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| 3.52
| 88
| Feb 22, 2018
| Apr 22, 2018
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liked it
| This Oxford University Press 'Organised Crime: A Very Short Introduction' is solid enough but it reads throughout like an academic report to a governm This Oxford University Press 'Organised Crime: A Very Short Introduction' is solid enough but it reads throughout like an academic report to a government department. As a basic primer, it might be useful to someone entirely new to the subject but it cannot be said to be 'inspiring'. One insight (although dealt with rather tentatively by the authors) is that our perceptions have been over-defined by, first, American reactions to the very specific experience of Italian-American organised crime and by, second, the emergent special interests of 'law enforcement'. A sub-text of the final chapter is a frustration that law enforcement's propensity to secrecy makes it difficult for academics to get access to the data that they think they require in order to understand what is going on 'out there'. A suspicion is that law enforcement's political narrative may be flimsy. Although the book is largely descriptive with little or minimal opinion, the final chapter more than hints at an uncomfortable truth - that organised crime is really not that organised except insofar as the market is organised ... it is just another aspect of human aspiration. This leads us to some uncomfortable thoughts because, in the end, criminality is not defined in terms of moral good and evil so much as what the law dictates. Any assumption that the law is the same as justice or morality is as dodgy as the equation made between education and intelligence. In general, there is some consonance of terms. Most people most of the time can reasonably prefer the order of the lawful State over the disorder of a market without restraints especially when the human condition creates desire for things that are harmful to it. The discomfort comes from a number of factors - one is that criminal behaviour can be a reasonable response to aspiration in any system where aspiration for things (including security) is unavailable to some people but normal for others (within the system that law protects). We might add here that the desire for 'bad' things - like addictive drugs or tobacco - may be driven by legitimate anxieties and pressures that the system as a whole will not deal with. Even human and sexual trafficking may be far more a negotiation with crime by the vulnerable than we might think. Protection (revisited later as extortion) may be the least worse outcome where law enforcement itself has failed to provide it. Loan sharking would not need to exist outside a world of low wages and vulnerable small businesses. Criminals mostly exploit the already weak or exploited. The authors flip things on their head a little further by pointing out that many criminals simply want things and do a cost-benefit analysis on the various non-legal means of ceasing to be weak or exploited themselves. They are, in short, just business people working in a parallel system. Another factor is that we should be in no doubt that order (in the form of States) originated in what we would call crime if extortion is a crime. Most of our state structures are derived from older forms where tribute was exacted for 'protection' and eventually became 'taxation'. In other words (and we do not have to be an anarchist to accept this), exactly who benefits from the State structures dependent on taxation and how and what they define as criminal is highly relevant to any attempt to match any concept of good and evil to the law. Finally, in the struggle between order and criminality, order is not averse to extreme and cruel measures sanctified as law if and when it can get away with it. One matter not covered very much in the book is organised political crime or 'resistance' but this really needs considering. If the State under pressure can start banging people up for a Facebook post and turning them into 'criminals', frustrated and excessively exploited or marginalised communities can turn to criminality to finance resistance or create their own authority. The response of the prevailing global neo-liberal community has been to try to force the abandonment of any notion of resistance or national liberation but retain the political dimension by creating a super-criminal category of 'terrorism'. The category may have back-fired as the complexity of Hamas' or Hezbollah's resistance has been understood better under what amounts to a state terrorist operation against their communities by Israel but it has also enabled States to impose extreme measures on their own populations. The abstract problem here is that, whereas lawful states can define criminality by fiat, there is no universally valid international legal structure that has not ultimately been a measure of the American interest (now under severe pressure). The 'rogue state' category has been invented to deal with this. Globalisation, which may prove to have been order's fundamental strategic error in maintaining itself viably, has intensified the ability of aspirational actors to work the global market system and driven 'order' to go trans-national and build a sledgehammer bureaucratism under US influence. Similarly, the New World Order's attempt to define itself as a global police force seems to be in ruins as 'rogue states' and 'terrorists' have proven resilient with increasing sympathies for their predicament from significant domestic minorities who are otherwise law-abiding. This presents a fascinating crisis of definitions where the temptation of the system is to start criminalising aspects of political dissent at home. This threatens to worsen the situation as elements amongst those targeted may start to see unlawfulness as a reasonable response to unjust legality. On balance, one should very much be part of the faction of humanity that seeks order over market chaos but if that order fails to deliver what people aspire to, is inept at controlling the market in general and becomes tyrannous in defence of order, then we have mounting problems. In practice, we should not be romantic about criminals. Sometimes they deliver 'goods' that really should never have been under state sanction. The case study of alcohol during prohibition is probably one of humanity's greatest examples of unintended consequences on these lines. Far more often, they supply 'bads' - addictive drugs, faulty counterfeit products, low priced tobacco, unnecessary protection (extortion), financial redistribution from the most vulnerable in society to themselves, exploitative labour, access to non-consensual sex and so forth. Getting the balance right between meeting the aspirations of all humanity equally, dealing with the trade in oppressive and dangerous 'bads' and maintaining a 'good' (that is, smoothly functioning) market system is not easy. A certain balance was seriously broken with imperial neo-liberalism. It would have been good if the authors had been bolder in addressing this tension which is essentially political but, as a basic overview, even if unsatisfactory in places, this will serve most newcomers to the subject well enough. ...more |
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| 1101904224
| 4.14
| 568,537
| Jul 26, 2016
| Jul 26, 2016
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really liked it
| I have not seen the Apple TV series deliberately so that I can assess 'Dark Matter' on its merits but I shall do so eventually. The book is a solid an I have not seen the Apple TV series deliberately so that I can assess 'Dark Matter' on its merits but I shall do so eventually. The book is a solid and imaginative science fiction thriller with a nice twist two thirds of the way through that sustains the momentum to the very end. Yes, it has unanswered plot holes that you could drive a TARDIS through but Blake Crouch makes you not care for three reasons - he writes clearly in that clean American populist way, he creates incident continuously and tells his story straight without post-modern irony or 'knowingness'. The core of the story is a machine and a drug that can take a person into alternate universes that split off but only in real time. It is not space or time travel although the debt to H G Wells' seminal science fiction novel is very clear. Each universe is one that splits on a choice in the past. The humanity of the novel lies in the attempt of Jason Dessen to return to his 'home universe' and rescue his wife Daniela and son Charlie from an alternate Jason [2] who has built the machine in another part of the multiverse and then travelled to take over Jason's life as more fulfilling. This is another variation on a common trope of popular American culture - male terror of losing family to chance or malice and the belief that anything can and should be done to recover the 'home'. Maybe it is displaced fear of the most likely cause of loss in actuality - a woman's decision. If there is a flaw in the book, it is a necessary one. The obsessional drive of the Jasons to particular ends (no spoilers offered here to explain that further) means that Jason 1 ('our' Jason) comes across as more than a little over the top in his drives, often as self-absorbed and more than once rather stupid. We have to identify with this flawed obsessive for this story to work and so accept a rather cardboard Daniela and Charlie. If there was one person I found myself caring about it was not our hero but the unlucky Amanda who gets trapped into travelling with Jason and leaves him en route. It is probably just me but I had to admit that the temptation was there just to split with the kind and intelligent Amanda in a tolerable alternate reality and not risk hellish destruction or despair, trusting to the author's determination to give us the ending we readers want. There is not much more to say except that this novel, while not a masterpiece by any description, gives Michael Crichton a run for his money in the scifi thriller genre. It is constantly engaging and manages to surprise sometimes even if we know how it must end. ...more |
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| Jul 01, 2001
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it was amazing
| Still a highly readable classic of its type, 'The Hound of the Baskervilles' (the third of Conan Doyle's four Sherlock Holmes novels and first seriali Still a highly readable classic of its type, 'The Hound of the Baskervilles' (the third of Conan Doyle's four Sherlock Holmes novels and first serialised in 1901/1902) stands up well as an atmospheric story of Victorian criminality with an undoubted Gothic feel to it. It is notable for holding back Holmes as resolver of problems until quite near the end. The novel reads (as it was intended to be) as a throw-back to mid-nineteenth century narratives of bad behaviour amongst the black sheep of the English gentle class. A highly conservative work in both style and content, it nevertheless acts as an important bridge to the twentieth century English country house tradition of class-ridden murder for property and advantage that still operates today in films like 'Knives out'. It might be noticed in passing that the story (which brought Holmes 'back from the dead' as far as his fans were concerned although Holmes apparently 'died' in 1891 and the story is set in 1889) was filmed (in Germany) as early as 1914. It has been a popular culture staple ever since. ...more |
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| 0553277405
| 9780553277401
| 0553277405
| 3.92
| 15,044
| Jan 01, 1981
| Apr 01, 1982
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liked it
| Clive Cussler's 1981 thriller, another exercise in implausibility, follows the formula of Vixen 03 but where the political background of the 5th novel Clive Cussler's 1981 thriller, another exercise in implausibility, follows the formula of Vixen 03 but where the political background of the 5th novel was the freedom struggle in South Africa, this 6th outing for Dirk Pitt is about the fate of Canada and, more tangentially, the energy crisis of the time. Cussler is nothing if not imaginative. As a Brit myself, it was quite a pleasant change to find the main antagonist of Dirk to be the British in the person of a suave and aging James Bond-alike with, at one point, a crew of tough Royal Marines invading Upper State New York. A lot happens (which is one of the markers of a Cussler). The British angle nicely dovetails with a nineteenth century railroad crime gone wrong and the ruthless internecine state politics of Canada in the age of Quebec Libre. The Soviets get only a very small, merely implied, walk-on part. The open sea also plays only a small part in this tale. Most of the action is on land or close to shore in riverine, estaurine and subterranean waters. As in Vixen 03, the story is as much an investigative historical detective story as 'contemporary' thriller. The sex stuff is there but is much more restrained if still more than a little a ridiculous. Heidi from Book 5 turns up as a likeable naif allowed to make girly mistakes and be patronised by the boys. The denouement (no spoilers) is sweet and romantic and fits the character we saw in the previous book. Dirk's team plays much less of a role in #6 - Giordano is scarcely seen. Even Pitt himself seems to take second place to no less than three sociopaths and the Canadian political shenanigans. The title is explained very late and only in passing. Still, for all that, it is an accomplished and enjoyable bit of nonsense. Although its politics are somewhat dated (like its gender relations), it is reasonably fast-paced and filled with 'incident' (which is generally what you want in a popular thriller). ...more |
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| 3.33
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| 2003
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liked it
| Written almost immediately after 9/11, this 'very short introduction' cannot do much more than give us a basic history of what we like to place under Written almost immediately after 9/11, this 'very short introduction' cannot do much more than give us a basic history of what we like to place under the term 'terrorism' and to express a barely hidden frustration with the war on an abstract noun (Terry Jones of Monty Python fame). There are two major points being made here. The first is that there is no satisfactory definition of what terrorism actually is except in terms of its political purposes. And the second is that media-driven hysteria around the subject threatens the very fabric of liberal society. The book also debates whether terrorism as tactic (by whatever definition) is efficacious or not. The author suggests not and yet his examples sometimes tend to tell us the opposite especially if we take the long view. We can agree that most socialist or anarchist terror within liberal democracies was a waste of energy but then the later manifestations of it in the Red Army Faction and similar organisations were somewhat narcissistic and even patronising expressions of middle class outrage on behalf of others. However, the cases of the Soviet Union, Cuba, China, Venezuela and others tend to show that terror as a tool designed to eliminate opposition in the sea in which revolutionaries must swim did work and that national/socialist regimes did emerge and survive for decades - right up until the present day. This, of course, is very different from the attempt at an 'ethical' terrorism by the Narodniki although anarchism descended into very unethical behaviours before too long. Whether ethical or unethical, these types of political excitability without a greater strategy certainly failed. It could be argued, of course, that the failure of the Social Revolutionaries constructed the conditions for Communist ruthlessness as, if we want a symbol of this, Lenin's ideology emerged out of the State murder of his brother. This would certainly be taking the long view. Townshend does himself great credit by not shying away from the existence of state terror and not only of the communist type. The Western empires have not been averse to it, again as part of a wider strategy of warfare, even if they like to cover it up as 'counter insurgency'. Townshend could have gone further and deeper down this route but the danger would have been that the purchasing punter might have got confused if this commissioned attempt to explain what was then a new phenomenon to some had moved into Chomskian territory. He is certainly right that terror within a revolutionary struggle that does not have a national resistance aspect is likely simply to mobilise the resources of the enemy into counter-strategies of great brutality (as in Chile and Argentina) and alienate