World War II – Blood and Porridge

February 18, 2023February 20, 2023

Singapore unmasked

From unsplash.com / © Brian Asare

Earlier this month Singapore’s Ministry of Health announced that it no longer perceived Covid-19 as a threat and the city-state’s ‘disease-response level’ would be lowered from ‘green’ to ‘yellow’. For those people visiting Singapore, this means they no longer have to buy Covid-19 travel insurance, and visitors not fully vaccinated no longer have to show test results to prove their uninfected status. It also looks like Singapore’s Trace Together app – something I had to constantly use when I arrived here a year ago, and without which I would probably have spent my first few months living on the streets – will be discontinued. The most noticeable relaxation of all, however, is that, since February 13^th, face-masks are no longer compulsory on Singapore’s public transport system. *

Thus, riding Singapore’s buses – as I normally do twice a day, to get to and from work – has been a strange experience during the past week. I’ve had to mentally adjust to seeing the entirety of other passengers’ faces. Not that all of them aren’t wearing masks now, of course. A lot of passengers still are, mostly, I have to say, the Singaporeans ones. It’s largely passengers from the country’s sizeable Western community who are suddenly, brazenly flaunting their facial features for the first time in a couple of years.

Perhaps I’m just odd, but I don’t actually mind people wearing masks around me. The masks make me take more notice of their eyes, the windows of the soul, and create a general air of mystery. “What marvellously alluring eyes that person has,” I might say to myself. “But I wonder what lurks lower down, concealed by their mask? Perchance a mouthful of Shane McGowan-style dental work?” Such are the thoughts I entertain as I make the 45-minute bus journey to and from my workplace in central Singapore. “Could that masked person be a gorgeous Singaporean equivalent of Selina Kyle, aka Catwoman from Batman? Or do they really resemble Lon Chaney Sr, from The Phantom of the Opera (1925)?” And in fact, I’ve seen a number of articles in the past few years claiming that a Covid-19 mask adds to a person’s aura of attractiveness.

It’s no surprise that an East Asian country like Singapore has stuck with its mask mandate for so long (way after Western ones have abandoned them), and its population has happily complied with it. Wearing a surgical mask when you’re unwell with something that might be contagious has never been a big deal in this part of the world. It was one of the first things I noticed when I started working in Asia, in Japan back in 1989 – folk suffering from a cold or a dose of the flu would mask up to avoid passing something on to their fellow citizens. Indeed, the surgical mask is so engrained on Japanese culture that there’s even a well-known figure of urban folklore, Kuchisake Onna, whose gimmick is that she wears one. Since Kuchisake Onna is a homicidal spirit who takes the form of a seemingly beautiful woman, that mask has a macabre function. It conceals a grotesquely widened mouth, its ends cut open as far as the ears.

© JollyRoger

Inevitably, the implementation of measures against Covid-19 was, in the West at least, immediately incorporated into the culture wars that these days rage between the right and the left in just about every area of politics and society. The sort of people who rant and rave against woke universities, LGBT rights, asylum seekers, critical race theory, restrictions on gun ownership, taking action against climate change and, in the latest manifestation of right-wing insanity, the so-called ’15-minute city’, have spent the last three years rupturing their hernias about mask mandates, lockdown orders and Covid-19 vaccinations. In the USA, millions of gun-toting, Trump-loving, QAnon-believing macho-men pooped their pants in rage when it was suggested that they don a small piece of cloth over their mouths and nostrils to prevent them getting a virus and, equally importantly, prevent them possibly passing it on to their fellow human beings. The very thought of such a thing was a violation of their rights and ’freeee-dum’, apparently.

The UK was also beset with Covid-19-induced whinging, most notably at alleged news station – though these days it’s more a drop-in centre for conspiracy-theory nutjobs – GB News. Much of it emanated from GB News pundit and supposed archaeologist Neil Oliver, whose schtick is to stare ashen-faced into the camera for six, seven, eight minutes or more and deliver a doom-laden monologue of right-wing paranoia, dog-whistles, unsubstantiated claims and windy, overwrought rhetoric that his hard-of-thinking viewers probably think is Shakespearean. He’s spent much of the pandemic lamenting about anti-Covid-19 measures and how, say, they’ve deprived children of a vital, communal story-telling tradition that’d hitherto existed unbroken since tribal campfires on the far side of the Ice Age. Or some drivel like that.

© GB News / From indy100.com

Oliver’s nadir came in 2021 when he declared, “If your freedom means that I might catch Covid from you, then so be it. If my freedom means that you might catch Covid from me, then so be it.” And presumably, if the person who caught it from him was a highly-at-risk octogenarian or person with serious underlying health issues who didn’t want to catch Covid-19 from anybody… Well, tough shit. At least they’d die of the virus with their freedom intact, which was the important thing.

Then, swooping off into realms of total doolally-ness, Oliver likened the Covid-sceptic minority in Britain, himself included presumably, to the pilots who flew Spitfires and Hurricanes against the Luftwaffe during the Battle of Britain: “They risked everything for freedom.” Forgive me if I’m wrong, but didn’t the entire population of Britain during World War II surrender a whole bunch of their freedoms whilst trying to unite against, and overcome, an external threat? I can’t imagine Oliver lasting long in London in 1940 if he’d insisted on having his houselights blazing every night because doing so was in the name of ‘freedom’. Yeah, leave my rights alone, Mr Churchill!

