Established 2005
Manchester / London
Manchester / London
'It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.'
George Orwell, 1984 (1949)
George Orwell, 1984 (1949)
CONTENTS
2024
2023
Interview
Author Bram E. Gieben discusses his latest book
'The Darkest Timeline: Living in a World with No Future'
Author Bram E. Gieben discusses his latest book
'The Darkest Timeline: Living in a World with No Future'
Researched, written, conducted and edited
by
Brett Gregory
June 6th 2024
by
Brett Gregory
June 6th 2024
Transcript
In the following interview with the Glasgow-based author of ‘The Darkest Timeline: Living in a World with No Future’, we discuss Scottish politics and literature, state propaganda, childbirth and nihilism, public apathy, male mental health issues, climate collapse, corporate corruption, consumer technology, and the future of the human race.
Brett: Hi. What’s your name, where do you live, and when, and why, did you first become interested in writing?
Bram: Hi, Brett, how you doing? My name is Bram. I live in Glasgow in Scotland. I'm originally from Edinburgh, that's where I grew up. I've been writing since probably a very young age. I can remember giving my mum storybooks with illustrations written unfortunately from back to front. I liked to write backwards back then so I’ve since learned to write in the correct direction. And I wrote a few things for stage when I was a kid, and then in my kind of mid-20s I started writing culture journalism for a magazine called ‘The Skinny’. Written for a few other places over the years, and tried my hand at creative writing: short stories, novels. I found the most success as a poet. I was the 2015 Scottish Slam Champion and I've kept on performing and writing poetry for the stage and for the page since then.
Brett: And what specifically inspired you to begin writing this particular book, Bram?
Bram: I've always been interested in theories around dystopias and utopias. I've always been fascinated by stories about the apocalypse and the pre- and post-apocalypse films like Mad Max. I think that was the first inspiration, was wanting to unpack those themes in more detail and at greater length using some of the tools of critical theory. I'm also a huge fan of Mark Fisher and even just his prose style, his approach to writing and structuring essays, that was very influential on me as a journalist. I was reading ‘K-punk’ around the same time as I was starting to get into interviewing bands and musicians and DJs and so on. It also proceeds from something that Mark Fisher wrote. He was paraphrasing both Fredric Jameson and Slavoj Žižek when he said ‘it's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism’, and that leads into an analysis of some of the aesthetics of apocalypse fiction, and why those might not be the most useful frame through which to understand our dystopian present.
Brett: How long did it take you to complete the first draft of ‘The Darkest Timeline’ and, maybe more importantly, what motivated you on a day-to-day basis to keep on writing?
Bram: The challenge was and this was … A lot of this was due to advice from Mike Watson who runs Revol Press and is an author I greatly admire. You know, he kind of gave me some steers about the kind of length that a critical theory book usually is. You know, what readers might enjoy in terms of you know picking up a big heavy tome of 90,000 words versus picking up something a lot shorter, that had a much more tightly defined theme. The total process of writing, that took about 5 years from about 2018, and then started to read like a lot of critical theory because I don't really have a background in that. I mean have something of a background: my father is a social scientist; he worked as a staff tutor for the for the Open University for a number of years, did some editorial work on a book with the academic social theorist, Stuart Hall, who was very influential on some of the left-wing authors that I read like Mark Fisher and Mike Watson.
Brett: Due to my own Scottish roots I’ve always been drawn to the country’s great literary tradition of producing narratives that can be seen to be antagonistic, pessimistic, and even apocalyptic. As a writer who is based in Glasgow, is this a creative heritage which you feel consciously a part of and, if so, why? Is it the weather? The landscape? The economy? The politics? The history?
Bram: That's a good question. Why is Scottish fiction and storytelling apocalyptic? Oh, that that's a really good question. I didn't grow up in Glasgow actually. I mean, I was born in England to Scottish parents. My mum's from the Orkney Islands, my dad grew up in Aberdeen, but his family's originally part Dutch, hence the strange name. So I moved up here when I was 11. I think I still have the outsider perspective on Scotland even though I spent, you know, the bigger part of my life here and, yeah, for me I think coming here, it's a remarkable country in a number of ways. It's got its own very distinct social codes, it's got its very own distinct norms and traditions, and it's got its own incredibly rich history, and it's a rich and bloody history as well. You know, there's a strong argument that you could consider Scotland a colonized people although, you know, obviously that's been the case for so long now that that's very normalised. And there is a strong tradition of class consciousness and political consciousness in Scottish writing. I think definitely, you know, [Irvine] Welsh's work is directly political, commenting on, you know, inequality, poverty, prejudice against people of working-class backgrounds or people with drug problems, you know? Ian Banks was a master of crafting science fiction novels which kind of dealt with the human condition, and where humanity might be headed among the stars, and deep philosophical issues about our, you know, in-built tendencies for violence, or even for empathy. So, yeah, I think it lends itself with its tendency to be rainy and gloomy, to maybe some dystopian speculation, you know, ruminating while the storm rages outside but, yeah, I think the economy and the politics have a little bit to do with it. Certainly being involved in the 2014 Scottish independence referendum as someone who was pro-independence and was, you know, doing some campaigning for the ‘YES Movement’, really more as a cultural performer, so performing events, speaking at events, that was very formative moment for me politically.
Brett: In every decade of my life I and millions of other Britons have been bombarded with apocalyptic propaganda of some sort or another: in the 1970s it was the IRA; in the 1980s it was nuclear annihilation; in the 1990s it was AIDS; in the 2000s it was Islamic terrorism; in the 2010s it was austerity cuts; and in the 2020s its climate change. Couldn’t we argue that such catastrophic narratives and their attendant Orwellian scaremongering are just forms of social control? That their overarching aim is to keep the general public quiet, conservative, acquiescent and appreciative?
Bram: That's a really interesting question, Brett. Yes, certainly every generation since the 1970s has been subjected to propaganda about issues or problems that you could label as apocalyptic or dystopian. So the threat of the IRA, I think, you know, while that might have been the subject and the topic of propaganda and, you know, used as a form of social control absolutely. It also must have felt very much like the end of the world if you were living in a city that was regularly being bombed, or indeed if you were living in Belfast itself where bombs were going off and riots were happening and, you know, cars were burning every night. So, regardless of whether that imagery and those events were used for social control, it retains that charge of an apocalyptic feel. In terms of nuclear annihilation, you know, I think like that's very much a threat that in the 1980s was predominant, and that was probably because of the Cold War. Hannah Arendt dealt a little with that in ‘On Revolution’. She basically said that the 1960s and 70s radicals were really the first generation who had had to grow up thinking about the ticking of the atomic clock, and the fact that we might be, you know, growing closer to the possibility of a nuclear exchange that could be catastrophic for all human life. If you apply that logic outwards you can look at the vast sweep of history and say that every century or so has its millenarian movements, each century sees the end of the world and the apocalypse coming. I think for us, in this particular moment in history, a few things are qualitatively different. First of all we've got the threat of climate collapse so that's a very, very complex series of interlocking challenges that are very, very difficult for humanity to solve, or even mitigate, and we just don't know how fast things are going to change as a result of climate collapse, and that the collapse of those structures, of those animal populations, those are already beginning. So, I think, in a very real sense that's a more real threat than the threat of potential nuclear annihilation. I think as well the second thing that's different is merely the rate of rapid technological change. Maybe you kind of had the same experience as me of growing up in a world with very analogue technologies, and then coming of age in one that was increasingly digital. There are people who are not much younger than us whose entire lives have been digital and, I think, we've still got a coming confluence of a lot of different technologies that could have just as transformative an impact on society and culture and the economy as the internet has had in the last 10 or 15 years.
Brett: Bram, you write: ‘The reality is that we or our children will in all likelihood have to watch a lot of people die, whether through extreme climate events, resource depletion, supply chain failure …’ etc.
If this truly is the future which awaits us, then why would any right-minded citizen choose to have children in the first place? Why drag innocent babies, kicking and screaming, into such a desolate world to endure a lifetime of horror?
Bram: It is very scary to confront the fact of something like that. I think in the chapter of the book called ‘Cascading Catastrophic Colony Collapse’ I look at several studies by NASA and other organisations, looking at the way that the effects of climate change might overlap and intersect, and thereby cause greater damage. I think it really is a reality that we have to confront is that we live … because of capitalism, because of our accelerated technology in quite a precarious world, even in the developed world where we, you know, supposedly have social safety nets and supposedly have infrastructure built on technology that keeps us safe, keeps us fed, all those things. I think if you look at what happened in the pandemic with, you know, empty shelves on British supermarkets, that shows the vulnerability of supply chains in a very, very real way. It didn't take much disruption for us to, you know, no longer have food on the shelves. To your question, why would anyone choose to have children? I mean, this is something I've grappled with myself. I don't have any kids. That's not like a conscious choice in the same way that somebody who was a member of, I don't know, something like the ‘Voluntary Human Extinction Movement’ might make that choice. You know, I've not gone and got a vasectomy or anything like that, but there are many reasons why I haven't had kids. Some of them are economic, some of them are to do with my concerns about the state of the world, some of them are to do with concerns about my own ability to be a parent to a kid in that world. The idea of having a son and having to inflict things like high school bullying on him, I just don't know if I'm strong enough or cruel enough to do that. I think I would say much like a teenager who says, ‘I never asked to be born’, I would ask the question of whether it's really fair to inflict life which for the most part can be suffering on any soul without their consent. So, yeah, I think its a strong nihilist argument against us really having the right to have babies and to inflict consciousness on another being in the first place.
Brett: You also argue that we [in the West] have an ‘inability to see that many people around the world … live in realities which can be described as ‘post-apocalyptic’.’ But isn’t this simply a case of everyday people suffering from overexposure to a 24/7 news cycle of exaggerated and sensationalist content? Couldn’t we argue that ordinary citizens actually do care, but it’s unreasonable to expect them to care on such an industrial scale? For instance, I know numerous ex-students of mine who are now in their late-20s and early 30s whose previous youthful optimism and compassion has simply been crushed beneath the weight of doom-scrolling through social media over the years. They now generally feel overwhelmed, powerless and nervous.
Bram: Yeah, I think that's a very good point, Brett. I mean, it's certainly true that in the media that we have now, you know, with 24-hour rolling news cycles with constant updates on social media. And, of course, just in terms of our friends, you know, everyone's sharing articles and wanting to appear informed and to, you know, engage in debate. You know, I don't think though that that kind of changes the point that some of the parts of the world that we live in right now are living under the conditions that we would describe as post-apocalyptic, or depict as post-apocalyptic in our media. There are people living on trash heaps who make, you know, a bare subsistence, living by picking plastic bottles out of those festering trash heaps to sell for a small amount to try and feed their families. That's before we even mention people living in tent cities, you know. You might picture tent cities as being like a refugee camp, people fleeing from conflict but, you know, you'd only have to go to a few American cities to see huge, huge tent cities in places like Portland, Los Angeles, you know, skid row in Los Angeles. Actually the way we treat those people is incredibly brutal as well, you know? I know in Las Vegas to clear homeless encampments they've driven down there with riot vans and just, you know, smashed everyone's tents, smashed everyone's belongings. In the book I think I quote the artist Anjalika Sagar who says that, you know, for indigenous people living in the Brazilian rainforest the apocalypse begins for them in that moment when the forest is cleared. To us something happening in the Amazon is just a story on TV. To them it's the end of their life-world, it's the end point in quite a fundamental way. And, you know, to take an example from Scottish history, I think the Highland Clearances must have felt like the end of the world to those people who experienced it. Maybe the difference now is that we live in such a globalised society that life-worlds that come to an end have nowhere else to go except the modern neoliberal world and, arguably, that's as much of a death as extinction is.
Brett: In relation to this you also contend, Bram, that evidence shows that ‘we do not truly care about other people — or rather, people we have ‘othered’. This could be countered however with the observation that millions upon millions of people actually don’t care for themselves either, physically, psychologically, emotionally and/or domestically. For example, when I found myself homeless and sofa-surfing in late 2023 I met a number of people from various backgrounds with various personalities who I would never usually encounter. I was surprised and saddened however to notice that many of them shared similar traits, such as anxiety, low self-esteem, a sense of isolation, and poor self-care: eating rubbish, drinking rubbish, posting rubbish on social media, lumbering from room to room in their dressing gowns all day long, draped in depression. How are such precarious people supposed to care for others when they can barely take care of themselves, riddled as they are with post-Brexit / post-COVID mental health issues while being ravaged on a weekly basis by this Tory government’s ongoing austerity cuts and nationwide asset-stripping?
Bram: You know, I think that often if you find yourself in an oppressive low, if you find yourself in a cycle of addiction, if you find yourself unable to escape a cycle of abuse, a lot of that has to do with, or is exacerbated by, a sense of shame, a sense of low self-worth, and a sense of not being able to picture a better world for oneself. And I think a lot of that shame comes from that same process of ‘othering’. You think , ‘Well, I'm not like a normal person. I'm not like a good person. I can't get out of here.’ I mean, I'm just drawing on my own experiences there, my limited experiences with addiction, my kind of extensive experience of suffering from bipolar disorder, going through treatment for other mental health problems. I think one thing I've definitely felt is that mental health culture today, there's a certain amount of paying lip service to listening to people privileging their experience, believing people, you know, valuing people, not discriminating against them, because they have a mental health condition, and that those are all fine words, and the organisations that do that activism are all fine organisations, but if you are confronted with someone with mental health problems who is symptomatic, I think a lot of people have the instinct to turn away rather than to help. Being hyper-manic, being in a manic state if you're bipolar, can absolutely make you say things that you wouldn't usually say, and it can push you into, you know, conspiratorial patterns of thinking. It can make you speak out of turn, say things you regret. So, I don't know, I mean I'm somebody who has a regime of self-care, self-analysis, you know? I go to therapy, I exercise and meditate. Those are all things that I have had to learn to do out of necessity to care for myself. Otherwise I would have been, I don't know, dead in jail. All I would say is that for me my recovery has massively involved learning to love structure. I have a very structured life, I structure it for myself, I try and keep busy. I exercise, and I try and eat as healthy as possible – don't always manage it! But having that structure is what I fall back on to stop my life being chaotic. When I go running up in the hills and sometimes I'm lucky enough to see a red deer, I find that very moving, I don't know why, it's just we see wild animals so rarely, you know? If we see them they are in a zoo, or most of us that live in the city anyway won't see wild animals all that often.
Brett: You quote the anthropologist, Jason Hickel: ‘[I]t seems all too clear: our economic system is incompatible with life on this planet.’ However, you also reject the speculative communist solutions put forward by the Swedish author, Andreas Malm. That is, you write: 'By the time we have regulated and campaigned our way to Malm’s functional communist society, everyone will be dead'. What should we do then?
Bram: I think the urgency of the apocalyptic messaging that we've had on climate change and other things for so many years has been quite intense. I think the problem with some of that messaging for me at least has, in fact, been its emphasis that we can do something you know from cycling schemes to, you know, carbon credits, carbon offsetting schemes like that. All of these things seem to me to be very much like distractions that capitalism has come up with to kind of, you know, convince us that something's being done when, in actual fact, the problem isn't being addressed. And I think really if you look at the big polluters those are nearly all corporations and, you know, even if all of the nations of the world reduce the output from people's homes, the output from industry, it's the output from agriculture that really contributes to climate change. So really, on a fundamental level, there is nothing that we can do to fix climate change, I believe at least, without transforming or getting rid of capitalism in quite a radical way. We've known about the problems of particularly climate collapse, you know, and threats to ecosystems, problems with extracting fossil fuels; we've known about that since the 1960s, that was the time for concerted political action and, in an actual fact, like if humanity had taken collective action at that point we could probably have mitigated a lot of the effects of it. And that really was the ambition of my book: not to propose a different system or, like Andreas Malm does, not to propose necessarily any different solutions, but rather just to draw attention to the ways in which we're not talking about the problems in a very useful way.
Brett: Of course, we can condemn the self-centred, capitalist lifestyle choices of ordinary citizens on the ground, even when they delude themselves into thinking that they’re helping to reverse climate change by recycling regularly and buying fair trade tea bags etc. However, shouldn’t it be our leaders in politics, business, industry, science etc. who should be publicly and permanently held to account for their myopic, self-serving decision-making, ideally with real-world legal consequences which their peers will genuinely heed and fear?
Bram: You know, no matter how virtuous you are in one area, there's probably something else that you're doing that's harming the planet and, you know, you can you can try and live like an absolute saint but, nonetheless, you still have a carbon footprint. There's a thing called the Five Earths Argument. I mean, basically, what that says is that if everybody in the developing world was able to access, you know, the kind of consumer goods, fast food and all that stuff that we have available to us in the West, we would need the resources of five earths to feed everybody. As to your point about should it be leaders in politics, business, industry, science who should be publicly held to account, I definitely do think that they should be. I think the likelihood of them being held to account is probably pretty low. You only have to look at things like the investigation into the Post Office Scandal to see how slippery those six figure salary senior executives can be when you put them on the spot. Things like public inquiries can become a ritual: they're meant to reassure us that something is being done, heads are going to roll. Meanwhile, in the background, the next scandal is probably brewing under the same kind of secretive management cultures. Our rights as people in this country to protest are under threat, rights to free speech and freedom of association are under threat. If you don't have power and you want to see change, you have to take power in whatever form that you can.
Brett: I totally agree. What about the apocalyptic role of technology in our daily lives? I mean, these days a smart phone can be regarded as simply an advanced form of electronic tagging, monitoring our whereabouts, our online behaviour, our possible future crimes. In turn, facial recognition technology will soon be ubiquitous and, who knows, maybe our Uber drivers will have to contractually have brain implants fitted. Why aren’t millions of people taking to the streets in protest, Bram?
Bram: If you think about the ways in which social media, for instance, was sold to us when it started it was a free service, you know? It largely remains free at the point of contact, but they've monetized it in all sorts of ways, not least of which, you know, the algorithmic manipulation of content. Things like the Cambridge Analytica Scandal can show how much personal data can be leveraged to achieve political outcomes, so there's those kinds of dangers of those technologies. I don't think any of us really opted into those; I think what it is we were offered a free service and weren't told up front about what the consequences were of sharing that kind of data, and by the time it became apparent what the consequences were, it was that sunk-cost fallacy, you know? It would actually be more hassle to come off Facebook: you'd lose contact with this person or that person; I have to be on LinkedIn because I'm looking for a job; or I have to be on Instagram because I'm trying to start my career as a singer, songwriter or a photographer, or someone who makes mosaics. You know we've all got a reason to be there now and so we kind of submit to having our data harvested and all that good stuff. We don't protest or at least, you know, it's not a popular protest movement as you quite rightly identify. In societies that are kind of more authoritarian, particularly Chinese society, you have things like a social credit system, so they're harvesting your data but it's, you know, slightly more by force and the consequences of, you know, them having your data could be could be a lot more grave, you could end up in a re-education camp. But I really don't think there's broad awareness of the dangers of technologies like facial recognition and the biases that are inherent in facial recognition algorithms. I think the consequences, even on a philosophical level, of technologies like neuralink which will, you know, allow direct human brain computer interface, there are grave philosophical consequences that flow from that. Again like the first way of people joining social media, I don't think people will consider before jacking the first chip into their brain. And I write in the book a lot about the value of cyberpunk as a tool for understanding this kind of accelerated technological age that we live in. We haven't even really begun to see how aspects of this technology could be used for social control yet, but I think we've had hints of it. But when the, you know, technology is going to be more directly connected to our bodies, our brains, our movement around the world, our health, our credit, once this is all linked together … We're already living in a in a world where a computer can make an arbitrary decision and say ‘no’ to you on something like credit. I think extending that to health, extending that to access to different parts of the world or different cities has grave consequences and grave authoritarian overtones that we maybe won't realise until we're in the midst of it shall we say.
Brett: Alternatively, rather than attempt to investigate, analyse and draw conclusions from colossal, arbitrary phenomena such as global affairs, the apocalypse and the cosmos, wouldn’t it be wiser for concerned citizens to scale down their attentions and concerns to address more manageable events and happenings which are much more closer to home? For example, by researching and understanding their local community in an effort to improve its functionality, well-being, and future direction? That is, setting goals which are both measurable and achievable, and less likely to lead to personal disappointment, depression, wrack and ruin?
Bram: I actually do think that, you know, taking action in your local community, getting involved in activist projects, or community projects which do have measurable, achievable goals, that is probably less likely to lead you to feelings of negativity or defeat than focusing on these gigantic issues which I'm covering in the book. However, I think, you know, everything exists in a context, and I think probably one challenge with infrastructure activism, you know, designed to patch the holes in collapsing infrastructure left behind by hyper-capitalism or indeed in projects like food banks which are designed to, you know, fill a really desperate and immediate and vital human need in a community; those can all get kind of co-opted by the State, right? So if the State knows that the community is going to step in and help people it can continue to ignore the problem. So I think that's one problem with that kind of activism is that, you know, we actually live in a country that kind of relies on volunteers at places like food banks, it relies on community projects to look after children after high school so they're not on the streets, rather than having invested carefully in infrastructure. So I think there's something there as well about, you know, involvement in politics. Like for me activist projects that are connected to politics are most effective when they're connected to infrastructure because it's infrastructure that we're lacking, and it's infrastructure, that’s the kind of activism you're describing kind of currently has to patch the gaps in. So, yeah, I don't think is quite as simple as ‘Think Global, Act Local’ but it's certainly, I would say, that, you know, if you are able to take a full and frank and unflinching look at the big problems then the solutions are usually not to attack those problems head-on, but instead to then narrow your focus and look and see what you can do for the people, you know, who live in your community or who are nearby.
