Salman Rushdie on Gita Sahgal and Amnesty

Salman Rushdie has also waded in on the Amnesty and Gita Sahgal situation. I remember at the time  in ’88 when the fatwa by Khomeini was issued against his book The Satanic Verses being shocked that this was happening to a writer. Women Against Fundamentalism was borne out of this struggle against censorship, religious fundamentalisms and freedoms. And I certainly supported WAF’s aims and objectives and attended the first conference in 1989.

But on this Rushdie is wrong because he is using a broad brush approach based on assertions. I don’t know if he is coming into this debate with all the weight that he could. It maybe is that he is less convinced of the position that he is defending than he is letting on. One thing is clear is that those with a neo-con line on these things (Cohen, Aaronovitch et al) are possessed of the ideological certainty that was attacked in the Satanic Verses. Rushdie must twig this unless he has politically degenerated further and faster that otherwise thought. These certainties are not based on a mustering of hard evidence but on a collecting together of broad and vague catagories such as “islamist” and “islamo-fascist” which are then in turn elided into each other. With such intellectual mush the “liberal-left” (another such category) is lectured on its errors.

It does need pointing out though that it is the lack of evidence that is the complaint here. Secular arguments are based on observable evidence or evidence that is reported where possible reported in a rebuttable way. Hard evidence can change minds.

If you have got evidence flaunt it!

Review: La Mujer Sin Cabeza (The Headless Woman)

La Mujer Sin Cabeza (The Headless Woman) is a fascinating and engrossing film that explores issues such as guilt, repression and denial. Verónica is a middle class dentist living in the north of Argentina. You cannot pin down the precise time this film is set (the director Lucrecia Martel explains in an interview in this month’s Sight & Sound that it is intentional to blur the exact period). Verónica is driving along a road where she hits something. She is not sure what. She looks back at the road and sees what is thought to be a dog. After that she disconnects from the real world, she evades responsibility by not contacting the police, there’s no consequence for her actions hence this trance like state (she visits the hospital and then stays in a hotel). She is in a fugue state. Eventually she tells her husband who orchestrates a cover-up, from Verónica’s visit to the hospital to the stay in the hotel. Nobody in Verónica’s world gives a damn whether she killed someone, it is all about using influence and power to cover this crime up. Even though it is still unclear whether Verónica actually hit a person. All we know is that a child’s body is found in the nearby canal, drowned. Further into the film Verónica displays aspects of guilt especially when a young boy comes to the house to offer to clean her car. She gives various items to the boy possibly to salve her own guilty conscience. Yet at the same time there’s a specific scene that elicits distaste when Verónica, while talking to her husband, is examining the front of her car minus a dent and in the background is the cousin of boy she may have killed carrying gardening items into her house.

Again, the interview with Martel in this month’s Sight & Sound highlights various aspects of the film. Verónica and her husband have many servants who are indigenous whilst many of the middle class people in Argentina are descendants of European immigration. Martel explained that this also exposes Spanish colonialism. The servants know their place in the class hierarchy. The film also highlights a very masculine way of dealing with things, when it comes to the cover-up and making the hit and run ‘go away’ it is left to the men in her life, while Verónica with other female relatives spend time in specific carer roles. There is a stark demarcation between gender roles. The viewer also doesn’t know much about the child who has been found in the canal nor of the people who live in poorer surrounding areas. Instead we are exposed to the conspiracy and cover-up by Verónica and her family. Martel makes the point that when hit and runs involve an indigenous victim it is treated with a ‘who cares’ attitude and that is powerfully brought to the forefront of the film. Martel, as well, was brought up during the Junta period, she wanted to link the dead body we don’t see but hear the horrific noise of something being hit with the desaparecidos.

The links are hinted at as opposed to being something that the audience are lectured with. The result is that the political underpinning of the film functions as a feeling that there is something disturbing in the background that is left unseen. It is all the more powerful for that.

Revealed: Who killed Archie

Ahhh, mon ami, the little grey cells have been working overtime… I shall reveal the killer.

It was Stacey who killed Archie Mitchell. The script harking from a Jacobean/revenge-style plot.

And poor old Bradley…splat on hard concrete (was there a stunt person?) I really wanted Bradley, while being pursued by cops on the rooftops, to shout, “Made it, Stace… Top of the world!” But instead he exclaimed prosaically, to his eternal love Stace, “Run Stacey!” And I was disappointed when Peggy Mitchell uttered the words to the Mitchell sisters, “You want the truth”…I hoped she was gonna finish it with, “You can’t handle the truth”… But no…

And there didn’t seem to be any fluffed lines during the live show.