Anyway, for the foreseeable future, I’ll continue to wear a face-mask while I use Singapore’s public transport system. I’ve had Covid but my partner hasn’t. Though she’s fully vaxed and boostered up, she probably hasn’t developed the level of immunity to it that I have, and I’d hate to bring the thing home one day and pass it onto her. Also, I’m not convinced we’re out of the woods yet with Covid. I’m sure it’s possible that future, nasty variants will appear and wreak more havoc. And thirdly, I’ll keep wearing my mask because it’s the sort of gesture that Neil Oliver would wholly despise.

And if it’s despised by him, it must be the right thing to do.

From unsplash.com / © Anshu A

* Face masks still have to be worn, though, in Singapore’s hospitals.

January 31, 2023February 1, 2023

Norm!

From wikipedia.org / © Gerald Lucas

I’m aware that some of the writers, artists, musicians and filmmakers whose work I admire were total arseholes in their personal lives. Possessing ‘artistic genius’, or just having an ‘artistic temperament’, was for them an excuse to commit all manner of heinous sins. Yet all I can do, I feel, is separate the art from the inadequate and disappointing personality that created it – and focus on and enjoy the former. As the writer Poppy Z. Brite (who sometimes goes by the name of Billy Martin) wrote recently about the author V.S. Naipaul: “Past a point, you can’t help what you love. Naipaul is my own problematic favourite, a sexist, racist, often unkind man, but I love his writing and he fascinates me as a person.”

To some extent, that sums up my feelings about that famous post-war American man of letters Norman Mailer, who would have been 100 years old today if he’d still been on the go. To say Mailer was problematic as a person is an understatement. From all the accounts the guy was a belligerent, egotistical, self-promoting, homophobic and misogynistic dickwad who lamented about ‘the womanisation of America’ and was preoccupied with the sort of toxic masculinity that, in the 21^st century and as embodied by the likes of Putin and Trump, seems capable of threatening the continued existence of humanity.

Most notoriously, in 1960, he stuck a knife into his second wife, Adele Morales, enraged when she told him he wasn’t as good a writer as Dostoyevsky. Morales survived and divorced him two years later. For that reason, my partner never refers to Norman Mailer as ‘Norman Mailer’, but as ‘Stabby’.

Among other things on Mailer’s charge-sheet, in 1981 he was instrumental in securing parole for murderer, bank robber and forger Jack Abbott. Abbott was also a writer, which for Mailer apparently righted all his other wrongs. Six weeks after his parole, Abbott stabbed to death a waiter following an argument about whether or not he could use a café’s toilet.

And yet… I’ve always enjoyed Mailer’s books when I’ve come across them, to greater or lesser degrees. This is despite – or if I’m in the right mood, because of – the rampant egotism of their author often finding its way onto their pages.

© Rhinehart & Company

Mailer’s first novel The Naked and the Dead (1948) is to my mind one of the great novels written about World War II. Mailer wrote about it from experience, as he’d been posted to the Philippines with the 112^th Cavalry. It made an impact on me with its pessimism, which isn’t just about human nature when it’s put under hideous pressure in a theatre of war. The pessimism also concerns the current, and likely future, condition of the USA, which is symbolised by the platoon at the centre of the plot. They represent an assortment of different ethnic and regional groups that make up American society – Jewish, Italian, Irish, Mexican, Southern – and they generally don’t like or trust each other. In charge of them are a psychotic sergeant, an educated and liberal-minded lieutenant and, at the top of the chain of command, a fascistic general who believes the war against Japan is soon going to morph into a war against the Soviet Union. The enlightened lieutenant offers the novel its one sliver of hope, but that hope is abruptly snuffed out in a plot-twist some way before the end.

However, even if you find the political allegory in The Naked and the Dead clunky, there’s no denying that it conveys the numbing physical exhaustion of warfare – especially a war fought in a jungle on a tropical Pacific island. If George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia (1938) gets across the idea that more than anything else war will leave you bored witless, The Naked and the Dead persuades you that it’ll leave you utterly knackered too.

One unfortunate feature of the novel, and something that modern-day readers will no doubt find hilarious, is that Mailer had to pepper his prose with the word ‘fug’, an invented substitute for the F-word. Warned by his publishers that the dialogue of his soldier-characters couldn’t be too realistic, even though in a real combat zone hard-pressed soldiers would be spewing the F-word endlessly, Mailer ended up having them say things like ‘Fug you!’ and ‘Fugging hell!’ It must have stuck in Mailer’s craw – and Mailer had a big craw for things to get stuck in – when, later, he was introduced to the celebrated writer and wit Dorothy Parker and she exclaimed, “So you’re the young man who can’t spell f*ck!”

A decade after its publication, The Naked and the Dead was turned into a movie. It’s a prime example of Hollywood taking something with an uncompromising message and watering it down to make it more palatable to mainstream cinema audiences – and losing what made the original effective in the process. Not only does the lieutenant (Cliff Robertson) survive at the end but, if I remember correctly, he gets to make an inspirational speech about the value of everyone pulling together. However, Mailer was already aware of the rottenness of Hollywood and in 1955 had written a novel on the topic, The Deer Park. This was the era when the House of Representatives’ Committee on Un-American Activities was at its most powerful and the notorious Hollywood Blacklist was ending filmmakers’ careers, events that are referred to in his book.