Brett: And on that uplifting, forward-thinking note, I think we should now end our discussion. Many thanks for your time and views, Bram. It’s been a challenging and fascinating journey.
‘The Darkest Timeline: Living in a World with No Future’ is published on June 24th 2024 on the Revol Press website.
In the following interview with the Glasgow-based author of ‘The Darkest Timeline: Living in a World with No Future’, we discuss Scottish politics and literature, state propaganda, childbirth and nihilism, public apathy, male mental health issues, climate collapse, corporate corruption, consumer technology, and the future of the human race.
Brett: Hi. What’s your name, where do you live, and when, and why, did you first become interested in writing?
Bram: Hi, Brett, how you doing? My name is Bram. I live in Glasgow in Scotland. I'm originally from Edinburgh, that's where I grew up. I've been writing since probably a very young age. I can remember giving my mum storybooks with illustrations written unfortunately from back to front. I liked to write backwards back then so I’ve since learned to write in the correct direction. And I wrote a few things for stage when I was a kid, and then in my kind of mid-20s I started writing culture journalism for a magazine called ‘The Skinny’. Written for a few other places over the years, and tried my hand at creative writing: short stories, novels. I found the most success as a poet. I was the 2015 Scottish Slam Champion and I've kept on performing and writing poetry for the stage and for the page since then.
Brett: And what specifically inspired you to begin writing this particular book, Bram?
Bram: I've always been interested in theories around dystopias and utopias. I've always been fascinated by stories about the apocalypse and the pre- and post-apocalypse films like Mad Max. I think that was the first inspiration, was wanting to unpack those themes in more detail and at greater length using some of the tools of critical theory. I'm also a huge fan of Mark Fisher and even just his prose style, his approach to writing and structuring essays, that was very influential on me as a journalist. I was reading ‘K-punk’ around the same time as I was starting to get into interviewing bands and musicians and DJs and so on. It also proceeds from something that Mark Fisher wrote. He was paraphrasing both Fredric Jameson and Slavoj Žižek when he said ‘it's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism’, and that leads into an analysis of some of the aesthetics of apocalypse fiction, and why those might not be the most useful frame through which to understand our dystopian present.
Brett: How long did it take you to complete the first draft of ‘The Darkest Timeline’ and, maybe more importantly, what motivated you on a day-to-day basis to keep on writing?
Bram: The challenge was and this was … A lot of this was due to advice from Mike Watson who runs Revol Press and is an author I greatly admire. You know, he kind of gave me some steers about the kind of length that a critical theory book usually is. You know, what readers might enjoy in terms of you know picking up a big heavy tome of 90,000 words versus picking up something a lot shorter, that had a much more tightly defined theme. The total process of writing, that took about 5 years from about 2018, and then started to read like a lot of critical theory because I don't really have a background in that. I mean have something of a background: my father is a social scientist; he worked as a staff tutor for the for the Open University for a number of years, did some editorial work on a book with the academic social theorist, Stuart Hall, who was very influential on some of the left-wing authors that I read like Mark Fisher and Mike Watson.
Brett: Due to my own Scottish roots I’ve always been drawn to the country’s great literary tradition of producing narratives that can be seen to be antagonistic, pessimistic, and even apocalyptic. As a writer who is based in Glasgow, is this a creative heritage which you feel consciously a part of and, if so, why? Is it the weather? The landscape? The economy? The politics? The history?
Bram: That's a good question. Why is Scottish fiction and storytelling apocalyptic? Oh, that that's a really good question. I didn't grow up in Glasgow actually. I mean, I was born in England to Scottish parents. My mum's from the Orkney Islands, my dad grew up in Aberdeen, but his family's originally part Dutch, hence the strange name. So I moved up here when I was 11. I think I still have the outsider perspective on Scotland even though I spent, you know, the bigger part of my life here and, yeah, for me I think coming here, it's a remarkable country in a number of ways. It's got its own very distinct social codes, it's got its very own distinct norms and traditions, and it's got its own incredibly rich history, and it's a rich and bloody history as well. You know, there's a strong argument that you could consider Scotland a colonized people although, you know, obviously that's been the case for so long now that that's very normalised. And there is a strong tradition of class consciousness and political consciousness in Scottish writing. I think definitely, you know, [Irvine] Welsh's work is directly political, commenting on, you know, inequality, poverty, prejudice against people of working-class backgrounds or people with drug problems, you know? Ian Banks was a master of crafting science fiction novels which kind of dealt with the human condition, and where humanity might be headed among the stars, and deep philosophical issues about our, you know, in-built tendencies for violence, or even for empathy. So, yeah, I think it lends itself with its tendency to be rainy and gloomy, to maybe some dystopian speculation, you know, ruminating while the storm rages outside but, yeah, I think the economy and the politics have a little bit to do with it. Certainly being involved in the 2014 Scottish independence referendum as someone who was pro-independence and was, you know, doing some campaigning for the ‘YES Movement’, really more as a cultural performer, so performing events, speaking at events, that was very formative moment for me politically.
Brett: In every decade of my life I and millions of other Britons have been bombarded with apocalyptic propaganda of some sort or another: in the 1970s it was the IRA; in the 1980s it was nuclear annihilation; in the 1990s it was AIDS; in the 2000s it was Islamic terrorism; in the 2010s it was austerity cuts; and in the 2020s its climate change. Couldn’t we argue that such catastrophic narratives and their attendant Orwellian scaremongering are just forms of social control? That their overarching aim is to keep the general public quiet, conservative, acquiescent and appreciative?
Bram: That's a really interesting question, Brett. Yes, certainly every generation since the 1970s has been subjected to propaganda about issues or problems that you could label as apocalyptic or dystopian. So the threat of the IRA, I think, you know, while that might have been the subject and the topic of propaganda and, you know, used as a form of social control absolutely. It also must have felt very much like the end of the world if you were living in a city that was regularly being bombed, or indeed if you were living in Belfast itself where bombs were going off and riots were happening and, you know, cars were burning every night. So, regardless of whether that imagery and those events were used for social control, it retains that charge of an apocalyptic feel. In terms of nuclear annihilation, you know, I think like that's very much a threat that in the 1980s was predominant, and that was probably because of the Cold War. Hannah Arendt dealt a little with that in ‘On Revolution’. She basically said that the 1960s and 70s radicals were really the first generation who had had to grow up thinking about the ticking of the atomic clock, and the fact that we might be, you know, growing closer to the possibility of a nuclear exchange that could be catastrophic for all human life. If you apply that logic outwards you can look at the vast sweep of history and say that every century or so has its millenarian movements, each century sees the end of the world and the apocalypse coming. I think for us, in this particular moment in history, a few things are qualitatively different. First of all we've got the threat of climate collapse so that's a very, very complex series of interlocking challenges that are very, very difficult for humanity to solve, or even mitigate, and we just don't know how fast things are going to change as a result of climate collapse, and that the collapse of those structures, of those animal populations, those are already beginning. So, I think, in a very real sense that's a more real threat than the threat of potential nuclear annihilation. I think as well the second thing that's different is merely the rate of rapid technological change. Maybe you kind of had the same experience as me of growing up in a world with very analogue technologies, and then coming of age in one that was increasingly digital. There are people who are not much younger than us whose entire lives have been digital and, I think, we've still got a coming confluence of a lot of different technologies that could have just as transformative an impact on society and culture and the economy as the internet has had in the last 10 or 15 years.
Brett: Bram, you write: ‘The reality is that we or our children will in all likelihood have to watch a lot of people die, whether through extreme climate events, resource depletion, supply chain failure …’ etc.
If this truly is the future which awaits us, then why would any right-minded citizen choose to have children in the first place? Why drag innocent babies, kicking and screaming, into such a desolate world to endure a lifetime of horror?
Bram: It is very scary to confront the fact of something like that. I think in the chapter of the book called ‘Cascading Catastrophic Colony Collapse’ I look at several studies by NASA and other organisations, looking at the way that the effects of climate change might overlap and intersect, and thereby cause greater damage. I think it really is a reality that we have to confront is that we live … because of capitalism, because of our accelerated technology in quite a precarious world, even in the developed world where we, you know, supposedly have social safety nets and supposedly have infrastructure built on technology that keeps us safe, keeps us fed, all those things. I think if you look at what happened in the pandemic with, you know, empty shelves on British supermarkets, that shows the vulnerability of supply chains in a very, very real way. It didn't take much disruption for us to, you know, no longer have food on the shelves. To your question, why would anyone choose to have children? I mean, this is something I've grappled with myself. I don't have any kids. That's not like a conscious choice in the same way that somebody who was a member of, I don't know, something like the ‘Voluntary Human Extinction Movement’ might make that choice. You know, I've not gone and got a vasectomy or anything like that, but there are many reasons why I haven't had kids. Some of them are economic, some of them are to do with my concerns about the state of the world, some of them are to do with concerns about my own ability to be a parent to a kid in that world. The idea of having a son and having to inflict things like high school bullying on him, I just don't know if I'm strong enough or cruel enough to do that. I think I would say much like a teenager who says, ‘I never asked to be born’, I would ask the question of whether it's really fair to inflict life which for the most part can be suffering on any soul without their consent. So, yeah, I think its a strong nihilist argument against us really having the right to have babies and to inflict consciousness on another being in the first place.
Brett: You also argue that we [in the West] have an ‘inability to see that many people around the world … live in realities which can be described as ‘post-apocalyptic’.’ But isn’t this simply a case of everyday people suffering from overexposure to a 24/7 news cycle of exaggerated and sensationalist content? Couldn’t we argue that ordinary citizens actually do care, but it’s unreasonable to expect them to care on such an industrial scale? For instance, I know numerous ex-students of mine who are now in their late-20s and early 30s whose previous youthful optimism and compassion has simply been crushed beneath the weight of doom-scrolling through social media over the years. They now generally feel overwhelmed, powerless and nervous.
Bram: Yeah, I think that's a very good point, Brett. I mean, it's certainly true that in the media that we have now, you know, with 24-hour rolling news cycles with constant updates on social media. And, of course, just in terms of our friends, you know, everyone's sharing articles and wanting to appear informed and to, you know, engage in debate. You know, I don't think though that that kind of changes the point that some of the parts of the world that we live in right now are living under the conditions that we would describe as post-apocalyptic, or depict as post-apocalyptic in our media. There are people living on trash heaps who make, you know, a bare subsistence, living by picking plastic bottles out of those festering trash heaps to sell for a small amount to try and feed their families. That's before we even mention people living in tent cities, you know. You might picture tent cities as being like a refugee camp, people fleeing from conflict but, you know, you'd only have to go to a few American cities to see huge, huge tent cities in places like Portland, Los Angeles, you know, skid row in Los Angeles. Actually the way we treat those people is incredibly brutal as well, you know? I know in Las Vegas to clear homeless encampments they've driven down there with riot vans and just, you know, smashed everyone's tents, smashed everyone's belongings. In the book I think I quote the artist Anjalika Sagar who says that, you know, for indigenous people living in the Brazilian rainforest the apocalypse begins for them in that moment when the forest is cleared. To us something happening in the Amazon is just a story on TV. To them it's the end of their life-world, it's the end point in quite a fundamental way. And, you know, to take an example from Scottish history, I think the Highland Clearances must have felt like the end of the world to those people who experienced it. Maybe the difference now is that we live in such a globalised society that life-worlds that come to an end have nowhere else to go except the modern neoliberal world and, arguably, that's as much of a death as extinction is.
Brett: In relation to this you also contend, Bram, that evidence shows that ‘we do not truly care about other people — or rather, people we have ‘othered’. This could be countered however with the observation that millions upon millions of people actually don’t care for themselves either, physically, psychologically, emotionally and/or domestically. For example, when I found myself homeless and sofa-surfing in late 2023 I met a number of people from various backgrounds with various personalities who I would never usually encounter. I was surprised and saddened however to notice that many of them shared similar traits, such as anxiety, low self-esteem, a sense of isolation, and poor self-care: eating rubbish, drinking rubbish, posting rubbish on social media, lumbering from room to room in their dressing gowns all day long, draped in depression. How are such precarious people supposed to care for others when they can barely take care of themselves, riddled as they are with post-Brexit / post-COVID mental health issues while being ravaged on a weekly basis by this Tory government’s ongoing austerity cuts and nationwide asset-stripping?
Bram: You know, I think that often if you find yourself in an oppressive low, if you find yourself in a cycle of addiction, if you find yourself unable to escape a cycle of abuse, a lot of that has to do with, or is exacerbated by, a sense of shame, a sense of low self-worth, and a sense of not being able to picture a better world for oneself. And I think a lot of that shame comes from that same process of ‘othering’. You think , ‘Well, I'm not like a normal person. I'm not like a good person. I can't get out of here.’ I mean, I'm just drawing on my own experiences there, my limited experiences with addiction, my kind of extensive experience of suffering from bipolar disorder, going through treatment for other mental health problems. I think one thing I've definitely felt is that mental health culture today, there's a certain amount of paying lip service to listening to people privileging their experience, believing people, you know, valuing people, not discriminating against them, because they have a mental health condition, and that those are all fine words, and the organisations that do that activism are all fine organisations, but if you are confronted with someone with mental health problems who is symptomatic, I think a lot of people have the instinct to turn away rather than to help. Being hyper-manic, being in a manic state if you're bipolar, can absolutely make you say things that you wouldn't usually say, and it can push you into, you know, conspiratorial patterns of thinking. It can make you speak out of turn, say things you regret. So, I don't know, I mean I'm somebody who has a regime of self-care, self-analysis, you know? I go to therapy, I exercise and meditate. Those are all things that I have had to learn to do out of necessity to care for myself. Otherwise I would have been, I don't know, dead in jail. All I would say is that for me my recovery has massively involved learning to love structure. I have a very structured life, I structure it for myself, I try and keep busy. I exercise, and I try and eat as healthy as possible – don't always manage it! But having that structure is what I fall back on to stop my life being chaotic. When I go running up in the hills and sometimes I'm lucky enough to see a red deer, I find that very moving, I don't know why, it's just we see wild animals so rarely, you know? If we see them they are in a zoo, or most of us that live in the city anyway won't see wild animals all that often.
Brett: You quote the anthropologist, Jason Hickel: ‘[I]t seems all too clear: our economic system is incompatible with life on this planet.’ However, you also reject the speculative communist solutions put forward by the Swedish author, Andreas Malm. That is, you write: 'By the time we have regulated and campaigned our way to Malm’s functional communist society, everyone will be dead'. What should we do then?
Bram: I think the urgency of the apocalyptic messaging that we've had on climate change and other things for so many years has been quite intense. I think the problem with some of that messaging for me at least has, in fact, been its emphasis that we can do something you know from cycling schemes to, you know, carbon credits, carbon offsetting schemes like that. All of these things seem to me to be very much like distractions that capitalism has come up with to kind of, you know, convince us that something's being done when, in actual fact, the problem isn't being addressed. And I think really if you look at the big polluters those are nearly all corporations and, you know, even if all of the nations of the world reduce the output from people's homes, the output from industry, it's the output from agriculture that really contributes to climate change. So really, on a fundamental level, there is nothing that we can do to fix climate change, I believe at least, without transforming or getting rid of capitalism in quite a radical way. We've known about the problems of particularly climate collapse, you know, and threats to ecosystems, problems with extracting fossil fuels; we've known about that since the 1960s, that was the time for concerted political action and, in an actual fact, like if humanity had taken collective action at that point we could probably have mitigated a lot of the effects of it. And that really was the ambition of my book: not to propose a different system or, like Andreas Malm does, not to propose necessarily any different solutions, but rather just to draw attention to the ways in which we're not talking about the problems in a very useful way.
Brett: Of course, we can condemn the self-centred, capitalist lifestyle choices of ordinary citizens on the ground, even when they delude themselves into thinking that they’re helping to reverse climate change by recycling regularly and buying fair trade tea bags etc. However, shouldn’t it be our leaders in politics, business, industry, science etc. who should be publicly and permanently held to account for their myopic, self-serving decision-making, ideally with real-world legal consequences which their peers will genuinely heed and fear?
Bram: You know, no matter how virtuous you are in one area, there's probably something else that you're doing that's harming the planet and, you know, you can you can try and live like an absolute saint but, nonetheless, you still have a carbon footprint. There's a thing called the Five Earths Argument. I mean, basically, what that says is that if everybody in the developing world was able to access, you know, the kind of consumer goods, fast food and all that stuff that we have available to us in the West, we would need the resources of five earths to feed everybody. As to your point about should it be leaders in politics, business, industry, science who should be publicly held to account, I definitely do think that they should be. I think the likelihood of them being held to account is probably pretty low. You only have to look at things like the investigation into the Post Office Scandal to see how slippery those six figure salary senior executives can be when you put them on the spot. Things like public inquiries can become a ritual: they're meant to reassure us that something is being done, heads are going to roll. Meanwhile, in the background, the next scandal is probably brewing under the same kind of secretive management cultures. Our rights as people in this country to protest are under threat, rights to free speech and freedom of association are under threat. If you don't have power and you want to see change, you have to take power in whatever form that you can.
Brett: I totally agree. What about the apocalyptic role of technology in our daily lives? I mean, these days a smart phone can be regarded as simply an advanced form of electronic tagging, monitoring our whereabouts, our online behaviour, our possible future crimes. In turn, facial recognition technology will soon be ubiquitous and, who knows, maybe our Uber drivers will have to contractually have brain implants fitted. Why aren’t millions of people taking to the streets in protest, Bram?
Bram: If you think about the ways in which social media, for instance, was sold to us when it started it was a free service, you know? It largely remains free at the point of contact, but they've monetized it in all sorts of ways, not least of which, you know, the algorithmic manipulation of content. Things like the Cambridge Analytica Scandal can show how much personal data can be leveraged to achieve political outcomes, so there's those kinds of dangers of those technologies. I don't think any of us really opted into those; I think what it is we were offered a free service and weren't told up front about what the consequences were of sharing that kind of data, and by the time it became apparent what the consequences were, it was that sunk-cost fallacy, you know? It would actually be more hassle to come off Facebook: you'd lose contact with this person or that person; I have to be on LinkedIn because I'm looking for a job; or I have to be on Instagram because I'm trying to start my career as a singer, songwriter or a photographer, or someone who makes mosaics. You know we've all got a reason to be there now and so we kind of submit to having our data harvested and all that good stuff. We don't protest or at least, you know, it's not a popular protest movement as you quite rightly identify. In societies that are kind of more authoritarian, particularly Chinese society, you have things like a social credit system, so they're harvesting your data but it's, you know, slightly more by force and the consequences of, you know, them having your data could be could be a lot more grave, you could end up in a re-education camp. But I really don't think there's broad awareness of the dangers of technologies like facial recognition and the biases that are inherent in facial recognition algorithms. I think the consequences, even on a philosophical level, of technologies like neuralink which will, you know, allow direct human brain computer interface, there are grave philosophical consequences that flow from that. Again like the first way of people joining social media, I don't think people will consider before jacking the first chip into their brain. And I write in the book a lot about the value of cyberpunk as a tool for understanding this kind of accelerated technological age that we live in. We haven't even really begun to see how aspects of this technology could be used for social control yet, but I think we've had hints of it. But when the, you know, technology is going to be more directly connected to our bodies, our brains, our movement around the world, our health, our credit, once this is all linked together … We're already living in a in a world where a computer can make an arbitrary decision and say ‘no’ to you on something like credit. I think extending that to health, extending that to access to different parts of the world or different cities has grave consequences and grave authoritarian overtones that we maybe won't realise until we're in the midst of it shall we say.
Brett: Alternatively, rather than attempt to investigate, analyse and draw conclusions from colossal, arbitrary phenomena such as global affairs, the apocalypse and the cosmos, wouldn’t it be wiser for concerned citizens to scale down their attentions and concerns to address more manageable events and happenings which are much more closer to home? For example, by researching and understanding their local community in an effort to improve its functionality, well-being, and future direction? That is, setting goals which are both measurable and achievable, and less likely to lead to personal disappointment, depression, wrack and ruin?
Bram: I actually do think that, you know, taking action in your local community, getting involved in activist projects, or community projects which do have measurable, achievable goals, that is probably less likely to lead you to feelings of negativity or defeat than focusing on these gigantic issues which I'm covering in the book. However, I think, you know, everything exists in a context, and I think probably one challenge with infrastructure activism, you know, designed to patch the holes in collapsing infrastructure left behind by hyper-capitalism or indeed in projects like food banks which are designed to, you know, fill a really desperate and immediate and vital human need in a community; those can all get kind of co-opted by the State, right? So if the State knows that the community is going to step in and help people it can continue to ignore the problem. So I think that's one problem with that kind of activism is that, you know, we actually live in a country that kind of relies on volunteers at places like food banks, it relies on community projects to look after children after high school so they're not on the streets, rather than having invested carefully in infrastructure. So I think there's something there as well about, you know, involvement in politics. Like for me activist projects that are connected to politics are most effective when they're connected to infrastructure because it's infrastructure that we're lacking, and it's infrastructure, that’s the kind of activism you're describing kind of currently has to patch the gaps in. So, yeah, I don't think is quite as simple as ‘Think Global, Act Local’ but it's certainly, I would say, that, you know, if you are able to take a full and frank and unflinching look at the big problems then the solutions are usually not to attack those problems head-on, but instead to then narrow your focus and look and see what you can do for the people, you know, who live in your community or who are nearby.
