done at a perspective. Something longer than a blog article, but shorter than a think tank report. Something digestible in ten minutes. And I want it written by someone who knows the subject, who may not be known to me, but who has worked on something for years and is telling me what they know about it: something like the TLS for example but about politics. What I get from the journals is hooraying for either side (something that I'm quite capable of imagining on my own or consuming from the papers, news or blogs) or gossip. Often in the New Statesman and the Spectator its gossip which takes itself seriously- the Peter Oborne school of journalism finds a trend in a government and proclaims the age of the lie or some such nonsense- and that reflects the desire the distinguish the magazine from the newspaper. That's why increasingly its the comment sections that the journals look like. I don't know that that is a viable business plan- to be distinct from your blogging competitors because you are in Westminster and they aren't and to be distinct from your newspaper competitors because you offer a facile kind of analysis. What I do know is that its not what I want from a journal, I'd prefer them to have people working on each article for three weeks and telling me something new- but then I'm not the consumer they want and nor I think is Don Paskini.

Ultimately I want analysis- and with a few notable exceptions there seem to be few journalists out there willing to provide anything that hasn't been said three thousand times before. The Decline of the Journal is a result of the Decline of Analysis and that proceeds out of many different forces within our society- market forces, both in terms of how journalists want to work and what they think their consumers want them to produce.