© G.P. Putnam’s Sons

I don’t remember much about the plot or characters of The Deer Park, but I recall the vividness of its setting, Desert D’Or, a desert town that’s become a fashionable resort and refuge for Hollywood bigwigs. Its existence as a pocket of lavish make-believe amid the desert’s harshness is matched by the artificiality of its inhabitants, who are an immoral, scheming, backstabbing, bullying lot. Wikipedia informs me that the novel’s title “refers to the Parc-aux-Serfs (‘Deer Park’), a resort Louis XV of France kept stocked with young women for his personal pleasure”, which seems appropriate.

Unsurprisingly, when the 1960s began to swing with sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll, and the Vietnam War, Mailer took to the decade like a duck to water. At a young and impressionable age – 17 years old – I read Mailer’s Armies of the Night, in which he recounts how he marched on the Pentagon in October 1967 and told the US government to stop the war in Vietnam. To be honest, Mailer did have a bit of help here. About 100,000 people marched with him, including Allen Ginsburg, Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, who tried to use concentrated, psychic hippie-power to levitate the Pentagon building and ‘exorcise the evil within’.

© Penguin Books

A ’fictionalised work of non-fiction’, Armies of the Night was the first such book I’d encountered and it took me a while to get used to its central conceit, wherein Mailer describes what happened at the march not as some omnipotent narrator, or in the first person, but in the third person, so that he becomes a character in the action itself. Yes, it’s a memorable device but, inevitably with Mailer, it’s self-aggrandising too. At one point, possibly inspired by Armies of the Night, I wrote entries in my journal for a few months in the third person. Years later, when I re-read what I’d written, my main thought was: “What a big-headed wanker I must have been back then.”

Mailer was in the first person for the next book by him I’ve read, also a work of non-fiction, 1975’s The Fight. This is about the ‘Rumble in the Jungle’, the famous boxing match between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman (who, to a younger generation, is primarily known as the inventor of the George Foreman Lean Mean Fat-Reducing Grilling Machine). With Ali at his peak, and Foreman at his meanest and most lethal, this was, for boxing fans, an epic event. It was also a grotesque one, because one of the 20^th century’s most opulently corrupt dictators, Zaire’s Mobutu Sese Seko, hosted the fight in his country. Sparing no expense, Mobutu also flew in some of the world’s greatest musicians, like James Brown and B.B. King, for a musical gala to accompany it. And it was no surprise that the world’s biggest literary ego, Mailer, rocked in too to write a book about it.

While I prefer the 1996 documentary When We were Kings (to which Mailer contributes) as the definite account of the Rumble in the Jungle, I think The Fight is pretty good. Mind you, with so much going on in Zaire at the time, Mailer could hardly fail to write an entertaining book about it all. And it does provide a fascinating insight into the mind of the man who called himself the greatest… The book mentions Muhammad Ali a few times as well.

Random House USA Inc

Having read one Mailer book from the 1940s, the 1950s, the 1960s and the 1970s, it’s fitting that the last of his works I’ve encountered is from the 1980s, 1984’s Tough Guys Don’t Dance. Mailer didn’t take the writing of this novel terribly seriously. It was something he dashed off in two months, to fulfil a contract, and is very obviously a pastiche / piss-take of the crime-thriller noir genre, vaguely in the tradition of Mickey Spillane and Raymond Chandler. Its plot twists all over the place before, unconvincingly, the hero’s dad – a no-nonsense hard man, but with a heart of gold, no doubt representing Mailer’s own image of himself – pops up out of nowhere to sort everything out.

I thought it was basically rubbish, then, but it was enjoyable rubbish. Maybe I liked it because, as with Tough Guys Don’t Dance’s hero Tim Madden, I was going through a hard-drinking phase at the time, waking up occasionally with a raging hangover but no firm idea of what I’d ended up doing the previous night. Thus, I could relate to what Madden goes through in the book. Though unlike Madden, I never woke up to find (1) an inexplicable tattoo on my body that hadn’t been there before, and (2) an inexplicable severed head in my possession that hadn’t been there before, either – the events that set the story in motion.

One thing that’s genuinely good about Tough Guys Don’t Dance is its setting, which is Provincetown in Cape Cod, Massachusetts – in real life Mailer had a house there, in Commercial Street. He nicely captures the eeriness of the place when the summer weather has receded and the tourist season has ended, when ‘one chill morose November sky went into another’ and, seemingly, the town’s ‘true number of inhabitants must be thirty men and women, all hiding’.

© Penguin Random House

Three years later, Mailer got the chance to turn Tough Guys Don’t Dance into a movie, which he directed, and co-scripted with the distinguished screenwriter Robert Towne, and with Francis Ford Coppola’s Zoetrope Studios as one of the production companies. Sounds good, yes? Well, no. The producers were Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus of the notorious Cannon Group, whose previous meisterwerks included Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo (1984), Bolero (1984), Invasion USA (1985), Cobra (1986) and Death Wish 4: The Crackdown (1987). And despite the talent involved, Tough Guys Don’t Dance definitely bears the Cannon imprint most strongly in terms of quality. It’s a delirious slice of so-bad-it’s-good campness.

