Our Friends in the North West Provinces

'Individual Moslems may show splendid qualities, but the influence of the religion

paralyzes the social development of those who follow it. No stronger retrograde
force exists in the world. Far from being moribund, Mohammedanism is a militant
and proselytizing faith. It has already spread throughout Central Africa, raising
fearless warriors at every step, and were it not that Christianity is sheltered in the
strong arms of science, the science against which it (Islam) has vainly struggled,
the civilization of modern Europe might fall, as fell the civilization of ancient Rome.”'

Winston Churchill, The River War: An Historical Account of the Reconquest of the Sudan (1899).

'Of course it could be argued that Afganistan had always posed difficult problems and that the setback to British influence there was an isolated, exceptional incident.'

David Fromkin, A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East (1989).

'The 4oth Army had gone, but the Afgan civil war continued with horrifying force. The morale of the mujahedin was high. Arms continued to reach them from Pakistan in contravention of the Geneva Agreements. These the Pakistanis had never had any intention of observing: President Zia ul-Haq told President Reagan that they had been denying their activities in Afghanistan for eight years, and that Muslims had the right to lie in a good cause.'

Roderic Braithwaite, Afgantsy: The Russians in Afghanistan 1979-1989 (2012).

'Britain also appears to have begun to secretly support the Afghan rebels before the Soviet invasion. On 17 December 1979, a 'special coordination' meeting was held in the White House, chaired by Carter's vice president, Walter Mondale, involving all key US government departments. As Soviet troops were amassing near the Afghanistan border, threatening to invade to shore up the communist regime, the meeting agreed to 'explore with the Pakistanis and British the possibility of improving the financing, arming and communications of the rebel forces to make it as expensive as possible for the Soviets to continue their efforts.' Thus the British now began to play their primary role vis-a-vis the Americans, that of junior partner in US-led covert action, a sharp contrast to the more equal role enjoyed by London in the 1950s; Britain would carry-out specialist tasks such as training the Afghanistan resistance and dispatching covert operatives to support the fighting. Overall the US was 'to cast the Soviets as opposing Moslem religious and nationalist expressions.'

Mark Curtis, Secret Affairs: Britain's Collusion with radical Islam (2012).

'Mr President... you accepted that a historic responsibility had been thrust upon you, a responsibility to cope with and manage this situation not just in the interests of Pakistan, but in the interests of the international community. It is for that reason, among others, that Pakistan deserves the support of Britain and of all the other nations of the world who are genuinely interested in bringing about the withdrawal of Soviet troops. On behalf of Britain, let me confirm to you – Pakistan has our support in the general problems you are facing... We deeply admire the courage and skill you have shown in handling the crisis.'

Speech given by Margaret Thatcher at a banquet in the home of Zia ul-Haq, 1981.

Yesterday's Liberation Has Become the Stagnation of Today

“Set the past conglomerates aflame” – Red Crayola- “Born in Flames”

Lizzie Borden’s debut film Born in Flames (1983) is often labeled with the genre tag science-fiction, but this is misleading. Although the film is set ‘Ten Years After the Social-Democratic War of Liberation”, there’s no reason to think that the events of the film take place in a future world. No specific date is given for the events that take place on screen. Indeed, all signs actually seem to indicate that the newly formed socialist democracy of the film’s present, established after a triumphant fissure of the labor movement from the democratic party, is a uchronia set in a parallax 1983.

Besides the alternative historical timeline and a vaguely dystopic outlook, there are no new technologies, lifeforms, scientific theories, or other tropes that would associate the film with sci-fi. In other words, the film takes place in a world we completely know and understand. The only thing vaguely alien about the plot is the ideology of its citiens. It’s telling that a film from this period would be branded science fiction solely because it imagines a notional socialist framework in the United States (albeit an “actually existing socialism” model). But to a cold war America, nothing could be more outlandish.

Shot documentary style, much of the film’s visual content consists of stock footage of women in the workplace, organized protests, street actions, and police brutality. As the entire film seems to be made guerilla-style on the cheap, it’s unlikely that the B-roll was staged, thus reinforcing the idea that it’s a narrative is actually set in a United States that its audiences know all too well. Born in Flames takes the form of a film essay, the kind of ideas-oriented fictional talkie tract that has been a continual project spanning from Godard’s Week End to Cronenberg’s Cosmopolis, despite almost universal repulsion from audiences and critics alike at the style.* As a deep underground picture, the film doesn’t seek to preach to its choir about the flaws of the existing power structure. Rather, it takes aim at failed movements, like the ones that were beginning to dissolve when the film began shooting in 1978 and which were almost remote dreams by its release in 1983.

