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Women in Revolt! Art and Activism in the UK 1970 to 1990 @ Tate Britain

‘You start by sinking into his arms and end up with your arms in his sink.’
(1970s feminist slogan)

‘Women in Revolt! Art and Activism in the UK 1970 to 1990’ does what it says on the tin and is the largest assembly of British feminist art ever gathered together in one place. It is an encyclopedia of British feminist art and activism in the 1970s and 80s, packed with images, ideas, associations, slogans, shocking stories, stimulating art works, music and voices.

Seven Demands 1974 by See Red Women’s Workshop © See Red Women’s Workshop

Huge

‘Women in Revolt!’ is huge. It features some 600 works by over 100 women artists and (very often) women’s collectives.

The definition of ‘work of art’ is cast as wide as possible to include paintings, drawings, photographs, textiles, prints and films, but this doesn’t begin to indicate the range of the material. Each of the seven rooms (and these are often sub-divided so you end up with about 12 distinct spaces in total) contains at least one display case, sometimes two or three, each containing large amounts of documentary material on the theme of the room, and this includes posters, leaflets, pamphlets, handouts, magazines, self-help manuals and books, all with a polemical feminist theme.

As one way of surfing through the material I set out to list all the magazines featured in these cases. I ran out of puff after noting Speak Out, Foward, Outwrite, Shrew, (lots and lots of copies of) Spare Rib, Enough, Banshee (for Irish feminists), the Beaumont Bulletin, Women’s Report, Feminist Art News, Mukli, Red Rag, In Print, the GLC Women’s Committee, Socialist Woman, Power of Women, Women Now!, Edinburgh Women’s Newsletter, Glasgow Women’s Liberation Newsletter, Tayside Women’s Liberation Newsletter and so very much on – an extraordinary outpouring of voices and opinions, a nationwide, grass roots explosion of activism and organising that burst out everywhere and then snowballed…

Reading list

The exhibition is accompanied by all kinds of paraphernalia and accessories. Before you even get in there’s a room-sized space containing a big table and 7 or 8 chairs next to shelves holding 20 or 30 feminist books from or about the period. You are encouraged to take the books down, sit and read them. I liked the look of ‘The Lost Women of Rock Music‘, although maybe not at the price of £49.

On a hoarding nearby there’s a list of feminists organisations which I list at the end of this review.

The LP

There’s an old-style record player playing an LP which has been created specially for the exhibition:

There are a couple of headsets so you can sit on the bench and tap your toes to feminist hits by the likes of the Mo-Dettes, the Slits, X-Ray Spex, The Raincoats or, my favourite, The Gymslips.

Films and documentaries

The LP headphones prepare you for the fact that the exhibition includes no fewer than 27 films with a combined duration of around 7 hours! Plus 25 artworks which include audio.

These all have headphones so you can sit and listen to documentaries about black women or a BBC discussion about whether domestic work should be paid, about the Grunwick strike, a shocking documentary about how women of colour immigrating to Britain had to undergo virginity checks (in the 1970s) and so on.

Related events

The exhibition is accompanied by 6 podcasts, a long Spotify playlist of Women in Revolt music, and there’s a festival of feminist films at the National Film Theatre. The Tate café even has feminist cakes on sale.

Feminist meringues on sale in the Tate café. Photo by the author

It’s much, much more than an exhibition. It feels like a parallel universe, the universe of committed feminists which sits alongside the universe the rest of us inhabit, and yet is based on a completely different set of values and assumptions, has its own vocabulary and jargon, inhabits a discursive realm thronged with hundreds of thousands of books, pamphlets, articles, meetings, organisations, websites, social media pronunciations, an endless alternative point of view.

Start point 1970

The exhibition very specifically covers the period 1970 to 1990. Why? 1970 was the year of the first Women’s Liberation Conference and is a convenient starting point for the emergence of a distinctive feminist branch of the cultural and political rebellions of the later 1960s.

Thus the early rooms are all about squats and collectives and are liberally sprinkled with talk of overthrowing capitalism, how capitalism relies on the patriarchy i.e. the systematic oppression of women, undervaluing of women’s work (especially housework and child-rearing) and so on.

There are pamphlets explaining the communist take on women and the family (‘Feminism in the Marxist Movement’ and ‘Communism and the Family’). In the curators’ words:

In the 1970s and 1980s a new wave of feminism erupted. Women used their lived experiences to create art, from painting and photography to film and performance, to fight against injustice. This included taking a stand for reproductive rights, equal pay and race equality. This creativity helped shape a period of pivotal change for women in Britain, including the opening of the first women’s refuge and the formation of the British Black Arts Movement.

There are lots of black-and-white photos of squats and slums, some of the vintage documentaries who street scenes of road filled with lovely old motors from the 60s and 70s.

Are many women Marxists?

The wall label of room 2 states:

Many women see capitalism as the root of their oppression. They challenge its reliance on patriarchal systems in which men hold the power and women are largely excluded. They also view women’s unpaid reproductive labour as exploitation, and a necessary condition of capitalism.

Do they? Do ‘Many women see capitalism as the root of their oppression’? In the intense hothouse of academia, maybe. But out here in the wider world where many women run companies and corporations and, of course, populate the highest ranks of the Conservative Party?

The buzzwords ‘capitalism’, ‘communism’ and ‘socialism’ crop up throughout the exhibition, particularly in the earlier rooms when we’re closest in time to the revolutionary turmoil of the late 1960s and many radicals thought that Western capitalism was teetering on the brink of collapse.

This made me feel sadly nostalgic for my school days in the 1970s when left-wingers believed in such a thing as socialism, believed that capitalism could be ‘overthrown’, all it would take would be one more heave and the entire oppressive system would be overthrown and usher in the communist utopia, social ownership of utilities, industries and businesses, where everyone would contribute according to their ability and take according to their need.

The economic, social and political naivety of those times seem an age ago, now.

Nostalgia

This raises an issue I had throughout the show which is that, I think I was meant to respond with outrage and sympathy to the many oppressions women laboured under in the 1970s and 80s but I found quite a lot of the material heart-warmingly nostalgic. Take the room devoted to punk women, which featured artworks and videos (of Ludus performing) and a display case full of fanzines with Johnny Rotten or the Clash on the cover. This was pure nostalgia for me and warmed the cockles of my heart.

Art or social history?

This thought in turn triggered several other questions which nagged me all the way through, namely: 1) How much of the works on display were art and how much social history? At one end were paintings and sculptures which are explicitly and unambiguously art. At the other end were the display cases holding magazines, posters, pamphlets and whatnot which are, in my opinion, documents of social history. In between were questionable objects or works which begged the question. For example, there’s a room devoted to Greenham Common. As in every room, it has a display case showing magazines, flyers, letters, maps and so on. In complete contrast was a massive installation of a wire fences covered with bric-a-brac typical of the camp and, on another wall, a bit painting (art).

But what about the ten or so (very good) black-and-white photos showing Greenham women in various stages of protest? Are they ‘art’, or documentary shots as might be taken by a magazine journalist? Or the quilt made by several Greenham women, showing Greenham slogans, hanging on the wall?

Installation view of photos of women at Greenham Common. Photo by the author

2) And this was related to a second question which was: am I responding to the works because a) they nostalgically remind me of my misspent youth (e.g. the punk room), or b) because I’m responding to the issues they raise and the (sometimes terrible) stories they tell) or c) as works of art?

Very few of the 600 works on display actually cut through to me as works of art (I mention my favourites below). Far more of them were attached to stories which were more in the shape of newspapers stories (the police shooting of Cherry Groce, the virginity inspections of black women immigrants, the disabled woman who was sterilised by male doctors without her consent etc) or issues (abortion, social pressure on women etc).

Or had a kind of documentary factual basis such as, in the pregnancy room:

the 90 second long black-and-white movie which consisted simply of a close-up of a pregnant woman’s stomach so that you could see the baby moving inside (Antepartum by Mary Kelly)
the sequence of black-and-white photos a woman artist took of her stomach from the moment she learned she was pregnant

Installation view of ‘Ten Months’ by Susan Hiller. Photo by the author

‘Ten Months’ documents Hiller’s pregnancy. The artist uses a conceptual framework to explore an intensely subjective experience, presenting one photograph of her stomach for each of the 28 days of 10 lunar months. Accompanying the photographs are texts from the artist’s journal that reflect on the psychic and physical changes that occur during pregnancy.

(Who isn’t) restoring women’s voices?

As always, the curators claim that many of these artists have been overlooked and left out of traditional male-dominated narratives of modern art – ‘women, who despite long careers, have been largely left outside the artistic narratives of the time’ – and so this exhibition is putting things to rights!

For many of the featured artists, this will be the first time many of their works have been on display since the 1970s.

This is very similar to the claim made at the ‘RE/SISTERS: A Lens on Gender and Ecology’ exhibition which is on at the Barbican until 14 January, and which also brings together women artists and collectives from the 1980s through to the present day, also claiming they have been written out of art history, also claiming to set the record straight, also claiming to give women artists their voice, etc.

In other words, this is the standard claim made at the exhibition of almost any woman artist or artists. It may well be true. But it’s well on the way to being a cliché, one of the received ideas of our time.

Are they worth it?

I’ll come straight out and state an obvious point: maybe a lot of these women artists weren’t consciously ‘written out’ of art history by wicked white male art historians as a result of a patriarchal conspiracy, but because they…er…aren’t any good.

Take that LP featuring tracks by revolting women bands such as the Mo-Dettes, the Slits, the Poison Girls, the Gymslips, the Au Pairs, Girls At Our Best and so on…maybe these bands haven’t been forgotten by time or erased, i.e. aren’t much known or written about in histories of pop music, not as the result of some scary conspiracy by white male music critics but…because they’re just not as good or interesting as The Sex Pistols, The Clash, The Jam, The Buzzcocks et al.

Some of the work here is outstanding, but a lot of it only makes sense in the context of feminist protest, was designed to provoke the enemy or raise the consciousness of allies, to educate and inform. A lot of it is only a little step above the posters, pamphlets and handouts created by women all over the country in response to injustice and discrimination, which is to say they are all in a worthwhile cause but…as art…judged as works of art…even if we extend the definition of ‘art’ to breaking point…

Rather than rewriting them badly, here are the curators’ own wall labels quoted directly. Indentation indicates curators’ text.

Room 1. Rising with Fury

In the early 1970s, women were second-class citizens. The Equal Pay Act wouldn’t be enacted until 1975. There were no statutory maternity rights or any sex-discrimination protection in law. Married women were legal dependants of their husbands, and men had the right to have sex with their wives, with or without consent. There were no domestic violence shelters or rape crisis units. For many women, their multiple intersection identities led to further inequality. The 1965 Race Relations Act had made racial discrimination an offence but did nothing to address systematic racism. While trans women were gaining visibility, a controversial 1970 legal case found that sex assigned at birth could not be changed, setting a precedent that would impact trans lives for decades. The 1970 Chronically Sick and Disabled Persons Act gave people with disabilities the right to equal access but failed to make discrimination unlawful. In 1967, the Sexual Offences Act had partially decriminalised sex between two men, but lesbian rights were almost entirely absent from public discourse.

In 1970, more than 500 women attended the first of a series of national women’s liberation conferences. Sally Alexander, one of the organisers notes, it was the beginning of ‘a spontaneous iconoclastic movement whose impulse and demands reached far beyond its estimated twenty thousand activists.’ Many of these activists were also members of organisations like the Gay Liberation Front (1970 to 1973) and Brixton Black Women’s Group (1973 to 1985). Together they marked a ‘second wave’ of feminist protest, emerging more than fifty years after women’s suffrage. They understood that women’s problems were political problems, caused by inequality and solved only through social change.

The artists in this room made art about their experiences and their oppression. They worked individually, and in groups, sharing resources and ideas, and using DIY techniques. Their subject matter and practices became forms of revolt, and their art became part of their activism.

Three display cases in room 1 of Women in Revolt! giving a sense of the number of small to medium-sized objects on display © Tate. Photo by Madeleine Buddo

I liked ‘Rabbits – the Pregnant Bunny Girl, Mrs Rabbits and Woman as Animal’ by Shirley Cameron.

These photographs document a performance from 1974. While heavily pregnant with her twin daughters, Cameron dressed as a Playboy bunny girl and ‘installed’ herself in a pen with rabbits at local country shows. She toured the Devon County Show, Lincoln Show, Three Counties Show, Border Show and East of England Show. Brilliant idea.

I liked the photos of a performance based on a wedding ceremony by Penny Slinger.

These photographs document a performance in which Slinger wore a handmade wedding cake costume. The artist describes the series as ‘both a parody of a wedding ritual, and recreation from a woman’s point of view’. The images were included in Slinger’s 1973 solo show at Flowers Gallery, London. Deemed too controversial for public display, the police raided and shut down the exhibition shortly after it opened.

Near the top of my favourite pieces in the show was a series of three porcelain figures of dancers by Rose English. These are small, barely a foot tall, brightly and joyfully decorated, humorously emphasising each figures’ brightly coloured vulva and melony breasts. They were fun and innocently frank.

Porcelain Dancer 1 by Rose English © Rose English courtesy of Richard Saltoun Gallery, London and Rome. Photo by the author

Room 2. The Marxist wife still does all the housework

By the mid-1970s, women has asserted their rights to equal pay and to work free from discrimination and harassment. Some held positions of power in business and politics, and following Margaret Thatcher’s election as prime minister in 1979, a woman held the highest office in the country. Despite this, traditional gender roles remained. For women to achieve equality, change was needed in both public and private spheres.

Small consciousness-raising groups brought women together to discuss their shared experiences and recognise the social and political causes of their inequality. This practice woke women up to their oppression and made the personal political. Women discussed the concept of reproductive labour – the work required to sustain human life and raise future generations – and joined international campaigns such as Wages for Housework. Art became a tool to highlight the unpaid activities they were expected to perform and the physical and emotional impact this had on them.

For many women artists, there was no separation between their home life and artistic practice. They produced work at kitchen tables between caring and domestic responsibilities. Their environment informed the materials used, the size and format of their work, as well as their subject matter. Artists also turned to their bodies as their subjects. They explored fertility, reproduction and the complexity of navigating highly prejudicial medical systems, particularly for women with multiple intersecting identities.

The artists in this room challenge art historical tropes and media stereotypes: from the idealised nude to the selfless mother and doting housewife. These women present their bodies and homes as sites of oppression whilst simultaneously reclaiming agency over them.