Brett: And on that uplifting, forward-thinking note, I think we should now end our discussion. Many thanks for your time and views, Bram. It’s been a challenging and fascinating journey.
‘The Darkest Timeline: Living in a World with No Future’ is published on June 24th 2024 on the Revol Press website.
Article
Culture Creation vs Commodity Creation:
‘Labour’s Plan for the Arts, Culture
and Creative Industries'
Culture Creation vs Commodity Creation:
‘Labour’s Plan for the Arts, Culture
and Creative Industries'
Written
by
Jon Baldwin
(London Metropolitan University)
and
Brett Gregory
May 6th 2024
by
Jon Baldwin
(London Metropolitan University)
and
Brett Gregory
May 6th 2024
On the 13th March 2024 Bracknell News reported that Sir Keir Starmer will use a speech to commit to ensuring the arts are ‘for everyone, everywhere’ under a future Labour government. This was an event which launched the document ‘Creating Growth: Labour’s Plan for the Arts, Culture and Creative Industries’ at the Labour Creatives Conference.
The glossy brochure reads like a description of a story rather than a story itself. Like the lost art of political pamphleteering, it makes promises it needn’t keep and promises it needn’t promise. Labour will do this and that for the benefit of the arts, culture and creative industries; it will put money here, support those there, scaffold this group, secure that role, lift up them, open opportunity and, not only that, it will be green, sustainable and inclusive.
Aren’t the arts brilliant! Isn’t culture great! Look how much money they all make!
And what can be said of the hipster Islington interns who produced this neoliberalist napkin during their smashed-avocado and decaf latte tea-break? A lugubrious legion of lickspittles paying lip service to political puffery, bringing to mind a quote from Jorge Luis Borges: ‘They seek neither truth nor likelihood; they seek astonishment. They think metaphysics is a branch of the literature of fantasy.’
Any commitment to the arts is to be welcomed. We live in an age of philistines and boors. The arts, culture and creativity inside and outside of our education system has been downgraded and devalued by the Tories. Creative subjects have been squeezed out of the curriculum by ministers, and their lackeys have fired phoney shots from their cottage industry ‘culture war’ which, in truth, is a proxy for an actual class war. Cultural Studies text books may soon have blank pages where the history of Marxism used to be written.
Jeremy Corbyn’s 2019 A Charter for the Arts was only 7 pages long. ‘Creating Growth’ is 19 pages long. The word ‘socialist’ appears three times in Corbyn’s document and the word ‘economy’ appears twice. In Starmer’s magnum opus ‘economy’ features ad nauseam, alongside ‘business’, with ‘socialist’ not featuring once.
The foreword for Starmer’s ‘Creative Growth’ is written by Thangam Debbonaire. Corbyn’s ‘Charter for the Arts’ opens with ‘The Socialist Vision of Jennie Lee.’ Debbonaire was educated at two private schools, Bradford Girls' Grammar School and Chetham's School of Music, and then she went off to Oxford. Jennie Lee was educated at the state school, Beath High, and was the daughter of a miner. Lee's maiden speech at Westminster was an attack on the budget of Winston Churchill, accusing him of ‘corruption and incompetence.' Debbonaire resigned her role of shadow Arts and Culture Minister due to her lack of confidence in Jeremy Corbyn. Lee was instrumental in founding the Open University and principle of open access to higher education for all. Lee’s husband, Nye Bevan, was the founder of universal, free healthcare through the NHS. Debbonaire is a school governor, a trustee of the University of Bristol Students’ Union (UBU), member of the local traffic action group, and co-founder of the House of Commons string quartet ‘The Statutory Instruments’ who perform culture with class, social class.
In her foreword Debbonaire writes that ‘the UK has won the highest number of Nobel prizes for literature and the second highest number of acting Oscars this century.’
Really? Wasn’t V. S. Naipaul (2001) from Trinidad and Tobago, and Doris Lessing (2007) from Iran? Isn’t Kazuo Ishiguro (2017) from Japan, and Abdulrazak Gurnah (2021) from Tanzania? And wasn’t Harold Pinter (2005) fined for refusing national service as a conscientious objector?
Debbonaire also writes that ‘the creative industries as a whole, have enormous economic value to the UK,’ associating arts and culture with the grubbiness of ‘growth potential’ as if they are commodities whose only value is to further the nation’s GDP. It looks like she hasn’t done her homework.
V. S. Naipaul: ‘[F]or having united perceptive narrative and incorruptible scrutiny in works that compel us to see the presence of suppressed histories.’
Harold Pinter: ‘[W]ho in his plays uncovers the precipice under everyday prattle and forces entry into oppression's closed rooms.’
Doris Lessing: ‘[T]hat epicist of the female experience, who with scepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilisation to scrutiny.’
Kazuo Ishiguro: ‘[W]who, in novels of great emotional force, has uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world.’
Abdulrazak Gurnah: ‘[F]or his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents.’
The scrutiny of suppressed histories, oppression’s closed rooms, scepticism of division, emotional force uncovering illusion, and the compassionate consideration of the refugee doesn’t seem to fit in with Labour’s economic understanding of the arts.
As for film award ceremonies, it was reported that, over the last 10 years, 40% of the recipients of the main prizes at the Oscars, Baftas and Mercury went to private school, whereas only about 6% of the population are privately educated. Of course, this is the type of elitism Labour claim they want to change and, indeed, Starmer’s would-be cabinet will almost certainly have the most state educated ministers in post-war history. You have to start somewhere.
In The Poverty of Philosophy, Marx outlines a picture of unabated continual commodification ‘when all that men have regarded as inalienable become objects of exchange . . . virtue, love, opinion, science, conscience, etc. — where all at last enter into commerce.’ This genealogy is notable for several reasons: aspects of life which were previously not commodified are now on a linear and seemingly irreversible production line. That is, there is a relentless colonisation of the life-world by commodity relations which leads to ‘universal venality’. This corruption of community bonds causes people to fetishize commodities and become alienated by them, oblivious to their exploitation.
The design of Labour’s brochure is quite nice, blocks of red and an easy-on-the eye font, with stock photos trying their hardest not to be stock photos. While the ambition for authenticity is admirable, the conclusion is clear and simple: this political party’s plan for the arts, culture and creative industries in the UK under Keir Starmer is but a plan for further commodification, privatisation and commerce. There is too much reliance on a nationalist and instrumental approach to culture, for instance, as well as PFI-style funding solutions, i.e. there is too much emphasis on economic growth rather than culture’s intrinsic value. This means subordinating cultural content to a means of legitimising exploitation and oppression through diversion, spectacle, irrelevance and inaccessibility. There is no reference to tackling class inequalities, for example, by making discrimination on the basis of class unlawful, just like race, sex and disability, as well as introducing a legal duty on public bodies to make tackling class and income inequality a priority.
As a consequence, here are a few of our alternatives proposals for ‘creating culture’ rather than ‘creating commodities’:
Education
Culture Industries
For example:
Arts Council England, BBC, Booker Prize Foundation, British Film Institute, British Institute of Professional Photography, Creative UK, English National Ballet, Football Association, Lawn Tennis Association, National Museum Directors' Council, National Lottery, Opera UK, Premier League Football, Royal Academy of Arts, Royal Academy of Dance, Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, Royal Drawing School, Royal Institute of British Architects, Royal Musical Association, Royal Society of Literature, Royal Society of Sculptors, Rugby Football League, UK Interactive Entertainment, UK Music, UK Sport, Wimbledon, etc.
Events
Initiatives
Financial Assistance
The glossy brochure reads like a description of a story rather than a story itself. Like the lost art of political pamphleteering, it makes promises it needn’t keep and promises it needn’t promise. Labour will do this and that for the benefit of the arts, culture and creative industries; it will put money here, support those there, scaffold this group, secure that role, lift up them, open opportunity and, not only that, it will be green, sustainable and inclusive.
Aren’t the arts brilliant! Isn’t culture great! Look how much money they all make!
And what can be said of the hipster Islington interns who produced this neoliberalist napkin during their smashed-avocado and decaf latte tea-break? A lugubrious legion of lickspittles paying lip service to political puffery, bringing to mind a quote from Jorge Luis Borges: ‘They seek neither truth nor likelihood; they seek astonishment. They think metaphysics is a branch of the literature of fantasy.’
Any commitment to the arts is to be welcomed. We live in an age of philistines and boors. The arts, culture and creativity inside and outside of our education system has been downgraded and devalued by the Tories. Creative subjects have been squeezed out of the curriculum by ministers, and their lackeys have fired phoney shots from their cottage industry ‘culture war’ which, in truth, is a proxy for an actual class war. Cultural Studies text books may soon have blank pages where the history of Marxism used to be written.
Jeremy Corbyn’s 2019 A Charter for the Arts was only 7 pages long. ‘Creating Growth’ is 19 pages long. The word ‘socialist’ appears three times in Corbyn’s document and the word ‘economy’ appears twice. In Starmer’s magnum opus ‘economy’ features ad nauseam, alongside ‘business’, with ‘socialist’ not featuring once.
The foreword for Starmer’s ‘Creative Growth’ is written by Thangam Debbonaire. Corbyn’s ‘Charter for the Arts’ opens with ‘The Socialist Vision of Jennie Lee.’ Debbonaire was educated at two private schools, Bradford Girls' Grammar School and Chetham's School of Music, and then she went off to Oxford. Jennie Lee was educated at the state school, Beath High, and was the daughter of a miner. Lee's maiden speech at Westminster was an attack on the budget of Winston Churchill, accusing him of ‘corruption and incompetence.' Debbonaire resigned her role of shadow Arts and Culture Minister due to her lack of confidence in Jeremy Corbyn. Lee was instrumental in founding the Open University and principle of open access to higher education for all. Lee’s husband, Nye Bevan, was the founder of universal, free healthcare through the NHS. Debbonaire is a school governor, a trustee of the University of Bristol Students’ Union (UBU), member of the local traffic action group, and co-founder of the House of Commons string quartet ‘The Statutory Instruments’ who perform culture with class, social class.
In her foreword Debbonaire writes that ‘the UK has won the highest number of Nobel prizes for literature and the second highest number of acting Oscars this century.’
Really? Wasn’t V. S. Naipaul (2001) from Trinidad and Tobago, and Doris Lessing (2007) from Iran? Isn’t Kazuo Ishiguro (2017) from Japan, and Abdulrazak Gurnah (2021) from Tanzania? And wasn’t Harold Pinter (2005) fined for refusing national service as a conscientious objector?
Debbonaire also writes that ‘the creative industries as a whole, have enormous economic value to the UK,’ associating arts and culture with the grubbiness of ‘growth potential’ as if they are commodities whose only value is to further the nation’s GDP. It looks like she hasn’t done her homework.
V. S. Naipaul: ‘[F]or having united perceptive narrative and incorruptible scrutiny in works that compel us to see the presence of suppressed histories.’
Harold Pinter: ‘[W]ho in his plays uncovers the precipice under everyday prattle and forces entry into oppression's closed rooms.’
Doris Lessing: ‘[T]hat epicist of the female experience, who with scepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilisation to scrutiny.’
Kazuo Ishiguro: ‘[W]who, in novels of great emotional force, has uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world.’
Abdulrazak Gurnah: ‘[F]or his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents.’
The scrutiny of suppressed histories, oppression’s closed rooms, scepticism of division, emotional force uncovering illusion, and the compassionate consideration of the refugee doesn’t seem to fit in with Labour’s economic understanding of the arts.
As for film award ceremonies, it was reported that, over the last 10 years, 40% of the recipients of the main prizes at the Oscars, Baftas and Mercury went to private school, whereas only about 6% of the population are privately educated. Of course, this is the type of elitism Labour claim they want to change and, indeed, Starmer’s would-be cabinet will almost certainly have the most state educated ministers in post-war history. You have to start somewhere.
In The Poverty of Philosophy, Marx outlines a picture of unabated continual commodification ‘when all that men have regarded as inalienable become objects of exchange . . . virtue, love, opinion, science, conscience, etc. — where all at last enter into commerce.’ This genealogy is notable for several reasons: aspects of life which were previously not commodified are now on a linear and seemingly irreversible production line. That is, there is a relentless colonisation of the life-world by commodity relations which leads to ‘universal venality’. This corruption of community bonds causes people to fetishize commodities and become alienated by them, oblivious to their exploitation.
The design of Labour’s brochure is quite nice, blocks of red and an easy-on-the eye font, with stock photos trying their hardest not to be stock photos. While the ambition for authenticity is admirable, the conclusion is clear and simple: this political party’s plan for the arts, culture and creative industries in the UK under Keir Starmer is but a plan for further commodification, privatisation and commerce. There is too much reliance on a nationalist and instrumental approach to culture, for instance, as well as PFI-style funding solutions, i.e. there is too much emphasis on economic growth rather than culture’s intrinsic value. This means subordinating cultural content to a means of legitimising exploitation and oppression through diversion, spectacle, irrelevance and inaccessibility. There is no reference to tackling class inequalities, for example, by making discrimination on the basis of class unlawful, just like race, sex and disability, as well as introducing a legal duty on public bodies to make tackling class and income inequality a priority.
As a consequence, here are a few of our alternatives proposals for ‘creating culture’ rather than ‘creating commodities’:
Education
- Working-class history, its artistic and sporting achievements, interests and perspectives, to feature fairly, equally and continually in all arts and humanities curricula and tutorial systems from primary education level upwards, including at private schools which benefit from a charitable status
Culture Industries
- Fair, equal, continual and transparent inclusion, participation and representation of working-class individuals, their creative works and sporting records with regards to the membership, administration, executive decision-making and funding processes of publicly-funded cultural institutions and their related bodies. Thus, addressing the social, financial, geographical and historical barriers which prevent people from diverse and deprived backgrounds from accessing culture as both practitioners and consumers.
For example:
Arts Council England, BBC, Booker Prize Foundation, British Film Institute, British Institute of Professional Photography, Creative UK, English National Ballet, Football Association, Lawn Tennis Association, National Museum Directors' Council, National Lottery, Opera UK, Premier League Football, Royal Academy of Arts, Royal Academy of Dance, Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, Royal Drawing School, Royal Institute of British Architects, Royal Musical Association, Royal Society of Literature, Royal Society of Sculptors, Rugby Football League, UK Interactive Entertainment, UK Music, UK Sport, Wimbledon, etc.
Events
- Publicly-funded festivals of working-class art, creativity and sporting endeavour to take place in different UK cities each year with affordable ticket prices. Documentary coverage and screenings to be marketed and streamed on BBC television, radio and iPlayer. For example: Working-Class Film Festival, Working-Class Literature Festival, Working-Class Sports Festival, Working-Class Photography Festival etc.
- Publicly-funded art galleries, theatres, cinemas etc. to exclusively and actively promote and exhibit contemporary working-class artefacts, events, performances, productions etc. for at least three months of the year.
- Working-class artists in residence with their independent exhibitions to held throughout the year, with financial support, in unlisted or vacant council owned buildings
- Working-class poetry, short story and/or novel extract readings to take place on BBC radio and BBC iPlayer weekly
Initiatives
- Government-led regulation and reformation of the ownership and control of the UK’s mainstream media: newspapers and their websites, magazines and their websites, social media platforms, television and radio etc. In turn, public taxes should be invested in community-based and grassroots media production which directly addresses the concerns, issues and tastes of local people
- Government-led regulation and reformation of the monopoly of UK football clubs under foreign-ownership which, in turn, alienate and exclude local and regional fans and communities with overpriced ticket and shirt sales etc.
- Increased accessibility to musical instruments, drawing, painting and ceramic materials etc. for those on low-incomes and/or from deprived backgrounds. These could be provided via the re-introduction and revitalisation of libraries as publicly-funded culture hubs in local communities
- Publicly-funded digital hubs to be established in economically disadvantaged areas to provide access to technology, training, and mentorship for aspiring creatives
- Provision of affordable workspaces and resources for working-class creatives, including production facilities, sporting facilities etc., particularly in deprived areas
- Development of initiatives and services which promote and achieve mental health and well-being amongst working-class talent within the creative and digital industries
- Integrated education programs in digital and creative organisations to address and eradicate conscious and unconscious social class bullying, intimidation, humiliation and/or bias in the workplace, in administrative materials, in promotional materials and during work-related social gatherings
- Expansion of apprenticeship programs in the creative and digital industries with a particular emphasis on recruiting and supporting individuals from low-income working-class backgrounds
- Establish a program where local councils provide financial support to crowdfunded video games that reach a certain number of backers from their community. Councils can offer grants or low-interest loans to successful crowdfunding campaigns, helping independent creators cover development costs and marketing expenses. In exchange, developers could be required to include elements of local culture, history, or landmarks in their games, promoting tourism and community pride.
Financial Assistance
- Grants to be made available to working-class individuals and organisations to help to develop digital and creative projects in their community which focus of social issues, diversity, inclusion, motivation and aspiration
- Twelve month subsidised work-placement schemes (including travel expenses) at regional companies or organisations for low-income arts and sports graduates. For example: film/media, creative writing, music, performance, football, tennis, snooker etc.
- Tax incentives for creative and digital companies in order for them to demonstrate a commitment to hiring and retaining working-class talent, as well as investing in initiatives that benefit economically disadvantaged communities in their region
- Low-income and unemployed artists with independently verifiable creative portfolios to be financially-supported by the DWP and DCMS so they are able to continue with their pursuits and endeavours
- Financial assistance from the DCMS for low-income musical acts wishing to tour post-Brexit Europe and beyond, as well as sporting individuals who need to access training facilities abroad
Review
Gregor Gall
Mick Lynch: The Making of a Working-Class Hero
(Manchester University Press, 2024)
Written
by
Jon Baldwin
(London Metropolitan University)
May 6th 2024
by
Jon Baldwin
(London Metropolitan University)
May 6th 2024
Mick Lynch is a 60 year old London School of Economics alumnus who earns a six figure salary, owns a Victorian terrace house worth £1million and supports Brexit. Yet in the summer of 2022 the status of ‘working-class hero’ was suddenly thrust upon him by the lumpen online left-wing following a series of severe yet quite sane ideological skirmishes with the UK’s corporate media. As the General Secretary of the National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers (RMT) – who oversaw extensive industrial action at the time – he is perceived as one of the most active, high-profile militants in the country. Indeed, apart from Arthur Scargill in the 1980s, it is difficult to recall the last time when a union leader had become such a household name.
Gregor Gall’s new political biography, Mick Lynch: The Making of a Working-Class Hero (Manchester University Press, 2024), traces and analyses Lynch’s journey to this vaunted status by following ‘The Four Ps’: persona, politics, period and power. That is, he is calm, collected and calculating; his politics are progressive and social democrat in ambit; the period of the 2022-23 strike action choreographed him on to centre stage; and the RMT have the resources of associational, structural and institutional power. And so he took the opportunity to be the astute voice of the union, rejuvenating its organisation so it could publicly punch above its weight.
As Gall recalls, when Piers Morgan linked him to the Thunderbirds’ arch enemy, ‘The Hood’, during an interview, Lynch retorted, ‘Is that the level of your journalism these days?’ On Good Morning Britain he reminded Richard Madeley, the programme’s host, that ‘you do come up with the most remarkable twaddle sometimes.’ And, as Sky News’ Kay Burley attempted to conjure up visions of picket line violence from the 1980s, he exclaimed, ‘I can’t believe this line of questioning …What are you talking about? You’ve gone off into the world of the surreal.’
Lynch’s self-assurance, use of plain language, factual correctness, indignation and sarcasm felt authentic and refreshing to media-literate viewers who were emerging from lockdown and, even worse, from a monotonous party political hum of prepared statements which proclaimed, like an Oxbridge choir, national consent on COVID. Gall suggests that, as a new voice with ‘soft power’, adept at out-manoeuvring mediated man-traps and reframing socio-political issues to represent his members’ concerns, fellow union leaders can learn a lot from his survival in the bear pit of broadcasting.
In the phenomenal wake of 46 million online views of Mick Lynch video clips, as well as the popularity of Mick Lynch mugs and Mick Lynch tote bags, Gall notes that there is no application process, no adjudication committee, and no references required for appointing a working-class hero. Indeed, as Brecht states in Life of Galileo (1943), ‘unhappy is the land that needs a hero’, and Lynch arrived in such an unhappy land at exactly the right time: the working class and disenfranchised beaten down by years of austerity, low in confidence, low in class consciousness and low in workers’ collective struggles. Following the Establishment’s political execution of Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell, the void in the mainstream was there to be filled.
Even the comedian Stewart Lee would name Lynch as the ‘best spokesman for workers’ rights and leftwing values this century.’ Yet he would also call Lynch a ‘Brexit arse made good’ due to the RMT’s support for Brexit – or its Lexit variant – due to the belief that rail nationalisation could only occur again under such insular conditions. This ignores the fact that many European countries have nationalised railways however and, surprisingly, Keir Starmer’s Labour Party has recently pledged that, should they reach government, much of the rail network will be renationalised.