Born in Flames’ radicalism is rooted not so much in a utopic futurist vision of egalitarianism as it is in a frustration with the then-contemporary tranquilization of the left. In the film, a feminist organization called the Women’s Army is singled out for policing by a paranoid state apparatus. There’s no evidence that the group has been militant in its direct actions. In fact, factions of the organization criticize the decentralized leadership for being too docile and acquiescent. There’s an early scene where the Women’s Army rescue a white collar woman from sexual assault by a couple of toughs, but contrary to media reports they do not attack the assailants. They merely circle them with bicycles and rape whistles until the toughs are intimidated enough to leave the scene.

Likewise, it’s never stated one way or another whether the aforementioned “Social-Democratic War” involved actual combat or was a symbolic struggle. The ten-year TV retrospective that frames the narrative makes the case that power was achieved democratically and there’s no reason to suspect it wasn’t, but whether that power was maintained by votes or seizure is moot. However, one can’t help but juxtapose this timeline to what took place in the nonfictional world during the ten years preceding the film’s 1983 release date.

1973 was a year still deeply defined by the spark of the 60s protest movement. It was the year of Roe v. Wade, the Paris Peace Accords, and the Watergate hearings (which gutted much of the executive branch that year and would lead to Nixon’s resignation in 1974).** It was a year when the left seemed to be gaining momentum, when it still seemed to have the potential to put a stop to the gears of the machine. But by 1983, it was clear who had actually won this civil war; patriarchy, militarism, capitalism, and a corrupt duopolistic political consensus (by ’84 many Democrats would even pimp for Reagan). Labor had never bifurcated from the Democratic party as it should have and it’s possible that the Democrats’ s capitulation to neoliberalism was the nail in the movement’s coffin. Concurrently, Reagan, once SDS’s number one foe, effectively marginalized and delegitimized unionized labor when we fired the striking Air Traffic Controllers.

The film emulates this defeat. Although there seem to have been some inherent post-“war” social improvements in the uchronia of Born in Flames, women, and in particular queer women, are still second-class citizens. Despite being a critical part of the workforce, women in the film still mainly occupy clerical, service, or blue collar roles. They have no relatively little access to power. At one point, several of the provocateurs of the Women’s Army are systematically purged from their jobs. The three female editors at a leading socialist journal*** are also fired for expressing sympathy with the group. Women are still objectified and attacked on the street and a news report talking about one such story interjects callous jokes about police officers picking up phone numbers at the crime scene.

The president’s seeming concession to the revolutionaries, charged by an incidence of prison neglect/abuse, is actually pretty radical- payment for housework, reparation for that final hidden corporate subsidy that a 1995 U.N. report on Gender and Human Development estimates saves the economy $11 trillion a year by its failure to be monetized. However, this is seen as little more than further pacification by the radicals, an attempt to keep female voices contained within the home rather than at the seats of power.

One of the ways that the Women’s Army are able to communicate is through radio, which serves as a kind of homebase for two separate factions of the group, lead by the mild-mannered Honey and the more militant Adele Bertei. On the one hand, radio’s a convenient route to dispense their agitprop, but music is also a liberating force for them as well. Although interspersed with bits of soul, funk, dub reggae, Lou Reed, and a brilliant cover of “No Woman No Cry” that I haven’t been able to identify, the recurrence of Red Crayola’s titular “Born in Flames” and the unreleased song “Undercover Nation”**** by former Contortions guitarist and organist Bertei’s band The Bloods pose this as something of a postpunk film.

Ulimately, the failure of the film’s New Labor (sic?) to accommodate the demands of feminism is indicative of a broader capitulation- an absorption of the terms of class struggle as a means of accommodating the desiring machinations of capitalism. The 10 year celebration itself is posed as a coda by its sign-off speech, which calls for a departure from collectivism into individualism. It’s an instantly recognizable speech that could have come straight from the neoliberal/neoconservative handbook:

“But has it gone too far? Is it time to ask if the politics and programs of yesterday’s liberation have become the stagnation of today? We cannot ignore the monumental inflation with which we are burdened nor can we ignore the widespread abuse rampant in our social programs. At home, we are becoming trapped in bureaucracy and throughout the rest of the world our influence wanes. The management of this station fears that oversocialization has transformed our democracy into a welfare state. If we are to survive our ideals, we must carefully consider their implications…”



* To those critics’ credit, the Born in Flames narrative is compelled by the acting and the acting is extremely flat at times, strung together by loud music over a B-roll that can seem a bit arbitrary. As such, it functions better as a historical artifact than a singular achievement of independent cinema.