Three fabulous crocheted figures by Rita McGurn

Untitled Rug and Figures by Rita McGurn (1974 to 1985) Photography by Keith Hunter

McGurn worked as a television, film and interior designer. In the 1970s and 1980s her art practice was pursued privately, primarily in the context of her home. She employed a range of found and domestic materials in her practice, making use of whatever was to hand. Working in crochet, she created life-sized people that were placed around the house in changing configurations. Her daughter, artist France-Lise McGurn (born 1983) recalls, ‘We all lost some good jumpers to those crochet figures, as stuffing or just stitched right in.’

Screaming video by Gina Birch

Still from 3 Minute Scream by Gina Birch (1977)

Birch writes: ‘I came to London from Nottingham in 1976 to go to Hornsey College of Art. I was very soon immersed in what became punk and the world of 1970s politics of squatting, nuclear disarmament, Rock Against Racism and later Rock Against Sexism. The rundown city was our playground.’ At Hornsey, she met Ana da Silva and they formed the experimental punk band The Raincoats (as featured on the exhibition LP). Birch recalls, ‘It was a time of casual sexism, casual sex and more overt sexism.’ Three-minutes is the approximate length of a Super 8 film cartridge, here filled entirely with Birch’s energetic screaming.

Helen Chadwick

This was really good, 12 photos recording a performance given by Chadwick, titled ‘In the Kitchen’. What I liked very much about them was their geometric precision and symmetry. Plus the brilliance of the conception.

For this performance Chadwick created wearable sculptural objects from PVC ‘skins’ stretched over metal frames. They included a cooker, sink, refrigerator, washing machine and cupboards. The original setting featured a strip of vinyl floor tiles and a soundtrack of excerpts from the BBC Radio 4 programmes ‘Woman’s Hour’ and ‘You and Yours’. Chadwick wrote: ‘The kitchen must inevitably be seen as the archetypal female domain where the fetishism of the kitchen appliance reigns supreme. By highlighting and manipulating this familiar domestic milieu, I have attempted to express the conflict that exists between … the manufactured consumer ideal/physical reality, plastic glamour images/banal routine, conditioned role-playing/individuality.’

‘In the Kitchen (Stove)’ by Helen Chadwick (1977) © The Estate of the Artist. Courtesy Richard Saltoun Gallery, London and Rome

Erin Pizzey

An honourable mention for Erin Pizzey who in 1971 founded the Chiswick refuge for abused women (formally known as Chiswick Women’s Aid), a self-funded haven for women victims of domestic abuse, and a model which was to be copied first around the country and then across the world.

It’s recorded here in six highly evocative black-and-white documentary photos. A nearby display case contains a copy of the book Pizzey wrote on the subject, ‘Scream quietly or the neighbours will hear.’ What a heroine, what a heroic achievement – although, reading further about her life, you see that Pizzey, like so many other idealistic feminists from the 1960s and 70s, has had a tortuous and often disillusioning afterlife.

Room 3. Oh bondage, up yours! (i.e. punk feminism)

Subcultures provided opportunities for new models of womanhood from the mid-1970s. Punk, post-punk and alternative music scenes combined socially conscious, anti-authoritarian ideologies with DIY methods. Technical virtuosity was out, and the amateur was in. Freed from the pressure of being the best, the first, or the most original, artists began trashing the conventions of both high and popular culture, giving rise to new forms of expression.

Young musicians, artists, designers and writers set up bands, record labels, fanzines, collectives and club nights. They created work that pushed the boundaries of acceptability, often using clashing and violent imagery and explicit material. For many women this meant subverting gender norms, embracing the provocatively ‘unfeminine’ as well as the hypersexual.

Through their DIY methods, multi-disciplinary approaches and challenge to the status quo, these subcultures had much in common with the women’s movement. Yet artist and musician Cosey Fanni Tutti notes: ‘I aligned myself more with Gay Liberation than Women’s Liberation… Freedom “to be” was my thing. I didn’t want another set of rules imposed on me by having to be “a feminist”.’ For zine writer and punk feminist Lucy Whitman (then Lucy Toothpaste), it didn’t matter whether these women identified as feminists or not, ‘in all their lyrics, in their clothing, in their attitudes – they were challenging conventional attitudes’. These artists were freeing women of the bondage of expectation and helping them redefine women’s role in society.

Leotard (1979) by Cosey Fanni Tutti

This is an example of one of the costumes worn by Fanni Tutti for her professional striptease performances. The artist explains: ‘The costumes I used for my striptease work were “scripted” according to the audiences I performed to. Each signed a different masked persona, a fantasy or sexual predilection applicable to the age or social groups of the men who frequented the places I performed in. The vast majority of the costumes were made myself using carefully selected sensual practical materials that enabled smooth, elegant removal.’

Installation view of ‘Leotard’ by Cosey Fanni Tutti. Photo by Larina Fernandes

Gill Posener’s defaced posters

You see these around quite a lot but they never lose their sparkle:

Installation view of photos of posters defaced by Gill Posener in 1982 and 1983. Photo by the author

In these prints Posener documents a series of feminist interventions to advertising billboards around London. Living in lesbian squats in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Posener and her friends (who wished to remain anonymous for fear of retribution) would graffiti over sexist billboards and photograph them. Prints were sold as postcards to raise funds for radical causes. After moving to the US in the late 1980s, Posener became photo editor of the hugely influential lesbian erotica magazine On Our Backs.

Room 4. Greenham Common

There’s a room about Greenham Common at the Barbican Re/Sisters exhibition. There was a room about Greenham at the Imperial War Museum’s exhibition about war protests a few years ago. I.e. it’s all true, it was all worthwhile but, in the realm of culture, it’s a well-trodden cliché.

On 5 September 1981, a group of women marched from Cardiff to the Royal Air Force base at Greenham in Berkshire. They called themselves Women for Life on Earth. They were challenging the decision to house 96 nuclear missiles at the site. When their request to debate was ignored, they set up camp. Others joined, creating a women-only space. Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp became a site of protest and home to thousands of women. Some stayed for months, others for years, and many (including a great number of artists in this exhibition) visited multiple times.

Greenham women saw their anti-nuclear position as a feminist one. They understood that government spending on nuclear missiles meant less money for public services. They used their identities as mothers and carers to fight for the protection of future generations and a more equal society. The camp’s way of life – communal living, no running water, regular evictions and arrests – was challenging. But Greenham was also a refuge. Women were liberated from the restrictions of heteronormative society and embraced separatism. Race, class, sexuality and gender roles were regular topics of discussion.

Protest took on artistic forms for Greenham women. They made banners and collages, produced sculptures and newsletters, and weaved spider webs of wool around the perimeter fences. They wrote and sang protest songs and keened – wailing in grief to mourn lives lost to future nuclear wars. Large-scale public actions, like the 14-mile human chain created by 30,000 people holding hands to ‘embrace the base’ brought widespread media coverage to their cause.

Greenham politicised a generation of women, inspiring protests across the world. It also forged relationships and networks that continue to inform the women’s movement.

Dominating the Greenham room is this big installation by Margaret Harrison.

Installation view of ‘Greenham Common (Common reflections) 1989 to 2013’ by Margaret Harrison. Photo by Larina Fernandes

‘Greenham Common (Common reflections) 1989 to 2013’ is constructed from concrete, mirrors, clothes, children’s boots, pram, soft toys, photographs, plastic bags, household items, wire netting and barbed wire. In this installation Harrison recreates a portion of the perimeter fence at Greenham Common military base. Women living at the Greenham Peace Camp regularly attached clothes, banners, toys, photographs, household items and other everyday objects to the wire fence Here, Harrison adds mirrors in reference to the 1983 ‘Reflect the Base’ action when women held up mirrors to allow the base to symbolically look back at itself and its actions.

Room 5. Women of colour

The following two rooms highlight some of the artists that defined Black feminist art practice in the UK. These women were part of the British Black Arts Movement, founded in the early 1980s. Their artworks explore the intersections of race, gender and sexuality. They do not share a unified aesthetic but acknowledge shared experiences of racism and discrimination.

In the 1980s, a series of high-profile uprisings across the UK highlighted the reality of life for Black people. In the face of high unemployment, hostile media, police brutality and violence and intimidation by far-right groups, people of colour came together. The term ‘political blackness’ was used to acknowledge solidarity between those who faced discrimination based on their skin colour. Many artists drew on this collective approach. They formed networks, organised conferences and curated exhibitions in order to navigate institutional racism in the art world. As Sutapa Biswas and Marlene Smith described in 1988:

We have to work simultaneously on many different fronts.
We must make our images, organise exhibitions, be art critics, historians, administrators, and speakers. We must be the watchdogs of art establishment bureaucracies; sitting as individuals on various panels, as a means of ensuring that Black people are not overlooked.
The list is endless.

In 1981, Bhajan Hunjan and Chila Kumari Singh Burman opened Four Indian Women Artists, the first UK exhibition exclusively organised by and featuring women of colour. In the following years artists including Sutapa Biswas, Lubaina Himid, Rita Keegan and Symrath Patti curated group exhibitions that set out to challenge what Himid describes as the double negation of being Black and a woman. By working, organising and exhibiting together, women of colour developed personal and professional networks that helped them sustain their practices up to the present day.

There’s a lot in these rooms. I liked a very conventional but beautifully executed painting, ‘Woman with earring’ by Claudette Johnson, which you can see on Pinterest.

Also a video by Mona Hatoum in which she walked through Brixton barefoot with her ankles attached to Doctor Marten boots which seem to have been filled with weights to make each step a challenge. Irritatingly, I can’t find the video online, but there’s a Tate web page about it.

Love, Sex and Romance by Rita Keegan

‘Love, Sex and Romance’ consists of 12 vivid photocopies and screenprints on paper.

Love, Sex and Romance by Rita Keegan (1984) Photo by the author

Keegan’s work responds to her extensive family archive that dates back to the 1880s. Here, Keegan employs images and fragments from this archive to create monoprint collages. The artist describes her practice as a response to ‘a feminist perspective’ of ‘putting yourself in the picture’. In talking about her process, Keegan explains: ‘I’ve always felt that to tear somebody’s face can be quite violent, but if you’re doing that to your own face, you’ve given yourself permission, so it’s no longer a violent act. It’s a deconstructive act. It’s a way of looking.’ This work was made in 1984, the same year Keegan co-founded Copy Art, a community space for artists working with computers and photocopiers.

Room 6. ‘There’s no such thing as society’ [the AIDS, gay and lesbian room]

In 1987, weekly lifestyle magazine Women’s Own interviewed Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. She discussed AIDS, the importance of the ‘traditional family’, and money as ‘the driving force of life’. During the interview she delivered the infamous line, ‘there is no such thing as society’

Thatcher’s statement centred the ‘individual’ and reflected her ‘fundamental belief in personal responsibility and choice’. This position aligned with her neoliberal ideology, encouraging minimal state intervention in economic and social affairs. Thatcher’s opponents read her comments as a suggestion people could overcome the conditions of their oppression through hard work and resolve. This failure to acknowledge the social and systemic inequalities that led to this oppression was counter to everything women’s liberation stood for.

The free market agenda of Thatcher’s Conservative government had also brought about a shift in the art world. Alongside the rapid commercialisation of the art market, a series of cuts to state funding resulted in arts organisations turning to corporate sponsorship. For the artists in this exhibition, this focus on individualism and profitability made the challenge of finding funding, space or a market for their work even harder.

Yet these artists persisted. They continued to make art, question authority and challenge dominant narratives. Times were difficult but they rose to the occasion. As Ingrid Pollard notes: ‘We weren’t expecting to get exhibitions at the Tate; in the 1980s, people set up things of their own. We did shows in alternative spaces – community centres, cafes, libraries, our homes. We occupied spaces differently.’

Gays and lesbians interviewed on film, playing on TV monitors. Photos of lesbians frolicking in the woods, on marches, staging poses for arty photos.

Stop the Clause protest, 1988 by Mumtaz Karimjee, Photograph courtesy the artist

There’s a humorous slogan on one of the photos (the exhibition is awash with ‘radical’ slogans, mottos, t-shirt jingles, lapel badge phrases and so on; before you even enter the exhibition, in the book space I mentioned there’s an entire wall of lapel badges each with a smart, catchy slogan).

One of these days these dykes are going to walk all over you.

Disability arts

The gay and lesbian room morphs into an area devoted to activist art for the disabled. For some reason these tugged at my heartstrings more than a lot of the art from the previous rooms. A society, and maybe all of us as individuals, will be judged by how we treat the weakest and most vulnerable in our society. If there is a God, they will judge us not by how angry we get at each other on Twitter or TikTok but how kind we are, especially to the poorest and weakest in our societies. It’s worth setting down the curators’ summary of disability arts, much less publicised than feminist art.

The Disability Arts Movement played an important part in the political struggle for Disability Rights and the 1995 Disability Discrimination Act. Artists and activists worked together to fight marginalisation and create more authentic representations of disabled people. Organisations such as Shape (founded 1976), Arts Integrated Merseyside (now DaDAFest) (founded 1984), London Disability Arts Forum (founded 1986) and publications such as Disability Arts in London (DAIL) (first published 1985) promoted Disability Arts across the UK.

Women were engaged with this work from the outset. In 1985, photographer Samena Rana spoke on disability and photography as part of Black Arts Forum Weekend at the ICA, London. In 1988 artist Nancy Willis was joint organiser of the Disabled Women Artists Conference at the Women Artists’ Slide Library in London. In 1989, DAIL editor Elspeth Morris guest edited an edition of Feminist Art News titled ‘Disability Arts: The Real Missing Culture’. The publication featured 18 contributors including standup comic Barbara Lisicki who declared, ‘I’m a disabled woman. My existence has been mocked, scorned and misrepresented and by being up here I’m not allowing that to continue.’

Rolling Sisters by Nina Nissen (1983) Courtesy of Lenthall Road Workshop

End point

The curators have chosen 1990 as the end point of the exhibition though there is no one event to mark it as clearly and definitively as the 1970s women’s liberation conference which marked the start. In November that year Mrs Thatcher was forced to resign. The Soviet Union was to cease to exist the following year. The downfall of Thatcher supposedly led to a more moderate form of Conservatism under John Major, though I was there and it seemed, at the time, more like a long, drawn-out epoch of embarrassing Tory incompetence. Around the same time (1989 to 1991) the collapse of the Soviet Union evaporated faith in a communist alternative to Western capitalism which had sustained the radical left for the previous 70 years. Much of the fiery left-wing rhetoric of the previous decades was suddenly hollowed out, became irrelevant overnight.