populations uncommitted to the struggle. Each case is different but Townshend is particularly good and honest on the cat-and-mouse terror tactics of Israel and the Palestinians where he unravels the self-serving Netanyahu narrative that drives American congressional opinion, a legislature of surpassing lack of sophistication. In fact, Israel is an example of terrorism working because it was primarily ethnic and capable of being integrated into the survival strategies of an emerging ethnic State. That Jews never truly repudiated the massacres committed on Arab villagers as ethnic cleansing is a blot on their moral reputation. He also looks at the IRA and ETA as national liberation movements making use of terror as a tactic and he judges, prematurely in the case of the IRA, that they were failures. This is probably true in the case of the Basques with the Basque territory still well locked into the Spanish State mechanism. However, the Whitehall sell-out by stealth of the Unionists in a trajectory that was perfectly happy to abandon aspects of UK sovereignty in collaboration with the Irish in return for Washington's little scheme to get Ireland into NATO was also partly driven by Irish terrorism. As each decade goes by the inveigling of Northern Ireland into an eventual referendum to get the Province off the back of the British budget and secure Ireland so that it was no longer a neutralist strategic risk factor in a European War could rely on Irish terror to make that job easier. If the purpose of Irish terror was to unite Ireland then, although Irish terror did not in itself bring the unification about, the conditions it created have enabled the possibility of their aspirations to be met just as Unionist terror has slowed the process down. In that respect, terror works. Terror, in other words, is a tool within a much wider political or military game. This is something the Israelis never forgot. When the Nazis called the French Resistance 'terrorists' they were strictly correct if we look at the term neutrally as a description of a 'practice'. The FLN in Algeria will have watched French terrorism 'working' in this way - as a process linked to politics and conventional or guerrilla war - just as the OAS blunderingly tried to do the same and the Islamist insurgents of the 1990s even more brutally did the same again. The claim that the 'terrorist' is someone else's 'freedom fighter' is trite because it separates the two as moral categories whereas the actual moral categories are a) the killing of 'innocents' on the one side set against b) the greater aims of, say, national self-determination on the other. We live with this every day. Ukrainian car bombs are called partisan activity and their terrorist nature is glossed over in the Western media and yet these same Editors froth at the mouth when the same tactic is used by Afghans or Hezbollah on their own soil. Townshend was also writing at that point where nearly all commentators found themselves thoroughly confused by the emergence of what appeared to be a nihilistic (from a liberal humane perspective) form of radical religious terrorism that looked to a supernatural end. As always throughout the book he is sensible here, if possibly overly non-committal. Research into Islamic terror was in its early days. Western observers were no more successful in getting into the mind-set of the Islamist than they are today in getting inside the mind-set of a Russian or Chinese. The overwhelming characteristic of the average Western policy wonk is a staggering lack of imagination which leads to simplistic and disproportionate, indeed hysterical, responses to what is generally far less of a threat to a population than exhausted doctors and truck drivers. However, Townshend's wise insights into the tactics of Hezbollah suggest that even Islamist fanatics (if we can only get to understand how they think instrumentally) are instrumental in their approach with attitudes no different in this respect from the Narodniki or the Tupamaros. One of the lessons of the book is that terrorism continues to have its instrumental logic and that we can soon begin to divine when it might be used ineffectively or effectively to achieve very long range ends in association with other strategies - military, political and economic. The liberal moral outrage at the tactic is justifiable in the abstract but the liberal rarely sits where the 'damned of the earth' (Fanon) sits and easily turns a blind eye to state terror when it acts in his interest. Morality is a tool like any other in the brutal game of power. Terror strategies tend to emerge when power is disproportionate so it was always likely that America as hegemon would face it because American power was and is disproportionately greater than anything else on the planet. We should really be surprised that there is so little of it. We might go further and say that, while national liberation strategies (for all the nonsense talked about a Terrorist International in Washington during the Cold War) were located in specific territories, globalisation has created a new West/Rest dichotomy that increases the risks of terror. Russian analyses of the nature of American power are far from incorrect. Russia has not been entirely isolated because non-Western elites connect with that analysis. The blocs that emerge in fact reduce the chances of terrorism because a countervailing non-Western bloc can imply sufficient resistance. However, if the resistance bloc is eliminated as a traditional network of powers striving not to be subsumed within the Western imperium, Western dominion creates the opportunities for asymmetric 'terrorist' resistance amongst the powerless and not only overseas. The same threat exists in the heart of the West from those who feel excluded from the imperium at home. So long as populist ideas and feelings have leg room, terrorism as a tactic is counter-productive but it becomes productive if the national populist or the deprived feel their back is to the wall. Similarly, the potential unravelling of the cosy consensus between the corporate sector, states and eco-politicians over green issues because of crude energy security and more urgent socio-economic requirements might also threaten the system with what might be called a Green Army Faction, The point here is that terrorism as a tactic is always a potential threat and increases to the degree that Western society behaves more like the old Russian Empire than the liberal democracy it purports to be - surveillance, social control, hunting down whistleblowers and so forth. Townshend notes something important - the grim dialectic between terrorism and the media and the way that the media's excitability and hysteria drives public panic far beyond what reason would dictate and so creates inappropriate political decision-making and manipulation. It could be argued (I would) that the most socially destructive force in Western society is not the potential terrorist but the Editor with his propensity for 'stories', fast news cycles, high emotion, moral posturing and attempts to manipulate power by the back door. There is nothing we can do about this because liberal democracy defines itself in part by the freedom given to the Press. The benefits of good journalism (where it exists) should theoretically always outweigh the disbenefits although increasingly they do not as serious journalism decays. Although now out of date by about two decades (especially in regard to Islamic terror), this very short book (139 pages) packs in a lot of information. If it does not do a great deal to help us define what the phenomenon is then that is because the phenomenon is not easily definable at all. ...more |
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| 3.66
| 92
| Nov 08, 1968
| Mar 22, 1989
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really liked it
| Alongside Trevor-Roper's 'Last Days of Hitler' and Crankshaw's 'Gestapo', this book was one of the earliest attempts (1956) to come to terms with the Alongside Trevor-Roper's 'Last Days of Hitler' and Crankshaw's 'Gestapo', this book was one of the earliest attempts (1956) to come to terms with the then very recent experience of the horrendously chaotic and destructive national socialist experiment in Germany. We have to remember that the period from the Nazi seizure of power to the collapse of the regime in 1945 was just twelve years ... which is no more than three Presidential terms and only two years more than Tony Blair's 'reign'. Reitlinger was writing only a decade after the regime collapsed. In other words, a historian's objectivity was likely to be difficult in such circumstances. Reitlinger was, in fact, an historian and specialist in Asian ceramics who just wanted to tell this particular history and, in another book, that of the holocaust. He also had to rely on a limited range of sources - unreliable media and Nuremburg process documentation and self-serving memoirs from former German officials and soldiers with a great deal of important evidence locked up in the closed Soviet system. From this perspective, his achievement - even if only preliminary and overtaken by other researchers - was significant. Although his emotional responses to what were recent events come through, the work is nevertheless a work of history albeit a provisional one. There is a bias towards the story of the chaotic concentration camps uncovered by the Western allies rather than the extermination process uncovered by the Soviets. This would be corrected by later writers. His horrified emotional responses are, of course, understandable regardless. His holocaust study had underestimated deaths in the extermination camps by a significant number. It took two decades more for academics to expose the scale of what happened in the East. From that perspective, giving slight primacy to Belsen over Auschwitz is of its time. He expresses a righteous disgust at the ease with which so many SS mass murderers got off lightly and you sense anger that the German State at the root of the crimes was too ready to try and forget what was done. However, he does not mention the Cold War context enabling this leniency. As an interim assessment of the role of the SS in the Hitlerite imperium Reitlinger's account remains useful today even if those emotional qualities to the book now look unnecessary and more polemical than academic. Yet the horrible facts still stand. Reitlinger has a polemical point and it is a fair point. In contemporary terms he wants to knock on the head the dangerous myths surrounding the SS as competent or idealistic or the sole monsters of the Nazi regime. He wins his point on the evidence then available. The story is also the story of Heinrich Himmler (where perhaps the account is sometimes less satisfactory as psychology) and of the SS as just one important element in the fragmented one person rule of that brilliant monomaniac Adolf Hitler. The SS starts off as a personally loyal death squad to deal with Hitler's problem with his own Party embodied in the SA as a potentially revolutionary armed force. To understand Hitler, one must understand that he was not a revolutionary but concerned only with the seizure of the State. The Nazi State was not like the Communist State - the arm of a Party - but the German State owned and guided by the Fuhrer who exercised control through not only the Party but the traditional organs of state power (the civil service) and, after its personal oath, the Army. Hitler did not give a damn which bit of the system he used so long it was directed at his personal ideological ends - effectively, a throwback to Wilhelmine imperialism combined with an existential loathing of the Jews and Bolsheviks. Each of his gangster barons was granted personal leave to exploit a segment of the machinery for these ends and their own. Each was allowed to compete ruthlessly for territory knowing that the Fuhrer could dispossess any one of them at any time to the advantage of another. Goebbels incorporated the revolution into Hitler's mainstream and came to control the nation qua nation. Goering was responsible for the economy and air power until his failings saw his influence crumble, largely in favour of Speer. Bormann rose to rule Germany as administrative machine through the Party Gauleiters. Others ruled segments - whether foreign affairs (Ribbentrop), the navy (Doenitz), occupied territories. 'justice' (meaning state control of society) or whatever. Himmler was both immensely powerful and an outsider with an emerging two-fold brief to police the Nazi State and act as brutal agent of Germanisation and social control (and obviously anti-semitism) in the grey area between Germany itself and the front lines of war. Hitler was a creature of his own history. He feared a 'stab in the back' while he pursued his warrior ambitions. Himmler's job was in part (alongside those of Goebbels and Bormann) to make sure that German dissent could not rise from below and snatch victory away. This helps to explain the viciousness of Hitler's reaction to the July Bomb Plot. One of the three great arms of Hitlerite power (the Army) had gone over a line and stabbed Germany, represented by him, in the back. The SS' importance rose accordingly but still not above that of the Army. When Himmler in the last days tried to negotiate futilely with the West to create an anti-Bolshevik front (we see a pale version of this today in the East European nationalist-NATO alliance against Russia), Hitler saw another betrayal under conditions where the personal was the political. The SS may have started life as a death squad-cum-personal protection operation for the Party Leader and it may have poddled along for some years accumulating power and numbers as a slightly potty ideological avant-garde with influence but war made it. It was charged with implementation of the Commissar Order (the slaughter of captured Soviets) and then of Jews (brought to a fine industrial art in the camps) and expanded as an economy in its own right as well as an auxiliary generally brave but variably competent military force. It 'grew like topsy' to the point where it was to become clear that Himmler himself could no longer cope. The last months of the war in 1945 show a man constantly on the edge of personal mental breakdown. The overwhelming impression is not of some dark lord of inherent evil but of someone without a traditional moral bottom who was led by circumstances ever deeper into the mire so that one wonders whether his eventual suicide may not have been a relief. Reitlinger's contempt for him may be deserved but two decades in corporate life taught me that there but for the grace of god would go not a few people I have worked with given perks, status, pathways to the top and a carefully cultivated ignorance of the consequences of their actions. From this perspective, Reitlinger wins his implicit polemic point that the attempt by modern (1950s) Germans to put all the blame for the evil done on the SS was criminally self-serving. The SS was the implementation agent for evil acts in which the German State as a whole was complicit. I do not agree, however, with Reitlinger's attempt to blame the German nation as a whole - like many people even today, he cannot draw the correct distinction between a nation and that filthy but necessary thing we call the State. I tend to believe Doenitz when he said that he did not know of the miserable horrors of the last days of the concentration camps which were largely the product of regime chaos and neglect let alone the extermination programme. Many if not most Germans would have been insulated from all this. He is right that the SS, evil though its actions were, cannot be allowed to be an alibi for Germany but we should be specific that we are talking about Germany as an elite State operation made up of a forced alliance of Party, civil service and military. A lot of that State survived 1945. It took all these forces working together to murder Jews, engage in imperialistic wars and create widespread mayhem and carnage - the SS was simply given the dirty jobs to do and it is clear that many of them did not enjoy it. It was just a job in a system. Because of sourcing problems the period before the war is less well served than the war. The account then starts to come alive but this reflects the relative unimportance of Himmler in the grand scheme of things until he is commissioned to deal with the occupied territories. What is very useful is the picture that the book develops of the bureaucratic rivalries under Hitler and within Himmler's own network. These demonstrate just how circumscribed Himmler could be by the machinations of others. His fear of Hitler lasts to the very end. The figures of Heydrich, Canaris, Schellenburg, Ohlendorf, Kaltenbrunner, Wolff and many others weave in and out of the story as what amount to Divisional Directors of National Socialism, Inc. of Bertlin and its offices across Europe - competing, conniving, sometimes dying. Sometimes the machinations become so abstruse and complex that the general reader may have difficulty in following what is happening but, at its best, incidents such as the Night of the Long Knives (1934) or the July 20th Bomb Plot (1944) can be positively exciting. Reitlinger is also good on weakening substantially myths about the SS's competence and even idealism which still hold the attention of popular culture three quarters of a century later. There were competent bureaucrats and idealists but the total system was a shambles. Although they tried hard, the SS were not professional soldiers in general. By the last eighteen months of the war, Himmler was commanding a motley group of 'racial Germans' (from outside Germany proper) and anti-communist occupied forces with weak military skills. This is not to say that they did not often fight bravely but it is to say that they were no substitute for the fully trained regular Wehrmacht once their numbers exceeded the original German core of dedicated Nazis and some of those were more enthusiastic than capable. As to the idealism, this could certainly be found in fanatic Nazis and in the dreamy 'Europeanists' in the Divisions raised in the West (the starting point for the European ideal now represented by Ursula Von Der Leyen) towards the end of the war but this was a minority if a dangerous one. Perhaps sometimes Reitlnger overstates his case but the case is there on the evidence he has to hand. Further analysis would in due course refine the picture, remove some of the emotion without losing the values and balance the picture out a bit but this still remains a useful history. Himmler and the SS should definitely not be let off the hook. They engaged in horrendous crimes in a horrendous age. However, the buck does not stop with them. They were part of a total system and this book makes it hard to accept claims that Hitler knew nothing of these crimes. There may be no incriminating piece of paper fingering Hitler but we can be sure that the SS was an agent more than it was a principal and that it was only one part of a much more complex criminal enterprise that encompassed almost every significant part of the German State System. ...more |