Christopher Hitchens on Amnesty and Gita Sahgal

Once upon a time in the distant past I used to respect Christopher Hitchens (like I once respected Nick Cohen), the former SWPer, he was the more left-wing of the brothers Hitchens. I regularly read his columns in Vanity Fair during the 1990s. Then the War on Terror came along…and Hitchens was in favour of the imperialist ‘liberators’ of Iraq. How the mighty have fallen! And now he has waded in on the Gita Sahgal and Amnesty situation.

Our Christopher used to have considerable rhetorical powers. He was also good at stating the heterodox view. His recent weighing in over the row between Gita Sahgal and Amnesty International rehashes the arguments already put by others and dealt with already.

The Hitchens of old would have demanded some evidence to back up allegations and would have been alert to “evidence” being guilt by association. He would also have flung out barb after barb against all the atrocities of the war of terror waged by the neo-cons.

Now it’s just lazy routine thinking…..

Films for the weekend

Well, I hope to get to the cinema twice this weekend. I have been meaning to see the highly praised, A Prophet (Un Prophète). It was remiss of me to forget to include Audiard’s previous film De battre mon coeur s’est arrêté (The Beat That my Heart Skipped) in my favourite films of the noughties!!

The other film I want to see is La mujer sin cabeza (The Headless Woman) which too has been highly praised. I decided to see this film before I saw the reviews as it is on release from today because I read an interesting and fascinating interview with the director, Lucrecia Martel, in the current edition of Sight & Sound.

Who killed Archie Mitchell?

Sacré bleu!

First James Purnell steps down as MP and now we find out who killed Archie Mitchell in ‘Enders tonight. Well, haven’t had so much excitement since who shot Ian Beale, Phil Mitchell…and JR Ewing (oh yeah, Dallas)..

I just hope we find out who killed Gavin’s dad aka Gavin & Stacey aka Archie Mitchell aka Larry Lamb in a Hercule Poirot-esque fashion. To celebrate the 25th anniversary the show tonight will be shown….live. Gosh, I can’t believe it is 25 years, I remember the very first episode where Den, Ali and Arthur broke into Reg Cox’s house to find him dead. Oh, the dramatic tension.

Oh the excitement… is at absolute fever pitch the anticipation of who dropped the bust of Queen Victoria on top of the head of the evil and vile patriarch Archie Mitchell. Greek tragedy with a smattering of Jacobean/revenge drama-lite. One of  the central tenets of  ’Enders is that ‘family is everything’ (usually lamented by matriarch Peggy Mitchell) used for dramatic, contradictory, dysfunctional and ironic purposes. The unrelenting murderous misery of life in Albert Square revolves around individual and extended families…coming together under that collective family roof known as the Queen Vic.

Anyway, less of the analysis back to the important issue, who killed Archie…. Was it Peggy? Ronnie? that cop from The Bill who plays a former cop? Bradley? Phil? Billy? Stacey? Janine? It is just too obvious to be Janine, mon ami. Need to engage the little grey cells.

Ah mon Dieu, now I know…. the killer is the scriptwriter!

Or from a pragmatic point of view, it could be Peggy or Bradley as both are bidding adieu to the soap…Or just play safe and frame Janine (I like Janine and also Stacey).

And sadly I will be watching as I like a good old whodunnit….

James Purnell has left the building….

Not totally surprised that James Purnell, former Secretary of State for Work and Pensions is stepping at the next election. Instead he is going to concentrate on ‘contributing ideas to the Labour project in the future’…. I presume that means recycled and revamped NL speak? Anyway, the political legacy Purnell leaves us with is ongoing privatisation of the benefits system, increased conditionality & sanctions and workfare. Overall a draconian Welfare Reform Act. I have heard he is a better constituency MP than a minister.

So I will bid adieu to my favourite former most loathed Secretary of State for Work and Pensions. You have more time to spend with your fridge magnets….now..

Every Good Boy Deserves Favour

I saw this play, Every Boy Deserves Good Favour, the other night with Madam Miaow. I enjoyed it immensely and yes politically suspect it was too but the whole thing was an amazing spectacle. And the understanding and interpretation of madness was thought-provking (objecting to the political hegemony in a society gets you both the labels of ‘dissident’ and ‘mad’…And what precisely is madness?).

Set in the 1960s, it is about two men sharing a ward in a Soviet asylum, one of them (Ivanov) hears an orchestra in his head, the other (also  called Ivanov) is a political dissident who has spoken out against the bureaucracy and finds himself banged up in an asylum.