A bit more interestingly, in the wall label for the final room the curators claim that it was the growing influence of the commercial art market which led to the marginalisation of the kind of hand-made, self-grown, radical, agit-prop art we’ve just been soaking ourselves in. In the 1990s art began its journey of increasingly commercialisation and monetisation which has brought us to the present moment when Damien Hirst artworks regularly sell for tens of millions of dollars.

My memory is that, as the 1990s progressed, the economic and cultural legacy of the Thatcher years kicked in, became widely accepted, became the foundational values of more and more people – and that ‘art’ became more and more about money and image. I loved the 1997 ‘Sensation’ exhibition but recognised at the time that it symbolised the triumph of the values of its sponsor, Charles Saatchi, the sensational, newsworthy but superficial values of a phenomenally successful advertising executive.

A lot of the material in this huge exhibition is barely art at all, or is art which relies heavily on its polemical political message for its value – but I miss the era when feminists like these, when so many of us on the left, believed that genuine society-wide change was possible. I take the mickey out of it but I miss it, too.

The merch

After visiting an exhibition stuffed with calls to overthrow capitalism, overthrow the patriarchy, overthrow the system which exploits women etc it’s always comical to emerge into the exhibition shop and discover you can buy all sorts of classy merchandise designed to help you overthrow capitalism from the comfort of your own living room.

Alongside the posters, prints, fridge magnets and tote bags festooned with slogans about women uniting and overthrowing the patriarchy, even I was surprised to come across a stand of feminist beer.

Riot Grrl beer on sale in the Tate shop. Photo by the author

This is Riot Grrrl Pale Ale, retailing at the revolutionary price of £7.95 a can – according to its marketers, ‘a tropical pale ale that’s as bold and rebellious as the feminist music, art and activism it champions.’

A long, long time ago (1978) The Clash lamented how the system turns rebellion into money. Countless works and slogans from the exhibition will probably inspire women who visit it to keep the torch burning, to take forward the endless struggle of women fighting for equality. But I humbly suggest that not many women nowadays believe they can ‘overthrow capitalism’ and so they, like most of us, have to make the best accommodations we can to the system as it actually is.

List of artists

Brenda Agard; Sam Ainsley; Simone Alexander; Bobby Baker; Anne Bean; Zarina Bhimji; Gina Birch; Sutapa Biswas; Tessa Boffin; Sonia Boyce; Chila Kumari Singh Burman; Shirley Cameron; Thalia Campbell; Helen Chadwick; Jennifer Comrie; Judy Clark; Caroline Coon; Eileen Cooper; Stella Dadzie; Poulomi Desai; Vivienne Dick; Nina Edge; Marianne Elliott-Said (Poly Styrene); Rose English; Catherine Elwes; Cosey Fanni Tutti; Aileen Ferriday; Format Photographers Agency; Chandan Fraser; Melanie Friend; Carole Gibbons; Penny Goring; Joy Gregory; Hackney Flashers; Margaret Harrison; Mona Hatoum; Susan Hiller; Lubaina Himid; Amanda Holiday; Bhajan Hunjan; Alexis Hunter; Kay Fido Hunt; Janis K. Jefferies; Claudette Johnson; Mumtaz Karimjee; Tina Keane; Rita Keegan; Mary Kelly; Rose Finn-Kelcey; Roshini Kempadoo; Sandra Lahire; Lenthall Road Workshop; Linder; Loraine Leeson; Alison Lloyd; Rosy Martin; Rita McGurn; Ramona Metcalfe; Jacqueline Morreau; The Neo Naturists; Lai Ngan Walsh; Houria Niati; Annabel Nicolson; Ruth Novaczek; Hannah O’Shea; Pratibha Parmar; Symrath Patti; Ingrid Pollard; Jill Posener; Elizabeth Radcliffe; Franki Raffles; Samena Rana; Su Richardson; Liz Rideal; Robina Rose; Monica Ross; Erica Rutherford; Maureen Scott; Lesley Sanderson; See Red Women’s Workshop; Gurminder Sikand; Sister Seven; Monica Sjöö; Veronica Slater; Penny Slinger; Marlene Smith; Maud Sulter; Jo Spence; Suzan Swale; Anne Tallentire; Shanti Thomas; Martine Thoquenne; Gee Vaucher; Suzy Varty, Christine Voge; Del LaGrace Volcano; Kate Walker; Jill Westwood; Nancy Willis; Christine Wilkinson; Vera Productions, Shirley Verhoeven.

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Tate Britain reviews

Tate Britain reviews

The Lesser Evil: Political Ethics in an Age of Terror by Michael Ignatieff (2004)

How should democracies respond to terrorist attacks? In particular, How much violence, secrecy and violations of human rights should a Western government deploy in order to safeguard a democratic state which, ironically, claims to deplore violence, secrecy and loudly promotes human rights?

How far can a democracy resort to these means without undermining and to some extent damaging the very values it claims to be defending?

How far can it go to deploy the lesser evil of abrogating some people’s human rights in order to ensure the greater good of ensuring the security and safety of the majority? These are the questions Ignatieff sets out to address in this book.

The book is based on a series of six lectures Ignatieff gave at the University of Edinburgh in 2003. Obviously the context for the lectures and their starting point was the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on America.

Historical context – the War on Terror

It’s difficult now to recreate the mood of hysteria which gripped so much public discourse in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. US President George W. Bush declared a War on Terror (18 September 2001) which justified major military attacks on Afghanistan (Operation Enduring Freedom starting 7 October 2001), then Iraq (Operation Iraqi Freedom starting 20 March 2003), alongside combat operations in a number of other Muslim countries (the Philippines, Sudan et al). The US Congress passed a law allowing the President to declare war on anyone he thought was a threat. In his State of the Union speech, 29 January 2002, Bush singled out three likely contenders as the so-called ‘Axis of Evil’, being Iran, Iraq and North Korea.

Apart from the mismanagement of the two major wars, in Afghanistan and Iraq, the most contentious aspect of the so-called War on Terror became what many perceived to be the egregious breaches of human rights which a newly bullish America began to practice. Critics claimed the so-called war was in reality an excuse for creating a hi-tech surveillance state, for reducing civil liberties and infringing human rights.

Within a month of the 9/11 attacks the US government passed the Patriot Act which included three main provisions:

expanded surveillance abilities of law enforcement, including by tapping domestic and international phones
easier inter-agency communication to allow federal agencies to more effectively use all available resources in counter-terrorism efforts
increased penalties for terrorism crimes and an expanded list of activities which would qualify for terrorism charges

The law upset human rights groups on various grounds, for example, the powers given law enforcement agencies to search property and records without a warrant, consent, or even knowledge of the targets. But the single most contentious provision was its authorisation of indefinite detention without trial, which became associated with the notorious detention centre at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba,

Ignatieff’s approach

The lectures were given at the heart of this period (2003), 18 months into the War on Terror, as the Patriot Act was still being rolled out, just after the US government launched its invasion of Iraq (March 2003).

In his introduction Ignatieff makes the point that already, by 2003, there was a well-developed legalistic literature on all these issues. He is not going to add to that (he isn’t a lawyer). He wants to take a broader moral point of view, bringing in philosophical and even literary writers from the whole Western tradition, to try and set the present moment in a much broader cultural context.

My purpose is…to articulate what values we are trying to save from attack. (p.xvii)

It’s worth noting that at the time he wrote and delivered these lectures, Ignatieff was the director of the Carr Center for Human Rights at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. I.e. he didn’t have an amateur, journalistic interest in these issues, but was a senior academic expert in them.

The text is full of Ignatieff’s trademark complex, subtle and often agonised moral reflections, mixing reportage on contemporary politics with references to writers of the past, continually teasing out subtle and often very illuminating insights. At the same time, as I worked my way through the rather laborious networks of arguments, I began to have less and less confidence in his arguments. Fine words butter no parsnips and seminars on moral philosophy can go on forever. What were his practical conclusions and recommendations?

Chapter 1. Democracy and the Lesser Evil

Democracies have often deployed coercive measures, seeing them as the lesser evil deployed to avert the greater evil of terrorism, civil conflict and so on. But it requires that the measures can be justified publicly, subject to judicial review, and have sunset clauses i.e. fixed lengths so they don’t become permanent features of the society.

Government infringement of its citizens’ rights must be tested under adversarial review. This idea recurs again and again in the text. The defining feature of democracies is intricate sets of checks and balances. If some rights have to be abrogated during emergencies, these suspensions can still be independently tested, by judges, by independent advisers, and they will eventually have to be revealed to the citizens for ultimate approval.

There is a spectrum of opinions on suspending civil liberties. At one end, pure civil libertarians maintain that no violations of rights can ever be justified. At the other end, pragmatists eschew moral principles and judge restrictive legislation purely on practical outcomes. Ignatieff is somewhere in the middle, confident that actions which breach ‘foundational commitments to justice and dignity – torture, illegal detention, unlawful assassination’ – should be beyond the pale. But defining precisely what constitutes torture, which detentions are or are not legal, where killing is or is not justified, that’s the problem area.

If lawyers and politicians and intellectuals are going to bicker about these issues forever i.e. there will never be fixed and agreed definitions, the one thing all good democrats can rally round is ‘to strengthen the process of adversarial review‘ i.e. to put in place independent review of government measures.

Chapter 2. The Ethics of Emergency

If laws can be abridged and liberties suspended during an ’emergency’, what remains of their legitimacy in times of peace? If laws are rules, and emergencies make exceptions to theses rules, how can their authority survive once exceptions are made? (p.25)

Chapter 2 examines the impact the emergency suspensions of civil liberties has on the rule of law and civil rights. Does the emergency derogation of normal rights strengthen or weaken the rule of law which we pride ourselves on in the Western democracies?

Ignatieff takes the middle ground that suspension of rights does not destroy them or undermine the normal practice of them, indeed helps to preserve them – provided they are ‘temporary, publicly justified, and deployed only as a last resort.’

Chapter 3. The Weakness of the Strong

Why do liberal democracies to habitually over-react to terrorist threats? Why do we seem so quick to barter away our liberties? One way to explain it is that majorities (i.e. most of us) are happy to deprive small and relatively powerless minorities (in the War against Terror, Muslims and immigrants) of their rights in order to achieve ‘security’.

But our opponents have rights, too. Just as in the debate over freedom of speech, any fool can approve free speech which they agree with, it’s harder to fight for the right of people to say things you dislike or actively think are wrong. But that is the essence of free speech, that is its crucial test – allowing the expression of opinions and views you violently disagree with, believe are wrong and immoral. It is precisely these kinds of views we should make every effort to allow free expression. ‘I may not agree with what you have to say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it,’ as Voltaire famously put it.

It’s easy and uncontroversial to defend the human rights of poets and activists who protested against apartheid or communist oppression. Much harder to insist that detainees being grabbed in Iraq or Syria or anywhere else in the Arab world and flown half way round the world and who might well be members of al Qaeda or ISIL, are provided just the same level of legal representation and rights as you and me. But that is exactly the test of our commitment to human rights: whether we extend them to our bitterest enemies.

Same goes for the other elements in the system of checks and balances, namely the other wings of government, the courts and the media. The temptation and the tendency is for everybody to ‘rally round the flag’ but this is exactly the opposite of what ought to happen. The American constitution vests power in the Presidency to take extraordinary steps in times of crisis or war but that is precisely the moment when the other elements in the division of power should increase their oversight of executive actions.

In his searing indictment of America’s mismanagement of the war in Iraq, Thomas E Ricks makes just this point. The build-up to the war involved questionable evidence (about weapons of mass destruction), wrong assumptions (about the response of the Iraqi population to foreign invasion), criminal mismanagement and the complete absence of a plan for the aftermath. While describing all this in forensic detail, Ricks points out that this is precisely the point when the administration’s plans should have been subjected to intense and critical scrutiny, something which might have saved tens of thousands of lives, billions of money, untold materiel. Instead, in the atmosphere of hysterical patriotism which gripped America, Congress rolled over and approved the plans with little serious examination and the press turned into bombastic cheerleaders. Both miserably failed to live up to the roles assigned to them in a free democratic society.

In fact most of this chapter is taken up with a useful and informative history of terrorism as a political tactic, starting with the Nihilists in nineteenth century Russia, then onto the two great loci of political violence, in revolutionary Russia and Weimar Germany, before turning to post-war terrorism in Latin America (Chile, Colombia, Peru), in Sri Lanka, in Israel, before cycling back to Europe and the 1970s terrorism of the Baader-Meinhof Gang and the Red Brigades, before a brief consideration of the separatist/nationalist terrorism faced by Britain in Northern Ireland and Spain in the Basque Country.

Ignatieff’s summary from this brief conspectus is that terrorism never works, it never achieves its political aims. The Russian and Weimar regimes weren’t undone by political violence but by the cataclysm of World War One and the Great Depression, respectively. Marxist terrorism in 1970s Germany and Italy aimed to create media spectaculars and psychological tipping points whereby the population would be woken from their slumber, rise up and overthrow the repressive bourgeois state etc. Complete failure with the terrorists either committing suicide or publicly recanting.

In Latin America political terrorism either produced the exact opposite of what was intended, for example in Argentina, where it helped a repressive military junta into power. Or, as in Sri Lanka and some extent Israel, it became a stalemate that extended over such a long period of time that it became the social reality of the country, giving rise to a society characterised by random atrocities, intimidation of local populations by the terrorists, and repressive state apparatuses. The host society wasn’t liberated and transformed but permanently degraded.

Ignatieff then considers how the British, on the whole, managed the Northern Ireland situation successfully by abrogating various civil rights but under the aegis of government and judicial review.

But part of the reason his review of traditional terrorism is so enjoyable is because it’s so familiar from decades of print and TV journalism – but this itself highlights, I think, a weakness of the whole book: which is that the campaign of al Qaeda and related groups was not to achieve political change (like the Marxist terrorist groups of the 1970s) or to achieve constitutional change / nationalist independence (as with the Basques or, at the other end of the Europe, the Kurdish terrorist groups in Turkey). Those aims could both be handled in Ignatieff’s model i.e. carefully incorporated into the existing political structures.

By contrast Al Qaeda wanted to destroy the West not only as a goal in itself but as part of an even grander aim which was to undermine the contemporary world order of nation-states and re-create the historical umma, the worldwide community of Muslims that was once held together under the caliphate of the prophet Mohammed. Osama bin Laden identified America as the chief bulwark of the existing world order, especially in the Arab world, where it subsidised and underpinned repressive states. So as a first step to remodelling the world, bin Laden ordered his followers to attack Western targets anywhere, at any time.