Gall’s biography probes the inner workings of the RMT and can be seen as neither a hagiography nor hatchet-job, but both a celebration and critique of Lynch. For instance, the author suggests two major contributions that this leader has made. Firstly, to reinvigorate social democracy as a counter-narrative and alternative ideology to neo-liberalism; and, secondly, to rekindle the heat of trade unionism and galvanise the working-class with collective self-confidence. He continues that there are six essential functions of leadership which are relevant to unions and the position of general secretary. These are: 1) clear agenda setting and framing of arguments; 2) confident public speaking and communication; 3) effective negotiation skills; 4) insightful strategic planning; 5) productive caucusing and alliance building; and 6) active management of people and organisational resources. Gregor further argues that Mick Lynch’s predecessor Bob Crow surpassed him in all these functions. For example, in terms of strategic planning, the RMT has a very limited strike fund, whereas Unite has the ability to pay £70 a day strike pay in an effort to secure victory under both Len McCluskey and Sharon Graham’s leadership. As a critical friend of the unions, Gall also advances more innovative tactics, coordination and organisation.
He writes that Lynch is best characterised as a social democrat because he advocates reforming capitalism rather than abolishing it. His thinking on politics is about pragmatism, compromise and he is known as a ‘dealmaker’. This may well serve RMT members, but what of the wider working-class community to whom he is supposedly a hero? From the perspective of Marx and Gramsci on the unions, this can be regarded as a lost opportunity.
Marx suggested in Der Vorbote (1866) that trade unions ‘originally sprang up from the spontaneous attempts of workmen’ to check competition amongst themselves and to raise them at ‘least above the condition of mere slaves.’ Unions, ‘unconsciously to themselves,’ formed ‘centres of organisation of the working class.’ But they did not expand or exploit this organisational potential, becoming instead too ‘exclusively bent upon the local and immediate struggles with capital’ and did not fully appreciate the possibility of ‘their power of acting against the system of wages slavery itself.’ The potential of trade unions is anticipated by Marx: ‘Apart from their original purposes, they must now learn to act deliberately as organising centres of the working class in the broad interest of its complete emancipation.’
In turn, Gramsci also indicates in L'Ordine Nuovo (1919) that a moment is now lost in unionisation. Instead of uniting in revolutionary and internationalist terms, the unions tended on the other hand ‘to embody the theory and the tactic of reformist opportunism and to become merely national organisms.’ To be sure, well-thought out and brave movements and strikes saw the condition of life of the workers improve with the eight-hour day, pay rise, social legislation and so forth. But all these victories of union action are set on the old basis and ‘the principle of private property remains intact and strong, the order of capitalist production and the exploitation of man by man remain intact.’ In such reformist union managerialism ‘[t]he choice of the union leaders was never made on criteria of industrial competence, but of merely legal, bureaucratic or demagogic competence.’ This notion of ‘demagogic competence’ might also be said of Mick Lynch.
Gall’s book and general work on trade unions is exemplary, and is precisely the helpful commentary that is needed. Lynch has often had low aspirations: ‘We hope for a little bit more than nothing.’ Surely, we should expect more from our heroes, even just for one day. Lynch has agreed to be interviewed by countless journalists and broadcasters, appeared on panel-shows and so forth, yet did not engage with Gall in the writing of his book, despite many appeals. This, of course, is his right, but it would be interesting to know if his possible trajectory is from ‘soft power’ to ‘hard power’.
Gregor Gall’s new political biography, Mick Lynch: The Making of a Working-Class Hero (Manchester University Press, 2024), traces and analyses Lynch’s journey to this vaunted status by following ‘The Four Ps’: persona, politics, period and power. That is, he is calm, collected and calculating; his politics are progressive and social democrat in ambit; the period of the 2022-23 strike action choreographed him on to centre stage; and the RMT have the resources of associational, structural and institutional power. And so he took the opportunity to be the astute voice of the union, rejuvenating its organisation so it could publicly punch above its weight.
As Gall recalls, when Piers Morgan linked him to the Thunderbirds’ arch enemy, ‘The Hood’, during an interview, Lynch retorted, ‘Is that the level of your journalism these days?’ On Good Morning Britain he reminded Richard Madeley, the programme’s host, that ‘you do come up with the most remarkable twaddle sometimes.’ And, as Sky News’ Kay Burley attempted to conjure up visions of picket line violence from the 1980s, he exclaimed, ‘I can’t believe this line of questioning …What are you talking about? You’ve gone off into the world of the surreal.’
Lynch’s self-assurance, use of plain language, factual correctness, indignation and sarcasm felt authentic and refreshing to media-literate viewers who were emerging from lockdown and, even worse, from a monotonous party political hum of prepared statements which proclaimed, like an Oxbridge choir, national consent on COVID. Gall suggests that, as a new voice with ‘soft power’, adept at out-manoeuvring mediated man-traps and reframing socio-political issues to represent his members’ concerns, fellow union leaders can learn a lot from his survival in the bear pit of broadcasting.
In the phenomenal wake of 46 million online views of Mick Lynch video clips, as well as the popularity of Mick Lynch mugs and Mick Lynch tote bags, Gall notes that there is no application process, no adjudication committee, and no references required for appointing a working-class hero. Indeed, as Brecht states in Life of Galileo (1943), ‘unhappy is the land that needs a hero’, and Lynch arrived in such an unhappy land at exactly the right time: the working class and disenfranchised beaten down by years of austerity, low in confidence, low in class consciousness and low in workers’ collective struggles. Following the Establishment’s political execution of Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell, the void in the mainstream was there to be filled.
Even the comedian Stewart Lee would name Lynch as the ‘best spokesman for workers’ rights and leftwing values this century.’ Yet he would also call Lynch a ‘Brexit arse made good’ due to the RMT’s support for Brexit – or its Lexit variant – due to the belief that rail nationalisation could only occur again under such insular conditions. This ignores the fact that many European countries have nationalised railways however and, surprisingly, Keir Starmer’s Labour Party has recently pledged that, should they reach government, much of the rail network will be renationalised.
Gall’s biography probes the inner workings of the RMT and can be seen as neither a hagiography nor hatchet-job, but both a celebration and critique of Lynch. For instance, the author suggests two major contributions that this leader has made. Firstly, to reinvigorate social democracy as a counter-narrative and alternative ideology to neo-liberalism; and, secondly, to rekindle the heat of trade unionism and galvanise the working-class with collective self-confidence. He continues that there are six essential functions of leadership which are relevant to unions and the position of general secretary. These are: 1) clear agenda setting and framing of arguments; 2) confident public speaking and communication; 3) effective negotiation skills; 4) insightful strategic planning; 5) productive caucusing and alliance building; and 6) active management of people and organisational resources. Gregor further argues that Mick Lynch’s predecessor Bob Crow surpassed him in all these functions. For example, in terms of strategic planning, the RMT has a very limited strike fund, whereas Unite has the ability to pay £70 a day strike pay in an effort to secure victory under both Len McCluskey and Sharon Graham’s leadership. As a critical friend of the unions, Gall also advances more innovative tactics, coordination and organisation.
He writes that Lynch is best characterised as a social democrat because he advocates reforming capitalism rather than abolishing it. His thinking on politics is about pragmatism, compromise and he is known as a ‘dealmaker’. This may well serve RMT members, but what of the wider working-class community to whom he is supposedly a hero? From the perspective of Marx and Gramsci on the unions, this can be regarded as a lost opportunity.
Marx suggested in Der Vorbote (1866) that trade unions ‘originally sprang up from the spontaneous attempts of workmen’ to check competition amongst themselves and to raise them at ‘least above the condition of mere slaves.’ Unions, ‘unconsciously to themselves,’ formed ‘centres of organisation of the working class.’ But they did not expand or exploit this organisational potential, becoming instead too ‘exclusively bent upon the local and immediate struggles with capital’ and did not fully appreciate the possibility of ‘their power of acting against the system of wages slavery itself.’ The potential of trade unions is anticipated by Marx: ‘Apart from their original purposes, they must now learn to act deliberately as organising centres of the working class in the broad interest of its complete emancipation.’
In turn, Gramsci also indicates in L'Ordine Nuovo (1919) that a moment is now lost in unionisation. Instead of uniting in revolutionary and internationalist terms, the unions tended on the other hand ‘to embody the theory and the tactic of reformist opportunism and to become merely national organisms.’ To be sure, well-thought out and brave movements and strikes saw the condition of life of the workers improve with the eight-hour day, pay rise, social legislation and so forth. But all these victories of union action are set on the old basis and ‘the principle of private property remains intact and strong, the order of capitalist production and the exploitation of man by man remain intact.’ In such reformist union managerialism ‘[t]he choice of the union leaders was never made on criteria of industrial competence, but of merely legal, bureaucratic or demagogic competence.’ This notion of ‘demagogic competence’ might also be said of Mick Lynch.
Gall’s book and general work on trade unions is exemplary, and is precisely the helpful commentary that is needed. Lynch has often had low aspirations: ‘We hope for a little bit more than nothing.’ Surely, we should expect more from our heroes, even just for one day. Lynch has agreed to be interviewed by countless journalists and broadcasters, appeared on panel-shows and so forth, yet did not engage with Gall in the writing of his book, despite many appeals. This, of course, is his right, but it would be interesting to know if his possible trajectory is from ‘soft power’ to ‘hard power’.
Article
Dear River Thames:
The Pollution of Privatisation
Dear River Thames:
The Pollution of Privatisation
Written
by
Jon Baldwin
(London Metropolitan University)
April 12th 2024
by
Jon Baldwin
(London Metropolitan University)
April 12th 2024
‘Thousands have lived without love, not one without water.’
- W.H. Auden ‘First Things First’ (1956)
If we regard the British Isles as a body of nations then its rivers and waterways are its veins, its lifeblood.
A walk along a river bank is so much more than a leisure activity. It is a journey for our senses, our selfhood and our humanity. The water’s unending and unpredictable undulations encouraging and enhancing the temporal flow of our reflections, our memories, our daydreams and our inspirations.
However urban we may think we are, however down-to-earth we may think we are, our rivers make romantics, poets and philosophers of us all.
It thus behoves us to take the time to understand them, to protect them and to cherish them, for now and forever, before it is too late.
For some the Oxford and Cambridge annual boat race is the epitome of the Corinthian spirit, raced by scholar-athletes who combine academic rigour with elite physical prowess, watched by adoring crowds on the banks of the Thames and broadcasted to millions.
For others it is an antiquated folk ritual for the wealthy and privileged to congratulate themselves. It is not an example of meritocracy but rather a monopoly where the same two teams play each other every year in the final. Inclusive it is not, it’s a public school-dominated pursuit with just one black participant in almost its two-hundred-year history.
Nonetheless the tradition holds that the winning crew throw their cox into the river in celebration of their triumph. This year the custom was abandoned. Why? To put it bluntly, there was shit in the River Thames. The privatised Thames Water has overseen mismanagement of sewage, discharging billions of litres of untreated sewage into the river. This meant there were high levels of Escherichia coli in the river. Losing Oxford captain Leonard Jenkins revealed that he and several crewmates had been plagued by an E. coli-related illness and said, ‘it would be a lot nicer if there wasn't as much poo in the water.’
A week later, on 4th April,the London Evening Standard carried on its front page an emoji of a poo, crying, with the logo of Thames Water. The title reads ‘London’s great stink’ and the subheading ‘Sewage flowed into capital's rivers for almost 10,000 hours last year.’
The title deliberately echoes what the press at the time called the Great Stink of London in 1858. Back then hot weather intensified the smell of untreated human waste and industrial effluent on the banks of the River Thames. As the heat increased, centuries of waste began to ferment, people got ill and thousands died. The smell hit the recently rebuilt Houses of Parliament, and the politicians finally acted with plans for a new sewage system to be built with the gusto typical of the era. But the resonance is clear, our current treatment of water and sewage has taken us back to the reign of Queen Victoria, as well to the river analyses and proto eco-criticism of Friedrich Engels.
The Engels family wealth can be traced to Friedrich’s grandfather who moved to Wuppertal, now the north Rhineland of Germany. This was due to the lime-free rivers and tributary of the river Rhine. This promised and delivered riches. Extracting elements from the river proved useful to bleach linen yarn, and later to power water mills. But the Wuppertal that Engels is later born into is not the idyllic high valleys, green fields, vibrant forests with clear fast-running streams it once was. Due to the extraction and subsequent pollution of the river, surrounding nature, and the industry in the area – and prefiguring what he will later find in Manchester – there is overcrowding, child labour, intense poverty and ostentatious wealth. In his 1839 Letter from Wuppertal, Engels opens with a discussion of the river:
‘The purple waves of the narrow river flow sometimes swiftly, sometimes sluggishly between smoky factory buildings and yarn-strewn bleaching-yards. [It has a] bright red colour…[due] simply and solely to the numerous dye-works using Turkey red…[T]he muddy Wupper flows slowly by and, compared with the Rhine just left behind, its miserable appearance is very disappointing.’
Young Engels reacts against this and rebels against his wealthy mill owning father’s business and its social and environmental implications. He is aroused by developments in German philosophy (Hegel), French politics (the Revolution), and English Romantic poetry. Engels father becomes concerned about his son’s poetic sensibility, revolutionary thoughts, and atheism, and wants to move him from such unseemly influences. How best to neuter a wistful, intellectual, young radical Romantic poet? Send him away to Manchester to become a middle manager of the family textile business. Have him learn the numbing and nauseating miseries of business. That is, of linen and cotton spinning and weaving, bleaching and dyeing, stock taking, audit and accounting. In Manchester Engels will reluctantly learn the ins and outs of world trade, currency deals, import duties, the division of labour, pricing-costs-profit, the extraction of surplus value from the worker, and all the mechanics of capitalism. This will, however, be put to good use in the critique of such a system.
The Manchester Engels is sent to is the most advanced site of industrialisation in the world. The damp, wet climate, with rivers of soft water, are ideal for treating cotton and washing cloth. The first canal in Britain was in Manchester, and the first inter-city railway in the world is between Manchester and the port of Liverpool. This transport system links to the colonies, and brings in coal, cotton from the plantations, aids the formulation of manufactories, and eases bulk imports and exports. The exponential growth of the cotton industry sees Manchester referred to as Cottonopolis.
Manchester is the first manufacturing city of the world, and the scene of the starkest social divides and sanitary horrors Europe had to offer. Engels is compelled to write The Conditions of the Working Class in England (1845). This is a celebrated polemic, a critical analysis of relentless capitalism, and the unvarnished horrors of industrialisation and urbanisation. It mixes history and statistics, political philosophy, medical records, government documents, court reports, newspaper articles, and Engels own eye-witness accounts, accompanied by the unsung heroine, Mary Burns.
The Manchester here stinks, is noisy, oppressive, full of grime and human deprivation and horror. There are ‘foul pools of stagnant urine and excrement’, ‘cattle-sheds for human beings’, pigs share stiles with children, there are slum tenements, crushed limbs, misshapen spines, disease and infirmity, and ultimately retreat to the two comforts no one can take from you: drunk stupors and sexual relief. This is a working class with hardly any political rights. Engels, like any decent journalist, wanted to speak truth to power about these conditions.
The book often reads as Dickensian or Victorian gothic horror, and here is an extract with concern for the river apparent:
‘The view from this bridge … is characteristic for the whole district. At the bottom flows, or rather stagnates, the Irk, a narrow, coal-black, foul-smelling stream, full of debris and refuse, which it deposits on the shallower right bank. In dry weather, a long string of the most disgusting, blackish-green, slime pools are left standing on this bank, from the depths of which bubbles of miasmatic gas constantly arise and give forth a stench unendurable even on the bridge forty or fifty feet above the surface of the stream. But besides this, the stream itself is checked every few paces by high weirs, behind which slime and refuse accumulate and rot in thick masses. Above the bridge are tanneries, bone mills, and gasworks, from which all drains and refuse find their way into the Irk, which receives further the contents of all the neighbouring sewers and privies. It may be easily imagined, therefore, what sort of residue the stream deposits. Below the bridge you look upon the piles of debris, the refuse, filth, and offal from the courts on the steep left bank…’
Engels writes in The Conditions of the Working Class in England, that ‘I accuse the English bourgeois before the entire world of murder, robbery and other crimes on a massive scale.’ These accusations stand the test of time. Despite advances in chemical treatment, engineering, sewage systems, technology, decline of polluting industrialisation, and so on, our rivers are not in a dissimilar state to the ones noted by Engels. The wealthy and privileged crew of a boat cannot even frolic in the river, and newspaper headlines recall Victorian conditions. What went wrong? In essence, the answer might be the turning away from a minimal form of the socialism Engels promoted and instead the turn to privatisation.
For much of the 20th century water in England and Wales was provisioned publicly in an era of the Keynesian welfare state. The capital costs and initial infrastructure was met by the State. The population was supplied with universal access to water. However, under the run-down (under fund and then sell off) of state assets by Thatcher within the ethos of neoliberalism, it was deemed that water should now be governed by the free market. The 1989 Water Act privatised water, selling off public assets to private water and wastewater firms for £7.6 billion. At the time the UK government took on the sector’s entire £4.9billion in debts and gave the new private corporations £1.5bn of public funds. The marketing campaign to sell shares was ‘You could be an H2Owner’ – to the sound of Handel’s Water Music. A basic human right, held in common by all, provided on the basis of social equity, became a private commodity.
What has water privatisation achieved? For Conservative peer, Baroness McIntosh of Pickering, ‘Private water and wastewater companies have enabled unprecedented spending and cleaning our beaches and rivers to reach record quality levels.’ For others, the privatised water system is leaking sewage, water, and money. Privatisation was meant to result in cheaper costs – yet water bills rose by 40 per cent in real terms (National Audit Office). Privatisation was meant to unlock more investment – yet less was invested in 2018 than in 1990. Privatisation was meant to improve the services – yet despite inept regulation, fines for non-compliance with drinking-water, quality standards have exceeded £1.5 million over the last five years, and we lose enough water for 20 million people to leaks every day. Water companies find it more profitable to pay relatively small fines than avoid sewage dumping. Austerity led cuts to the government’s Environment Agency have seen monitoring levels fall, leading to the necessity of the largest citizen science water testing project ever to take place in the UK. It found that 83% of English rivers contain evidence of high pollution caused by sewage and agricultural waste, aquatic life struggles to survive in such conditions.
Since 2010, shareholders have enjoyed dividends upwards of £13.5 billion, this money which could have improved water systems, addressed environmental concerns, or served the State. In this sense there has been a shift of wealth from public hands into private hands. Far from Thatcher’s vision of a ‘shareholder democracy,’ current shareholders, often registered in countries like the Channel Islands to pay lower tax, include four major pension funds and four overseas investment funds which between them hold over 90% of the company's shares. The cost of maintaining and improving water and sewer infrastructure has been paid for by an increase in debt, which has risen from almost zero at the time of privatisation to nearly £40bn in 2016. Having syphoned off as much profit as possible, shareholders are reluctant to pay their debts and now the suggestion is that state owned banks of China will bail out Thames Water. You couldn’t make it up! Water, once state owned in England, gets run down and sold off, it gets exploited, and debt increases while shareholders receive dividends. Shareholders don’t want to pay off the debt, so it is sold to an overseas state. The Conservative government do not like state ownership of utilities, unless it is an overseas state it seems.
Consumers are urged not to waste water, not to use hose pipes, to use a shower instead of bath, to not flush at certain items, to move away from possible flood areas and so on. That is, consumers are called upon to act in the public interest while the private equity owners operate in the interests of shareholders. This is the trick of diverting attention from production and water companies and on to consumption and individual behaviour. ‘It’s your fault – you left the tap dripping all night.’ Privatisation can be seen for what it really is: a transfer of economic power from the public purse to private pocket, an associated attack on unions, a break-up of the state, an ideological mission of neoliberalism and, therefore, what we called in the old days – a class war.
What is happening with Thames Water is indicative of what is happening more broadly around the country’s rivers, beaches, woodlands, environment and so forth. And indicative of what is happening on a wider scale when capital exploits the planet. Lake Windermere suffers illegal dumps of sewage and Lough Neagh is described as a toilet without a flush. We are due to run short of water in 20 years time, added to this is the climate crisis and various tipping points. Shareholders concern is for short term gain, there is no incentive, and they cannot be relied upon to organise the long term projects that are required to address the incoming environmental issues.
What’s worse is that under Brexit, ministers are planning to diverge from the EU’s water framework directive which sets pollution standards for European waterways. This further weakens the already impotent regulation around water quality. England is the only country to have fully privatised its water and sewerage system. European cities such as Paris and Berlin have re-nationalised water and sewer systems as outsourcing contracts come to an end. What do we see in England is a public asset ruined by private extraction. What do we need? Re-nationalisation. A return of water (and other utilities) back to the commons and then further collectivisation. After all, who doesn’t want to see an Oxbridge student tossed into the river?
This country’s rivers and waterways historically, spiritually and naturally transcend the short-term, self-serving, self-importance of economic and political enterprise.
They are earthly phenomena for enjoyment and escape, conviviality and community, perspective and peace; venues of vitality where picnics are prepared, personal decisions are pronounced and marriages are proposed.
Millions of people would prefer such life-affirming human happenings to occur in surroundings that are fresh, flowing and crystal clear rather than amidst the corpse-like clutter and contagion of late stage capitalism.
- W.H. Auden ‘First Things First’ (1956)
If we regard the British Isles as a body of nations then its rivers and waterways are its veins, its lifeblood.
A walk along a river bank is so much more than a leisure activity. It is a journey for our senses, our selfhood and our humanity. The water’s unending and unpredictable undulations encouraging and enhancing the temporal flow of our reflections, our memories, our daydreams and our inspirations.
However urban we may think we are, however down-to-earth we may think we are, our rivers make romantics, poets and philosophers of us all.
