- All articles

All articles

- Letters

- James Butler - What’s a majority for?

- Stephen Sedley - The Rise and Fall of Treason in English History

- Rae Armantrout - Poem: ‘Hell’

- Christian Lorentzen - The Last Politician: Inside Joe Biden’s White House and the Struggle for America’s Future / The Fight of His Life: Inside Joe Biden’s White House / The Internationalists: The Fight to Restore American Foreign Policy after Trump

- Rosemary Hill - At the William Morris Gallery: On Mingei

- Thomas Meaney - Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America / The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of US History / Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance

- Mélissa Cornet - On Gender Apartheid

- David Trotter - The Fatal Alliance: A Century of War on Film

- Blake Morrison - The Road to the Country

- Gavin Francis - Short Cuts: Medicine Shortages

- Alexander Bevilacqua - Diary of a Black Jewish Messiah: The 16th-Century Journey of David Reubeni through Africa, the Middle East and Europe

- Andrew O’Hagan - The House of Beckham: Money, Sex and Power

- David Goldblatt - What are the Olympics for? / Igniting the Games: The Evolution of the Olympics and Bach’s Legacy

- Colin Kidd - Mandeville’s Fable: Pride, Hypocrisy and Sociability

- A.E. Stallings - Poem: ‘Blackbird at Dawn’

- Nora Goldschmidt - Rome’s Patron: The Lives and Afterlives of Maecenas

- Michael Wood - At the Movies: ‘The Beast’

- Ulinka Rublack - Tudor Liveliness: Vivid Art in Post-Reformation England

- Dani Garavelli - Diary: Election Night in Glasgow

Letters

Vol. 46 No. 14 · 18 July 2024

Get Out Now

In the light of Adam Shatz’s superb piece on Israel and the US it is depressing to reflect on the extent to which propagandists for Israel have succeeded in defining any attack on its government’s policies as antisemitic (LRB, 20 June). Two decades ago I was shocked when the New Zealand Herald fired its longstanding cartoonist Malcolm Evans for a work that dared to compare Israel’s oppression of Palestinians with the policies of apartheid South Africa. But I wasn’t entirely surprised: Evans had expressed a somewhat radical view for the time and the Herald was known for its conservative opinions. Much more disturbing was last year’s decision by the supposedly left-leaning Guardian to sack Steve Bell. Arguably the greatest British cartoonist and caricaturist since George Cruikshank, Bell had published in the Guardian since 1981. He had produced a caricature of Benjamin Netanyahu that now seems prophetic: completed on 9 October 2023, shortly after the bombardment of Gaza began, it shows Israel’s prime minister engraving a map of Gaza on his stomach while his speech bubble orders ‘Residents of Gaza, get out now.’ The cartoon, explicitly labelled ‘After David Levine’, was closely based on Levine’s depiction of Lyndon Johnson from 1966, showing his stomach scar as a map of Vietnam. But the Guardian accused Bell of employing an antisemitic trope deriving from the ‘pound of flesh’ episode in The Merchant of Venice. They refused to publish the cartoon; Bell posted it on Twitter, and was fired. Looking at it now, I find it hard to imagine how the connection with The Merchant of Venice could have been made; but once such an allegation has been uttered, there seems to be no escaping its consequences.

Michael Neill

Auckland

Not in Front of the Servants

Stefan Collini’s review of Polly Toynbee’s family memoir and Hubert Murray’s subsequent letter prompt me to recall my relationship, as a very young child, with my great-grandfather Gilbert Murray (LRB, 6 June and Letters, 4 July). My grandfather Denis Murray (1892-1930) was Gilbert and Mary’s oldest son. He died, from an excess of drink and a rackety, rather tragic life, when my mother was only ten. Toynbee records Gilbert’s ‘chilling coldness’ towards Denis both as a boy and as a troubled young man.

My experience of the formidable man was rather different. I have typed letters sent to me by Gilbert dated 20 December 1948 (when I was all of six months old) and another on 27 October 1956 (less than a year before he died). I am sure he typed these himself; the second has, rather touchingly, a few typos. In the first, he thanks me for his Christmas present (‘the biggest and most elaborate diary I have ever had’) and goes on to say: ‘We are hesitating about our present for you. It is either to be a Shetland woollie or else a black bear. Of course you and I would prefer the bear, but very likely your mother will think the woollie is more useful, and of course mothers have to be humoured – especially if your mother, grandmother and great-grandmother all stand together. But I am sorry about the bear.’ The second, in response to letters I must have sent to him (I was eight by then) says: ‘It must be fun being at your new school, a proper boy’s school with football and so on. Some birds won’t eat coconut but they all like fat. But they like eating the raspberries and plums better than anything.’ I maybe had sent him a coconut and, for the record, I hated playing football.

If there is any point to these little anecdotes it is, as both Toynbee and Collini testify, that there was much more to Gilbert Murray than a worthy, moralistic, exhaustingly high-minded scholar and public intellectual devoted to saving the world. The recent flurry of publishing around the Murrays, the Howards, the Toynbees et al has made me reflect on the contradictions and pressures (often disguised or unspoken) of growing up in a dynasty where academic achievement seemed to be valorised and prized above all else. In an undogmatic and very ‘liberal’ way my parents were guilty of this and it has been a weight on my shoulders throughout my working life. I recently retired from the University of Glasgow, where Gilbert Murray remains the youngest person ever appointed professor, at the age of 23. This connection does not displease me.

Simon Murray

Glasgow

Housing Crisis

James Meek, writing about the UK housing crisis, mentions that outsourcing companies such as Serco are hoovering up private rented accommodation in which to place asylum seekers, removing properties from the rental market and thereby exacerbating the problems facing ‘local people of limited means’ (LRB, 4 July).

As home secretary in the early 2000s, David Blunkett introduced a number of measures to address the influx of record numbers of asylum seekers to the UK. These included a requirement that judges regard an applicant’s credibility as damaged if they had journeyed across the safe countries of Europe to reach the UK; and that accommodation and support be denied to any asylum seeker deemed not to have claimed asylum ‘as soon as reasonably practicable’. There was a backlog of more than 450,000 asylum claims in the 2000s, many of which took years to resolve, but at least the applicants and their families generally had places to live – in the empty properties and ‘hard to let’ council flats Meek writes about.

The austerity of the 2010s, in particular the 60 per cent cut in local authority housebuilding, has led to competition between local authorities, outsourcing companies and the Home Office itself to secure cheap rented property and downmarket hotels in which to house asylum seekers. In 2020, when the most recent accommodation contracts were drawn up, the National Audit Office noted that potentially better long-term solutions, such as paying asylum seekers mainstream benefits and building more houses, had not been modelled.

Money is being made. In May, it was reported that Graham King, the founder and majority owner of Clearsprings Readyhomes, one of the three current holders of contracts for asylum accommodation, had entered the Sunday Times Rich List. Meanwhile, as a result of cuts at the Home Office, delays and backlogs in asylum processing have ballooned again. In 2010 there was a backlog of just over nine thousand; today there are more than a hundred thousand asylum applicants in the system.

Anti-migrant political views have existed in the UK for decades. What has changed is that the housing crisis has raised the cost of warehousing asylum seekers and at the same time rendered them ‘hypervisible’. We read that it costs £8 million per day to house them ‘in hotels’; or they are placed in large groups in the countryside or in barracks. As the situation worsens, radical solutions are proposed: asylum seekers are to be sent to Rwanda; or, much more likely, interned on UK soil, at least until the inevitable stories of hardship, sickness, abuse, suicide and uprisings reach the media. One hopes that the new Labour government will properly diagnose the problem. Asylum seekers are here now, and more will arrive: a housebuilding programme prioritising social housing is essential to make sure that Meek’s ‘local people of limited means’ are not driven to see asylum seekers as their enemies.

Sheona York

Kent Law Clinic, Canterbury

Special Period

Rachel Nolan describes the effects of Cuba’s economic crisis of 1990-95, which followed the collapse of the Soviet Union and the loss of its annual $5 billion in subsidies (LRB, 6 June). There is an interesting public health footnote to the severe food shortages that resulted. Using data from successive surveys from 1980 to 2010, researchers reported in the British Medical Journal in 2013 that during the deprivations of the Special Period people in Cuba ate less and, thanks to a shortage of petrol, exercised more. As people became thinner (the average adult weight loss was 5.5 kg in a population that by today’s standards was not particularly overweight) there was a rapid decline in new cases of type 2 diabetes and mortality from heart disease. After normal service was resumed in 1995, there was a population-wide increase in weight, immediately followed by a marked increase in the incidence of diabetes.

Tim Cundy

Auckland

Helping Saddam

Andrew Cockburn describes the way the United States covered up its assistance to Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq War, and blamed Iran for gassing thousands of Kurds in Halabja in 1988 (LRB, 4 July). Britain was at it, too, as I learned when reporting for the Guardian on the Scott Inquiry into the export of arms to Iraq, triggered by the collapse of the trial of three executives at the Matrix Churchill machine tool company. Unbeknown to the customs authorities who prosecuted the executives for breaching export controls, MI5 and MI6 had encouraged them to trade with Iraq and feed back intelligence about what Saddam was up to. British officials also initially blamed the Halabja gassing on Iran but later reluctantly acknowledged that Saddam had ordered the massacre. That did not stop Geoffrey Howe, the foreign secretary at the time, from drawing up a paper about ways to export more weapons to Saddam. He told his officials to keep it secret. ‘It could look very cynical,’ he said, ‘if, so soon after expressing outrage about the treatment of the Kurds, we adopt a more flexible approach to arms sales.’

Richard Norton-Taylor

London N10

Origins of the Unconscious

Adam Phillips notes that the word ‘unconscious’ was first used in English in 1712 (LRB, 20 June). Not quite true: a translation from the Latin of Thomas Hobbes used it in 1678. But as the noun ‘the unconscious’ it appeared first in 1818, the author being Samuel Taylor Coleridge, making notes for a lecture on 10 March: ‘As in every work of Art the Conscious – is so impressed on the Unconscious, as to appear in it.’

John Worthen

Mülheim an der Ruhr, Germany

War Chariots

Tom Stevenson, imagining a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, refers to ‘hundreds of thousands of soldiers’ (LRB, 4 July). The entire PLA ground force is less than 950,000 personnel, more than half of whom are in support structures. Of the 400,000 deployable troops, at least 80,000 are serving on the Sino-Indian border, with another 40,000 in the rear to support them. In the absence of dedicated border forces, the PLA must provide rear security along at least twelve sensitive borders. With a little effort (say, to the Finnish level) and a little money, Taiwan could see off any invasion attempt.

Edward Luttwak

Chevy Chase, Maryland

Truth to Power

Clare Bucknell, writing about Henry VIII’s fool Will Somer, mentions the conceit, found in Erasmus and King Lear, of the fool’s capacity to ‘speak truth to power without fear’ (LRB, 4 July). She adds that this had little to do with the reality of the court fool’s experience; in one episode Henry VIII nearly murdered his fool (perhaps Somer) after an ill-judged sally. This brings to mind a story told about Henry III. Informed by his jester that he was like Christ, Henry fell into the trap and asked how so. Just as Christ was as wise at the moment of his conception as when thirty years old, the jester answered, so the king was as wise now as when a little child. Enraged, Henry ordered the jester to be hanged, but his courtiers, serving a very different master from Henry VIII, instead went through a mock form of execution and told the jester to clear out till the king calmed down. Fools and jesters had to know their audience.

David Carpenter

London SE3

Vol. 46 No. 14 · 18 July 2024

What’s a majority for?

James Butler

Keir Starmer is now the central fact of British politics. He has achieved an extraordinary majority. His preferences and commitments will shape the country. He has ridden a wave of revulsion at Conservatism into Number Ten. Desire for change wore social democratic dress, but disgust is also anti-systemic: the depressed turnout and the success of pro-Gaza independents, Greens and Reform augur a far stormier first term than once expected.

It would be risible for Starmer to stand in Downing Street and invoke buoyant optimism. If this is a new dawn, it is an uncertain one. Starmer has been keen to remind voters of his ordinary upbringing and Everyman qualities, but he is evasive and mutable in his beliefs. His manifesto promised ‘change’, but its real commitments were sparse. Unlike Tony Blair, Starmer inherits a broken and dysfunctional country. Where Blair surfed a burgeoning economic boom and aspired to a frictionless world united under Visa, Starmer’s Britain is stuck in protracted accidie, economically DOA and beset by a deep – if justified – cynicism about politicians and the ability of the state to improve people’s lives.

Long delayed schadenfreude found its targets last night: Truss’s annihilation, Rees-Mogg’s obliteration, Shapps’s ejection. But too few of the real architects of broken Britain were still around for outright rejoicing. Labour’s victory has appeared inevitable for so long that it’s easy to understate how rapid and total the change has been, and how emboldened the party ought to be. Boris Johnson won the 2019 election with a majority of 80 and 44 per cent of the popular vote. Just five years later, with one constituency in the Highlands still to declare, Starmer’s Labour has won 412 seats – a majority of 175 – while the Tories clung on to just 121. Yet it is a loveless landslide and a weird result. First past the post distorts votes like a funhouse mirror: Labour gained 65 per cent of the seats on 34 per cent of the national vote, a vote share reminiscent of the embattled later Blair. The SNP were routed. Jeremy Corbyn, forced to run as an independent, was rightly returned in the face of party chicanery, a focus for a rudderless left. Socially conservative independents standing in support of Gaza claimed safe seats from Labour. The Greens claimed four seats, benefiting from left-wing disaffection. Millions of people voted for a party replete with racist candidates, putting Reform into second place across a swathe of strongly pro-Brexit Labour seats. The electoral system will grant them few seats but a powerful grievance. Yet Labour won. Tory rule is over.

The campaign was trivial. Neither party addressed the £20 billion of cuts to unprotected public services baked into current spending. The primary mode was assertion: Labour claimed it would solve social care, reanimate the economy, stay all strikes, revive the NHS, defang the housing crisis and rescue collapsing public services through sheer force of will, magical economic growth or the mysterious power of change. But certainly not by spending any money. An air of unreality descended, with most of the press dutiful collaborators. Unable to discuss the elephants crowding the electoral room, coverage devolved into a sputter of stories about Tory squalor and avarice, inconsequential gaffes and tired vox pops. Attention dwindled. The brightest and most improbable hope when trudging to the ballot box was that Labour had been pretending not to grasp the scale of the problem, and had a secret plan to solve it.

Rishi Sunak went downhill from his sodden announcement of the election date, reduced in his final days to begging the electorate not to give Labour a ‘supermajority’. Half of all voters, and a quarter of those who voted Tory in 2019, thought the party deserved to lose every seat it held. Given a commanding majority in the last election and the opportunity to remake the country, the Conservatives squandered their final term in office, piling failure upon failure. Any twinge of pity is easily assuaged by recalling the vast waste and gratuitous cruelty of Sunak’s Rwanda scheme. His humiliation is deserved.

Starmer has been fortunate in his enemies. His proscription of the Labour left was aided by its predictable descent into mutual recrimination after the 2019 catastrophe; he had an unusually free hand in remaking the party to his taste. His imposition of factional allies in prize seats, often to the chagrin of local activists, was intended to forestall any future rebellion. A succession of Tory prime ministers handed Starmer gifts: Johnson’s inclination for cronyism and scandal; Liz Truss’s kamikaze libertarianism; Sunak’s wealth and Silicon Valley cipher personality. All proved to be modes of flagrant misgovernment. Starmer’s victory has looked certain for months, but his personal approval ratings have never risen above lukewarm; they are unlikely to improve in office. In this election, it was enough to be the other guy.

The holding pattern is over: Starmer now has the opportunity to ‘roll up his sleeves’, as he has so often said he wants to do, and get to work. The manifesto lists five central missions – including delivering the highest sustained growth in the G7 and making Britain a ‘clean energy superpower’ – and six first steps, among them the imposition of tighter fiscal rules, the recruitment of a raft of new teachers and border guards, and the launch of Great British Energy. The imperatives are already pulling in different directions and the method remains mysterious. The Institute for Fiscal Studies scorned Labour’s spending plans as ‘tiny, going on trivial’; Andy Haldane, former chief economist at the Bank of England, ridiculed the notion that any of this could be achieved with an increase in spending amounting to less than a weekend’s GDP. Neither could be accused of being a sneering pinko.

Labour’s programme is curiously bifurcated: its diagnoses are trenchant, its remedies anaemic. The doubleness has a double cause: showy divestment from the party’s recent left-wing past (including Starmer’s own adherence to it) and an attempt to appeal to undecided voters. Many of the voters it targeted were to the right of British politics. Starmer’s weird jibe at Bangladeshi migrants, and his genuflection to transphobic panic – both late in the campaign, with victory already assured – were directed at this constituency. Clips of the former circulated widely on WhatsApp; combined with contempt for Labour’s moral cowardice and vacillation on Palestine, it helped lose the party seats in Leicester, Birmingham, Blackburn and Dewsbury, and smashed the majorities of Wes Streeting, Jess Phillips and Rushanara Ali, whose seat had been Labour’s second safest in 2019. Mutterings about sectarian or communal politics fail to see that Palestine is a catalyst for longstanding dissatisfaction with Labour, not least for its failure to oppose the two-child benefit cap.

Studied vacuity will be unsustainable. Labour will not retain all the historically Conservative seats it has won, many of them on narrow margins and aided by a split right-wing vote and widespread abstention. Jon Cruddas, one of few recent Labour MPs capable of independent thought, has described Starmer’s programme for Labour as an attempt to reforge the party’s traditional working-class regional base. Such an approach, as Cruddas acknowledges, jeopardises the strand of Labourism concerned with civil liberties and social liberalism, a trade-off he finds sad but ultimately acceptable. It is a generous reading of Starmerism, which has rarely seemed cogent either as philosophy or electoral strategy.

Labour’s vote has improved in efficiency rather than raw numbers, magnified by an unfair electoral system. The chief lesson of recent elections is widespread volatility and transactionalism: few seats are really safe anymore. As Cruddas would acknowledge, the shared values and consociational bodies – from churches to trade unions – that historically anchored the Labour vote have suffered secular decline. What if the Tories in 2019 had taken ‘levelling-up’ seriously, followed through on reforms to renting and housebuilding and actually built some hospitals? There are many reasons this was never likely to happen: Johnson’s laziness, his preference for rhetoric over delivery, the powerful rentier and client interests that comprise the Tories’ donor base, electoral core and political apparatus. Some 2019 seats weren’t retainable, but a more nakedly transactional approach to its voters – an attempt to get anyone under fifty to vote for them – would have seen them running Labour much closer in this election.

Unlike his predecessors in outright Labour victory – Attlee, Wilson, Blair – Starmer enters Downing Street without a firm electoral coalition. Labour’s share of the vote in England was virtually static, masked by a stunning increase in Scotland and much more efficient distribution. The internal politics of the new government will involve tense stand-offs between Labour MPs with Reform at their heels and those threatened by the Greens. Solidifying conditional Labour support usually means adopting regressive social stances, but work by YouGov suggests that 12 per cent of Labour’s vote is ‘naturally’ – that is, under a system without tactical voting – Green. A party tempted to give up on its climate commitments ought to keep that number pinned to its desk, next to a picture of Thangam Debbonaire. Starmer has said he wants a decade to transform Britain, but his electoral base is broad, not deep, and far from stable. Voters rank the NHS, cost of living, migration and housing as their most pressing issues. Putting down roots will involve spending money.

Labour benefited from a pliable media, which spent the final week of the campaign running adulatory guff on Starmer’s ‘no drama’ style or ‘quiet radicalism’. His political mutations and embrace of plutocrats went unmentioned. Diminished in influence, the Murdoch papers half-heartedly half-endorsed Labour, partly hoping to forestall any resumption of the aborted second part of the Leveson Inquiry, but mostly just accepting the inevitable. The backgrounds of Labour candidates were hardly probed, yet alongside the strong representation of charities and NGOs, the lobbying industry practically has its own party grouping; it would be canny to bet on lobbying as the focus of the first scandal of the Starmer years. Westminster correspondents were disinclined to press too hard on the gaps in the manifesto or investigate discontent over Gaza. If the outcome is a foregone conclusion, why make yourself unpopular?

Victory arrives as a shock because Labour is habituated to losing. It has spent two-thirds of the past century out of office and many of its incoming MPs lack parliamentary experience, let alone experience of government. Sue Gray’s appointment as chief of staff signals Starmer’s intent to make the government machine function, but it isn’t clear that he realises how dysfunctional, demoralised and hollowed-out its institutions have become. Gray has a formidable Westminster reputation, not least for her hostility to external scrutiny: the treatment of Freedom of Information will be an early indicator as to how far the Starmer government shares the authoritarian streak of its antecedents.

Nye Bevan once warned fresh Labour MPs that if ‘the past lies like an Alp on the human mind,’ then ‘the House of Commons is a whole range of mountains.’ He derided Westminster as a temple of conservative ancestor worship, a powerful social shock absorber designed to muffle and constrain its inhabitants. Governments often believe they can refashion the whole administrative body. But the demands that greet new ministers can force them into established patterns, no matter how dysfunctional or superficial. The five new boards intended to ensure the fulfilment of Labour’s missions will achieve little if they merely supervise a broken system. And diligence tips easily into the other Labour vice, conformism. As Sidney Webb, by then an ex-minister, reportedly wailed after Britain departed the gold standard in 1931: ‘They never told us we could do that!’

The situation may be so dire that conformism of any kind is implausible. Whitehall has drawn up a list of potential ‘black swan’ events that could upend the new government in its first year; many of them seem unsurprising, even likely: the collapse of the prison estate; the total failure of a hospital system during the now annual winter crisis; the financial collapse of one or more universities; a renewed spike in energy prices and interrupted food supplies. Wes Streeting faces serious strikes in the NHS (although he has said negotiations with junior doctors will begin immediately), themselves a prelude to industrial strife over public sector pay. A sane government would take this as a mandate for drastic intervention.

Britain is stuck in a doom loop. The economy isn’t growing, so the country is starved of the cash it needs to rebuild. Its institutions degrade. Money earmarked for investment gets swiped for day-to-day costs (schools and hospitals both have repair backlogs amounting to £12 billion). Failure to invest means failure to grow, again, and the cycle worsens and repeats. External shocks expose our weakness: Britain’s recovery from the financial crisis, the pandemic and the energy spike has been more protracted and less complete than in other advanced economies. The productivity problem that afflicts post-industrial economies in general is sharpened by rentier parasitism. Starmer has argued throughout the campaign that a return to growth is the only way to end the cycle. But growth cannot be achieved through finger-wagging, nor will it feed through to the Exchequer before the cuts bear down.

The doom loop isn’t the only problem facing the new government, but it renders all else intractable. Starmer has committed to hard borders and a revitalised Border Command. He has been reticent about immigration targets, which helped undo David Cameron. For liberal politicians, migration is a zugzwang: a state in which action is unavoidable, but any action makes the situation worse. Aggressive migration policies imperil the cheap labour on which Britain depends (especially in its health and care services), alienate the liberal left, risk scandalous miscarriages of justice and are usually ineffective. Explicitly pro-migration positions bring down the wrath of the press. Farage, ascendant, will scent blood either way.

One of Starmer’s first duties on entering Downing Street will be to write and sign the letters of last resort to the nuclear commanders. He soon heads to a fractious, uncertain Nato summit. He has professed his Atlanticist faith many times over, but it cannot be lost on him that by the end of this year he may be one of the most left-wing leaders remaining on the global stage. Reflexive support for Washington has torpedoed Labour prime ministers in the past; Biden’s support for Israeli atrocities in Gaza is a reminder that even apparently congenial presidencies can cause domestic headaches. Trump would be a greater headache still.

Labour is relying on two major green policies – Great British Energy and the National Wealth Fund – to bring about the social renewal needed to stem the rise of the populist right in Britain. Yet each is a shadow of the original proposal and woefully undercapitalised for the number of problems they are supposed to solve. GB Energy, in particular, is a chimera, with the extent of public ownership still unclear. Its exact design will be a cause of early internal strife for the government. Labour can’t afford to get this wrong: the far right have identified net zero, especially socially unjust transition, as a chief rallying point.

In her Mais Lecture earlier this year, Rachel Reeves deplored the Conservative failure to take advantage of the economic environment after 2008 as ‘an act of historic negligence’. She is right. The party should have borrowed to invest and introduced taxes on wealth. Her own reluctance to tax wealth irks the left, but in other respects the post-2008 window has closed. Many of the win-win options advocated by the left in those years depended on a monetary environment, including reliably low interest rates, that no longer exists. The areas of economic policy that most require reform are also the kill zones of British politics: inflated housing assets and the raft of monetary indulgences for pensioners. But what’s a majority for?

Reeves’s current plan is to ‘get BlackRock to rebuild Britain’, using public money to ‘derisk’ investment in infrastructure and energy generation: effectively using the state to guarantee private profits. We have been here before. Labour’s last love affair with private finance gave us crumbling schools and contractual extortion; tying a new infrastructural revolution to private capital risks beggaring future generations too. Starmer occasionally cites Wilson’s attempt to draw private capital into long-term national strategy as an inspiration. But if this was briefly plausible with industrial capital, which had an obvious interest in the nation’s basic functioning, there is no reason to believe it will work with finance capital. BlackRock does what’s best for BlackRock, not for Britain.

Conservative warnings about a Labour ‘supermajority’ were constitutionally meaningless: the UK’s overpowered executive can enforce great change with tiny majorities. Select committees will be overwhelmingly Labour. The size of the parliamentary party, longstanding disquiet from Black MPs and contradictory threats from a progressive left and a nativist right will make political management a problem. Meanwhile, the Tory rump will enter its wilderness years riven with arguments about Faragism. Public office will not fetter Farage; he will use his time in Westminster to exploit his press collaborators, witting and otherwise, into dragging British politics further to the right. The real threat in 2029 will be if Reform can endure long enough to find a less divisive successor.

Thatcher said that she felt a deep loneliness on entering Number Ten. Blair said the first emotion he felt after the black door closed was fear. Both grasped the magnitude of the office. Keir Starmer has the most daunting task of any postwar Labour prime minister: the recovery of a comatose economy, a collapsing state, a cynical and exhausted electorate. The stakes could not be higher.

5 July

Vol. 46 No. 14 · 18 July 2024

Boil the cook

Stephen Sedley

The Rise and Fall of Treason in English History

by Allen D. Boyer and Mark Nicholls.

Routledge, 340 pp., £135, February, 978 0 367 50993 4

According to the Great Statute of Treasons, 1352, which is still on the statute book, treason consists of ‘Compassing the Death of the King, Queen, or their eldest Son; violating the Queen, or the King’s eldest Daughter unmarried, or his eldest Son’s Wife; levying War; adhering to the King’s Enemies; killing the Chancellor, Treasurer, or Judges in Execution of their Duty’. Allen Boyer (an American attorney and historian) and Mark Nicholls (a Cambridge academic) have what at first appears a straightforward project: to trace the path followed by English law for more than a millennium in categorising, criminalising and penalising treasonable acts. They conclude that treason as a crime has had its day: ‘Today, dangers inherent in the prosecution of treason manifestly outweigh the advantages, and the absurdity of a 21st-century state deriving weighty and drastic legal conclusions from a 14th-century statute has become ever more obvious.’ They express surprise that treason ‘is still around’ and ask why the state ‘condones life support’ for it, especially when prosecution may generate the glamour of martyrdom. It’s true that there has for many years been a web of statutes prescribing sentences up to life imprisonment for disclosing official secrets and for unauthorised possession of firearms and explosives. There is legislation against terrorism. There is also a longstanding common law offence of conspiracy to commit crime. Not long before this book went to press, Parliament was invited to modernise and condense the entire antique law of treason but opted to leave it untouched.

The book tracks the English law of treason century by century and dynasty by dynasty, as rulers grapple with the perennial problem of subjects who made the fatal mistake of backing the losing side in a power struggle. Alfred the Great (who earns the mysterious plaudit that ‘there was something about him of T.E. Lawrence’) gets credit for proscribing as treason any plot against the life of a feudal superior, and Henry VII for backdating his reign to the day before the Battle of Bosworth, making a traitor of anyone who fought for Richard III. There followed, in 1495, his Treason Act, which recognised that it was ‘ayenst all lawes reason and gode conscience’ to penalise subjects for treason that consisted purely of loyalty to the eventual loser. It remains in force. In 1662 it was invoked by Sir Henry Vane, charged with treason by reason of having fought for Parliament in the Civil War. The Restoration judges held that the law applied only to those who had fought for a king, not to anti-monarchist rebels. Although he had played no part in the trial of Charles I, Vane was executed. The jurisprudential duplicity of Vane’s case, and the revanchist exercise of which it formed part, might be thought to cast some doubt on Boyer and Nicholls’s sanguine assertion that the 1495 Act’s general absolution ‘has ever since been seen as a principle worth preserving’.

Pepys witnessed what the supposed principle was worth in action. In January 1649 he had been in the crowd that watched the beheading of Charles I. In October 1660, he ‘went out to Charing Cross to see Major-General Harrison hanged, drawn and quartered; which was done there, he looking as cheerful as any man could do in that condition. He was presently cut down, and his head and heart shown to the people, at which there was great shouts of joy.’ Pepys had no hesitation in calling this revenge. No more had the 1495 Act afforded Charles I a defence at his trial. For leyving war on his own people he was indicted and convicted as a traitor. When he questioned the jurisdiction of the specially assembled high court, its president, John Bradshawe, replied: ‘There is a contract and bargain made between the king and his people … The one tie, the one bond, is the bond of protection that is due from the sovereign. The other is the bond of subjection that is due from the subject. Sir, if this bond be once broken, farewell sovereignty.’

The paradigm of a constitutional bargain – loyalty in return for protection – is all but incompatible with the feudal model of obligation owed to status, especially when the feudal model itself is held to be God’s universe in microcosm. It followed, as Boyer and Nicholls point out, that the union of the Scottish and English crowns had rendered the allegiance of Scottish-born subjects to the British monarchy indissoluble, making a traitor of every Scot who took up arms in 1715 and 1745 (though without any concomitant right to be tried in Scotland, where acquittal was likely).

Similar issues of divided allegiance arose during the American Revolutionary War. In mid-1776 the Continental Congress resolved that citizens’ allegiance was owed exclusively to the governments of the United Colonies. Adopting the antique definition in the English Act of 1352, it advised states to legislate individually to enforce it. This they did, reinforcing it with mandatory loyalty oaths. The British, for their part, were able to treat any act of rebellion as treason against the crown, and to behave with corresponding brutality. Boyer and Nicholls write unapologetically of the ‘spate of judicial murders’ that followed. One of the few bright spots was the pardoning of enslaved Blacks who, having no status as citizens, could not be held to have violated their allegiance by rebellion.

In 1781 Lord George Gordon stood trial in London for treason, having provoked anti-Catholic riots in the course of which the townhouse of the presiding judge, Lord Mansfield, had been burned down (a personal interest that appears not to have troubled him at all). Mansfield accepted the submission of Gordon’s lawyer, Thomas Erskine, that guilt demanded treasonous intent, but it’s doubtful whether a jury of London property-owners would have worried about such questions. They were not going to convict an Englishman who had set out to defend Protestantism.

A number of statutes were passed during the 18th and 19th centuries to meet a variety of idiosyncratic attempts on the life or safety of reigning monarchs by enlarging the meaning of treason. Hence the conviction of Jaswant Singh Chail, who was found on Christmas Day 2021 in the grounds of Windsor Castle with a crossbow and ammunition and was convicted of wilfully producing a loaded crossbow with intent to use it to injure the person of her majesty, contrary to the Treason Act of 1842. Perhaps more important, as the authors recount, the 1696 Treason Act, following hard on the heels of the Bill of Rights, set up a series of procedural hedges, not cut down until 1945, which made treason difficult to prosecute. One result was that for many years sedition became governments’ accusation of choice against political dissenters.

Treason was never used as a charge in prosecutions for crimes committed by or ascribed to the Provisional IRA. Asked in debate by Lord Denning why the Birmingham Six had not been charged with treason, the lord chancellor, Lord Hailsham, replied evasively that, while treason was not obsolete, the choice of charge was a matter for the prosecuting authorities. Not long afterwards the attorney general, Sir Michael Havers, told the Commons more candidly: ‘One must realise that the 600-year-old statute is couched in such archaic language that it would be difficult to prove all the necessary ingredients of the crime and for a modern jury to come to grips with the terminology.’ This was no doubt one reason Parliament rushed through a Treachery Act in 1940 which began:

If, with intent to help the enemy, any person does, or attempts or conspires with any other person to do, any act which is designed or likely to give assistance to the naval, military or air operations of the enemy, to impede such operations of His Majesty’s forces, or to endanger life, he shall be guilty of felony and shall on conviction suffer death.

Boyer and Nicholls doubt whether this, or any of the other treason statutes passed in the centuries since 1352, represented a lasting improvement on ‘adhering to the King’s Enemies’ as the core meaning of treason. What has changed is the political situation in which the perceived enemies of whoever happened to be in charge of the state were interrogated, tortured, charged, tried and – if it went badly for them – publicly hanged, disembowelled, decapitated or (if a woman) burned alive. Where shoehorning the evidence into an extant definition proved difficult, new definitions could be enacted, as was done in 1531 when Henry VIII had poisoning made treasonable by statute in order to have the bishop of Rochester’s cook boiled to death for poisoning the Lambeth Palace stew (a measure cited by Lord Hoffmann in the House of Lords’ debate on the Rwanda safety bill as an early example of unprincipled ad hoc legislation).

Treason’s path, so far as it has had one, reaches its greatest height in the show trials and spectacular executions of the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries, becomes murky and tangled in the 19th, and stutters to a halt with the hanging of two Second World War collaborators, William Joyce (the despised Lord Haw-Haw, who was born in the United States, was brought up in Ireland and on the basis of long residence had acquired a British passport) and John Amery (scion of a High Tory family, who had moved to Germany after the outbreak of hostilities and attempted to recruit troops for the Nazis). Amery pleaded guilty to adhering to the king’s enemies in breach of the 1352 Act. Albert Pierrepoint considered him the bravest man he had ever hanged.