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liked it
| Graham Greene struggled to make his mark as a writer. His first book was, in my opinion, dreadful. His next two he refused to have republished. Stambo Graham Greene struggled to make his mark as a writer. His first book was, in my opinion, dreadful. His next two he refused to have republished. Stamboul Train, the fourth,was a slightly overwritten but tolerable entertainment. This was his seventh book, appearing in 1936. It too is marked out as an 'entertainment', essentially an attempt to both be and rise above the thriller of the period. It is successful enough to pass muster in that respect. However, it has probably been over-praised because of the need to retrospectively sign off on Greene's 'genius'. My copy is stamped 'Education Office, Intelligence Centre, Maresfield Camp' and the 'blurb emphasises a 'very thorough dissection of a criminal mind' (the anti-hero Raven) but I cannot say I was convinced that we were seeing a true representation of the psychopath. What we are reading is a literary discovery of the possibility of the psychopath, an interest of Greene's which would develop further in the character of 'Pinkie', the small-time gangster of 'Brighton Rock' (1938) made more famous by the film of 1947. Greene provides us with a solid and exciting thriller, well within the expectations of the popular culture of the period but which he then overlays with his own personal concerns and the expectations of his more immediate 'cultured' milieu. Greene (in general) had learned to write over the previous five or six years but he is not satisfied to be just a good thriller writer with perhaps a simple political message like Ambler. Greene wants to moralise yet subtly and through a Catholic conservative lens. There are thus two books here. The effective and often exciting popular thriller with stereotypical characters more creatively drawn that we usually have a right to expect and a rumination on evil in society designed for his 'posh' literary audience back home in Oxbridge. There are all the hints of a full-blown Catholic novel here - the pessimism about human nature and about society's ability to deal with evil except through the policing of order without imagination. True evil is without redemption to the very end. Good is sacrificed or self-sacrificing. The working and lower middle classes are satirised, sometimes with a barely concealed sneering bitterness. The business class is distant and amoral. Solidity lies in those who do their duty like the policeman Mather. Goodness lies in the naive actions of his girlfriend. Marriage is a solution. By this time, Greene can write seductively and hold the attention but the novel does not (ironically) bear too much intellectual investigation. If you look too closely, you see a patrician conservative trying to hold the mob at bay - a thoroughly bourgeois position if ever there was one. ...more |
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| 445
| 1950
| Jan 01, 1987
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it was amazing
| The story is simple. Middle class parents visit New York on business with their nine year old much loved child in tow. The babysitter lets them down a The story is simple. Middle class parents visit New York on business with their nine year old much loved child in tow. The babysitter lets them down and an ineffectual and not very bright hotel employee offers his niece in their place to help try to get her back into employment and the world. The trouble is that the niece is a full-on small town psychopath. The story unfolds as her behaviour draws ever more people into her web with the safety of the child the lurking terror at the heart of the story - all largely played out in two adjoining hotel rooms and the small territory around them. The story is Hitchcockian. The writing cinematic. We can watch it in our heads as a fast-moving film noir, choreographed for maximum tension and emotional involvement. A filmmaker could make it almost line for line within the black and white mood at the end of the 1940s. The interior lives of the characters might be taken as instructions given to actors by a director. The sets are delineated clearly so that we tread in the steps of each character in turn. The exits and entrances and passings of characters are those of the true dramatist. What really makes the slim work great is the sensitivity of Armstrong to her characters, each of whom, all very slightly weak in a very human way, reacts as we would expect them to react yet those reactions create the potential for a very real tragedy - the possibility of a child's death. The book is a test for empathy. We are forced into a 'cringing' state where we ask ourselves whether we would do better than any of the characters in the novel under the same circumstances. We hope so but we hope more that we never find ourselves in such a situation. If it is about anything, the novel is about the darkness that can lurk within a society that relies on trust to hold itself in place and how those who live within this general assumption of trust can be betrayed by momentary weakness and how the weak and the good are self-policed by guilt. In the end, the psychopath, a rather simple creature to understand, is less interesting than are the ordinary folk with the right feelings but inadequate information and a tendency to assume that interference should be limited or controlled by self interest, rules, propriety or good manners. In fact, American society works very well to solve a problem in Armstrong's reading of events but it is a close run thing and requires something primal in the girl's mother that shunts aside the 'civilised' to tip the balance. ...more |
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| Oct 14, 2021
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really liked it
| I have a reasonable library on crime, organised crime rather than the individual evil-doer. This book fills a nice gap in the story providing a histor I have a reasonable library on crime, organised crime rather than the individual evil-doer. This book fills a nice gap in the story providing a history of the transition from the race course gangs to the world of organised crime as we would come to understand it in the age of the Krays. It is one of several books by an academic who knows something of the cultural milieu of gangland because of his own family's past involvement in the illegal betting game in Birmingham in the interwar period. One of the virtues of the book is original research and interviews. It is, of course, a spin-off from the popular BBC TV series. I have to admit that I have not seen this series partly because I have an aversion to fictionalised history (e.g. Downton Abbey) but there is no reason to bring such prejudices to the evaluation of this book. It can be 'bitty' (especially in the earlier period covered - the 1920s), the characters pop in and out in a somewhat haphazard way, there is probably an inadequate analytical framework and there is no index - a major fault if you are to keep track of individuals. Still, the book is written for a mass audience. A mass audience tends to demand the piling on of incident rather than an overly academic approach. Without that mass audience, we might not have got this book and its (as yet) unread companions so I am grateful to it. Despite the intellectual flaws caused in part by popularisation (I have no quarrel with the factual basis of the book and Chinn is adept at stripping away romantic sensationalism from the story), we can get a good understanding of the transitions within criminality over a long period. The book concentrates on the interwar years and introduces the likes of the Krays and 'Mad' Frankie Fraser (with whom I shared a space in a small Chinese restaurant in Islington once upon a time) but also takes us back to the origins of 'thuggery' in the late mid nineteenth century. Indeed, what strikes one is a sense of 'lineage' back in time and of competitive association and mutual awareness stretching from the 1870s through to the arrival of the Krays and beyond. This is an anarchic and complex alternative culture with its own codes and shifting allegiances. Part of the fascination of organised crime and its development is how it 'matures' and how it parallels legitimate society so that one can see both how it can infiltrate a weak state but also how close it might be to the thugs and war bands that create new states out of old. Chinn does not dwell on the role of the State throughout this period. Observed on his evidence, it appears to be both weaker and more sensible (about its own reach) than we might expect. The habit of leniency is embedded because 'bourgois' society is fearful of the consequences of other measures. In a few cases, gangsters go over a red line and are hanged but it is surprising just how much obvious crime took place because the State's resources were limited and the evidential requirements too great. Mussolini did not have this problem with the Mafia. It is an axiom that the poor prey on the poor or rather, in this case, the sociopathic elements at the very bottom of society (most people were never criminals no matter how poor) would prey on bookies, small traders and the lower middle classes in poor areas. Of course, there is another world sitting alongside the early race track and extortion gangs, one of organised robbery and fencing which did prey on the higher levels of a highly classed society but this only becomes the subject of the book when one of its hard men arrives, Billy Hill. The story starts (though this appears at the end of the book) with small armies of thugs, prepared to travel cross country to disrupt and extort from the liminal world of race track betting (horses and then dogs). Chinn is very good on the evolution of these 'race gangs' from the invasions of race tracks to the carving up of territories through fear and violence with the razor blade (and other nasty instruments) taking the place of the American gangsters' gun. The gun does emerge later but British gangsters, although many young toughs emulated the filmic gangsters on the 1930s, were simply not organised or strong enough against even a weak police to carve out the same sort of territories - and there was no trigger like prohibition for growth. If organisation starts as simply the organsation of mass terror raids on race tracks (and the subsequent fencing), it eventually evolves into symbiotic relationship between certain gangs and the 'industry' (racetrack betting), always in a grey area of respectability. On of the fascinating aspects of the story is the three-way negotiation between the more intelligent thugs (sociopathy and intelligence are not incompatible), the private sector and evolving and rather intelligent monitoring and management of the urge to bet by the authorities. There might be said to be a peculiarly English adaptive approach to vice very different from the black and white approach of American culture - wait for a problem to appear, analyse the problem and resolve it through low-cost compromise. Basically, accept and manage human weakness. With the race track betting industry increasingly legitimised (eventually to become fully legal and recognised to the point that licences were eventually given only to candidates proven to have engaged illegally!) some gangsterdom was effectively integrated into enforcement. At the beginning inchoate roaming underclass gangs could come from anywhere and turn up anywhere (with Birmingham lads the undoubted leaders and the source of the 'peaky blinders' saga) but the human instinct to war and territorialism will always out. We can see little difference between these inchoate gangs and the war bands of young warriors trying to plunder the Roman Empire until someone had the bright idea to pay them to defend it. If the British State had ever collapsed, gangs might have created new States. The London-based Sabini gang and Kimber's Birmingham mob fought, the latter lost (though he was spending most of his time in London by then) and the country was carved up between the two, with the Sabinis taking their turn from the lucrative Southern race tracks. Chinn traces how the Birmingham gangs collapsed over the interwar period for lack of sustained and organised leadership after Kimber was no longer in play so the book is largely about London as centre of a network of competing gangs out of which the Krays and Richardsons would emerge. Although there are ethnic elements to the story, Italian, Jewish and antisemitic South London, what is striking is that (as with Lucky Luciano and Meyer Lansky in New York), ethnicity did not count for as much as many believe. Italian gangs were as much English as Italian, if not more, over time. One exception was Jack Spot, friend and then rival of Billy Hill, who consciously travelled the country to help Jewish small traders and interests to fight off local extortionists and who claimed (almost certainly incorrectly) to have been instrumental in the Battle of Cable Street. In fact, the territorialism of gangs has also been exaggerated. Yes, they often came out of particular 'hard case' localities in places like Hoxton but they often travelled across country, Birmingham boys gravitated towards London and Soho was often shared competitive territory as race tracks had been. The transition from the pure race gangs to Jack Spot as dominant London gangster (although Chinn is careful to dismiss any idea of some 'Mr. Big' running organised crime across the capital or the country) and then to Billy Hill is fascinating. Billy Hill was a thug but an unusually intelligent one who came not out of the violence and fisticuffs of the tracks but from the world of burglaries, requiring a much greater awareness of the need for stealth, organisation and not to embarrass the police and draw attention to one's actual work. His technique was curious - to hide in plain sight by cultivating crime journalists and claiming leadership of the underworld in public, confident that nothing could be pinned directly on him under English legal procedures. The claim, of course, irritated Spot. It was this conflict that helped the Krays to smell blood like the sharks that they were but there was much less of that generational slaughter normal in New York. More of the youngsters slowly grabbed rackets while the older generation either went respectable or slipped into decline. While Spot ended up a forgotten meat packer, gangsters like Sabini and Hill came to live a comfortable and respected life, seemingly not unhappy to see younger gangsters take their place on the more obvious rackets. This is a story of considerable violence that horrified and titillated on occasions the British public through its pre-tabloid media and crime correspondents whose role was more than ambiguous on occasions. The theatre of it all is part of the interest. The one great lack in Chinn's book is the evolution of police corruption, always present. Somewhere in this period or soon after, police corruption became highly institutionalised and is only fully being rooted out this century. We need a history of that phenomenon - difficult to research, of course. ...more |