Thus, you get a party sequence, which appears to be Mailer’s idea of what a decadent 1980s shindig would be like – yuppies with feather-cut hairdos cavorting like arthritic elephants to some god-awful 1980s soft-rock music while nose-hoovering cocaine off the tabletops and brazenly opening the front door stark-naked because they think it’s their ‘boyfriend’. (No, it’s actually the local police chief, played by Wings Hauser, come to ask them to turn the noise down.) Still, I’m told that Mailer filmed much of the movie at his own house in Provincetown, so maybe he did hold parties like this. Then there’s the scene where Madden (Ryan O’Neal) finds out about his wife’s infidelity and reacts with a jaw-dropping display of bad acting – “Oh man! Oh God! Oh man! Oh God!” – which, over the years, has become so infamous it’s now an Internet meme.

To be fair to O’Neal, almost everyone in the film is having a bad-acting day. This ranges from the way-over-the-top ‘southern’ accents sported by Debra Sandlund and John Bedford Lloyd – “Madden, take it in the mouth or you’ll die. Will you take my pride and joy into your mouth?” – to the stilted awkwardness of just about everyone else (Hauser, Isabella Rossellini, Frances Fisher) as they try to get their tongues, and their minds, around Mailer’s dialogue, which is largely fixated on performing the sex-deed with adequate levels of manliness. At one point Rossellini tells O’Neal that she and her husband, Hauser, “make out five times a night. That’s why I call him Mr Five.” Though this is contradicted when Rossellini and Hauser have an argument. “I made you come 16 times – in a night.” “And none of them was any good!”

On the plus side, Lawrence Tierney gives a solid performance as Madden’s dad. I’ve read somewhere that after seeing him in this, a young Quentin Tarantino decided to hire him for Reservoir Dogs (1993). Also, Mailer adds some supernatural elements that I don’t recall being in the book, and ramps up the general weirdness, so that the film becomes an oddly prescient mixture: a superficially sleepy little town, dark secrets, murder, drugs, violence, corruption, the uncanny, the strange… There’s even a creepy forest where O’Neal has hidden his marijuana stash. Yes, three years before the real event, did Mailer accidentally create the prototype for David Lynch’s Twin Peaks (1990-91, 2017)?

© Zoetrope Studios / Golan-Globus

Like Captain Ahab and his whale, Mailer spent his literary life pursuing that elusive beast, the writing of the Great American Novel. Though the critical consensus is that he never managed it, he did produce some very big books along the way, like Ancient Evenings (1983) and Harlot’s Ghost (1992), neither of which I’ve read – and with them weighing in at 709 and 1168 pages respectively, I doubt if I ever will read them. Nonetheless, I suspect I’ll find myself perusing Mailer’s other, more digestible books in future, because basically I enjoy his stuff. My partner may not approve, but there are still works by old ‘Stabby’ that I’d like to have a stab at.

And the only possible reaction to that distasteful pun is: “Oh man! Oh God! Oh man! Oh God!”

January 29, 2023January 31, 2023

The literary Bond revisited: Moonraker

© Penguin Books

As a ten or eleven-year-old kid I read a lot of Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels. Indeed, I read most of them before I ever saw any of the films. However, it was only a few years ago, after Penguin Books brought out new editions of the novels, using the same covers that’d graced them in the 1950s and early 1960s and having contemporary writers like Val McDermid write introductions to them, that I got round to reading the novels I hadn’t come across in my boyhood – Moonraker (1955), The Spy Who Loved Me (1962), On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1963) and Octopussy and the Living Daylights (1966). I also reread a few of the novels I’d read at a young age which, for one reason or other, had gone over my head or not left much of an impression – I still vividly remembered Live and Let Die (1954) or You Only Live Twice (1964) from those far-off days, but almost nothing of Diamonds are Forever (1956) or The Man with the Golden Gun (1965).

And in the case of From Russia With Love (1957)… Well, as a kid, I started reading it, but unfortunately at the time I was staying at my grandmother’s house in rural Northern Ireland. My grandmother noticed I had my nose stuck in a book, insisted on reading the blurb on its back cover and confiscated it from me, saying she didn’t think it was suitable reading matter for someone my age. To rub salt into the wound, she then started reading it herself. “I’m really enjoying it,” she told me a few days later.

Anyway, here is the first in a series of posts in which I describe my reactions to the Fleming / Bond novels I’ve read or re-read in the 21^st century. Starting with Moonraker.

It’s difficult to approach Moonraker the novel without having your brain fogged by memories of Moonraker the 1979 movie, which for good or bad – well, bad, actually – was a milestone in the James Bond cinematic franchise. The Bond movies had become increasingly absurd over the years and by 1979 both the filmmakers and cinema audiences were firmly aware of their silliness. But with Moonraker, those filmmakers – Cubby Broccoli and his team – seemed to abandon all restraint. It was as if they decided, “The audiences know that we know the movies are silly… And we know that they know… So, let’s have a ball!” The result was that Moonraker, which has James Bond (Roger Moore) blasting off in a space shuttle and taking on an orbiting space station full of villains, also blasted off into whole new realms of galaxy-sized daftness.