But even the mandatory death penalty in the 1940 Treachery Act was not what it seemed. According to Boyer and Nicholls ‘it fell under the Judgment of Death Act 1823, which permitted commutation by the court.’ It is a pity that they offer no elucidation, because the 1823 Act is an under-explored cavity in the history of the criminal law. It provided that, save in cases of murder, if the judge considered the case a proper one for clemency, ‘the Court shall and may and is hereby authorised to abstain from pronouncing Judgment of Death upon such Offender; and instead of pronouncing such Judgment to order the same to be entered of Record … as if Judgment of Death had actually been pronounced in open Court.’

This remarkable law, authorising the falsification of court records, is not mentioned in the modern Oxford History of the Laws of England, but earlier historians such as James Fitzjames Stephen and Leon Radzinowicz describe its operation. Stephen attributes it to the need to regularise the practice that had developed during the 18th century of granting a de facto reprieve by ordering condemned prisoners to be transported. Radzinowicz sees it as a step on the road to the final reduction by 1861 of some two hundred capital offences to four: murder, treason, piracy and arson in dockyards or arsenals. Whatever its object, the 1823 Act must have resulted in an unknown number of accused persons who had been convicted of capital offences, treason among them, being discharged instead of hanged. Maurice Healy’s classic volume of gossip, The Old Munster Circuit, contains what may have been a residual misapplication of the 1823 Act that continued in Ireland into the later 19th century. A young woman was convicted, against the judge’s advice, of wilfully causing her child’s death by strangulation. Donning his black cap, the judge pronounced the full death sentence, then added: ‘Now it’s all the greatest nonsense. Nothing will happen to you.’ The terrified prisoner, Healy says, failed to appreciate this demonstration of the majestic clemency of the law because she had fainted.

In 1940, when the lean and efficient Treachery Act was passed, there was no need to spell out who the enemy was. But when in June 1941 Hitler reneged on his non-aggression pact with Stalin and invaded the USSR, difficult questions arose. The USSR might now be an ally, but a significant element of the British establishment hoped Germany would overrun and defeat it. What then of individuals who, like the publisher James MacGibbon, used their access to military intelligence to prevent this happening?*

Having signed up with the Royal Fusiliers on the outbreak of war, MacGibbon was seconded in 1940 to the War Office as an intelligence officer. It was known to MI5 that he had been a member of the Communist Party, leaving when Stalin made his pact with Hitler. He was interviewed by a Major Johnstone, who asked him about his CP membership and then inquired: ‘Are you for Stalin or for us?’ ‘For us, sir,’ MacGibbon said. ‘Shake on it, old man,’ the major replied. In the succeeding years, MacGibbon gave to a Soviet handler all the decrypts, coming from Bletchley Park, that passed across his desk and were being routinely redacted before being handed over at diplomatic level to the Russians. How much of this was a dry run for the Cold War and how much a military judgment intended to prevent the Germans from realising that the Enigma code had been broken may never be known. But if, as seems to have been the case, MacGibbon passed to the Russians the complete German order of battle before Kursk, the decisive tank battle that turned the tide of war against Germany, it is difficult to imagine a jury finding him guilty of treachery.

Boyer and Nicholls cite, as a substitute for the Plantagenet formula, a paper published in 2018 by the right-wing think tank Policy Exchange, arguing for a single broad crime of assisting ‘states and organisations that plan to attack the UK or against whom UK forces are engaged’. Later that year the Queen’s Speech promised a review of the law of treason, but the eventual National Security Act 2023 is a pragmatic piece of legislation that classifies as espionage three generic activities: obtaining or disclosing protected information (formerly known as official secrets), obtaining or disclosing UK trade secrets, and assisting a foreign intelligence service. It also contains wide powers to prevent and punish disruptive activity. An amendment redefining and criminalising treason in the form proposed by Policy Exchange was rejected by the government. Had this not occurred too late for mention in their book, Boyer and Nicholls could well have claimed it as evidence that the state itself now accepts that treason as a crime has had its day.

It’s worth returning for a moment from the lofty heights of treachery to the disturbed young man with the crossbow. An individual at large with a loaded crossbow, especially if he has a history of mental disturbance, is no joke, and Chail was sent to prison for a total of nine years with associated hospital orders. The principal charge to which he pleaded guilty was attempting to ‘injure or alarm the sovereign’, contrary to section 2 of the Treason Act 1842, for which the statutory maximum sentence is seven years imprisonment. It was only by aggregation of treason with the offences of having an offensive weapon (maximum four years) and making threats to kill (maximum ten years) that a condign sentence could be arrived at by the sentencing judge. It does lend some force to Boyer and Nicholls’s suggestion that the law of treason belongs in a different age.

The predicate of any modern treason law, even in a constitutional monarchy, has to be a mutual obligation of loyalty between citizen and state, not a fealty owed by the individual to the crown. How does that play out in a case such as that of Shamima Begum, briefly mentioned by Boyer and Nicholls, who at the age of fifteen left the UK to join Islamic State? Instead of depriving her of British nationality and refusing her readmission to the UK, might the home secretary have acknowledged a continuing duty to protect her? If so, might she have been readmitted to the UK, then arrested and charged with treason? The Court of Appeal’s recent decision that the home secretary had acted lawfully in having, in effect, made her a lifelong exile may be on its way to the Supreme Court.

Whatever the outcome, Boyer and Nicholls’s parting reflection merits attention: while high treason may no longer be a sensible juridical tool – they quote Alan Brien’s remark that it sounds ‘more like the kind of mystic, archaic, all-purpose crime that dictators invent to catch their opponents than any offence that ought to be invoked by democrats and liberators’ – the last thirty years have brought ‘a chill wind’. ‘Authoritarianism and intolerance,’ they suggest, ‘are on the rise, assuming many guises. Intolerance and fear breed societies in which paranoia flourishes, informers settle to their work, in which the need for an unchallenged authority seems compelling. Under these conditions the old pulse starts to beat again. Treason twitches and bestirs itself.’

Vol. 46 No. 14 · 18 July 2024

Poem

Hell

Rae Armantrout

In the first place

the idea was

to gauge

how far or near

certain hotspots

on my closed eyelids

were from one another

and from me –

to put them in perspective.

Some part of me

is still dealing with this,

but now ‘Edgy

and Cerebral’

have been added

to my favourites

along with ‘Hilarious

and Heartbreaking’.

The new job

is to hitch

‘opposites’

to a central pivot.

Everyone

is going to hell around here.

Vol. 46 No. 14 · 18 July 2024

Hey man, we’re out of runway

Christian Lorentzen

The Last Politician: Inside Joe Biden’s White House and the Struggle for America’s Future

by Franklin Foer.

Penguin, 432 pp., £24, September 2023, 978 1 101 98114 6

The Fight of His Life: Inside Joe Biden’s White House

by Chris Whipple.

Scribner, 409 pp., £12.99, December 2023, 978 1 9821 0644 7

The Internationalists: The Fight to Restore American Foreign Policy after Trump

by Alexander Ward.

Portfolio, 354 pp., £28.99, February, 978 0 593 53907 1

The debate last month between Biden and Trump was painful to watch because it reminded us that someday we’ll all die. In retrospect Biden’s advanced age was a political asset in 2020. By contrast with the sneering and erratic Trump, given to mocking the disabled and insulting anyone unlucky enough to be in his vicinity, here was a kindly and familiar old man who had suffered terrible personal tragedies: the death of his young wife and infant daughter in an automobile accident in 1972; the death of his eldest son from brain cancer in 2015; the crack addiction and wastrelsy of his surviving son in the years that followed. Broadcasting a socially distanced campaign from his Delaware basement, he appeared gentle and forgiving, the ‘designated mourner’ in Fintan O’Toole’s phrase, just the man to heal the country after the devastation of the pandemic and the four-year reign of the American berserk. To see Biden that way was to forget his decades in the Senate as an arrogant opportunist, an inconsistent warmonger and a plagiarist (his speeches stole from Neil Kinnock and JFK). Age took the edge off him. Reaching the White House four years ago, he accomplished at 78 what he couldn’t manage at 45 or 65. Perhaps he’s been better at the job as a mellow old man than he would have been as a middle-aged hothead – though that is little comfort to the rest of the world, especially the zones under American protection or subject to US (or US-sponsored) might. There, it seems, the emperor has no brain.

It’s difficult to divine from the histories of the Biden administration written so far just how active a role the president has played in governing the country. The titles of Franklin Foer’s The Last Politician and Chris Whipple’s The Fight of His Life put Biden at the centre of the story, while Alexander Ward’s The Internationalists casts the administration’s foreign policy forthrightly as a team effort. All draw on published accounts and interviews with aides and officials – some named (especially in Whipple) and others not, though their points of view, if not actual identities, are easy to glean – and view Biden himself at a distance. He presides over meetings, attends ceremonies and picks up the telephone to prod legislators, chastise despots and puff his appointees on a job well done.

Whereas accounts of the Trump White House varied from clown show to cesspool, with backstabbing among hacks, mercenaries and scumbags, the histories of the Biden administration present a succession of earnest and credentialled professionals lining up to help the president better the country and the world. Jeff Zients, a management consultant who made $200 million before the age of forty by starting and taking public a series of research and investment firms and served the Obama administration as ‘chief performance officer’, ran Biden’s transition organisation before becoming his Covid tsar. Zients’s team included a former healthcare executive who had dreamed of being a foreign correspondent and now kept the public informed via Twitter about the administration’s pandemic efforts; a former field geologist and volunteer firefighter who whipped Pfizer into ramping up vaccine production; and a former head of the Food and Drug Administration who once impounded thousands of gallons of ‘pure squeezed’ orange juice on suspicion of insufficient freshness. These men were the brash but ‘low-ego’ technocrats who got the job done. Female aides have also thrived in the Biden White House. ‘He is completely comfortable with women in authority roles,’ Biden’s former press secretary, Jen Psaki, told Whipple. ‘He doesn’t need to have, like, a “bro” conversation. I’ve never experienced that ever with him.’

The hero of Ward’s book is Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser, who is said to have memorised the capitals of the world by the age of ‘ten or thirteen’ (a little late in the game by my lights) and knows the lyrics to every Billy Joel song by heart (a detail rarely omitted, for some reason, when he is profiled in the press). After Hillary Clinton’s defeat, which as her top wonk he took personally, Sullivan and colleagues started a think tank called National Security Action, which advocated a ‘foreign policy for the middle class’ whose focus would be ‘Russia, Russia, Russia and China, China, China’, that is, the abandonment of Bush’s war on terror and ramping up of Trump’s reindustrialisation and trade war. They would be like Trump, only progressive, and in favour of freedom, though less often at the barrel of a gun, at least a gun held by an American soldier. One of Whipple’s key sources is Antony Blinken, a habitual punner who plays guitar in a DC cover band called Coalition of the Willing, specialising in tunes by the Stones and Clapton. Blinken has worked for Biden on and off since the invasion of Iraq; presented with a binder full of dossiers on potential appointees during the transition and a vetting process that would take weeks, Biden said: ‘Tony is my secretary of state.’

Another figure who features heavily in Foer’s book and spoke to Whipple at length is Ron Klain, Biden’s chief of staff until after the 2022 midterms and a Democratic Party lifer. He has plenty to say about Kamala Harris, whom Biden himself calls ‘a work in progress’. Foer writes that Klain ‘assumed the role of Harris’s guide’ but

struggled to productively help her. He felt Harris kept making life excessively difficult by imposing all sorts of constraints on herself. She told him that she didn’t want to work on women’s issues or anything to do with race … Constantly in search of a portfolio but reluctant to accept them when they were handed to her, she asked to be placed in charge of relations with Scandinavia – away from the spotlight.

Foer reports Klain saying: ‘This is baseball. You need to start getting out of the dugout and scoring some runs. You can’t score runs if you’re not on the field.’ Eventually, Harris asked to lead the administration’s response to Republican efforts to erode voting rights; she took up the task of outreach to the Northern Triangle in Central America, source of many of the migrants crossing the US’s southern border; and she has been outspoken in defence of reproductive rights after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. Immigration has been a thorn in Biden’s side – a crisis he can’t solve thanks to Republican obstruction and a lack of consensus in his own party – and the main theme of Trump’s xenophobic political career. Abortion is an issue that could win the election for the Democrats in November because people don’t like having their rights taken away. At the time of writing – if the betting markets and obsequious voices on social media are to be believed – Harris is the person most likely to replace Biden. Her downsides include her unpopularity outside her home state of California and her reputation as a dysfunctional manager, something Whipple makes much of.

It’s quaint now to recall the way Biden entered office. Washington is a dull city, full of civil servants and lawyers who look like they’re on their way to lacrosse practice. Trump’s outer-borough gangster posturing was ill-suited to the town. Rejected by the electorate after four years of incompetence, ineffectuality and bluster, he left a legacy of tax cuts for the rich, a Supreme Court tilted decisively to the right and degraded American prestige abroad, no matter how cosy he got with Netanyahu and the Saudis. The vandalism done by provincial brigands in his name at the Capitol on 6 January 2021 looked from afar like a skirmish of rowdy spectators outside a Division Three college hockey match or a Limp Bizkit concert gone fatally awry. The casualties included five who died within 36 hours of the event and hundreds injured, including 174 police officers. Deadly though the day was, Biden and the Democrats have overstated matters by repeatedly comparing the event to the Civil War, in which more than half a million people died over four years, but hyperbole has been the default style in US politics ever since Trump rode down the escalator.

Congress was back in session within a few hours after the shaman in horns was expelled from the chamber. Biden took the oath of office a fortnight later. A 22-year-old Harvard graduate, Amanda Gorman, delivered the inaugural poem; the New Radicals reunited to perform ‘You Get What You Give’, the late Beau Biden’s favourite song; and Tom Hanks presided over a virtual celebration from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. The usual ceremonial balls were scotched thanks to Covid protocols. It wasn’t quite a ‘return to normalcy’, as the slogan of Warren Harding’s 1920 campaign had it, but that was the idea.

‘After Trump had unleashed the furies, Biden’s task was to restore as much calm as possible,’ Foer writes. ‘Despite his expansive agenda, Biden managed to get slapped with the label “boring” by friends and critics alike – which is not far from what he aimed to achieve.’ It was a sound footing for the new leader, who is said to have avoided saying his predecessor’s name even in private, referring to him only as ‘the former guy’. In the early months of 2021, he kept the federal government out of local fights over pandemic management – mask mandates, the reopening of schools – and focused on making the vaccine available. ‘America is back,’ Biden told a crowd of diplomats at the State Department on 4 February that year, and he and his staff got on with the business of reversing Trump’s executive orders, rejoining treaties, unbanning Muslims and carrying on the technocratic response to Covid. News channel ratings plummeted, as did news media consumption generally. The vaccines were rolled out that spring. The $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan was passed by Congress in March: it would cut child poverty almost in half, to 5.2 per cent, until it spiked again in 2022, after the Act’s child tax credit expired. That month Biden’s national approval rating was at 54 per cent. It would linger above 50 per cent until August, when the US withdrew from Afghanistan, and disapproval numbers have outpaced approval numbers ever since.

The exit from Afghanistan was initiated by Trump, though with a timeline that stretched beyond his term in office (perhaps because he was too optimistic, perhaps because he wanted someone else to do the dirty work). Biden advocated withdrawal as vice president under Obama, but it was a lonely position, one he formed on a 2009 visit to the country, when he concluded, according to Klain, ‘that there was no way to build a nationwide pluralistic democracy based in Kabul’. David Petraeus and other generals instead convinced Obama to send in tens of thousands of additional troops. On the campaign trail in 2020, Biden promised to pull out US troops and told an interviewer that he would feel ‘zero responsibility’ for what happened after they were gone. In initial meetings with diplomats, generals, cabinet members and other officials, Biden professed to keep an open mind about arguments for staying put. According to Ward, Blinken and the defence secretary, Lloyd Austin, presented him with three choices: ‘Option 1: Stick to the Trump-era timeline. Option 2: Negotiate an extension to the deal with the Taliban, permitting American forces to stay beyond the set deadline. And Option 3: Rip up the pact altogether and push for the victory that had eluded the United States and its allies for two decades.’ Austin, a former general who served with Beau Biden in Iraq, and Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, favoured maintaining a force of 2500 troops in the country. Milley made an ‘emotional’ pitch, Ward writes: ‘Withdrawing American forces would make it easy for the Taliban to regain control of the country. The lives of millions of people would quickly get worse. Women’s rights “will go back to the Stone Age” and it wasn’t worth leaving after “all the blood and treasure spent” in the war.’ Biden decided to withdraw anyway. Foer quotes him telling another journalist in 2010 that he was ‘not sending my boy back there to risk his life on behalf of women’s rights. It just won’t work, that’s not what they are there for.’

Thirteen US soldiers died during the withdrawal and the optics – chaos at the airfield; people falling from a plane as it took off – were not to Biden’s political advantage in a media environment that fetishises American imperial power. But for a few months in the offices of socialist magazines in Brooklyn you could hear nice things about Biden, ‘the best president of our lifetime’. The war on terror had at last been wound down (mostly). The American Rescue Plan was generous. The Infrastructure, Investment and Jobs Act and the American Families Plan (the three had initially been grouped together as the Build Back Better Plan and that name stuck to the last of the bills) incorporated many of the ideas put forward by Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, even if they fell short of their Green New Deal. Lawrence Summers, Clinton’s neoliberal Treasury secretary, was left out of the administration and Warren’s people were invited in.

It’s after the withdrawal from Afghanistan that the histories of the Biden years move to the Democrats’ efforts to pass their domestic agenda and the obstructions of two right-wing Democratic senators, Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona. With the Senate split 50-50 and deciding votes cast by the vice president, Manchin and Sinema (now both registered as Independents caucusing with the Democrats, neither of them running for re-election) maintained something like veto power over whatever Biden wanted to do. Klain and various congressional allies shuffled their way to Manchin’s houseboat on the Potomac to plead and bargain with him. He grudgingly assented to the Infrastructure, Investment and Jobs Act, as he had to the American Rescue Plan, despite concerns about inflation. The White House and progressive Democrats in Congress worried that Manchin, with his ties to the energy industry, and Sinema, with hers to finance, wanted, in Foer’s words, ‘to whittle it down to an uninspired nub’. In the end, Manchin sank the American Families Plan, but in 2022 he agreed to a nub version, the Inflation Reduction Act, scrubbed of most social benefits but including corporate tax reform, deficit reduction, curbs to carbon emissions and boosts to domestic energy production. A nub is better than nothing.

This is one of the two almost happy notes that conclude the Biden histories, which cover his first two years in office, until the House was lost to the Republicans in November 2022 and Klain left as chief of staff to be replaced by Zients. The other is the war in Ukraine, which, before these books were published, seemed from Washington to be going well. The Russians were repulsed from Kyiv. The invasion had been defeated and might be turned back. The stalemate that set in last summer and the failure of Ukraine’s counteroffensive were not yet apparent. The narratives of the months before the hostilities resumed portray a time of uncertainty and suspense in the White House. In September 2021, Zelensky arrived in Washington to plead for Ukraine to be allowed to join Nato. Biden didn’t take him seriously, especially when Zelensky also said that Nato was a relic and that France and Germany were planning to leave. The next month, Milley and Austin came to Biden with intelligence showing that the Russian military was massed on the border with Ukraine, possibly in preparation for an invasion. The director of the CIA, William Burns, was dispatched to Moscow to talk Putin down. He ended up speaking to him on a secure phone. Burns told him that the US would respond with harsh sanctions in the event of an invasion. Putin responded tauntingly that the time had never been so ripe for such an operation: Zelensky was weak; Merkel had left office; Macron was hanging on by a thread; the Russian economy was strong and could withstand sanctions. Within a few months Harris was at the Munich security conference warning Zelensky to watch out for assassins, and Ukrainian flags were flying in American front yards. In 2023 Blinken dressed his son up as Zelensky for Halloween and joined a band in Kyiv on guitar to play a listless cover of Neil Young’s ‘Rockin’ in the Free World’, a song about American poverty, pollution and imperialism. For his part, Sullivan told the New Yorker: ‘As a child of the 1980s and Rocky and Red Dawn, I believe in freedom fighters and I believe in righteous causes … and I believe the Ukrainians have one. We’re on the side of the good guy and we have to do a lot for that person.’

These histories stop short of 7 October and the war in Gaza, but they do cover the brief war that broke out between Israel and Hamas in May 2021. Biden expressed support for Netanyahu during nine days of Israeli airstrikes and Hamas rocket attacks, and then told him over the phone: ‘Hey man, we’re out of runway here. It’s over.’ Netanyahu agreed to a ceasefire brokered by Egypt. It was perhaps this experience, plus the advance towards a deal with Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States following on from Trump’s Abraham Accords, that led Sullivan to say in September 2023: ‘The Middle East region is quieter today than it has been in two decades.’ Less than a month later Biden, whose record of fealty to Israel dates back to a 1973 visit he paid Golda Meir as a young senator, addressed the nation to make the case for sending $106 billion in military aid to Israel and Ukraine. He emphasised that the money going abroad would benefit the American economy, particularly in swing states crucial to his re-election:

And let me be clear about something: we send Ukraine equipment sitting in our stockpiles. And when we use the money allocated by Congress, we use it to replenish our own stores … with new equipment, equipment that defends America and is made in America: Patriot missiles for air defence batteries made in Arizona; artillery shells manufactured in twelve states across the country, in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Texas; and so much more.

You know, just as in World War Two, today, patriotic American workers are building the arsenal of democracy and serving the cause of freedom.

Returning the United States to a war economy, albeit one that doesn’t require the deployment of its armed forces, was not what Biden had in mind when during his 2020 campaign he spoke of governing like Franklin Roosevelt. Nor did he expect he would have to hide his impairments from the public to the extent that he appears to have done.

The issue of Biden’s age is not much discussed in these books. Whipple, whose previous books include a study of the job of White House chief of staff, recounts a Zoom meeting between Klain and some of his predecessors during the transition in 2020. Jim Jones, the 82-year-old former chief of staff to LBJ, asked: ‘Could a soon to be 82-year-old man, battered by four years of stress and crisis, serve effectively for another full term as president?’ The question became pertinent in April 2022 when at a ceremony at the White House to unveil a proposed expansion of Obamacare, the former president was mobbed by admirers while Biden, in Whipple’s phrase, ‘looked a little lost’. Republican Senator Rick Scott of Florida said: ‘Let’s be honest here. Joe Biden is unwell. He’s unfit for office. He’s incoherent, incapacitated and confused. He doesn’t know where he is half the time.’ ‘This was, of course, false,’ Whipple insists. ‘Biden was mentally sharp, even if he appeared physically frail.’ Bruce Reed, the deputy chief of staff, told Whipple of a long flight home from Geneva in 2021 during which Biden regaled his jetlagged entourage with old stories, including the one about the time he visited the Kremlin and told Putin he had no soul, until everyone except the president passed out. But Foer writes that Senate Republicans ‘doubted Joe Biden was running his own show. Because of his advanced age, they whispered that he was a marionette, wiggling his arms as Klain manipulated him from above. Aides to Mitch McConnell were blunt in their analysis. They dubbed Klain “prime minister”.’ Tucker Carlson has made Biden’s age one of the central themes of his twerpy routine. Defenders of the president have written off such claims as ‘right-wing talking points’, but like left-wing and centrist talking points, right-wing talking points occasionally have some basis in fact.

Biden was trailing Trump in the polls before the debate on 27 June, despite Trump’s conviction in New York on 34 felonies. A poll in February found that 86 per cent of Americans think Biden is too old to be president and 62 per cent think the same of Trump. The debate only confirmed them in their opinions. Over the winter the war in Gaza became a political liability for Biden among many voters, especially the young, who not unreasonably call him ‘Genocide Joe’. (Trump, not himself a model of cognitive splendour these days, affirmed at the debate: ‘As far as Israel and Hamas, Israel’s the one that wants to go – he said the only one who wants to keep going is Hamas. Actually, Israel is the one. And you should let them go and let them finish the job.’) Biden has lost the support of the liberal commentariat, with the editorial board of the New York Times and the editor of the New Yorker calling for him to drop out of the race and make way for a younger candidate. Dozens of speculative columns have bloomed, suggesting replacement tickets featuring various governors and even Harris running with Barack Obama as her vice president –not technically a violation of the constitution. Biden, who has long believed the press unfairly chased him out of the race for the 1988 Democratic nomination after his plagiarism came to light, is unlikely to accept the pundits’ premature obituaries. He has hunkered down with his family, and now Gen X icon Hunter Biden, recently convicted of lying about his drug use on a gun permit application, sits by his side at White House meetings. It’s an astonishing moment in American politics. I preferred the few months in the summer of 2021 when things seemed boring.

Vol. 46 No. 14 · 18 July 2024

At the William Morris Gallery

On Mingei

Rosemary Hill

Artistic influence may benefit from a degree of misunderstanding: it keeps it from lapsing into imitation. By the time William Morris launched the Arts and Crafts movement in the 1860s, it took a certain wilful ignorance to believe, as he and Ruskin did, that the builders of the Gothic cathedrals were anonymous artisans, working humbly for the glory of God. Three generations of antiquarian research had uncovered quantities of information about individual masons, many of whom worked internationally, were highly sought after and travelled with their own specialist teams. There is, as Róisín Inglesby emphasises in her thoughtful introduction to Mingei: Art without Heroes (Yale, £35), a difference between an anonymous maker and one who has been anonymised, whether, as in some of the instances she cites, by ‘political and social oppression’ or, as with Morris’s medievalism, by the condescension of posterity.

The Victorians’ attempt to compensate for the overwhelming impact of urbanisation and industrialisation required a reimagining of the past in a form that could be projected as a model for a better future. Morris’s Middle Ages were a vision of the world to come as a rural communist paradise. The result was some wonderful wallpaper. His genius was for pattern design, and he contributed more to the sum of human happiness in that capacity than as a political theorist. The inherent contradictions in his practice troubled him greatly. The revival of supposedly humble crafts in a mechanised, capitalist society left him raging ‘like a wild animal’ in fury that he was condemned to spend his life ‘ministering to the swinish luxury of the rich’. He did not live to encounter the opposite problem, that an era of mass production has spread his designs like a rash over tea towels and biscuit tins, smothering their brilliance in cliché.

Korean porcelain water sprinkler.

Patchwork ‘yogi’. Karun Thakar collection, London.

‘Yuki bōshi’ (snow hat). Karun Thakar collection, London.

Bowl by Tomimoto Kenkichi (1912).

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Unlike the Arts and Crafts movement, which became part of art history, the theory and practice of Mingei is seen in Japan as a continuing philosophy, though it owes much of its initial inspiration to Morris. By the time he died in 1896 his economic theories were known there in socialist circles: his ideas about art came later but had more impact. In a society that industrialised slowly, long after most of Europe, and where feudalism was formally abolished only in 1871, the Middle Ages felt much closer than they did in Britain. Mingei was rooted in surviving traditions and it continues to develop, as do critical attitudes to its founders and their sources. In 1991 the landmark exhibition Mingei: The Living Tradition in Japanese Arts was shown in Glasgow, Sunderland and London as part of the Japan Festival. It presented a selection of exquisite objects loaned by the Mingeikan, the Japan Folk Crafts Museum. Spanning two centuries, it juxtaposed traditional craft work by unknown makers with pieces by the founders of Mingei – the potters Soetsu Yanagi and Shoji Hamada – and others, with relatively slight commentary. This almost purely aesthetic approach has given way to a more critical evaluation of Mingei’s own complicated history and its selective use of the anonymous dead.

Visitors to the small but enjoyably argumentative exhibition at the William Morris Gallery (until 22 September) might bear some of this background in mind to help make sense of a somewhat disjointed display which works best as an illustration of the accompanying book. It includes the expected and exquisite in the form of kimonos hung on rods that lend a hieratic quality even to a 19th-century patchwork yogi, or sleeping coverlet, made from scraps in half a dozen shades of blue. There are stranger things too, such as a hat worn by a ‘winter hunter’ or matagi. Made of rice straw, which being hollow provided the wearer with some insulation from the cold, it is designed to protect from heavy snow falls and would have hung down over the face. Unworn it looks like a wig, shading from gold at the crown to black; in use it must have given the hunter a sinister appearance. A small Korean water sprinkler made of white porcelain some time in the 17th or 18th century sits self-possessed among the heftier stoneware. Inevitable, and modest, with a tiny hole at the top for filling and a correspondingly tiny beak of a lip for pouring, it would sit perfectly in the hand, and embodies the ideals of Mingei. It comes from the collection of the British potter Bernard Leach, who lived for periods in Japan and was one the founders of the movement. There is a small etching by him of a farmhouse scene in the home village of his friend Tomimoto Kenkichi, a designer and potter who spent time in England and, in an article published in 1912 in the art magazine Bijutsu Shinpō, introduced the Arts and Crafts movement to a Japanese readership. The feature was illustrated not only with objects but with interior views of Morris’s homes, the Red House and Kelmscott Manor.

Mingei absorbed the philosophy and domestic ideal, as well as the production values, of Morris & Co and it encountered many of the same difficulties. A shortening of minshūteki kōgei or ‘art for the people’, it may not have wanted heroes, but it acquired them in a number of strong and sometimes conflicting personalities. There are several versions of the Mingei origin story of which the most attractive is the one told by Yanagi, who emerged as the pre-eminent figure. In his account it began one January night on the slopes of Mount Koya, where he and a group of friends discussed their love of the ‘incomparable beauty’ of utilitarian objects. From this came the Mingei manifesto, ‘Prospectus for the Establishment of a Mingei Art Museum’, which led to the foundation of the Mingeikan in 1936.

Threads of Eastern and Western influence continued to cross until the Second World War. European modernists, including Bruno Taut and Charlotte Perriand, travelled in rural Japan with Yanagi seeking out folk art and architecture in which they detected their own Corbusian ideal of form deriving purely from function. The centre of interest was the Tōhoku region: remote, mountainous and largely untouched by modernisation. Yanagi made more than twenty trips there between 1927 and 1944, looking for work to include in the exhibitions he curated to promote his conception of Mingei. Like Morris, he had to come to terms with the economics of his own time and it was not on the mountain top but in the department stores of Tokyo that the public first saw the fruits of his vision. Yanagi’s theories were based on a combination of William Blake, Zen and the Chinese philosophy of Lao Tzu, who reasoned that in the best of all possible worlds there would be no need for individual artists because beauty would be inherent in every artefact. While Morris looked to the Middle Ages for his nameless makers, the Japanese turned to the rural artisans of Tōhoku and, further afield, the products of their empire in the ceramic traditions of Korea and the textiles of the Indigenous people of Okinawa.

To bend them to the philosophy of Mingei required a degree of wishful thinking and selective looking. The resist-dyed bingata textiles of Okinawa, represented in the exhibition by a cotton robe, patterned with astonishing delicacy using traditional stencil and paste-resistant dyeing, were to the Mingei pioneers the epitome of those humble objects they were looking for, ‘faithful to the dictates of material and method’ and democratically ‘available to all’. In fact, bingata was made to order in tiny quantities and had been the prerogative of royalty until the late 19th century.

Korea, formerly Joseon, was ruled by the Japanese from 1910 to 1945. The main threat to its Indigenous crafts was from its imperial occupiers, who tried to eradicate the native culture. Yanagi, who spoke of the Korean aesthetic as ‘the beauty of sorrow’, seems to have lamented the loss in much the same spirit that Morris lamented the death of Gothic craftsmanship three centuries earlier, in a spirit of helplessness tinged with sentimentality. He had none of Morris’s political radicalism. The exhibition takes the Mingei movement in general and Yanagi in particular to task over this, juxtaposing works by named and unnamed Korean makers. Dasom Sung, a curator of Korean ceramics at the V&A who writes even-handedly about Yanagi’s complicity in the Japanese occupation, rescues, if not from anonymity then from a degree of obscurity, the Noritaka brothers, who introduced him to Korean craft.

Neither book nor exhibition has much to say about the war years, and in the postwar period there was a remarkably quick resumption of East-West relations in the Mingei network. At the International Conference of Craftsmen in Pottery and Textiles, held at Dartington Hall in Devon in 1952, Yanagi, Hamada and Leach emerged as the leading evangelists for the movement. They went on to tour the United States for five months, seeding craft foundations in Santa Fe, Minnesota and later Canada and New Zealand. In Japan the Mingei ideal continued to fluctuate with the rise and fall of the Japanese economy and has revived somewhat since the aftermath of the 2011 earthquake. It has descended at times into tourist trinketry and become part of the culture of Kawaii or ‘cuteness’, recently the subject of its own major exhibition at the V&A.

This show ends on one of the more compelling contradictions that have characterised the history of Mingei, with the suggestion that its ideals are now best embodied in the moderately priced products of the Muji chain, founded in 1980. The name is a contraction of characters meaning ‘no brand-quality goods’. Muji’s art director, Hara Kenya, has argued that its aesthetic, which he defines as a process of editing, derives from Shinto tradition in which the centre of the shrine is empty, a space left for the kami, or deity. An aesthetic philosophy based on a divine absence avoids the complications implicit in wilfully anonymising human beings. Muji represents a reversal of means and ends as espoused by Morris and the founders of Mingei: there is no handicraft in its manufactured, mass-produced products. Yet the results work with the grain of the society that creates them and might seem to have more in common with the self-effacing little water dropper than with the assertive studio ceramics of Leach and Yanagi.

Vol. 46 No. 14 · 18 July 2024

Red Power

Thomas Meaney

Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America

by Pekka Hämäläinen.

Norton, 571 pp., £17.99, October 2023, 978 1 324 09406 7

The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of US History

by Ned Blackhawk.

Yale, 596 pp., £28, April 2023, 978 0 300 24405 2

Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance

by Nick Estes.