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| 1880448742
| 3.85
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| Nov 1963
| 1999
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liked it
| Lloyd Biggle Jnr. is not a name that jumps to mind nowadays amongst science fictions fans but he was a fairly prolific writer of science fiction and m Lloyd Biggle Jnr. is not a name that jumps to mind nowadays amongst science fictions fans but he was a fairly prolific writer of science fiction and mystery stories from the 1950s to the 1960s. He was perhaps best known for his Jan Darzen series which mixed the tropes of the two genres. 'All the Colors of Darkness' (1963) is the first of the Jan Darzen novels and is a little disappointing, not because it is 'bad' (it isn't by any means) but because the central idea is so interesting and initially well handled that reducing it to an off-planet 'mystery' tale flattens early expectations. That central idea is the invention of a technology which allows instant and safe transmission of people and eventually freight from one place to another. The early chapters explore the idea as a social and business phenomenon. The mystery seems to be one of organised sabotage. This is very well written with interesting characters interacting in realistic ways to solve a practical problem but then the story suddenly flips into something very different - a more jocular science fiction pulp with aliens (more should not be said because of spoilers). Biggle went for fun-pulp at this point and abandoned the more serious side of science fiction. The disappointment is only that he seemed perfectly capable of giving us something that could explore the effects of a new technology on us and then abandoned that mission. The bulk of the book is entertaining and even sensitive. His aliens are as 'real' and rounded as his humans, while still being alien, and the interactions show us how cultural lack of understanding can be worked around with good will. We may be frustrated by the aliens but we tend to 'like' them. However, some of the events become a little incoherent (let us call them 'the rescue mission') to the casual reader. The liking of mystery writers for complicated puzzles takes over before narrative order can be restored. I could not be bothered to make sense of it all at that point. Biggle sets up his series to be entertainments relying on the technology of matter transmission but one senses an opportunity lost and an under-use of his talents, a sudden loss of imagination as more than just complicated story lines and aliens. Still, it was (mostly) entertaining and (mostly) well written and I would certainly not baulk at reading others in the series in good time. ...more |
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| 4.30
| 582
| Sep 29, 2021
| Sep 29, 2021
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it was amazing
| I cannot praise this book enough. Eighty years since the battles of Guadalcanal, El Alamein and Stalingrad, Overy's 878-page masterpiece manages to co I cannot praise this book enough. Eighty years since the battles of Guadalcanal, El Alamein and Stalingrad, Overy's 878-page masterpiece manages to cover much more than the canonical Second World War in one perfectly arranged volume. It is the new starting point for its study. Overy solves the problem of the competition between narrative and thematic history by doing both in an orderly way. Four chapters take the story from 1931 to 1945, seven chapters look at the great themes of the conflict and a final chapter looks at the legacy of the war in decolonisation. He takes one broad interpretative position (that the conflict must be seen as an essentially imperial struggle between older and aspirant empires finally decided by new ideological structures that were against empire) and asks one question that he never actually answers perhaps because he cannot. That most interesting question is why vast populations within the contesting powers suddenly switched into behaviours that involved the acceptance of conscripted enslavement and complicity in mass murder under the command of relatively small elites with the levers on power. It is a question of fundamental importance to our objective assessment of the capability and worth of our own species and is probably beyond the ability of any working historian to answer without moving into speculative territory that would work against his or her credibility. What Overy does, though, is provide the facts as efficiently and as completely as may be possible in a single volume so that we can make our own anthropological and perhaps moral judgements of what happened not only in the fourteen years of imperial war but afterwards. I might criticise him a little for one lapse in one section in failing to question the standard moral narrative provided to us in the West by our victorious history but I think not lapsing would have taken him into such dangerous territory that his book would have been devalued immediately. I cannot blame him for not answering the question he poses because the answer may be very frightening to all of us, to our own self-image of being individuals and not a herd, of being good rather than evil, of being superior to animals rather than fundamentally animal ourselves. The precise mechanisms of power are not merely institutional, they are fundamentally psychological and anthropological. They lie in issues as basic as the pecking order that you find in nature and the way co-operative behaviours create dependency on others. The consequential horrors of nation-empires at war are provided as facts on the ground and not as evidence in some moralistic polemic. One picture he has of what would be primary school children being guided by trusted authority into gas vans is the tip of a terrifying abyss of murder. The Holocaust is the known worst or is it? Do we sometimes conveniently present the Holocaust as a 'unique' horror so that we can load all the evil onto one apparently unnatural event run by demons from hell in order not to face the sheer breadth and depth of violence in war? This is the problem. The Holocaust was actually a natural event, the latest in a long line of genocides in history and prehistory but one merely with access to inventive technologies. The perpetrators were not demons but humans such as you might see walking down your street. Let us step back to the primary focus of the book. Three aggressive 'hungry' powers challenge two fat self-satisfied empires in an expectation of empire as their right. But why do they consider it their right? Because they think themselves 'civilised' and civilisation means empire. What does empire mean? It means the control of vast areas of the world as natural territory where 'lesser' human beings exist to serve the civilised and where any brutality is acceptable to control those peoples and clear space for the civilised and their needs. Does that sound familiar? It should. Because the Axis imperial mission is precisely what the British, French and the Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese and Belgians had done in the not-so-recent past and what American Manifest Destiny did to indigenous peoples in their turn. In other words the mentality behind brutality was created and shaped by what we think as the 'good guys' in the Second World War who could moderate their position only because their command and control (and brutality) had worked - it had created a resource base. The Japanese looked at China and thought that it was their right to own it before the Westerners could seize it. The Germans looked East, seeing Slavs as if they were African natives with the problem of the Jews a gross racial inconvenience. Italy wanted a slice of an Africa already carved up. It is undoubtedly true that Axis racism and brutality was of another order to that of the older empires (or at least the Axis brought their brutality closer to home and 'civilisation') but the mental map and attitudes would not be alien to British officials in India or French in Indo-China. The other victors too were lesser demons rather than angels. The hypocrisy of a deeply racist US in trumpeting the rights of man is well known as is that of the Soviet Union with its Gulag and its strategy of slaughtering national elites as it did in Katyn Wood. Of course, when war broke out, we see the conduct of Japanese troops (the rape of Nanking and the slaughter in Manila), of German troops (with the Wehrmacht willing war criminals ready to slaughter families) and of Italian troops murderous in their inept and blundering way. But, before too long, Churchill was complicit in the deliberate terror bombing tactics of Harris over Germany and Roosevelt in the equally vicious and deliberately terror-directed fire-bombing of Tokyo while Soviet troops raped their way across Prussia with complete tolerance back in Moscow. One officer who protested rape ended up in the Gulag for 'bourgeois humanism'. American intelligence officers had a tough time trying to get front line troops in the Pacific to take prisoners for questioning. This gets us back to the problem of our species. This is that we are not truly free individuals (or rather only some of us are). However, we are not a potential hive either as might be suggested in the nightmare post war fashionable liberal critiques of totalitarianism. What we are is something closer to a complex herd species, perhaps with a lemming quality. At a certain point, we all willingly coalesce into a social narrative not of our making and quite possibly personally harmful to us and our families and have done so certainly since the Greek city-state. As the international socialists crumbled within days of imperial-national war being declared in 1914 so did the churches in 1939 and 1941, despite all the cant of believing in the gospel of peace of Jesus Christ. Only the Jehovah's Witnesses showed courage and many died for that reason. Pacifists too represented very considerable movements of people in the 'free world' in the late 1930s but they too crumbled under social pressure quickly. Here we get to the heart of the matter - reality is socially constructed and war allows elites to construct that reality. The mechanism by which our herd species, allowed freedom in peace in the West at least, enslaves itself to imperial elites is what is not and cannot be covered in this book but the book is absolutely invaluable to the person who wants to start that process of understanding. It is an understanding that is vital because you can see the same mechanisms re-emerging even as I write this in the struggle for mastery between the latest iteration of imperial conflict, a process that goes back at least to the facing off of the Egyptians and Hittites at Megiddo (Armageddon). This time the now-cyclical nonsense is between the 'West' (actually the political class of the Western alliance) and the 'SCO' (the political elites in Moscow and Beijing). Once again, reality is being falsely constructed by both sides to get their herds moving in the right direction. For this reason, Overy's book is not just a history book, it is a book that gives us the raw data in a new form, without bias or loss of moral compass, that we need to understand our own situation - impotent as individuals before the mass and the State as manipulator of the mass. The social construction of reality under the command of elites is not a false reality or 'fake news', it is reality and that reality can quickly get out of control and unleash animal forces that are quite capable of mass rape, the murder of ordinary people and widespread destruction. And if you do not believe me - take a look at the atrocities on all sides in the current Tigrayan War in Ethiopia or the deaths, barely reported in the mainstream media, that took place in the Congolese Wars or the evidence of our own and French behaviour during decolonisation. The final chapter of Overy's book is the most cursory but in some ways the most revealing because it shows how the savagery of 1931 to 1945 did not end there but continued out of sight of the 'civilised', perpetrated by precisely those victors who had claimed the moral high ground. Nuremburg refused to deal with mass terror bombing or US unrestricted submarine warfare in the Pacific. Germany was never obliged to deal with the murderers of women and children in the East. Soviet crimes are self-evident. Dutch behaviour in Indonesia was unconscionable. The list goes on. Although the story of the Second World War is one we all think we know and there is much that is familiar, there is also much here that will be new to most of us and possibly awkward, supported by references that indicate a man who is in total command of his sources. Churchill may be regarded as a great war leader from the point of view of the homelander but he was a ruthless imperialist too. Stalin was a brutal leader but his troops were exhausted when they reached the Vistula and it would have been unreasonable to test them further to relieve Warsaw. The German military was highly effective in its early expansion but lost its edge not simply because of greater material resources on the opposing side but because the Allies learned by doing in the face of challenge in both theatres. This brings out another, perhaps more positive side of the socially constructed herd, its adaptability under pressure, its ability to learn rapidly and exploit its advantages and an understanding of the behaviours of the other side. No one has a workable system to win in the casino in the long run and no power can beat the house in the struggle between empires. The house is a matter of resources and control over populations, economics and that ability to construct narratives that enable power to be exercised. The Axis powers were doomed from the point that the United States decided to fight back and hard and the Nazis failed to push Stalin out of the industrial zones to the East and create the conditions for regime change amongst a discontented population. It was only a matter of time. But it was also only a matter of time before the triumph of the two new ideological powers unravelled the older empires as well and came into direct conflict. The blindness to this aspect of strategy is perhaps what is most unnerving about Axis and old imperial decision-making. Perhaps, despite the racism in the East (which had some reasonable origin in foul Japanese behaviour), the terror bombing of Japan and the hypocrisies, the nation that comes out of this best is the US which, for all its flaws, showed an anti-imperialist commitment to be commended. It can also be honestly said that it was least inclined to oppress its own people to undertake war and least inclined to atrocity. Its later history may have tainted its status as moral arbiter (as did the cowardice of elites towards popular racism) but it was easily the best of a bad bunch. Given just how evil war is, the act of perpetrating war for whatever reason should be a mark against a nation. Both the US (attacked at Pearl Harbour and with war on it declared by Germany) and the Soviet Union (attacked by Germany, noting its earlier occupations of others) come out best here. If the Axis empires are the prime aggressors, it has to be said that the British and French Empires escalated things by initiating declarations of war against Germany in 1939. We should fear today that alliances designed for defence may end up with our being dragged into things we may regret. Complex alliances to maintain the balance of power, neglect of homeland defence and failure to distinguish between wrongful imperial acquisition and legitimate unification of peoples are permitted because elites know that, ultimately, they can guide the herd. Our entire international system is based on some fundamental conceptual flaws - above all, that borders must be fixed eternally and externally rather than through democratic non-violent self-determination - and those flaws are going to see many small wars and some big ones to come. And the herd will follow as it always has done and always will, elites will countenance horrible crimes claiming existential necessity and ordinary people will once again become thieves, rapists and killers when they are unleashed on the world. And so it goes ... ...more |