Apart from the far-fetched science-fictional plot (which might have had something to do with the success of a certain movie called Star Wars two years earlier), the stupidity includes the hulking, steel-toothed villain Jaws (Richard Keil), who’s not only invulnerable to mishaps such as falling out a plane and hitting the ground without a parachute or having a cable-car crash down on top of him, but who’s also given a cringe-inducing, comedic love interest. But even the business with Jaws pales into insignificance compared to the sequence where Bond escapes from some baddies in Venice using a gondola that transforms into a speedboat and then into a hovercraft, whose appearance in St Mark’s Square causes a pigeon – yes, a pigeon – to do a double-take. I remember the movie critic John Brosnan writing that at that moment he concluded “the Bond series had gone about as far down the tube it could possibly go without reaching China.”

© Eon Films

But… Trying to erase all thoughts of the movie, I started reading the book from 24 years earlier. Unlike the film version, whose plot ricochets between the USA, Italy, South America and outer space, the novel’s action takes place entirely in England, where immensely rich industrialist, stockbroker and rocket-designer Sir Hugo Drax has built a base, with a launch site, on the south coast. From this he intends to test-fly a new missile called the Moonraker, potentially a valuable new means of defence against the Soviet Union. Bond first crosses paths with Drax at Blades, an exclusive and opulent London gentleman’s club, where he discovers he’s been cheating at cards. This suggests he’s less saintly than the adoring British media has made him out to be. Later, Bond is sent to investigate the death of a security officer at Drax’s base, where he finds further, and much more serious, evidence that Drax is a bad ’un. In fact, Drax is an embittered former Nazi, now employed by the USSR, who plans to fit a nuclear warhead into the Moonraker and send it ploughing into downtown London during its test flight.

During his mission, Bond joins forces with a policewoman called Gala Brand, who’s working undercover at the base. After Drax’s goons make a couple of unsuccessful attempts to eliminate them, they manage to thwart the scheme by sending the Moonraker off course. Rather than striking London, it niftily lands on top of a submarine transporting Drax and his minions back to the Soviet Union. The novel ends on a rather un-Bondian note, however. Gala Brand reveals to 007 that she already has a fiancé and isn’t about to swoon into his arms. So, instead, Moonraker’s final line is: “He touched her for the last time and they turned away from each other and walked off into their different lives.”

In Moonraker the film, Gala Brand is replaced by an American heroine called Holly Goodhead, played by Lois Chiles. (Goodhead… Get it? Good… head…?) In fact, according to jamesbond.fandom.com, poor Gala is “the only lead female character of the Fleming canon not to have appeared as a character in a James Bond film”, which is puzzling given the quip-friendly nature of her name. I could just imagine Roger Moore hoisting a crinkly eyebrow at her and intoning, “Well, this is going to be a Gala affair…” or “I know where I’d like to Brand you…”

© Eon Films

Reading Moonraker, what struck my 21^st century self was the shadow that World War II casts over the plot. It has a heavy bearing on the characters – not just on the villainous ex-Nazi Drax, who draws on German V2 technology for his missile project and intends to destroy London as revenge for his country’s defeat in 1945, but on minor ones like the lift operator in the secret-service headquarters who lost an arm during the conflict. And of course, there are references to how Bond served in the war himself and has scars on his back to prove it. I didn’t notice this so much when I read other Bond novels in the 1970s probably because, then, the war didn’t seem so far back in time. I knew middle-aged people who had vivid memories of it. And it was still being enacted on television in countless documentaries, comedies and dramas like The World At War (1973-74), Dad’s Army (1968-77), It Ain’t Half Hot Mum (1974-81), Secret Army (1977-79) and Colditz (1972-74), and the stories in practically every boys’ comic on sale in the newsagents at the time – Victor, Battle, Warlord – dealt with nothing else. Indeed, there were probably some kids my age who believed we were still fighting the Germans.

And no doubt the war, or more specifically the war’s aftermath, played a part in the Bond novels’ huge success in the 1950s. Those six years of conflict had broken Britain’s economy and Fleming’s readers inhabited a drab, grey world of rationing and austerity. I recall a remark J.G. Ballard made in his memoir Miracles of Life (2008), about leaving Shanghai and arriving in Britain for the first time in 1946. Taking his first steps on the soil of his home country, Ballard wondered why the British claimed to have won the war. From the worn-out faces and rundown landscapes around him, it very much looked like they’d lost it. Another pertinent quote is one made by Keith Richards, who said that growing up in early 1950s Britain was like living in black and white. Only when rock ‘n’ roll arrived from America did life suddenly switch to being in colour.

But reading Moonraker, I also realised how far Bond is removed from the dreary reality of post-war Britain. Fleming portrays him as a shameless consumer, one with a seemingly inexhaustible shopping budget. He wears the most expensive labels, smokes the costliest cigars, drinks the finest wines and spirits, helps himself to the fanciest foods. Accordingly, Bond’s first encounter with Drax in Moonraker is in the club Blades, whose service, food-and-drink and furnishings were things that most of Fleming’s 1950s readers could only dream about. Though Fleming was accused of marketing watered-down pornography in his books, it surely wasn’t pornography of a sexual or violent nature that titillated his readers so much at the time. It was consumer porn, intended to give a perverse, if futile, thrill to underfed and down-at-heels readers who were still carrying ration books.