Ignatieff was writing in 2003. We had yet to have the 2004 Madrid train bombings (193 dead), the 7/7 2005 attacks in London (56 dead), the Boston Marathon bombing on 15 April 2013 (3 dead), the 18 March 2015 attack on a beach in Tunisia (21 dead), the 13 November 2015 attack at the Bataclan theatre in Paris (90 dead), the Manchester Arena bombing on 22 May 2017 (23 dead), plus numerous other Islamist atrocities in countries further afield.

If the central aim of al Qaeda and its affiliates is to kill and maim as many Westerners as possible, it’s difficult to see how this can be incorporated into any kind of political process. And in the next chapter Ignatieff indeed concludes that the organisation itself can only be defeated militarily.

Chapter 4. The Strength of the Weak

An examination of terrorism itself.

In this chapter I want to distinguish among forms of terrorism, identify the political claims terrorists use to justify violence against civilians, and propose political strategies to defeat them (p.82)

Ignatieff considers terrorism the resort of groups who are suppressed and oppressed, who have no voice and no say in the power structures which rule over them. He gives a handy categorisation of six types of terrorism:

insurrectionary terrorism aimed at the revolutionary overthrow of a state
loner or issue terrorism, aimed at promoting a single cause
liberation terrorism, aimed at the overthrow of a colonial regime
separatist terrorism, aiming at independence for a subordinate ethnic or religious group within a state
occupation terrorism, aimed at driving an occupying force from territory acquired through war or conquest
global terrorism, aimed not at the liberation of a particular group, but at inflicting damage and humiliation on a global power

With the last one sounding like it’s been made up to describe al Qaeda-style hatred of America.

Terrorism presents a classic challenge for liberals, who have traditionally been on the side of the underdog and oppressed minorities, from the early trade unions to blacks under apartheid, and so often have an instinctive sympathy for the social or political or economic causes of terrorism but who, obviously, want to stop short of supporting actual acts of violence. Where do you draw the line?

Ignatieff says the only practical solution is to ensure that the oppressed always have peaceful political means to address their grievances. Purely military means cannot solve terrorism. It requires political solutions, above all bringing the voiceless into peaceful political processes. He doesn’t mention it but I think of how the warring factions in Northern Ireland were cajoled into joining a political ‘peace process’ which promised to take seriously the concerns of all sides and parties, to listen to all grievances and try to resolve them in a peaceful, political way.

Mrs Thatcher said ‘we do not talk to terrorists’ but, rather as with free speech, it is precisely the terrorists that you should be talking to, to figure out how their grievances can be addressed and the violence be brought to an end.

Thus even if al Qaeda’s values come from completely outside the modern framework of human rights, even if they base themselves on Islamic traditions of jihad and unrelenting war against the infidel, even if they cannot be reasoned with but only crushed militarily, this doesn’t prevent Ignatieff making the obvious point that we in the West can still bring pressure to bear on many authoritarian Arab regimes to try and remove the causes of grievance which drive young men into these causes. These would include overt American imperialism; repressive police policies which enact brutal violence and deny human rights; lack of pluralistic political systems i.e. which allow subaltern voices a say and some influence. And so on (pages 99 to 101).

The weak and oppressed must be given a peaceful political alternative that enables them to rise up against the violence exercised in their name. (p.106)

The Arab future

Trouble is, a lot of this kind of hopeful rhetoric was claimed for the movements of the so-called Arab Spring of 2011, when authoritarian regimes were overthrown in Libya, Egypt and nearly in Syria. Just a few years later it was clear that the ‘spring’ comprehensively failed: an even more authoritarian regime was in place in Egypt, Libya had split into warlord-run areas and a ruinous civil war had bedded down in Syria which would pave the way for the rise of ISIS.

Personally, I think the countries in that part of the world which aren’t lucky enough to be sitting on vast reserves of oil will be condemned to perpetual poverty and conflict, because of:

the lack of traditions of individual civic responsibility and the complex matrix of civil society organisations which make the Western countries stable as politically stable as they are;
as the main offshoot of the above – universal corruption
the entrenched political tradition of strong rulers invoking ethnic nationalism or Islamic models of rule or both (Nasser, Gaddafi, Saddam)
what Ignatieff calls ‘the corruption and decay of the Arab and Islamic political order’ (p.152)
the economic backwardness of most Arab countries i.e. preponderance of subsistence agriculture
widespread lack of education
marginalisation / lack of education or political rights for women
the extraordinary population explosion (when I first visited Egypt in 1981 it had a population of 45 million; now it’s 110 million) which ensures widespread poverty
and now, the speedy degradation of the environment by climate change (loss of water and agricultural land)

One or two of these would be tricky challenges enough. All of them together will ensure that most countries in the Arab world will remain breeding grounds for angry, aggrieved and unemployed young men who can be persuaded to carry out atrocities and terrorist acts against domestic or Western targets, for the foreseeable future.

Chapter 5. The Temptations of Nihilism

This chapter addresses the way that, in the absence of peaceful talks, terrorist campaigns tend to degenerate into destruction and killing for their own sake, as does the behaviour of the authorities and security services set to combat them. Tit-for-tat killing becomes an end in itself. Violence begets violence in a downward spiral.

This is the most serious ethical trap lying in wait in the long war on terror that stretches before us. (p.115)

Ignatieff realises that this well-observed tendency can be used by opponents of his notion of ‘the lesser evil’ i.e. the moderate and constantly scrutinised, temporary abrogation of human rights. Their argument goes that what begins as a high-minded, carefully defined and temporary ‘abrogation’ of human rights law has so often in the past degenerated into abuse, which then becomes standard practice, becomes institutionalised, and then causes permanent damage to the democracies which implemented it.

As you’d expect, Ignatieff meets this claim by breaking the threat down into categories, and then analysing them and the moral problems and issues they throw up.

First, though, he starts the chapter with some low-pressure, enjoyably colourful discussion of Dostoyevsky’s novel, The Possessed – which describes a terrorist group which takes over a remote Russian town – and then of Joseph Conrad’s novel, The Secret Agent, which features a nihilistic character named the Professor, who walks round London with an early version of a suicide vest.

Part of the chapter addresses the practical, administrative problem of preventing anti-terrorist campaigns from descending into violence. But, as mention of the novels suggest, he also explores (as far as anyone can) the psychology of the nihilistic terrorist i.e. people who just want to destroy, for no purpose, with no political aim, for destruction’s sake.

It can be an individual who wants to make a name for themselves through a spectacular, for example Timothy McVeigh who carried out the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing that killed 168 people and injured 680. Lone actors like this are always going to be very difficult to detect or deter.

Then he discusses the Japanese doomsday cult known as Aum Shinrikyo which carried out the deadly Tokyo subway sarin attack in 1995, killing 13 commuters, seriously injuring 54 and affecting 980 more. Terrorists who (claim to) represent an ethnic or nationalist cause can, in principle, be negotiated with for at least two reasons: one is that negotiations may hold out the hope that some at least of their goals may be achieved; the other, is that, insofar as they represent an ethnic group, a population, this population can be worked on to reject the group or moderate its behaviour.

With single actors or death cults, levers of negotiation and bargaining are obviously absent. Having established the key characteristics of these kinds of actors, Ignatieff moves on to a detailed consideration of al Qaeda. In his view it has twisted Islamic teachings so completely as to become a death cult. The 9/11 bombers didn’t leave demands or any way to negotiate – they just wanted to strike a blow at the West, specifically America, and that meant killing as many Americans as possible.

His analysis is on the brief side (there are, obviously, hundreds of books about bin Laden and al Qaeda) but, as usual, throws up fascinating insights and ideas. a) It is impossible to negotiate with a suicide bomber because being negotiated out of detonating is, by definition, a failure of the mission they’ve taken on.

b) More subtly, an organisation that sets out to use suicide bombing as a strategy cannot fail because it has no defined, workable political goals or aims. Bin Laden’s aim of clearing Westerners out of Arab lands, overthrowing the existing Arab states, recreating the 7th century caliphate and implementing Sharia law in full, is not a practical programme, it is a utopian millennarian vision. It is so impractical, it is such a long-term and enormous goal, that true believers can’t, in a sense, be demoralised.

c) And this is where the promise of immortality comes in. Once true believers are promised direct entry into heaven, they have ceased to be political actors and, in this narrow sense, Ignatieff defines them as fanatics.

He adds a distinct and fascinating idea which is that all death cults, and most terrorist groups, have to have a theory which discredits the idea of civilian innocence. Obviously blowing up a load of people going to work in their offices is murder. So, just as obviously, terrorists who do it have been re-educated or indoctrinated not to see it that way. The most basic route is for their ideological leaders to persuade them that nobody is innocent; that so-called ‘civilians’ are as guilty as the acts of repression or infidelity or murder as the armies or forces of their countries.

The Algerian National Liberation Front used this defence to justify blowing up cafes full of civilians as part of their ‘war’. Scores of other terrorist groups use the same justification, erasing the difference between the soldier (a figure defined and attributed specific rights and responsibilities under international convention going back at least as far as the Geneva Conventions) and the civilian (who, under human rights law, is not responsible in warfare and should not be a target).

But this works both ways. For when terrorists are embedded in local populations, emerging to ambush soldiers then disappearing back into the crowd, a tendency develops for those soldiers to come to hate the civilian population and take out their anger and frustration on them. Happened in Vietnam (My Lai etc), happened in Iraq (Haditha etc). And of course all such breakdowns of military discipline it play into the terrorists’ hands by getting the population to move over to support them. That’s why terrorists work hard to trigger them.

So, blurring the difference between soldier and civilian can be practiced by both terrorist and security forces and always heads in the same direction, towards ever-growing atrocity and massacre. Eventually both sides are murdering unarmed civilians, as happened in Bosnia and Kosovo.

Something which distinguishes us from the terrorists is that liberal democracies put huge value on human life, and this particularly applies to civilian human life. Therefore the kinds of massacres which US troops carried out in Vietnam and Iraq sully the reputation and undermine the meaning of liberal democracy itself. I.e. they drag us closer to the indiscriminate violence of our enemies.

These pictures of fanatical death cults are by way of preparing the way for the second half of the chapter which moves on to try and define precisely when two anti-human rights tactics may be used, namely selective assassination and torture. Ignatieff is not an absolutist or civil libertarian i.e. he reluctantly admits that, in addressing the kind of nihilistic fanatics he has described, assassination may be the only way to eliminate people you can’t bargain with, and that extremely ‘coercive’ interrogation may be necessary to extract information from fanatics which may save lives.

This is a detailed discussion of contentious issues, but the bottom line is Ignatieff things they may be permitted, but so long as his basic criteria are fulfilled, namely that they are a) approaches of last resort, after all else has been tried b) and that some kind of independent judicial review or oversight is in place. It is when these kind of policies turn into secret death squads that a rules-based liberal democracy starts to be in trouble.

Ignatieff repeats some familiar objections to torture, namely that it simply doesn’t work, that it produces intense hatred which can motivate those who survive and are released into going on to carry out atrocities, and it degrades those tasked with carrying it out. There’s evidence of post-traumatic stress disorder suffered by American operatives tasked with torturing during the War on Terror.

Typically, Ignatieff adds another point I’d never considered which is that there is a slippery slope from torture to plain murder. This may be for two reasons: the tortured may be converted by the process into such inveterate enemies of the state that their interrogators realise they will never be rehabilitated; and, more sinisterly, the torturers realise they can never release their victims because they themselves, will eventually be implicated i.e. the truth will out. Therefore it’s easier all round just to bump them off. Hence the ‘disappeared’ in South American dictatorships, all those detainees who, after extensive torture, were taken out in helicopters and thrown into the sea. Torture doesn’t just not work, create new enemies and degrade the torturers – it creates a problem of what to do with the tortured? A downward spiral all the way.

Chapter 6. Liberty and Armageddon

The book ends with a bleak discussion of what may happen as and when terrorists acquire weapons of mass destruction i.e. terror attacks on a devastating scale. Are our democracies strong enough to withstand such attacks? How can we strengthen our institutions to ensure that they are?

Ignatieff has a number of suggestions about how to prevent the proliferation of terrifying WMDs. But he comes back to his fundamental position which is that the way to defend and strengthen liberal democracies in the face of increased terrorist threats is to make them more liberal and democratic, not less.

Other thoughts

1. Internecine killing

The text is continually spinning off insights and ideas which I found distracted me from the main flow. For example, the notion that every terror campaign, sooner or later, with complete inevitability, ends up terrorising and killing people on their own side – moderates and ‘sell-outs’ and anybody in their ethnic group or repressed minority who threatens to engage in political discussion with the oppressors. In a sense, moderates are more threatening to a terrorist group than their overt enemy, the repressive state, which is why so many terrorist groups end up killing so many people on their own side (p.104).

2. The threshold of repugnance

The savagery of the Algerian fighters for independence in the 1950s left a permanent scar on the national psyche of all concerned so that when, 30 years after independence (1962) in 1992, the ruling elite disallowed an election which would have given power to the new radical Islamist party, the country very quickly descended into a savage civil war, with Islamic terrorists and government security forces both murdering unarmed civilians they considered guilty of aiding their opponents.

Both sides, with generational memories of the super-violence of the struggle for independence, invoked it and copied it in the new struggle. There was little or no threshold of repugnance to deter them (p.105). Violent civil wars set new lows of behaviour with after-comers can then invoke. The whole process ratchets ever downwards.

3. The world is watching

There’s plenty of evidence that if a movement judges that it needs the help of the outside world (of the ‘international community’ which Ignatieff is so sceptical about in his previous books) then it will tailor its behaviour accordingly. It will, in other words, try to restrain violence.

The African National Congress knew it had strong support across the Western world and put its faith in international pressure eventually bringing a settlement, so that its political leaders (and its defenders in the West) chose to play down the violence of the movement’s activist wings (which, as per rule 1, above, were mostly directed against their own i.e. the black community, witness the invention and widespread use of ‘necklacing).

In other words, the international community counts. It can exert pressure. It can use its leverage to turn liberation movements away from terrorist methods. Up to a point. As long as the movement is well organised, as the ANC was and is. At the other extreme is the Revolutionary United Front (RUF), little more than a rag-tag band of psychopaths, who led an 11-year ‘civil war’, little more than a campaign of terror against their own populations (as described in stomach-churning detail in Anthony Loyd’s book, ‘Another Bloody Love Letter’). They had nothing whatsoever to gain from outside influence except being shut down. So with nothing to lose, they continued their killing sprees for 11 long years (1991 to 2002).