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| May 01, 2000
| May 01, 2000
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really liked it
| A very short (90 pages) but surprisingly full review of 'noir fiction'. 'Noir' is not to be confused with the 'hard boiled' stories that made up the b A very short (90 pages) but surprisingly full review of 'noir fiction'. 'Noir' is not to be confused with the 'hard boiled' stories that made up the bulk of film noir as most of us have experienced it. Do not expect to see Chandler or Hammett in the canon: Duncan is good at explaining why. This is about darker stuff - mid-twentieth century advertising copywriters, scriptwriters, journalists and even bums with pretty roughed up lives telling a few home truths about our species and our society whilst trying, unsuccessfully for the most part, to exorcise their own demons. It starts with Dostoyevsky and Conrad and pretty well goes downhill in terms of cynicism, violence and misery from that point on taking in some writers we will probably all know (Camus, Cain, Thompson, Ellroy) with others that we should (Bardin, Gresham, Karp, Stevens, Raymond). Seventeen American, British and French writers (plus the aforementioned Russian and Anglo-Pole) are covered through access to a key work, a brief biography and an account of their larger literary corpus. The French get Camus and Vian. Duncan links the writers to a loose chronological scheme in which emotions, such as depression for the 1930s, fear for the 1940s, paranoia for the 1950s, apathy for the 1960s and 1970s and amorality for the author's present (to 2000) help to make each writer a creature of their time. The common denominator is a sense of profound alienation from the rest of the human species and distrust of its moral claims. This is the writing (other than true crime) that most deals with the potential horror implicit in none of us knowing other minds. Much of it is a variation on a basic theme about which Duncan writes with feeling (the book seems quite personal at times). This is the 'immobilised man' who, on this side of the millennium, sounds uncannily like the popular uncaring description of the 'incel' today. The book is best read than described. We can see how the black novel might be developed for our time based on the emotion of terror (for society and women in particular) but we suspect our lily-livered liberal publishers dare not publish further. There certainly seems a gap in the market. The 'immobilised man' today seems to have learned how to mobilise himself into individual acts of mayhem. What was the lurching stomach of what might happen seems to have become a matter of things actually happening and perhaps a social 'terror' of encouraging it by recognising it. The 'immobilised man' - once stuck within four walls feeding on his own despair, a despair that leads to death or suicide, imagined or real - was in Dostoyevsky's 'Notes from the Underground' in the 1860s. He will still be here in the 2060s as, no doubt silent, he was in the 1760s. All our attempts to consign him into nothingness by self-censoring our reading just because some men could imagine him into a place on the page as facets of themselves will not eliminate him or those of his drives or anti-drives present in many men (and women) and in society as a whole. This is a tale largely of men (linked to mobility, economic depression and war) but I am not convinced that there are not women who are equally 'immobilised', only that publishers never sought or found the market. Perhaps Highsmith comes closest in sensibility. The genre creates the question for us of whether it is better to know or not know of the existence of the dark. Was Plato right about art? Are these writers a danger to society or do they provide 'catharsis'? Would their social elimination by liberal totalitarian thinking be the greater danger? I keep an open mind but tend to the view that to recognise the darkness is to start to find ways of dealing with it but also that the truly dark novel goes beyond the crime, true crime or even horror novel in one respect that can be potentially dangerous to the sanity of writer and reader alike. The crime, true crime and horror novel are expressions of the 'other', something we fear but is 'over there'. Someone else is dealing with it (maybe just the writer) to ensure that it can only come to us as either fantasy or a tale of the lives of others. We can empathise and go home cathartised. The truly dark novel may be a story (a fiction) but it is not 'over there' and it is not 'other'. It is looking inward not at the crimes of others but at the emotions we have and then taking them towards violence and crime, suicide and murder, loneliness and self-destruction. The consequently created fear and loathing within 'noir fiction' (if it is doing its job) arises not from the acts of others but from the acts of someone who could be us in certain circumstances - that person inveigled by history into becoming a guard at an extermination camp perhaps. The loathing is turned onto others because the others are the ones creating the conditions that make a man (mostly the writer) loathsome to himself - much as an 'incel' might blame society as much as God for an erotic pecking order that excludes him from pleasure and love. Of course, in reality, we mostly become loathsome because we choose loathsomeness or are lazy in allowing ourselves to be sucked into the condition that makes us loathsome. Some of us are just natural psychopaths but there is a measure of truth in the implicit 'noir' social analysis. If we are the product of our actions (which is the view of some existentialists) and if our actions are dictated by our social condition and if our general condition is truly awful, then there is a certain logic in our actions being dictated by our condition caused by others. Whoever we are becomes lost somehow in the sheer weight of circumstance. The 'noir' novel is thus not about redemption or heroic transcendence but one of acceptance of our trapped state and a refusal to internalise social ideology. It floats constantly in and out of psychopathy. The ambiguity here is that we have moved beyond ethics and morality to simple descriptions of animal survival (and often failure) in an equally animal world where the social analysis can sometimes be horrible, factually correct. It is, literally, a world beyond good and evil. On balance, 'noir' fiction is almost necessary in a free society. Its absence is a sign of a totalitarian culture being present or (as today by stealth) re-emerging or it means that there has been a resolution of the conditions that create the 'immobilised man'. Yeah, right! The 'noir' novel reminds us that, for all the propagandistic crud produced by a liberal society, the resolution of the conditions that create personal misery and despair have not been resolved. The relative lack of such novels today is merely a sign of a wilful denial of this truth. Personally I am glad to be reminded of reality much as I might be very pleased that Claude Lanzmann pushed my nose into the cesspits of Auschwitz in his documentary 'Shoah' but my survival depends on remaining largely settled in the fantasies that we have all built up together. A society that understands the abattoir that provides its meat, the cost of war and the crimes committed by all sides and the ever-presence at the margins of the serial killer is ironically more likely to resolve conditions than one in denial. 'Noir' could thus be said to serve a social purpose. ...more |
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liked it
| [Written entirely in a personal capacity and not to be construed otherwise] I must confess to finding this book a disappointment but then I was disappo [Written entirely in a personal capacity and not to be construed otherwise] I must confess to finding this book a disappointment but then I was disappointed by Kim Ghattas' 'Black Wave' which I reviewed in June 2020 and for much the same reasons. I think there is a general problem emerging with senior journalists moving from reportage to analysis. I will try not to repeat that general critique (I refer you to the earlier review) but will be very specific about this book whose faults and problems cannot be entirely laid at the door of a journalist who has been severely circumscribed in his access to sources and the subject he is covering. Too much of what analysis there is depends on sources who are not close to the centres of decision-making in the Kingdom (which, as I say, is certainly not Hubbard's fault) or who have reason to resent or be disappointed by MBS' approach to policy. I have another problem (mine not his) in that, unlike the Middle East as a whole where I can say what I like, I am limited in the comments I can make on Saudi Arabia (and perhaps two or three other nations) because of my professional interests. I have to respect these. My reviews usually try to do two things - critique constructively a book and draw wider conclusions from the critique - but I am afraid that those professional interests mean that I cannot comment on MBS, the Saudi dynasty, Saudi Arabia or even Western relations with the Kingdom in any depth. So, let us stick to the book and be straight up front by saying that Hubbard, who is a conscientious journalist covering a wide beat, will admit to only restricted access to the Kingdom and, when he is there, will tend to meet representatives of his own cosmopolitan class. This is the Kim Ghattas problem again - a class of commentators who operate as subaltern critics of their own order which they implicitly believe as having universal moral value and who tend to associate with upper middle class like-minded people in exile or, more guardedly, in-country. I certainly cannot criticise Hubbard for trying. The American elite market in particular was crying out for a coherent explanation of the phenomenon of MBS. It incidentally desperately wanted to understand the post-election 'volte face' of the man they most like to hate - ex-President Trump. Somebody had to do it and, as an honest journalist, Hubbard could only do this by taking his sparse sources (no other mainstream Western journalist could do it better) and constructing a sufficiently plausible narrative which met with the moral expectations of his audience. As a result, although there is some new material, the book is essentially one of taking the news stories of the last few years and binding them into that plausible narrative, adding some nuggets of experience from dealing with similar Saudi subalterns to create the whole. It is thus a reasonably reliable account of the facts of the case as they are available (our Western intelligence services almost certainly do not know much more than Hubbard) but one suspects it is merely a temporary paradigm. It is certainly not an analysis. If one wants a working model of the Saudi conundrum that will 'do' to be going along with, the book is definitely worth getting. Indeed, the Saudi leadership should read it because, true or false, it is what most influential Americans tend to think of their country and of their Crown Prince. However (I am definitely not trying to pull rank because I have seen Saudis from the inside during crisis situations), the book does not manage to communicate the complexity of the situation or be fair about the reasoning that leads to what Americans and many Europeans think of as blunders. Perhaps because of its audience or perhaps because of the material available, Hubbard concentrates on Khashoggi and female human rights activists in a way that distorts the total picture. These are stories engaged liberal Americans care about but they are not central to calculations in Riyadh. There is a form of implicit neo-imperialist assumption that countries like the Kingdom should care about what East Coast Americans care about. That assumption gets confused with the 'realpolitik' involved in arms deals, oil, strategic regional influence and trade. What matters is the nexus between moral fervour (bad things must be punished) and the realities of power. The tragedy for the East Coasters is that the terms of political trade no longer connect the two so readily or as they had hoped. Their ideological triumph comes as American power wanes. US power is still substantial but has materially declined in recent years. The last real hold that the liberals have over states like the Kingdom is the threat of investor or consumer revolts over inappropriate dealings or perhaps an ending of arms sales. The first means the French Chinese, Russians or Turks will try to fill the gap in a competitve market. The second (as Trump liked to point out implicitly in praising the value of arms deals) means job losses and business failures in an economy over-tied to military-industrial production. Similarly, we do not know if the Saudi opening up of the country to foreign tourists will work or not but there are signs that the sports industry and its customers do not give a stuff about 'sportswashing' - the acquisition of Newcastle United by the Saudis was welcomed locally. East Coasters want to be both rich and moral or rather powerful and moral because the fantastic rise of the US to global power has also been an exercise in morality. Where the US has not been moral (frequently), its intelligentsia have forced it to become moral or at least appear to be so. This 'beacon on the hill' approach to foreign affairs (exemplified by the sponsorship of the United Nations and the Nuremburg War Crimes Tribunal) has been influential, limiting barbarism elsewhere, not least in the collapse of the European empires and even within Communism. It is, as Sellars and Yeatman might put it, generally a 'good thing' but sometimes it takes on a life of its own, becomes detached from reality and seems to ignore the fact that the beacon sheds poor light on problems at home and that sometimes brutal realpolitik is also what Democrats do. Forget Saudi Arabia for a moment and consider the position of any country faced with an America (or increasingly Europe) that mixes real tradeable advantages over power and resources with ideological or moral fervour. That country is likely to be get puzzled and resentful. The Russians today sit puzzled as the Europeans seem to want to undermine their sphere of influence in Belarus and seek regime change (with Navalny) in Moscow yet have some 40% (roughly) of their core energy supplies dependent on Russian gas reserves. The result is as we see it today. Not that the Russians are actually doing anything to restrict gas supplies (on the contrary, they religiously meet contract and want to supply more through NordStream 2) but that 'anti-Russianism' led to a failure to contract. It may be that the alliance of greens and liberals in Europe may create an own goal where their 'morality' results in inflationary pressures that start to grant ammunition to populists. Moral foreign policy is always risky when it comes to dealing with resource or trade dependencies. Look outward from such countries and they get confused because America has, during the war on terror, been ruthless (with the approval of its liberal elite) towards its enemies - which include people like Assange about whom there are reliable reports of a least a discussion of a kidnapping. Extraordinary rendition was normalised (as, briefly, was torture) during the War on Terror and drone and missile attacks (currently and rightly a subject of criticism in Yemen) once routinely destroyed wedding parties in an Afghanistan in a war that proved futile. They also see regular reports of excessive force used by American police against 'black' citizens even if they are not fully aware of the scale of America's prison population. It is not that 'liberals' do not also protest against such things but foreigners get confused as to who speaks for the West. This is also not to be anti-Western or anti-American (quite the contrary - I consider myself a British patriot and god help any Russky who attempts a landing on our shores) but simply to say that analysis requires analysis not of what should be but of what is to get to what should be. This is also not to justify or condone anything by anyone (Russian, Saudi, Chinese) but only to suggest that long-lasting reform in any national situation comes from a realistic, almost Machiavellian, understanding of the political reality and social forces that reformers have inherited. Thus, a book must be either an advocate for liberal reform, sharing the values of its expected readership and friends in the region, or be an analytical description of the socio-political reality of the world of its subject matter. It cannot easily be both. If the latter, then more time should be spent on the nexus of power between international capital