Haymarket, 320 pp., £14.99, July, 979 8 88890 082 6

The conquest of most of the North American continent by Anglophone settlers took roughly three hundred years, from the first stake at Jamestown to the last bullet at Wounded Knee. The Spanish had subdued a much vaster population of Indigenous peoples in Mexico and Peru in just under half a century and expected to repeat the formula, mobilising the Indigenous tributaries against the Indigenous core as they moved up from their outposts in Florida, only to find there was no power centre to replace. The last great city-state in pre-colonial North America, Cahokia, had dissolved two centuries before. Instead, the Spanish encountered a patchwork of peoples stretched thinly across the land, which would have to be won over town by town.

The fate of Hernando de Soto was paradigmatic. He sailed to the New World in 1514 and made his fortune in the Spanish campaigns against the Inca. By 1534 he was lieutenant governor of Cuzco, where he took an Incan noblewoman for his mistress and lived in the spectacular palace of the emperor Huayna Cápac. But his expedition of 1540 from present-day Louisiana to the Carolinas amounted to a series of disastrous confrontations with Native groups. He ended his days trying to pass as a god before a local chief, only to be exposed when he failed to dry up the Mississippi, into which his corpse was unceremoniously tossed by his men after he died of a fever. They scrambled back to Mexico City with the horses they had not slaughtered for food.

No prior record of success burdened the early English colonists. They could not afford the more languid colonialism of the Russian and French empires, whose fur traders established tributaries and commerce over the course of centuries, as well as making occasional attempts at the religious indoctrination of peoples in the tundra and wilderness that no settler planned to inhabit. The strength and entrenchment of Natives in North America, along with the Anglo determination to settle and not merely extract goods and labour, meant that there was a longer period of mutual testing before full-scale elimination could become an aspiration. The 18th century saw a series of setbacks along the perimeter of settlement: from the French and Indian War in the Ohio Valley to the Tuscarora, Yamasee and Cherokee wars in the Carolinas. In the 1760s, the British future in North America was ransomed by the Odawa charismatic Pontiac, whose forces, numbering only three thousand, seized eight forts and besieged Fort Detroit and Fort Pitt. While British troops were caught in such quagmires, the Qing Dynasty was securing its far Western frontier, crushing some of the last concentrations of Mongol nomadism in massacres that left more than 400,000 Dzungars dead. The skirmishes on the shores of Lake Michigan look puny by comparison.

The most foreboding development for Native peoples in North America was the cohesion of a unified settler state in the wake of the American Revolution. Far more than Black slavery, the Native question was central to the reordering of political loyalties on the eastern seaboard. From the vantage of the American colonials, the Indians were, as the historian Colin Calloway has put it, paraphrasing Thomas Jefferson, ‘the vicious pawns of a tyrannical king’. From the perspective of Westminster, the colonials were ungrateful rogue subjects who provoked needless border clashes that strained the Treasury, which had already been exhausted on their behalf in the French and Indian War. In his 1763 proclamation, George III made major concessions to Indian tribes and declared the Appalachian mountain range to be the outer limit of colonial expansion. For trigger-happy real estate speculators like George Washington, who had ignited the French and Indian War with an ill-planned attack on French forces in Jumonville Glen and who aimed to make his fortune selling land to settlers moving west, this entente was intolerable. Washington himself was at least willing to enforce a settlement line in order to prevent improvident squatters from occupying alienated land, but his more republican peers in the ‘Founding’ generation believed that the point of being an American was having access to cheap land. Any attempt to shut off the supply was met with strategic violence. When the crown sent the Pennsylvania trader and land speculator (and Washington rival) George Croghan into Ohio Country with a pack train of goods, including enough white linen shirts to clothe half the male Indian population, in an attempt to start realising its vision of imperial-Native co-prosperity, it was attacked in 1765 by a gang of American settlers (‘the Black Boys’) dressed up as Indians with charcoaled faces, who destroyed all 30,000 pounds of goods – three times the amount the Tea Partiers, also dressed as Natives, dumped into Boston harbour eight years later.

After the revolution broke out, most tribes treated the conflict as a British civil war. But the results were often dire for them: the Shawnee and the Delaware were pushed west of the Mississippi; the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, split between British and American-aligned factions, moved up to Canada and as far away as present-day Wisconsin, while the Seneca and Mohawks stayed in the east; the Creeks lost great tracts of territory in Georgia. The annexation and confiscation of Indian lands – and the control that the nascent US state would have over areas not already claimed by settlers – was expected to be one of the great boons of the revolution, allowing the state to build up its treasury by selling the land to its citizens. Yet the new federal government took a position similar to that of the empire it had overthrown: wary of the instability that resulted from a population fixed on moving west, it searched for a modus vivendi with the Indigenous peoples. The authors of the constitution considered the inclusion of an Indigenous local government led by the Delawares and with its own representatives in Congress as the 14th state of the union. In 1807, the United States forbade its citizens from surveying lands beyond the federal boundary, or even marking trees to signal future claims. Twenty years later, John Quincy Adams did not hesitate to send troops to burn down squatters’ homes and crops in Alabama. But these legal enforcements would be swept away in the coming demographic storm. The settler-sceptical northeastern Federalists had many political victories, and the state later used much of its ‘land bank’ for developments such as railroads and universities, while most yeomen farmers ended up as renters rather than owners. Despite this, the republican fantasy of numerous smallholders continued to power the trajectory of the young United States, which teemed with schemes for what Jefferson called ‘our final consolidation’.

Evaluations of Native resistance to European occupation have always been bound up with contemporary political reckonings. Dee Brown, an amateur historian from Arkansas, published his bestselling book, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (1970), during the Vietnam War. Brown depicted the Indigenous peoples of the continent as heroically resisting an imperial onslaught beyond their control and fixed in the public imagination the notion of Indians as the noble victims of a slow-motion extinction. Though professional historians pointed out the book’s many factual errors and criticised its flattening of all violence in the West into ‘Indian Wars’, its unwitting embrace of the myth of the ‘vanishing Indian’ and its emotional manipulation of readers, Bury My Heart set the tone for nearly half a century of historiography. From Francis Jennings’s The Invasion of America (1975) to Benjamin Madley’s An American Genocide (2016), the subject of this scholarly outpouring has been the destruction of Native peoples at the hands of the British and US empires and their proxies. More recently, in works such as Jeffrey Ostler’s Surviving Genocide (2019), there is increasingly bald acknowledgment that, more than the military or vigilantes or even disease, the organising force behind the destruction was the capitalist economy itself.

But recent road maps of the historiography either sidestep material questions or mistake a colonised mindset for a progressivist one. The symptoms manifest in different, competing ways. Some work overcompensates for Native agency in the face of the European onslaught to the point that it neglects wider historical forces. There are studies by legal historians – Indigenous originalists in all but name – who, however correctly they emphasise the disciplinary power of the law over Native peoples, have so thoroughly internalised constitutional ideology that they seem not to notice how their cause has been instrumentalised by the most fanatically libertarian segment of American society. There is also a nominally left-wing Native scholarship that recognises the unique force of certain Native groups in environmental and anti-capital movements in North America, but resists historicising Native experience itself. Instead, it holds to romantic notions about peoples who are still privy to uncontaminated, non-Western consciousness, immune to the profit motive, and if left to their own devices would build societies, administer land and protect water in ways that modern states fail to emulate at their peril. These three versions of Native history are all the more regrettable because the 20th century offered examples of Indigenous co-operation with the left, cases contemporary political theorists have examined with more care than their historian peers.

Pekka Hämäläinen’s Indigenous Continent, the third book in his celebrated trilogy about Native American ‘empires’ – following Comanche Empire (2008) and Lakota America (2019) – attempts to flip Brown’s script. Hämäläinen gives no quarter to the claim that Native populations in North America were easy prey for Europeans. In his account, the continent was still up for grabs and the Native peoples were capable of inflicting severe, potentially irrevocable losses on the young United States. His evidence includes Native archaeological and material sources such as the Lakota ‘Winter Counts’ – buffalo hides on which they depicted the decisive event of a given year. (A book inhabiting a historical Native point of view still seems to elude contemporary academics. Daniel Richter’s Facing East from Indian Country (2001), which contained vignettes narrated from the imagined vantage point of Natives, looms as a cautionary tale of over-identification.)

The balance of forces in the early decades of the new nation was far from clear. In 1791, General St Clair’s US army was defeated on the banks of the Ohio River by the Northwestern Confederacy; a thousand American troops were killed or wounded. In the periodisation laid out in Richard White’s Middle Ground (1991), the irreversible decline of Indigenous peoples only set in at the end of the War of 1812, when ‘they could no longer pose a major threat or be a major asset to an empire or a republic, and even their economic consequence declined with the fur trade.’ This is where Hämäläinen makes his provocative claim: ‘Indigenous power in North America,’ he argues, ‘reached its apogee in the mid to late 19th century.’

How does Hämäläinen support his claim that some Native groups remained or became sufficiently powerful that they were serious strategic antagonists for the US state in the second half of the 19th century? For a start, he reads their histories as concomitant with but not inevitably subservient to that of the young United States: 1776 might mark the founding of the US, but he claims it also marked the declaration of independence of another ‘empire’ two thousand miles away – the Lakota Sioux. A former farming people from the Missouri River valley, the Lakota had started a series of explorations of the northern central plains in the early 1770s. ‘It was,’ Hämäläinen writes, ‘North America’s first sustained westward expansion beyond the Appalachian Mountains.’ They claimed the Pahá Sápa – the Black Hills of South Dakota – as their homeland while Jefferson was drafting the Declaration of Independence. Within a decade, the Lakota had become the Prussians of the Plains: a people with few obvious prospects, who, through a series of deftly managed alliances, such as with the more powerful Cheyennes and Arapahos, rapidly accrued power of their own. After years of raiding Crows, Kiowas and Poncas for horses, they were able to challenge their former allies, exile the agricultural peoples of the river valleys – the Omaha and the Otoes – and achieve what Hämäläinen calls ‘hegemony’ in the Great Plains.

None of this would have been possible without horses. The domesticated horse originated in North America four million years ago, but had been extinct there for 10,000 years. Hernán Cortés and the Spanish brought the horse back to the Americas in the 1500s, and over the next two centuries they spread across their ancient homeland. Hämäläinen relates the account given to the English explorer David Thompson by one of the Blackfeet Indians, Saahkómaapi. In around 1730, the Blackfeet heard that there were horses in Snake Indian country and that not far away was the body of a horse that had been killed by an arrow. They found the dead horse and gathered around it. ‘We all admired him,’ Saahkómaapi told Thompson. ‘He put us in mind of a stag that had lost his horns; and we did not know what name to give him. But as he was a slave to man, like the dog, which carried our things; he was named the Big Dog.’

The people who most successfully mastered the power of the big dog were the Comanche of the Southern Plains. Like the Lakota, they were relative newcomers in their region, which incorporated parts of what are today Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado and Kansas. In the early 1700s, the Comanches started buying Spanish horses from the more sedentary Pueblo people, whom they quickly displaced as the major power in the southwest. When they forged an alliance with another horse people, the Utes, the result was a mounted army that raided Spanish settlements. The Comanche also operated a booming slave trade in subject Native peoples and other captives, as well as profiting from an enormous hunting range for buffalo. Hämäläinen writes that

for the Comanches the sun was ‘the primary cause of all living things’, and horses brought them closer to it, redefining what was possible: the biomass of the continental grasslands may have been a thousand times greater than that of the region’s animals. The Comanches plugged themselves into a seemingly inexhaustible energy stream of grass, flesh, and sunlight.

The Lakota, too, secured a vast hunting range, annexing swathes of the Northern Plains. Their relations with the empire to their east – the United States – was initially a trading one, in which the Lakota were by no means the inferior party. Hämäläinen gives the example of the fur tycoon John Jacob Astor building his supply chain right up to the Lakota’s doorstep so that they did not have to inconvenience themselves delivering furs and hides. By the 1860s, the Lakota, in a loose alliance with the Comanches, held sway over a territory larger than Western Europe.

Indigenous Continent is determined to downplay the usual culprits of Native decline: disease brought by Europeans certainly devastated Native populations, but some, especially horse peoples who lived in less dense clusters, were not greatly affected. Every technological innovation the Europeans brought with them – the mounted horse, the gun, the kettle – was acquired and adopted by Natives. In his headlong rush to overturn the Dee Brown story, Hämäläinen ends up reproducing some of its most dubious elements. The focus on military confrontations between the ‘fledgling United States’ and Native ‘armies’ is one of the chief misprisions. The destruction of Native peoples was a result of commercial imperatives as much as political ones. Between 1820 and 1889, for example, the number of buffalo – a major source of Lakota power – declined by 99.99 per cent, from 28 million to 1091. Anglo-European demand for buffalo leather to use in factory machine belts set off a killing spree in the 1870s. The 1848 Gold Rush lured hundreds of thousands of settlers to California through Indian territory, upsetting agricultural patterns and diminishing food supplies. The market went ahead of the cavalry. When Crazy Horse and George Armstrong Custer confronted each other at the Battle of the Little Bighorn, it was reported to be 44°C in the shade, and Evan Connell noted in Son of the Morning Star that ‘a shrewd Yankee merchant on the Yellowstone turned a neat profit selling straw hats for 25 cents.’ Hämäläinen continually emphasises the amount of land area still under Native control, but as the historian Daniel Immerwahr pointed out (his critical review of Indigenous Continent has been cobbled together as praise on the back cover), this is like the Republican Party claiming mass popular support because much of the map is coloured red, no matter how sparsely populated the area in question. The usefulness of calling the Comanche an empire becomes less clear when one considers that at the height of their power they numbered forty thousand people – the population at the time of Cincinnati.

At times Hämäläinen’s prose suffers from Silicon Valleyitis: the ‘nimble’ natives, endowed with ‘principled plasticity,’ outfox the sluggard American monolith. But many of the classic episodes he touches on – from the Native destruction of Custer’s 7th Cavalry to Geronimo and Quanah Parker’s raids on the Mexican border – were desperate Native last stands in the face of settler consolidation. As in his previous books, Hämäläinen hasn’t attempted to correct or improve the scholarly record so much as to declare it in need of overhaul: Copernicanism or bust. Yet Indigenous Continent has been treated as a revelation by some of the leading figures in the field – David Treuer, Claudio Saunt, Elizabeth Fenn, Elliott West – and its depiction of a pumped-up period of Indigenous control has achieved far greater commercial success than the milder revisionism in favour of Native agency of Kathleen DuVal’s The Native Ground (2006) and Michael Witgen’s An Infinity of Nations (2011).

Shortly after the publication of Indigenous Continent, a dissenting review appeared in the Washington Post from a historian who was himself preparing a work on the same scale. Ned Blackhawk’s Rediscovery of America won the National Book Award the following year. Blackhawk criticised Hämäläinen for concentrating almost exclusively on military and kinetic aspects of the confrontations between Europeans and Natives (he ‘studies equestrianism as well as anybody’, Blackhawk told the New York Times), and argued that Hämäläinen gave short shrift to the all-important legal dimension of Native struggles and failed to recognise ‘federal Indian policy as a constitutive feature of the emerging administrative state’. He described Hämäläinen’s ‘celebrations of Indigenous agency’ as ‘crude’. Blackhawk’s book sets out to retell the history of the United States from a Native perspective, but ends up being more a history of the policies, treaties and negotiations of the US state.

From the first Spanish encounters with Natives, European jurists mulled over ideas of Native sovereignty. As Blackhawk shows, much of the legal work of the early republic was sealed in decisions such as the Supreme Court chief justice John Marshall’s trilogy of judgments between 1823 and 1832 which made the federal state – rather than individual states – the sole guarantor of sovereign rights on the continent, enshrining the doctrine of ‘discovery’ and relegating the Indigenous from the status of murkily rights-bearing ‘occupants’. Blackhawk presents the Monroe Doctrine – the policy that saw European meddling in the Americas as a hostile act – as an attempt to prevent Europeans from re-conspiring with Indigenous peoples against the new state. At the same time, the US government treated Native groups as ‘nations’, which could be afforded territories outside US legal jurisdiction. Policies and plans for Indians ranged from ‘removal’ onto reservations to forced buyouts of land, from indiscriminate slaughter to the payment of annuities into trusts that Natives couldn’t access, from the subdivision and marketisation of their lands to forced assimilation, from re-sovereignisation to de-sovereignisation and back again.

The Rediscovery of America is most impressive on the Civil War period. It’s not just that the first stirrings of the conflict came in the struggle to extend slavery into the West, but that the Civil War scrambled the interests of Native Americans while sharpening questions about rights for citizens of the republic. The 15 per cent of Navajos in slavery looked to the Union Army for their liberation, while the Cherokees – who owned thousands of Black slaves – sided with the Confederacy (the last Confederate general to surrender was the Cherokee leader Stand Watie). The Creeks were split on the war question, with some siding with the Union and others with the South. Some of the Dakotas in the Great Plains, meanwhile, already under pressure from settler inroads into their territory, became alarmed that freed Black slaves might seize the nation’s capital and divert Native annuities to themselves. As with the Revolutionary War, the Civil War meant balance-of-power triangulations for Native groups.

Blackhawk sees the 1860s as a period of radical US legal readjustment over Native claims on the land. The first Fort Laramie Treaty (1851) officially recognised a vast Lakota homeland in the Plains, as well as hunting rights in abutting territories. Federal seizure of Lakota land was forbidden without the approval of three-quarters of adult Lakota males. Whereas Hämäläinen interprets the treaty as the fruit of Lakota power – these were the grand concessions its horse warriors could wrest from Washington – Blackhawk sees it as the pinnacle of goodwill between Natives and the US government, which, for a brief moment, viewed the land as something other than an endpoint for settlement. The treaty allowed settlers safe passage to territories further west, but an ample space for the Lakota seemed assured. In practice, the sheer number of miners traversing the territory, and the new mineral deposits discovered in Indian lands, made violations of this treaty and others an American tradition. After the sham Treaty of Fort Wise (1861), the Cheyenne were divided over the best way to handle settler incursions. Chiefs such as Tall Bull and White Horse led radicalised bands of Dog Soldiers, who engaged in an all-out offensive against settlers, while chiefs such as Lean Bear and Black Kettle instead supported treaty adjustments. After the US army renewed its attacks on the Plains Indians in the 1860s, the Dog Soldiers were smashed at the Battle of Summit Springs. Lean Bear was killed while wearing a medal Abraham Lincoln had presented to him the year before. A Colorado unit of the Union Army committed one of the nation’s largest single massacres – 160 people – at Sand Creek.

The end of the Civil War meant the Union Army could more easily concentrate its forces in support of settlers in the West. By the late 1860s, mounted Native counterraids targeted railway lines as conduits of violence and accelerated settlement. But this failed to stop railroad towns springing up across the Midwest, bulging with settlers proud of what their mere presence had accomplished. In Omaha in the 1990s, my public library still displayed a relic of this chapter of American progress in the form of the scalp of William Thompson, a settler attacked during a raid in 1867, who had preserved the lopped-off sliver of his head and had it tanned for posterity.

Seventeen years after the first Fort Laramie Treaty, a new version was drafted that contains hints of the legal landscape to come: farming equipment and training were offered to the Lakota by Washington – a gesture towards assimilation that was refused by the Lakota chiefs. A clause in an 1863 treaty with the Shoshones determined that ‘whenever the president of the United States shall deem it expedient’, the Shoshones would ‘abandon the roaming life’ and ‘convert to lives as herdsmen or agriculturalists’. As Elliott West put it in Continental Reckoning: The American West in the Age of Expansion,*

past treaties had typically promised mutual amity between encroaching settlements and Native peoples, then laid down some demarcation between them. Now, with no stark division possible, treaties became more direct, assertive, pointed and particular. They would partner with the reservations that had emerged in the 1850s. There Indians would be set apart, not on the edge of an expanded nation, but inside of it, and the purpose was not to keep them apart from white society but ultimately to make them part of it.

By the mid-19th century, many Native nations found themselves in the position of powerless rentiers, living under what Emilie Connolly calls ‘fiduciary colonialism’. Washington had devised a system of annual annuities instead of one-off buyouts of land, but much of the money was invested in state and federal bonds, effectively making Natives passive investors in their own dispossession. In 1887, the Dawes Act was passed, allowing the US government to subdivide Indian land – previously commonly held – into private allotments of 160 acres apiece: the idea was to break Native patterns of land tenure and force Indians into the capitalist order. The new ‘owners’ would either have to make their portions profitable or sell up to settlers. Though some tribes were initially exempt, the extension of the act in 1898 and the abolition of tribal governments led to the loss of around two-thirds of Native American land over the next thirty years.

The Rediscovery of America jumps from treaty to treaty, from act to act, in a narrative of accelerating Native dispossession. Unlike Hämäläinen, Blackhawk’s book stresses that the ultimate fate of Native peoples would be determined not by military might but by how the US state chose to view them. Discussing Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation and the Fourteenth Amendment, he acknowledges that the government established the principle of birthright citizenship for Blacks, but criticises the legal provisions that allowed it to rebuff the demands of untaxed Indians (Native Americans have an exceptional status in the constitution and the laws of the land do not uniformly apply to them). Yet the most powerful Native constituencies at the time were bent on securing their own sovereignty, not equal citizenship with former slaves in the American nation-state. It is one thing to strive for equal rights within a country’s borders and quite another to work towards sovereignty outside them. A Westerner himself, Lincoln was not inclined to be generous to the Indigenous population. His Homestead Act of 1862 allowed any adult to claim a free plot of land, provided they had never taken up arms against the federal government. More than 160 million acres, most of it taken from Native Americans, passed into private ownership as a result. In the same year, Lincoln’s administration sent a volunteer army to combat a band of Dakota, led by Little Crow, which had attacked settlers in the Minnesota River valley. A poor harvest and the depletion of wild game meant the Dakota people were starving and desperate; after suppressing the uprising, the army took more than two thousand Dakota, most of them non-combatants, into custody and sentenced 303 to death. Lincoln insisted the number be lowered, but the 38 men hanged in Mankato, Minnesota still comprise the largest official execution in American history.

By the 20th century, Native dispossession on the continent, excepting reservations won by legal wrangling, was complete. As Blackhawk illustrates, US colonialism meant that Native leaders were faced by the false binary of assimilation or maintaining cultural distinctiveness. The main site for confronting this problem was the Society of American Indians. Founding members such as the Oneida leader Laura Cornelius Kellogg argued for outright ‘Indian communism’ and against US citizenship for Natives, while the Santee Dakota doctor Charles Eastman believed that Native Americans could have a productive relationship as US nationals while retaining cultural autonomy. Other Natives embraced the terms of integration, such as Eastman’s contemporary, the Kaw Charles Curtis, who became vice president under Herbert Hoover and advocated complete assimilation, as Jefferson had a century before. Blackhawk’s sympathies clearly lie with the likes of Eastman and more radical autonomists such as the Yankton Dakota thinker Zitkala-Ša, as well as later anti-assimilationists such as Vine Deloria Jr.

The legal battles that preoccupy Blackhawk demonstrate the power of American lawmakers and lawfare when it comes to Native interests. Less often acknowledged is the way Native attempts to claim rights through the US constitution and established legal pathways ended up reaffirming the legitimacy of the US executive and its conceptions of property rights. With few options available to them, it isn’t surprising that Native Americans used every means possible to ensure their survival, and from the perspective of Aboriginal activists in Australia, simply having treaties on which to base such claims is a great advantage. But even the most radical policymakers have come up with little beyond the existing programme of slightly differentiated special economic zones – this one given over to nuclear waste, that one casinos – and there is little to suggest this will change. There is a reason the most stalwart market fundamentalist judges on the US Supreme Court pride themselves on their commitment to tribal rights. When Native lawyers praised the poetry of Neil Gorsuch’s majority opinion in McGirt v. Oklahoma (2020), which effectively awarded the Muscogee Nation legal jurisdiction over a territory the size of Lebanon, there was little discussion about what political experiments might follow that legal victory. Similarly, there was no thought after Gorsuch’s majority opinion this year in Grants Pass v. Johnson, which effectively criminalised homelessness in America, about how the two opinions might be linked. The restitution of Native property in order to fulfil treaty obligations (though always rescindable) buttresses all claims of legal title and further sanctifies settler property.

The difference between Native and Black reparations could not be starker. Whereas Black reparations (unless tied to probably impossible evidentiary showings of slave inheritance) run up against another relative constant of the American legal order – the principle of ‘equal protection’ – Native treaty rights are themselves black-letter law. Blackhawk is right that he’s identified a place for Natives within the American legal order – the place they have been given, as interpreted by judges. Black reparations were never so legally entrenched, and exist as a concept in tension with prevailing understandings of equal protection, however much those understandings are bemoaned by left-liberals. The Rediscovery of America ends up embracing the co-optive limits of the US constitutional order: what was broken by unprecedented economic expansion with the assistance of a rushing-to-keep-up state, he suggests, can best be remedied within that same state’s legal architecture.

Asharp contrast to Blackhawk’s liberal legalist orientation can be found in the work of Nick Estes. A citizen of the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe and a generation younger than Blackhawk, Estes bears the marks of the political radicalisation brought by the 2008 financial crisis and the Dakota Access Pipeline protests of 2016-17, which attempted to block the construction of an oil pipeline traversing the Standing Rock Reservation. In Our History Is the Future, Estes balances a political polemic with an account of Native resistance to settler advances, stressing the environmental impact as well as the imbrications of Native American resistance and the international left, a history absent from both Hämäläinen and Blackhawk’s narratives. Our History Is the Future begins with Marx’s metaphor of the mole. ‘The mole is easily defeated on the surface by counterrevolutionary forces if she hasn’t adequately prepared her subterranean spaces, which provide shelter and safety,’ Estes writes, ‘even when pushed back underground, the mole doesn’t stop her work.’

Marx wrote of his admiration for Native American societies in his copious ‘Ethnographic Notebooks’. The work of the anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan, a persona non grata in contemporary Indigenous Studies, made Marx appreciate the Haudenosaunee’s ‘sense of independence’ and ‘personal dignity’, the diminishment of which Marx and Morgan lamented as a product of mankind’s ‘property career’. What interested Marx most about the Haudenosaunee was the way they organised themselves: not in a state, but as a league in which citizens – including women – could voice their concerns at regular intervals. Marx was convinced that the goddesses of Mount Olympus revealed the lost status of women in ancient societies. In Morgan’s ethnographies, he found much more evidence for his views as well as other clues to alternatives for society outside capitalism. One could, he wrote, find ‘what is newest in what is oldest’.

Marxism did not make many inroads in Indian thought in North America – as opposed to its adoption by Indigenous thinkers elsewhere in the Americas – until the Second World War. Six decades before theories of settler colonialism were developed by Maxime Rodinson for Israel and, in their current academic configuration, by Patrick Wolfe for Anglo-settler states, Karl Kautsky refined the distinction between ‘work’ colonies, where Europeans settled and conducted extermination, and ‘exploitation’ colonies, where the aims were more purely extractive and relied on local labour. But the importance of radical politics for Native American thinkers wasn’t merely abstract. Lenin’s policies on safeguarding Indigenous cultures in the Soviet Union were looked on by many Native Americans as preferable to the forced assimilation initiatives of the US Bureau of Indian Affairs. When Native nations petitioned to attend the Versailles Peace Conference, the Wilson administration dismissed them out of hand.

In 1932, the Marxist Nez Perce anthropologist Archie Phinney travelled from Idaho to the Soviet Union. He completed a doctorate at the Leningrad Academy of Science in which he favourably contrasted Soviet management of minority peoples with US federal Indian policy. As Benjamin Balthaser has noted, of particular interest to Phinney was the way that – in theory, if not in practice – the Indigenous peoples of Russia maintained dual identities as Soviet citizens and custodians of their cultures, which retained the right to outright self-determination. Phinney acknowledged the necessity of the developmentalism imposed by the US state but pointed out that it was hardly in Indian interests to become proletarians at the same level as the poorest people in the country. ‘The US government,’ he wrote, ‘feels compelled to rehabilitate [the Niimíipu] and bring them up “to the level equal to that of the average rural white family”. Yet that “average rural white family” is itself in need of a strong dose of “rehabilitation”.’ He argued instead for reforging traditions of common ownership on reservations into democratic co-operatives which would allow Indians to pursue – and exhibit to the rest of the country – alternative paths towards social transformation.

Native-Soviet mutual admiration reached its zenith in 1942, when Chief Fallen Tree of the Mohawk nation presented an Indian war bonnet to a representative of Stalin, whom the Indian Confederation of America voted ‘warrior of the year’. But the rest of the decade saw radicalism weaken dramatically. The interest in Marxism vanished with the Cold War consensus, as figures such as Luther Standing Bear – who starred as an Indian gardener in the Red Scare film Bolshevism on Trial – became a standard bearer for the ‘progressive’ Indian cultural movement of the 1940s and 1950s. More materially, 45,000 Indigenous soldiers had enlisted in the Second World War (the US military relied on code based on the Navajo language). But there were good reasons for Indigenous activists to think that the US state was starting to move in their favour. Roosevelt’s New Deal had included an ‘Indian New Deal’, in the form of the Indian Reorganisation Act, which counteracted some of the measures that had divided Indian lands. His administration closed down Indian boarding schools and other vehicles of violent assimilation, and also sought to re-sovereignise Native lands, including by means of legal jurisdiction. The Reorganisation Act went so far as to include provisions for the state to buy land and restore it to Indian reservations. As a further counter-thrust legal advocates for Natives such as Felix Cohen sought to bring the states back into submission by, for instance, suing them in federal court for withholding welfare payments to tribes. In the following decade, Roosevelt’s Indian New Deal was undermined by Western senators who sought to terminate the status – and take over the territorial holdings – of tribes by using the language of civil rights to insist on their members becoming fully integrated citizens of the nation.

One of Roosevelt’s more enduring reforms was the policy of hiring Native Americans to work at the Bureau for Indian Affairs. Many of the leading Indian activists of the postwar decades held jobs at the bureau, transforming it into a laboratory for reform. They conceived of their mission as preserving New Deal gains and their particular foe was the postwar drive for ‘termination’, by which politicians sought to cut off federal land grants to tribes deemed sufficiently assimilated. The 1956 Indian Relocation Act accelerated this process by moving Indians into cities en masse. The result was predictable: a new revolutionary movement of Native Americans who channelled their sense of dislocation into a new wave of activism known as Red Power.

In 1966, this slogan was first displayed on the side of a Chevrolet driven by the activists Clyde and Della Warrior and Hank Adams at a parade by the National Congress of American Indians in Oklahoma City. A banner on the other side read ‘Custer Died for Your Sins’; Vine Deloria Jr, the leading figure in the Red Power movement and the most formidable Native political writer of the 20th century, used this as the title of his groundbreaking book published three years later. Custer Died for Your Sins was an attempt to re-radicalise Indian affairs at a time when they seemed in danger of dissolving into the wider civil rights movement. For Deloria and Clyde Warrior, the civil rights movement played into the hands of assimilationists. What Indians needed to do, they argued, was to exploit the shrinking openings for autonomy granted by the Roosevelt reforms. ‘In our hearts and minds,’ Deloria wrote, ‘we could not believe that blacks wanted to be the same as whites.’ Instead of supporting Lyndon Johnson, Deloria and Warrior preferred the right-wing candidate Barry Goldwater, since the Arizona senator, like them, wanted Native Americans to live separately within the US, in reservations, with their annuities invested in the stock market. ‘I’m going to vote for that man,’ Warrior joked. ‘He’s a racist and so am I.’ Deloria thought the most promising possibility for a Black-Indian alliance was via a figure like Stokely Carmichael, who wanted a Black nation with its own land. ‘Peoplehood is impossible without cultural independence,’ Deloria wrote, ‘which in turn is impossible without a land base.’

In the late 1960s, the Red Power movement became radicalised beyond Deloria’s expectations with the foundation of the American Indian Movement (AIM). Formed in Minneapolis by urban Indians who had endured police brutality after being forced into the cities, the movement swept across a younger generation that was determined – unlike Deloria’s generation – to achieve its aims through popular mobilisation rather than bureaucratic manoeuvring. In 1964, the Oglala Lakota activist Russell Means and his father began an occupation of Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay, which they believed was theirs as a result of the Fort Laramie Treaty. (As Estes points out, it more properly belonged to the Ohlone people.) Five years later, when Richard Oakes and LaNada Means led a larger encampment, they were joined by a hundred activists, who set up a Bureau of Anglo Affairs inside the old prison walls. When the Kiowa novelist N. Scott Momaday arrived on the scene, he felt what he saw was a pantomime ‘running too well in the groove of revolution and reform’. ‘If the takeover of Alcatraz proved anything at all,’ he wrote, it was ‘that the Indians had learned only too well how to deal, and with a conscious irony their teachers never intended, in that grandstand morality that the American public has always taken as the best evidence of heroism. The poverty of that ethic could not have been more effectively exposed, I think, had a performance of Indians been given there on the dock.’ In 1972, AIM occupied the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and a year later – in its most dramatic encounter – its members seized the town of Wounded Knee, on the Pine Ridge Reservation, leading to a shoot-out with federal officers, who wounded fourteen AIM activists at the same site where nearly three hundred Lakota had been exterminated 83 years earlier.

The immediate goal of AIM – recuperation of territory – was unrealised. But it changed the conception of Native Americans in the public imagination, and, alongside Deloria’s indefatigable polemics, made the Nixon administration back away from termination. Critically, AIM also made Native Americans a liability for US Cold Warriors, with the Eastern Bloc and Soviet press regularly running stories about the poor treatment of Indians. In the wake of the Wounded Knee shooting, Russell Means and his fellow activists received letters of support from East German schoolchildren. But AIM was divided over its relationship with the international left. ‘Marxism is the last thing on my mind,’ Means said at a meeting in 1975. ‘Marxism is as alien to my culture as capitalism and Christianity.’ Another wing of AIM took a different view. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, herself a protégée of Deloria’s, expanded AIM’s ties to the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. She and other activists worked to counter the CIA’s co-option of the Indigenous Miskito people and developed networks with radical Indigenous activists in Central America that have lasted to this day.