At the other end of the organisational scale, Russia was able to carry out atrocities and conduct a war of total destruction in Chechnya because they know no-one was looking (it was almost impossible for foreign journalists to get in) and nobody cared (it wasn’t a location of strategic significance, no oil, none of the racial discrimination the West gets so worked up about) so mass murder proceeded with barely a ripple in the Western press.

These examples prove a general rule which is that the ‘international community’ can have some moderating influence on some insurgences, terrorist campaigns and wars (p.98).

Notes and thoughts

This is a complex and sophisticated book. The language of human rights often segues into discussion of particular conventions and international declarations in such a way that to really follow the discussion you have to be pretty familiar with these documents and laws and rules.

I also found some of the political concepts which Ignatieff routinely throws around quite obscure and unfamiliar – communitarianism, the conservative principle, adversarial justification, the decision cycle and so on.

I got along with his first political book, ‘Blood and Belonging’, very well. Ignatieff began his discussions with detailed descriptions of the political situations in half a dozen countries, giving plenty of colour and a good feel for the place, its history and issues and people, before getting on to the philosophical discussion, and only applied a handful of relatively simple ideas in order to shed light on the nationalist conflict he was covering.

This book is the opposite. It is sustained at a high academic level, continually introducing new concepts and making fine distinctions and drawing subtle conclusions, with only passing reference to real world examples. It sustains a level of abstraction which I eventually found exhausting. I wasn’t clever enough, or educated enough in the concepts which Ignatieff routinely throws around, to really make the most of it. Probably the best way to read it is one chapter at a time, going back and working through the logic of his argument, chewing over the tumble of clever conclusions. It’s certainly the most demanding of Ignatieff’s half dozen politics books.

Seven days later

Having pondered and revisited the book for a week, maybe I can offer a better description of how the text works. The best bits of ‘Blood and Belonging’ were where Ignatieff shed light on the psychology of different types of nationalism (especially the crude sort of ethnic nationalism which so quickly degenerates into violence).

The same is true here, as well. The best bit about, say, the chapter on nihilism, is Ignatieff’s categorisation of different types of terrorist psychology, and then his exploration of what each psychology is, how it comes about and works in practice. This is fascinating and hugely increases the reader’s understanding, especially when he applies the categories to real historical examples.

What I found harder going, where I think the book comes adrift, is when he moves on to discuss how ‘we’ in liberal democracies ought to deal with the new post-9/11 terrorism threat. It’s at this point, throughout the book, that he keeps using his concept of ‘the lesser evil’ i.e. we should, temporarily, and with supervision by some kind of objective person like a judge, abrogate some of our treasured human rights in some circumstances, where it’s absolutely necessary – it’s these passages, and the entire concept of ‘the lesser evil’, which I sometimes struggled to understand and never found completely clear or convincing.

Ignatieff’s categorisations and definitions of types of society or politics or terrorism, and his descriptions of the psychologies behind them, I found thrilling because they’re so incisive and instantly clarified my own thinking; whereas his discussions of the ‘morality’ of the political response to terrorism, I found confusing and unsatisfactory.

Credit

The Lesser Evil: Political Ethics in an Age of Terror by Michael Ignatieff was published by Vintage in 2004. All references are to the 2005 Edinburgh University Press paperback edition.

New world disorder reviews

New world disorder reviews

Conspiracy to Murder: The Rwandan Genocide by Linda Melvern (2004)

“You have missed some of the enemies. You must go back there and finish them off. The graves are not yet full!”
(Radio Milles Collines)

“Go everywhere, spare no one, not even babies.”
(Lieutenant Bizumuremyi)

“No amount of its cash or its aid will ever wash its hands clean of Rwandan blood.”
(Lieutenant-General Roméo Dallaire who led the United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda, talking about the UN’s guilt)

Linda Melvern

Melvern is a seasoned investigative journalist who worked on the Sunday Times in the 1980s. In her introduction, she tells us she was putting the finishing touches to The Ultimate Crime, a history of the United Nation’s first fifty years, at the UN headquarters in New York, when the first reports of the Rwanda genocide started to come in in April 1994.

She was able to interview people within the UN hierarchy and monitor the institution’s ham-fisted response as events unfolded, and this forms the basis of her first book on the subject, A People Betrayed: The Role of the West in Rwanda’s Genocide (1995).

So why write another book on the same subject ten years later? The central reason is that during that time the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) was set up and went to work, tracking down and bringing to justice the Rwandan army and government officials responsible for the genocide. The ICTR’s work resulted in a wealth of new evidence, the coming to light of countless documents, letters, faxes and so on, as well as extensive eye-witness accounts of key meetings and events.

In addition, documents and paperwork regarding the role of Western nations such as Belgium, France, the US and UK had emerged, as well as memoirs by central players, most notably Lieutenant-General Roméo Dallaire who led the United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda (UNAMIR) and whose book Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda was published in 2003.

Using her contacts at the UN Melvern has amassed extensive records of communications, faxes, memos which passed between its senior officials, such as the Secretary-General himself, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, and his appointment as head of the United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda (UNAMIR), Jacques-Roger Booh-Booh, who didn’t get on at all with Dallaire, and did everything to subvert his authority.

And then there are documents and quotes from the international charities involved such as the International Committee of the Red Cross, Médecins Sans Frontières, Amnesty International, Oxfam, Africa Watch and more.

In other words, this book is an update of her previous one which takes account of the huge number of new documents and testimonies which had become available, and this explains why the book is littered with references to witnesses, witness accounts, interrogations, statements under oath, quotations from papers, memoirs, faxes, interviews and much more.

Scholarly apparatus

This explains why there is such a scholarly apparatus to the book, which has 100 pages of notes and appendices. The notes themselves are very thorough and I enjoyed reading some of the random factoids as much as the main text (such as the fact that ‘There are no surnames in Rwanda. Women do not take the name of their husbands, and children do not bear the name of their parents.’ p.285; or that Rwandan president Juvénal Habyarimana had his predecessor, Grégoire Kayibanda, who he overthrew in a coup, locked up and starved to death because Habyarimana had a voodoo superstition that if he spilled Kayibanda’s blood in any way, he would be haunted by his spirit, p.287).

The notes are followed by a long section on sources, detailing books, reports, papers and journals relating to the genocide. I can imagine these would be very useful for a scholar setting out to study the genocide.

There’s a 13-page chronology of Rwanda which starts in the colonial period, but once it arrives at the commencement of the civil war with the invasion of the RPF in October 1990 becomes surprisingly gripping.

And, most striking of all, Melvern includes the full text of The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. It’s only five pages long. And – according to my present understanding – completely failed to prevent the genocide in Rwanda, Saddam’s attempts to exterminate the Kurds, the mass murders in former Yugoslavia (Srebrenica, Kosovo), the Darfur genocide, mass murders in the Syrian civil war and what, nowadays, seems to be accepted as China’s repression and mass murders of Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang. Apart from these blips, it’s been a roaring success.

It’s worth quoting the official UN definition of genocide in full:

Genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

Killing members of the group
Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group
Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part
Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group
Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group

I’m interested to see the words ‘in part’. I thought genocide meant the intent to completely wipe out a group; I’m interested to see it’s significantly broader than that. I bet there’s vast scholarly debate on the subject…

Conspiracy to murder – the downsides

Terrible style

So much for the provenance of the book, what’s it like to read? Well unfortunately, despite the huge amount of research which Melvern has obviously put into the book, it suffers from some severe deficiencies. Very quickly you realise she writes a clunky, repetitive form of English, with odd, uncomfortable phrasing of even simple facts. Quite a few sentences felt like they’d been translated from another language and I frequently wondered whether English is Melvern’s first language, she sometimes struggles so badly to express herself in it.

Poor narrative skills

Bigger than that, though, is Melvern’s struggle to fully work through the material she’s amassed. The clunky English is often the expression of tortuous thinking.

The opening chapters giving the earlier history of Rwanda through the colonial period, the Hutu Revolution of 1959, the Habyarimana coup of 1973 and the build-up to the invasion of Rwanda by the Tutsi-led Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) in 1990, all these are basic facts which are admirably described in the books by Philip Gourevitch, Fergal Keane, David van Reybrouck or the Wikipedia entries.

But in Melvern’s hands they are told in a contorted way which I sometimes found hard to follow. For example, it was only because I’d read the other, much more clearly expressed accounts, that I could follow her description of the RPF’s origins in Uganda. She doesn’t bring out the key role played by the RPF leaders in Yoweri Museveni’s National Resistance Movement which overthrew Uganda’s dictator Milton Obote, and how that experience inspired them to think about attempting to overthrow their dictator, Juvénal Habyarimana.

The facts are all here but Melvern often lacks the ability to bring to the fore the ones that matter while leaving others in the background, to shape the facts into a narrative. Reading a book like this which completely lacks that skill makes you realise how important it is, particularly in factual-historical narratives.

Lack of interpretation

The same goes in spades for the end of the book. One of the concluding chapters looks in detail at the numerous (conspiracy) theories which have arisen around the shooting down of the Rwandan president’s private jet, which was what triggered the crisis. Melvern lists all the theories which have been put forward over the previous ten years by an impressive roster of interested parties, but she never manages to come to a conclusion. The more I read, the more confused I became. She doesn’t state which one she, as an investigative journalist who’s given it more time than you or I will ever manage, believes in (pages 260 to 266).

Even more glaring is the crude and clumsy way the book ends. The final chapter describes the setting up of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) but fails to stand back and give us an overview of its work. Instead it dives right into a detailed account of the proceedings against one of the central figures, Colonel Théoneste Bagosora, drilling down to such a detailed level that she quotes the cross-questioning Bagosora was subjected to in court by prosecuting council, Canadian lawyer Drew White (pages 281 to 283).

And then the book just stops, not quite in mid-sentence, but right in the middle of quoting the accusations White put to Bagosora and the latter’s indignant denials. It just stops, without any attempt at a conclusion or perspective.

I think all these flaws stem from Melvern’s apparent inability to think about the events she’s describing, to step back and place them in a wide-ranging intellectual or conceptual framework. Compare and contrast the terrific books on international affairs by Michael Ignatieff which I’ve just read. Ignatgieff is an intellectual to his fingertips, which means that he can’t describe any event in the real world without bringing to it fascinating and thought-provoking insights, placing it in a rich intellectual context, broadening individual moments out to make useful and interesting generalisations about civil war, humanitarian intervention and so on.

Melvern, by contrast, rarely if ever provides any insight into anything. She has amassed an awesome amount of documentation and arranged it in precise and accurate order, but this book doesn’t really reflect on any of it in any significant way.

Conspiracy to murder – the upsides

So far, so negative, and at moments in the first 50 or so pages I was tempted to put the book down for good and move on to something less clunky and more thoughtful. However, around page 60 the narrative is transformed with the UN decision to set up the United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda (UNAMIR). From this point onwards the book becomes first interesting and then absolutely riveting. I found myself gripped and thrilled by the narrative.

As explained, this isn’t because of any storytelling skills on Melvern’s part – selecting light and shade, carefully modulating the pace, dropping in selected insights and context – no, it’s because she has assembled a precise and specific and detailed account of the events of the genocide and these are, in themselves, gripping, horrifying and addictive. I went from feeling very meh about her so-so attempts to describe the historical background, to being utterly riveted. From page 60 to 260 I couldn’t put the book down.

The documents she has so carefully assembled allow Melvern to put together a meticulous day-by-day, and often hour-by-hour account of the key decisions made by the key players. Since she uses eyewitness testimony which emerged during ICTR trials, we are taken right into the rooms where the key decisions were made. You can see the sweat on the foreheads of the army chiefs as they agonise over what to do in the emergency meeting called as soon as news of the president’s plane crash (on 6 April 1994) arrives. You can smell the cigarette smoke and the paranoia.

Eyewitnesses testify to the specific words and phrases used by the senior army figures as they debate who should assume power, as they agree it must not look like a coup, as they allow Hutu Power exponents like Théoneste Bagosora to insist that the civilian Prime Minister Agathe Uwilingiyimana (a moderate Hutu) must not be allowed to take power. Witnesses testify to adjutants being sent into side rooms to phone through orders to the Presidential Guard. Within the hour Uwilingiyimana’s house was surrounded, then she was beaten and murdered (p.163).

Melvern includes transcriptions of phone calls made by ministers in the supposed interim government as the Presidential Guard knocked on their doors, made them and their families lie on the floor, then murdered them (p.151). It is terrifying.

On the government side, Melvern explains more clearly than anything else I’d read how the shot-down plane was carrying not only the president but the army chief of staff and key ministers so a real power vacuum appeared at the top of the Rwandan state (p.137). She shows how, although the exponents of Hutu Power had for a long time been developing a detailed plan for the complete extermination of the 10% or so of the population who were ethnic Tutsi, there was nonetheless initial confusion about who was to do what, and where power ultimately lay. It took some days before Jean Kambanda, a regional leader of the Hutu extremist party, the Republican Democratic Movement (MDR), was appointed Prime Minister of the caretaker government and was its nominal leader throughout the genocide.

In fact one of the many fascinating things that comes over from her super-detailed account is that power shifted throughout the three month period of the genocide. By the end even the senior army officers were scared of the lawless, murderous Interahamwe militia and the men who controlled it who are, at one point, named as Robert Kajuga, Bernard Maniragaba, and Ephren Nkezabera (p.232) with their political master being Mathieu Ngirumpatse, chairman of Habyariman’s party, the MRND (p.198).

One of the absolutely key things which comes over in her account is the centrality of the Rwandan Civil War. I hadn’t quite grasped that UNAMIR was solely set up to oversee the implementation of the Arusha Accords, signed in August 1993, which gave the RPF positions in a Broad-Based Transitional Government (BBTG) and in the national army.

Thus Dallaire arrived in the country 6 months before the genocide occurred and the early sections about his arrival are devoted to a very detailed consideration of what the accords demanded and how the Hutu Power die-hards within President Habyarimana’s cabinet and army absolutely refused to implement them. They would literally rather die than see RPF Tutsis in positions of power in the cabinet or the army.

Habyarimana’s government put as many obstacles as possible in the way of implementing the accords, and Melvern’s detailed explanation of how they did this, and which ministers in the government were responsible, and General Dallaire’s exasperated attempts to get the two side to co-operate, make for fascinating reading.

It also reinforces everything I’ve read in other accounts which is the idea that, as the Western sponsors of the peace deal, namely France, Belgium and America, brought pressure on Habyarimana, and as he showed signs of buckling, giving in and starting to implement the accords (i.e. integrating the Tutsi RPF into the Rwandan army and cabinet) that’s when the hardline Hutu faction decided to get rid of him. Hence the widely-held theory that it was soldiers, militia or even mercenaries following orders from Hutu Power extremists, who assassinated their own president and then blamed it on the Tutsi RPF.