It thus behoves us to take the time to understand them, to protect them and to cherish them, for now and forever, before it is too late.
For some the Oxford and Cambridge annual boat race is the epitome of the Corinthian spirit, raced by scholar-athletes who combine academic rigour with elite physical prowess, watched by adoring crowds on the banks of the Thames and broadcasted to millions.
For others it is an antiquated folk ritual for the wealthy and privileged to congratulate themselves. It is not an example of meritocracy but rather a monopoly where the same two teams play each other every year in the final. Inclusive it is not, it’s a public school-dominated pursuit with just one black participant in almost its two-hundred-year history.
Nonetheless the tradition holds that the winning crew throw their cox into the river in celebration of their triumph. This year the custom was abandoned. Why? To put it bluntly, there was shit in the River Thames. The privatised Thames Water has overseen mismanagement of sewage, discharging billions of litres of untreated sewage into the river. This meant there were high levels of Escherichia coli in the river. Losing Oxford captain Leonard Jenkins revealed that he and several crewmates had been plagued by an E. coli-related illness and said, ‘it would be a lot nicer if there wasn't as much poo in the water.’
A week later, on 4th April,
The title deliberately echoes what the press at the time called the Great Stink of London in 1858. Back then hot weather intensified the smell of untreated human waste and industrial effluent on the banks of the River Thames. As the heat increased, centuries of waste began to ferment, people got ill and thousands died. The smell hit the recently rebuilt Houses of Parliament, and the politicians finally acted with plans for a new sewage system to be built with the gusto typical of the era. But the resonance is clear, our current treatment of water and sewage has taken us back to the reign of Queen Victoria, as well to the river analyses and proto eco-criticism of Friedrich Engels.
The Engels family wealth can be traced to Friedrich’s grandfather who moved to Wuppertal, now the north Rhineland of Germany. This was due to the lime-free rivers and tributary of the river Rhine. This promised and delivered riches. Extracting elements from the river proved useful to bleach linen yarn, and later to power water mills. But the Wuppertal that Engels is later born into is not the idyllic high valleys, green fields, vibrant forests with clear fast-running streams it once was. Due to the extraction and subsequent pollution of the river, surrounding nature, and the industry in the area – and prefiguring what he will later find in Manchester – there is overcrowding, child labour, intense poverty and ostentatious wealth. In his 1839 Letter from Wuppertal, Engels opens with a discussion of the river:
‘The purple waves of the narrow river flow sometimes swiftly, sometimes sluggishly between smoky factory buildings and yarn-strewn bleaching-yards. [It has a] bright red colour…[due] simply and solely to the numerous dye-works using Turkey red…[T]he muddy Wupper flows slowly by and, compared with the Rhine just left behind, its miserable appearance is very disappointing.’
Young Engels reacts against this and rebels against his wealthy mill owning father’s business and its social and environmental implications. He is aroused by developments in German philosophy (Hegel), French politics (the Revolution), and English Romantic poetry. Engels father becomes concerned about his son’s poetic sensibility, revolutionary thoughts, and atheism, and wants to move him from such unseemly influences. How best to neuter a wistful, intellectual, young radical Romantic poet? Send him away to Manchester to become a middle manager of the family textile business. Have him learn the numbing and nauseating miseries of business. That is, of linen and cotton spinning and weaving, bleaching and dyeing, stock taking, audit and accounting. In Manchester Engels will reluctantly learn the ins and outs of world trade, currency deals, import duties, the division of labour, pricing-costs-profit, the extraction of surplus value from the worker, and all the mechanics of capitalism. This will, however, be put to good use in the critique of such a system.
The Manchester Engels is sent to is the most advanced site of industrialisation in the world. The damp, wet climate, with rivers of soft water, are ideal for treating cotton and washing cloth. The first canal in Britain was in Manchester, and the first inter-city railway in the world is between Manchester and the port of Liverpool. This transport system links to the colonies, and brings in coal, cotton from the plantations, aids the formulation of manufactories, and eases bulk imports and exports. The exponential growth of the cotton industry sees Manchester referred to as Cottonopolis.
Manchester is the first manufacturing city of the world, and the scene of the starkest social divides and sanitary horrors Europe had to offer. Engels is compelled to write The Conditions of the Working Class in England (1845). This is a celebrated polemic, a critical analysis of relentless capitalism, and the unvarnished horrors of industrialisation and urbanisation. It mixes history and statistics, political philosophy, medical records, government documents, court reports, newspaper articles, and Engels own eye-witness accounts, accompanied by the unsung heroine, Mary Burns.
The Manchester here stinks, is noisy, oppressive, full of grime and human deprivation and horror. There are ‘foul pools of stagnant urine and excrement’, ‘cattle-sheds for human beings’, pigs share stiles with children, there are slum tenements, crushed limbs, misshapen spines, disease and infirmity, and ultimately retreat to the two comforts no one can take from you: drunk stupors and sexual relief. This is a working class with hardly any political rights. Engels, like any decent journalist, wanted to speak truth to power about these conditions.
The book often reads as Dickensian or Victorian gothic horror, and here is an extract with concern for the river apparent:
‘The view from this bridge … is characteristic for the whole district. At the bottom flows, or rather stagnates, the Irk, a narrow, coal-black, foul-smelling stream, full of debris and refuse, which it deposits on the shallower right bank. In dry weather, a long string of the most disgusting, blackish-green, slime pools are left standing on this bank, from the depths of which bubbles of miasmatic gas constantly arise and give forth a stench unendurable even on the bridge forty or fifty feet above the surface of the stream. But besides this, the stream itself is checked every few paces by high weirs, behind which slime and refuse accumulate and rot in thick masses. Above the bridge are tanneries, bone mills, and gasworks, from which all drains and refuse find their way into the Irk, which receives further the contents of all the neighbouring sewers and privies. It may be easily imagined, therefore, what sort of residue the stream deposits. Below the bridge you look upon the piles of debris, the refuse, filth, and offal from the courts on the steep left bank…’
Engels writes in The Conditions of the Working Class in England, that ‘I accuse the English bourgeois before the entire world of murder, robbery and other crimes on a massive scale.’ These accusations stand the test of time. Despite advances in chemical treatment, engineering, sewage systems, technology, decline of polluting industrialisation, and so on, our rivers are not in a dissimilar state to the ones noted by Engels. The wealthy and privileged crew of a boat cannot even frolic in the river, and newspaper headlines recall Victorian conditions. What went wrong? In essence, the answer might be the turning away from a minimal form of the socialism Engels promoted and instead the turn to privatisation.
For much of the 20th century water in England and Wales was provisioned publicly in an era of the Keynesian welfare state. The capital costs and initial infrastructure was met by the State. The population was supplied with universal access to water. However, under the run-down (under fund and then sell off) of state assets by Thatcher within the ethos of neoliberalism, it was deemed that water should now be governed by the free market. The 1989 Water Act privatised water, selling off public assets to private water and wastewater firms for £7.6 billion. At the time the UK government took on the sector’s entire £4.9billion in debts and gave the new private corporations £1.5bn of public funds. The marketing campaign to sell shares was ‘You could be an H2Owner’ – to the sound of Handel’s Water Music. A basic human right, held in common by all, provided on the basis of social equity, became a private commodity.
What has water privatisation achieved? For Conservative peer, Baroness McIntosh of Pickering, ‘Private water and wastewater companies have enabled unprecedented spending and cleaning our beaches and rivers to reach record quality levels.’ For others, the privatised water system is leaking sewage, water, and money. Privatisation was meant to result in cheaper costs – yet water bills rose by 40 per cent in real terms (National Audit Office). Privatisation was meant to unlock more investment – yet less was invested in 2018 than in 1990. Privatisation was meant to improve the services – yet despite inept regulation, fines for non-compliance with drinking-water, quality standards have exceeded £1.5 million over the last five years, and we lose enough water for 20 million people to leaks every day. Water companies find it more profitable to pay relatively small fines than avoid sewage dumping. Austerity led cuts to the government’s Environment Agency have seen monitoring levels fall, leading to the necessity of the largest citizen science water testing project ever to take place in the UK. It found that 83% of English rivers contain evidence of high pollution caused by sewage and agricultural waste, aquatic life struggles to survive in such conditions.
Since 2010, shareholders have enjoyed dividends upwards of £13.5 billion, this money which could have improved water systems, addressed environmental concerns, or served the State. In this sense there has been a shift of wealth from public hands into private hands. Far from Thatcher’s vision of a ‘shareholder democracy,’ current shareholders, often registered in countries like the Channel Islands to pay lower tax, include four major pension funds and four overseas investment funds which between them hold over 90% of the company's shares. The cost of maintaining and improving water and sewer infrastructure has been paid for by an increase in debt, which has risen from almost zero at the time of privatisation to nearly £40bn in 2016. Having syphoned off as much profit as possible, shareholders are reluctant to pay their debts and now the suggestion is that state owned banks of China will bail out Thames Water. You couldn’t make it up! Water, once state owned in England, gets run down and sold off, it gets exploited, and debt increases while shareholders receive dividends. Shareholders don’t want to pay off the debt, so it is sold to an overseas state. The Conservative government do not like state ownership of utilities, unless it is an overseas state it seems.
Consumers are urged not to waste water, not to use hose pipes, to use a shower instead of bath, to not flush at certain items, to move away from possible flood areas and so on. That is, consumers are called upon to act in the public interest while the private equity owners operate in the interests of shareholders. This is the trick of diverting attention from production and water companies and on to consumption and individual behaviour. ‘It’s your fault – you left the tap dripping all night.’ Privatisation can be seen for what it really is: a transfer of economic power from the public purse to private pocket, an associated attack on unions, a break-up of the state, an ideological mission of neoliberalism and, therefore, what we called in the old days – a class war.
What is happening with Thames Water is indicative of what is happening more broadly around the country’s rivers, beaches, woodlands, environment and so forth. And indicative of what is happening on a wider scale when capital exploits the planet. Lake Windermere suffers illegal dumps of sewage and Lough Neagh is described as a toilet without a flush. We are due to run short of water in 20 years time, added to this is the climate crisis and various tipping points. Shareholders concern is for short term gain, there is no incentive, and they cannot be relied upon to organise the long term projects that are required to address the incoming environmental issues.
What’s worse is that under Brexit, ministers are planning to diverge from the EU’s water framework directive which sets pollution standards for European waterways. This further weakens the already impotent regulation around water quality. England is the only country to have fully privatised its water and sewerage system. European cities such as Paris and Berlin have re-nationalised water and sewer systems as outsourcing contracts come to an end. What do we see in England is a public asset ruined by private extraction. What do we need? Re-nationalisation. A return of water (and other utilities) back to the commons and then further collectivisation. After all, who doesn’t want to see an Oxbridge student tossed into the river?
This country’s rivers and waterways historically, spiritually and naturally transcend the short-term, self-serving, self-importance of economic and political enterprise.
They are earthly phenomena for enjoyment and escape, conviviality and community, perspective and peace; venues of vitality where picnics are prepared, personal decisions are pronounced and marriages are proposed.
Millions of people would prefer such life-affirming human happenings to occur in surroundings that are fresh, flowing and crystal clear rather than amidst the corpse-like clutter and contagion of late stage capitalism.
Interview
Ms. Giedre Kubiliute
(Leeds Beckett University)
discusses 'Protests and the Media'
Ms. Giedre Kubiliute
(Leeds Beckett University)
discusses 'Protests and the Media'
Researched, written, conducted and edited
by Brett Gregory
April 10th 2024
by Brett Gregory
April 10th 2024
Transcript
BG: What follows is a wide-ranging interview with the principal author of ‘Protests and the Media: A Critical Event Studies Exploration into the Future of Protest’, an excellent book published in February 2024 which interrogates the interrelationship between protest, politics and propaganda in the UK.
Hi. What is your name, and what are the academic origins behind your publication?
GK: My name is Giedre Kubiliute. My path into research began through my Master's research project while studying at Leeds Beckett University, and that's where I met Dr Ian Lamond, the co-author of the book who was my research supervisor at the time.
Ian's areas of research interests include conceptual foundations of event research, creativity and events of dissent, death, fandom, critical geography, whereas myself, having no previous academic background, my interest in protest and dissent is rooted in my own past growing up in Lithuania in the turbulent 1980s and 1990s, and the significance of dissent throughout my country's history.
BG: And what was the experiential key which helped you to unlock your motivation and determination with regards to completing this project?
GK: The book started as my Master's research project which I was due to start working on during the Covid-19 pandemic. All the events happening at the time, particularly the wave of the Black Lives Matter protests across the world, and Sarah Everard’s murder and the vigil. They were so emotionally charged and emotive, and the unprecedented context of the lockdown and the unknown that they were happening in, it added a whole new level of intensity. So, I personally found myself feeling really moved on some visceral level by all the protests taking place, and I wanted to interrogate that feeling further.
BG: You mentioned your Lithuanian background earlier. In what ways has this characterised your political outlook?
GK: It took me back to my childhood and the events of dissent I was a witness to from The Baltic Way of 1989 – which was a demonstration of close to 2 million people creating a human chain connected Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia – to the hundreds of people defending the Lithuanian Parliament and the television tower in Vilnius, and standing up to the Russian tanks on the 13th January 1991 where 14 people lost their lives, to many other events I have seen or have been told about.
So, to me protest events of defiance against oppression first and foremost, and they can bring hope, unite people and change the course of history, and they are tools to achieve societal change and innovation.
BG: And what wider sources have helped to define your own personal understanding of political dissent and protest?
GK: As Matthew Mars has said for innovation and the betterment of the existing situation to happen, there must be a form of so-called ‘creative disruption’. Or, as Henri Lefebvre said, a group of people who designate themselves as innovators must firstly intervene by imprinting a rhythm on an era, and their acts must inscribe themselves on reality.
So, seeing protest from my standpoint, it was very uncomfortable to observe how the media twisted and framed those events. Not only influencing how the public saw those specific events in question, but how the purpose and the driving force for that dissent was at times twisted to meet certain narratives that were perpetuated by certain media outlets or the State; and there was often a certain lack of will from the wider public to interrogate those narratives as well. And once you see it happen over and over again you can't unsee it: it happens everywhere all the time.
BG: Please tell us a little bit more about ‘Critical Event Studies’ as an academic subject, and how it can relate to our everyday lives.
GK: ‘Critical Event Studies’ interrogates the concept of an event. It frames the event as a rupture that can reveal the structures of power that underlie what's holding the daily life routines in place. Different theorists will use different terms which, while the meanings differ, they basically show that it is power or oppression that binds the routines of daily life into the practices of daily life. However, as well as exposing those power relationships, we also open up possibilities for different ways the relationships can be formed, and it's the events ability to open up the multiplicity of alternative formations that enables resistance to existing power relationships.
When we stop seeing an event as something anchored to corporate or commercial constructions of events and project management, that enables us to draw on multiple fields and disciplines whilst seeking to explore their disruptive connections.
BG: Could you give a few specific examples?
GK: I mean there are so many of them from a mainstream event studies perspective. We could look at the reactions to recent sporting mega events such as the Qatar World Cup or the recent iteration of the Olympic Games. We'll look at the debates of how to manage the most recent Eurovision song contest. Outside that narrow frame of reference, in the UK general elections, recent and emerging legislation around the forms protest can take; the huge upsurge in hate crime, particularly associated with sexual orientation and gender identity. None of them are critical events but they are ‘evental landscapes’ that warrant critical interrogation.
BG: Let's now look a little deeper into the mechanics and organics of political dissent and protest. What is the overall purpose, for example?
GK: Public dissent is really about publicly demonstrating counter-narratives. When we increase the level of knowledge and awareness of a topic the general trajectory of public discourse can be slightly nudged. It won't be an overnight solution, it's not a magic bullet kind of thinking. It's just a slight push but it can influence the change: it can draw people into coalitions as well, maybe those who were floating before. Of course, it can push people away too.
One of the people we interviewed for our book Pete, a scientist for Extinction Rebellion and other movements, made a very interesting and important point. There is often a misunderstanding that a movement behind a protest always seeks some sort of approval from the public which is then followed by an argument that more disruptive protest action will turn the public against the movement. And Pete argued that the purpose of a protest is never to make the wider public to like the movement: it's to draw the public's attention to the problem, and that can often be lost in how the events are framed by the media.
BG: And what possible consequences can such actions and events have for wider society?
GK: Roland Bleiker, a Professor of International Relations, suggested that if we push the understanding of democracy beyond an institutionalised framework of processes and procedures, then dissenting protest could be viewed as a new kind of democratic participation that actually makes a meaningful contribution to the theory and practice of global democracy. But, instead, we witness governments refusing to deal with the causes that push people to protest and often those governments won't even attempt to eliminate those reasons but will instead put forward legislation to increase police powers and punishment in an attempt to squash the dissent which will only set the system up for further failure.
BG: So, how do governments, corporations and their media associates manage to keep the public at large in check?
GK: Public relations will often use propaganda and persuasion techniques that make use of emotional triggers instead of rational arguments, and often those are used without any regard for potential underlying ethical issues. Popular media sources and even some academics tend to frame protest by using traditional ‘angry mob’ or ‘mob mentality’ concepts which originate in historic crowd psychology. This cliché has been perpetuated to the extent where just one mention of a protest will evoke an image of an angry crowd in some people's minds.
BG: Can you give us a specific example of this?
GK: In April 2023 Extinction Rebellion organised an event called ‘The Big One’, and this event attracted approximately 100,000 participants and it was run in cooperation with the police. However, I'm pretty sure that hardly anyone has heard about it because we know that there are various reasons why the media will not cover peaceful gatherings.
If you speak to some journalists that have turned to activism I'm sure they'll tell you that disruptive events are partially driven and encouraged by the media itself, so the reporters are not exactly free to report the topics they feel are important as the power structures within their corporations decide what narratives and stories are acceptable. So, sometimes publishing a coverage of events may be the only way to touch on the issues at the heart of the dissent. However, for a journalist to be able to cover the event it has to be of significant scope and cause enough disruption to attract the media attention, so in that way media in itself can act as a catalyst for disruptive action.
BG: And the work of Noam Chomsky has been important in terms of your understanding of, for instance, ‘soft power’ shaping public opinion.
GK: In our book we talk a lot about how Herman and Chomsky’s ‘Propaganda Model’ is still very much alive today and it can be adapted for the new information technologies, and the way the information society operates. This model looks at how the so-called ‘raw information’ or ‘raw news’ gets filtered and manipulated by the factors of who owns the media firms, where their political interests lie, advertising as the primary income source; the reliance of the media on information provided by the government and so-called experts who are funded and approved by those sources and agents of power.
BG: What do you mean by the term ‘priority distortion’ with regards to mainstream mediated communication?
GK: Mainstream media, and particularly those sources specialising in ‘soft news’, they will use what we call ‘priority distortion’ by firstly reporting on some celebrity drama which will be followed by a story about political or social welfare issues, and that creates an absurd contrast in the reader’s mind and it devalues any interest in political engagement. When we spoke to a member of Extinction Rebellion they told us that the right-wing media will sometimes publish articles stating that the scientists are concerned about the climate emergency, but will not explain any details. So that makes such a topic and news too complex for some of the readers to understand or engage with; and, worryingly, as coverage of important social issues can be distorted and controlled by misinformation and omission, the public and some mid-level policy makers will still be basing their decisions on such filtered information.
BG: And ‘perspectivism’?
GK: ‘Perspectivism’, a concept that looks at how we interpret the world around us based on our views and perceptions, and that is a result of the impact, the ideology and material conditions have on news reporting, which in itself is a process of choosing what information to report on and then using that information to carve it into further narratives. Most frequently we can witness the narratives that create a binary between us and them where ‘they’ will be positioned as problematic disruptive outsiders whose actions and nature are always so transparent to us, while they cannot fully appreciate the complexity of the virtuous ‘us’.
BG: Them and Us. Us and Them.
GK: So, there’s binaries are everywhere you can find them in the news reporting, ranging from the local reports about disruptive protesters in the UK, the asylum seekers in Europe, the narratives about gender identity, religion, to ultimately the West against Russia narrative which has been perpetuated by the Russian government over the last couple of years. We also witnessed it again when the right-wing media reacted to Extinction Rebellion's blockade of Murdoch's print works and used character assassinations of individual members of the movement in order to discredit the whole movement.
BG: Misinformation, disinformation, character assassinations … How did they keep getting away with it?
GK: Often the ruling elite will also use the concept of national security and intelligence to control any information leaks that could pose a danger to the ruling classes and corporations; and those who question the corporate political and military powers will be labelled as traitors. In the same way mainstream media can be used to drive the general public away from political debates by conditioning people to support the policies of political elites by claiming that those policies are essential for state security and public safety, although they are really aimed at silencing the voices that could be dangerous to those who are in power.
BG: And what else has your research uncovered?
GK: In our research it was interesting to observe how the media's portrayal of police actions at protests shifted depending on the event. All three events we spoke about in the book took place within about a year of each other during the lockdowns and under the same guidelines lines. However, the media was expecting the police to behave very differently in each of them; and not only that the media can use a protest event as a basis to reinforce certain narratives that lie at the heart of the movement. In our book we explore how both right-leaning and left-leaning media displayed overall similar attitudes and coverage of the events around Sarah Everard’s vigil, but behind that coverage they had very different attitudes and discussions regarding the matter of women’s safety. And there are so many more examples of how public opinions are formed to avoid any interrogation.
BG: For example?