But the barriers to full co-operation and support between Native American activists and Third Worldist countries were formidable. Estes merely demonstrates these limitations when he gives the example from 1979 of AIM activists forging a deal with Iranian revolutionaries to deliver mail to the US hostages at the embassy in Tehran: risking life and limb to get a letter to US military and diplomatic personnel is an example of atavistic American patriotism more than an instance of Third Worldist solidarity. Third World countries were for the most part fundamentally statist, determined to claim the reins of power from their colonial predecessors, and repressed Indigenous populations who dissented from the national programme. In the 1970s, in contrast to Howard Adams, an avowedly Marxist Indigenous activist, who railed against the ‘red bourgeoisie’ that increasingly ran the affairs of Indian nations, the Secwépemc George Manuel conceived of the ‘Fourth World’ as an alternative ground for rallying Native peoples. He envisioned a New World Economic Order that would be less commodity-centric and less damaging to the environment than the New International Economic Order that developed in Third World countries in the decades after the Second World War. Manuel visited Tanzania, where he admired Julius Nyerere’s socialist project, but many Native Americans shared Deloria’s contempt for anti-colonialist statists. In his foreword to Manuel’s Fourth World, Deloria writes that ‘when the Lakota protesters were surrounded by federal officers [at Wounded Knee] … the Third World was either nowhere in sight or busy making speeches on behalf of the Palestinian Liberation Front.’ The rationale for Native Americans to try to make gains through the courts was compelling: unlike the populations of decolonising countries in Asia and Africa, they formed only a tiny minority and could never hope to change government policy drastically. But the compromises agreed along the way have meant that successful Indigenous resistance to environmentally destructive extractive projects, as recently conducted in Ecuador, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Panama and elsewhere, remains out of reach for their peers in North America. The strategy in Latin America of shutting down a mine by making a local Indigenous issue into a national one is less attractive in the US context, where Natives have better luck with the courts than with representative institutions.

The most successful attempt in recent years to reconcile Indigenous and left political theory is Robert Nichols’s Theft Is Property! (2020). The problem, as Nichols argues, is that the Marxist left has long detected traces of anarchic romanticism in Indigenous claims about dispossession, claims that too closely resemble the arguments made by Proudhon on behalf of the European peasantry: that their land, once held in common, had been expropriated unjustly by a feudal class of landlords and the remedy was simply to get the land back. It didn’t seem to bother Proudhon that, if property could be stolen from the peasants, this meant they already had a modern conception of property; instead of trying to free contemporary proletarians from exploitative wage labour, Marx claimed, the Proudhonists wasted time dreaming of a golden age that never existed. Nichols concedes the power of Marx’s critique but points out that, in North America, land became property in the very instant it was expropriated from Natives, for whom it is not a contradiction to claim that ‘the earth is not to be thought of as property at all, and that it has been stolen from its rightful owner’. Much as former slaves found they had no choice but to sell their labour, so even the Natives with the most favourable treaties had no choice but to sell their land. The trouble is that while Nichols makes a strong case for the conceptual novelty of counter-dispossession – that reclaiming land is different from its original seizure and holds inherent radical potential – the historical record doesn’t bear him out. Areas reclaimed by Indians have not for the most part been used for collective or anti-capitalist ends; alternative political structures have not for the most part thrived there. Without attention to actual Native hierarchies and ways of doing business – was the Mashantucket battle against unionisation efforts at their Foxwoods casino a cause for celebration? – one risks taking the Dakota Access Pipeline protests as the norm for Native political organising rather than the exception.

In Our History Is the Future, Estes traces different aspects of 20th-century Indigenous political strategy. Like Archie Phinney, he aims to be a resolute Marxist and materialist thinker. Like Deloria, he believes Natives should exist in autonomously governed lands within the US but outside its jurisdiction and monoculture, and that any strategy must tack between legal advocacy and direct action. And like his collaborator Dunbar-Ortiz and Manuel, he sees his cause as world-spanning. But he seems not to have considered how these various ingredients combine. For a self-styled Marxist, Estes has an odd tendency to view his subjects as phenomena untouched by history. The notion that the Indigenous traditions have resources which Native people have carefully preserved unaltered for centuries and which perfectly fit the grooves of contemporary environmentalism, feminism and radical democracy seems more like a roundabout expression of wishful presentism than any organic outcome of Indigenous experience.

Estes takes Hämäläinen to task for calling the Lakota an ‘empire’ and Richard White for designating them ‘expansionists’ – not because the terms are categorically wrong but because he believes portraying them in such a way has made their ‘colonisation more palatable’. Estes himself prefers to stress Native traditions of flexible kinship and the adoption of outsiders, but biological determinations often have the upper hand in contemporary tribal politics. No other group in America is so fixated on blood percentages as Native Americans, whose numbers have climbed in the past two decades as more and more people claim Indigenous identity. Though some tribes reject genetic tests, others based on reservations typically have blood quantum requirements of at least a quarter, and individuals must be able to trace descent from 19th-century US government censuses or the registers, such as the Dawes Rolls, that were used to subdivide and apportion Native land. The financial and cultural benefits that can accrue to those of Native descent, as well as a concern to protect distinctiveness and way of life, incentivise the limiting of tribe numbers. But having special rights and privileges based on blood goes hand in hand with other forms of racism: people of mixed Native and African American ancestry, for instance, have regularly been denied recognition.

As for the land, when Estes repeats Deloria’s claim that the Lakota have inhabited the Badlands for at least a thousand years – a claim based in myth rather than the archaeological record – one wonders: why does it matter? Why claim a millennium, when the more reasonable case is simply that no one should be moved off land as a result of a capitalist onslaught aligned with a settler state, whether they have been there for a hundred years or ten thousand. Said believed Palestinian identity had been forged in response to Zionist oppression of a particular people in a particular place in modern capitalist time. He did not, like Deloria, entertain notions of transhistorical identity stretching back before modernity, whether rooted in biblical land grants or mystical battles in the mists of Germania’s Urzeit. (As Estes notes, Deloria counselled Native Americans to copy Zionist success in legitimating their land claims.)

Native identity as it is most often expressed today began with Indigenous prophets such as Neolin, Pontiac and in particular the early 19th-century Shawnee evangelist Tecumseh and his brother Tenskwatawa, who determined what it meant to be white and Indigenous, although their invented traditions were a tell-tale blend of modern science, Christian eschatology and Native survivals. Tenskwatawa’s status as a holy prophet was confirmed after he predicted a solar eclipse in 1806. (He had consulted an almanac.) Along with Tecumseh and other Indigenous visionaries, Tenskwatawa developed a notion of Native authenticity that was threatened by corruption by whites, who were ‘children of the Great Serpent’.

Why suggest the Lakota were self-sufficient, peaceable buffalo hunters in the Black Hills for a thousand years, when they stalked buffalo for less than a century and were so thoroughly connected to international trade that, on entering the homes of their chiefs, visitors found New England carpets, French soap, African coffee, Haitian sugar and knives from Sheffield? What does it mean that the Oneida Nation still celebrates its supporting role in the American Revolution and reveres George Washington, or that a Mohawk man wears a laminated copy of the Fort Laramie Treaty around his neck? Are these signs of freedom or captivity? Nothing could be more patronising to Indigenous peoples than to deny the cost of their survival or pretend that their consciousness exists outside modern time, on a reservation outside history.

Vol. 46 No. 14 · 18 July 2024

On Gender Apartheid

Mélissa Cornet

The question of women’s status has been central to the Taliban’s rule in Afghanistan, with more than eighty edicts curtailing their rights since the movement returned to power almost three years ago. The Taliban prohibits women from going to secondary school or university, from working in the public sector or for NGOs, from leaving home uncovered and unaccompanied, from visiting bathhouses, the gym, beauty salons, parks – the list goes on. Taliban policy, the UN special rapporteur on human rights in Afghanistan said on 18 June, is ‘motivated by and results in a profound rejection of the full humanity of women and girls’.

Afghan women have often been used as an emblem for a particular position: do you stand for modernity or for tradition? King Abdur Rahman Khan, who reigned from 1880 until 1901, improved the legal status of women, in opposition to conservative tribal law. King Amanullah Khan and his wife, Queen Soraya, who ruled between 1919 and 1929, campaigned against veil-wearing and polygamy, and encouraged girls’ education, as part of the wave of modernism also seen in Iran and Turkey at the time. But the brief reign of Habibullah II, between January and October 1929, saw most of Afghanistan’s gender equality laws abrogated. Later rulers were cautious about reform, worried about antagonising tribal leaders. Things changed slowly until the communists took over in 1978. After that, women wore short skirts, went to and taught at university, worked as doctors and nurses and became members of parliament. That period came to an end in 1992 when the mujahidin took over and the civil war began.

The Americans justified their invasion of 2001, five years after the Taliban first took Kabul, in part by the need to ‘save’ Afghan women, and invested heavily in empowerment programmes designed to achieve quick and visible results. The 2004 constitution set a quota for women in parliament: at 27 per cent, it made the Afghan parliament more progressive than that of the UK or France. But as the sociologist Sippi Azarbaijani-Moghaddam wrote in 2022,

the removal of the Taliban had not automatically led to the shedding of burqas and overnight emancipation, and, therefore, there was no easy public relations victory for the military. The aid/media complex stepped in and, using Afghan women as mascots, began the process of creating a troupe of high-profile ‘activists’ who would be trained, publicised and feted.

During the two decades of US-sponsored government, progress failed to trickle down to the countryside. Many of the women I interviewed who lived outside the cities saw the Taliban’s arrival as a positive thing: they had never had girls’ schools in their areas anyway, and they always had to wear the burqa, even when Afghanistan was home to more than 100,000 American troops. At least now there is peace.

The Taliban’s policies are laid down by the supreme leader, Hibatullah Akhundzada, who is based in Kandahar and surrounded by ultra-conservative advisers. But a large part of the Taliban movement, including some ministers in Kabul, supports girls’ education and women’s right to work – as long as they follow Sharia law. As a result, the implementation of the emir’s edicts varies widely from one area to another, depending on the local commander’s willingness to look the other way and tolerate some freedoms. However, there is a strong tradition of centralisation and loyalty inside the movement, built over decades of war, which means that there is little chance that internal differences will lead to a wider policy change any time soon.

Fatimah and Gulsom, who are seventeen and fourteen, are sisters who live in the Hazara neighbourhood of Dasht-e-Barchi in Kabul. I sat with them in their living room, while in the other room their mother and aunt recited prayers following a Shia ritual. Their parents are uneducated, and wanted better for their four daughters. The day the Taliban took over, Fatimah was in hospital in central Kabul. Her school had been attacked by suicide bombers, and a piece of shrapnel had hit her in the back of the neck, causing nerve damage. The doctors told her she might be permanently paralysed. Her family managed to find a car and find shelter for them all at her aunt’s house. They stayed for ten days, not risking going outside: there were rumours that the Taliban were taking single women and marrying them off to their fighters. When things calmed down they went home, and Fatimah started going to an underground school, first in her wheelchair, and later, as she recovered, on foot. ‘I wanted to study law after school, but now I don’t want to as knowing the law doesn’t help secure your rights any more. Now, I want to become a good journalist. I write articles; one was published. I write what I hear from girls.’

Gulsom reacted differently. She went back to school too, but when the Taliban grew more violent and women in their neighbourhood started being arrested, she dropped out. ‘My biggest fear is that I go out and something happens to me, and others blame my family because of me. At checkpoints, the Taliban make problems if there’s anything wrong with our clothes. I’m afraid of them taking me.’ She estimates that she has left the house only five times in the last two years (one of these was for the anniversary of the explosion at their old school). Fatimah tried to persuade her sister to start studying again, but Gulsom doesn’t see the point. ‘I lost my interest in studying. When you see the Taliban and this situation, it would be useless.’

Last year a campaign called End Gender Apartheid was launched in response to proposals for a new Crimes against Humanity treaty which are under discussion at the UN’s Sixth Committee. The aim is for the draft text to go before the General Assembly in September. Apartheid is legally defined as ‘inhuman acts committed for the purpose of establishing and maintaining domination by one racial group of persons over any other racial group of persons and systematically oppressing them’. The crime of gender apartheid currently does not exist. There is a crime of gender-based persecution, but – according to a former UN special rapporteur, Karima Bennoune – it ‘fails to adequately implicate the institutionalised and ideological nature of the abuses in question or reflect on the responsibilities of other international actors to respond appropriately’. If the definition were expanded, activists argue, states would have to take action, as they did in the 1990s over South Africa, where the international response included diplomatic and economic sanctions. This sustained pressure weakened the increasingly isolated regime to the point where it was forced to change.

If codified as a crime, and applied to Afghanistan, gender apartheid would create an obligation for states to take action. If they failed to do this it would further weaken international law, already undermined in recent years by governments’ failure to implement it to prevent atrocities in South Sudan, Yemen, Ethiopia, Myanmar, Ukraine or Gaza. One European diplomat confessed to me that many countries are concerned about the political consequences of recognising gender apartheid, especially because it would bring pressure to grant unconditional asylum to Afghan women and girls. This is despite the fact that gender persecution is already a legitimate basis for asylum, and that Afghan women are acknowledged to be victims of it. Although some states, including Malta and Iceland, already describe the Taliban as perpetrating gender apartheid, other diplomats question the usefulness of this approach, noting that condemnation, sanctions and public pronouncements have so far left the Taliban unmoved.

The international community bears a heavy responsibility for the situation faced by Afghan women, having left in 2021 knowing that the country was being taken over by the group they took arms against twenty years earlier. They have allowed the Taliban to become gradually normalised in the extended region. Many states have ambassadors in Kabul: Pakistan and India, of course, but also US clients and allies like Saudi Arabia and the UAE.

Latifa, an ex-prosecutor living in Herat, told me that ‘a lot of positive things happened to women’ during the twenty years of US occupation – the job she had being one of them. After the takeover, she was told to stop working but continued to receive her salary for ten months before she was officially terminated. She now teaches Islamic law in a private institute. I met her in her friend’s clothes shop, hidden on the second floor of a building. She is one of very few women I have spoken to who says she wants to stay in Afghanistan to fight for Afghan women. ‘A lot of women came out and got to learn about their rights. But it happened too quickly, and sometimes women would go from being at home to being in very high-level positions. If it had been done gradually, it would not have collapsed like it did. These changes did not get injected step by step into society.’ She argued that just as women were the only thing the Americans cared about, the same was true of the Taliban. ‘Each is too extreme … They each brought something not adapted to Afghan society.’

There are two schools of thought about how the international community could influence the Taliban’s policy on women: isolating the regime, or pursuing conditional engagement. While parts of the Afghan diaspora push for sanctions and isolation, the majority of governments and civil society organisations are in favour of conditional engagement, with human rights always part of the discussion. Engagement, which does not equate to formal recognition, is seen as the only way to ensure long-term influence over the Taliban. Diplomacy takes time, it’s argued, and is needed most when you’re talking to people you don’t agree with. As the country’s acting foreign minister, Amir Khan Muttaqi, has repeatedly insisted, the Taliban do care about being reintegrated into the international community. It’s true that discussions and engagement have so far brought no concrete results – but neither have the financial sanctions and travel bans on individuals imposed by the US and EU. The Taliban play for time, observing that their regime is slowly being accepted without their making a single concession on women’s rights. Activists, of course, object to the soft-pedalling pragmatism of international bodies. In November the UN Security Council, under the leadership of the Turkish diplomat Feridun Sinirlioğlu, laid out a roadmap for engagement with the Taliban, which depends on its upholding its obligations under international law. In response, 71 human rights groups issued an open letter condemning the Security Council for ‘reducing human rights and women’s plight to second place’.

The Taliban like to remind foreign states that they are upholding their promises under the Doha Agreement of 2020, which laid down conditions for US withdrawal, and that other countries have no business interfering in Afghanistan’s internal affairs, certainly not after being responsible for twenty years of war. As a result, the gap is growing between countries which insist on principle that they won’t engage with the Taliban without concessions on women’s rights and pragmatic neighbouring countries which prioritise regional stability – these countries increasingly occupy the diplomatic space in Kabul.

With all parties entrenched in their own corners – and with the proposed codification of gender apartheid as a crime unlikely to make much difference – it’s hard to see who or what would enable a breakthrough. Afghan women don’t expect anything to change. ‘In the last two and a half years,’ Latifa said, ‘every media organisation, every UN agency has been doing their independent research on women’s rights. They know exactly what is going on, and yet what have they done for us?’

Vol. 46 No. 14 · 18 July 2024

You have been warned

David Trotter

The Fatal Alliance: A Century of War on Film

by David Thomson.

Harper, 435 pp., £25, January, 978 0 06 304141 7

David Thomson is best known for a series of surveys of the history of cinema as Olympian in scope as they are in evenness of tone, the most notable being his indispensable Biographical Dictionary of Film from 1975, subsequently updated in a series of editions as the New Biographical Dictionary of Film. His latest book, The Fatal Alliance, is every bit as commanding in its succinct description and analysis of a wide variety of films, good, bad and (mostly) indifferent. But its tone veers and jags as he attempts to cut through to what he perceives to be the moral and political heart of the matter.

This is a book about war, an attempt to describe the dynamic in film that has been so infatuated with battle. But battle and war are not the same: war is a malignancy in our nature and society, the deep expression of our fear; while battle aspires to adventure and a thrill, like going to a movie, and trying to believe that we can handle fear.

There can’t be many histories of cinema as a mass medium which seek to examine and address a ‘malignancy’ in human nature and society. Siegfried Kracauer’s From Caligari to Hitler (1947), about Weimar filmmaking and the rise of Nazism, would certainly count. The Fatal Alliance is in select company.

The charge Thomson lays against war films is the obvious one: they make it all too easy to experience the thrill of battle while remaining safely out of harm’s way, to relish the violence, to gorge or feast ourselves on it (he does like a culinary metaphor). People have always found ways to do that. Thomson, however, is prepared to put the blame on a particular institution. The ‘onset of the movies’, he argues, may well have proved the ‘most influential’ of all innovations in the ‘process’ of modern warfare. The fact that the enduring tension between martial fantasy and an awareness of damage done is unlikely to be resolved any time soon adds a flavour of hellfire sermon to the book’s encyclopedic intent. ‘I’m warning you,’ Thomson says at the outset. ‘This book will not be comfortable … Ask yourself whether you are up for it.’

‘In two world wars,’ he observes, ‘the American homeland was calm; its industry thrived; its stories swelled in grandeur. But it longs to be the leader and a star in war studies. So America has had few rivals in the making of exciting war movies, or in the ingenuity and expressiveness of its military expenditure.’ Thomson has always been as interested in the way films are made as he is in their appearance on the screen, and he gets down to business with some intriguing thoughts about the ways in which the process and scheduling of a film might seem to resemble the ‘order of battle’. Both require advance planning, a firm control of logistics, and, above all, an absolute faith in the ability of the various members of the ‘unit’ – task force, or cast and crew – to work together to get the job done.

The example offered is Black Hawk Down (2001), a blockbuster based on a book by Mark Bowden about the near disastrous military operation that culminated in the hasty retreat of US forces from the centre of Mogadishu. Thomson tells us that he has felt compelled to watch the movie over and over again – a guilty pleasure – thanks to the performance not of Sam Shepard as the general in command but of Tom Sizemore as ‘the sergeant hacking his way out of the labyrinth’. Sizemore is in fact playing a lieutenant colonel, but he might as well be a sergeant (as indeed he was in Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan), because we only ever see him in the absolute thick of combat. It’s up to him to get the job done without asking what on earth they’re doing in Mogadishu in the first place. To that extent, Thomson suggests, the sergeant figure could be seen as a kind of director, ‘expert and committed, yet uninterested in the nature of the mission’. The sergeant Hollywood called up for this particular assignment was Ridley Scott, son of an army officer, who had by 2001 acquired a handy reputation for ‘getting difficult and novel adventure pictures done’. The US army provided the helicopters and a week or two of basic training for the cast.

Thomson reckons it was Lewis Milestone’s All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) that first established the grammar of the ‘good battle scene’: high-angle points of view, a ‘tracking motion’ to ‘animate or excite’ the progress of an attack, an editorial ‘cut and thrust’ to match that of hand-to-hand combat. All Quiet, mixing elegant master shot with brutal close-up, does not ‘shrink’ from the ‘doom or futility’ of combat. Indeed its release could be said to have represented a last chance to ‘act upon’ a full understanding of what warfare entailed in the era of tanks, planes and heavy machine-guns. Yet the techniques it pioneered soon became, and still remain, the basis of the ‘American model’ of war film. The relentlessly thrilling Black Hawk Down never loses its ‘constitutional faith’ in the unit to get the job done. Unlike All Quiet, it denies any ‘responsibility’ for the ensuing mayhem.

The Fatal Alliance is to some degree autobiographical: ‘I was born in February 1941, in a London being bombed, and I was told by everyone in my childhood that it was a good thing “we” had won the war.’ To the visceral pleasures of the battle scene could now be added the moral intoxication of victory in a ‘just’ war: a war there had been no good way not to fight. Thomson’s father took him to see Laurence Olivier’s Henry V in 1945, the year after its release. ‘He said it was a matter of duty.’ The standard British movie fare of the day had plenty of ‘syrup’, he recalls, to ladle over the ‘suet pudding’ of tremulous national morale.

Sands of Iwo Jima (1949), in which John Wayne plays the ‘fearsome yet admirable’ Marine Sergeant John Stryker, introduced him to the American model. ‘If you look at films like that, buttered with message, it’s easier to comprehend the unguarded innocence that was still active in 1945.’ The feast, once so eagerly devoured, now sits uneasily on his stomach. Viewed from a different angle, the ‘just war’ is just war. No surprise, then, that Thomson should be at his very best when discussing films which, rather than merely acknowledging the chaos unleashed by combat, actively explore its nature and consequences: Humphrey Jennings’s Fires Were Started (1943), Larisa Shepitko’s The Ascent (1977), Bertrand Tavernier’s Life and Nothing But (1989), Peter Jackson’s They Shall Not Grow Old (2018). He captures to vivid effect the distinctive lyrical anguish filmmakers like Jennings and Shepitko bring to their portrayal of the damage that war does to people and places; and, like any good historian, he has a trick or two up his sleeve. There’s Ted Post’s Go Tell the Spartans (1978), for example, a ’Nam movie set in 1964 during the early stages of American involvement, which tests the All Quiet-plus-sergeants model to absolute destruction. Burt Lancaster, a sergeant in Fred Zinnemann’s era-defining From Here to Eternity (1953), now the officer in command at a besieged outpost, puts in a performance laconic enough to remind you of that term’s origin in the terseness of Spartan rhetoric. Thomson has as ever cast his net widely. I’m about two hours into Masaki Kobayashi’s epic The Human Condition (1959-61), with a further seven to go.

I thought that one way to get to grips with the American model would be to watch a film I’d not seen before that earns a chapter to itself in The Fatal Alliance. Fury (2014), written and directed by David Ayer, is a coming-of-age saga set for the most part in the shuddering interior of a Sherman tank. The Sherman, produced in vast numbers, was at once one of the weapons that won the Second World War and a potential death-trap, highly vulnerable to anti-tank fire and to the superior performance of the more advanced Wehrmacht models. In the British army, Shermans were apparently known as Ronsons because, like the celebrated cigarette lighter, they lit ‘first time, every time’. In Fury, Private Norman Ellison (Logan Lerman), a recruit as green as they come, joins a battle-hardened crew under the leadership of Sergeant Don ‘Wardaddy’ Collier (Brad Pitt). It’s April 1945, and they’re about to drive like hell into the heart of Germany. For the next hour or so, Ellison learns his trade the hard way under Wardaddy’s unforgiving gaze.

Altogether less expected is the scope of the extra-vehicular ‘education’ Wardaddy seems ready to offer the young man. As the crews relax after taking a small town, Wardaddy leads Norman into a building where they find two women, Irma (Anamaria Marinca) and her young cousin Emma (Alicia von Rittberg). While Irma fries the eggs Wardaddy has managed to scavenge and boils some water for him to shave in, Norman and Emma repair to a convenient piano (he plays, she sings, they bond). Wardaddy now has his top off, so Thomson is able to poke some gentle fun at Pitt’s ‘enviable torso’ (then there’s the haircut: that tank must have been carrying a crate-load of gel). He’s right to draw attention to the star’s beauty. But quite a lot else happens in the scene. We realise that Emma and Norman are gazing in rapt attention at Wardaddy, who now has his back turned to them. We were expecting a further dose of enviable torso. What we get instead is a mottled fretwork of deep scarring. At some point in his eventful career, Wardaddy has evidently had to extricate himself in a hurry from a blazing tank. Thus dignified by suffering, he can proceed to pass on the rest of what he knows to his apprentice. ‘If you don’t take her to that bedroom,’ he tells Norman, ‘I will.’ The scene takes place exactly halfway through the film. It lets us know that Wardaddy, marked as a sacrificial victim by the damage done to his body, is unlikely to make it to the end of the campaign. Norman is already odds-on to survive. The fury to come (including the film’s battlefield raison d’être, a climactic last-ditch stand in the now disabled tank) carries an air of redundancy. Here’s a war film in which the representation of battle – ‘Night is falling,’ Thomson observes, ‘so the gunfire will be prettier’ – is at once the whole point and a complete waste of time.

Born and raised in London, Thomson is now an American citizen. As the book progresses, it becomes increasingly clear that the audience he has primarily in mind is that of his fellow citizens. These are the people who must continue to ask themselves if they’re up for it. So there’s no avoiding Vietnam. Thomson’s at times excoriating critique of the best-known ’Nam films – The Deer Hunter (1978), Apocalypse Now (1979), Platoon (1986) – is both shrewd and heartfelt. Indeed, starting as it does on page 299 out of 384, it seems like a significant clenching of the book’s mood and tone. It’s followed immediately by a chapter on Mel Gibson, star of We Were Soldiers (2002) – ‘a triumph of combat and the most deplorable Vietnam picture ever made’ – and more recently director of a series of films notable for the lively interest they take in the infliction of ‘damage and pain’. Gibson’s world is ‘a place where cinema meets anthropology’, Thomson declares, ‘and the plain bloodlust in audiences – in us – is set free.’ No more so than in Apocalypto (2006), an epic saga of ambush, enslavement and escape set in the last days of Mayan civilisation. Apocalypto is ‘Trumpian cinema’, Thomson remarks: you can feel Gibson’s ‘contempt for us’ and ‘shudder at the power it may attain’. After some further discussion of the more benign version of the All Quiet-plus-sergeants model delivered by Hollywood’s pre-eminent ‘unit’, Spielberg and Hanks, The Fatal Alliance concludes on a note of menace. ‘That is war’s weather system, the idea of being under control. Oppressed, yet sort of safe? Warn yourself.’

The chapter on Gibson includes a revealing aside. To put violence on screen is a ‘laborious’ business, Thomson points out, ‘boring almost’. You can scrap the ‘almost’ when it comes to the final forty minutes of Apocalypto, which chronicle the hero’s escape from captivity. The cinematography is sumptuous, and the performances brim with conviction. But the resulting ‘rush of brutalism’, as Thomson puts it, can’t altogether conceal the fact that the sequence amounts to a long wait for the carefully calculated unveiling of a series of stunts – multi-pronged deathtrap, slo-mo duel, oh-shit leap over the edge of a precipice – which have surely seen better days. These sequences depend on a steady escalation of effect, and thus on overload. Their chief characteristic is the necessary occlusion of significant detail. It’s striking that Thomson couldn’t find any battle scenes to include in his illuminating guide to Moments That Made the Movies (2013). I can only recall two such moments from Black Hawk Down. Both occur during the uncanny hiatus created when a civilian strays into the line of fire. Thomson certainly has me warning myself. But I also think that there’s a great deal more to be said about those war films which know perfectly well that gunfire is boring.

My introduction to patriotic filmmaking came in the shape of The Guns of Navarone (1961), adapted from a novel by Alistair MacLean and directed by J. Lee Thompson. By the beginning of the 1960s, the war’s most photogenic episodes had all been used up: The Colditz Story, The Dam Busters, Sink the Bismarck! It was time to let the old action adventure format loose on some vaguely plausible military scenarios. In The Guns of Navarone, a team of crack saboteurs led by Major Roy Franklin (Anthony Quayle) makes its way across a notional Aegean island towards a fortress which houses deep within it a battery of big guns. Franklin breaks a leg and has to be left behind, so the rather more wolfish Captain Keith Mallory (Gregory Peck) takes over. The team is harried all the way. Someone has been revealing their movements to the enemy. The finger points at a young partisan, Anna (Gia Scala), whom Mallory has evidently fallen for. It can’t be her, surely. The proof of her loyalty lies in a brutal whipping at the hands of Nazi interrogators infuriated by her refusal to talk. But hang on a moment. No one has ever actually seen the scars. Time to have a look. The effect when the back of Anna’s dress is pulled roughly open is the opposite of the pivot Pitt executes in Fury. We’d hoped for a redemptive disfigurement. What we get instead is a glimpse of flawlessness. Scala’s back, unencumbered by anything as fussy as a bra strap, proves to be as beautiful as Brad’s front; which means that Anna is indeed a traitor.

This isn’t just an interlude of erotic theatre before the killing resumes in earnest. The killing does resume, but only as a diversion. Lured out of the fortress by some cunningly spread disinformation, the garrison is to be kept busy by means of ambush and sniping while Mallory slips in to spike the guns. The military feint is also the film’s. For its narrative climax concerns the ingenuity about to be displayed by Mallory’s urbane companion, the explosives expert Corporal John Miller (David Niven, thank goodness, when it was meant to be Kenneth More). Anna has somehow contrived to destroy or remove key elements of Miller’s kit, including all the fuses and timers. So it’s down to him to improvise a solution with what he has left. The enemy, alerted to their presence, hammers at the door. Mallory can only scurry around aimlessly as the dapper sapper booby-traps the hoist used to ferry ammunition from the magazine below. It’s a taut little scene. Niven, up to his waist in water, fell seriously ill while filming it. The suspense, as we await the outcome of these experiments, is real enough – and almost entirely abstract.

The Guns of Navarone is of course by no means unique in the delight it takes in improvisation. Prisoner-of-war movies, an enduringly popular subgenre, consist of little else. Thomson would no doubt want to remind us of the lethal consequences of wartime inventiveness. He’s rightly struck by the grim elegance of the scene in Spielberg’s Empire of the Sun (1987) in which young Jim Graham (Christian Bale) sees a ‘dazzling light in the sky’ that he isn’t yet able to identify as the detonation over Nagasaki. But his overriding emphasis on the guilty pleasure induced by scenes of battle does detract to some degree from the war film’s capacity to reflect on the sorts of long-term social and cultural change that improvisation in a time of emergency might be thought to have encouraged. I’m not sure, for example, that he entirely fulfils his promise to make as much as he can of ‘women at war’. Given his strong interest in films set in occupied Europe, it’s odd that he has nothing at all to say here about Claude Chabrol’s Une affaire de femmes (1988), which earns warm commendation in the New Biographical Dictionary. The heroine, Marie Latour (Isabelle Huppert), is based on Marie-Louise Giraud, who lived with her husband and two children in a run-down area of Cherbourg. Giraud was guillotined by the Vichy state on 30 July 1943 for performing 27 illegal abortions. Une affaire takes an unflinching look at wartime improvisations in both business and pleasure (Chabrol was obsessed with Madame Bovary). It’s also a film about battle in which barely a shot is fired. The men who betray, prosecute and punish Latour believe that a moral crusade is the only way to restore national pride after devastating military defeat. In punishing her, they have taken revenge, as one of them puts it, on their own cowardice.

Thomson does speculate at some length as to whether or not the military ‘unit’ will remain an exclusively male preserve. There’s an entertaining paragraph on Demi Moore as a female warrior in Scott’s G.I. Jane (1997), ‘buffed and cropped and going through intense training tests to prove a girl could do it’. Buffing and cropping is, however, only one of the many roles war has encouraged or obliged women to undertake, since the shape of battle changes too. Cinema has long found a subject in the emergence around 1900 of the figure of the female go-between or medium: a figure by then as necessary to the smooth functioning of the secretarial pool, telegraph office and telephone switchboard as it was to that of the séance. Women, it turned out, were good – more efficient than men, less obtrusive – at transcription, at encoding and decoding.

Filmmakers cottoned on quickly. The protagonist of the Selig Polyscope Company’s American Civil War drama Pauline Cushman, the Federal Spy (1913) is a Union spy who hacks into the Confederate army’s communications system by holding between her teeth one end of a ramrod, while the other end has been pushed through a wall and up against a telegraph sounder in the next room, ‘so receiving the vibrations of the dots and dashes as they are ticked off’. The onset of the First World War rapidly accelerated the feminisation of data transfer. Between 1915 and 1919, more than six hundred women were recruited to work alongside male civil servants and military personnel at MI5’s London headquarters. The foundations had been laid for Bletchley Park.

Mata Hari may have been the most celebrated female spy of the First World War, especially as played by Greta Garbo. But the more thoughtful retrospective accounts put the stress on ingenuity. The opening ten minutes of Victor Saville’s Dark Journey (1937) constitute a user’s guide to the strategies appropriate to the clandestine transfer of information across national borders. It’s the spring of 1918. Madeleine Goddard (Vivien Leigh), a couturier travelling on a Swiss passport, is returning to Stockholm, where she owns a shop, after a business trip to Paris. She has a trunk full of dresses to back her up. The dresses are the key. Or, rather, they contain the key. It’s not long before Goddard is displaying one of them to a room full of German intelligence officers in a luxurious mansion somewhere on the Swedish coast. Aligning this gauzy creation with a map of the Western Front etched on a lampshade, she is able to read off a series of numbers and placenames that reveal the current positions of the Third and Fourth Groups of the French army. This information is transmitted by means of a portable optical telegraph to a yacht offshore, and thence by wireless to Section Eight of the German secret service in Berlin. What matters is the efficacy of the code, not the means by which it has been transmitted: a dress is as good a method as an optical telegraph or a wireless set. We may also have noticed, however, that as her initial message is relayed up the chain of command, control over its transmission passes from a female exponent of technique to a hierarchy of male exponents of technology.