and the Gulf and on the dynamics of the relationship with the US at a strategic level and less on a single influential depressed journalist or the radical wing of feminism in a conservative culture. In fact, Hubbard does us a service by giving us some important new background on why Khashoggi was potentially more of a threat to the regime than simply 'speaking out for reform'. The evidence shows that he was being drawn heavily into a Turkic-Qatari network anathema to Riyadh. He was also toying (although one suspects naively by 'friends') with engagement in what would amount to an electronic warfare operation against the regime. Only the most naive would not understand that, today, cyberwarfare of all types is a form of warfare implying 'treason' to some. Similarly, there is perhaps insufficient understanding on the US East Coast (this applies to situations elsewhere in the world) that dissent is also a serious game. It is interpreted, rightly or wrongly, as representing foreign influence and destabilisation. This is not an argument against dissent (on the contrary, intelligent dissent is the agent of socio-political transformation) but that dissenters without a strategy who concentrate on single issues are likely to get ground down because that issue may unravel complex negotiated settlements. This is especially so when dissent appears to represent class or special interests and is not argued for in terms of the national or general interest. The best argument for feminism in Saudi Arabia at the moment is not 'rights' (a Western concept) but the unleashing of female power in the economy. So, for lack of any other sound single volume account of the rise of MBS from the perspective of the West, I can recommend this book but as a 'true account' of the politics I have my doubts - too much concentration on the defeated elements in the elite and the views of moneyed cosmopolitans. As to MBS himself, whether he will ascend the throne, whether he will settle the atrocious Yemeni War through some form of rapprochement with Iran, whether he will transform the Saudi economy (Hubbard is too downbeat on this) are matters I cannot comment on. I will also not comment on US-Saudi relations except to say that many countries like the Kingdom can afford to play a long game because American politics tend to be a succession of short games. For the 'liberal' view of the universe to become the new global norm, the US has to see liberals win the mid-terms and then the Presidential for 2024 and then see the Republican opposition swing back to the centre and become bipartisan again. Here in the West, we seem to be coming to the end of our public health crisis but we are already entering an economic one (more one of uncertainty than deterioration) and economic crises invariably lead to socio-political tensions and almost certainly some form of class conflict. That gives the 'illiberal' part of the global world order good reason to be cautious about kow-towing to liberal norms too quickly or not on their own terms. In fact, most 'illiberal' leaders have modernisation strategies of a sort that ultimately lead to liberalisation ... but perhaps not yet. All in all, get this book if you want a basic run-down of the facts in a clear and well-written narrative or if you want your liberal prejudices given a bit more useful ammunition but you may have to wait a little longer for the information that will give you a definitive picture of MBS. ...more |
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| Oct 06, 1992
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it was amazing
| I have always felt uneasy about the legitimacy and conduct of the Nuremburg Trials and this excellent memoire by one of the senior American prosecutor I have always felt uneasy about the legitimacy and conduct of the Nuremburg Trials and this excellent memoire by one of the senior American prosecutors did little to make me feel more comfortable about the 'justice of the victors'. Do not misunderstand me. The murderous out-of-control inhuman behaviour of the German military under an extremist and partially irrational political movement could not go unpunished. The victors were in an unenviable position in deciding to go about enforcing 'justice'. There were four victors speaking for the 'United Nations' (the victors' own ideological construct which survives to this day) - the Soviet Union, France, the British Empire and the United States of America - and all had human rights skeletons in their closet. The Soviet Union had a simple political position - it did not care how the bastards that had wrecked its country were punished but punished they must be. The French were distracted - they were lucky to be included in the victors' roster and had bigger problems rebuilding a shattered economy. It was the two Western victors - the US and the British Empire, the first clearly by now displacing the latter as 'top dog' - who had to decide whether the victors' triumph should be a matter of simple political decision-making or should somehow be 'legitimised'. Being pragmatists, the British initially wanted simply to sort things out as a set of political choices but the Americans had other ideas - they wanted a show trial with a difference, one that would be conducted not on Soviet lines but according to proper judicial procedures. What Telford Taylor's book makes clear is that the Americans made the running in pushing forward the idea of a trial (which the Soviets certainly had no problem with on the basis that its results would be a foregone conclusion to all intents and purposes). Taylor's book is remarkable as the testimony of the best of America - a decent, thoughtful and educated man trying to make sense of his own experience and giving a three-fold account of the atmosphere of the period, the processes involved and the moral issues raised by the trials. Before we come to the reasons for unease in this reader (we detect slight unease at times in Telford), we should describe the book. It is an 'anatomy' not only of the trials themselves but of how they came to be, the thinking behind them and the mood of the time. It is also a description of the Nazi defendants and their behaviour which adds to our understanding of their nature and motivation. It is not merely 'contemporary' narrative history but also a contribution to legal scholarship which the casual reader might find difficult and dull at times. Nevertheless, it is worth persevering with because, while the legal issues can sometimes seem recondite and its structures built on sand when it comes to ethical considerations, the insight given into how lawyers make decisions in undoubtedly highly political circumstances is invaluable. This is not to say that the trials were ever overtly political in procedure rather than initiation. The judges took their duty of care towards correct judicial form and as fair a trial as possible very seriously and this was no Vishinsky-style exercise in a witch hunt. The defence was often poor from inexperience and part of one's unease lies in lack of allowance for the disadvantages it faced but there was an open and transparent defence process. The judges often challenged the prosecution and refused to let them dictate terms. Telford's later access to Judge Biddle's notes of the deliberations of the judges before judgement and sentencing show us four judges and four alternates from four radically different political and judicial cultures horse-trading, yes, but attempting to be just according to their own lights. Given the strength of feeling amongst the publics of the victorious nations and the emerging information about the deliberate and chaotic brutalities of the Nazi regime, the restraint being shown by the victors seems to be historically remarkable. Nevertheless, what also comes across (and Telford's intellectual integrity in presenting and analysing what happened is commendable) is the degree to which the process and the judges fell between stools - neither a show trial along Soviet lines but also not something wholly depoliticised. Looking back over what is now nearly seventy years, two contrasting thoughts emerge - that the 'American fix' of an international tribunal was probably the best bad option for dealing with a murderous regime and that the tribunal was not entirely fair either. Unease lies in both the compromises essential to making this 'fix' work and its long term consequences with which we are still dealing today. It also lies in some specific decisions which remain disturbing of which more later. The most obvious concern (felt then by many lawyers and military men as much as today) lies in the retrospectivity of the charges, Despite their claims, the Tribunal was creating international law after the fact. They were turning moral beliefs in the present into law in the past. We are back to the problem of how you deal with undoubted 'crimes' (in ethical terms) when, in fact, there was no rule of law pertaining to them when they were committed. The victorious allies were obliged to create retrospective legislation as the only means of avoiding political solutions. The theoretically right approach would have been to create consensual binding global legislation for the future based on the terrible events of the preceding years and this is what emerged as the United Nations became a force that could help create a framework of international law. But this does not get away from the difficulties that no one before the UN Charter was agreed and who had not signed up to it was bound by it and that international relations is a relation of sovereign states and so law is only enforceable to the degree that it can be enforced by a 'victor'. Moreover, the German (and Nazi) arguments about the oppressive nature of the Versailles Treaty and its denial of self-determination to Germans in the Sudetenland and the Polish corridor were never adequately answered except by diktat. It is really uncomfortable for us to say this today but, while it does not justify the expansion of activity into imperialist war and certainly not the atrocities that ensued, the Wilsonian position on national self-determination should have recognised some German aspirations. In short, we have skewed the story into a binary tale of good and evil so thatinternational justice becomes a fiction wholly dependent on the 'macht' of victors. Its retrospectivity was simply a sign of that 'macht'. The judicial procedures were the justice of the victors at that point in time. The reason this creates unease is that, while many progressives were sincere and are sincere in their belief in international justice, the creators of this system all had far from clean hands in judging the Nazi regime. The Nazi regime merely concentrated its crimes into a short space of time at the heart of the 'civilised world' and made the unfortunate error of glorifying its own brutality as an imperialist race struggle. But let us look at the record of the judging countries. The Soviet Union's record in this respect requires no introduction but it had actively participated in the carving up of Poland (an important part of the charge sheet against Germany) and its activities since 1917 towards peasants and dissenters were certainly comparable to that of the Nazis. The Soviets could and did make arguments from necessity and ideology not much differently from the Nazis (as did the Western imperialist powers in their time) while the German argument about the invasion of Norway as pre-emptive might well have held water if evidence was not withheld. The two Western imperiums - those of France and Britain - had long since been constructed on the conquest of many indigenous peoples, some of whom (as in Tasmania) had been exterminated, and there is barely a nation in the world not invaded by the British at some point in history. The King of little Belgium (for whom hundreds of thousands of young British men died in the First War) had overseen a brutal exploitative slave state in the Congo and Hitler was taking many beliefs and actions of the West in the previous century only to their horrible logical conclusion. The United States, the 'beacon on the hill' and self aware store of moral value, had also been built on the original sin of the near-extermination of indigenous peoples and had still not come to terms with its own racial attitudes (it still has not) as it was liberating Dachau. And then there were the more specific 'war crimes' arguments. One of the few defence wins at Nuremburg was to show that Doenitz and the German naval approach to unrestricted submarine warfare was much the same as the heroised Admiral Nimitz in the Pacific in the war against Japan. The British obsession with punishing the Germans for the infamous Commando Order conveniently forgot that those same Commandos were slitting German throats from behind in secret raids. The Germans were committing war crimes but the Tribunal was never good at explaining context. Then, when considering the unrestricted slaughter of civilians, the undoubted evil of the German military in the East and Himmler's machine could be seen as part of a general degradation that included the fire bombings of Hamburg, Dresden and Tokyo and the atom bomb blasts. There were other oddities - the Soviets drove Germans out of their lands as the Germans drove Slavs out of theirs. Even as the trials were ending, the Czechs expelled the Sudeten Germans from their homeland without a whisper of complaint from the allies. This is not to minimise the evils of the Nazi regime (on the contrary, there was something peculiarly demonic about the Himmler machine and Hitler) but to say that the victors glossed over things to ensure a political result with only relatively late behaviour change on their part. The low point was probably the Soviets pushing their interpretation of the Katyn Wood massacre but there was also 'mauvaise foi' in the entire construction of the conspiracy to mount an aggressive war that repeated for political purposes the reasoning at Versailles. What was ultimately behind this was a peculiarly American ideological drive to build a world that did not exist at that time and we can either share that intent and accept that the means justified the ends or be concerned that the means would become the ends as history unfolded. American internationalists had tried to build that world under Woodrow Wilson and failed abysmally because Congress was not in tune with their thinking. The attempt to force democracy and national self-determination into the same pot at the expense of the losers in 1918/1919 had been the trigger for a second round of violence and brutality in the 1930s and early 1940s but American liberalism was not about to give up on its dreams. The Nuremburg Trials were part, just one part, of an attempt to impose moral order on a political universe which needed to risk nuclear conflagration with the Soviet Union in the coming years just as it needs to risk economic melt-down with the same conflict with China to achieve meaning. What started with the crushing of the Confederacy and required the dismantling of the old European empires continued with the settlement of 1945 and the creation of a liberal democratic bloc and today's confrontations. It is as ideological as anything from the pen of Karl Marx. But we come back to the main problem of 1945. The Nazis had been defeated. The evidence was clear that they had considered war an instrument of policy (but who did not until relatively recently) and that they had engaged in vicious and monstrous behaviours, especially in the East. Incidentally, what is fascinating about Telford's account is the great time spent on the conspiracy to wage war (the main international legal argument) and on crimes against Allied servicemen (mostly to satisfy the British) and the relatively secondary role given to atrocities. The atrocities are covered alright. Very early in the trials, the defendants were cowed and many shattered by the revelations of cruelty in the East (which it is clear that some had no experience of) which were staggering in their brutality. Even allowing for some slight exaggeration in untestable Soviet evidence, history has shown that there was no exaggeration required to demonstrate the barbarism, neglect and chaos of Nazi rule in which the Wehrmacht were wholly complicit. The point is that atrocities were largely a PR and prosecutory back-drop to arguments that centred on national 'amour propre' and 'rule of law' - the Jews were treated as almost a side issue by all except the Soviet prosecutors explaining legitimate Jewish resentment in later years. The choice of defendants was also peculiar at times. There was confusion about which Krupp was to be charged so no Krupp was charged. Because Goebbels was dead, the prosecutors simply picked on an official, Fritsche, as close to him as possible (he was one of three acquitted). Policy