** [Spoilers] It was also the year that the World Trade Center opened. Like the monoliths in 2001: A Space Odyssey, the twin towers seemed to be structurally designed to represent a next step in global evolution towards hypercapitalism, making its destruction a common daydream amongst Marxists, Islamists, and particularly Hollywood for the next 28 years of its existence. In the film, the Women’s Army’s final act is to blow up the antenna on top of one of the towers, which was broadcasting the 10 year retrospective. This destruction serves multiple purposes; condemning the decline of revolutionary intent, robbing the TV program of its final declaration of failure (to a project which had never been effectively conceived), removing a mouthpiece that spoke over or in place of the voiceless, and decentralizing media into more independent satellites like the two radio stations run by the Women’s Army protagonists.

*** One of these editors is director Kathryn Bigelow in her more radical days. Bigelow’s student film made at Columbia while studying under Vito Acconci amongst others, had been a literal deconstruction of film violence- two actors (one being Gary Busey) beating the crap out of one another while a play-by-play critique by two semioticians sounds over the on-screen action. Contrary to these polarizing origins, Bigelow has in the past decade committed herself to making what she terms “apolitical” films, which some argue actually celebrate state violence (perhaps unintentionally) by the very nature of their depoliticization.

****Fueled by a riff that more-than-a-little resembles Joy Division’s “Interzone”, "Undercover Nation" features Bertei’s voice before she went Scritti-pop, which sounds uncannily like Kathleen Hanna, who would become the voice of radical feminism for good or ill a decade later.

Short history of popular terrorist and guerilla movements; or, "I'd Rather be Killing Communists" said the T-shirt

 

Meanwhile in scenes out of a Cabaret Voltaire EP:

 Amazingly, they made it happen, and quickly. In the first week of June 1985, mujahedin, Contras and Laotian rebels joined Savimbi and his men in Jamba, Angola, UNITA’s jungle headquarters, for the Democratic International, as Lehrman had titled the event. For several days they commiserated and compared notes, huddling together in thatched huts and signing an anti-Soviet pact. Wheeler organized transportation, and Abramoff dealt with the money and logistics from Lehrman’s end. Lehrman himself read a letter of support from Reagan and handed out framed copies of the Declaration of Independence. It received some press coverage. Abramoff had pulled off his first far-right adventure. 

Further example of the right consuming the innovations of the left in organization.

More details in Thomas Frank's The Wrecking Crew: The American Right and the Lust for Power

(Yeah, it is Ronnie Wood on the Fall video.)

Welcome to the Occupation (UK Edition)

"The Government accept the clear conclusions of Lord Stevens and Judge Cory that there was collusion. I want to reiterate the Government's apology in the House today. The Government are deeply sorry for what happened. Despite the clear conclusions of previous investigations and reports, there is still only limited information in the public domain. That is why my right honourable friend the Prime Minister and I have committed to establishing a further process to ensure that the truth is revealed."

Rt Hon Owen Paterson MP (2013), on the role of state involvement in the murder of Pat Finucane.

“After the publication of the Parker Report in March 1972, much publicity was given to the government statement that the use of hooding, the noise machine and the SD process would be 'discontinued', less, much less, publicity was given to Mr. Heath's statement at the same time that although the hooding might not be used, he must 'make it plain that interrogation in depth will continue.'”

John McGuffin, The Guineapigs (1981).

It is possible to watch a thread emerging in British film and television in the last decades of the 20^th century articulating a nameless anxiety about Britain’s role in Northern Ireland. The reaction is an interesting one because it is separate to conventional worries that Northern Irish terrorism could bleed over into England (The Long Good Friday), or ‘heart of darkness’ anxieties about Britain’s imperial presence in a region of alien strangeness (Harry’s Game). What this reaction was, expressed most fully in the conspiracy thrillers produced by the BBC and Channel 4, by two of Britain’s best writers for television, Troy Kennedy Martin, and Alan Bleasedale, is that Northern Ireland is a testing ground where practices of experimental torture and coercion can be applied before they are subjected on the real colonial subjects of the Empire: England and the English. Edge of Darkness and G.B.H. both deal in a similar reality where in the 1980s and 1990s a militarised state has emerged within Britain, governed by elites in the security service and politics. Northern Ireland represents a zone where this collusion can be see much more clearly than in Britain, and where the practices of the English establishment results in paranoia, bloodshed, and hatred.