That was to change, in the real world, and then in cinema. In Charles Crichton’s Against the Wind (1948), a team of SOE agents led by a Catholic priest (Robert Beatty) is parachuted into Belgium for the purpose of rescuing a local resistance leader from captivity. The team includes a radio operator, Michèle Denis (Simone Signoret), and an older man, Max Cronk (Jack Warner). Cronk is a double agent: a discovery not made until they’re already on their way to Belgium. The decisive scene takes place in the kitchen of the remote farmhouse where the team has assembled. As the others disperse, Denis remains at the farmhouse with Cronk, awaiting the first radio transmission from London. She’s seated in front of the sewing machine which contains the radio set, while he shaves in a mirror at the far end of the room. The technology of data transfer has been feminised as thoroughly as its technique. Denis is in control. The editing isolates the protagonists in an equal and opposite ignorance. Then it switches for the first time to a two-shot, as Denis begins to decode and transcribe the message she’s receiving from London, which unmasks Cronk. There’s a gun in the sewing machine too. Denis waits until Cronk has turned to face her and pulls the trigger.

Bloody hell, I thought when I first saw the film, she’s just shot Dixon of Dock Green. Warner was to appear in all 432 episodes of the celebrated BBC series of that name about everyday life in a London police station, each of which begins with him delivering a homily from its doorstep (‘Evening all’). He had already made his name as the embodiment of imperturbable Cockney good humour and worldly wisdom in It Always Rains on Sunday (1947) and Easy Money (1948). Like the few other British war films released in the years immediately after 1945, Against the Wind no longer feels under any obligation to maintain morale. But it’s not yet ready to indulge in the nostalgic myth-making of The Dam Busters or The Guns of Navarone. How might its original audience have felt as they watched the moment that makes it? Not oppressed, I’d imagine – but not exactly safe either.

Vol. 46 No. 14 · 18 July 2024

Doing It in Hellfire

Blake Morrison

The Road to the Country

by Chigozie Obioma.

Hutchinson Heinemann, 358 pp., £16.99, May, 978 1 5291 5346 0

Kunle is a law student in Lagos with little grasp of what’s happening in the country. When his uncle asks, ‘You have heard that there is war in Eastern Region, abi?’ he shakes his head. He’s a lonely, ‘hermitic’ sort of boy. Since his transistor radio ran out of batteries, he hasn’t kept up with current events. Now term is over there’s no excuse for him not to visit his parents, who live a five-hour bus ride away. When he sees their distress he understands the risk that war poses to his younger brother, Tunde, who has gone to live in the east with the family of a childhood friend, Nkechi. It’s clear what he must do: bring Tunde home at once, thereby redeeming himself in the eyes of his parents and atoning for his ‘sin’.

The sin was a game with Nkechi that led to Tunde, aged six, rushing into the road, where he was knocked down by an Oldsmobile; he has been in a wheelchair ever since. Kunle has been told, many times, not to blame himself, but guilt has ‘greyed his life like a wet cloth’. A journey into the war zone will be fraught with danger. But he’s resourceful enough to volunteer for the Red Cross, which carries supplies to the Eastern Region. When the station wagon he’s travelling in is stopped at a checkpoint and he is interrogated by a Nigerian soldier on the lookout for rebels, he knows the right answer to give, even if it’s only half-true: no, his tribe isn’t Igbo, it’s Yoruba. Safely through and over the Niger Bridge he enters a new country: ‘Welcome to Biafra!’

He has the address for Tunde, and sneaks away from the Red Cross team one night to rescue him. But his sense of direction is no better than his knowledge of war. Lost in a forest of gunfire and corpses, he’s arrested by Biafran soldiers and taken to their commander, who wears a green Fidel Castro cap. ‘So, a westerner, eh?’ ‘Yes, sa. But my mother is Igbo.’ ‘Hmm, so you came to help us?’ ‘Yes, sa.’ Which is how Kunle, the least likely of combatants, comes to be enlisted in the Biafran Armed Forces, ‘a man who must fight in a war against his will’.

To those who remember it, the abiding image of the civil war of 1967-70, fought between Nigerian federalists and Biafran secessionists, isn’t of the actual fighting, or the divided international support (the UK and the Soviet Union were pro-Nigeria, France and Israel pro-Biafra), or the battle between two colonels, Gowon and Ojukwu (both British-educated, courtesy of Sandhurst and Oxford), but of children suffering severe malnutrition. Though the death toll was reportedly as high as three million, and though Western authors, from Kurt Vonnegut to Frederick Forsyth, witnessed the struggle, insider accounts weren’t much encouraged in the aftermath. ‘Why has the war not been discussed, or taught to the young, over forty years after its end?’ Chinua Achebe asked in his memoir There Was a Country (2012), which considers whether Nigeria was guilty of genocide by enforcing starvation. Fictional accounts of the war aren’t lacking, though. Buchi Emecheta published hers, Destination Biafra, in 1982. And recently there have been several more, including Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s stupendous Half of a Yellow Sun (2006), which has a bibliography of thirty books about the war.

Chigozie Obioma’s acknowledgments are more selective, just a dozen or so titles. But he has drawn heavily, as Adichie did, on the memories of an earlier generation: his father took him to interview both Biafran and federal veterans. The Road to the Country is a painstaking novel, and necessarily a painful one too, given the abundance of corpses and vultures. Unlike Half of a Yellow Sun, with its trio of viewpoints, it concentrates on the story of one man, Kunle, whose engagement in war is at best reluctant and at worst timorous and inept. The plight of the ingénu soldier is as classic a set-up for war fiction as the detective hauled from retirement is for crime fiction. ‘It is a story as old as time itself, told across cultures and among all people: a man is thrust into something beyond him.’

Bullets zip past. Shells crash down. Bodies pile up. There’s the ‘odour of the battlefront: mud, urine, blood, gunpowder, sweat’ and ‘a continuous realm of noise, of rumbling and rattling, of cries and screams and clicking of triggers and chamber bolts’. Kunle is wounded several times. Awarded a lance corporal chevron, he’s acclaimed by comrades (‘the last time he’d been celebrated this way’, he reflects, was ‘when he’d won the debate competition in the primary school’). In retreat from the enemy, or ‘vandals’, he wades up to his shoulders across a river. In quieter moments he listens to men wiser than he is argue about the intricacies of war, not least the involvement of white men in a Black conflict. ‘Is it not because of Wilson and Britain that we are losing this war?’ one man asks. ‘Yes,’ another replies,

but also, look everywhere. The only reason we are alive and still fighting is because of white people. Look at the fathers – Caritas, Irish Council of Priests, Holy Ghost Fathers, and all the people coming in to give food. How many foreign pilots have died trying to help our people. Eh? More than fifty! At least fifty. And who is killing us? Our own people – our brothers.

Despite the loss of life and ceding of ground, Kunle is struck by a sense that ‘the cause he’s been unwillingly roped into may actually be a good one.’ But soon afterwards, conscious that the people now killing one another were good neighbours just a few weeks ago, ‘he feels a sudden force pulling him away from his resolve to stick with his comrades … And in the misery, the longing for home returns.’ The thread of the novel is vacillation: ‘One moment he is happy, and then a sadness cycles into his day.’ His turmoil is frustrating, for the reader as well as for him: the same note over and over. But the lesson he learns is that turmoil and frustration define war; the novel is as much Bildungsroman as battle song. After a failed attempt to escape one night, he lies awake reading a stolen copy of Jane Eyre.

War deprives him of solitude; the shy boy comes out of his shell. Of his three comrades, Felix, Bube-Orji and Ekpeyong, he is closest to Felix, a poet. Half of a Yellow Sun features a poet too, Okeoma, inspired by Christopher Okigbo, one of the Biafran war’s saddest casualties. Felix is upbeat about the chances of victory and fierce in the cause: when he discovers new Nigerian banknotes on a civilian suspected of being a saboteur, he shoots him dead, which leaves Kunle feeling anger and ‘revulsion’. They argue but are quickly reconciled. In war the great fear is dying alone: you want ‘companionship, even in its most cradle form’. Conditions are squalid: the recruits ‘cry constantly, leave snot smeared on their faces, wet and shit themselves’. The solace for Kunle is friendship with fellow soldiers, though one of them, a new arrival, Agnes, is not a fellow at all.

Agnes’s strength and self-containment remind him of Nkechi, his childhood friend; despite their long separation, he still harbours romantic feelings for her. When relations with Agnes become more intimate, he’s baffled. ‘Why does she like me?’ he asks Felix, who has an earnest poet’s response: ‘Because you are mysterious … what do you think is a great poem or even art? It is one that you cannot easily interpret.’ Consummation is inevitable. Kunle, a virgin, needs to discover sex and the novel needs jouissance to offset the carnage:

Their mouths clatter in a rushed, frenzied kiss. She is raw and grasping, trembling at the concussions. He steers her towards the big tree and slides into her from behind … As he reaches the threshold of pleasure, he finds that her moaning voice – shaped by the acoustic beats of the distant concussions – feels like a violent thing. After he has dropped down among the dry leaves, she laughs at the sheer madness of the act.

‘We are doing it inside hellfire,’ she says.

‘Threshold of pleasure’: the idiom is seemly and old-fashioned (elsewhere there is a reference to ‘the hardening of his organ’), as if the context or the era require it. When Obioma describes wounded and dead bodies, which he does often, he’s similarly challenged. The temptation is to reach for arresting similes – as, say, Christopher Logue does when redoing Homer in War Music. But anything fancy here looks undignified. The result is an awkward mix, photorealism and metaphor bumping up against each other: ‘the charred body of a dead man whose head has morphed into something gory, alien, as of eyes and skin melted on a deformed, plastic blob’; ‘decaying bodies of soldiers, stripped naked or in rotting camouflage, flowers springing from the bodies and mushrooms fruiting between the bones’; ‘he is blinking, thick blood coursing from his neck like the mealy saliva of a stricken beast.’ Sometimes the descriptions aren’t just unconvincing but contradictory. ‘They watch the parachute drop like a stone, the white thing fluttering above the parachutist’ – can a parachute flutter and drop like a stone at the same time? And can you be ‘beaten by the crude anvils of suffering’ rather than beaten on them?

Kunle’s romance with Agnes complicates his situation: it’s another reason to stick with the war rather than run away. Further complication comes with the periodic appearances of ‘the Seer’, Igbala, who – in an episode set in 1947, twenty years before the Biafra conflict – has a prophetic vision revealing the future of a man about to be born, Kunle, ‘the rarest of mankind, an abami eda: one who will die and return to life’. Like Kunle, the Seer is searching for redemption, after an accident that killed his wife. If what’s disclosed to him in the vision were believed, the war might never happen; Nigerians, he warns, must learn to live with people from other ethnic groups. But no one is willing to trust a crazy prophet, least of all Kunle’s Christian family: ‘we don’t use idols and pagan gods in our home,’ they tell him when he visits. Still, the Seer’s investment is so intense that Kunle can feel his presence; the wall between them is ‘hymen thin’. His interruptions of the main narrative carry the promise that Kunle will survive, despite a section in which he consorts with the dead and seems to have perished from a head wound.

Obioma’s previous novel, An Orchestra of Minorities (2019), employs a similar device, with an Igbo guardian spirit or ‘chi’ narrating the story and influencing the ‘host’ at its centre. And his first novel, The Fishermen (2015), has a ‘vision-seeing madman’, Abulu, who predicts that one of the narrator’s brothers will be killed by a ‘fisherman’, which Ikenna takes to mean his brother Boja. For half of The Fishermen, which is lighter in tone than The Road to the Country despite the shadow of fratricide, the tension comes from wondering whether Abulu, a ‘devil’ who dresses in rags, will be proved right. Igbala the Seer is more solidly based: he’s not a magic realist chimera. But his vision enlarges the novel. And his spiritual promptings lie behind Kunle’s view of the war as more than a local squabble:

As Kunle listens to each of his comrades’ stories, it occurs to him that they are all wrong in their understanding of the cause of the war. This war has not merely grown out of the dark desires of evil men who had set upon their Igbo neighbours in the north, killing and wreaking destruction. Instead, it seems the war sprouted out of the natural soil of society and has been growing for many thousands of years in the old blood of mankind itself. If it had not been the north, perhaps it would have been someone else starting the fighting, or even Nigeria against other countries. War, he thinks, is something inherent in mankind: to strike another for a cause, no matter what the cause might be.

After his head injury, Kunle is given the opportunity to leave the war and go home. But he wants Agnes to join him, and she’s committed to fighting in revenge for the death of her family. Only towards the end of the conflict does he recognise that ‘for the past several months he’s been hovering’ and might now be ‘finally entering himself’.

As Obioma sees it, The Road to the Country isn’t ‘wartime fiction’ like Half of a Yellow Sun, which follows characters (mostly middle-class) living through a war, but ‘war fiction’, where the focus is on the people doing the fighting rather than civilians. Not that the novel underplays the harm to civilians: Kunle remarks that they’re often at greater risk. But the setting is the forests where battles are fought, where ‘bush rebels’ bravely resist better equipped forces. Kunle ought not to be there. But he becomes a man in the process, not just through encountering death but by understanding what matters to him in life, including family, fraternity and, to his surprise, fatherhood.

Vol. 46 No. 14 · 18 July 2024

Short Cuts

Medicine Shortages

Gavin Francis

After I finish my morning clinic as a GP there are a few tasks that I have to get done before heading out on home visits. The first is to check my inbox. There are always some messages from the government, public health alerts, emails from hospital consultants and district nurses with concerns about mutual patients, emails from the local medical school regarding students. Most GPs are independent contractors, not salaried to the NHS, a model which is cheaper for the taxpayer but means that doctors have to deal with a lot of the minutiae entailed in managing a small business. After the emails there will be hospital correspondence and test results to review, and after that there are prescriptions to sign.

Though digital prescriptions have been introduced in some parts of the UK, most GPs still sign a little slip of paper for every prescription they issue – 1.41 billion of them in the UK in the financial year 2022-23. The hope is that in time we can phase out the bits of paper altogether in favour of electronic barcodes. Pharmacists would then simply check a patient’s ID, see the prescription on their computer system and dispense it.

Recently there has been an additional strand of work for GPs to complete before they can get out on visits: amending prescriptions they have already issued. If a pharmacist doesn’t have a medication I have prescribed, they send the bit of paper back to me with a note saying ‘Can you prescribe an alternative?’ Pharmacists are highly trained professionals but they can’t legally issue a substitute for the intended prescription themselves. To find out what they have on their shelves, or what they can get hold of, I usually end up trying to get the pharmacist on the phone, adding further delay to my morning and theirs.

This used to be an occasional irritation, but it’s becoming routine. Between 2021 and 2023 there was a 67 per cent increase in the number of reports from pharmaceutical manufacturers that a medication was in short supply. In June I was helping to manage a community outbreak of whooping cough when the whole town ran out of clarithromycin suspension, the recommended antibiotic for the acute phase in children. None could be found, and I was reduced to asking the parents of affected children to get a pestle and mortar to grind up tablets and hide the powder in yoghurt. A few months ago we had an outbreak of scarlet fever and did the same with tablets of penicillin. The pestle and mortar is one of the oldest symbols of the pharmaceutical profession; it’s an unexpected twist in the spiralling problems of the health service that in 2024 we’re having to recommend returning to it.

Outbreaks of infectious disease are one thing, and it could be argued that, given the unpredictable nature of focal epidemics, it’s unreasonable to expect that the supply of antibiotics will always meet demand. But we are now seeing shortages of medicines that people take month in, month out. A House of Commons report in May listed a few of the reasons: geopolitical factors such as the war in Ukraine, the after-effects of the Covid pandemic and the disruption of supply chains in the wake of Brexit. It also pointed to manufacturing and distribution problems (the result of a lack of agility among pharmaceutical companies) and – more worrying – ‘severe’ financial pressures on pharmacies. Community pharmacies buy medicines with their own funds and are reimbursed for the ones they dispense under the auspices of the NHS according to the Drug Tariff, a list of prices set by the government. When global prices rise, the government can arrange a ‘price concession’, but may not do so straight away and won’t necessarily reimburse the full amount, so pharmacies stand to make a loss.

The report includes case studies on several drugs whose supply, as I know from my own experience, can be unreliable: the medicines to manage type 2 diabetes and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, and the drugs comprising Hormone Replacement Therapy. The Royal College of GPs recently raised concerns that the diabetes drug Ozempic is in short supply because private clinics who use it ‘off-label’ as a slimming agent are buying up stocks to sell it at a premium. This is a global problem: a recent study from Denmark showed that between 2021 and 2023 the number of people prescribed Ozempic almost trebled, though a third of its users didn’t have a diagnosis of type 2 diabetes – they were being prescribed it as a dieting drug. Abuse by private clinics has been suggested as one of the reasons ADHD drugs are in such short supply, too, but in this case there have also been surges in diagnoses and prescriptions in recent years: 660,000 ADHD prescriptions were issued in NHS England in 2010, but more than 1.5 million in 2020. A recent study at UCL found that, between 2000 and 2018, there was a twenty-fold increase in ADHD diagnoses among young men and a near fifty-fold increase in prescriptions. There are a wealth of generic suppliers of most cardiac or diabetic medications, but only a limited number of manufacturers of ADHD drugs, which means that a hiccup in a single company’s supply chain can have protracted global effects. To take just one example, Takeda, a key supplier of Adderall, blamed recent glitches in supply on a packaging problem at one of its sites.

The UK isn’t alone in all this, but some factors peculiar to its situation have undoubtedly made things worse. In April the Nuffield Trust issued a report detailing what it described as ‘fragilities’ in the UK’s supply chains, with Brexit one of the chief causes (since it reduced the value of the pound and created new obstructions to trade across borders). The NHS has huge purchasing power and is able to drive the price of drugs down to levels so low that, if a medicine is in short supply globally, it can be more trouble than it’s worth for manufacturers to navigate the UK’s many barriers to trade. Earlier this year the EU offered incentives to Big Pharma to build more manufacturing plants and create a stockpile of commonly used medications to smooth out supply for member states – a stockpile to which the UK will have no access, and which won’t make it any easier for the UK to meet its own needs.

In March 2024 the Lord Bishop of St Albans submitted a written question to the government asking how many preventable hospitalisations had occurred because of Brexit-induced medicine shortages. Lord Markham, Tory under-secretary of state for health and social care, replied disingenuously: ‘The department has no evidence of the EU exit leading to sustained medicines shortages.’ But if you need a drug every day, you don’t care whether the shortage is ‘sustained’ or not – even one day’s delay is a problem. One of the medications affected is liquid salbutamol, which is delivered through a nebuliser to treat a severe asthma attack. If you are unfortunate enough to be in need of nebulised salbutamol, you need it right now. Another potential drag on supplies, as I mentioned already, is the sluggishness of government in making price concessions to pharmacies. In 2023 the surging price of atorvastatin, a cholesterol-lowering drug which is the most frequently prescribed medication in the UK (59 million prescriptions in 2022-23), meant that for several months, despite pleas from representatives of community pharmacies, the reimbursement offered by the government was lower than the price pharmacies had to pay for the drug.

Similar issues have beset the supply of HRT. Following a reduced emphasis on potential side-effects in medical guidelines, as well as increasing public awareness and requests for treatment, the number of prescriptions per month went from 238,000 in January 2017 to 538,000 in December 2021. The costs of HRT prescribed by GP practices over the same period increased from £3.2 million to £7 million. HRT drugs have repeatedly been in short supply since 2018. The NHS may have a lot of purchasing power, but it can’t ‘pull rank’ in the market for medications and has no legal right to jump the queue in meeting its own needs. In late 2019 the government was obliged to impose export restrictions on HRT drugs to stop wholesalers taking advantage of higher prices elsewhere.

The House of Commons report from May highlights the government’s introduction, also in 2019, of Serious Shortage Protocols, which give pharmacists some licence to be creative. Instead of sending the slip of paper back to the GP, for instance, they can offer the patient a liquid preparation in place of a capsule, or a greater quantity of tablets of a lower strength. In 2020, the National Supply Disruption Response was introduced to give clinical providers access to an ‘express freight’ mechanism, whereby the international logistics firm Kuehne and Nagel is used to help meet NHS demand for medicines. It’s strange that, in order to overcome trade barriers erected because of Brexit, the NHS is now obliged to pay a private company to circumvent those barriers, but then these are strange times. My own experience suggests that pharmacists somehow find a way to restock their shelves, and go to great lengths to serve those patients with the greatest need ahead of those who make the loudest demands. But until government support for their efforts improves, and drug supply chains become more robust, I imagine I’ll have to continue calling pharmacies to find out what they’re able to get hold of. Meanwhile, it may be a good idea for all of us to keep a pestle and mortar close to hand.

Vol. 46 No. 14 · 18 July 2024

Not a Prophet

Alexander Bevilacqua

Diary of a Black Jewish Messiah: The 16th-Century Journey of David Reubeni through Africa, the Middle East and Europe

by Alan Verskin.

Stanford, 189 pp., £23.99, January 2023, 978 1 5036 3443 5

David Reubeni posed a puzzle to contemporaries; he still poses one today. The Mediterranean world was turbulent in the early decades of the 16th century. The Ottoman Empire toppled the Mamluks in 1517, giving the sultan control over Egypt, Syria and much of the Arabian Peninsula; Western Christian rulers feared that they might be next. In the wake of Martin Luther’s censure of the Catholic Church, the Holy Roman Empire was deeply divided. The Italian states suffered invasions made more violent by the use of newly developed firearms; Rome was sacked by the troops of the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, in 1527.

Many of the Jews who lived around the Mediterranean were on the move, and not by choice. Those who hadn’t converted to Christianity were expelled from the domains of the Spanish crown in 1492, and from the kingdom of Portugal in 1497. The experience of diaspora – initially in North Africa, Italy and the Ottoman Empire – was traumatic. In Italy, the physician and writer Judah Abravanel, who had been separated from his young son, lamented: ‘Time with his pointed shafts has hit my heart/And split my gut, laid open my entrails,/Landed me a blow that will not heal,/Knocked me down, left me in lasting pain.’

In such uncertain times, many dreamed of a distant saviour. Christians across Europe believed in the existence of Prester John, a Christian ruler thought to be based in East Africa, or perhaps the Indian Ocean. They thought that if he could be reached and convinced to launch a military intervention, it might just turn the tide against Ottoman expansion. There were also rumours of a non-Christian ally in the East, the ‘grand khan’ Christopher Columbus had hoped to find in the Indies. Many Jews believed that the Lost Tribes of Israel – who were thought to inhabit an independent Jewish state somewhere beyond the Muslim lands – would rescue the Sephardic Jews in their exile.

For a while it seemed that they might. A man calling himself David, son of Solomon, claimed that he was the brother of Joseph, a Jewish king who ruled in the Arabian desert over three hundred thousand men – or two and a half of the lost tribes. One of these was the tribe of Reuben, hence the name Reubeni. The man had skin so dark one witness compared him to a ‘Kushite’, or Nubian, and a body covered with scars. Reubeni travelled first to the Sudan, Egypt and Syria and then, via Venice, to Rome and Tuscany, before finally visiting Portugal, Spain and the German lands. At each stop he tried to rouse Jews and Christians to defeat the common Muslim enemy; his ultimate goal was ‘to gather Israel from all over and bring them to a settled land’. He was received by rulers and prominent figures almost everywhere he went. He met the pope, the kings of France and Portugal, and the Holy Roman Emperor. As he explained: ‘I have come in search of artisans – skilled in manufacturing weapons and firearms – to travel to my land to manufacture them and teach our soldiers.’ The combination of European artillery and Jewish troops, he suggested, could defeat the Ottomans.

Reubeni spoke only Hebrew and Arabic. He kept kosher and observed religious fasts. But there were signs that he might be a fraud. He was penniless – he claimed that his money had been stolen in Cairo by a treacherous Egyptian – and expected to be housed and fed free of charge. He travelled with a motley and constantly changing coterie of hangers-on and servants, who were always getting into quarrels with one another and with him. Perhaps the pope and the kings agreed to meet him on the off-chance he might be the genuine article. As the historian Zvi Ben-Dor Benite has explained, Reubeni’s story might have seemed plausible because of ‘the long legacy of debates about the [lost] tribes that placed them in the distant, old, southern edge of the world … and furnished them with military prowess’. Reubeni got a hearing, but no Christian ruler was persuaded to fund or arm him. Some Jews proved more receptive. Reubeni insisted, quoting Amos 7:14, that he was not ‘a prophet nor the son of a prophet’, nor ‘a sage or a kabbalist’, but ‘merely an army commander’. Yet many of his followers believed him to be more than a diplomatic envoy – perhaps even the messiah.

Slippery figures like Reubeni usually flit in and out of the historical record. What makes his case exceptional is that he kept a diary: a bracingly frank account of his travels on three continents, written in a colloquial, idiosyncratic Hebrew (the diary might have been taken down by a scribe, so we don’t know whether this reflects Reubeni’s way of speaking). It’s now available to Anglophone readers in unabridged form, translated by Alan Verskin, who has also produced a detailed introduction and notes. The first mention of the diary is in an Inquisition document from 1639. There was also a copy in the 19th-century collection of a Jewish bibliographer in Frankfurt. On his death the copy was sold to the Bodleian Library, but it went missing in 1867. Fortunately, it had been transferred onto tracing paper; Reubeni’s words survive only in this diaphanous facsimile.

The diary begins in 1521 with his departure from the Arabian desert, followed by an effortful journey across the Red Sea. After a stay in what he called the kingdom of Kush (possibly the Funj sultanate, which lay in what is now Sudan, north-western Eritrea and western Ethiopia), he reached Cairo, and from there travelled to Jerusalem, stopping in Gaza and Hebron. Disguised as a Muslim sayyid, or descendant of the Prophet Muhammad, he was received coolly by local Jews. In Egypt the most powerful Jewish figure didn’t let him into his house: ‘If you were to stay in my home, you would bring trouble upon me.’ In Jerusalem prominent Jews appear to have shunned him. (Still in disguise, Reubeni prayed at the Dome of the Rock, on the Temple Mount.) More generously, the Jews of Gaza helped fund his travel to Venice, which he reached via Damietta and Alexandria. But in the Venetian ghetto, too, his reception was frosty. ‘If the rest of the Jews give,’ one person told him, ‘I will give my share.’

Reubeni had greater success with the Christians of Rome. He came under the protection of the learned humanist Cardinal Egidio da Viterbo, in whose household the Jewish scholar Elijah Levita studied kabbalistic works. Cardinal Egidio was also godfather to the Moroccan diplomat Leo Africanus, who had been captured by Christian pirates in 1518 and converted from Islam to Christianity in 1520. During the cardinal’s spell as papal legate in Spain in 1518, he commissioned an early Latin translation of the Quran by another convert, Juan Gabriel of Teruel, which Africanus later corrected. Reubeni must have encountered Levita and Africanus, though ‘to the enduring frustration of historians’, in Verskin’s words, there is no account of these meetings.

In Rome, Reubeni was accused of wanting to convince local Sephardic conversos to return to their ancestral religion. Unconverted Italian Jews didn’t always welcome him either. ‘I have no desire for Jerusalem,’ a wealthy Sienese Jew told him. ‘I desire nothing but to stay here in Siena.’ In 1525 Reubeni left Rome and set sail for Portugal. Egidio had brokered Reubeni’s audiences with Pope Clement VII, who had then written Reubeni a letter of introduction to John III, the king of Portugal. The only European ruler whose ships sailed to the Indian Ocean, John was the right person to approach about a conquest intended to be launched from the Red Sea. He took Reubeni seriously at first, and promised him ships, but soon came to distrust him. For one thing, Reubeni had welcomed too many conversos into his home. This was a sensitive issue because the conversos of Iberia, though nominally Christian, remained susceptible to Jewish messianic hopes. A few decades earlier Inés of Herrera, a young conversa who had apocalyptic visions, started to gain a wide following; she was tried by the Holy Office and burned at the stake at the age of twelve. To make matters worse, during Reubeni’s time in Portugal a high-ranking gentile called Diogo Pires was inspired to convert to Judaism. According to the diary, he asked Reubeni to circumcise him; fearing the repercussions for both men, Reubeni refused. Pires performed the act himself and took the name Solomon Molkho. He soon left the country and became a messianic prophet himself. Reubeni was ordered to leave Portugal and decided to return to Italy via Spain, where he was arrested when his letters of introduction were called into question.

The diary breaks off at this point. There is a brief epilogue written by an Italian Jew who had served as his chamberlain and who tried to sort out his messy financial affairs. What happened to Reubeni next can be pieced together from other sources. He was freed by the Spanish authorities, and eventually made it back to Italy, where he was caught forging a letter from his brother in Mantua in 1530. A local rabbi denounced him as ‘this evil Haman’ (the villain of the Book of Esther) for putting Italian Jews at risk. He returned to Venice, where the local Jews treated him ‘like a messiah’, according to the geographer Giovanni Battista Ramusio. Reubeni was reunited with Molkho, who by then had his own following, and the pair set out for Regensburg, intending to meet Charles V at the Imperial Diet of 1532. The Jewish leader Josel of Rosheim left town when he learned of this plan, keen to show that he had nothing to do with it. This was a wise move: Charles V had both men arrested and sent back to Italy, where Molkho was burned at the stake later that year. Reubeni was imprisoned for several years, first in Mantua and then in Llerena in Spain. He was tried by the Spanish Inquisition in 1538 for proselytising Judaism, condemned and burned at the stake – possibly the only unconverted Jew ever to be prosecuted on those grounds.

The diary paints an unflattering portrait of its author. Reubeni could be an ungrateful guest, describing the home of one host as ‘a bad house with a bad smell’. When his interpreters stayed for Passover, he complained that they ‘caused me great expense because they ate a lot and had a taste for delicacies’. He also complained about servants: one of them, an early follower called Joseph, was prone to violence. It probably didn’t help that Reubeni seems to have seen wages as optional: ‘the servants who attended me did so on account of their love of God and did not ask for any payment.’ The diary is equally candid about his own bad temper. On encountering a locked door in a house where he was staying, he found an axe and smashed it. When one converso criticised Judaism, Reubeni reached out to strike him. His nemesis at the Portuguese court, a courtier called Dom Miguel, provoked particular rage in Reubeni, but anyone who displeased him or refused to do his bidding was ‘a complete villain’.

One question the diary leaves unresolved is that of Reubeni’s appearance. The contemporary consensus was that his skin was dark, even ‘black’. His follower Daniel da Pisa referred to his ‘black visage’; another witness described him as ‘black as a Nubian’. In the 16th century, Reubeni’s dark skin would have been as likely to inspire wonder as to trigger a sense of racial superiority. It’s true that Jews didn’t have entirely positive views about Black people. The 12th-century Jewish traveller Benjamin of Tudela wrote that in the land of Kush lived ‘the black slaves, the sons of Ham’, who ‘have not the intelligence of ordinary men’. He believed that they went around naked, grazed like animals and committed incest. Tudela wasn’t alone in taking sub-Saharan Africans to be the descendants of Noah’s son Ham. In a puzzling passage in Genesis, Noah curses his grandson Canaan (‘a servant of servants shall he be’), even though it is Ham, Canaan’s father, who has sinned. The passage doesn’t mention blackness, yet from the Middle Ages onwards it was taken to justify the slavery of Black people. As David Goldenberg has shown, this specious interpretation was adopted by Christians and Muslims as well as Jews. Writing in 1627, the minister John Weemse expressed a view that had become widespread: ‘This curse to be a servant was laid, first upon a disobedient sonne Cham, and wee see to this day, that the Moores, Chams posteritie, are sold like slaves yet.’

There is no evidence that Reubeni thought of himself as Black. In the diary he never describes his physical appearance or expresses a sense of kinship with the Black people he encounters. In Portugal, he purchased two enslaved young Black men, whom he called ‘Kushite slaves’. When the older one got into a fight with another member of Reubeni’s retinue, Reubeni had him tied up, beat him with sticks until they broke, then ordered that he be given one hundred lashes. While some scholars have argued that Reubeni came from Abyssinia, others have suggested that he was Indian or Yemeni. Some have thought him an Ashkenazic, Yiddish-speaking Jew, others a Sephardic, Spanish-speaking one. It has even been suggested that he might not have been Jewish at all. Verskin writes that this debate is ‘fruitless’. By characterising Reubeni as ‘a Jew of colour’ (not a term he would have recognised), Verskin is making the point that neither Reubeni nor his interlocutors considered the different facets of his identity to be incompatible.

Even the most charitable view of Reubeni must contend with the non-existence of the Jewish kingdom he claimed to represent. Did he believe his own story? His diary entries give nothing away. Other aspects of Reubeni’s narrative have also been called into doubt. Only the European leg of his journey can be corroborated with other sources. Some historians have argued that Reubeni made up his travels in the kingdom of Kush. It’s true that their mythical quality sets them apart from the rest of the diary. The otherwise naked Kushite queen and her attendants wear gold bracelets on their arms and legs and ‘cover their genitals with hand-crafted, golden chainwork’. Inevitably, an enslaved girl attempts to seduce Reubeni, but he resists. The Kushites eat ‘elephants, wolves, leopards, dogs, camels, scorpions, frogs and snakes’, and there’s some light cannibalism for good measure.

But Reubeni shouldn’t be judged too harshly for making misleading statements, assuming different identities and keeping his true motivations to himself. In an age before photography, ID documents and searchable government databases, he was far from unique in pretending to be someone he was not. Assuming a false identity was so common that Miriam Eliav-Feldon has described the Renaissance as an ‘age of imposters’. Dissimulation was essential for Iberian Jews who had been forced to convert to Christianity, as it would soon be for their Muslim counterparts who were also forced to convert. People on the move sometimes assumed the identity that seemed most useful: the merchant Samuel Pallache was a practising Jew in Amsterdam and a loyal converso in Spain.