was being made on the hoof because events were moving fast from the process of persuading the United Nations to undertake a Tribunal through the pragmatic politics of rebuilding Germany (and the strange process of 'denazification') to the new politics of the Cold War. This was not a stable process so it may best be understood as basically decent men of often limited capacity (this comes out strongly in Telford's text) and limited resources of information and time who were trapped in their cultural assumptions trying to work around political realities. This meant many failures of process, lack of consistency, horse-trading and tokenism while the actual business of sorting out the consequences of Nazi rule were still being made politically. In some countries, such as France, it took quite a while to restore order and end 'rough justice'. One particularly disturbing aspect of the trial was the link between the psychologist with access to the defendants and the prosecution and there were other procedures that may not have made the trial unfair but certainly loaded the dice heavily against the defendants. In the end half of the defendants were hanged and most of the others got long terms of imprisonment with just three acquittals (all three of whom were then hunted down by the new German authorities in any case). Were the sentences just? Perhaps so, possibly too soft in some cases and certainly in later trials, but 'justice' was only part of the story. The punishments and the 'show trial' aspects were politically necessary at the time in order to give meaning to the sacrifice of the allies and 'educate' Germans. Indeed, given the violence done to so many people by the malice or incompetence or simple bureaucratic discipline of the defendants, no tears should be shed for those sentenced, including many of those summarily dealt with by the Soviets. Schacht and Speer got off lightly. Indeed, one suspects that Schacht the banker and Speer the industrial fixer whose empire relied on the slave labour provided by the executed Sauckel were given some leeway because they were men of the judges' own class, professional men. Some defendants behaved with exceptional dignity and one in particular, Seyss-Inquart, while remaining a Nazi to the end, earns some small respect both for his attempt to rule relaively humanely and to defy Hitler on a final destruction of the Netherlands. He was hanged. Perhaps only two defendants end up as 'victims' for very different reasons. Doenitz had nothing to do with the 'conspiracy to war' nor direct involvement in the atrocities but got his jail sentence largely because he was the nearest they could get to the 'big bad' other than Goering himself. The one that disturbs me the most is probably the least likeable personality (and weakest intellect), Julius Streicher, whose only crime was (it would appear) to run an antisemitic scandal sheet that was sidelined in much of the war and had a relatively small circulation. He was notorious in the West and one gets the impression that he was to be hanged because a representative of ideology (other than Rosenberg who was also indicted as boss of a territory) was needed regardless of his actual lack of importance except as bogey man. What is disturbing is that a man was hanged for expressing an opinion in a way that overturned the Voltairean Enlightenment position on freedom of speech and with no real evidence that his journal had anything directly to do with the crimes raised in the charges. This is one of the darker sides of the liberal internationalist triumph of 1945 and more in accord with the Soviet influence in that triumph - the necessity for controlling the freedom that force brings to a people. It lives on in current German banning of free discourse. Otherwise, we must accept the necessity of some sort of decisive act against the leaders of the Nazi regime and that it should be done by the Allies since Germany was in chaos (the US could rely on Iraqi revenge to deal with Saddam Husseion and leave with 'clean hands'). From that perspective, the Tribunal was flawed but necessary and there is no better book than Telford's for understanding the processes and compromises involved and how judgements were made under very difficult conditions. Aspects of it may leave a bad taste in the mouth but the crimes of the Nazis leave an even nastier one and a 'St. Helena' solution of taking leading Nazis en masse and incarcerating them on a prison island or shooting them out of hand would have been even more problematic. There was not time to think things through or to be pure about such issues as retrospectivity and admitting our own crimes as the basis for a new shared form of international justice. Such a system is not possible now so it was scarcely going to be possible in the first flush of 1945. And so it was a 'fix', a well-intentioned and necessary one but a fix nevertheless. As to the book, which I highly recommend for its decency and intellectual integrity, it is not quite definitive because we would need to read French, British and Soviet (and then German and even Nazi) perspectives for that but it is definitive enough in giving us an American view. Non-lawyers might want to speed-read some of the more technical legal analyses (although they are worth studying in their own right) but Telford writes well and gives a good feel for what it was like to live as an occupier in a shattered post-war Germany. ...more |
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it was amazing
| Patricia Highsmith's first novel (1950) is deservedly a classic and only a year later became the basis for an equally classic Hitchcock movie. The prem Patricia Highsmith's first novel (1950) is deservedly a classic and only a year later became the basis for an equally classic Hitchcock movie. The premise is so well known that there is no reason to worry about spoilers - an educated but weak creative architect accidentally interacts with a sociopathic and far less intelligent rich mummy's boy who manipulates him into a 'quid pro-quo' murder of the latter's father. The story itself would just be a standard thriller with a clever twist if it was not for the quality of Highsmith's writing and the skilled construction of a psychological relationship that is riddled with repressed homosexuality or, in the case of the architect, repressed bisexuality. Perhaps the flaw in the psychology (but a necessary flaw if the story is to take place) is the one intellectual weakness of Guy, the architect. There are ample opportunities for him to unravel the situation before he crosses the rubicon and murders Bruno's father. He does not. The only justification I can see for this is distrust of the reaction of American law enforcement to an attempted explanation of events up to that point and it is true that everything we know about the American legal system suggests a man may be a fool to be honest. Nevertheless, if we suspend disbelief in this one respect, everything else hangs together perfectly and the story twists and turns so that I can tell you what I have told you and know that there is plenty left for you to be surprised by and react to until the final perhaps too easy closure. The book should be read as a thriller perhaps but better as a psychologically troubling novel of how a persistent psychopath can manipulate an apparently decent and respectable member of society into crossing moral boundaries regarded as central to that decency and respectability. The relationship between Guy and Bruno (the manipulator) is fascinating in part because from the beginning Bruno seems a rather unattractive character (he is introduced with a boil on his forehead and as an evident alcoholic) and yet he seduces not only Guy but perhaps the reader. Bruno is a killer from boredom, a mummy's boy, a misogynist, a wastrel, a rich kid who only wants money to spend on being wasteful, and yet there are times we find ourselves feeling sorry for him in his loneliness and his neediness. Guy cannot shake him off and neither can we. What is remarkable about the book is not the murders or the skilled plotting but the unfolding of the dynamic between the two men and the degradation of Guy into accomplice, murderer and then into a double life that undermines his otherwise perfect rise to social success and a happy marriage. As the book proceeds, we find ourselves questioning exactly how much Guy is victim of Bruno and how much he is complicit in Bruno's insidious entry into his life. There is no overt homosexuality in the book but critics are right to detect something going on on both sides. Highsmith has created not only these two complex characters where repressed guilt in Guy (Bruno is incapable of the sentiment) drives the story to its denouement but strong believable characters in Guy's wife, Bruno's mother and the private detective tracking them. Highsmith never overplays her hand. Each character is rounded rather than a unit of production in a thriller. You sense the dynamics that might take place between them 'off camera' and how these constrain the two main actors. Though not quite perfect (because of the necessities of plotting a crime thriller) these aspects of the story make the book into quite a serious novel of middle class life, contrasting the idle rich and the rising educated middle class, as America moved towards its 'man in the grey suit' era. The geography of the book is interesting. People move easily between towns and cities. The plot depends on people being or not being in particular places at particular times. Events happen on yachts. The big cities are contrasted with the American South West. Trains are obviously important. This is an expansive but lonely America with a distant enforcing State. It is not accidental that justice is represented by a private sector detective. Financial insecurity is ever-present as the situation a man runs from (in the case of Guy) only a couple of decades after the Great Depression. Consumerism is another theme. Bruno is always buying small accessories for himself or for Guy. Guy is building and fitting out a house for himself and his wife Anne. His paying work is for golf clubs and department stores, his pro bono for a hospital. Everyone drinks like an episode of 'Mad Men' but Bruno drinks to excess and as a crutch. Guns remain normal even if they are rarely used - Bruno kills by his hands. This is a society moving towards the American Dream but the protagonists are riddled with neurosis and stress. Having said that, the ancillary characters are actually quite stable. The private detective is dogged and intelligent, acting from a sense of honour to Bruno's father. Anne is almost perfect (though believable) - kind, loving, patient, intuitively intelligent although no walk-over. Even the flawed first wife, Miriam, may be a small-town flibbertigibbet but she is not bad: she is normal enough. The portrayal of Bruno's mother is cunningly not of someone who might explain Bruno's nature. She too seems shallow but otherwise normal. Everything revolves around the psychologies of the two men - killer by choice and complicit killer by necessity. Both are troubled. Both are incapable of seeing into themselves, Both are drawn to each other despite the best efforts of one of them. There is thus a stable decent and normal America into which these two alternately evil and weak men are inserted and whose destiny is to be defeated by it, one by his obsessive need to be noticed and the other by an equally obsessive need to be punished. I can see why Hitchcock was drawn to it ... ...more |
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| 0099689707
| 9780099689706
| 0099689707
| 3.91
| 26,670
| 1987
| 1991
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really liked it
| A solid variant of the hard-boiled detective story published in 1987 and introducing troubled former Vietnam Vet, recovering alcoholic and police lieu A solid variant of the hard-boiled detective story published in 1987 and introducing troubled former Vietnam Vet, recovering alcoholic and police lieutenant (at least in this first novel) Dave Robicheaux in a story series set in southern Louisiana (New Orleans and its bayou country). All the ingredients of the Chandler School are here. Fans of the genre will get their comfort food and Burke is a good writer, especially at evoking place even if non-Southerners might like a dictionary to hand occasionally to get the best of it. Overall, I enjoyed it even if Robicheaux's self-destructive stupidity sometimes stretches one's patience ... but, then, where would we be with the story if he was not impulsive and sometimes just a bit dim? And it is always fun to see Catholic moral questioning rear its head in a crime novel. The story owes a great deal to the then-current scandal of the Iran-Contra affair. The politics here are not exactly sophisticated (standard liberal torment) but that is not to be taken as a criticism. Books like this need a hook and they are entertainments, not designed to be analytical. ...more |
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| 9781785152085
| 1785152084
| 4.03
| 23,111
| Jun 25, 2019
| Jan 01, 2019
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really liked it
| There are two stories running concurrently in 'Chaos'. One is an investigation into past investigations of the Manson murders leading to new and distu There are two stories running concurrently in 'Chaos'. One is an investigation into past investigations of the Manson murders leading to new and disturbing findings. The other is a story of obsession and an insight into the mind of that dying breed, the investigative journalist. The two stories are as important as each other and in no way could it be said that O'Neill is expressing any form of gonzo narcissism in describing his processes. On the contrary, he is self-critical and well aware of the dangers of falling down the conspiracist's rabbit-hole. Don't be fooled by the publicity either ... it tells some truths about the Manson murders but not the truth because no one knows the truth and any role oforthe CIA remains speculative and not quite proven at the end of the day. O'Neill would not claim otherwise. The point though is that O'Neill does demonstrate the moral turpitude of the American State and CIA, does have evidence of some link between Manson and the shenanigans of its representatives and does shatter the standard narrative about the murders and their motivation. If you are expecting some final revelation that is proven, dried and dusted off, forget it. What you get above all is an evidenced chipping away at the given Bugliosi narrative until it no longer stands up. Bugliosi looks increasingly like an ambitious chancer. He was certainly not a very nice person. O'Neill demonstrates this without rancour yet one can see how a relatively young and ambitious prosecutor constructed a narrative to enhance his career and then assumed no one would be energetic or fool enough to go much deeper. O'Neill is that energetic fool. He finds not so much evidence for one explanation as sufficient evidence for Bugliosi's narrative to be misleading, a rather sad assessment since the possibility of a final truth has probably been buried along with so many now-aged actors in this horrible story. The past is another country, it was once famously said. The Hollywood of the 1960s is barely recoverable to the reader of the twenty-first century yet O'Neill perhaps could have made more of one salient fact - the players were all very young, unmoored and mostly immature. Once you know this, then the world of Polanski and Melcher and Dennis Wilson looks more like a lot of young men who are quite simply out of their depth with too much cash in hand, creating a honey pot for yet another set of chancers like Manson and Beausoleil. However, O'Neill manages to sow a reasonable distrust of all previously given narratives by finding evidence of a whole range of new possibilities and probabilities that may or may not be significant or connected to each other but offer far more plausible leads than those offered in the past. We are reminded of the JFK assassination narrative where a convenient tale designed to shut investigation down and control a situation starts to unravel as more evidence comes to light, not only about the crime but the handling of the crime by the authorities. Because the book reads like a thriller and because the unfolding of the story is part of the pleasure (a grim pleasure perhaps), I am reluctant to say too much in case of spoilers but the presentation of hard facts about psychological experimentation in Haight-Ashbury must be noted. The biggest elephant in this zoo full of weighty creatures is the question of how a small-time crook developed the ability to bind so many people to him in ways that lasted long after conviction and were to result in appalling crimes. This problem is not