GK: One that really boils my blood is the conversations we are having about gender-neutral toilets. What we have now is an argument that women's safety is put in danger as essentially men posing at trans-women or otherwise can get access to women's spaces. So, the narrative has been turned to position two marginalised groups, women and trans-people, against each other and to put trans-people in a role of the threat when the real and, in my opinion, very obvious situation is that women are worried about their safety because men in disguise or not pose a threat to women's safety, and not only women's: any other marginalised groups really. It's a historical, cultural and societal problem that we are avoiding and we're not talking about.
So, what we do as a society now, we position two marginalised groups against each other as enemies and allow the real perpetrator to walk away unchallenged and unscathed. Those who pose the real danger just so happen to also hold the power in terms of capital, legislation, justice, policing, yet they don't get challenged. Why don't we as a society start having those uncomfortable conversations? Why aren't we challenging our male friends, family members? Why don't we educate our sons and employees and teach them the values they never had to be bothered to learn? Because it's an uncomfortable conversation, and people would rather find an enemy in a marginalised group that holds no power than challenge the real problem. Again, you see this everywhere and I think as a society, and particularly in this country, we will do everything in order to avoid any uncomfortable conversation. So, we will happily reinforce power structures even though they are contributing to the collapse of society, and put people and the planet in danger, just so, God forbid, we don't have to question anyone.
BG: Indeed. Utterly shameful. We are talking about at least 2,000 years of white patriarchy however – fully resourced by seemingly unlimited wealth and power – and which is, sadly, as embedded into our society and collective psyche as the foundations of Hadrian's Wall are embedded into the earth.
I believe it is going to take at least another 200 years of round-the-clock vigilance, education, activism and sacrifice for a truly permanent attitudinal change to be accepted on a national scale.
However, isn't this one of the reasons why we choose to be here right now in 2024: to continue to help bring about progressive and positive change in others in some small but significant way?
And with this in mind, I suppose we should continue and explore how propaganda and persuasion techniques are currently being employed online.
GK: The dominant social media platforms have concentrated ownership and form a very concentrated market. So, while on television and in the printed press the advertisers can target specific audiences, on social media multiple audiences can be targeted at once and this can be done artificially through bots which not only create automated posts, shares, likes and such but can be used as a tool to target and harass journalists and activists to flood them with hate and threads from artificially created accounts.
BG: And, of course, the reaction of the billionaire owners of these platforms is to simply hide away in their high-security ivory towers and count their money. As a consequence, where does that leave the rest of us?
GK: Facebook and Google algorithms are kept as a corporate secret so the owners control them and determine new sources for the general public. So the algorithms selected, exposure and audience fragmentation, they all create a hotbed for radicalisation, deep fake videos, voice cloning, generative text and other artificial intelligence generated content are becoming more and more convincing, and they have been widely used to spread disinformation during the US presidential elections, the Kremlin's attempts to discredit European governments, bots and fake accounts have been widely reported to be used by Russia to create counter-narratives around the war in Ukraine. It's also suspected that the Chinese government used fake news stories in a barrage jamming technique to overwhelm certain hashtags and make the readers see images of cotton fields as opposed to the tweet about the forced labour camps.
One of the people we interviewed for the book shared her horrific experiences when following her public actions trolls created a fake ‘Only Fans’ account where they had her face superimposed and which was shared to her family, and those trolls used and altered photographs of her mother who had passed away to harass this person even further.
BG: It's like a war, an ideological, hyperreal war. Such a daily and nightly barrage of abuse must take its toll on activists and protesters on a personal level?
GK: We gathered from the people we interviewed for the book that a lot of people come to social activism not really knowing what to expect or rather not understanding how hard-hitting and life-changing this choice can be. First of all it's a huge and steep learning curve. An individual may think they might know enough and that they stand firmly on the ground, however joining a movement seems to open a floodgate of information or truth that one was not prepared for. Ultimately, it can create a sense of burden and loss and foster a sense of duty to create a change, and it will likely impact personal life choices going further as well which can have a negative impact on existing relationships, family ties, even professional life. Ultimately, it is likely to have a very significant impact on a person's mental health.
BG: Of course, naturally.
GK: Then again there are other significant aspects. The question of finding one's identity and purpose within a movement; finally seeing that a change can be achieved and advocated for through collective action; network-building, finding like-minded people. So, there is a lot to consider, there is a lot of potential for life-changing happenings. Social movements also need to support activists more. Whether that support will be on a movement by movement basis, or it adopts the lines of something like the Green and Black Cross Group where an independent body of volunteer counsellors are established to support movements.
This is something both Ian and I want to interrogate further. The mediated manipulation of activism and activists has raised profound mental health and well-being issues for social movements, and to neglect working on those can cause high risk to individuals and to the work of the movements for social justice.
BG: Due to the absolute derelict state the UK is in at the moment I'm certain there are many, many conscientious readers and listeners out there who have seriously considered political activism of some sort but then again, on a personal level, is it worth the risk?
GK: There is always a risk but there are a couple of important things to bear in mind. Engaged democratic mobilisation for change that operates through a perspective of care and conviviality is much stronger on the left than it is on the right politically. It is opposed to the neoliberalist stance that promotes the destruction of the social through increased focus on the individual. We mentioned well-being and personal transformations that individuals undergo when they get involved in activism, and that's not to scare or put anyone off, it's to highlight how all-encompassing such transformations can be. And I think it's important for the movements to remember that they are creating lasting networks where peer support and education must be and it must remain one of the priorities and, hopefully, external players being aware of what activism entails. The various aspects and sometimes risks, they can also contribute to the societal change by offering their support and promoting and facilitating the culture of collaboration between different networks and groups.
The political right is far less about conviviality and much more about the spectacle and Donald Trump is an example of this above all others. Late capitalist democracy is very skilled at appropriating the tools of activism and converting them into commodified commercial opportunities, but activism isn't static either. What this means is that as activists we must always be adapting growing and evolving. By assuming the approach we are now adopting that will affect change we will essentially be walking those techniques into the hands of those we are opposing, so only by being agile and creative we can keep ahead.
BG: Many thanks for your time, insights and patience, Giedre.
‘Protests and the Media: A Critical Event Studies Exploration into the Future of Protest’ is available now via the Routledge website.
BG: What follows is a wide-ranging interview with the principal author of ‘Protests and the Media: A Critical Event Studies Exploration into the Future of Protest’, an excellent book published in February 2024 which interrogates the interrelationship between protest, politics and propaganda in the UK.
Hi. What is your name, and what are the academic origins behind your publication?
GK: My name is Giedre Kubiliute. My path into research began through my Master's research project while studying at Leeds Beckett University, and that's where I met Dr Ian Lamond, the co-author of the book who was my research supervisor at the time.
Ian's areas of research interests include conceptual foundations of event research, creativity and events of dissent, death, fandom, critical geography, whereas myself, having no previous academic background, my interest in protest and dissent is rooted in my own past growing up in Lithuania in the turbulent 1980s and 1990s, and the significance of dissent throughout my country's history.
BG: And what was the experiential key which helped you to unlock your motivation and determination with regards to completing this project?
GK: The book started as my Master's research project which I was due to start working on during the Covid-19 pandemic. All the events happening at the time, particularly the wave of the Black Lives Matter protests across the world, and Sarah Everard’s murder and the vigil. They were so emotionally charged and emotive, and the unprecedented context of the lockdown and the unknown that they were happening in, it added a whole new level of intensity. So, I personally found myself feeling really moved on some visceral level by all the protests taking place, and I wanted to interrogate that feeling further.
BG: You mentioned your Lithuanian background earlier. In what ways has this characterised your political outlook?
GK: It took me back to my childhood and the events of dissent I was a witness to from The Baltic Way of 1989 – which was a demonstration of close to 2 million people creating a human chain connected Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia – to the hundreds of people defending the Lithuanian Parliament and the television tower in Vilnius, and standing up to the Russian tanks on the 13th January 1991 where 14 people lost their lives, to many other events I have seen or have been told about.
So, to me protest events of defiance against oppression first and foremost, and they can bring hope, unite people and change the course of history, and they are tools to achieve societal change and innovation.
BG: And what wider sources have helped to define your own personal understanding of political dissent and protest?
GK: As Matthew Mars has said for innovation and the betterment of the existing situation to happen, there must be a form of so-called ‘creative disruption’. Or, as Henri Lefebvre said, a group of people who designate themselves as innovators must firstly intervene by imprinting a rhythm on an era, and their acts must inscribe themselves on reality.
So, seeing protest from my standpoint, it was very uncomfortable to observe how the media twisted and framed those events. Not only influencing how the public saw those specific events in question, but how the purpose and the driving force for that dissent was at times twisted to meet certain narratives that were perpetuated by certain media outlets or the State; and there was often a certain lack of will from the wider public to interrogate those narratives as well. And once you see it happen over and over again you can't unsee it: it happens everywhere all the time.
BG: Please tell us a little bit more about ‘Critical Event Studies’ as an academic subject, and how it can relate to our everyday lives.
GK: ‘Critical Event Studies’ interrogates the concept of an event. It frames the event as a rupture that can reveal the structures of power that underlie what's holding the daily life routines in place. Different theorists will use different terms which, while the meanings differ, they basically show that it is power or oppression that binds the routines of daily life into the practices of daily life. However, as well as exposing those power relationships, we also open up possibilities for different ways the relationships can be formed, and it's the events ability to open up the multiplicity of alternative formations that enables resistance to existing power relationships.
When we stop seeing an event as something anchored to corporate or commercial constructions of events and project management, that enables us to draw on multiple fields and disciplines whilst seeking to explore their disruptive connections.
BG: Could you give a few specific examples?
GK: I mean there are so many of them from a mainstream event studies perspective. We could look at the reactions to recent sporting mega events such as the Qatar World Cup or the recent iteration of the Olympic Games. We'll look at the debates of how to manage the most recent Eurovision song contest. Outside that narrow frame of reference, in the UK general elections, recent and emerging legislation around the forms protest can take; the huge upsurge in hate crime, particularly associated with sexual orientation and gender identity. None of them are critical events but they are ‘evental landscapes’ that warrant critical interrogation.
BG: Let's now look a little deeper into the mechanics and organics of political dissent and protest. What is the overall purpose, for example?
GK: Public dissent is really about publicly demonstrating counter-narratives. When we increase the level of knowledge and awareness of a topic the general trajectory of public discourse can be slightly nudged. It won't be an overnight solution, it's not a magic bullet kind of thinking. It's just a slight push but it can influence the change: it can draw people into coalitions as well, maybe those who were floating before. Of course, it can push people away too.
One of the people we interviewed for our book Pete, a scientist for Extinction Rebellion and other movements, made a very interesting and important point. There is often a misunderstanding that a movement behind a protest always seeks some sort of approval from the public which is then followed by an argument that more disruptive protest action will turn the public against the movement. And Pete argued that the purpose of a protest is never to make the wider public to like the movement: it's to draw the public's attention to the problem, and that can often be lost in how the events are framed by the media.
BG: And what possible consequences can such actions and events have for wider society?
GK: Roland Bleiker, a Professor of International Relations, suggested that if we push the understanding of democracy beyond an institutionalised framework of processes and procedures, then dissenting protest could be viewed as a new kind of democratic participation that actually makes a meaningful contribution to the theory and practice of global democracy. But, instead, we witness governments refusing to deal with the causes that push people to protest and often those governments won't even attempt to eliminate those reasons but will instead put forward legislation to increase police powers and punishment in an attempt to squash the dissent which will only set the system up for further failure.
BG: So, how do governments, corporations and their media associates manage to keep the public at large in check?
GK: Public relations will often use propaganda and persuasion techniques that make use of emotional triggers instead of rational arguments, and often those are used without any regard for potential underlying ethical issues. Popular media sources and even some academics tend to frame protest by using traditional ‘angry mob’ or ‘mob mentality’ concepts which originate in historic crowd psychology. This cliché has been perpetuated to the extent where just one mention of a protest will evoke an image of an angry crowd in some people's minds.
BG: Can you give us a specific example of this?
GK: In April 2023 Extinction Rebellion organised an event called ‘The Big One’, and this event attracted approximately 100,000 participants and it was run in cooperation with the police. However, I'm pretty sure that hardly anyone has heard about it because we know that there are various reasons why the media will not cover peaceful gatherings.
If you speak to some journalists that have turned to activism I'm sure they'll tell you that disruptive events are partially driven and encouraged by the media itself, so the reporters are not exactly free to report the topics they feel are important as the power structures within their corporations decide what narratives and stories are acceptable. So, sometimes publishing a coverage of events may be the only way to touch on the issues at the heart of the dissent. However, for a journalist to be able to cover the event it has to be of significant scope and cause enough disruption to attract the media attention, so in that way media in itself can act as a catalyst for disruptive action.
BG: And the work of Noam Chomsky has been important in terms of your understanding of, for instance, ‘soft power’ shaping public opinion.
GK: In our book we talk a lot about how Herman and Chomsky’s ‘Propaganda Model’ is still very much alive today and it can be adapted for the new information technologies, and the way the information society operates. This model looks at how the so-called ‘raw information’ or ‘raw news’ gets filtered and manipulated by the factors of who owns the media firms, where their political interests lie, advertising as the primary income source; the reliance of the media on information provided by the government and so-called experts who are funded and approved by those sources and agents of power.
BG: What do you mean by the term ‘priority distortion’ with regards to mainstream mediated communication?
GK: Mainstream media, and particularly those sources specialising in ‘soft news’, they will use what we call ‘priority distortion’ by firstly reporting on some celebrity drama which will be followed by a story about political or social welfare issues, and that creates an absurd contrast in the reader’s mind and it devalues any interest in political engagement. When we spoke to a member of Extinction Rebellion they told us that the right-wing media will sometimes publish articles stating that the scientists are concerned about the climate emergency, but will not explain any details. So that makes such a topic and news too complex for some of the readers to understand or engage with; and, worryingly, as coverage of important social issues can be distorted and controlled by misinformation and omission, the public and some mid-level policy makers will still be basing their decisions on such filtered information.
BG: And ‘perspectivism’?
GK: ‘Perspectivism’, a concept that looks at how we interpret the world around us based on our views and perceptions, and that is a result of the impact, the ideology and material conditions have on news reporting, which in itself is a process of choosing what information to report on and then using that information to carve it into further narratives. Most frequently we can witness the narratives that create a binary between us and them where ‘they’ will be positioned as problematic disruptive outsiders whose actions and nature are always so transparent to us, while they cannot fully appreciate the complexity of the virtuous ‘us’.
BG: Them and Us. Us and Them.
GK: So, there’s binaries are everywhere you can find them in the news reporting, ranging from the local reports about disruptive protesters in the UK, the asylum seekers in Europe, the narratives about gender identity, religion, to ultimately the West against Russia narrative which has been perpetuated by the Russian government over the last couple of years. We also witnessed it again when the right-wing media reacted to Extinction Rebellion's blockade of Murdoch's print works and used character assassinations of individual members of the movement in order to discredit the whole movement.
BG: Misinformation, disinformation, character assassinations … How did they keep getting away with it?
GK: Often the ruling elite will also use the concept of national security and intelligence to control any information leaks that could pose a danger to the ruling classes and corporations; and those who question the corporate political and military powers will be labelled as traitors. In the same way mainstream media can be used to drive the general public away from political debates by conditioning people to support the policies of political elites by claiming that those policies are essential for state security and public safety, although they are really aimed at silencing the voices that could be dangerous to those who are in power.
BG: And what else has your research uncovered?
GK: In our research it was interesting to observe how the media's portrayal of police actions at protests shifted depending on the event. All three events we spoke about in the book took place within about a year of each other during the lockdowns and under the same guidelines lines. However, the media was expecting the police to behave very differently in each of them; and not only that the media can use a protest event as a basis to reinforce certain narratives that lie at the heart of the movement. In our book we explore how both right-leaning and left-leaning media displayed overall similar attitudes and coverage of the events around Sarah Everard’s vigil, but behind that coverage they had very different attitudes and discussions regarding the matter of women’s safety. And there are so many more examples of how public opinions are formed to avoid any interrogation.
BG: For example?
GK: One that really boils my blood is the conversations we are having about gender-neutral toilets. What we have now is an argument that women's safety is put in danger as essentially men posing at trans-women or otherwise can get access to women's spaces. So, the narrative has been turned to position two marginalised groups, women and trans-people, against each other and to put trans-people in a role of the threat when the real and, in my opinion, very obvious situation is that women are worried about their safety because men in disguise or not pose a threat to women's safety, and not only women's: any other marginalised groups really. It's a historical, cultural and societal problem that we are avoiding and we're not talking about.
So, what we do as a society now, we position two marginalised groups against each other as enemies and allow the real perpetrator to walk away unchallenged and unscathed. Those who pose the real danger just so happen to also hold the power in terms of capital, legislation, justice, policing, yet they don't get challenged. Why don't we as a society start having those uncomfortable conversations? Why aren't we challenging our male friends, family members? Why don't we educate our sons and employees and teach them the values they never had to be bothered to learn? Because it's an uncomfortable conversation, and people would rather find an enemy in a marginalised group that holds no power than challenge the real problem. Again, you see this everywhere and I think as a society, and particularly in this country, we will do everything in order to avoid any uncomfortable conversation. So, we will happily reinforce power structures even though they are contributing to the collapse of society, and put people and the planet in danger, just so, God forbid, we don't have to question anyone.
BG: Indeed. Utterly shameful. We are talking about at least 2,000 years of white patriarchy however – fully resourced by seemingly unlimited wealth and power – and which is, sadly, as embedded into our society and collective psyche as the foundations of Hadrian's Wall are embedded into the earth.
I believe it is going to take at least another 200 years of round-the-clock vigilance, education, activism and sacrifice for a truly permanent attitudinal change to be accepted on a national scale.
However, isn't this one of the reasons why we choose to be here right now in 2024: to continue to help bring about progressive and positive change in others in some small but significant way?
And with this in mind, I suppose we should continue and explore how propaganda and persuasion techniques are currently being employed online.
GK: The dominant social media platforms have concentrated ownership and form a very concentrated market. So, while on television and in the printed press the advertisers can target specific audiences, on social media multiple audiences can be targeted at once and this can be done artificially through bots which not only create automated posts, shares, likes and such but can be used as a tool to target and harass journalists and activists to flood them with hate and threads from artificially created accounts.
BG: And, of course, the reaction of the billionaire owners of these platforms is to simply hide away in their high-security ivory towers and count their money. As a consequence, where does that leave the rest of us?
GK: Facebook and Google algorithms are kept as a corporate secret so the owners control them and determine new sources for the general public. So the algorithms selected, exposure and audience fragmentation, they all create a hotbed for radicalisation, deep fake videos, voice cloning, generative text and other artificial intelligence generated content are becoming more and more convincing, and they have been widely used to spread disinformation during the US presidential elections, the Kremlin's attempts to discredit European governments, bots and fake accounts have been widely reported to be used by Russia to create counter-narratives around the war in Ukraine. It's also suspected that the Chinese government used fake news stories in a barrage jamming technique to overwhelm certain hashtags and make the readers see images of cotton fields as opposed to the tweet about the forced labour camps.
One of the people we interviewed for the book shared her horrific experiences when following her public actions trolls created a fake ‘Only Fans’ account where they had her face superimposed and which was shared to her family, and those trolls used and altered photographs of her mother who had passed away to harass this person even further.
BG: It's like a war, an ideological, hyperreal war. Such a daily and nightly barrage of abuse must take its toll on activists and protesters on a personal level?
GK: We gathered from the people we interviewed for the book that a lot of people come to social activism not really knowing what to expect or rather not understanding how hard-hitting and life-changing this choice can be. First of all it's a huge and steep learning curve. An individual may think they might know enough and that they stand firmly on the ground, however joining a movement seems to open a floodgate of information or truth that one was not prepared for. Ultimately, it can create a sense of burden and loss and foster a sense of duty to create a change, and it will likely impact personal life choices going further as well which can have a negative impact on existing relationships, family ties, even professional life. Ultimately, it is likely to have a very significant impact on a person's mental health.
BG: Of course, naturally.
GK: Then again there are other significant aspects. The question of finding one's identity and purpose within a movement; finally seeing that a change can be achieved and advocated for through collective action; network-building, finding like-minded people. So, there is a lot to consider, there is a lot of potential for life-changing happenings. Social movements also need to support activists more. Whether that support will be on a movement by movement basis, or it adopts the lines of something like the Green and Black Cross Group where an independent body of volunteer counsellors are established to support movements.
This is something both Ian and I want to interrogate further. The mediated manipulation of activism and activists has raised profound mental health and well-being issues for social movements, and to neglect working on those can cause high risk to individuals and to the work of the movements for social justice.
BG: Due to the absolute derelict state the UK is in at the moment I'm certain there are many, many conscientious readers and listeners out there who have seriously considered political activism of some sort but then again, on a personal level, is it worth the risk?
GK: There is always a risk but there are a couple of important things to bear in mind. Engaged democratic mobilisation for change that operates through a perspective of care and conviviality is much stronger on the left than it is on the right politically. It is opposed to the neoliberalist stance that promotes the destruction of the social through increased focus on the individual. We mentioned well-being and personal transformations that individuals undergo when they get involved in activism, and that's not to scare or put anyone off, it's to highlight how all-encompassing such transformations can be. And I think it's important for the movements to remember that they are creating lasting networks where peer support and education must be and it must remain one of the priorities and, hopefully, external players being aware of what activism entails. The various aspects and sometimes risks, they can also contribute to the societal change by offering their support and promoting and facilitating the culture of collaboration between different networks and groups.