And immediately put into force a long-gestated plan to exterminate the entire Tutsi population of Rwanda, some 1.5 million men, women, children and babies.

Radio Milles Collines

Her treatment of Radio Milles Collines is a good example of Melvern’s strong points. All the other accounts certainly mention the radio station and its role in spewing poisonous racist genocidal propaganda from its founding in July 1993 and then going into overdrive during the period of the actual genocide (7 April to 15 July 1994).

It is typical that Melvern gives it its full name – Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines – and thereafter refers to its proper initialism (RTLMC).

But, more importantly, Melvern explains who founded it, how it was funded, how it was run. She names the director-general Félicien Kabuga; the director Ferdinand Nahimana who was a respected historian; Jean Bosco Barayagwiza, chairman of the executive committee, who was also policy director in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and so provided a direct conduit from the genocidal government; editor-in-chief Gaspard Gahigi, and the day-to-day manager, Phocas Habimana. She gives us pen portraits of the four main broadcasters:

Kantano Habimana, who called for “those who have guns [to] immediately go to these cockroaches [and] encircle them and kill them…”
Valérie Bemeriki, the only female presenter, who encouraged the use of machetes not guns to eradicate the Tuti, telling her listeners to “not kill those cockroaches with a bullet — cut them to pieces with a machete”
Noël Hitimana
and Georges Ruggiu, a white man from Belgium who urged listeners to kill Tutsis and told them that “graves were waiting to be filled”

So Melvern’s great strong point is that, in the words of the old cliché, she names the guilty men. And by naming them she makes the entire thing incredibly more real and present. Instead of being a faceless emitter of toxic propaganda, Radio Milles Collines becomes a much more real institution, populated by flesh and blood people with specific personalities. Via eyewitness accounts we sit in on some of the editorial meetings, we are told how the poison messages were sent by named officials in the army or Hutu Power leadership, she quotes from the broadcasts.

We get a feel for the smirkingly jokey style of Valérie Bemeriki and we get several pages of the account Ruggiu gave years later to the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda of, on several occasions, being shown round roadblocks in Kigali by the side of which were piles of bodies of people who had been hacked to pieces. He noticed that some of them were still breathing and suggested to the Interahamwe that they shoot dying to put them out of their misery, but the blood thirsty young men just laughed and said the ‘cockroaches’ weren’t worth a bullet (p.209).

So every element of the genocidal regime is treated in much more detail than in other accounts, and the repeated references to specific named individuals responsible for specific genocidal decisions and actions begins to build them up into real people. You can see why Melvin’s research was quoted in court proceedings against the génocidaires and why she is liberally quoted on the Wikipedia pages about many of them. It’s because she does such a good job of associating named individuals with specific meetings in specific locations which took specific murderous decisions.

She appears to have set out to document every single instance in which Tutsi were killed, even when it was ‘only’ a handful, documenting the time and place and numbers and the police or militia or army leaders in charge. In this sense the book is like a very long charge sheet.

The trials

And this brings us to another positive aspect of the book, which is the way she then follows these named individuals into their afterlives, on the run from the authorities, arrested, and then their court proceedings at the ICTR.

All the other books I’ve read roll straight on from the genocide to the refugee crisis in eastern Zaire, to the regrouping of the génocidaires in the camps, to the eventual invasion of eastern Zaire by the RPF, on to the overthrow of President Mobutu and so on, in a continuous sweep of unfolding history.

Melvern ignores all that, ends her main narrative with the victory of the RPF in July 1994, and then switches her focus to the efforts to bring the génocidaires to justice. And because she has named them so consistently throughout the text and, as far as the evidence allows, pinned them to specific meetings and decisions, by the end of the book these guys are more than just names, they have the same kind of monstrous reality as Goebbels or Himmler.

Twelve of the leading Rwandan génocidaires and the sentences they received at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR)

The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda

This focus on trials prompted me to do a bit of searching on the internet and Immediately discovered the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda’s website. As far as I can see this shut down in 2015, along with the court, some 20 years after it was set up. But it contains a simple but fascinating page listing all 92 genocidaires who were brought to with full details of the charges and their sentences.

Once I discovered this I began to look up the individuals Melvern mentions, for example the man who emerges as the closest thing to a mastermind of the genocide, Bagosora and then go on to surf through the documents relating to his trial.

Fascinating to see how so many of the people she mentions in the book were indeed brought to justice (including the popular singer Simon Bikindi, who wrote songs and made speeches inciting the Hutu majority to liquidate the Tutsi.)

We learn about the trial of Hassan Ngeze, director and editor of the Kangura magazine which published the ‘Hutu Ten Commandments’ in its December 1990 edition and played a key role in spreading Hutu supremacist ideology. During the genocide, Ngeze helped organise the Impuzamugambi militia and is said to have personally supervised and taken part in torture, mass rape and killings of Tutsis.

About Matthieu Ngirumpatse and Edouard Karemera, key figures in organising the genocide who were both sentenced to life imprisonment. The RTLM directors Ferdinand Nahimana and Jean Bosco Barayagwiza, mentioned above, were both given life sentences.

Venturing beyond the ICTR website, I discovered that the smirking RTLM announcer Valérie Bemeriki was convicted by a gacaca or local community court and sentenced to life imprisonment which she is currently serving in Gikondo prison, Kigali.

Main findings and insights

The Rwandan genocide was preventable. Decisive intervention by a sizeable and properly armed force could have stopped it.

The West behaved shamefully. After ten of its peacekeepers were murdered, Belgium withdrew the rest and the Belgian foreign minister Willy Claes rang round other nations telling them to withdraw their troops as well, claiming they’d all be massacred (p.219).

It’s a complicated series of events, and Melvern documents how arguments and debates and discussions influence a body like the United Nations, but there was a catalogue of failings which she anatomises in great detail. One of these was that Dallaire’s alarmed messages were often intercepted and superceded by the far more calm and complacent assessments of the situation by Jacques-Roger Booh-Booh.

I knew the US not only downplayed the genocide but actively undermined the UNAMIR force. As the genocide got underway, the Americans argued for downscaling the UN presence against all Dallaire’s protests.

The US put every obstacle in the way. (p.234)

But it was news to me that the UK took America’s side and also made every effort to downplay the situation, to resist requests for help, only reluctantly sending a fleet of clapped out lorries towards the end of the murdering. David Hannay, Baron Hannay of Chiswick (Winchester and New College, Oxford) was our man at the UN, arguing that we shouldn’t intervene to save the genocide victims. John Major was British Prime Minister. Eternal shame.

To be fair to the Western powers, Melvern’s account brings out how a number of players, starting with the Rwandan government, managed to hoodwink people for some time by portraying the violence as a fresh outbreak of the civil war. In other words, some Western officials and most of the Western media thought it was just a resumption of the hostilities which had characterised the country since the October 1990 invasion.

These people, exemplified by U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Madeleine Albright, later claimed they weren’t properly briefed by the UN bureaucracy, and she shows how there’s a flicker of truth in this, for example the way Booh-Booh doctored and toned down the accurate factual briefs an anguished Dallaire was sending daily from Kigali.

But it doesn’t hold up as much of a defence, because the foreign ministers of some other countries quickly grasped what was going on and spoke out against it early and strong, notably Colin Keating ambassador from New Zealand and the ambassadors from the Czech Republic, Spain, Argentina who lobbied hard for the massacres to be formally defined as a genocide. But the representatives of America and Britain vetoed this and they had the decisive say. Shame.

It goes without saying that the French government:

helped the genocidal regime at every opportunity
had military advisers at every level of the Rwandan army and Presidential Guard who did absolutely nothing to intervene or prevent the massacre
continued to break sanctions and fly in weapons to arm the murderers even after the genocidal massacres had begun
offered refuge to the wife and relatives of the assassinated president – some of the hardest core promulgators of racist, supremacist, genocidal Hutu Power ideology – in Paris
and then sent in a massive consignment of troops and equipment, not to stop the genocide, but to set up a safe haven in the western part of Rwanda into which over a million Hutu refugees, including the entire genocidal government, leaders of the murderous militias, could flee and be safe from the advancing RPF

“It was the French government which facilitated the cohesive migration of the interim government, in effect the political, military and administrative leadership of the genocide.” (p.250)

and then, when the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda was established, sent emissaries, journalists and historians to meet its new head, South African judge Richard Goldstone, to tell him that the stories about the genocide were simply untrue (p.275)

And then when the genocide was over… the French ambassador to the UN, Jean-Bernard Mérimée, blamed the UK and the USA for everything (p.260)

The French government stood shoulder to shoulder every step of the way with the administrators of the greatest genocide since the Holocaust. Even after the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) had conquered the whole of the country and brought the genocide to a halt – the only power on earth which acted to do so – the French continued to undermine them in every way possible, blame them for shooting down the president’s plane, accusing the RPF of massacres while conveniently sheltering, supporting and overlooking the crimes of their own Hutu clients. Viva la France!

RPF official Tito Rutaremara documented fifty-six ways in which the militias killed people in the genocide the French claimed never happened, including using machetes, clubs studded with nails, screwdrivers, hammers, hoes, spades and so on (p.253). Pregnant women were commonly disembowelled. Men had their penises cut off. Young children were chopped in half.

Accounts tend to focus on the anti-Tutsi propaganda and massacres, but Melvern brings out in some detail that many of the victims were moderate Hutus, who the Hutu fanatics saw as traitors to their own race, starting with the Hutu Prime Minister and all the moderate members of Habyarimana’s cabinet who were murdered in their homes within hours of the plane crash.

She also brings out the north-south divide in the country. The Hutu Power heartland was in the north and sometimes Hutus from the south were murdered indiscriminately simply because they were southerners. Up to 800,000 Tutsis were slaughtered, but as many as 200,000 Hutus were, too.

Main conclusion

Arriving exhausted at the end of the book, after 284 pages of gruellingly detailed evidence, one big conclusion leapt out at me. Gourevitch and Keane’s accounts both betray their nice white guy bewilderment and incomprehension at the scale and ferocity of the killing. Both men say, in effect, I have no idea why this happened.

Reading Melvern’s book totally explains why it happened. She explains how Hutu-Tutsi tension was over a century old, but received its modern animus as long ago as 1959 when the Hutu Revolution swept away the Tutsi monarchy, amid the usual feverish revolutionary rhetoric about overthrowing the exploiters and taking back their country for themselves.

She shows how this rhetoric never subsequently went away but became entrenched and embedded at every level of Rwandan society. Hutu propagandists, of which there were many, tried to make it a central plank of state education that the Tutsi were not Rwandan at all, but invaders from the North who had oppressed and enslaved the virtuous Hutu.

There was continual low-level harassment of Tutsis from independence in 1962 right through to 1994, which occasionally rose to the higher level of localised massacres. Real massacres. Hundreds and sometimes thousands of innocent Tutsis were hacked to pieces or hammered to death at intervals and various locations throughout the 1960s and 70s.

“I would like to inform the chamber that this hatred existed for a very long time, since 1959 in particular, until the time when the genocide took place in 1994.” (Militia leader and ICTR prosecution witness Omar Serushago, quoted on page 169)

So this was emphatically not a harmonious society living in peace. It was a society riven with inter-ethnic tension, in which localised pogroms broke out again and again, in which media at all levels – papers, magazines and radios – pumped out a continuous stream of anti-Tutsi propaganda.

In other words, closer familiarity with the problems of Rwandan society turns your attitude around 180 degrees, from wondering how such a thing could ever have happened, to wondering why it didn’t happen sooner.

In a sense the interest in the story is that such ferocious hatred had to wait so long to burst out into the open. And it’s interesting that it only did so under the stress of three Big Events:

In 1989 there was a worldwide glut of raw materials which led to a collapse in the price for Rwanda’s main exports, tea and coffee, which itself led to widespread poverty, misery and the traditional search for scapegoats. The government encouraged the 90% Hutu population to blame ‘Tutsi exploiters’ in much the same way the Nazi government encouraged the German population to blame all their tribulations on the Jews. So: Economic stress.
In October 1990 the small Rwandan Patriotic Force, soon to be led by Paul Kagame, invaded the north of the country, starting what became known as the Rwandan civil war, which underwent fluctuating fortunes for the invader and the government but led, eventually, to a peace treaty, the Arusha Accords, signed in the autumn of 1993. So: Civil war.
Assassination of the president. On the night of 6 April 1994 Juvénal Habyarimana’s plane was shot down as it came in to land at Kigali airport. It was the middle of the night so families across the country heard about it on the TV news, which spread the rumour that the country was once again, suddenly, under treacherous attack. All the people the journalists spoke to remember where they were when they heard the news. It was a JFK or 9/11 moment. Everyone knew something terrible was going to happen, a state of extreme crisis was created. So: mysterious assassination of the country’s leader.

And then there’s the fourth factor or element, which isn’t quite an event but rather the thing Melvern devotes her book to, which is:

The plan. Rwanda was a highly regimented, hierarchical and organised society. Since the RPF invasion of October 1990, influential elements in the cabinet, the civil service and above all the military, including the sinister Zero Network, had been making detailed plans to carry out a systematic, well-organised extermination of all the Tutsis which would end the Tutsi Problem forever.

So if you want a summary of why the Rwandan genocide took place, it goes something like this:

Generations-long inter-ethnic hatred directed from the Hutu majority against the Tutsi minority.
Deep rural depression, affecting the living standards of most of the population and exacerbating existing tensions and resentments.
Invasion of the country by a largely Tutsi force leading to civil war which could easily be portrayed as an attempt to reverse the Hutu revolution and re-subject the Hutu population to slavery and serfdom.
The sudden, terrifying and mysterious assassination of the president leading to widespread panic and hysteria.
At which (perfect psychological) moment the Hutu Power strategists immediately began implementing a far-reaching and well-worked-out plan for mass extermination, rousing a hard core of about 100,000 fanatical Hutu nationalists, at all levels of local government, who used lists of Tutsi names and addresses to drive from one neighbourhood to another, from one village to another, systematically rounding up all the Tutsi ‘spies and traitors’ who they accused of planning to help the invaders complete the reconquest of their country, and methodically hacking them to pieces with machetes, in a bid to end the ‘Tutsi Problem’ forever.