My favourite scenes are Ivanov mimicking beautifully to the sounds of the orchestra inside his head (but we the audience see that magnificent orchestra)

It also brought to my mind as well the 1950s height of the Cold War ‘commie under the bed’ hysteria MK-ULTRA experiments and latter day War on Terror ‘shock and awe’ warfare of the mind. It all being about breaking and destroying someone’s mind and spirit.

Here’s the link to excellent MM’s review.

Waiting for the Great Leap Forward

I only like a couple of Billy Bragg songs….such as Kirsty MacColl’s ‘New England’ and ‘It Says Here’. I discovered as a teenager that they may have political lyrics but you just can’t dance to them!

But I like this one, ‘Waiting for the Great Leap Forward’, especially as Bragg updated the lyrics to fit with political and social times during the past couple of years.

(You have to go around 50 seconds into the video to see Bragg)

“It was the best times, it was the worst of times”….

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times….” That for me summarises my experience of being in Trot group. The experience was enlightening, it was a kind of apprenticeship where you develop an analysis and a critique of the world from a Marxist perspective. Developing a technique in how to think for yourself but not thinking for yourself. And that was downer, looking back…hindsight is such a luxury! Following a line, imbued with the sense of Leninism and party discipline. And I really believed in it all, it encompassed my whole personal and political landscape. I believed in the one day overthrow of the capitalist system. From the age 16 onwards until I was around 26 I felt part of something, something identifiable, something I believed in. Something which shared a collective spirit in fighting and campaigning for a better life. I still define myself as a Marxist sympathetic to Trotskyism but I wouldn’t touch another Trot grouping with a six-foot barge pole, maybe that sounds rigid and fixed in my thinking but I have been unbelievably burnt before, yes you learn by your experiences and that’s why I wouldn’t make the same mistake twice. I suppose what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger but if I could go back in a Tardis and visit my 16 year old self I would inevitably say, ‘Don’t do it’! But hey, it was the ‘best of times, it was the worst of times’…

And what has made me think of this are the ructions in the SWP. The revolutionary left has endured years of splits and fusions, sometimes healthy and unhealthy. But over the years I am starting to believe that the revolutionary left is stuck in a dead-end, forever damned into that dead-end. Why? Because the political culture of these groupings. The central structure based on democratic centralism, it is a dead-end (and I have argued this countless times). It doesn’t build healthy pluralist free-thinking organisations it creates dogmatic degenerating bad for the political soul places where a small group of people are given immense power. Oh, and don’t forget to hand over 10% or so of your hard earned case to keep the party going (you may as well chuck it down a drain for what good it does!) Plus don’t forget to sell the propaganda (to this day I detest paper selling… smacks of desperation).

Too much power is given to the leaderships, cult of the leader situations and top-down education. Fortunately the group I was in at least encouraged tendencies and factions. In the case of the SWP, I believe that the likes of Lindsey German is a victim of her own political and cynical methods.

The conceit and arrogance shown believing their grouping is the true inheritor of the Bolshevik Party. It is utterly distasteful along with the patronising recruitment speeches I have encountered over the years and why I should join their merry brand of Trotskyism, and the desperation of paper selling. The whole recruitment technique has the whiff of the Jehovah Witnesses about it….but without the organised religion. I wrote a couple of years ago for the F Word about my experiences of being a woman in the revolutionary left and I still stand by it.

The biggest shame that so many groups shaft their own members, foot soldiers for the revolution, who have been willing to put the energy and time into building the movement, it is like you are treated contempt. I thought it was about comradeship and solidarity but it is case of being chewed up and spat out like you don’t matter. Dehumanised and devalued.

The leaders of Trot groups put their own personal ambitions first while subordinating the class struggle. Here’s me thinking that it’s all about building for the struggle not about the personal ambitions of the ‘leaders’. And all these underhand methods and behaviour discredit the whole left further ghettoising the ideas of revolutionary Marxism ending up in a dead-end. But then that’s the thing, there’s so many problems with the conduct, internal politics, culture and behaviour of the revolutionary left that damage and scar dynamic and vibrant people. I have seen it countless times over the years. Laughable really considering we are the alternatives to capitalism. If the revolutionary left is to heave itself out of the quagmire, stymied by its own conceit, then the point is about changing its political internal dynamics if not then in the political scheme of things it will mean to nothing.

Links: Anna Chen’s excellent A Bad Case of the Trots

On the SWP: Exit stage left, What German’s resignation tell us, SWP split: what now?, Splits in the Judean Peoples Front