Mind you, the fact that Moonraker’s plot is confined to 1950s England didn’t go down well with those readers who’d started reading the Bond books – Moonraker was the third in the series – for the pleasure of being transported in their imaginations to exotic locales, which in real life they lacked the financial means to visit themselves. My trusty copy of Henry Chancellor’s guide to the novels, James Bond: The Man and his World (2005) tells me that “Fleming received a number of letters from disappointed readers complaining that Kent, even on the most glorious English summer’s day, did not compare with the tropical heat of the Caribbean. ‘We want taking out of ourselves,’ declared one old couple, who read Bond novels to each other aloud, ‘not sitting on the beach in Dover.’” Fleming took note of the complaints. None of his later novels restricted Bond to English soil.

© Hammer Films

I have to say that nowadays Fleming’s descriptions of Drax’s base and its technology sound decidedly low-fi. The references to ‘gyros’, ‘radio homing beacons’, ‘ventilation tunnels’ and, indeed, ‘rockets’ had me thinking of some old black-and-white British sci-fi movie. They particularly made me think of the Hammer film Quatermass 2 (1957), which features both rockets and a big secret base where the villains – aliens – hang out. For their depiction of the base, the filmmakers used the sprawling and suitably eerie oil refinery at Thurrock in Essex for location shooting, and I imagined Bond and Gala battling Drax and his minions against a similar backdrop.

On the other hand, one element of Moonraker’s plot that feels more relevant than ever is its notion that a super-rich tycoon could become so enthused about, and involved in, developing futuristic rocket technology. I can think of one billionaire… no, two billionaires… no, three billionaires in 2023 whose fascination with space-going vehicles is like that of little boys with toy train-sets.

Finally, even as a ten or eleven-year-old, one thing I did pick up from Fleming’s novels was a sense of Bond’s melancholia – a melancholia that wasn’t hinted at in the movies until the tenures of Timothy Dalton and, later, Daniel Craig in the lead role. You get this in Moonraker at the very beginning, with Bond calculating how many more missions he has to go on before he can retire from the secret service and what the odds are for surviving that number of missions. Retirement for Bond, I was shocked to discover, comes at the age of 45. Yikes, I thought. If I’d been an agent in Fleming’s version of MI6, I’d be way beyond pensionable age now.

So, readers of post-war Britain, forget the thrills and spills, and forget the fine living and exotic locations, and forget the fancy cars and beautiful women. Even Commander Bond has reasons to gripe about his lot.

June 25, 2020

We need to talk about Winston

With his bronze statue in London’s Parliament Square getting daubed in some uncomplimentary (but to be honest, accurate) graffiti during the anti-racism demonstrations on June 8^th, and then being unceremoniously closed up inside a giant box to protect it from further protests, and then being the subject of a scurrilous and rabble-rousing campaign by the Daily Mail whereby people were urged to sign a petition to stop it being removed – as if there was actually one iota of political willpower in Britain to get rid of it – Winston Churchill and the question of whether he was a good guy or a bad guy are back in the news. In fact, Churchill and all things relating to the British experience of World War II seem more prominent than ever with the death on June 18^th of wartime ‘Forces’ Sweetheart’ Dame Vera Lynn. With impeccable timing, Dame Vera died 80 years to the day that Churchill delivered his ‘finest hour’ speech.

Therefore, it seems timely to dust down and repost this blog entry about Churchill, which first appeared here in January 2019 while a high-profile bust-up about Churchill’s moral standing was taking place between Green Party Member of the Scottish Parliament Ross Greer and Good Morning Britain presenter / gobshite Piers Morgan.

I know it’s wishing for way too much, but it’s a pity there hasn’t been less heated and more nuanced debate about Churchill, about the opinions he held and decisions he made, and about the influence he’s had since his death. This is especially so as Churchill has seemingly become a totemic figure for the half of the British electorate who in June 2016 voted to leave the European Union. Indeed, in this era of all-pervasive social media, when everybody seems to have a twitter and Facebook account, if not a website and a blog, I suspect there’s been more written about the man since the Brexit vote that was ever written about him before it.

So what to make of Churchill? A hero? A villain? Or something in between? Well, here are the facts as I see them for the prosecution and the defence. Those for the prosecution are numerous and varied. Those for the defence are brief, but weighty.

In his correspondence as a young man attached to the Malakand Field Force, which fought Mohmand rebels in the Swat Valley in Northwest India in 1897, Churchill comes across as racist and bellicose. He said of the Pashtun tribespeople: “in proportion that these valleys are purged from the pernicious vermin that infest them, so will the happiness of humanity be increased, and the progress of mankind accelerated.” Admittedly, the tribespeople were brutal towards anyone who antagonised them, but the British more than matched them for cruelty. In a letter in September 1897, Churchill wrote approvingly that: “After today we begin to burn villages. Every one. And all who resist will be killed without quarter.” Later, in his autobiography, he noted how “every tribesman who was caught was speared or cut down at once.”

A decade later, when he was British Home Secretary, one of Churchill’s more alarming enthusiasms was for eugenics. He wrote about his fear that the “unnatural and increasingly rapid growth of the Feeble-Minded and Insane classes… constitutes a national and race danger which it is impossible to exaggerate” and advocated sterilization as a solution. Writing in a departmental paper in 1910, he suggested the solution of labour camps alongside that of sterilization: “I propose that 100,000 degenerate Britons should be forcibly sterilised and others put in labour camps to halt the decline of the British race.”