Surely if you put it like that, the Rwandan genocide is far from incomprehensible but can be seen as the result of a series of stresses (poverty, civil war) applied to a society already boiling over with seething hatred, all of which were ruthlessly exploited by the genocidaires who Melvern goes to such lengths to identify and provide evidence directly relating them to the killing.

Surely a good grasp of the background and the sequence of events makes the genocide seem the reverse of incomprehensible – it comes to seem human, all too human.

Credit

Conspiracy to Murder: The Rwandan Genocide by Linda Melvern was published by Verso Books in 2004. All references are to the revised 2006 paperback edition.

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Putting coronavirus death rates into perspective

So far 177 deaths from coronavirus have been reported in the UK and the media are full of wild speculation about how big the death toll could eventually become. They stoke up hysteria by adding in the ever-increasing figures from Italy and Spain, and showing the empty freeways of Los Angeles or Venice abandoned to the fishes as if that’s going to be us, soon.

I just want to calm things down, and take a minute to look at the ordinary background rate of deaths in the United Kingdom, and try to put all these numbers in perspective.

In my opinion, this involves really grasping how common death is in the UK. In 2018 616,000 deaths were recorded in the UK. A little maths shows that that is an average of 1,687 every day, or 70 per hour.

All I’m suggesting is that people stop and meditate on that figure for a minute.

If you live your life through the media, through the newspapers and magazines, the internet, social media, film and TV, you get the impression that everyone is young and sexy, and is going to live forever.

Death is only occasionally reported in all these optimistic media, almost all of which are funded by adverts showing images of astonishingly beautiful healthy people buying cars, or meeting at nightclubs, or holidaying on golden sands.

This is all a misleading lie. In reality a large number of people in the UK are ill, suffer from chronic health conditions or disabilities.

And about 616,000 of these die every year. 616,000 is the average, ordinary, ‘normal’ rate of background deaths. On average someone dies in the UK every minute.

616,000 strikes me as a huge number of deaths. If you think about the care homes and nurses and doctors required to give these mostly elderly people end-stage care, the ambulance drivers and paramedics and pharmacists, and then the funeral homes and crematoria and their staff, then you begin to realise that there is a huge infrastructure devoted to the management of death in the UK.

It is a big subject and a big sector of the economy which almost never gets any media coverage and which, therefore, people rarely think or talk about until it’s their relatives dying.

Consider with the amount of publicity that pregnancy and birth get, from all the magazines and products surrounding pregnancy to media representations of actual births in popular TV shows such as Call The Midwife.

Then compare and contrast with media representations of death – not the sensational deaths of film and TV thrillers – but ordinary everyday death, slowly expiring in a hospital ward, doubly incontinent, your body full of tubes, pumped full of drugs and painkillers.

You rarely see it accurately portrayed, do you? Instead the media usually only report on exceptional deaths, such as the occasional terrorist atrocity or motorway pile-up or the death of a celebrity.

All of which gives the quite false impression that, somehow, death is a rare and horrific event which we should all be shocked and terrified by. Whereas, what I’m trying to establish is that death is surprisingly common. 1 a minute, 1,687 a day, 616,000 a year.

My point is that death is all around us all the time. It is not only an inevitable part of life, it is quite a significant part of the British economy, with maybe a million or so personnel, in total, devoted to managing it.

So now let’s return to the coronavirus outbreak. Maybe the total deaths in the UK will rise to match Italian rates. Maybe it will hit 3,000, 10,000, 20,000. You can see why the government wants to control the spread (ideally to halt the spread, though that seems unlikely in any country which is not a totalitarian regime) in order to reduce the impact on the existing health services which are already running at capacity.

I understand all of that. But just in terms of total deaths, even 20,000 fatalities from coronavirus would only represent 3% of the standard background rate of 616,000.

I’m not saying every one of those deaths doesn’t count. But where was the national mourning and lamentation over the 616,000 who died in 2018? There was none because we all of us get on with our busy lives, rarely thinking about the elderly and frail who are dying in our midst all the time, never giving the subject or the numbers a second thought.

All I am suggesting is that a proper understanding of the relative commonness of death in our country ought to place a few thousand more deaths in their proper perspective, and maybe moderate and damp down the hysteria and panic which the media are helping to stoke up.

How deadly is the coronavirus? It’s still far from clear by Dr John Lee in the Spectator (28 March 2020)

1 Comment

by Simon on March 21, 2020 • Permalink

Posted in Biology, Politics

Tagged Call The Midwife, Coronavirus, death, death toll, deaths, media, pandemic, television, UK

Posted by Simon on March 21, 2020

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2020/03/21/coronavirus-uk-death-rates/

How students, academics, artists and galleries help to create a globalised, woke discourse which alienates ordinary people and hands political power to the Right

‘As polls have attested [traditional Labour voters] rejected Labour because it had become a party that derided everything they loved.’
(John Gray in The New Statesman)

As of January 2020, Labour has 580,000 registered members, giving it the largest membership of any party in Europe, and yet it has just suffered its worst election defeat since 1987. How do we reconcile these contradictory facts?

Trying to make sense of Labour’s catastrophic defeat in the 2019 General Election has prompted a flood of articles and analyses, most of which rightly focus on the distorting effects of Brexit. But I was fascinated to read several articles, by writers from the Left and the Right, which also attribute the defeat to more profound changes which have taken place in the Labour Party itself, that:

The decline of the traditional, manual-labouring working class, the decline in Trades Union membership and the increasing diversity of types of work and workplace, with the rise of part-time and zero hours contracts, now mean that the only section of society which Labour can entirely rely on is the vote of students, academics and middle-class, urban, university-educated progressives – writers, artists, film-makers, actors and the like – in other words, the cultural élite.
Students and academics and artists and film-makers are vastly more woke and concerned about the cultural issues which make up political correctness – feminism, #metoo, Black Lives Matter, LGBT+ issues and trans rights – these issues matter hugely more to them than to the rest of the population. Why? Because they’re well fed, they have the time, and the education.

1. ‘Why Labour Lost’ by John Curtice in The Spectator

John Curtice is Professor of Politics at the University of Strathclyde and Senior Research Fellow at the National Centre for Social Research. His article in the Spectator (in fact extracts from a speech) is measured and cautious, but includes the following revealing statements:

Where does the [Labour] party go from here? Well, you certainly need to understand where you are at. This is no longer a party that particularly gains the support of working-class voters. Although it does still do relatively well in places that you might call working-class communities. This, at the moment, is a party that has young people, it has graduates, and their distinctive characteristic is that they are socially liberal. These are the people who are remain-y. These are people who are not concerned about immigration…

… now the party should run with the grain of what its got, which is young, socially liberal, university-educated voters…

This is where source of the new members who flocked into the Labour Party as it became clear that Jeremy Corbyn was running for leadership in 2015: young, socially liberal, aware and radical students or former students, who elected and then re-elected the old school, radical Socialist leader, Jeremy Corbyn.

Image result for labour party membership graph

UK political party membership

So if it has such an enormous membership, why did Labour lose so badly? Obviously Brexit played a large part, but so – every single post mortem and account of anyone who canvassed on the doorsteps indicates – did the public’s profound dislike and distrust of Jeremy Corbyn himself.

To put in bluntly: the half million or so members of the Labour Party repeatedly voted for a leader who was shown time after time to be incompetent and unelectable. And in so doing cemented the shift from Labour being a party of the working class, to it becoming a party which mostly represents the bien-pensant, socially liberal, urban, professional middle classes.

2. ‘Why the Left Keep Losing’ by John Gray in the New Statesman

I very much enjoy Gray’s detached scepticism. Like me, he starts from the belief that humans are only another type of animal, mammals who happen to be able to stand up, speak and make things and as a result have developed an over-inflated sense of their own importance, but whose main achievement, in the long run, may turn out to be making planet earth uninhabitable.

Gray rightly gives pride of place to Brexit in this long analysis of what went wrong for Labour. But it is set in the context of a broader attack on the self-defeating progressive strain within the party.

He starts by enjoying the way the progressive liberal-minded politically correct have been shocked to discover that they don’t own the electorate and that things don’t appear to be smoothly trundling along fixed railway lines towards their version of a progressive Nirvana.

For the two wings of British progressivism – liberal centrism and Corbynite leftism – the election has been a profound shock. It is almost as if there was something in the contemporary scene they have failed to comprehend. They regard themselves as the embodiment of advancing modernity. Yet the pattern they imagined in history shows no signs of emerging. Any tendency to gradual improvement has given way to kaleidoscopic flux. Rather than tending towards some rational harmony, values are plural and contending. Political monotheism – the faith that only one political system can be right for all of humankind – has given way to inescapable pluralism. Progress has ceased to be the providential arc of history and instead become a prize snatched for a moment from the caprice of the gods.

He is describing that state of blank incomprehension and incredulity which we have seen all across the progressive cultural élite (writers, commentators, film-makers, actors, playwrights, poets, novelists and academics) ever since Leave won the Brexit referendum (23 June 2016).

The root cause is because progressives don’t understand that the majority of people are not like them – didn’t go to university, don’t agonise every day about the slave trade and trans rights, don’t have cushy office jobs writing books and articles.

Because many people in Britain struggle to earn enough to keep a roof over their heads and feed their children. Many people never read books or magazine articles and only read newspapers for the football and racing results. In fact many people in this country – up to 8 million adults, a fifth of the population – are functionally illiterate. (Adult Illiteracy In The UK)

Ignoring these most basic facts about the country they live in and the people they live among, progressives think everyone is like them, deep down, whether they know it or not – because progressives are convinced that their values are the only correct values and so must inevitably triumph.

Given this mindset, the only reason they can conceive for their repeated failures is that it’s all due to some right-wing conspiracy, or Russians manipulating the internet, or the first past the post system, or the patriarchy, or the influence of the right-wing media, or institutional racism, or any number of what are, in effect, paranoid conspiracy theories.

A much simpler explanation doesn’t occur to them: that the majority of the British people do actually pretty much understand their ideas and values and simply – reject them.

Gray makes a detour to demolish the progressive case for changing the electoral system, the case the Liberals and Social Democratic Party and then the Lib Dems have been making all my adult life.

Because they don’t understand the nature of the population of the country they live in, Gray says, it rarely crosses the progressive mind to consider that, if we introduced some other form of electoral system such as proportional representation, it would in all probability not usher in a multicultural Paradise, but might reveal the electorate as being even more right-wing than we had imagined. Progressives easily forget that in the 2014 election UKIP won nearly 4 million votes. If we had an elementary system of proportional representation, that would have given them 80 MPs!

Progressives talk of building the kind of majority they want, as if it somehow already latently exists. More likely, parties of the far right would set the political agenda, as they do throughout much of the continent. If you want a European-style voting system, you get a European style of politics.

Sceptics love ironies and Gray is a turbo-charged sceptic, he revels in paradoxes and ironic reversals. Thus he enjoys the idea that Tony Blair’s enthusiasm for modernising New Labour, for the glamorous appeal of a global economy and for the unlimited immigration which went with it, ended up shafting his own party.

New Labour’s unthinking embrace of globalisation and open borders produced the working-class revolt against economic liberalism and mobilised support for Brexit.

A key element of this has been the unforeseen consequence of Blair and Brown’s idea to send 50% of the British population to university.

The result over the past fifteen years or so has been a huge increase in the number of young people with degrees, people who – if they did a humanities degree, certainly – will have been exposed to an exhilarating mix of Western Marxism, feminism, anti-racism, post-structuralism and the whole gamut of progressive ideas which come under the rubric of ‘Theory’ or ‘Critical Theory’. (What is critical theory)

I feel confident of this terrain since this is precisely the exhilarating mix of ideas which I absorbed as an English student back in the 1980s, when we thought reading Roland Barthes and Jacques Lacan and Walter Benjamin and Jacques Derrida would somehow sort out the Miners’ Strike and overthrow Mrs Thatcher, much like the rioting students of 1968 thought that reading Michel Foucault would usher in the Millennium.

But it didn’t, did it?

It turns out that clever students reading clever books – devoting months of your life to studying ‘the death of the author’, Gramsci’s theory of cultural hegemony or Derrida’s notion of deconstruction – doesn’t really change anything. And then they all go out into the real world and become lawyers and accountants. Or TV producers and writers. Or they remain in academia and teach this self-reinforcing and weirdly irrelevant ideology to a new generation of young acolytes.

Gray devotes a central section of his essay to the baleful impact which contemporary woke academia and the progressive ideology it promotes have had on actual politics.

If only people aged between 18 and 24 had voted in the general election, Corbyn would have won an enormous majority. No doubt this is partly because of Corbyn’s promise to abolish student tuition fees and the difficulties young people face in the housing and jobs markets. But their support for Corbyn is also a by-product of beliefs and values they have absorbed at school and university. According to the progressive ideology that has been instilled in them, the West is uniquely malignant, the ultimate source of injustice and oppression throughout the world, and Western power and values essentially illegitimate.

Humanities and social sciences teaching has been largely shaped by progressive thinking for generations, though other perspectives were previously tolerated. The metamorphosis of universities into centres of censorship and indoctrination is a more recent development, and with the expansion of higher education it has become politically significant. By over-enlarging the university system, Blair created the constituency that enabled the Corbynites to displace New Labour. No longer mainly a cult of intellectuals, as in Orwell’s time, progressivism has become the unthinking faith of millions of graduates.

When Labour voters switched to Johnson, they were surely moved by moral revulsion as well as their material interests. As polls have attested, they rejected Labour because it had become a party that derided everything they loved. Many referenced Corbyn’s support for regimes and movements that are violently hostile to the West. Some cited anti-Semitism as one of the evils their parents or grandparents had gone to war to defeat. For working class voters, Labour had set itself against patriotism and moral decency.

Compare and contrast Gray’s summary with this excerpt from an article by Toby Young, who did some canvassing for a friend standing as a Tory candidate in Newcastle. All the working class people he spoke to said they were going to vote Conservative, often for the first time in their lives. This was partly because many wanted to get Brexit done, but also:

Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters have talked a good deal about winning back these working class voters, but his policy positions haven’t been designed to appeal to them. I’m not just talking about his ambivalence on Brexit – there’s a widespread feeling among voters who value flag, faith and family that Corbyn isn’t one of them. Before he became Labour leader in 2015, he was an energetic protestor against nearly every armed conflict Britain has been involved in since Suez, including the Falklands War. He’s also called for the abandonment of Britain’s independent nuclear deterrent, the withdrawal of the UK from NATO and the dismantling of our security services – not to mention declining to sing the National Anthem at a Battle of Britain service in 2015. From the point of view of many working class voters, for whom love of country is still a deeply felt emotion, Corbyn seems to side with the country’s enemies more often than he does with Britain. (Britain’s Labour Party Got Woke – And Now It’s Broke)

Immediately after the election I read an interview with a Labour activist in a northern constituency which was home of several army barracks of the British Army. She said many people considered Corbyn a traitor who was a more enthusiastic supporter of groups like Hamas and the IRA than of our own armed forces.