The political right is far less about conviviality and much more about the spectacle and Donald Trump is an example of this above all others. Late capitalist democracy is very skilled at appropriating the tools of activism and converting them into commodified commercial opportunities, but activism isn't static either. What this means is that as activists we must always be adapting growing and evolving. By assuming the approach we are now adopting that will affect change we will essentially be walking those techniques into the hands of those we are opposing, so only by being agile and creative we can keep ahead.
BG: Many thanks for your time, insights and patience, Giedre.
‘Protests and the Media: A Critical Event Studies Exploration into the Future of Protest’ is available now via the Routledge website.
Zoom Interview
Director Kym Staton discusses
his Julian Assange documentary, 'The Trust Fall'
Director Kym Staton discusses
his Julian Assange documentary, 'The Trust Fall'
Researched, written, conducted and edited
by Brett Gregory
March 16th 2024
by Brett Gregory
March 16th 2024
Article
Kym Staton appears on screen, tired.
In the little Zoom box in front of me he's sitting at a table in a little box room in a hotel with his head a little bowed.
I hate Zoom interviews. They always feel so hurried and hollow, and my voice carries.
Anyway, Kym is the Australian director and producer of the 2023 documentary, ‘The Trust Fall’, a 126 minute rumination on the 15 year political evisceration of the journalist, activist and WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, who's been indicted under the 1917 US Espionage Act and incarcerated in Belmarsh Prison in London since 2019.
I'm sure that releasing this film in the UK in the wake of Assange’s final appeal at the Supreme Court on February 20-21, amidst cacophonous coverage from the international media, seemed like a good idea at the time.
After Staton’s twenty minutes with The Daily Star, it's my turn.
I ask what inspired him to produce the documentary.
‘In 2010 I was watching the news in my living room,’ he replies, ‘and I was absolutely shocked to see 12 civilians, including two journalists, being shot dead on a street in Baghdad by a US Army helicopter.
‘Seven or eight years later I started to explore some films about Assange and WikiLeaks, and I started to make sense of it all. It just happened that three years ago I had some spare time to make a documentary.
‘I’m an Australian and Assange is an Australian citizen who’s just a few years older than me, and I really admire his bravery, his striving for peace and truth.’
The coarse black-and-white footage filmed from the POV of a circling US Apache gunship in 2007 – subsequently disclosed to WikiLeaks by whistleblower, Chelsea Manning – forms the centrepiece of ‘The Trust Fall’, providing undeniable, demented and damning evidence of the US military’s febrile ferocity during its operations in Iraq.
‘What the US government didn’t bank on,’ Staton continues, ‘was that we were going to dredge up this footage, enhance it and make it even more shocking and more powerful by putting it on a screen for an audience, eliciting all kinds of emotive elements that would make grown men cry.’
The segment is called ‘Collateral Murder’, and I ask where he acquired the footage.
‘It’s freely available on the Sunshine Press YouTube channel,’ he informs me. ‘It’s been there since 2010 but it’s only had a couple of million views. This shows you that YouTube hasn’t taken it off their platform, but they’re definitely stopping it from circulating, and perhaps that’s why only 5% of the world’s population has seen it.
‘Plus there is the never-seen-before footage of the 10-year-old boy who was a victim of that incident.’
He's referring to Sajad Sattar Mutashar who, along with his father, was gunned down by the Apache crew as they attempted to rescue some of the wounded from off the street.
While his father was killed, Sajad survived and, during an archive interview featured in the documentary, the boy lifts up his t-shirt, in tears, to reveal a scar rising up from his stomach to his sternum.
I point out that there are far-reaching issues at stake in ‘The Trust Fall’ which, ominously, are critical to the future direction of Western democracy, such as freedom of speech, freedom of the press and governmental accountability.
I then ask if he has any plans to produce a follow-up documentary, regardless of whether Julian Assange is extradited to the US or not?
‘Well, this film was such a laborious process I wouldn't be surprised if I never make one again,’ he confesses.
‘It just stretched me to my absolute limits. I'm not a career documentary-maker, I'm a musician in fact; and once this is all finished I'd quite happily go back to my singer/song writing adventures and take things easy.
‘But certainly, with this project, with this cause and this campaign, I won't stop until Julian is free.’
And with that my time's up.
‘We’ll be in touch,’ the PR tells me, and the little Zoom box goes black.
I remain at my desk, however, and ponder Australia.
There are twenty or so screenings of the documentary taking place there throughout March, and I imagine the ways in which it will be received differently than in the UK.
Aljazeera reported that a motion had been proposed in the Australian Parliament by MP Andrew Wilkie on February 15th and, in response, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese argued that the Australian government had a duty to lobby for its citizens and that he had raised the issue ‘at the highest levels’ in Britain and the US.
‘This thing cannot just go on and on and on indefinitely,’ he said.
Of course, from the UK Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, there has been nothing.
Nothing but silence.
With regards to the documentary itself, as well as the accomplished publicity campaign which accompanies it, I find it admirable that the team has managed, amidst a mediated milieu of animosity and apathy, to strong-arm Julian Assange’s sorrowful saga of persecution and imprisonment into the public eye.
Allied with the leaked footage of the US military’s multi-million dollar drive-by shooting of twelve Iraqi civilians, it is hoped that the audiences the film connects with will rightfully and rigorously reflect upon the war crimes which their superiors commit, and the whistleblowers they condemn, in their name.
Whether or not they choose to act upon the results of such reflection, however, is another matter.
Unfortunately, as a cinematic construction, the production does not deliver the stylistic or narrative discipline, deftness or definitiveness which such high-profile political subject matter deserves.
The music cues are often immodest, the editing inelegant, and the unrestrained use of still photographs somewhat undermines our understanding of cinema as ‘the art of the moving image’.
In turn, the production’s awkward aesthetic endeavours are exacerbated by a parallel animated narrative running throughout which, we assume, aims to illustrate and dramatise Assange’s ordeal. However, this is not needed: the wide array of political, legal and intellectual talking-heads, interspersed with footage harvested from online sources, serves this purpose effectively enough. Thus, instead of humanising a blighted man on our behalf, we are instead distracted from him.
Furthermore, the running time of the documentary is too long and should have been restricted to about 90 minutes, so it would be more accessible to a wider and younger audience. For instance, probably due to their international reputations as purveyors of peace and justice, the late journalist and documentarian, John Pilger, and the writer and activist, Tariq Ali, are somewhat overused and, inevitably, their political points begin to grow repetitive.
Regrettably, in the denouement of the documentary, we are also met by multiple emotive endings, an act of authorial indiscipline which subverts the clear, compelling and conclusive call-to-action which a political production of this type requires.
In short, this film’s heart is firmly in the right place, but its head sometimes is not.
‘The Trust Fall: Julian Assange’ is released in selected UK cinemas from March 15th 2024.
Kym Staton appears on screen, tired.
In the little Zoom box in front of me he's sitting at a table in a little box room in a hotel with his head a little bowed.
I hate Zoom interviews. They always feel so hurried and hollow, and my voice carries.
Anyway, Kym is the Australian director and producer of the 2023 documentary, ‘The Trust Fall’, a 126 minute rumination on the 15 year political evisceration of the journalist, activist and WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, who's been indicted under the 1917 US Espionage Act and incarcerated in Belmarsh Prison in London since 2019.
I'm sure that releasing this film in the UK in the wake of Assange’s final appeal at the Supreme Court on February 20-21, amidst cacophonous coverage from the international media, seemed like a good idea at the time.
After Staton’s twenty minutes with The Daily Star, it's my turn.
I ask what inspired him to produce the documentary.
‘In 2010 I was watching the news in my living room,’ he replies, ‘and I was absolutely shocked to see 12 civilians, including two journalists, being shot dead on a street in Baghdad by a US Army helicopter.
‘Seven or eight years later I started to explore some films about Assange and WikiLeaks, and I started to make sense of it all. It just happened that three years ago I had some spare time to make a documentary.
‘I’m an Australian and Assange is an Australian citizen who’s just a few years older than me, and I really admire his bravery, his striving for peace and truth.’
The coarse black-and-white footage filmed from the POV of a circling US Apache gunship in 2007 – subsequently disclosed to WikiLeaks by whistleblower, Chelsea Manning – forms the centrepiece of ‘The Trust Fall’, providing undeniable, demented and damning evidence of the US military’s febrile ferocity during its operations in Iraq.
‘What the US government didn’t bank on,’ Staton continues, ‘was that we were going to dredge up this footage, enhance it and make it even more shocking and more powerful by putting it on a screen for an audience, eliciting all kinds of emotive elements that would make grown men cry.’
The segment is called ‘Collateral Murder’, and I ask where he acquired the footage.
‘It’s freely available on the Sunshine Press YouTube channel,’ he informs me. ‘It’s been there since 2010 but it’s only had a couple of million views. This shows you that YouTube hasn’t taken it off their platform, but they’re definitely stopping it from circulating, and perhaps that’s why only 5% of the world’s population has seen it.
‘Plus there is the never-seen-before footage of the 10-year-old boy who was a victim of that incident.’
He's referring to Sajad Sattar Mutashar who, along with his father, was gunned down by the Apache crew as they attempted to rescue some of the wounded from off the street.
While his father was killed, Sajad survived and, during an archive interview featured in the documentary, the boy lifts up his t-shirt, in tears, to reveal a scar rising up from his stomach to his sternum.
I point out that there are far-reaching issues at stake in ‘The Trust Fall’ which, ominously, are critical to the future direction of Western democracy, such as freedom of speech, freedom of the press and governmental accountability.
I then ask if he has any plans to produce a follow-up documentary, regardless of whether Julian Assange is extradited to the US or not?
‘Well, this film was such a laborious process I wouldn't be surprised if I never make one again,’ he confesses.
‘It just stretched me to my absolute limits. I'm not a career documentary-maker, I'm a musician in fact; and once this is all finished I'd quite happily go back to my singer/song writing adventures and take things easy.
‘But certainly, with this project, with this cause and this campaign, I won't stop until Julian is free.’
And with that my time's up.
‘We’ll be in touch,’ the PR tells me, and the little Zoom box goes black.
I remain at my desk, however, and ponder Australia.
There are twenty or so screenings of the documentary taking place there throughout March, and I imagine the ways in which it will be received differently than in the UK.
Aljazeera reported that a motion had been proposed in the Australian Parliament by MP Andrew Wilkie on February 15th and, in response, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese argued that the Australian government had a duty to lobby for its citizens and that he had raised the issue ‘at the highest levels’ in Britain and the US.
‘This thing cannot just go on and on and on indefinitely,’ he said.
Of course, from the UK Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, there has been nothing.
Nothing but silence.
With regards to the documentary itself, as well as the accomplished publicity campaign which accompanies it, I find it admirable that the team has managed, amidst a mediated milieu of animosity and apathy, to strong-arm Julian Assange’s sorrowful saga of persecution and imprisonment into the public eye.
Allied with the leaked footage of the US military’s multi-million dollar drive-by shooting of twelve Iraqi civilians, it is hoped that the audiences the film connects with will rightfully and rigorously reflect upon the war crimes which their superiors commit, and the whistleblowers they condemn, in their name.
Whether or not they choose to act upon the results of such reflection, however, is another matter.
Unfortunately, as a cinematic construction, the production does not deliver the stylistic or narrative discipline, deftness or definitiveness which such high-profile political subject matter deserves.
The music cues are often immodest, the editing inelegant, and the unrestrained use of still photographs somewhat undermines our understanding of cinema as ‘the art of the moving image’.
In turn, the production’s awkward aesthetic endeavours are exacerbated by a parallel animated narrative running throughout which, we assume, aims to illustrate and dramatise Assange’s ordeal. However, this is not needed: the wide array of political, legal and intellectual talking-heads, interspersed with footage harvested from online sources, serves this purpose effectively enough. Thus, instead of humanising a blighted man on our behalf, we are instead distracted from him.
Furthermore, the running time of the documentary is too long and should have been restricted to about 90 minutes, so it would be more accessible to a wider and younger audience. For instance, probably due to their international reputations as purveyors of peace and justice, the late journalist and documentarian, John Pilger, and the writer and activist, Tariq Ali, are somewhat overused and, inevitably, their political points begin to grow repetitive.
Regrettably, in the denouement of the documentary, we are also met by multiple emotive endings, an act of authorial indiscipline which subverts the clear, compelling and conclusive call-to-action which a political production of this type requires.
In short, this film’s heart is firmly in the right place, but its head sometimes is not.
‘The Trust Fall: Julian Assange’ is released in selected UK cinemas from March 15th 2024.
Interview
Dr. Matthew Alford
(University of Bath)
discusses 'Julian Assange: The Final Appeal'
Dr. Matthew Alford
(University of Bath)
discusses 'Julian Assange: The Final Appeal'
Researched, written, conducted and edited
by Brett Gregory
January 7th 2024
by Brett Gregory
January 7th 2024
Transcript
BG: Antonio Gramsci, Eugene Debs, Emma Goldman, Bertrand Russell, Benazir Bhutto … Just a handful of 20th century citizens who were incarcerated by their respective governments because they dug deep, took a stand and said, ‘No!’ No to injustice, no to fascism, and no to war. This evening I'm joined by Dr. Matthew Alford from the University of Bath in the UK who is here to discuss one of the most important political prisoners of the 21st century.
Matt, please tell us more.
MA: Julian Assange is 52 years old. He's Australian, he studied maths and computing and then founded WikiLeaks in 2006. I'd say perhaps the most neutral term for Julian Assange's profession is ‘publisher’. Personally, I prefer to call him a ‘freedom fighter’.
BG: WikiLeaks is a term which is often bandied about by the mainstream media, but how did it actually work?
MA: WikiLeaks was important because it had a specially designed drop box that allowed whistleblowers to post secret documents without anyone, including WikiLeaks itself, knowing their actual identity. This was designed in order for everyone to be kept safe from prosecution. It was a brilliant invention.
BG: And why is whistleblowing so important?
MA: Whistleblowing is part of democratising any organisation, and it's really, really important, especially for organisations that are as secret as the CIA and NSA.
BG: So, what kind of information did Julian Assange release by way of WikiLeaks?
MA: Julian Assange's revelations implicate powerful government and corporate villains worldwide in things like illegal surveillance, false flag military attacks. And the charges that are against him are for much of his best and his most famous work, including footage of the US Army when they slowly and deliberately killed 12 innocent people, including several journalists, from the safety of a helicopter gunship. He was instrumental in putting that video out online to hold the American military to account.
BG: And I'm assuming the consequences for him were extremely dire?
MA: Julian Assange was charged under the US Espionage Act of 1917 back in 2010. He's accused of working with army private, Chelsea Manning, to obtain and disclose classified information.
BG: Tell us a little more about Chelsea Manning, another name which the mainstream media has conveniently forgotten.
MA: Chelsea Manning leaked a lot of material when she was a private in the army, and she did this for moral reasons. She was imprisoned for several years herself. Eventually she was released following a plea bargain with Barack Obama. Chelsea Manning is a real hero for what she did. Personally, I'm unclear on why she has been so silent about Julian Assange's case for quite some time. It might be that she's had to sign some kind of gagging order, I don't know. That would just be speculation on my part.
BG: The plot thickens ...
MA: There's been a huge clampdown on these sorts of leaks from the Obama presidency onwards. One study found that almost all non-government representatives thought that the Espionage Act had been used ‘inappropriately in leak cases that have a public interest component.’ One journalist says that it's almost impossible to mount a defence against charges under the Espionage Act because defendants are not allowed to use the term ‘whistleblower’; they're not allowed to mention the First Amendment, and they're not allowed to explain the reasons for their actions. The US government wants to get Julian Assange using the Espionage Act, but this would be the first time in over a hundred years that that legislation has been used against a publisher.
BG: A lurid labyrinth of bestial bureaucracy. But Assange managed to escape, didn't he, for a while at least?
MA: In 2012, Julian Assange hid in an embassy in London, and he stayed there for the next seven years. He was forcibly removed in 2019 and, ever since, he's been in Britain's top security prison, Belmarsh. All of Julian Assange's exercise is indoors; he has not seen the sun for five years, and his feet haven't touched free soil in nearly 12 years. Library books, where he currently resides, are deemed a fire hazard. Julian Assange married his brilliant lawyer, Stella, in 2022 while in prison. For their wedding they were not allowed to use the chapel, and his children weren't even allowed to give him a daisy chain that they had made: it was deemed a security risk. The food available in Belmarsh consists of, quote, ‘porridge for breakfast, thin soup for lunch, and not much else for dinner,’ according to his latest visitor.
Julian has been in Belmarsh longer than any other prisoner, apart from one old man. He's actually lost his freedom for longer than Solzhenitsyn did when he was sent to the Soviet gulag. Julian Assange does currently have a radio, but this is only because one of his prominent friends pointed out to the prison warden that even Hezbollah allows their hostages access to radios. The authorities, even up to the top judicial level, formally accept that Julian Assange is a suicide risk. They don't seem to care; in fact, if anything, they seem to be encouraging it. I find it quite heart-breaking that the last photograph of Julian Assange is of him in court while he happens to be having a mini-stroke.
BG: That's a horrific and inhuman timeline, and in the Land of Hope and Glory as well. In 2022 the then UK Home Secretary Priti Patel of the right-wing Conservative Party approved the extradition of Assange to the US in order to face the country's judiciary and penal system. From your descriptions though, can this really be worse than Belmarsh prison? Isn't the United States the land of the free and the home of the brave? Hasn't Julian Assange been brave?
MA: There are all sorts of ways to make his life worse in prison, to make anyone's life worse in prison, and those could well occur if he is deported, if he is extradited to the United States. So, for example, Julian Assange is currently isolated in his cell for 23 hours a day, which is really, really bad. But if he goes to a supermax facility in the United States, it could be even worse.
For example, it's likely that the CIA would prevent him from handling paper. I mean, it's possible; it does happen to several dozen other prisoners who are there on national security grounds. You know, just be shown a letter through a glass screen. In fact, the British prison Belmarsh already did this once a couple of years ago. In the depths of winter, they said, ‘Okay, fill in this form so that you can acquire your clothes,’ but, due to coronavirus regulations, he was not actually permitted to touch the pen and paper to put in that application. So, there are all sorts of grotesque, perverse things that can be done to a human being when they are incarcerated, and that situation could easily get a lot worse for Julian Assange if he goes to the United States, where the prison system is, I think, widely accepted to be more brutal than even the British cases.
BG: Aren't political cases like this explicitly banned under the UK-US Extradition Treaty? Is international law being tampered with here?
MA: Yeah, I mean, the extradition treaty does explicitly ban extradition for political reasons, except for in cases that involve things like murder. But, you know, law can always be stretched, it could be repurposed for political reasons, and when it comes down to it, the national security state in the United States and in the UK despise Julian Assange. It's almost kind of personal. They're prepared to break all laws, they're prepared to break all conventions just to mess him up. I think standard borders, things like sovereign jurisdiction, Australia's rights, Ecuador's rights, doesn't matter a jot to organisations like the CIA.
BG: What about freedom of speech? What about our right to know how our societies are being governed?
MA: I mean, it's always been standard practice for journalists to receive secret information, and they can use that secret information to hold powerful organisations, particularly the government, to account. If the government is allowed to repurpose current laws to prosecute a publisher, that means that in the future, they'll have set a precedent; they'll be able to do whatever they want in the name of ‘national security’. And it would take a phenomenally brave whistleblower or publisher right now to follow in Julian's footsteps, having seen the price that he's paid.
BG: That's genuinely chilling; it's like we're discussing the Gestapo or the Stasi Police or something. Anyway, so from a personal perspective, what does Julian Assange mean to you, Matt?
MA: Julian Assange is a symbol, a symbol of freedom, and a symbol of resistance. But he is also a human being in his own right. Even from this British prison where he currently languishes – Belmarsh in London – he's still sending out regularly, whenever he can, messages of love and hope. I like this quote from him: ‘If wars can be started by lies, peace can be started by truth.’
BG: Exactly. We need to keep the faith. So what action can people take? What can they do so they don't feel, you know, useless?
MA: For more information, I'd suggest going to the website stellaassange.com. That's the best place to be active, to support, and to coordinate both online and on the streets. You can also contact me on Facebook if you like: Matt Alford: War, Laughs, and Lies. If you want some more specifics, I'll be doing a running commentary about Julian Assange and other international political events.
I'd just like to add, and this comes from Stella Assange's website: ‘Saving Julian Assange is about saving ourselves. What happens to him cannot be undone. It would be the end of our right to know and the end of our democracies.’ So please, listeners, gather outside the Royal Courts of Justice in London, and in cities around the world, on the 20th to the 21st of February at 8:30 am and demand Julian's freedom.
BG: That's the Royal Courts of Justice in London on February 20th to the 21st from 8:30 am.
This has been a very sobering yet very urgent interview, Matt. Many thanks for your time.
MA: No problem. Nice speaking with you, Brett.
BG: Antonio Gramsci, Eugene Debs, Emma Goldman, Bertrand Russell, Benazir Bhutto … Just a handful of 20th century citizens who were incarcerated by their respective governments because they dug deep, took a stand and said, ‘No!’ No to injustice, no to fascism, and no to war. This evening I'm joined by Dr. Matthew Alford from the University of Bath in the UK who is here to discuss one of the most important political prisoners of the 21st century.