As a Jew, Reubeni posed a threat to the kingdoms of Spain and Portugal, where his religion had been outlawed and even converted Jews were under suspicion. As a self-proclaimed political emissary, he posed a risk to anyone who welcomed him. Every time he travelled, there was a chance that his letters of safe passage would not be recognised. A pure grifter could have found less dangerous ways of making a living. But it seems that Reubeni may have recanted in the end. In 1993, Elias Lipiner uncovered evidence that he converted to Christianity at the eleventh hour, which would have allowed him to be garrotted rather than face the pyre alive. (Verskin doesn’t mention Lipiner’s discovery.) The obvious comparison is with Sabbatai Zevi, a 17th-century mystic and rabbi from Izmir who claimed to be the Jewish messiah then, when threatened by the Ottoman authorities, converted to Islam to save his own life, much to the embarrassment of his followers.

Nineteenth-century scholars tended to judge Reubeni sternly. The historian Heinrich Graetz described him as ‘an adventurer who intentionally deceived others’, while Adolf Poznański, a scholar of Judaism, thought him ‘devoid of all wisdom and learning, capricious and ignorant’. But after the First World War he was reclaimed as a Jewish patriot and a Zionist avant la lettre. In 1925 Max Brod, Kafka’s literary executor, published a historical novel called Reubeni: Prince of the Jews. Brod, who had seen Molkho’s prayer shawl and flag in Prague’s Pinkas synagogue, made Reubeni a Jew from Prague like himself. His Reubeni seeks to reawaken the pride of his fellow Jews; his goal is ‘to create a free people, without distorted souls and shrivelled bodies – a happy people, in whom the whole earth shall rejoice!’ The novel was adapted for the stage and performed in Tel Aviv in 1940. Four years later the Yiddish author David Bergelson wrote a play called Prince Reuveni, which draws parallels between the Inquisition and the Holocaust. Bergelson’s Reubeni wants the Jews to have ‘a foothold somewhere on earth’. The play ends: ‘you fight, my people, that is, you live, my people.’

Vol. 46 No. 14 · 18 July 2024

Push Me Pull You

Andrew O’Hagan

The House of Beckham: Money, Sex and Power

by Tom Bower.

HarperCollins, 376 pp., £22, June, 978 0 00 863887 0

People who write unauthorised biographies often get authorised rebuttals. In 2004, when Kitty Kelley published The Family: The Real Story of the Bush Dynasty, the disaster-prone House majority leader Tom DeLay wrote to her publisher, Doubleday, that she was in an ‘advanced stage of her pathological career’. He also claimed that Doubleday was in a state of ‘moral collapse’. Kelley was opposed to authorised books, believing that the art of biography should never be a branch of the public relations industry, and neither should journalism. ‘Approval’ was irrelevant. It could be said that Kelley often took a little too much pleasure in the delinquencies she spotted. She once stole a badge from Christopher Hitchens that said ‘All the Right Enemies’.

David and Victoria Beckham in 1999.

Choosing whom to hate is an exact science for the enterprising biographer. With an excessive and portable moral hauteur, the intrepid muckraker tends to find subjects whose awfulness plays well with the awfulness of the period, setting the scene for a well-timed explosion of gossip and dirt. David Beckham, who once had a golden right foot, a sweet face, a high voice and a famous willingness to sit around in branded underpants while being photographed by the world’s press, might have proved a sensational subject all by himself, a walking-and-squeaking reality TV show. But the gods of narrative are kind, and at the age of 24 our hero met Victoria Adams, ‘Posh’ Spice, a woman with a rigid pout, a seemingly insatiable appetite for designer everything and instinctively postmodern notions about the possible meaning of privacy. They married in 1999 and have four children, Brooklyn, Romeo, Cruz and Harper, the youngest and the only girl. The Beckhams are British in a new way, a way that wealthy people who live most of the time in places like Dubai and Miami are British, loving the royal family and hating income tax while deploring the press they relentlessly deploy. They fill their days topping up their self-pity and complaining that they haven’t yet got the knighthood they so clearly deserve. There’s a sense of hangover in Tom Bower’s book, as if the grand Thatcherite party finally met the morning, as if Brexit and designer gear and ‘no such thing as society’ finally snuffed itself out, making us glad of the long walk home and the sense that the whole thing was actually an experiment in unreality.

Let’s be clear about Beckham. He likes pineapple on his pizza. He can’t get enough of The Lion King. He admits that he has never read a book in his life, almost certainly including the ones he wrote himself. (He didn’t make it all the way through Posh’s either.) It is said he once posed wearing an Adolf Eichmann T-shirt and carrying a bottle of Moët, without realising who the guy on the T-shirt was, though he recognised the champagne. In his best moments, he’s a reverse Dorothy Parker, curving another déclaration folle into the back of the net. ‘We’re definitely going to get Brooklyn christened,’ he said, ‘but we don’t know into which religion.’ The laughter peters out though when you consider his blithe willingness to lend his name to the Qatari World Cup in 2022, choosing, for ten million dollars, to get behind fossil fuels, homophobia, migrant wage-slavery, the institutional silencing of women and the Taliban. Over and over again he has said money doesn’t matter to him, yet he has allowed his name to become tangled up in ‘business opportunities’ that disgrace him.

Following Beckham from Manchester United to Real Madrid, from there to LA Galaxy, AC Milan, Paris Saint-Germain and his dealings with the Qataris, Bower puts a lot of effort into examining Beckham’s tax affairs, and his allegations provide a portrait of the civic negligence that became rampant in Austerity Britain. Beckham may have joined the 12-hour queue to pay his respects when the queen was lying in state, but the state itself doesn’t matter to him, except in the hugely sentimental way that fans interpret loyalty.

Thankfully, we have Posh to keep up the Lols. The main point about Victoria is that she isn’t what anybody would call posh. The funniest moment in the Netflix hagiography Beckham, directed by Fisher Stevens, is when our eponymous hero pops his head round the door while his wife is being interviewed by Fisher. ‘We both come from families that work really hard,’ she says. ‘We’re very working … working class.’

‘Be honest!’ Beckham says from the door.

‘I am being honest.’

‘Be honest! What car did your dad drive you to school in?’

She fights back for a moment, then turns to the camera like a busted child. ‘OK, in the 1980s, my dad had a Rolls-Royce.’

‘Thank you,’ he says, closing the door.

Bower takes up the story. ‘Tony Adams’s electrical wholesale business had paid for a second-hand Rolls-Royce and a comfortable lifestyle for Jackie [his wife] … Both parents were credited with instilling their daughter with ferocious ambition and a passion for performing.’

In the cosmic sense, it’s probably best if trophy-hunters marry trophy-hunters. The obsession with ‘personal goals’ might even seem natural enough to become a kind of contentment. All the same, it must be pretty exhausting being married to Posh. And sex to her is like something one might do at the gym; she talks very publicly about it in terms of levels, bulk, longevity and girth (‘He does have a huge one … It’s like a tractor exhaust pipe’). Some couples spend time in separate beds, but the Beckhams went for separate continents, with Posh boosting her dying career or pursuing another one (as a fashion designer, earning her decent write-ups and huge losses) while Becks endorsed everything he could touch, failing to impress on foreign football fields. It may be to Posh’s credit that she was not born to be a footballer’s wife, but she did prove fantastically awkward in that role, refusing to move to Spain when he signed with Real Madrid, then refusing to be in Milan or Paris when he played in these cities. What she wanted was Los Angeles. For the former student at the Laine Theatre Arts School in Epsom, hanging out with Tom Cruise in Beverly Hills spelled arrival. Alex Ferguson, who signed Beckham for Manchester United, wasn’t keen on Victoria, or her role as a fashion influencer, dressing David in sarongs, PVC trousers and knitted Tibetan peasant hats. ‘I saw his transition to a different person,’ Ferguson said with irrepressible Glasgow repression.

There’s a ‘tell’ in English prose, established by Daniel Defoe in Moll Flanders. The book seeks to condemn the sexual antics of Moll (at length and with repudiating thunder) only then to undermine the moral objection by allowing the prose to become excited whenever the censured action is described. This trick has served biographers well for centuries. In The House of Beckham Bower roundly condemns Beckham for his alleged affairs, the temperature of his sentences rising before breaking into a sweat. I mean, who really cares whether Beckham, alone in a foreign city at the age of 28, shagged Rebecca Loos in a Madrid hotel or snogged some girl in a nightclub or let a passing model sit on his lap? I don’t believe Bower does, but he brings a level of outrage to the topic that tends to induce the giggles. ‘Loos says now that she was attracted by Beckham’s vulnerability,’ he writes. ‘And inevitably his looks. A one-hour video shot by Sam Taylor-Johnson of Beckham asleep in his Madrid hotel room revealed a stunning Adonis. Bare-chested with flopping blond hair, Taylor-Johnson captured the Sleeping Beauty, the icon.’

I mean, Jilly Cooper couldn’t improve on that, and neither could Defoe. But the Defoe tradition isn’t kind to women. Moll Flanders is a con artist, a thief, ‘an abominable creature’, a kept woman and a curse. Groaning with excited repugnance, Bower appears to hate Posh Spice. ‘Constantly she exposed her breasts for photographers.’ (Exposed her breasts? Constantly? She wore a few low-cut dresses, while her husband lived in his tiny briefs, putting in the hours as an Adonis.) Bower paraphrases a tabloid journalist listing Posh’s similarities to the plumped-up celebrity model Katie Price: ‘fake boobs, fake hair and shovels of make-up’. To him she is all products, trinkets and downright lies, putting her talented man off his stride. She is needy. Emotional. And then of course snobbery emerges to put her very tidily in her place. She is – or wants to be – ‘the check-out girl at the supermarket whom everyone claims to fancy’.

Britain was not a great place during the Beckhams’ reign, and it was a reign – who can forget those velvet thrones at their wedding in Luttrellstown Castle? We learn that they were bought by the Sunday Mirror for £1500 and offered by the newspaper in a competition. The editor suggested that Posh could present them to the winning reader. ‘No,’ Posh’s representative, Caroline McAteer, told the paper. ‘Vic wants them. For nothing.’ Bower reports that

the newspaper’s executive agreed, but only if Victoria agreed to be photographed accepting the newspaper’s gift. McAteer concurred, but there was a hitch. Without a fanfare the thrones were taken off the lorry outside [the Beckhams’] house. The doorbell was rung.

McAteer voiced outrage. ‘Victoria wants to be surprised,’ she said in a fury.

The delivery had to be contrived as a revelation. ‘You mean staged?’ asked the journalist.

From that moment, the Sunday Mirror and every other tabloid journalist understood that Victoria and Beckham wanted to ‘play’ coy. They would appear to resist media intrusion while agreeing to stage ‘impromptu’ photographs. Their collusion with the media was to be disguised.

In this sense, and not only in this sense, they behaved like real royals. The Beckhams learned at the school of Princess Diana how to present as both fabulous and vulnerable, and in their marriage they formed the same push-me-pull-you battle with fakery that typifies the lives of the British royals today, whether at Windsor or the spiritual estates of Montecito. For a couple of decades, the Beckhams took on the mantle of national aspiration when the royals lost their cool, but too much naked ambition has always been mistrusted in Britain, where the Kardashians are mainly something to laugh at. The Beckhams’ choices now seem ridiculous: the Maserati for Romeo’s eighteenth birthday; Brooklyn on the cover of New York magazine under the headline, ‘The Year of the Nepo Baby’; Cruz in i-D magazine with his jeans around his ankles (‘Proud Dad,’ David posted). And Harper Beckham, aged six, going as Cinderella to a birthday party at Buckingham Palace arranged by Prince Andrew’s former wife, ‘wearing £240 Gucci boots, a £695 monogrammed cashmere Burberry coat, a £1525 Versace gown and holding a £1200 Goyard leather mini-bag’. For a different approach to success, consider Taylor Swift’s actions during her current tour of the UK. In every city she’s played, she has made a huge donation to keep the food banks going. The chief executive of St Andrew’s Community Network in Liverpool, which runs eleven food banks and eight community pantries, said her donation would fund them for the next twelve months. In Cardiff, the food bank boss told the Guardian the donation would have a lasting impact on the city.

Bower claims that Beckham didn’t do enough as an envoy for Unicef, didn’t give enough of his own money. I don’t have an opinion on that. But as someone who was a Unicef ambassador myself for more than twenty years, I saw something beyond this low comedy. Despite everything, Beckham’s name and the special kind of inspiration he embodied could make a difference in an instant. In 2006, I went to the Namasimba Child Centre in Malawi. The young girls there were all on antiretroviral drugs to halt the progress of Aids. But the thing I see most clearly is a boy who was scooping sand at the edge of the village. When I went over to speak to him he showed me he could only speak two words of English – ‘David Beckham’.

Vol. 46 No. 14 · 18 July 2024

Five Ring Circus

David Goldblatt

What are the Olympics for?

by Jules Boykoff.

Bristol, 157 pp., £8.99, March, 978 1 5292 3028 4

Igniting the Games: The Evolution of the Olympics and Bach’s Legacy

by David Miller.

Pitch, 272 pp., £12.99, July 2022, 978 1 80150 142 2

Olympism, the strange syncretic invention of Pierre de Coubertin, drew on the baron’s misreading of the ancient games and a wilfully romantic appropriation of the English public school cult of the amateur athlete. Coubertin first called for a revival of the Olympics at a symposium at the Sorbonne in 1892, and in 1894 established the International Olympic Committee (IOC), which chose Athens as the games’ first host city. This month, after a gap of a hundred years, the Olympic Games will return to Paris for a third time.

The first Olympics held in Paris, in 1900, were a farce. Coubertin had intended them to serve as the sporting component of the Exposition Universelle. Its chief organiser, Alfred Picard, was less keen, dismissing Coubertin’s games for a few hundred amateur male athletes as ‘cheap and unfit to represent the nation’, while the neo-Hellenism of the Olympic movement was seen as an ‘absurd anachronism’. The official programme of the exhibition included a range of sports that were popular in late 19th-century France: motor races and ballooning, fishing and pigeon racing, as well as mass displays featuring thousands of gymnasts and archers, golf and polo parties, school sports, events for women and children, and – least Olympic of all – professionals competing in tennis, pelota and cycling.

Undeterred, Coubertin in effect decreed that the events in the exhibition’s sporting programme that didn’t involve motor vehicles, professionals, children or animals were Olympic events. The press was confused, describing these contests as festival games, Olympian games and international games. The public didn’t pay much attention. Just one paying spectator seems to have attended the croquet. No laurels or certificates were awarded. Many of the winners were surprised to discover, years later, that they had participated in the Olympics. ‘It’s a miracle that the Olympic movement survived,’ Coubertin admitted.

By the time of the next Paris games, in 1924, Coubertin’s resilience, monomania and focus on what would now be called branding had succeeded in turning the Olympics into a global institution, which would soon supersede the world’s fairs and imperial exhibitions on which it had initially depended. The St Louis World’s Fair staged the Olympics in 1904, and the Franco-British imperial exhibition hosted in 1908. In 1912 the Swedish monarchy, along with the country’s military and bourgeois sports associations, held the Stockholm games as a free-standing event; a similar grouping in Belgium put on the Antwerp games in 1920. The core of invented Olympic ritual was established in this early period: the parade of nations to open the games; gold, silver and bronze medals for the athletes; an Olympic oath; the five intersecting rings. Paris 1924 added the motto ‘Citius, Altius, Fortius’. These Olympics had the aid, for the first time, of an unambiguously supportive national government: the French Foreign Ministry took responsibility for the preparations and put up ten million francs. From then on, whatever the IOC might claim, the Olympic Games were political events with political agendas. Minuscule by contemporary standards, Paris 1924 was significantly bigger and more prominent than earlier games, with more than three thousand athletes – triple the number in 1900. The media too were a significant presence: more than a thousand accredited journalists attended, most events were filmed for newsreel coverage, and there were radio broadcasts around the world.

The Olympics, however, were not the only game in town. The IOC’s notion of sporting spectacle and its belief in the moral superiority of amateurism were challenged by the rise of professional and commercial sport. Baseball in the United States, cycling in France and the Low Countries, football in Europe and Latin America, and boxing everywhere offered a different model, catered to a much bigger working-class audience, and created sporting celebrities and popular narratives that made the Olympics appear fusty. The problems crystallised at the Antwerp games in 1920. Genteel but sparse crowds attended the athletics and swimming in the Beerschot stadium and the tennis and polo competitions held at private clubs. Working-class Antwerp, and much of the popular press, chose instead to watch the sports they were familiar with: boxing, wrestling and football. The football final, Belgium v. Czechoslovakia, was played at Beerschot. Local youths dug an ‘Olympic trench’ under the stadium walls to allow people to get in without paying, so that the stands were filled to overflowing. With Belgium 2-0 up, the Czechs walked off in protest at the officiating. A pitch invasion followed.

Paris 1924 attempted to bridge these worlds. While Antwerp had put on trade and art shows in palaces, Paris had a sporting exhibition at Magic City, a popular ballroom and amusement park. Antwerp contained the raucous crowds for boxing by holding it at the zoo; Paris held it at the Winter Velodrome, a venue normally packed with working-class crowds who liked gambling on cycle races. It was at the 1924 games that the first big Olympic stars emerged. The Finnish distance runner Paavo Nurmi won five gold medals – two of them, for the 5000 metres and 1500 metres, within ninety minutes of each other. The other standouts were Uruguay’s football team, which sold out its games and, according to one newspaper, ‘pushed towards perfection the art of the feint and swerve and the dodge’. The Uruguayan players were fêted in the city’s brasseries, nightclubs and ballrooms.

For the moment the Olympics could match professional sport for spectacle and celebrity, but a different kind of challenge came from the women’s and workers’ sports movements. The Fédération des sociétés féminines sportives de France, founded by Alice Milliat, held its own women’s Olympics (in Monte Carlo in 1921, Paris in 1922, Monte Carlo again in 1923 and London in 1924) as a challenge to the IOC’s virtual exclusion of female athletes. Worried by the popularity of these alternative games, the IOC and its allies at the International Amateur Athletic Federation incorporated the movement, permitting women’s athletics and other sports at the 1928 Amsterdam Olympics, but on limited terms. Women weren’t allowed to run further than 200 metres at the Olympics until 1960 (they ran the 800 metres in 1928, but were said to be exhausted by it; the 10,000 metres and the marathon weren’t added until the 1980s), and as late as 1984 made up a fifth of the games’ participants. The workers’ sports movement, which had four million members across North America and Europe, was created by social democratic parties and trade unions and offered an inclusive model of sport, favouring participation over excellence and rejecting the rising tide of nationalism that accompanied Olympic sport. In 1925 it staged the first Workers’ Summer Olympiad in Frankfurt, attracting a hundred thousand participants, accommodated in comrades’ houses and festival-style camping grounds. In 1931 Vienna hosted. At the opening ceremony tens of thousands of socialist youths hauled down a giant tower representing Capital. But with the rise of fascism, the German and Austrian core of the movement was disbanded.

Over the next half-century the IOC established and entrenched the global pre-eminence of its version of sport. Los Angeles 1932 added commercialism and showbusiness to the Olympics. Berlin 1936 demonstrated how to mobilise the power of the nation-state behind the spectacle. The 1960s brought live colour television and transformed the staging and reach of the event. Los Angeles 1984 created the media and sponsorship model that underpins the Olympics today, and, because it spent no money on stadiums, turned a small profit. Barcelona in 1992 made the games the final piece of the city’s post-Franco urban revival and convinced the world that the Olympics could bring tourists, growth and development. Neither city’s success has been repeated. TV and sponsorship money was soon taken away from the host cities and kept by the IOC. The biggest change of all was the decision of the IOC’s long-time president Juan Antonio Samaranch quietly to remove the amateurism rules from the Olympic charter. Barcelona’s triumph was not its new pedestrian squares, but the presence of Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson and the rest of the US basketball ‘dream team’.

What was Olympism without amateurism? Samaranch attempted to fill the ideological void by bringing the IOC into line with the emerging concerns of international politics in the 1990s, incorporating human rights, gender equity and the pursuit of environmental sustainability into the Olympic charter. Under his successor, Jacques Rogge, bidders to host the games were plentiful, television audiences and income grew, and the games became bigger – more athletes, more sports and more media. The number of female Olympians crept up towards half. But the new model had problems.

In 1998 it was revealed in the press that Salt Lake City had bribed many members of the IOC to choose it as the host of the 2002 Winter Olympics. Subsequent investigation suggested that there had been an element of subterfuge or criminality in the awarding of almost every Olympic Games for decades. Academic studies showed that the games did not bring increased employment, growth or productivity, and that they often diminished levels of tourism, as well as saddling cities with venues they couldn’t use or afford to maintain. The Chinese state’s clampdown on protest at the 2008 Beijing Olympics sat uneasily with the IOC’s new commitment to human rights, while the city’s air pollution and carbon footprint, caused in part by construction for Olympic venues, was at odds with its green ambitions.

In 2013, Thomas Bach – a German fencer, lawyer and sports bureaucrat – was elected the IOC’s ninth president. It has been his task to try to resolve the mounting problems faced by the organisation. It would be useful to have an account of his time in power that laid bare the forces at work in international sport and considered the gap between the IOC’s claims and the reality of its actions. David Miller’s Igniting the Games is not that book. As its subtitle suggests, it is primarily a celebration of Bach’s heroic attempts to surmount the crisis. Miller has past form for leaving out uncomfortable facts. His official history of the IOC describes the Mexico City Olympics of 1968 without mentioning the massacre of more than three hundred student protesters in Tlatelolco just a few days before the games began – the kind of editorial choice that wins you the Pierre de Coubertin medal for outstanding contribution to the Olympic movement.

Quite a bit of Bach’s time at the IOC has been spent on problems with Russia. First, what to do about its huge, long-standing, state-sponsored doping programme. Second, whether or not to allow Russians to participate in the Olympics after the invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Neither of these matters has been resolved. Nor has the capacity of the IOC to honour its ‘clean games’ and human rights commitments. Bach has so far presided over two summer games, Rio 2016 and Tokyo 2020 (delayed by Covid until 2021), and three winter games: Sochi 2014, Pyeongchang 2018 and Beijing 2022. All have had their problems. Rio, the first Olympics held in South America, was supposed to be the crowning glory of a decade of mega-events held in Brazil, including the 2014 World Cup, testament to the country’s economic dynamism and international reach under Lula and his successor, Dilma Rousseff. But by the time the games began Dilma had been impeached, Lula had been arrested and the Lava Jato scandal had laid bare the scale of waste and corruption in public construction projects, not least at the Olympic Park and the refurbished Maracanã football stadium. These projects displaced seventy thousand people from their homes, most of whom received piffling compensation. Many ended up living on the edge of the metropolis in new social housing run by drug gangs. Promises to Rio’s poor – new sewage systems in the poorest districts and the clean-up of Guanabara Bay, the venue for the sailing events – were abandoned as too costly. Boats and floating barriers were used to keep dead dogs and jettisoned sofas out of the competitors’ way.

Tokyo 2020 was transformed by the Covid pandemic. Held in 2021 with virtually no crowds in attendance, it was an eerie and often soulless affair. Unusually fierce typhoons meant the sailing and rowing events had to be rescheduled. The marathon and long-distance walking events, a serious health risk even in a normal Tokyo summer, had already been moved five hundred miles north to the more temperate Sapporo. The heat and humidity meant that tennis matches had to be played in the evening, and that outdoor swimmers had to compete in what was, in effect, a dangerously warm bath.

Sochi 2014, at $51 billion the most expensive Olympics ever, was primarily an instrument for transferring some of the Russian state’s hydrocarbon money to oligarchs and their underlings. Boris Nemtsov, the opposition leader assassinated near the Kremlin in 2015, estimated that $30 billion went to the managers of state corporations and private construction firms. In clear contravention of the IOC charter, the Russian government passed a raft of anti-LGBT laws in the run-up to the games and made life impossible for LGBT sports clubs. Fears regarding Putin’s imperial ambitions, amply displayed in the opening ceremony, were confirmed just four days after the end of the games by Russian-backed action in Crimea. Over the next few years, the details of its state-sponsored doping schemes became public.

Pyeongchang 2018 was much less eventful. Even so, a forest of sixty thousand ancient and spiritually significant trees on Mount Gariwang were chopped down to make way for ski runs. The ski centre for Beijing 2022 was built in the middle of the Songshan nature reserve. These games were conducted under even tighter Covid restrictions than Tokyo the previous year, and any media investigation of the Chinese government’s oppression of the Uyghur people or protest by athletes was shut down. But nothing could hide the impact of the climate crisis on the games. It was clear even in the tightest camera shots that the alpine events were being staged on bare mountains, with just a thin white ribbon of artificial snow. And fewer people were watching: from a peak at London 2012, the global TV audience for the summer games fell at Rio and Tokyo. NBC’s viewing figures for Beijing were its lowest ever for a winter games.

However bad this catalogue of disasters and embarrassments, much more pressing for Bach is the increasing lack of interest cities appear to have in hosting the Olympics. There were ten candidates to host in 2008, the list then whittled down to five. The fight for 2012 was also closely contested. But there were just five prospective bidders for the 2020 games and three final candidates. Enthusiasm for hosting the Winter Olympics has also declined: the choice for 2022 was between Beijing (a city with no mountains) and Almaty, the former capital of Kazakhstan (a city with mountains but no winter sports infrastructure). More worrying still was the number of candidate cities that withdrew from the bid process. Winter games bids were scuppered after votes in Oslo, Kraków, Lviv and Stockholm; Hamburg, Boston and Rome gave up on their ambitions to hold the summer games. Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán, lost his only significant political battle of the last decade when a local campaign collected a petition big enough to force a referendum on Budapest’s bid, a test Orbán and the organisers declined to take. Only Paris and Los Angeles were in the running for the 2024 summer games and no one seemed interested in 2028. Recognising the danger, Bach gave 2024 to Paris and persuaded Los Angeles to take 2028, without the irritation and fuss of an IOC vote. After a similar manoeuvre in 2021, the 2032 games were awarded to Brisbane, which was the only plausible bidder.

It has taken a long time for potential bidders to clock that the Olympic model has not been working, but there has been opposition from those living in potential host cities for decades. Denver’s plans to host the 1976 Winter Games were ruined by an unlikely coalition of low-tax Republicans and environmentalists, who forced and won a local referendum. Bids by Amsterdam, Berlin and Toronto in the 1980s and 1990s were all scuppered by noisy protests from housing activists, squatters and anarchists. More recently Indigenous groups have challenged the iconography of Sydney 2000, and protested against a highway constructed on unceded native land to serve Vancouver 2010. Rio, Paris and Los Angeles all generated anti-Olympic campaigns. Jules Boykoff, who has been a participant in the anti-Olympic movement, offers a good guide to these developments in What are the Olympics for?

In 2014, Bach published his manifesto for change, Agenda 2020. The document, and its many successors, proposed ways that the Olympic bidding process could be streamlined, infrastructure costs reduced and white elephants avoided. It promised to prioritise bids that created a positive urban legacy and were climate-friendly, and imagined a new version of Olympism in which clean athletes were protected, human rights observed and young people inspired to participate in sport. Sochi, Rio and Pyeongchang, awarded before Bach’s presidency began, would all have failed to meet these aspirations. Tokyo might have been a better test, but Covid and postponement caused its cost to soar to $13 billion, twice the initial estimate, and its TV viewership to collapse. So it has fallen to Paris, as it did in 1924, to stage a games that tests the viability of a new Olympic model.

It is the responsibility of the IOC, rather than the host, to stage a clean Olympics that are in accordance with the IOC’s commitment to human rights and international law. The absence of the Russian and Belarusian teams from Paris 2024 means that the games will be cleaner, but given the prevalence of performance-enhancing drugs in global sport and the unequal pharmacological arms race between concealing and discovering their use, the Olympics will never be drug-free. The human rights component of the charter is just as problematic. The world’s sporting federations have turned a blind eye to psychologically and sexually abusive coaching practices and have failed to safeguard the athletes in their charge. The IOC’s response has been pitiful. Russia’s exclusion from the games on the grounds that its invasion of Ukraine constitutes a breach of international law is to be welcomed, but how does this fit with the seemingly legitimate participation of Israel?

The more immediate questions facing Bach and the organisers of Paris 2024 are to do with cost. Allowing for inflation, Paris 2024 is the cheapest games for more than a quarter of a century, and the first since Los Angeles 1984 for which so little new infrastructure has been built – just the aquatics centre, the Olympic village and the international media centre, all concentrated in the banlieue of Saint-Denis, on the northern edge of central Paris. The construction budget, most of it from public funding, has crept up to $4.5 billion, but compared to other recent games the French have kept a tight rein on overspending. The actual staging of the event will cost a similar amount. This has been paid for by selling a lot of expensive tickets and product licences, by local sponsors and, surprisingly, by the IOC itself. In recent years the IOC has kept all the money from global media rights and sponsorship deals to itself but, panicked by mounting criticism, it has added $1.2 billion to the pot.

Polls initially found that around 60 per cent of the French population approved of hosting the Olympics, but in Paris itself, as the games and their inconveniences come closer, this figure has dropped to around half. Compared to other host cities at a similar point this is a reasonable performance. There have been complaints about the high cost of tickets and about the steep rise in metro and bus fares during the games. But Parisians have bought tickets to the games in huge numbers, and those who have season tickets on the metro or buy passes in advance will avoid the price rise. In an effort to reduce the pressure on public transport, the government has asked residents to work at home during the games and to accept that deliveries to many parts of the city will be impossible owing to security checks. The city’s traditional August exodus is likely to be bigger than ever, though the police and civil service have to stay put. They threatened to go on strike and, miraculously, additional money for bonuses has been found.

Every Olympics since Sydney 2000 has promised to be the ‘greenest games ever’, but the record has been dismal. Aside from installing recycling bins, Athens failed to achieve any of its environmental objectives. Beijing’s already toxic air was no better after the 2008 games than before. London and Rio promised to keep carbon emissions down but still emitted as much as Haiti or Madagascar do in a whole year. The Seine is supposed to be clean enough for the first time in more than a century for aquatic events to take place on the river, but recent tests have shown high levels of E. coli. New facilities in the city have been built to high environmental standards, and all the Olympic sites have been connected to the electricity grid, meaning that the usual phalanx of diesel generators that mega-events depend on can be ditched. There have been environmental losses too: an observation tower just off the coast of Tahiti, where the surfing events are being held, has had to be rebuilt, damaging the coral reef. Acres of parkland have been sacrificed to the international media centre.

The organisers have avoided claiming that the event will be carbon neutral. When Fifa made that claim about the 2022 Qatar World Cup it was struck down by a Swiss regulator, which ruled that Fifa had failed accurately to account for the event’s emissions and that its carbon offset programme was inadequate at best. What’s more, the Paris organisers know that consumption at the games as well as the transport of more than ten thousand athletes, maybe thirty thousand coaches and officials, and even larger numbers of journalists and media workers, let alone spectators, will produce more than 1.5 million tonnes of CO2. This is half the carbon emitted by London 2012 or Rio 2016, but we are close to the limit of easy emission reductions and have no meaningful ways of compensating for the rest. If there’s a case to be made that moving dressage horses and volleyball teams around the world is a reasonable way to use up the carbon budget, I would struggle to make it. In the meantime, there is the worry that the games will be staged during one of France’s increasingly frequent and intense heatwaves.

Berlin 1936, Tokyo 1964 and Moscow 1980 all made considerable efforts to make rough sleepers, drug addicts and petty criminals invisible during the games. The Nazis relocated Berlin’s Roma population to Marzahn, a concentration camp on the edge of the city. Tokyo arrested pickpockets and vagrants and asked the local yakuza gangs to take a holiday. Moscow drove chronic alcoholics and heroin users beyond the city’s ring road and dumped them there. In 1984 the LAPD expanded its already extensive and violent sweeps of the homeless to take in Black and Latino youths, forcing many of them into de facto lockdown for the duration of the games. In 1996 Atlanta handed out free one-way coach tickets to the homeless and passed local ordinances that made being in a car park without owning a car or ‘reclining’ in public a crime. The police were issued with printed arrest dockets marked: ‘Male, African American, Homeless’. Shade, toilets and water fountains, temporarily installed in the city centre for the duration of the games, were removed afterwards. The city demolished the remaining social housing and Black business premises in central Atlanta and replaced them with commercial real estate.

Rough sleepers in Paris, according to the last count, number around four thousand, but they are just the most visible members of a much larger homeless population. Tens of thousands of people are squatting in old industrial buildings, or setting up encampments in marginal public spaces. Around 150,000 people live in other forms of temporary accommodation. Since early 2023, the police have been evicting people from all these places. Four hundred migrants, mainly from Chad and Sudan, were turfed out of the old Unibéton cement factory close to the Olympic village, as were seven hundred Roma camping to the north-east of the city. Informal camps, like the one under the Charles de Gaulle bridge, have been aggressively dismantled and the space fenced off. The government and the police have claimed that none of this has anything to do with the Olympics, and is in fact part of a plan to move homeless people into better temporary accommodation, even if this is to parts of the country they have never visited before. Students who occupy accommodation that has been set aside for the international press corps have been told they will have to get out for the duration of the games, and have been given two free tickets and €100 – a sum unlikely to cover many nights’ alternative digs, given the city’s startlingly high rents. Airbnb, which paid half a billion dollars to be an Olympic partner, lists a hundred thousand properties for rent in Paris during the games. Despite the efforts of the Parisian mairie to curb Airbnb, the Olympics will accelerate the shift from long-term private rents to short-term leisure lets, in a city already desperately short of accommodation for its residents.