Predictably, Churchill’s views on sexual equality were no more enlightened. Of the suffrage movement, he once commented: “Nothing would induce me to vote for giving women the franchise. I am not going to be henpecked into a question of such importance.”

From britishbattles.com / painting by Charles Dixon

Churchill saw World War I, when he was in charge of the British Admiralty, as an opportunity for glory: “I have it in me to be a successful soldier,” he boasted. “I can visualise great movements and combinations.” Unfortunately, the great movement he visualised – sending the fleet up the Dardanelles and grabbing Constantinople and the waterways that linked the Black Sea and the eastern Mediterranean, thus enfeebling the Ottoman Empire, improving access between the Allies and Russia and drawing Greece, Romania and Bulgaria into the war on the Allies’ side – resulted in the bloody, nine-month stalemate of Gallipoli in 1915. This ended with a death toll of 65,000 Turks, 26,000 Britons, 8,000 French, 7,800 Australians, 2,445 New Zealanders and 1,682 Indians. Churchill stayed unrepentant about what he’d tried and failed to achieve at Gallipoli: “The Dardanelles might have saved millions of lives. Don’t imagine I am running away from the Dardanelles. I glory in it.” However, the site historyextra.com gives his scheme a damning assessment: “…far from being a brilliant, potentially war-winning strategy, it was a piece of folly that was always likely to fail.”

One thing I’ll give Churchill credit for. After the Gallipoli fiasco, he joined the British Army, became a battalion commander and served with the Grenadier Guards and Royal Scots Fusiliers. According to his Wikipedia entry, this included 36 ventures into No Man’s Land. If only every politician who made a military blunder was forced to pay for it by becoming a soldier in a warzone. There’d surely be fewer military blunders by politicians. In fact, there’d be a hell of a lot less military adventurism by them in the first place.

1917 saw the Russian Revolution and no sooner had the 1918 Armistice been signed than the British establishment had something new, Bolshevism, to worry about. Churchill was dismayingly inclined to blame this on a Jewish conspiracy: “With the notable exception of Lenin, the majority of the leading figures are Jews. Moreover, the principal inspiration and driving power comes from the Jewish leaders… Although in all these countries there are many non-Jews ever whit as bad as the worst of the Jewish revolutionaries, the part played by the latter in proportion to their numbers in the population is astonishing.”

In February 1919, the fear that Britain was on the cusp of a workers’ revolution helped Churchill, as Secretary of State for Air and War, and his cabinet colleagues decide to send 10,000 troops into Glasgow to deal with striking workers. Churchill already had form in this area. As Home Secretary in 1910 he’d sent in troops to deal with striking miners in Tonypandy in South Wales. Unsurprisingly, today, Churchill is not quite as widely revered among the Scots and Welsh as he is among his fellow Englishmen. His disdain for the labour movement hadn’t abated by the time of the General Strike in 1926. While the Prime Minister Lord Birkenhead tried to reach agreement with the Trade Unions, he was strongly opposed by Churchill, who was desperate for an all-out fight with them.

Elsewhere on these islands, Churchill is not remembered with much affection in Ireland. In 1920, he oversaw the deployment in Ireland of the Black and Tans, the police force who soon became notorious for their unrestrained brutality and whose memory poisoned Anglo-Irish relations for decades afterwards. Churchill ignored warnings that the damage that the Black and Tans were doing. Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson commented: “I warned him again that those Black and Tans who are committing very indiscriminate reprisals will play the devil in Ireland, but he won’t listen or agree.” As for the Tans’ habit of killing suspected troublemakers without bothering to arrest them and put them on trial, Wilson said, “Winston saw very little harm in this but it horrifies me.”

From historyireland.com

Unsurprisingly, Churchill is better thought of among the pro-British Protestant community of Northern Ireland. But this wasn’t always so. It’s said that in 1912, when he visited Belfast, thousands of Protestant workers from the Harland and Wolff shipyard lined the streets wanting to pelt his car with rivets, on account of his support for Irish Home Rule. And though Ulster Protestants often express pride about Northern Ireland taking part in the UK’s war effort from 1939 to 1945 while southern Ireland opted to remain neutral, it must rankle that Churchill offered Eamon De Valera a united Ireland if he agreed to bring his country into the war on Britain’s side.

Churchill also found time to leave his mark on Iraq: not in a good way. As convener of a conference in Cairo in 1912 to draw up the boundaries of Britain’s Middle Eastern mandate, he unwisely lumped together three warring factions, Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds, within the borders of the new country. And when Shiites and Sunnis rebelled against British colonial rule there in 1920, Churchill ordered military oppression and retribution on par with what he’d seen in the Swat Valley 23 years earlier – villages burned, civilians as well as combatants killed – and employed some deadly new technology too. He approved the use of chemical weapons against Iraqis, having opined earlier: “I do not understand this squeamishness about the use of gas. I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes… It will cause great inconvenience and spread a lively terror.”

Also causing great inconvenience and lively terror was his use of ‘aerial policing’, i.e. getting the RAF to bomb Iraqi villages. Unsurprisingly, these bombings, still within living memory, didn’t put the Iraqi population at ease when in the early 2000s British troops arrived again in their country thanks to the actions of Tony Blair and George Bush Jr.

Churchill also sent planes and chemical weapons to attack Bolsheviks in northern Russia in 1919. Again, he was unrepentant about waging chemical warfare: “Why is it not fair for a British artilleryman to fire a shell that makes the said native sneeze? It is really too silly.”