The discrepancy between how woke, over-educated commentators interpreted the Brexit vote and the reality on the ground was epitomised by disputes about whether it involved some kind of nostalgia for the British Empire. I read numerous articles by academics and progressive commentators saying Brexit was the result of entrenched racism and/or nostalgia for the days when Britain was Great.

But on Radio 4 I heard Ruth Smeeth, the Labour MP for Stoke-on-Trent North, saying she’d been reading London-based, college-educated commentators claiming that the people who voted Brexit were nostalgic for the British Empire, and went on quite crossly to say people voting Brexit had nothing to do with the bloody British Empire which hardly any of them remember…

It’s because where they live there’s widespread unemployment, lack of housing, the schools are poor, the infrastructure is falling to pieces and they just think they’ve been ignored and taken for granted by London politicians for too long. And being told they’re ignorant white racist imperialist chavs by posh London liberals doesn’t exactly help.

This is the problem Rebecca Long-Bailey tried to address a few weeks ago when she called for a patriotic progressivism. She had obviously seen how Corbyn’s support for Britain’s enemies lost him huge swathes of working class support, the support of not only soldiers and sailors and air force personnel, but all the families of those people, the average squaddie and seaman who have often come from rough working class backgrounds and for whom a career in the services, with the training which goes along with it, is a welcome way out of a life of low expectations.

‘We can take the Labour party back into power. Here’s how’ by Rebecca Long-Bailey

But on ‘patriotism’ Long-Bailey is caught between two forces, the common sense views of the majority of the British public and the hyper-liberal progressive values of the modern Labour Party’s middle-class and student base. Just as she is on transgender rights and anti-Semitism and dwelling endlessly on the evils of the slave trade – because the majority of the population doesn’t hold these views, but the majority of the Labour Party’s young, indoctrinated, politically correct students and graduates (the ones John Gray describes) very powerfully do hold all these views.

They have been taught by their lecturers and professors that the British Empire was the worst thing in world history, worse than the Nazis and Stalin and Pol Pot, and that Britain only has any industry or prosperity because of the slave trade, and that all British institutions (starting with the police, the army and the judiciary) are institutionally racist and sexist – just as they think trans rights are one of the key issues of our time, and are vehemently anti-Israel and pro-Palestine – the attitude which lies behind the lamentable rise of anti-Semitism in the modern Labour Party.

Here’s an excerpt from an article in GQ lamenting the big hole Labour has dug for itself by identifying with progressive anti-patriotism, and essentially agreeing with the John Gray and Toby Young analyses:

Much has been made of Labour leadership hopeful Long-Bailey’s reference to “progressive patriotism”, a phrase which wants to have its cake and eat it, but ends up satisfying nobody. The fact that she felt compelled to mention at all it suggests a cultural jolt is underway. In this context, “progressive” is being used to soothe her suspicious supporters, to help them hold their noses when discussing something as demeaning as patriotism. For the millions of voters Labour has lost, patriotism is not and has never been a problem, so dressing it up in the frills of progressive politics not only neuters the idea, but insults their intelligence. (Boris Johnson has won the culture war… for now by George Chesterton in GQ magazine)

Who can forget Emily Thornberry’s tweeted photo of a white van parked outside a house displaying the English flag while she was out canvassing in Rochester, a photo which neatly embodied both the anti-patriotic instincts of the Labour high command, as well as their Islington middle-class contempt for the actual working classes they so ludicrously claim to represent.

Thornberry was forced to resign from the shadow cabinet as a result of this tweet and this image, but she was, of course, taken back into the cabinet a year later, and until very recently was one of the candidates to become next Labour leader. Who needs any additional proof of the Labour Party top cadres’ contempt for the ‘patriotic’, ‘white’, ‘working classes’, three terms which, in the last decade or so, have become terms of abuse within progressive ideology.

Image result for emily thornberry tweet

Towards the end of his essay Gray skewers politically correct progressives with a vengeance:

Liberal or Corbynite, the core of the progressivist cult is the belief that the values that have guided human civilisation to date, especially in the West, need to be junked. A new kind of society is required, which progressives will devise. They are equipped for this task with scraps of faux-Marxism and hyper-liberalism, from which they have assembled a world-view. They believed a majority of people would submit to their vision and follow them. Instead they have been ignored, while their world-view has melted down into a heap of trash. They retain their position in British institutions, but their self-image as the leaders of society has been badly shaken. It is only to be expected that many should be fixated on conspiracy theories, or otherwise unhinged. The feature of the contemporary scene progressives fail to understand, in the end, is themselves.

Given the grip of these progressive zealots over the party base, it is going to be difficult to create a coherent Labour Party ideology which can reunite its alienated working class voters, especially in the North, with the liberal, middle-class progressives of the bourgeois south.

And then Gray ends his essay with a calculated insult designed to infuriate the kind of woke progressives he is describing, suggesting that to a large extent their vehement espousal of women’s rights, black rights, Muslim rights, LGBT+ rights, trans rights and so on were in fact, in the end, the convenient posturing of cynical careerists who could see that it would help their careers as actors and film-makers and TV presenters and artists and gallery curators and so on to adopt the latest progressive views but who might, given the right-wing drift of the times, be prepared to abandon them… for the right price.

Faced with the possibility of a decade or more of Conservative rule, Britain’s cultural establishment may change its complexion. As well as an identity, progressive views have been a means of advancement in the academy, the arts and broadcast media. With the funding position of cultural institutions under review, the usefulness of progressivism as a career strategy may be about to decline.

As satirical insults go, this is quite funny, as funny as anything in Swift or Pope, but I think it’s wrong.

In my opinion progressives will continue painting themselves further and further into a virtuously woke corner, and in doing so permanently undermine the ability of a Left-of-centre government to ever return to power.

Conclusion

The point of this blog post is not to present conclusive evidence for my thesis. There is a world of evidence for countless other positions and I’ve mostly omitted the importance of Brexit which might turn out to have caused a one-off temporary alignment of British politics which then gently returns to its basic two-party model, all the commentators I’ve quoted say that is a possibility.

And I’m always ready to accept the possibility that I am simply wrong.

The main point of this brief commentary on John Gray’s article is more to explain to readers the thinking underlying my response to books and exhibitions which embody progressivee ideology i.e. which go out of their way to criticise Britain, Britain’s armed forces, the British Empire, white people, men, and straight people.

My points are:

1. The progressive academics and writers and artists and film-makers and gallery curators who use 1960s sociological terminology to attack British history, British heritage, the British Empire and British values, and who quote feminist and post-colonial rhetoric to attack men, the patriarchy, the male gaze, heteronormativity, Britain’s racist society and so on – they quite clearly think that History is On Their Side and that each one of their critical and minatory articles, works of art, films and exhibitions, are chipping away at the white, patriarchal, racist Establishment which, because of their efforts, will one day crumble away and reveal a multicultural Paradise in which the male gaze and inequality and manspreading have all been abolished.

2. But not only is this not very likely to happen, but the General Election of 2019 (and the Brexit vote and, if you want to drag the Yanks into it, the election of Donald Trump) suggest the precise opposite: that there is no such thing as history being on anyone’s side, that events take their own course regardless of anyone’s intentions, that their victory is far from inevitable. I entirely agree with Gray’s fundamental interpretation of human history which is things change, they change all the time and often at bewildering speed – but they don’t necessarily change for the better. To believe they do is a fundamentally Christian idea, based on the notion that History has a purpose and is heading towards a glorious endpoint, the Revolution, the Return of the King, the creation of a fair and just society.

But it’s not. It never has been and it never will. To believe otherwise, contrary to all the evidence of human history, is to have precisely the same kind of ‘faith’ as Christians and other religious believers do in their consoling ideologies. It is not, in other words, to live in the real world which we all actually inhabit.

3. And lastly, as the various writers quoted above suggest, there is plenty of evidence that, if anything, the metropolitan, liberal, progressive élite of artists and actors and film-makers and writers and gallery curators and their relentless insistence on woke issues actively alienates the majority of the population.

The majority of the population does not support its victim-grievance politics, its disproportionate concern for refugees and immigrants and every other minority cause, its excessive concern for the Palestinians and the black victims of the American police. Who gives a damn about all that (the overwhelmingly white, London, liberal middle classes, that’s who).

On the contrary most of the polling evidence shows that the majority of the British population just wants someone to sort out the NHS, and the police, and crack down on crime, and control immigration, and improve their local schools. Much the same issues, in other words, as have dominated all the general elections I can remember going back to the 1970s, and which a huge swathe of working class and Northern voters didn’t believe the Labour Party was capable of delivering.

The sound of losers

So it is this real-world political analysis which explains why, when I read yet another book by a left-wing academic attacking the British Empire or the slave trade i.e. fighting battles which were over generations or hundreds of years ago – or when I visit another exhibition about the wickedness of straight white men, or read another article explaining why I should be up in arms about the rapacious behaviour of Hollywood film producers, my first reaction is: this is the rhetoric of losers.

Not ‘losers’ in the playground, insult sense. I mean it is, quite literally, the rhetoric of the over-educated minority of the population who keep losing elections, who lost the last election, and the three before that, and the Brexit referendum. It is the sound of people who keep losing. Any way you look at it, the progressive Left’s record is appalling.

2010 General Election = Conservative-led coalition
2015 General Election = Conservative government
2016 Leave wins the Brexit referendum
2017 General Election = Conservative government
2019 General Election = Conservative government

In order to win elections in a modern Western country you need to build coalitions and reach out to people, all kinds of people, imperfect people, people you don’t like or whose values you may not share or actively oppose, in order to assemble what is called ‘a majority’.

The woke insistence on an utterly pure, unstained and uncontaminated virtue – a kind of political virginity test – militates against this ever happening.

So all this explains why, when I visited the Barbican gallery’s exhibition Masculinities: Liberation through Photography and read its wall labels:

attacking traditional notions of masculinity
attacking men for running the Patriarchy and for their male gaze and for their manspreading and mansplaining and their toxic masculinity (in case you think I’m exaggerating, there is a section of the exhibition devoted to manspreading, and several displays devoted explicitly to toxic masculinity)
attacking white people for their institutional racism
attacking straight people for their homophobia
and attacking heteronormative people for their transphobia

I very simply concluded that this is not how you reach out and build alliances. This is not how you create coalitions. This is not how you win political power.

This is how you create a politically correct ivory tower, convinced of your own virtue and rectitude – this is how you propagate an ideology which objectifies, judges and demonises the majority of the population for what you claim to be its sins of sexism, racism, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia and so on.

What I felt was that exhibitions like this are part of the much broader anti-British, anti-white, anti-straight, anti-family, anti-tradition cultural message being pumped out across all channels and all media by a London-based, university-educated, progressive élite, which worships American gay and black and feminist art, but which – when it came to the crunch – repelled huge numbers of traditional Labour Party voters and helped deliver the Conservative Party its biggest electoral victory since 1987.

Quite frankly this scares me. It scares me because I wonder whether the decline of the old manual-labouring working class, the disappearance of all the old heavy industries I grew up with – coalmining, steelmaking, shipbuilding, car manufactring – the casualisation and zero contract nature of so much modern work, the loss to Labour of the so-called Red Wall constituencies, the loss of Scotland dammit, combined with the sustained attack on all forms of traditional belief by the metropolitan cultural élite and the reduction of Labour support to the progressive middle classes of the big English cities – London, Bristol, Brighton…

All these social, economic and cultural changes hardly make me think we’re on the verge of some glorious multicultural, post-patriarchal age of Aquarius which progressive ideology promises if only we can smash the patriarchy and reclaim the night and free the nipple and stand up for trans rights and welcome tens of thousands more refugees into the country…

It all makes me wonder whether the Labour Party will ever hold power in Britain again.

And, more specifically, whether the kind of progressive art élite I’m describing is destined to become a permanent minority, stuck like a cracked record in its reverence of ‘transgressive’ and ‘rebel’ art by black and feminist and gay and trans artists from New York and Berlin and Seoul, luxuriating in its rhetoric of ‘subversion’ and ‘challenge’ and ‘interrogation’, while in reality being completely ignored by the great majority of the population or, if it makes any impression at all, simply contributing to the widespread sense that a snobbish progressive London élite is looking down its superior nose at the lifestyles, opinions and patriotic beliefs of the great majority of the working class, while hypocritically keeping all the money and power, the best schools, the private hospitals and the plum jobs for themselves.

The scale of the challenge

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Huge

Reading list

The LP

Films and documentaries

Related events

Start point 1970

Are many women Marxists?

Nostalgia

Art or social history?

(Who isn’t) restoring women’s voices?

Are they worth it?

Room 1. Rising with Fury

Room 2. The Marxist wife still does all the housework

Three fabulous crocheted figures by Rita McGurn

Screaming video by Gina Birch

Helen Chadwick

Erin Pizzey

Room 3. Oh bondage, up yours! (i.e. punk feminism)

Leotard (1979) by Cosey Fanni Tutti

Gill Posener’s defaced posters

Room 4. Greenham Common

Room 5. Women of colour

Love, Sex and Romance by Rita Keegan

Room 6. ‘There’s no such thing as society’ [the AIDS, gay and lesbian room]

Disability arts

End point

The merch

List of artists

Promotional video

Information and support

Research and resources

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Tate Britain reviews

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Historical context – the War on Terror

Ignatieff’s approach

Contents

Chapter 1. Democracy and the Lesser Evil

Chapter 2. The Ethics of Emergency

Chapter 3. The Weakness of the Strong

Chapter 4. The Strength of the Weak

The Arab future

Chapter 5. The Temptations of Nihilism

Chapter 6. Liberty and Armageddon

Other thoughts

1. Internecine killing

2. The threshold of repugnance

3. The world is watching

Notes and thoughts

Seven days later

Credit

New world disorder reviews

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Linda Melvern

Scholarly apparatus

Conspiracy to murder – the downsides

Terrible style

Poor narrative skills

Lack of interpretation

Conspiracy to murder – the upsides

Radio Milles Collines

The trials

The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda

Main findings and insights

Main conclusion

Credit

Africa-related reviews

History

Fictions and memoirs set wholly or partly in Africa

Exhibitions about Africa

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Related articles

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Conclusion

The sound of losers

Related links

Related blog posts

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