After the games, the athletes’ village will provide around three thousand apartments, just under half of them sold privately, the rest let at affordable rates or made available as social housing. The development will be served by two new metro lines, and feature the usual mix of leisure, retail and commercial spaces. Olympic villages’ record in delivering affordable housing and economic regeneration is very poor. Mexico City’s towers were handed out to civil servants. Apartments in Barcelona’s Olympic village, on the city’s new beachfront, soared in price as it became a hotspot of gentrification and property speculation. Athens allocated the apartments in its Olympic village by lottery, open only to households in need. As a consequence, the new village had high rates of unemployment, long-term sickness and disability. Once the new tenants moved in, the quality of the bus service that had run during the games rapidly declined, the shops soon closed, and education and health facilities were run down. It is now one of the poorest and grimmest areas in Athens. Vancouver and London promised to deliver ample affordable and social housing, but Vancouver cut its plans in half and London’s 4500 affordable rental properties dwindled to a few hundred. Rio never pretended that its Olympic village would become anything other than a privately owned upscale neighbourhood, but it remains virtually empty, next to an Olympic Park full of desolate venues. The private flats in Saint-Denis are selling like hot cakes, at prices that very few locals can afford. The new metro links and business parks are attracting corporate firms, but jobs there aren’t being given to locals. They’re no more likely to find employment at the new offices of the Interior Ministry when it moves to Saint-Denis in 2026.

The banlieue has been the site of riots for years, and in 2022 there was trouble at the Champions League final between Liverpool and Real Madrid, played at the Stade de France, which is going to be used as the main Olympic stadium. Madrid’s supporters had a fan park a few minutes’ walk from the stadium, but Liverpool’s was ten kilometres away, and the route to the stadium from the nearest metro station led through congested streets and a narrow subway under a motorway. Under-stewarded and under-policed, crowds of Liverpool fans built up around the subway, a checkpoint and the ticket turnstiles, which had been closed. The police tear-gassed and pepper-sprayed them. The kick-off was delayed for almost forty minutes, and after the match there were hundreds of assaults outside the stadium as local gangs fought the police and attacked the fans. French police and politicians attempted to blame the Liverpool fans for what happened (just as the British authorities did following the Hillsborough disaster in 1989), saying they had arrived late and tried to gain entry with fake tickets. A year later, Uefa issued a report absolving the fans of blame, accepting that it, the French authorities and French police were responsible for the chaos.

This time round the level of security in Saint-Denis will be of a different order. Even the torch relay that is bringing the Olympic flame from Marseille to the stadium has a guard of a hundred elite police officers, including rapid response units and anti-drone specialists. During the games themselves, France will employ thirty thousand gendarmes, fifteen thousand members of the armed forces and secret services, and 22,000 private security guards. The military will deploy surveillance drones, AWACS aircraft and helicopter-borne snipers. This will cost €320 million and hand the security forces and the police an upgraded infrastructure of intrusive digital surveillance. Residents of the security zones around the Olympic venues will need to acquire and show QR codes. Saint-Denis has a brand new urban supervisory centre connected to four hundred cameras. Data and privacy laws have been rewritten so that the images generated can be used as material for AI-augmented surveillance. This legislation is scheduled to be rescinded after the games: we shall see.

For most of the 20th century, Olympic opening ceremonies were like military tattoos, and any music played was martial or classical. The use of an electronic glockenspiel during the opening ceremony at the 1972 Munich games was considered a major break with tradition. But in Los Angeles in 1984, the opening ceremony took the form of an open-air Broadway musical and the closing ceremony was given over to Lionel Richie, who performed a nine-minute version of ‘All Night Long’ with hundreds of dancers on a stage lit by pulsating pink neon Olympic rings. Since then, opening and closing ceremonies have featured, among others, Kylie Minogue in Sydney, Lang Lang in Beijing, and Paul McCartney and the Spice Girls in London.

Paris apparently hopes to book Aya Nakamura. Indeed, President Macron has publicly stated that he would like her to perform. Nakamura is by some way the bestselling French-language singer in the world. Born in Mali, she grew up in Aulnay-sous-Bois, a banlieue in the same département as Saint-Denis. You might think she’d be the perfect choice for Paris 2024, but in one poll 73 per cent of the French public said that her work was not representative of French music and 63 per cent were against her playing the opening ceremony. A majority preferred the DJ David Guetta (who is white and primarily records in English) or Daft Punk (who are also white, primarily recorded in English and split up in 2021). The rumour that Nakamura might sing Edith Piaf’s ‘La Vie en Rose’ infuriated the far right. Éric Zemmour, leader of the Reconquête party, claimed he could only hear a ‘foreign language’ in Nakamura’s songs, while an extremist group called Les Natifs unveiled a banner on the banks of the Seine that read: ‘No way Aya! This is Paris not the Bamako market.’

However grand the opening ceremony, however, the Olympics has already ceded its place as the greatest show on earth to the World Cup. Football is now without peer in the vast majority of national sports cultures, and has a major foothold in all the refusenik countries too. It has fan cultures of a scale and intensity nothing else can match. Football means something to much of the world, while the core sports of the Olympic spectacle – athletics, aquatics and gymnastics – do not, still less the real minority pursuits like fencing, equestrianism, archery and rowing. The 64 matches in the World Cup accrue fewer viewer minutes than the more than three hundred events at an Olympic Games, but have a narrative simplicity and focused intensity. Consider Morocco’s run to the semi-finals of the Qatar World Cup in 2022, which was celebrated in the streets of cities across the Middle East, from Casablanca to Baghdad, and by the Moroccan diaspora in Europe. Chants and songs reflected pan-Arabic and pan-African identities, and the Palestinian flag was on widespread display.

At the closing ceremony of the Paris games, the Olympic flag will be handed over to Los Angeles 2028, which will also be hosting its third Olympics. It will have its work cut out, not least because the city has ten times as many rough sleepers as Paris. Los Angeles isn’t building an Olympic village, but the games are being used to rush through the construction of hotels and student housing, displacing Latino and African American communities. In the final chapter of What Are the Olympics for? Boykoff asks whether the games should be held in a permanent location. Athens is the usual candidate for this honour, but given its disastrous experience in 2004 might not be keen. In any case, the demands of the games are constantly changing, meaning that any infrastructure is unlikely to remain usable for long. If that idea can’t be made to work, Boykoff wonders if the process of choosing the host could be democratised by insisting that the candidate city hold a referendum on the issue. The last city to do so successfully was Vancouver in 2003, with a ‘Yes’ campaign that had more than a hundred times the budget of the ‘No’. Boykoff also argues that the IOC should refuse to allocate the games to autocracies and dictatorships, and ban teams from states that have broken international law. Maybe the answer is to keep the Olympics and abolish the IOC. Boykoff argues that the whole show – its intellectual property and bureaucracy – could be put into the hands of athletes and their unions. This might well be an improvement on the self-selecting membership of the IOC, but I’m not convinced that these organisations are good representatives of the sporting world or that they have adequate forms of democratic accountability themselves. In any case, the IOC is not going to reform itself out of existence.

Perhaps, like Coubertin, we should take our inspiration from antiquity. In 392 CE the Roman emperor Theodosius I, head of the Christian church, banned pagan festivals and practices. The ancient Olympic games, which fell under that rubric, did not immediately disappear. They limped on, smaller and more marginal each year, their divine pantheon dissolved, their statuary and relics looted, their rituals rendered suspect. The final gathering at Olympia in the mid-fifth century must have been a melancholy affair. A century later, riverine floods covered its temples and stadiums in silt. Perhaps, if we choose to treat Olympism with the moral scepticism it deserves, something like this will be the fate of its modern incarnation too. The games will limp on for a few decades, unloved and increasingly disregarded, until in the end almost no one can remember why they were ever held in the first place.

Vol. 46 No. 14 · 18 July 2024

Builder Bees

Colin Kidd

Mandeville’s Fable: Pride, Hypocrisy and Sociability

by Robin Douglass.

Princeton, 249 pp., £30, May 2023, 978 0 691 21917 2

The Presbyterian ministers of my Ayrshire childhood never harangued their congregations, and were almost to a man – they were all men – mellow and avuncular. Authority figures policed behaviour – all the way down to disciplining boys who walked around with hands in pockets or shirt-tails hanging out – but nobody propounded moral values; ethics tended to be intuited rather than paraded. Far worse than any actual offence was to ‘clype’ – to tell tales about the transgressions of others – just as it was not the done thing to boast about our own occasional good deeds. I have found the recent tendency towards ostentatious virtue-signalling unsettling. Why strive so hard to communicate good character, outside the confines of a job interview or a first meeting with prospective in-laws? Humblebragging in itself is, I suppose, innocuous, but much less so the sustained and coercive judgmentalism of social media.

The work of the early 18th-century paradox-monger Bernard Mandeville supplies a devastating corrective to the fashion for unctuous grandstanding. Notorious in his own day as a cynical anti-moralist, Mandeville possessed a prophetic insight into the deformations of the social media age. The psychological traits we now parse as effects of Instagram and Twitter consumption, he recognised as deep-laid elements in our lives as social beings. Although 21st-century terms like virtue-signalling and ethical narcissism were outside his vocabulary, Mandeville knew the phenomena intimately. A connoisseur of hypocrisy and self-deception, he perceived that all good deeds are tinged with self-regard. Pride – ‘the vast esteem we have for our selves’ – lies at the root of our supposed virtue. Our motives are never pure.

Mandeville also skewers the motives of non-virtue-signallers, however, unmasking the feelings of secret superiority that accompany such reticence. We merely deceive ourselves into thinking we might not be showing off. The seeming contrast between sanctimonious exhibitionists and the quietly smug is no contrast at all. Both groups are equally motivated by pride; the only difference lies in the subtlety of execution. According to Robin Douglass, Mandeville understood that ‘secretly concealing the outward display of our pride from others’ is pride’s ‘most sophisticated manifestation’. He knew that people felt the ‘pleasure of being esteemed by a vast majority, not as what they are, but what they appear to be’. In his reading, every one of us is a sleekit – and self-deceiving – attention-seeker: we brim over with self-admiration and spin our vainglory as altruistic and other-serving. Centuries before Facebook, he perceived the way that as social beings we constantly curate the profiles we disclose to the wider world and to ourselves.

Mandeville was born in Rotterdam in 1670. His father, Michael, was a physician, and Bernard followed in his footsteps, studying medicine and philosophy at Leiden. His thesis in 1691 concerned the effects of digestion on mental processes. This early interest in psychology persisted, and he chose hypochondria and hysteria as his specialisms. In the early 1690s he moved to England, possibly thanks to the vexed political atmosphere of Rotterdam, which forced his father to move his practice to Amsterdam. In London, Mandeville married, practised medicine without a licence and embarked on a literary career. He published an English translation of La Fontaine’s Aesopian free verse fables, and a mock epic influenced by another 17th-century French writer, Paul Scarron.

These influences are evident in Mandeville’s most famous work, The Fable of the Bees. It started out as a short poetic fable with the title The Grumbling Hive (1705), and then snowballed, with later editions including commentaries on the poem and essays on related themes. He published the first version of The Fable of the Bees, with extended glosses on the poem, in 1714, but it was only half the size of the completed project. The 1723 edition – the first to generate public outcry, over his critique of charity schools as nurseries of virtue – contained even more essays, and the final edition of 1724 also included Mandeville’s ‘Vindication’ of his book. A sequel, Fable of the Bees Part II, which took the form of a set of dialogues, arrived at the end of 1728. A further sequel, An Enquiry into the Origin of Honour, was published in 1732, the year before Mandeville’s death. These accumulating components seem, at first sight, to be clearly distinguished. But it’s less obvious where the doctor’s neutral, non-moralising examination of the human animal and its psyche ends, and the satirist’s delighted excoriation of human sham begins – and whether the two approaches can in fact be disentangled. Though The Fable of the Bees is saggy and unstructured, the tone throughout retains a deadpan uncertainty. The natural philosopher’s disturbing calculus of our propensity to counterfeit and dissimulate also seems to carry subversive tints of the sort associated with his contemporary Jonathan Swift.

The Grumbling Hive provides an allegorical account of a thriving early 18th-century economy, in the form of a colony of heavily anthropomorphised bees. Christian and Stoic moralists recommended virtuous austerity, but Mandeville depicts its opposite, showing in his insect world ‘Millions endeavouring to supply/Each other’s lust and vanity’. But it transpires that this is far from a dystopia. Rather, vice ‘nursed ingenuity’ in every quarter, and ‘Luxury/Employ’d a million of the poor.’ Fickleness and fashion in diet, furniture and dress constitute ‘the very wheel that turn’d the trade’. No profession, calling or craft, including medicine and the Church, ‘was without deceit’, but this doesn’t matter, because every cheat, crime and moral failing ultimately serves the greater good of prosperity: ‘Thus every part was full of vice/Yet the whole mass a Paradise.’

But the bees start to moralise, and curse the deceit, vanity and envy that underpin the life of the hive. The deity grants their wish, and rids ‘the bawling hive of fraud’. The result is a minor catastrophe. Lawyer bees are redundant because debtor bees pay their creditors at the appointed time. Jailer bees are no longer needed, nor are swarms of artisan and builder bees: without immoral spurs to getting and spending, ‘All arts and crafts neglected lie.’ The hive declines, and eventually, ‘to avoid extravagance’, the bees ‘flew into a hollow tree’. Mandeville then advertises the so-called moral of his tale: ‘Fraud, luxury and pride must live/Whilst we the benefits receive.’ The commentaries and essays in The Fable of the Bees spell out this lesson in much more detail, providing insights into the warped psychology of human sociability.

Contemporary commentators regarded Mandeville, as they did earlier thinkers like Machiavelli and Hobbes, as a dangerous and disruptive threat to conventional morality. The first decades of the 18th century in England witnessed repeated brouhahas about the rise of infidelity, deism and other insidious heresies. However, Mandeville’s ideas presented a novelty of a still more dangerous sort, according to the dramatist and man of letters John Dennis. Heretics misconstrued religion, but did not set out to overturn the moral order. Mandeville, however, presented himself as ‘a serious, a cool, a deliberate champion’ of vice and luxury; a new kind of intellectual renegade such as ‘has never been heard of before in any nation, or any age of the world’. One anonymous 18th-century poet thought Mandeville was the antithesis of Christ: ‘if GOD-MAN vice to abolish came/Who vice commends, MAN-DEVIL be his name.’

As Douglass notes, Mandeville no longer possesses this diabolic notoriety. In so far as his work still holds a place in the public imagination, it is distorted into a precocious paean of praise to laissez-faire capitalism. His paradoxical conflation of the way private vices unexpectedly generate public benefits means that we tend to see him as a psychologist of the passions underpinning the free market; an early champion of the theories of unregulated spontaneous order that we now associate with Hayek; an amoral apologist for greed-is-good hyper-capitalism. Indeed, Mandevillian economics might acquire a fresh and disturbing relevance for societies attempting to wean themselves off overconsumption. Where would we be without waste? Will the circular economy of recycling, hand-me-downs and making do lead to another empty hive?

Attempts to shoehorn Mandeville into the disciplinary history of economics, Douglass contends, are misconceived. Not only do they take one strand of his thought for the whole, they also miss crucial counter-arguments in his account of the way humans become sociable. Douglass asks us to see Mandeville as a theorist of moral and social norms who is concerned with the question of how the human animal with its ineradicable passions came to be socially domesticated in the first place. Mandeville’s answer was intricate and multi-stranded, drawing on both a conjectural history of the origins of society and a series of hypotheses about the way the passions – and particularly pride – are repurposed for the overall good of society. Mandeville, Douglass notes, thought that humans became sociable by a process of ‘fermentation’, ‘analogous to that by which grapes become wine’.

Mandeville saw human sociability as a consequence of society, not its cause. It seemed far from obvious what had enabled the bestial savagery of pre-social man to be transmuted into lasting communal cohesion. Our innate will to dominate others should have produced endless conflict rather than co-operation. Why had this not been the case? In part, Mandeville argued, wily lawgivers had devised policies that turned human frailties to public advantage, ‘in the happy contrivance of playing our passions against one another’. Our passions can’t be extinguished, merely redirected. In an ancient and surprisingly successful policy of Whac-A-Mole, early legislators managed to suppress, divert and – ultimately – refashion certain human appetites in the interest of the community. Once rechannelled, the ‘imperfections’ of humankind worked to reinforce sociability. The craving for the esteem of those around us leads us to feign virtues such as modesty and honesty. These counterfeits win the approval of others, but they also – a welcome unintended result – help knit envious, competitive individuals into the social fabric. A benign spiral of social education perpetuates itself. The happily ‘taught animal’ eventually acquired the sophisticated arts of politeness, an unregulated system of self-control which functions by way of complex, interrelated mechanisms of flattery and emulation. These tame our unsociable impulses, while also, with a twist of subtle indirection, furthering our irresistible lust for social recognition. Etiquette and manners serve to disguise our worst instincts – but they don’t vanquish them. In this sense, sociability remains a holding operation, characterised by multiple everyday compromises. Society, Mandeville concluded, was a ‘most beautiful superstructure’ built on the ‘rotten and despicable foundation’ of human flaws.

Mandeville reckoned that ‘it is impossible we could be sociable creatures without hypocrisy.’ By this he meant specifically the capacity to transform our selfishness, will to dominate and desire for esteem into something more acceptable. Hypocrisy is a universal, lifelong ‘habit … by the help of which, we have learned from our cradle to hide even from ourselves the vast extent of self-love’. Our true inner selves would be insufferable if they were revealed in their nakedness; indeed, they would horrify and depress us, which is why they need to be cloaked in self-deception. Hypocrisy, in Douglass’s deft encapsulation of Mandeville’s theories, is ‘a feature, not a bug, of our moral practices’.

But should we take this apparent champion of insincerity at face value? Where did he stand in relation to the Christian norms of his own society? Though Mandeville provides a cynical picture of flawed but socially educable humanity, he leaves open the question of whether we reached this state after a fall from a state of innocence in the Garden of Eden. As Douglass notes, Mandeville takes humanity as he sees it, advancing a naturalistic account of human nature, one that happens to mesh with Christian theology but doesn’t depend on it.

Douglass identifies another disturbing purveyor of paradoxes, the erudite and evasive Dutch-based French Protestant exile Pierre Bayle, as the chief influence on Mandeville’s ideas. Bayle won notoriety for his Pensées diverses sur la comète (1682), in which he countered the orthodox consensus that a society of atheists was an impossibility; the prevailing assumption was that, since they lacked any belief in the existence of punishment in the afterlife, atheists could not be trusted to behave decently. On the contrary, Bayle argued, history recounts the lives of several virtuous atheists. It is character and temperament, not belief or unbelief, that determine whether a man lives virtuously. Bayle then adds a further disturbing paradox. Religious believers are often roused to extreme passions in defence of their beliefs. A society of atheists – cushioned by happy indifference from violent idolatries and fanaticisms – might be more peaceful and law-abiding than a society of Christians. Bayle continues to defy easy interpretation, a Christian ironist whose criticism of prevailing fatuities seems to verge on an apology for atheism. Similarly, the deeper purpose of Mandeville’s exposure of the ‘bluster’ of contemporary moralism remains obscure.

The quest for a straight answer is perhaps misconceived. While Douglass makes a persuasive case for taking Mandeville seriously as a philosopher, beyond the substantive content of his arguments lies the question of the way The Fable of the Bees should be treated as a text. Its strange publication history and sprawling additions (including the inexplicable and controversial essay on charity schools) suggest it is the achievement of an improvisational bricoleur. There’s also the issue of genre. The dominant strain of satire in early 18th-century England was Menippean, notionally indebted to the third-century bc Cynic Menippus of Gadara, whose works were said to have been chaotically formless, fusing verse and prose and defying all conventions of genre, as well as being equally indiscriminate in their attacks on the ancient philosophical schools and their speculative systems.

Although Menippus’ satires are lost, a Menippean model survived in the work of Lucian, a Hellenised Syrian satirist of the second century ad, whose collected works were published in London in 1710-11, in a four-volume translation which incorporated a Life of Lucian by John Dryden. Lucian exercised a huge influence on late 17th and early 18th-century English satire; on Swift, Pope and Prior, as well as a host of lesser-known figures, including Charles Cotton, Tom Brown and William King. Among the most conspicuous features of early 18th-century Menippean satire was the cod scholarly apparatus. Mandeville’s generically unstable Fable, with its core tale written in verse and its flabbily unstructured prose commentaries, was decidedly Menippean in form. More significantly, there is a Menippean dislike of speculative systems in Mandeville’s Treatise of the Hypochondriack and Hysterick Diseases (1711), which attacks the arrogance of physicians who attempt to spin fanciful theories from the comfort of their closets rather than attend to patients. Unlike, say, the severity of Juvenal or the indulgence of Horace, Menippean satire didn’t take a clear position on the matter at hand: losing one’s intellectual compass was the point of the exercise. Yet even this indeterminacy seems reductive. Mandeville somehow escapes even the exiguous to non-existent constraints of the Menippean: beneath the satire and provocation, the natural philosopher’s illusionless observations of the human-animal-in-society persist.

Vol. 46 No. 14 · 18 July 2024

Poem

Blackbird at Dawn

A.E. Stallings

Central Athens

Too full of fret to sleep, I rose

To hear the grey of dawn

And watch the shapes of things compose

Before the day turned on.

A motorcycle one street over

Made the morning shift

(Or furtive homecoming from lover).

The dark began to sift

Like coffee grounds. Then liquid, clear,

As cool as water, bright

As sunlight striking windows, sheer

Music scaled a height

Past fire escapes, so that I heard

A tune that scored itself

Across the paper sky: a bird

Perched on the tree’s top shelf

With grey apartments on each side,

An odeon of sorts

Of concrete boxes, far and wide

Broadcasting his reports

From somewhere else, of beauty, spring,

And Hope-renewing life,

And seasons in their solemn ring.

The song was also strife –

I’d learned somewhere – contention, pride

And territory – here

I am, he bruits, and takes a bride,

And steers his rivals clear.

He doesn’t read the news: not long

From now some August brings

A heat to wither every song.

(Or else, that’s why he sings.)

Vol. 46 No. 14 · 18 July 2024

Friends in High Places

Nora Goldschmidt

Rome’s Patron: The Lives and Afterlives of Maecenas

by Emily Gowers.

Princeton, 463 pp., £38, February, 978 0 691 19314 4

If you look up ‘patron of the arts’ in most European languages, you will find a variation on the name of Gaius Maecenas: mécène in French, mecenate in Italian, mecenas in Spanish, Mäzen in German, mecenas in Polish, mecenáš in Czech, mécenás in Hungarian, меценат in Ukrainian, Russian and Bulgarian. The term has been in use since at least the composition of Laus Pisonis (‘Praise of Piso’) by an unknown author in the first century ce. Edmund Spenser’s shepherds complain that there is no ‘Mecoenas’ in England in the 1570s. Voltaire told the Duc de Brancas that he was tired of poets comparing their patrons to Maecenas and wasn’t going to bother. Count Vronsky is ‘the Russian Maecenas’ in Anna Karenina, and the poet H.D. called the lover who rescued her from a breakdown ‘baby Maecenas’.

Gaius Cilnius Maecenas was born at some point between 78 and 64 bce, in or near Arretium (now Arezzo). He claimed ancient Etruscan and even royal ancestry – a daring assertion in the republican discourse of Rome – via the Cilnii, perhaps through his mother’s family. He and Marcus Agrippa became the right-hand men of Octavian, the future Augustus. Having amassed a great deal of wealth, some of it confiscated from proscribed individuals, he gathered around him a circle of the most renowned poets in Rome, including Virgil and Horace, helping to foster the Golden Age of Latin literature that accompanied the transition from republic to empire. He is credited with influencing the poets in his circle to address affairs of state, but inspired more than just dutiful verse: Virgil’s Georgics, the first three books of Horace’s Odes and the first book of his Epistles are all dedicated to Maecenas. He wielded great political power without holding a formal position (he chose to remain among the ranks of the equites, one rung below the senatorial class). He served as Rome’s caretaker in Octavian’s absence and was invested with a copy of the emperor’s seal-ring, allowing him to unseal, alter and reseal official correspondence.

Maecenas might have acted as Augustus’ proxy but he also had a reputation for loose living. He is described by Velleius Paterculus as ‘dripping with effeminacy’ and by Seneca as a gender-fluid, orientalising pleasure lover who conducted business in the company of two eunuchs ‘more man than he was’. He was known to be a superfan of the pantomime actor Bathyllus – Tacitus says that he ‘overflowed with passion’ for him – an infatuation enabled by Augustus, who instituted popular dramatic performances. In turn, rumours circulated that Maecenas allowed Augustus to sleep with his wife, Terentia. It was said that when Terentia’s brother, Murena, was discovered to be embroiled in a plot against Augustus, Maecenas revealed the discovery to her, giving Murena a chance to escape (he didn’t, and was executed in 22 BCE).

At some point after that, Maecenas disappears from the record. Perhaps because of the Terentia affair, or because he was no longer politically useful, he seems to have ended his days on his luxurious estate on the Esquiline Hill, located partly within the boundaries of Rome, which allowed him, as Tacitus puts it, ‘to retire within the city as if he were abroad’. After Maecenas’ death, the estate passed to Augustus and became the pleasure garden of the Roman emperors who succeeded him: Tiberius lived there for a while and the (perhaps apocryphal) Tower of Maecenas is said to have been the spot from which Nero watched Rome burn.

The trouble with even this basic outline of Maecenas’ life is that there aren’t any reliable biographical sources. Contemporary evidence consists mainly of the words of Augustan poets (above all Horace), who were more interested in fashioning the image of the patron they needed than in faithfully recording Maecenas’ life and character. Later imperial sources follow their own varied agendas, from Seneca, who links Maecenas’ lack of stylistic self-control in his writings with his reputation for loose morals, to Martial and Juvenal, for whom he represents a lost, more privileged age.

Philologists have diligently collected the fragments of Maecenas’ own work, but these are just as hard to be sure of. It’s possible, as Emily Gowers suggests, that Seneca invented some of the many ‘quotations’ from Maecenas that have been extracted from his work, or that what is taken as the title of a lost work, De cultu suo (‘On His Own Style’), wasn’t a title at all. Two letters purportedly written by Augustus to Maecenas are recorded by Suetonius (around 100 ce) and Macrobius (around 400 ce), one urging Maecenas to chivvy Horace to accept a job as Augustus’ private secretary (‘leave your parasitic table and come to this royal one’), a position Horace declined, and the other poking fun at Maecenas’ ornate literary style (Augustus is said to have described it as ‘ringlets dripping with perfume’). The first may well be genuine – Suetonius had access to the imperial archives until he was booted out by Hadrian – but as Gowers warns, they ‘line up almost too perfectly’ with the style and subject of a fragment of Maecenas’ own work.

Modern scholars have used the same evidence to come up with a multitude of Maecenates. Recent monographs (at least three in the last decade) have tended to tackle the problem through careful reconstructions from ancient sources within the wider social and political contexts of the late first century bce, but as Philippe Le Doze put it in 2014, ‘Maecenas defies conventional biography.’ Gowers has not attempted a conventional biography. Instead, she has produced what she calls an ‘anti-biography’, taking in the many lives Maecenas has acquired in reception, from ancient poetry to modern scholarship.

Maecenas was far from the first patron of the arts in the ancient world, or even in Rome. Homer describes bards singing for a place at court, and lyric poets wrote songs for autocrats all over the Greek world. The poet Ennius (b.239 bce) benefited from the support of Roman statesmen and generals. His Annales, the great epic of Rome before Virgil’s Aeneid (it survives only in fragments), included a well-known episode describing a ‘good companion’, fit to share the ‘table and conversation’ of his patron, which was read in antiquity as a self-portrait of the poet.

The relationship between Maecenas and the poets he supported remains opaque. Virgil and Horace must have benefited materially: he is said to have given Horace his precious Sabine farm, while Virgil was worth at least ten million sesterces and owned a villa next to Maecenas’ own. But it would be a mistake to reduce these relationships to the exchange of material possessions for poetic immortality or a corpus of texts to serve the propaganda demands of the Augustan regime. What Virgil calls Maecenas’ ‘un-soft commands’ (haud mollia iussa) must have been double-edged, in as much as they were commands at all, and his reputation for soft living could easily be enlisted by poets who wanted to avoid the higher, more ‘manly’ genres of politically inflected epic.

Roman poets are slippery constructors of lives in verse. The Maecenas who emerges from their texts is bound up with their own literary and biographical self-positioning, both in the present (how to negotiate between Maecenas and the increasingly powerful Octavian/Augustus) and the future (how posterity will remember their poetic achievements). Maecenas is mentioned sparingly by Virgil and only rarely by Propertius (who may not have been patronised by him), but he is a key presence in Horace’s poetry. Gowers, who has also edited Horace’s first book of Satires, plots the unfolding drama of literary patronage as Horace presents it in his texts. In Satires 1.6, a conversational poem addressed to Maecenas, Horace describes their first meeting. The interview was awkward: Horace was a freedman’s son and came without the backing of a famous father or the trappings of fancy horses and estates; he didn’t even blow his own trumpet as a poet (his friends Virgil and Varius had already done that for him). Instead, he presents his younger self as a country bumpkin who could barely speak (‘I blurted out a few words; bashful shyness prevented me from saying more’). It’s a neat reversal of the usual encounter between poet and patron, in which the poet tries to show off his skills or begs for favour (like the poetaster whom Horace encounters later in the Satires, desperately angling to be admitted to Maecenas’ circle). As Gowers puts it, Horace seems to have ‘patronage thrust upon him’. Later, in Epistles 1.7, an older, more confident Horace seems to chart the end of the road in their relationship. He compares himself to a fattened fox in a grain bin, unable to squeeze back out through the narrow gap it crept in through, and wonders if freedom has been too high a price to pay, even for his beloved Sabine farm.

Horace’s Odes represent a different act in the drama of patronage. In the dedication to Maecenas that opens the first book, Horace refers to his patron’s ‘royal ancestors’ and appears to flatter him further by saying that he needs only Maecenas’ high estimation of his poetry for his head to ‘strike the stars’ (sublimi feriam sidera vertice). In Book 3, he invites Maecenas to drink with him to celebrate a close call with a falling tree and lay down the concerns of state. It’s a compliment to Maecenas as statesman and right-hand man of the victorious Augustus. But as in other odes addressed to Maecenas, the suggestion of real friendship between patron and poet comes through as strongly as the flattery. Was this how Maecenas wished to be seen, not as a lofty commissioner but a friend and confidant of writers? Or is it just part of the ‘Maecenas trail’ which Horace lays in his poems, allowing him to produce the kind of verse he wants to write?

There are further complications. In Book 2 of the Odes Horace writes that he cannot live beyond Maecenas, who is not only his ‘pillar of prosperity’ but ‘part of my soul’. Yet a few odes later he claims that he, Horace, being a poet, won’t taste death. Is Maecenas assured immortality, too, as the poet’s patron? Will Horace carry (feram) his patron’s name to the stars like other protégés, or is it the poet himself whose head will bump into them (feriam)?

Because Maecenas is closely interlinked with Horace’s own fictional persona (Gowers juxtaposes ut tuus est mos, ‘as is your manner’, of Satires 1.6.60, with sicut meus est mos, ‘as is my manner’, in Satires 1.9.1), we should perhaps assume that these rhetorical developments trace Horace’s poetical aspiration rather than any real-life dynamic between the two men. The Latin word patronus could describe the relationship of a former master to his freedman. So when Horace, ‘whom everyone disparages as a freedman’s son’, calls Maecenas his ‘sweet friend’, a partner in an amicitia of equals, he is constructing the relationship he needs in the Satires (a genre which goes back to Lucilius, who was famously patron-free), while the Maecenas that emerges in the Odes, ‘offspring of royal ancestors’, is the kind of figure Horace requires as an ally in his ascent to a higher genre.

None of this tells us very much about the real Maecenas, but it ensured that the character ‘Maecenas’ remained at the heart of discussions about artistic patronage long after the man had disappeared. As patronage shifted in the imperial period from the blurred boundaries of amicitia to a much more hierarchical system of indulgentia, Maecenas became a figure of both admiration and disparagement. Augustan poetry had left one half of the relationship silent. Where Virgil is taciturn about his connection to Maecenas (who gets only four mentions in the Georgics), the Appendix Vergiliana – a collection of what purport to be the early works of Virgil, most of which are now considered spurious – is much more forthcoming. It includes a pair of poems, or perhaps one poem in two parts, known as the Elegiae in Maecenatem (the date is contested but they are probably Neronian), which insert themselves into what must have been a thriving posthumous tradition. The first poem consists of a lament for the dead Maecenas, picking up the much-repeated motifs of the standard biographical narrative while softening Maecenas’ faults. The second, addressed to Augustus, is spoken by Maecenas himself on his deathbed in 8 bce (Virgil died in 19 bce). If the real Maecenas was a blank in Augustan poetry, here, so the fiction goes, he takes charge of his own narrative (‘I controlled my own life’), finally speaking as the one and only Maecenas, both hard man of state and soft man of leisure.

After antiquity, Lives of Maecenas proliferated in the salons and court culture of 17th-century France. Ben Jonson put him on the English stage in Poetaster (1601). ‘To Maecenas’ (1773) by Phillis Wheatley, the first recorded African American to publish a book of poetry, appeals not simply to a patron of the arts but to the patronus as former master, part of a broader struggle for freedom from enslavement. Nowadays, the name ‘Maecenas’ is used in all sorts of context to evoke wealth and patronage: a silver Montblanc pen for signing those philanthropic cheques (others in the ‘Patron of Arts’ series include ‘Augustus’ and ‘Andrew Carnegie’); a website offering ‘fractional interests in great works of art, using … blockchain technology’; and various schemes promoting private or corporate giving. However little we know about the real Maecenas, his shifting role as the archetypal patron of the arts – shaped by the Roman poets he supported – has defied oblivion in ways that not even Horace could have predicted.

Vol. 46 No. 14 · 18 July 2024

At the Movies

‘The Beast’

Michael Wood

The bad year in Bertrand Bonello’s dizzying film The Beast is 2025. That’s when everything went wrong. By 2044, the latest date in the movie, the world is steady again and much improved. The bots are in charge and humans have only humble clerical jobs where their mistakes will not matter much. The bots are human in their fashion, a long way from being mere machines. They have emotions but are not burdened by the baggage of their pasts in the way humans are.