Matt, please tell us more.
MA: Julian Assange is 52 years old. He's Australian, he studied maths and computing and then founded WikiLeaks in 2006. I'd say perhaps the most neutral term for Julian Assange's profession is ‘publisher’. Personally, I prefer to call him a ‘freedom fighter’.
BG: WikiLeaks is a term which is often bandied about by the mainstream media, but how did it actually work?
MA: WikiLeaks was important because it had a specially designed drop box that allowed whistleblowers to post secret documents without anyone, including WikiLeaks itself, knowing their actual identity. This was designed in order for everyone to be kept safe from prosecution. It was a brilliant invention.
BG: And why is whistleblowing so important?
MA: Whistleblowing is part of democratising any organisation, and it's really, really important, especially for organisations that are as secret as the CIA and NSA.
BG: So, what kind of information did Julian Assange release by way of WikiLeaks?
MA: Julian Assange's revelations implicate powerful government and corporate villains worldwide in things like illegal surveillance, false flag military attacks. And the charges that are against him are for much of his best and his most famous work, including footage of the US Army when they slowly and deliberately killed 12 innocent people, including several journalists, from the safety of a helicopter gunship. He was instrumental in putting that video out online to hold the American military to account.
BG: And I'm assuming the consequences for him were extremely dire?
MA: Julian Assange was charged under the US Espionage Act of 1917 back in 2010. He's accused of working with army private, Chelsea Manning, to obtain and disclose classified information.
BG: Tell us a little more about Chelsea Manning, another name which the mainstream media has conveniently forgotten.
MA: Chelsea Manning leaked a lot of material when she was a private in the army, and she did this for moral reasons. She was imprisoned for several years herself. Eventually she was released following a plea bargain with Barack Obama. Chelsea Manning is a real hero for what she did. Personally, I'm unclear on why she has been so silent about Julian Assange's case for quite some time. It might be that she's had to sign some kind of gagging order, I don't know. That would just be speculation on my part.
BG: The plot thickens ...
MA: There's been a huge clampdown on these sorts of leaks from the Obama presidency onwards. One study found that almost all non-government representatives thought that the Espionage Act had been used ‘inappropriately in leak cases that have a public interest component.’ One journalist says that it's almost impossible to mount a defence against charges under the Espionage Act because defendants are not allowed to use the term ‘whistleblower’; they're not allowed to mention the First Amendment, and they're not allowed to explain the reasons for their actions. The US government wants to get Julian Assange using the Espionage Act, but this would be the first time in over a hundred years that that legislation has been used against a publisher.
BG: A lurid labyrinth of bestial bureaucracy. But Assange managed to escape, didn't he, for a while at least?
MA: In 2012, Julian Assange hid in an embassy in London, and he stayed there for the next seven years. He was forcibly removed in 2019 and, ever since, he's been in Britain's top security prison, Belmarsh. All of Julian Assange's exercise is indoors; he has not seen the sun for five years, and his feet haven't touched free soil in nearly 12 years. Library books, where he currently resides, are deemed a fire hazard. Julian Assange married his brilliant lawyer, Stella, in 2022 while in prison. For their wedding they were not allowed to use the chapel, and his children weren't even allowed to give him a daisy chain that they had made: it was deemed a security risk. The food available in Belmarsh consists of, quote, ‘porridge for breakfast, thin soup for lunch, and not much else for dinner,’ according to his latest visitor.
Julian has been in Belmarsh longer than any other prisoner, apart from one old man. He's actually lost his freedom for longer than Solzhenitsyn did when he was sent to the Soviet gulag. Julian Assange does currently have a radio, but this is only because one of his prominent friends pointed out to the prison warden that even Hezbollah allows their hostages access to radios. The authorities, even up to the top judicial level, formally accept that Julian Assange is a suicide risk. They don't seem to care; in fact, if anything, they seem to be encouraging it. I find it quite heart-breaking that the last photograph of Julian Assange is of him in court while he happens to be having a mini-stroke.
BG: That's a horrific and inhuman timeline, and in the Land of Hope and Glory as well. In 2022 the then UK Home Secretary Priti Patel of the right-wing Conservative Party approved the extradition of Assange to the US in order to face the country's judiciary and penal system. From your descriptions though, can this really be worse than Belmarsh prison? Isn't the United States the land of the free and the home of the brave? Hasn't Julian Assange been brave?
MA: There are all sorts of ways to make his life worse in prison, to make anyone's life worse in prison, and those could well occur if he is deported, if he is extradited to the United States. So, for example, Julian Assange is currently isolated in his cell for 23 hours a day, which is really, really bad. But if he goes to a supermax facility in the United States, it could be even worse.
For example, it's likely that the CIA would prevent him from handling paper. I mean, it's possible; it does happen to several dozen other prisoners who are there on national security grounds. You know, just be shown a letter through a glass screen. In fact, the British prison Belmarsh already did this once a couple of years ago. In the depths of winter, they said, ‘Okay, fill in this form so that you can acquire your clothes,’ but, due to coronavirus regulations, he was not actually permitted to touch the pen and paper to put in that application. So, there are all sorts of grotesque, perverse things that can be done to a human being when they are incarcerated, and that situation could easily get a lot worse for Julian Assange if he goes to the United States, where the prison system is, I think, widely accepted to be more brutal than even the British cases.
BG: Aren't political cases like this explicitly banned under the UK-US Extradition Treaty? Is international law being tampered with here?
MA: Yeah, I mean, the extradition treaty does explicitly ban extradition for political reasons, except for in cases that involve things like murder. But, you know, law can always be stretched, it could be repurposed for political reasons, and when it comes down to it, the national security state in the United States and in the UK despise Julian Assange. It's almost kind of personal. They're prepared to break all laws, they're prepared to break all conventions just to mess him up. I think standard borders, things like sovereign jurisdiction, Australia's rights, Ecuador's rights, doesn't matter a jot to organisations like the CIA.
BG: What about freedom of speech? What about our right to know how our societies are being governed?
MA: I mean, it's always been standard practice for journalists to receive secret information, and they can use that secret information to hold powerful organisations, particularly the government, to account. If the government is allowed to repurpose current laws to prosecute a publisher, that means that in the future, they'll have set a precedent; they'll be able to do whatever they want in the name of ‘national security’. And it would take a phenomenally brave whistleblower or publisher right now to follow in Julian's footsteps, having seen the price that he's paid.
BG: That's genuinely chilling; it's like we're discussing the Gestapo or the Stasi Police or something. Anyway, so from a personal perspective, what does Julian Assange mean to you, Matt?
MA: Julian Assange is a symbol, a symbol of freedom, and a symbol of resistance. But he is also a human being in his own right. Even from this British prison where he currently languishes – Belmarsh in London – he's still sending out regularly, whenever he can, messages of love and hope. I like this quote from him: ‘If wars can be started by lies, peace can be started by truth.’
BG: Exactly. We need to keep the faith. So what action can people take? What can they do so they don't feel, you know, useless?
MA: For more information, I'd suggest going to the website stellaassange.com. That's the best place to be active, to support, and to coordinate both online and on the streets. You can also contact me on Facebook if you like: Matt Alford: War, Laughs, and Lies. If you want some more specifics, I'll be doing a running commentary about Julian Assange and other international political events.
I'd just like to add, and this comes from Stella Assange's website: ‘Saving Julian Assange is about saving ourselves. What happens to him cannot be undone. It would be the end of our right to know and the end of our democracies.’ So please, listeners, gather outside the Royal Courts of Justice in London, and in cities around the world, on the 20th to the 21st of February at 8:30 am and demand Julian's freedom.
BG: That's the Royal Courts of Justice in London on February 20th to the 21st from 8:30 am.
This has been a very sobering yet very urgent interview, Matt. Many thanks for your time.
MA: No problem. Nice speaking with you, Brett.
Norman Finkelstein
I'll Burn That Bridge When I Get To It
(Sublation Press, 2023)
I'll Burn That Bridge When I Get To It
(Sublation Press, 2023)
Book Review
Written and Narrated
by Brett Gregory
September 13th 2023
Written and Narrated
by Brett Gregory
September 13th 2023
Transcript
What follows is my review of Norman Finkelstein’s latest book, I'll Burn That Bridge When I Get To It!: Heretical Thoughts on Identity Politics, Cancel Culture, and Academic Freedom, published by Sublation Press in 2023.
Finkelstein was born in Brooklyn in 1953 and both his mother and father were survivors of the Warsaw Ghetto and the concentration camps in Majdanek and Auschwitz. The rest of his family were wiped out completely.
Educated at Princeton University, his subsequent academic work, publications and political activism generated from the 1970s onwards, appear to have been intensely and inevitably informed by this woebegotten wellspring of human horror.
While his mother’s recollections of enduring the Holocaust burned into his psyche as a boy growing up, her post-war pacifism impressed itself upon his mindset as a man. In the 2009 documentary, ‘American Radical: The Trials of Norman Finkelstein’, available on YouTube, he even jokingly describes himself as ‘Finkelstein’s Monster’.
He has written many books on the Israel-Palestine conflict but, in 2005, he wrote Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History where he disparages in detail the 2003 book, A Case for Israel, written by the influential and affluent US lawyer, Alan Dershowitz, primarily for containing false information and for academic plagiarism. He later repeated these attributions in person to Amy Goodman here on WBAI’s Democracy Now! show.
Following these charges Dershowitz accused Finkelstein of being a ‘Jew Hater’ and a ‘Holocaust Denier’, and persistently threatened him with libel action over the next four years. He even approached the then Governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger, to prevent Beyond Chutzpah from being published by the University of California. When this request was rejected he proceeded to exert his considerable power to successfully lobby professors, alumni and administrators to oppose Finkelstein’s 2007 bid for tenure at DePaul University in Chicago.
Ultimately, Norman Finkelstein, feted alongside Edward Said and Noam Chomsky as one of the most prominent US defenders of the Palestinian people, described by South African Professor of Law, John Dugard, as [QUOTE] ‘probably the most serious scholar on the conflict in the Middle East’, was made unemployable in both the US and Europe for the next seven years until, finally, he secured a long-distance lecturing position at Sakarya University in Turkey in 2014.
In today’s parlance, he was cancelled.
I’ll Burn That Bridge When I Get To It!!! contends, amongst many other things, that the spontaneous, illogical, unresearched and regressive practice of wokeness, identity politics and cancel culture is being systematically exploited by the established elite and their media outlets in order to distract, divide, disenfranchise and dominate the political agency of citizens throughout the socio-cultural sphere.
Finkelstein acknowledges that Western society’s attitudes toward sexual, racial and ethnic minorities are [QUOTE] ‘a civilizational advance, a cultural tectonic shift’ which we should all take pride in.
This said, he also argues that at the core of identity politics there is a battle within a group about who represents them most legitimately and effectively in wider society until one faction’s version prevails. Yet there is still no single valid definition of what race is, what ethnicity is, what gender is or what sexuality is.
Furthermore, Finkelstein queries why somebody would want to be defined by their own birth and personhood anyway, or have it superficially valorised by wider popular culture, instead of being recognised for one’s own agency, actions and achievements. Why would one not wish to transcend this imposition, this burden?
For instance, why does an engineer have to be identified and co-opted as a black engineer, a female engineer or a gay engineer? Why can’t an engineer be identified as an engineer due to their intelligence, industriousness and insight? Why single out their ethnicity, gender or sexuality, something which they have had no choice about?
To reinforce his point Finkelstein cites Martin Luther King’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech from 1963 wherein the late minister hopes that ‘my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character.’
He then heatedly illustrates this point by charting the mainstream corporate media’s ongoing lionisation of Barack and Michelle Obama’s ‘wokeness’ as the couple proceed to spend $12 million dollars on an estate in Martha’s Vineyard and $8 million on a property in Washington, D.C., as well as accrue $65 million from a joint book deal with Random House and negotiate an unspecified high amount with Netflix. Crucially however, he also targets Jeff Bezos’ recent $100 million donation to the Obama Foundation, stating ‘it’s not hard to guess which side Obama will be on if and when Amazon workers strike.’
Indeed, as neoliberalist tech-feudalism rapidly engulfs people’s everyday lives and, in reaction, class-based politics once again attempts to keep everyone’s heads above water, it is no surprise that, along with the cult of mediated narcissism, ‘the ruling elites across the political spectrum have embraced identity politics to deflect from the class struggle’.
Finkelstein continues by reminding us that ‘Professor Noam Chomsky popularised the phrase ‘manufacturing consent’ to denote the mechanisms by which incongruous facts and opinions are filtered out in an ostensibly democratic society’.
And, in essence, this is what cancel culture is all about: the suppression of ideas, language and people as a method of social control, as a means for a self-appointed ruling body to maintain and increase its power in a relationship, in a group, in an institution and/or across culture in general.
Usefully, Finkelstein advances four key semantic areas wherein cancel culture erroneously operates.
Firstly, that speech is suppressed or cancelled because it is deemed to be ‘false’. However, since human beings are fallible, how do we know who is right or wrong? For example, a 98-year-old Ukrainian war veteran was recently hailed as a ‘hero’ and received two standing ovations in the Canadian Parliament. It was later discovered however that he had in fact been a member of the SS 14th Waffen Division under the command of the Nazis.
Secondly, the person articulating this speech is ‘evil’. Be that as it may, this doesn’t discount that what is being said is not true. For example, the early 20th century US serial killer, Albert Fish, is widely quoted as declaring, ‘none of us are saints’.
Thirdly, what is being said is ‘offensive’. However, as individuals, aren’t we always offended by something, somewhere, at any time? A stupid comment overheard at a bus stop, an idiotic post on social media, a mawkish line of dialogue delivered by some movie star, a poorly written review on a radio show? So what should happen? Ban all communication, all opinion, all difference? ‘[as] Justice Holmes famously rejoined: ‘Every idea is an incitement.’’
Finally, there is speech which is suppressed or cancelled because it is considered regressive, underdeveloped or backward. Times change however. For example, ‘in the first half of the 20th century, eugenics was all the rage … in progressive circles,’ and notable names such as Theodore Roosevelt and H.G. Wells were in favour of improving the human race by way of scientific breeding. Fortunately, the legality of state-enforced sterilisation came before the U.S. Supreme Court in Buck v. Bell in 1927 wherein it was argued that feeble-minded Carrie Buck, and her feeble-minded mother and daughter, should be made infertile because ‘three generations of imbeciles are enough.’ Justice Butler was a devout Catholic however, and he dismissed the case on the grounds that all human life is sacred. Thus, as the Nazi concentration camps would later prove, the scientific ‘progressives’ here were wrong while the religious ‘regressives’ were right.
I’ll Burn That Bridge When I Get To It!!! is broad in scope, brash in style, bristling with morality and bulging with uncomfortable truths.
It is highly recommended.
What follows is my review of Norman Finkelstein’s latest book, I'll Burn That Bridge When I Get To It!: Heretical Thoughts on Identity Politics, Cancel Culture, and Academic Freedom, published by Sublation Press in 2023.
Finkelstein was born in Brooklyn in 1953 and both his mother and father were survivors of the Warsaw Ghetto and the concentration camps in Majdanek and Auschwitz. The rest of his family were wiped out completely.
Educated at Princeton University, his subsequent academic work, publications and political activism generated from the 1970s onwards, appear to have been intensely and inevitably informed by this woebegotten wellspring of human horror.
While his mother’s recollections of enduring the Holocaust burned into his psyche as a boy growing up, her post-war pacifism impressed itself upon his mindset as a man. In the 2009 documentary, ‘American Radical: The Trials of Norman Finkelstein’, available on YouTube, he even jokingly describes himself as ‘Finkelstein’s Monster’.
He has written many books on the Israel-Palestine conflict but, in 2005, he wrote Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History where he disparages in detail the 2003 book, A Case for Israel, written by the influential and affluent US lawyer, Alan Dershowitz, primarily for containing false information and for academic plagiarism. He later repeated these attributions in person to Amy Goodman here on WBAI’s Democracy Now! show.
Following these charges Dershowitz accused Finkelstein of being a ‘Jew Hater’ and a ‘Holocaust Denier’, and persistently threatened him with libel action over the next four years. He even approached the then Governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger, to prevent Beyond Chutzpah from being published by the University of California. When this request was rejected he proceeded to exert his considerable power to successfully lobby professors, alumni and administrators to oppose Finkelstein’s 2007 bid for tenure at DePaul University in Chicago.
Ultimately, Norman Finkelstein, feted alongside Edward Said and Noam Chomsky as one of the most prominent US defenders of the Palestinian people, described by South African Professor of Law, John Dugard, as [QUOTE] ‘probably the most serious scholar on the conflict in the Middle East’, was made unemployable in both the US and Europe for the next seven years until, finally, he secured a long-distance lecturing position at Sakarya University in Turkey in 2014.
In today’s parlance, he was cancelled.
I’ll Burn That Bridge When I Get To It!!! contends, amongst many other things, that the spontaneous, illogical, unresearched and regressive practice of wokeness, identity politics and cancel culture is being systematically exploited by the established elite and their media outlets in order to distract, divide, disenfranchise and dominate the political agency of citizens throughout the socio-cultural sphere.
Finkelstein acknowledges that Western society’s attitudes toward sexual, racial and ethnic minorities are [QUOTE] ‘a civilizational advance, a cultural tectonic shift’ which we should all take pride in.
This said, he also argues that at the core of identity politics there is a battle within a group about who represents them most legitimately and effectively in wider society until one faction’s version prevails. Yet there is still no single valid definition of what race is, what ethnicity is, what gender is or what sexuality is.
Furthermore, Finkelstein queries why somebody would want to be defined by their own birth and personhood anyway, or have it superficially valorised by wider popular culture, instead of being recognised for one’s own agency, actions and achievements. Why would one not wish to transcend this imposition, this burden?
For instance, why does an engineer have to be identified and co-opted as a black engineer, a female engineer or a gay engineer? Why can’t an engineer be identified as an engineer due to their intelligence, industriousness and insight? Why single out their ethnicity, gender or sexuality, something which they have had no choice about?
To reinforce his point Finkelstein cites Martin Luther King’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech from 1963 wherein the late minister hopes that ‘my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character.’
He then heatedly illustrates this point by charting the mainstream corporate media’s ongoing lionisation of Barack and Michelle Obama’s ‘wokeness’ as the couple proceed to spend $12 million dollars on an estate in Martha’s Vineyard and $8 million on a property in Washington, D.C., as well as accrue $65 million from a joint book deal with Random House and negotiate an unspecified high amount with Netflix. Crucially however, he also targets Jeff Bezos’ recent $100 million donation to the Obama Foundation, stating ‘it’s not hard to guess which side Obama will be on if and when Amazon workers strike.’
Indeed, as neoliberalist tech-feudalism rapidly engulfs people’s everyday lives and, in reaction, class-based politics once again attempts to keep everyone’s heads above water, it is no surprise that, along with the cult of mediated narcissism, ‘the ruling elites across the political spectrum have embraced identity politics to deflect from the class struggle’.
Finkelstein continues by reminding us that ‘Professor Noam Chomsky popularised the phrase ‘manufacturing consent’ to denote the mechanisms by which incongruous facts and opinions are filtered out in an ostensibly democratic society’.
And, in essence, this is what cancel culture is all about: the suppression of ideas, language and people as a method of social control, as a means for a self-appointed ruling body to maintain and increase its power in a relationship, in a group, in an institution and/or across culture in general.
Usefully, Finkelstein advances four key semantic areas wherein cancel culture erroneously operates.
Firstly, that speech is suppressed or cancelled because it is deemed to be ‘false’. However, since human beings are fallible, how do we know who is right or wrong? For example, a 98-year-old Ukrainian war veteran was recently hailed as a ‘hero’ and received two standing ovations in the Canadian Parliament. It was later discovered however that he had in fact been a member of the SS 14th Waffen Division under the command of the Nazis.
Secondly, the person articulating this speech is ‘evil’. Be that as it may, this doesn’t discount that what is being said is not true. For example, the early 20th century US serial killer, Albert Fish, is widely quoted as declaring, ‘none of us are saints’.
Thirdly, what is being said is ‘offensive’. However, as individuals, aren’t we always offended by something, somewhere, at any time? A stupid comment overheard at a bus stop, an idiotic post on social media, a mawkish line of dialogue delivered by some movie star, a poorly written review on a radio show? So what should happen? Ban all communication, all opinion, all difference? ‘[as] Justice Holmes famously rejoined: ‘Every idea is an incitement.’’
Finally, there is speech which is suppressed or cancelled because it is considered regressive, underdeveloped or backward. Times change however. For example, ‘in the first half of the 20th century, eugenics was all the rage … in progressive circles,’ and notable names such as Theodore Roosevelt and H.G. Wells were in favour of improving the human race by way of scientific breeding. Fortunately, the legality of state-enforced sterilisation came before the U.S. Supreme Court in Buck v. Bell in 1927 wherein it was argued that feeble-minded Carrie Buck, and her feeble-minded mother and daughter, should be made infertile because ‘three generations of imbeciles are enough.’ Justice Butler was a devout Catholic however, and he dismissed the case on the grounds that all human life is sacred. Thus, as the Nazi concentration camps would later prove, the scientific ‘progressives’ here were wrong while the religious ‘regressives’ were right.
I’ll Burn That Bridge When I Get To It!!! is broad in scope, brash in style, bristling with morality and bulging with uncomfortable truths.
It is highly recommended.