The biggest stain on Churchill’s record is surely his role in the Bengal Famine of 1943 that claimed three million or more lives. Let me quote the Indian writer and politician Dr Shashi Tharoor: “Not only did the British pursue its own policy of not helping the victims of this famine which was created by their policies. Churchill persisted in exporting grain to Europe, not to feed actual ‘Sturdy Tommies’, to use his phrase, but to add to the buffer stocks that were being piled up in the event of a future invasion of Greece and Yugoslavia… Ships laden with wheat were coming in from Australia, docking in Calcutta and were instructed by Churchill not to disembark their cargo but sail on to Europe. And when conscience-stricken British officials wrote to the Prime Minister in London pointing out that his policies were causing needless loss of life all he could do was write peevishly in the margin of the report, ‘Why hasn’t Gandhi died yet?’”

Another charge against Churchill during World War Two is that in 1944 he basically threw the Greek resistance movement, i.e. the Greek People’s Liberation Army (ELAS) and the National Liberation Front (EAM), under the bus. Previously, they’d fought alongside the British, against the Nazis. However, afraid of the Communist Party’s influence within the resistance, and wanting to restore the monarchy and general pre-war status quo in Greece, he opted to abandon the partisans and place British support behind elements who’d collaborated with the Nazis. These included officers in the Security Battalions and SS-affiliated Special Security Branch and they were soon incorporated into the post-occupation army, security forces and judiciary. The result was the gunning down of unarmed protestors in Athens on December 3^rd, 1944, which marked the beginning of the five-week conflict in the city known as the Dekemvriana; which in turn helped lead to the three-year Greek Civil War, estimated to have cost some 158,000 lives.

From greekreporter.com

Churchill was voted out of office in 1945 but returned for a second term as Prime Minister from 1951 to 1955. It was on this watch that he responded to the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya in a characteristically sledgehammer manner. By the uprising’s end, it was calculated that colonial forces had killed 10,000 Africans, roughly four times the number killed by the Mau Mau. Indeed, if you were a white settler in Kenya, you stood a better chance of dying in a road accident than at the hands of the rebels. The techniques employed by British troops for dealing with the Mau Mau included mass arrests, mass trials, mass hangings, torture, whippings, mutilations, the burning of villages, ‘free fire zones’ where any African person could be a target, forced labour and huge detention camps where disease and maltreatment were rife and conditions were scarcely any better than they’d been in German and Japanese camps a decade earlier.

It’s no surprise that when Barack Obama became US president in 2008, a miniature act of statue removal was carried out in the Oval Office. Obama, whose Kenyan grandfather Hussein Onyango Obama had been among those arrested and tortured during the Mau Mau uprising, saw it that Churchill’s bust disappeared from his workplace.

That’s a damning charge-sheet. What’s to be said in Churchill’s defence? Well, it’s a trite observation, but though the man’s opinions and decisions were frequently rotten, they weren’t as rotten as those offered by the opposing side between 1939 and 1945. No doubt Churchill’s idea of utopia was a British Empire where the sun never set. There’d be a catastrophic famine here, and a bloodily put-down insurgency there, but he’d regard that as the regrettable but unavoidable price of the White Man having to shoulder his civilising burden… And the White Man continuing on the side to fill his pockets with the trade and plunder of his colonies. Among the Empire’s ‘subjects’, life for many would be humiliating and wretched, and for some pretty hellish. But compare that with Adolf Hitler’s idea of utopia, which frankly doesn’t bear thinking about.

And he was in possession of good qualities – courage, determination, intellect, a rhetorical flair – that enabled him to galvanise the British population to make a stand against Nazism and prevent all of Western Europe from falling under Hitler’s influence. Of course, saying he won the war for Britain is different from saying he won the war full stop, which is what many of his modern-day fans in Britain seem to believe he did.

As the saying goes, cometh the hour, cometh the man. That the man happened to be an asshole in most other ways doesn’t denigrate his achievements during the hour itself. I’d like to think that if I’d lived in Britain during World War II, and I’d known about Churchill what I know about him now, I wouldn’t have let the old git into my house. But I’d have been secretly and grudgingly relieved that he was running the country at the time.

A while ago, the Times columnist Alex Massey penned an article on the subject. Though I find Massey a bit right-wing and fogeyish, I agree with his article’s title: CHURCHILL WAS A GREAT BRITON, NOT A GREAT MAN. I don’t, however, agree with some of Massey’s sentiments. He claims that it’s wrong to apply the value judgements of the 21^st century to a historical figure whose views were typical of and acceptable among the British ruling class of his time. But in fact, there were plenty of people alive when Churchill was alive who detested him too. However, they tended to be Indians, Kenyans, Greeks, Irish, Iraqis, etc. People whose opinions rarely get much coverage in British history books.

Come to think of it, Britons would find it enlightening if they got their history from sources in a wider and more international pool than they do now. In these Brexiting times, unfortunately, with World War II the only bit of history that many British people seem to care about, and with British politicians talking misty-eyed about creating a trading ‘Empire 2.0’ after withdrawal from the EU, I don’t think British awareness of history is going to get any wider.

It’s going to get even narrower, which won’t be good for Britain’s future place in the world.