There is a lot of time and space travel in the movie: to Paris in the early 20th century, to Los Angeles in the early 21st, and repeatedly back to an unspecified city in 2044. The improbable but helpful constant in all this movement is that the main characters, Gabrielle Monnier (Léa Seydoux) and Louis Lewanski (George MacKay), remain the same throughout. Both performances, especially that of Seydoux, are amazing.

Just before we see the film’s title, we are shown Gabrielle alone in front of a green screen, receiving instructions from a director (Bonello) about what will happen next. She will hear sounds, she will pick up a kitchen knife, and ‘the shadow of the beast’ will appear. The director asks if she is ready, and she mimes all this, ending in a violent scream of fear. Cut to the title, followed by the return of Gabrielle to one of her past lives, in Paris around 1910.

She is at a soirée looking for her husband, who is in another room, and bumps into Louis, a person she scarcely remembers meeting a few years ago. And although Gabrielle and Louis are presumably unaware of this, they have also stumbled into the opening scene of Henry James’s ‘The Beast in the Jungle’. The gender roles are reversed but almost everything else is the same. The first time they met, Gabrielle (or John Marcher) told Louis (May Bartram) the great governing secret of her/his life. She/he was waiting for a ‘strange, rare and terrible thing’ to happen, an event that would spring at its victim ‘like a hidden beast’ and perhaps ‘obliterate’ that person. This is the language of the film and very close to that of James, who says Marcher ‘had the sense of being kept for something rare and strange, possibly prodigious and terrible, that was sooner or later to happen’. The listener is fascinated on both occasions and promises to watch and wait with the victim until the prodigious moment arrives. In James it never does – or it arrives twice. Once when Marcher fails to understand that May is the great love of his life; once when, contemplating her grave, he realises that waiting, when it occupies a whole existence, is an extravagant event in itself.

After the Paris conversation we move to an image of the present-day Gabrielle. She wants a more interesting job than the one she has, and there is a form of mental surgery that will allow her to compete with the bots. It involves ‘purifying’ her DNA by visiting various moments in her past and getting rid of lingering loads of feeling. Dressed in a black leather suit, she lies in a tub of liquid, receives an injection in her ear and takes off into the past. The soirée we attended was part of the first of her trips.

Let’s look at some of this more closely. Periodically we return to the tub of liquid or the interview Gabrielle had before she started on the operation. In the first of these interludes she meets Louis, who is also contemplating the same treatment. They are much busier than James’s protagonists. We see them again in Paris, where they both die; in Los Angeles around 2014, where he kills her; and later, back in the city of the present day, where she learns that the exorcism of feeling worked for him but not for her. She is still passionate where he is only charming.

In the Paris sequence Gabrielle is a classical pianist who is asked to play a piece by Schoenberg. As a last Romantic she feels the work lacks feeling, but Louis is much more up-to-date on modernist music. Gabrielle is married to a man who owns a doll factory, which allows Bonello to go to town on the imagery of imitated humanity – he did quite a bit of this with masks in his film The House of Tolerance (2011) – and to create a wonderful scene where the factory catches fire, the dolls burn, and Gabrielle and Louis, visiting the site at this inopportune moment, try to escape by swimming underwater through a flooded basement. They don’t make it.

When Gabrielle returns to the past again, she is an actress and model living in Los Angeles, although her main source of income is house-sitting. It doesn’t pay all that well, but she has a nifty red sports car. Perhaps it comes with the house. She hasn’t changed much, but Louis has, as we learn from his first monologue in this time and place. He is a self-absorbed maniac and would-be serial killer, convinced that his failure to have had any sort of relation with a girl or a woman is a fault of that sex and needs to be avenged. He picks Gabrielle as his target, the woman who will pay for the perceived crimes of all the others.

There are two amazing moments in this sequence that I am far from understanding but found gripping in terms of psychology and filming. One occurs when Gabrielle invites the psychopath Louis into the house where she is living and persuades him to kiss her and sleep with her. She cures him, in effect. When she wakes up after sex, the man on top of her is not Louis but someone else, a neighbour. This man is surprised at her surprise and leaves quickly. Has she replaced a current real lover with an imaginary Louis, or has she dreamed of both? What does the filming of such scenes say?

We can ask a similar question of the other moment. This time Louis enters the house with a gun, determined to kill Gabrielle. She retreats to her bedroom and locks the door. She is safe. But as with the invitation to join her in the house, she wants to play the kindly therapist rather than the loved woman or the victim. This is the scene we saw rehearsed before the appearance of the title, and now we see it repeated. Gabrielle opens the door three times and stands there unharmed with Louis unmoving. The fourth time he kills her. Here, surely, we are looking at narrative as an explicit matter of choice rather than fate, an implication reinforced by the fact that we are in the past, within the orbit of the operation. In the next present-day scene Gabrielle will be alive again, and Louis will not be an incel.

Beneath all these antics is the sketch of a sentimental anti-bot story, a tale about being human, a defence of feeling and individuality at all costs. But the sense finally created by the film, by our living for a couple of hours with Gabrielle and Louis, is rather different, closer to speculative fiction than science fiction. The preoccupation with what may happen in the midst of what does happen seems very relevant, and if this interest is often an obstacle or deviance in ordinary life, it is also the full-time job of many writers and filmmakers. In the movie we see a lot of what James called the jungle of human life, the paths in the vegetation, the escape routes taken or missed, and we face or fail to face the knowledge that some people have no life except in this unliveable world.

Vol. 46 No. 14 · 18 July 2024

Young Men in Flames

Ulinka Rublack

Tudor Liveliness: Vivid Art in Post-Reformation England

by Christina J. Faraday.

Paul Mellon, 198 pp., £45, April 2023, 978 1 913107 37 6

Tudor art has a poor reputation. Compared to the works of the Northern and Italian Renaissance, 16th-century English paintings look provincial. Tudor patrons weren’t generally prepared to pay much for pictures, and were more concerned with the documentary function of a painting, its cost and size, than with its aesthetic qualities. A proclamation of 1563 recommended that London painters be paid less than carpenters and goldsmiths. Much of the labour was done in workshops by assistants who used pattern books to reproduce designs.

Things were different at court, where foreign luxuries were prized and European artists welcomed – most notably Hans Holbein the Younger, who spent the last decade of his life in England. The influence of their work slowly began to be felt: court artists such as Nicholas Hilliard were shaped by their admiration for Holbein, and by the 1570s refugee artists from the Netherlands were inspiring many now unknown English painters to attempt greater tonal subtlety and more complex compositions. Native practices began to merge with more sophisticated Continental painterly traditions.

As for religious painting, even extreme Protestants found biblical scenes acceptable in domestic chapels and common rooms. The Tudors favoured moral themes from the Old Testament (and, to a much lesser extent, the New Testament), especially parables, which featured on everything from ceramics to furniture fittings, plasterwork and murals. These arts flourished under both Henry VIII and Elizabeth I, as wealthy householders sought to surround themselves with beautiful and edifying objects to guide charitable behaviour. Unlike paintings on panel, such decoration wasn’t intended for prolonged contemplation: that, after all, would encourage idolatry, which had been purged from churches during the Reformation. Tudor merchants had their portraits painted for display in civic or charitable institutions, as well as in their own homes. Like their Dutch counterparts, they were concerned to appear virtuous, dressing in black to signal their sobriety. Such portraits had personal and institutional significance, but most had no exchange value. Cheap oil paintings quickly lost their freshness. Only a small percentage of painted portraits from the period survive.

‘Young man against a background of flames’ (c.1600) by Nicholas Hilliard.

By the last decades of the 16th century, the notion of the portrait gallery had taken hold. Galleries were built in private homes to display paintings of notable men and women and illustrate dynastic allegiances. Oxbridge colleges commissioned portraits of significant figures from their past to show their own genealogies. The middling classes commissioned cheap heraldic paintings with invented coats of arms. There was gradually more work for artists, especially in London, where less successful painters displayed their pictures on walls along the Strand while the more ambitious claimed shop windows.

Christina Faraday’s book seeks to understand the ways in which the Tudors thought and spoke about art and, in particular, the excitement and dangers posed by artworks that seemed almost ‘alive’. Such beguiling works could both instruct and seduce. Significantly, their power lay not in the degree of naturalistic representation achieved by the artist but in the vivid liveliness, or enargeia, brought to the design by other means: through decoration, inscriptions and emblems, all carrying meaning for the viewer.

Holbein appears only briefly in Faraday’s account. He was, as she points out, an anomaly. It wasn’t just that the English didn’t use linear perspective: they hardly understood the concept. It might seem obvious to us that patrons ought to have preferred a Holbein painting to one by a local portraitist, but Faraday is sceptical. ‘While illusionistic portraits by Hans Holbein and Hans Eworth would have been present in English collections throughout the period,’ she writes, ‘it is doubtful whether patrons recognised these qualities in them … For their own commissions English patrons often favoured another mode of representation, such as the emblematic or inscriptional.’ Delight and awe might be part of a work’s rhetorical function, but they were not its raison d’être. As Faraday reminds us, ‘fine’ art wasn’t distinguished from the great range of decorative and decorated objects with which the Tudors surrounded themselves. This was a world of tapestries and embroideries, plasterwork and panelling, illustrated books and manuscripts, carvings, metalwork, murals and every sort of embellishment.

Faraday’s use of the terms of rhetoric to describe the strategies of Tudor artists is helpful, but only up to a point. Quintilian, whose Institutio Oratoria was known to every Tudor schoolboy, urged rhetoricians to convey their arguments clearly, concisely and quickly; Faraday identifies a corresponding attitude in the fine brushwork and economic format of the portrait miniature. Eyes, for example, were quickly outlined with a few strokes. The Tudors and their European counterparts ascribed great power to the miniature, which was never more than two or three inches in diameter, designed to fit in the hand. It was considered the equivalent of a brief encounter, a way of summoning the sitter. When Henry Unton, Elizabeth I’s ambassador to France, was asked by Henri IV to give his opinion of Henri’s mistress, Gabrielle d’Estrées, Unton instead produced his miniature of the English queen, saying that Elizabeth was a ‘far more excellent mistress’. Henri was enchanted by the picture – which, as Unton put it, ‘did draw more speech and affection’ from the king than all his ‘best arguments and eloquence’.

Novel techniques helped to intensify the effect of the portrait miniature. Hilliard used powdered gold to create a background of flames behind a lovestruck young man – the flames would have seemed to flicker in the light. Flaming portraits were a genre in their own right – a number survive – and here Faraday’s framework starts to look rigid. It isn’t clear that works like these had, above all else, a singular rhetorical purpose. Does fire indicate sexual passion or, alternatively, a chivalric courtly milieu in which men advertise their fierce devotion to the queen? Perhaps it signified spiritual commitment to the Protestant cause? Or all three? We might wonder whether Hilliard enjoyed the ambiguity: the unknown man in his portrait wears an emblem round his neck, which could have given us the necessary clue, but he is hiding the image it bears.

Holbein’s The Ambassadors (1533) followed the European tradition of illusionistic portraiture, in which individuals are shown in a realistic setting, surrounded by the attributes of their wealth and learning. By comparison, a rather flat-looking portrait of Unton, painted by an unknown British artist some sixty years later, has him occupying only a quarter of the canvas, which is otherwise taken up by scenes from his life: Unton as a baby surrounded by women; Unton as an Oxford student surrounded by men; Unton in mixed company at a feast with his household. The difference is due in part to function – the picture was commissioned by Unton’s widow, to narrate his life to future generations of the family – but it also reminds us that Tudor patrons didn’t value naturalism or single-point perspective as later viewers have. The Unton memorial portrait is busy with narrative, presenting its subject in all his aspects, professional and personal, with emblematic figures – Death wielding an hourglass, Fame blowing a trumpet – rounding out the story.

Bartmann jug with English royal motifs (1594).

The Tudors could be extravagant in other media, often building on foreign expertise. Consider John Caius’s memorial in Cambridge, probably carved by Theodore Haveus, a Fleming or German from Cleves who settled in England in 1562. After Caius’s death in 1573, his tomb lay above ground for the next six decades. Anyone entering the chapel would first have seen the inscription ‘VIVIT’ (‘he lives’). Then, walking around the tomb, they would have read the full inscription: first, ‘He lives after burial’; then, ‘Virtue lives after burial’; and, above the tomb, ‘FVI CAIVS’ (‘I was Caius’). The design was intended to commemorate in marble a man whose example would impress young minds. Visual liveliness – scrolls and whorls, gilt and scarlet – enhanced the effect, seeking to combine edification with pleasure.

Tudor book illustrations owe much to German, northern Italian and French printmaking, and European woodcuts were often carefully copied when making translations. Innovations such as fold-out pages were also adopted from abroad, and often used in works of geometry and anatomy. In tapestry, too, the English relied on designs from elsewhere, particularly Italy and the workshops in Brussels, where Old Testament scenes were depicted with proper perspective. Bartmann jugs, imported from the German Rhineland, were especially popular in Tudor England. Linked to folklore about wild men, they usually show a heavily bearded and grinning man on the upper half, with heraldic motifs below. Potters in Cologne began adding Tudor roses to the jugs they supplied to the English. The Tudors wrote little about art, and even less about design, so it’s hard to know whether Faraday’s interpretation of the reason for the jugs’ popularity – that Protestant Tudors would have registered an association between the fragility of humanity and the fragile clay vessel – holds true. The jugs were often seen in homes heavily decorated with moral inscriptions and religious images, which the good housewife or husband might have referred to when speaking to the servants or children. But perhaps their owners just found them funny.

In the decades after the death of Elizabeth I, Continental influences came to dominate perceptions of art in all genres. Thomas Howard, the earl of Arundel and a diplomat under both James VI and I and Charles I, represented a new kind of ruthless art connoisseur and collector, hunting for classical statues as well as bargain works by Holbein and Dürer during the Thirty Years’ War. Contemporary commentators began to frame much of Tudor art as an ‘insular mistake’ or a ‘patriotic lie’. We have yet to shake off their legacy.

Vol. 46 No. 14 · 18 July 2024

Diary

Election Night in Glasgow

Dani Garavelli

‘What is the point of voting?’ a man in beige salwar kameez yelled. ‘Whoever wins, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.’ He was halfway up the street when he turned to add: ‘And murderers keep on murdering.’ It was 2.45 p.m. on Friday, 7 June. Dozens of Jumu’ah worshippers – some in prayer hats and sandals, some in sweatshirts and jeans – were coming down the steps of the Madrasa Taleem ul Islam, a 19th-century sandstone villa turned synagogue turned Islamic centre in East Pollokshields on the southside of Glasgow. At the bottom, Chris Stephens, the SNP candidate for Glasgow South West, was waiting. He had two separate bundles of leaflets: one aimed at the general population, the other at Muslims. The all-purpose leaflet was about the cost of living crisis, pension inequality affecting women born in the 1950s, the infected blood scandal: issues Stephens had campaigned on. The Muslim leaflet was all about Gaza, immigration and Islamophobia. ‘For Labour and the Tories to refuse for so long to call for an immediate ceasefire is unforgivable,’ it said, while reminding voters that Stephens had called for the UK to stop arming Israel. Pollokshields ward has the highest concentration of Muslims in Scotland – 27.8 per cent. Many of those coming out of the madrasa shook Stephens’s hand and promised him their vote. But Umar Ali, an IT worker who had supported the SNP, was minded to switch to Labour. ‘Nicola was very good, but it’s different now,’ he said. ‘My parents’ generation stopped voting Labour over the Iraq War. But these things have their cycles.’

One of the 56 SNP MPs elected in the 2015 general election, when the narrowish failure of the independence referendum the year before and the excitement generated by the Yes campaign led to a huge increase in the SNP vote, Stephens knows all about voting cycles. For almost a hundred years, Glasgow was the heart of the Labour movement: almost all of the city had been represented by Labour MPs ever since 1922. But in the run-up to the 2015 election, every second window displayed a Saltire, and ‘I didn’t leave Labour, Labour left me’ became the mantra of disaffected working-class voters. Stephens, who had contested the seat unsuccessfully in 2010, turned the 14,671 majority his Labour predecessor, Ian Davidson, had won in that election into a 9950 majority of his own, a swing of 35.2 per cent. There were similarly large swings in the other Glasgow constituencies. The SNP had transformed referendum defeat into general election triumph, and a permanent political realignment seemed to have taken place.

On 4 July, the realignment went the other way. In the 2019 election the SNP won 48 seats; now it has nine. It lost all six Glasgow constituencies to Labour. Polls had predicted significant losses for the SNP, but not to this extent. Much has changed, of course, in the seventeen months since Nicola Sturgeon’s resignation as first minister. The independence movement has splintered; the party is mired in scandal. Peter Murrell, Sturgeon’s husband and the SNP’s former chief executive, has been charged with embezzlement, while Sturgeon’s replacement as party leader, Humza Yousaf, had to resign after ill-advisedly cancelling the party’s co-operation agreement with the Scottish Greens. Yousaf and his replacement, John Swinney, sullied their reputations by defending the former health secretary Michael Matheson, who misled Holyrood’s presiding officer over £11,000 of roaming charges racked up on his iPad. The SNP’s centralising tendencies, lack of transparency and clumsy handling of the Gender Recognition Reform Bill (which would have allowed people to self-identify their legal sex but was blocked by the Tory government in Westminster) further alienated voters. Even more damaging was the creeping realisation that the SNP, like Labour before it, had failed to deliver on council tax reform, education or poverty.

The race in Glasgow South West seemed likely to be tight. Boundary changes meant Pollokshields was included in the constituency for the first time in this election. Pollok and Govan have a history of left-wing radicalism and Stephens, a trade unionist, hoped to profit from it. His Labour opponent was Zubir Ahmed, a transplant surgeon, who was selected to replace the constituency’s previous candidate, the Corbynite Matt Kerr. In 2017 Kerr came within sixty votes of deposing Stephens; as Stephens saw it, a more centrist opponent would ‘present a different challenge’ – that is, an easier one. Glasgow South West is the kind of place that felt the ‘Corbyn bounce’. Many local Labour activists are less than keen on Keir Starmer, frustrated by his caution, and angry about the purges the party has carried out in an ostentatious attempt to distance itself from his predecessor. ‘The problem any Labour candidate has here is that Labour’s economic position has tipped back to the right and its foreign policy position is back to the Blair years,’ Stephens said. He believed he could keep voters who might have been tempted by a candidate from the Labour left.

There were around twenty SNP activists outside Pollokshields Library. Stephens had decided to canvass in Kenmure Street, which in May 2021 was the scene of a mass protest when the Home Office attempted to deport two Sikh men at the beginning of Eid. A photograph of Stephens in the thick of it and wielding a megaphone was prominent in the Muslim leaflet. He swaggered a bit as we approached the spot where the enforcement van had been parked. ‘I remember the phone call telling me: “Get yourself down here,”’ he said. In the end, hundreds of people surrounded the van in which the two men were being held and prevented it from leaving; eventually the Home Office was forced to release them. ‘Did you know Kenmure Street made it onto a list of the Top 10 protests that made a difference?’ Stephens asked.

The protest wasn’t led by the SNP, but it played in some way into Yes supporters’ conception of themselves as more progressive and outward-looking than their unionist counterparts. It brought an echo of the time during the pandemic when Sturgeon seemed unassailable, and SNP supporters still believed in the party’s capacity to deliver the country from Westminster. When the activists talked to one man on Kenmure Street, the word ‘Nicola’ leapt out from a torrent of Punjabi. I asked someone what he had said. ‘He wanted to know if we were “Team Nicola”,’ she replied.

Shops selling Asian sweetmeats, jewellery and sequined salwar kameez in lime green, yellow, teal and peach abound in the area. But with its high-ceilinged tenement flats, it attracts white bohemian types too. Morag Ramsay, a French and Spanish teacher, ushered me into her kitchen. There was a poster from a Cuban movie about Che Guevara on her kitchen wall. ‘I bought it on a street in Havana,’ she said. Ramsay, who is 59, had voted SNP all her life, and expected to do so again this time. ‘I can’t say I like everything the SNP stand for. But at the same time, I don’t think the party is selling its achievements well enough.’ She cited the Scottish Child Payment (£26.70 a week to every child whose parents are in receipt of particular benefits), the baby box (which includes baby clothes, a blanket, toys, a thermometer and so on) and the fact that the Scottish government settled with junior doctors before they took strike action.

Stephens wanted to tell me about his work with the charity Feeding Britain. As chair of its Scottish arm, Good Food Scotland, his mission was ‘to eradicate food poverty’. Feeding Britain runs community shops which form a bridge between food banks and supermarkets. Members pay a fee of £1 a month, then buy their groceries at a discount. Feeding Britain has two shops in Glasgow South West, with two more in the pipeline, and a mobile van. They are lifelines, but they are also a product of political failure. ‘They’re a sign the social security system, immigration system and economy are broken,’ he said.

A few days earlier, I had attended a Labour press call at another discount food outlet, the Govan Pantry. The pantry is in the Pearce Institute, a crow-gabled sandstone building topped by a silver galleon. It was built in memory of Sir William Pearce, who owned Fairfield’s shipyard, one of the biggest yards on the Clyde, in the late 19th century and was given to Govan by his widow. On the wall inside it says: ‘This is a house of friendship. This is a house of service. For families. For lonely folk. For the people of Govan. For the strangers of the world. Welcome.’ It provided a gymnasium, a library, laundry facilities, cookery classes, a women’s and a men’s club. In the Govan Pantry Ahmed and Sarwar filled their shopping baskets with cans of soup and sweetcorn taken from colour-coded shelves, as photographers shouted instructions at them. Across from the Pearce Institute is a statue of the man himself. A hundred metres away is a much more recent statue, of Mary Barbour, organiser of the 1915 rent strikes which succeeded in forcing the government to bring in rent controls – she is small but mighty, and has a string of followers in her wake. Govan’s motto is ‘nihil sine labore’: nothing without labour. For a long time this was true in both senses of the word. But Govan was also the scene of the SNP’s first serious incursion into Glasgow politics: the by-election victories of Margo MacDonald in 1973 and her husband, Jim Sillars, in 1988.

I wandered down Govan Road, past several community support projects and smart new blocks of housing association flats which are supposed to drive regeneration – together with a bridge due to open in the autumn that will link Govan to Partick in the more affluent West End. The ornate Fairfield offices designed by Honeyman and Keppie (the young Charles Rennie Mackintosh worked there at the time) now house a shipbuilding museum, but construction continues next door at BAE Systems, where Type 26 frigates are being built for the Royal Navy. The yard has become a rallying point for protesters who claim BAE Systems produces arms for Israel. ‘So long as there is warmongering, there will be work,’ one local said to me.

Harjinder Kaur told me that in the forty years since she emigrated from India, Glasgow had got ‘dirtier, the roads are worse, education standards have dropped’. Sturgeon had inspired her to vote SNP. ‘Nicola was the first politician I had ever connected with,’ she said. ‘The way she spoke, she was strong: a warrior woman. I don’t feel that connection any more.’ If ‘hope’ was the buzzword in 2015, today it’s ‘scunnered’. Even those who support independence seem too tired to talk about it, or perhaps are just resigned to it not happening any time soon. ‘Each party picks up the last one’s shit and no one can clean it up,’ one former SNP voter told me. The woman, who did not want to be named, said she might vote Labour this time. ‘I doubt it, but just maybe, there’s a chance of change.’

‘I’ve found that – despite the bitterness between the SNP and Labour – for voters, the journey between the parties isn’t a difficult one,’ the Labour MSP Paul Sweeney told me. ‘You get a lot of people on the doors swithering, to the extent that one piece of literature or a breaking story could change their view.’ The question was whether Ahmed, the party’s candidate in Glasgow South West, was someone who could nudge switherers in his direction. Ahmed’s father arrived in the UK in 1963, having hitched a lift from hippies travelling back from Pakistan. By the 1970s, he had settled in Govanhill. After working as a bus driver he drove a black cab. He is, his son says, still driving it at the age of 85. Zubir, the oldest child, won a scholarship to Hutchesons’ Grammar School (the Scottish Labour Party leader, Anas Sarwar, went there too; so did Yousaf). In 1996, when Ahmed was still at school, his aunt fell ill; a CT scan revealed a brain tumour, and she died five months later. ‘I sat with her in the A&E for sixteen hours, my dad and I taking shifts,’ Ahmed told me, ‘and thought: “This is not right.” It also piqued my interest in medicine. I remember the doctor giving my uncle the diagnosis and prognosis. And I remember the night she died thinking: “That’s exactly how the doctor said it would be.” I was amazed he could be so empathetic and so detailed about what would happen.’ Soon after, he joined the Labour Party. ‘Without the support of our Labour MP, my mum wouldn’t have got into this country. And then later, when my grandmother was unwell, it was the Labour Party that helped us access social care.’

I asked him about SNP claims that Labour will privatise the NHS. ‘I think sometimes people conflate private providers inside the NHS and privatisation,’ he said. ‘Privatisation, for me, is when you can’t get your treatment free at the point of care and that’s what’s happening in Scotland now. Waiting lists mean 45 per cent of joint replacements are being done in the private sector. That’s not the NHS commissioning the private sector to do it: that’s your mum or mine tipping out their life savings because they see it as the only way to relieve their pain.’ Ahmed, who does not carry out private surgery, said that Labour’s plans to crack down on non-dom tax loopholes would allow for an extra 160,000 appointments a year in Scotland.

I asked whether Gaza was a tricky issue for him. ‘I am a registered volunteer surgeon for Medical Aid for Palestinians, so Gaza is personal for me,’ he said. ‘But the Muslim community shouldn’t be thought of as a homogenous block. Having said that, there is a sentiment there. Some people are still supportive of Labour and me, others are against us, but that’s not only about Gaza, it’s because the SNP has been very successful in cultivating the Asian vote.’ He said that across all classes – ‘if you still believe in class’ – the prevailing theme was a worry about public services, and a desire for the area to be an economic powerhouse.

Everything went smoothly until we came to Labour’s plan to remove the VAT exemption on private school fees. ‘It’s hard to argue against it if it generates the revenue it’s meant to and then that revenue is spent back in the state school sector,’ he said. But when I asked where his own sons, aged nine and six, were being educated, he became defensive. ‘They go to a private school,’ he said. ‘That’s a choice my wife and I have made, just as Anas’s children go to the same school.’ I pointed out that Sarwar had been heavily criticised for this. ‘I think you can have faith in the [state system] without grandstanding about it,’ he replied.

I went to Roughmussel, where I noticed that Ahmed had been canvassing. Outside their two-storey, semi-detached house, John and Irene Mailer were preparing for a trip to the dump. Lifelong Tories, they had lost patience with the party over Boris Johnson’s ‘buffoonery’, but remained concerned about immigration: Irene worried that, further down the line, indigenous Scots will be the minority. Ahmed had knocked on their door twice. ‘He seemed like a lovely young man,’ Irene said. ‘I felt as though he listened.’ She had promised him her vote.

The Green candidate, John Hamelink, had no chance of winning. The last time the party fielded a candidate here, in 2015, he polled 507 votes. But the Greens have been a significant presence in Scottish politics thanks to the Bute House Agreement, the co-operation deal they signed with the SNP in August 2021, which allowed the minority SNP government to burnish its environmental credentials in advance of COP26 in Glasgow and to bolster its progressive image. But many in the SNP were unhappy about the Gender Recognition Reform Bill, which the Bute House Agreement committed it to introducing. Some MSPs left; a handful, including Ash Regan, who stood for the SNP leadership against Yousaf, defected to Alex Salmond’s new party, Alba, which recast itself as a champion of women’s rights. Outside the madrasa, Umar Ali had come back to tell me the Bute House Agreement was another reason he was voting Labour. ‘From what I’ve heard, the SNP were doing things they didn’t want to, but they had to because of the coalition,’ he said. What kind of things? ‘I’d rather not say, but I think you know.’

On a rainy afternoon, I met Hamelink and his fellow canvassers in Linthouse, at the west end of Govan. The streets looked uncared for. There were broken fences, and some of the gardens were full of junk. It didn’t seem to be the Greens’ natural territory. But, as Hamelink padlocked his electric bike to a fence, he reminded me this ward had elected a Green councillor, and said he had learned never to prejudge. He was right. Most of those who answered their doors were interested in what he had to say on jobs, transport and green energy, though it felt like he would struggle to turn goodwill into votes.

Glasgow South West’s only hustings took place on 21 June. A lot had happened in the intervening days. The Tories were embroiled in a gambling scandal. Labour was refusing to commit to scrapping the two-child benefits cap. The SNP was insisting that it would treat victory in a majority of Scottish seats as a licence to begin independence negotiations with Westminster. Nigel Farage’s televisual ubiquity was luring disenchanted Tories to Reform. Though no one had clapped eyes on the party’s Glasgow South West candidate, Morag McRae, there was speculation she might keep her deposit.

McRae didn’t show up; neither did the Conservative or Lib Dem candidates. Stephens, Ahmed and Hamelink were joined by the Alba candidate, Tony Osy. At points, the hustings felt like a game of hard times Top Trumps. Asked what they would do to hold absentee landlords to account, Ahmed began: ‘As someone who has lived in both a housing association and privately rented property …’ Stephens raised the stakes with a story of trying to force an absentee landlord to fix a leaking roof during lockdown. Then Hamelink talked about living in a block full of party flats and drug-dealing. Stephens’s nine years as MP gave him an advantage, but he couldn’t adequately answer a question on Operation Branchform (the police inquiry into the SNP’s finances) any more than Ahmed could counter criticism of the two-child benefits cap, or Hamelink criticism of the Scottish Greens’ position on gender recognition reform.

On election night I was at Glasgow’s Emirates Arena, where the counts for the city’s six constituencies were being held. The shrieks of Labour supporters when the exit polls were announced set the mood. As the ballot boxes were tipped out and the sorting began, I sat with Stephens’s wife, Aileen Colleran. She used to be a Labour councillor, but has since left the party. Today was their fifteenth wedding anniversary. Colleran remembered watching from the Emirates balcony when Stephens was elected to Parliament in 2015. ‘From the February onwards, I had started to realise that “Oh my God, he is actually going to get in this time.” And then, on the night, it was one win after another. It was something else; it was epic.’

I watched Stephens stalking the line of counters, trying to work out who was ahead in various parts of the constituency. His assistant darted back and forth delivering updates. ‘Most of the ballots so far are tight, but we’re slightly ahead from what I’ve seen,’ he told Colleran. Yet as Labour victories elsewhere in the country – Rutherglen, Falkirk, East Renfrewshire – filtered through, the mood in the SNP ranks grew sour. There was no nostalgia for Sturgeon here. ‘The damage was already done, and not by us,’ the outgoing SNP MP for Glasgow North West, Carol Monaghan, said as she passed. On social media, I saw that Sturgeon appeared to be blaming Swinney for failing to establish a ‘USP’ for the party. In the Emirates, SNP anger was stoked by the sight of her on a big screen, sitting on an ITV panel alongside George Osborne and Ed Balls. There was no sound, so the focus was on her facial expressions. ‘Look at her, laughing,’ one activist said. ‘Why is it that the people who make the mess go on without a care, while the rest of us have to pick up the pieces?’

By 2 a.m. it was clear that every Glasgow constituency had fallen to Labour bar Glasgow South West, where the count seemed to be closer. There was much talk about Stephens’s personal standing and speculation that the vote in Pollokshields might have tipped the balance in his favour. But by 3 a.m. even Stephens appeared to have accepted that this was wishful thinking. In the end, Ahmed won 15,552 votes, turning Stephens’s 4900 majority into a 3285 majority of his own. Hamelink polled a respectable 2727 votes.

‘There is a national tide against us and having been elected on a national tide for us I have to accept those results,’ Stephens said. ‘As far as I am concerned, we need to reform the party and rebuild.’ Does that seem possible? ‘I remember, in 2010, losing Glasgow South West by 14,000 votes yet, in 2011, we came back and I nearly won the seat in Holyrood.’ A few feet away, Colleran told me that her bridesmaid, Katrina Murray, had become the Labour MP for Cumbernauld and Kirkintilloch.

I asked her to what extent the night had been a mirror image of 2015’s Labour wipeout. ‘It’s almost identical,’ she said. ‘Everybody here wearing a red rosette and celebrating should enjoy it while they can because it comes around, and the wheels fall off, and one day they will have to be gracious losers too.’

Table of Contents

London Review of Books: Vol. 46 No. 14 · 18 July 2024

All articles

Letters

James Butler - What’s a majority for?

Stephen Sedley - The Rise and Fall of Treason in English History

Rae Armantrout - Poem: ‘Hell’

Christian Lorentzen - The Last Politician: Inside Joe Biden’s White House and the Struggle for America’s Future / The Fight of His Life: Inside Joe Biden’s White House / The Internationalists: The Fight to Restore American Foreign Policy after Trump

Rosemary Hill - At the William Morris Gallery: On Mingei

Thomas Meaney - Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America / The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of US History / Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance

Mélissa Cornet - On Gender Apartheid

David Trotter - The Fatal Alliance: A Century of War on Film

Blake Morrison - The Road to the Country

Gavin Francis - Short Cuts: Medicine Shortages

Alexander Bevilacqua - Diary of a Black Jewish Messiah: The 16th-Century Journey of David Reubeni through Africa, the Middle East and Europe

Andrew O’Hagan - The House of Beckham: Money, Sex and Power

David Goldblatt - What are the Olympics for? / Igniting the Games: The Evolution of the Olympics and Bach’s Legacy

Colin Kidd - Mandeville’s Fable: Pride, Hypocrisy and Sociability

A.E. Stallings - Poem: ‘Blackbird at Dawn’

Nora Goldschmidt - Rome’s Patron: The Lives and Afterlives of Maecenas

Michael Wood - At the Movies: ‘The Beast’

Ulinka Rublack - Tudor Liveliness: Vivid Art in Post-Reformation England

Dani Garavelli - Diary: Election Night in Glasgow