Edge of Darkness is the story of a police detective who has a history in the sectarian conflicts of Northern Ireland, and shadowy dealings on behalf of the security services.  Craven’s job in Northen Ireland was to manage a network of touts, who relayed information to Craven who himself sent it on to MI6; Craven had a privileged position within the English machine, he has control over part of the flow of information and knows that in practice Northern Ireland is closer the India of the 19^th century: keep the factions playing off against each other and they’ll never know who they’re really fighting. Craven is withdrawn however from Northern Ireland, aware that the network of informers he left behind are all extremely likely to be uncovered and murdered. Craven is forced to confront his own role in the empire when one of his informers makes an unexpected reappearance and murders his daughter before his eyes. The rest of Edge of Darkness is a realisation for Craven that England, and the rest of the world, is Northern Ireland in macrocosm: alone he is only one point of contact for something bigger, more organised, and more ruthless, than anything he could have imagined. If the establishment (or elites, or empire, or security services, or Americans, or energy companies; the evil that Craven opposes is so pervasive and protean it cannot be named or truly understood) wishes to play with the lives of the natives, then there is perhaps nothing, as Craven discovers, that can be done to stop them. The forces Craven encounters in the UK are similar to the role he served in Northern Ireland; he is a missionary amongst heathens, bringing the gospel and the law to heathens in the manner of Henry Morton Stanley; when his begins to unravel the conspiracy of the collusion between politics and energy, he encounters missionaries of a greater gospel than his own, Neoliberalism. Great Britain has become the last outpost of the British Empire, its people the empire’s last subjects, and its politics the only game in town for the intelligence services.

Northern Ireland returns to haunt the end-of-history setting of G.B.H., with a security service plot to overthrow the elected socialist council leader of a northern city. G.B.H. is a tale from the end of history because it depicts the world post-apocalypse, post-1980s, after the great work of Neoliberalism was nearly complete: both main characters, Murray the socialist councillor, Nelson the old-labour teacher, are yesterday’s men next to the apolitical security service operators (you could say managers) who have been dispatched to cause chaos. The security service characters are incarnated Neoliberalism, cored-out of all real beliefs (Nelson’s and Murray’s political convictions are wavering, or clouded by personal ambitions or neuroses, but never allowed to be completely distinguished), faster, better organized, and better able to shape themselves to the needs of the job at hand (Neoliberalism demands flexibility and fluidity of its subjects) , changing roles and accents with ease (Murray and Nelson maintain their accents through the programme as a mark of their integrity; even Nelson’s middle class friend changes his accent, softened when attempting to romance one his students, choppy working class when with Nelson). The Northern Ireland analogy works well in G.B.H. because Murray for instance is depicted as being of Irish descent, with the addition that the Northern city is implied to be Liverpool. The intelligence agents, when they reveal their real nature, make many comparisons between working in England and working in Ireland: they are greatly displeasured to be once again working amongst, as the character Grendel describes them, “heathens.” There is no concern for England as a place, but as a colonized zone where the consequences of causing anarchy are summed up by Grendel’s triumphant grin as he, like Craven, abandons his native dupes (socialist henchmen attacking the city’s ethnic minorities) to be murdered by a mob of the city’s citizens. Britain is just somewhere that if you are prepared to submit yourself to the colonists, you can drive away from.

Northen Ireland today has assumed a very strange position in British culture. Everybody knows ‘something’ went on there, but despite this something being periodically fleshed out (the Stalker Inquiry, the Saville Report, the Pat Finucane review) the public are still unwilling to probe deeper. The tone taken towards the recent ‘flag riots’ is very much one of “why, I thought all of this had been sorted out years ago,” with an added “the fucking peasants”, depending on one’s political sensibilities. This common-sense approach can be seen applied in the BBC tv movie Mo: the peace process is simply a process of getting two silly boys to sit down in front of level-headed but cookie Julie Walters and “grow a pair.” No death squads, no sensory deprivation, no collusion with terrorists, not in this account of Northern Ireland’s recent history (this will also be the definitive account of Iraq and Afghanistan around 10 years hence). ‘Occupy’ became a buzzword for the pseudo-socialists and activists a few years ago who organized themselves to seize territory from their perceived opponents, high finance and corrupt politicians. With Northern Ireland as an example they could perhaps better glimpse how power really works in Britain, how little regard the colonists have towards the colonized, and the brutality that is an everyday fact of the occupation.

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And So That It Would Be...

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