solved by the book. What we come to see is that (circumstantially) Manson is to be found connected to whatever the sociopathic Dr. Louis West may have been doing in Haight-Ashbury prior to the murders. For a considerable period of time, Manson also seemed to be highly protected from parole officers. Was this incompetence or was it just the ineptitude of a sleepy system with more limited technological capability than authority has access to today or was it part of some programme that ran interference with the law enforcement system? I tend to go with incompetence as explanation of such things but O'Neill's list of failures and intrusions pile up in chapter after chapter to make one question the sheer scale of the necessary incompetence and laziness and draw one towards something more structured and sinister. There are other issues raised - the degree to which Manson was integrated into a Hollywood circle, the strange connections of the family connections of that circle in the subsequent investigation and the convenient manipulations of legal counsel and hiding of evidence from the defence. The amount of paper evidence destroyed reminds me of the similar mass destruction of evidence related to alleged state-tolerated child abuse in the UK while, as in that case, the authorities appear to have been doing a lot of arse-covering in attempting to restrict access to what is now available. What O'Neill does uncover is quite impressive - not enough to join all the dots to something final and fully coherent but enough to justify his title of investigative journalist. This man is not only not a conspiracy theorist, he bends over backwards not to join the dots too readily. Which brings us on to the second story. O'Neill's journey tells us that obsession with a story can come close to neurosis in some journalists (though he never goes over the edge) and that proper investigation of wrong-doing is very time and cash expensive. The 'system' (such as it is) has its strongest defence not in its blundering destruction of data, the insiders who draft cover up narratives or the self-interest of the authorities in restricting material but in the sheer cost of investigation for investigators, not only in money and time but in lifestyle. Investigation into state-tolerated child abuse in the UK ran into the sand for many reasons - kicking the problem upstairs to be buried in an official inquiry, document destruction, blunders by journalists in dealing with agent provocateurs but the cost of investigation was the killer punch. In this case, the Manson crimes took place over half a century ago (the child abuse allegations relate to a period only slightly more recent). People get old and are reluctant to give the reasons for their small complicities. Perhaps they may risk a pension. Many are dead. Was it all worth it for O'Neill to spend two decades getting into debt simply to destroy the prevailing narrative without firmly establishing an alternative one? Only he can say but I, for one, am grateful for his efforts if not only for the obvious reason of true crime entertainment. People like O'Neill ensure that the villains, the ambitious, the corrupt, the corporate, the system,, the state-sociopath may 'get away with it' (they generally do) but that they do not do so unharmed. There is enough information here to undermine their claims to be decent and competent. This is what it is important to understand - that the individual sociopath and the state-sponsored sociopath are often two sides of the same social coin and that it is important for investigators to explore those times in history when they overlap and then expose those connections. America as a soi-disant free society seems to be a natural home for that overlap - the historic connections between organised crime and the State, the secret state's experimentation on private citizens and many other examples should be proof-positive of that. Of course, to be fair, all societies and systems - including churches and corporations and probably most NGOs and activist groups - are structured to offer opportunities for sociopaths and sociopaths are happy to use not only true innocents but their counterparts outside. O'Neill does not say this (though he does find a suggestive direct link between one character and the JFK story) but the circumstantial parallels between the state and the worlds of Manson and Lee Harvey Oswald gave me some pause for thought. But of course that was then and this is now. Surely, with so much congressional scrutiny and our new liberal view of accountability and human rights, nothing bad could ever happen again. Surely a Manson could not today slip through the parole net. I am not so sure. My take is that State manipulative technologies centred on drugs, hypnosis and similar techniques, 'scientific' in the 1950s and 1960s because that is what behaviourism told them was going to work, are now surplus to requirements. Today, the behavioural sciences are very different in orientation. Ask yourself how much funding goes into government-funded psychological operations and then ask yourself why you do not know what it is spent on and whether you are not perhaps the subject of those operations. Drugging people and experiments in Haight-Ashbury are no longer required in a world of suggestion, media manipulation, surveillance, algorithms and more subtle forms of social control. Perhaps a future O'Neill will uncover something to shock us ... in 2071. But let's be clear about what this story is not saying. It is not a conspiracy story about a strong evil State and a nasty charismatic sociopath but about a weak inept, amoral and unaccountable state filled with moral cowards who create the space for sociopaths and moral weaklings to thrive. That is the service O'Neill and good investigative journalists (so very few of them) provide, often at huge cost to themselves - proof that the units of the great system in which we are embedded are fundamentally inept because human nature is what it is, weak, rather dim and often cowardly. Thus has it been, thus it probably is and thus it is likely always to be. Even if not entirely conclusive, 'Chaos' is a text for political scientists as much as for historians of America and true crime aficionados. It helps to stop us taking all the nonsense we are fed at face value. ...more |
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Jul 17, 2021
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| 1908276738
| 9781908276735
| B01H65WGE4
| 3.69
| 2,939
| Oct 01, 2013
| Jul 07, 2016
|
really liked it
| Herrera produced in 2013 this short novella about which there is not a great deal to say other than that it is a successful twenty-first century updat Herrera produced in 2013 this short novella about which there is not a great deal to say other than that it is a successful twenty-first century updating of the noir style and that it is oddly predictive of at least some of the psychology of disease-related lockdowns six or seven years later. There was no way that Herrera could have known of the current (2019-2021) pandemic in advance unless you have the conspiratorial mentality of a card-carrying Qanon member so it is interesting to read how a creative talent imagined in advance the effect a plague might have on people. In this case, the disease is only a back-drop. We are, if you like, in 'early 2020' when people were unsure of causes and risks and with governments half-absent and half-heavy-handed. Meanwhile, the world of low-life survival and negotiation and of sex continues. But the book is not about a pandemic. It is an attempt to take noir and re-envision it for a more anarchic modern society where not everything is quite as obvious as murder. Sometimes bad things just happen by accident. A fixer' like The Redeemer tries to manage the consequences. I am not one to give away plots but we can say that the story centres on an exchange of bodies betwen two families who stand in relation to one another like the two gangs in 'A Fistful of Dollars' but with a twist that emerges later. Within its limited ambition, the book works well even if its literary modernism makes you sometimes work a little harder than you should need to for 'sense'. It is an elite approach to literature that undermines the whole point of noir which is demotic and ultimately pulp. This is good writing and worth reading although it should be seen as a gloss on a great tradition rather than a masterpiece, perhaps a literary exercise by a craftsman, mannered and modernist and wearing its apparent 'gritty realism' as mere rhetorical cover. Yet I enjoyed it. ...more |
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Jul 03, 2021
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| 1852427418
| 9781852427412
| 1852427418
| 3.62
| 5,842
| 1999
| Oct 01, 2000
|
really liked it
| 'Nineteen Seventy Four' was much praised when it appeared two decades ago but I suspect that an element of this may have been London-based literary cr 'Nineteen Seventy Four' was much praised when it appeared two decades ago but I suspect that an element of this may have been London-based literary critics wanting to have their instinctive prejudices about life up north confirmed. Peace's novel certainly plays well to that crowd. The book is undoubtedly (mostly) well written with a staccato style well tuned to 'noir' and an ability to concentrate on action without losing atmosphere. Occasionally, the language goes hysterical and 'poetic' but not so much as to spoil a book which is an above average entertainment. Peace also manages to contain his desire to set the scene with contemporary references to the Yorkshire of Christmas 1974 after going a little over the top in the first pages. So, why is it not quite as great as critics in 2000 liked us to believe that it was (though it is good)? We can accept the sustained violence, grim and extreme though it is, because nobody said 'noir' should not be bloody and brutal. The violence may tip over into grand guignol towards the end but we can accept that as a concession to the market. It is what fearful middle class punters want. The problem is the extremity and the hysteria is just too widespread. We all know that Yorkshire Police in the 1970s were often more demons than angels but the unrelenting nature of their evil and local corruption seems more suited to the Bosnian War than British reality. The 'hero' (not exactly an angel himself), a Northern crime correspondent, is undoubtedly a hysteric. It is very hard to believe that his sexual encounters have much to do with reality. It has to be said though that the news room atmosphere 'up north' feels authentic. The denouement (which I will not reveal for spoilers) eventually manages to ruin a carefully structured 'noir' ambience to give us the mere shocks and thrills of a aspirant bestseller. The lack of realism in the realism of British 'noir' is much as we have already critiqued in Lewis' 'GBH'. In other words, neither Peace did not capture the subtlety in the fantasy underlying classic American noir which emphasised relationships rather than betrayal by numbers and gore. Characterisation is sometimes good here but often stereotypical. Noir and crime are very different and this book strikes me as straddling the divide and losing something in the process. The protagonist has all the marks of a noir hero, if flawed, but the plot hinges on serial murder plot, not really the territory of 'noir'. One suspects that the book arrived at just the right time to feed southern fantasies about the barbarism presumed to be inherent up north and which would contribute to a form of imperial disdain that would led to the shocks of 2016 and 2019. Such readers also wanted gore and extremity rather than subtlety and that is what they got. Pandering to two fears - of the barbarism lurking within the system that upholds property and of psychopaths preying on us - means both collapse into the 'cheap thrill' at the end of the day. If only the book had showed some restraint, it would be on the way to being a classic because there is no doubt that Peace had mastered British 'noir' as a form of language if not quite as plot. From that perspective, the book is a pleasure to read, evocative of place more than of time. ...more |
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| 0517014300
| 9780517014301
| 0517014300
| 4.15
| 20
| Aug 03, 1983
| Aug 03, 1983
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liked it
| This was a childhood favourite of mine, perhaps because of the ghoulish photos of dead men and stories of evil doings. The photographs are, in my edit This was a childhood favourite of mine, perhaps because of the ghoulish photos of dead men and stories of evil doings. The photographs are, in my edition, not always of the greatest quality but there are plenty of them. Rediscovered in clearing out an attic, I sat down and re-read it. It stands up as a sound 'revisionist' history of the West with some original contributions from diligent research. The authors not only read texts but interviewed people only a little distant from the final years of the West. Its weakness is that it is anecdotal rather than a narrative. It is also heavily lopsided in devoting the last quarter of the book exclusively to Butch Cassidy and the Wild Bunch. Nevertheless, an intelligent reader can pick up the threads of a narrative. There are plenty of facts to fill one out. The story is essentially one of modernisation and state formation that could be told across the planet and in all ages even if the American federal state takes a surprisingly long time to appear in this case. The 'Wild West' is perhaps unique only in its scale, concentration and documentation. Given that the disruption of the American Civil War is a central event in creating Western lawlessness, the fact that a private army could be raised by private interests as late as the 1890s suggests that the American State was internally quite weak in the late nineteenth century. The book starts with the earliest organised crime operations in New York, family based thieving and extortion operations that sided with the British, and highwaymen who might have been found not long before in the Weald of Kent and Sussex as smuggling gangs and on the roads into London. After this very brief account of criminality on the edges of the West (the book closes with a particularly nasty Oregon outlaw in the 1900s who has nothing particularly frontier about him), the vast bulk of the book is what it says on the tin. If there is a narrative model to be imposed on the book, it is two-fold. The first is about how justice emerges out of chaos and the second is how great events in the world outside a frontier can create the conditions for crime. Borders are generally territories open to criminality (notoriously so in, for example, the Scots and English border in the Early Modern Period) and the huge gap between the settled mid-West and California was an internal border for the US that was destined for initial anarchy. The first theme is a simple progression from libertarian anarchy in which the strongest (the best, in this case, with firearms) wins out. then a reluctant community justice (the vigilantes), then some formalisation of justice (sheriffs and marshalls, not always free of outlaw taint themselves). From there, we see private interests with the capital to organise private armies take hold (the most staggering example being the Johnson County Wars of the early 1890s) or to hire professionals (as the railroads hired the Pinkertons) until, finally, state and federal authorities can step in. The whole period from anarchy to authority took a relatively short time, extending outwards as the frontier extended outwards and following the same pattern of slowly gathering civilisation, starting with the Gold Rush of the 1850s and ending with the Hole in the Wall-type of rustler in the 1890s. The centre of the story shifts decade by decade. Ignoring California, we have the vicious borders wars of the 1860s in Kansas and Missouri, then the shift down to the South West and then the cattle trails to the railroads and finally to the Northern Plains States. Each decade and region had its own distinctive network of criminals where outlaws could become lawmen, lawmen invested in local vice and outlaws and lawmen could be on first name terms as they shot at each other. For the border territory, the quintessential characters were the James-Younger gang (who would act as a lineage for the Daltons), in the cattle towns it was the Earps and Wild Bill Hickock and in the northern plains rustling and bank robbing operations like that of the Wild Bunch. As an anecdotal history, the book is not only well illustrated (with new material found by the authors) but tells more stories than we can review here - Billy the Kid and the Lincoln County Wars, the murderous John Wesley Hardin, the extrajudicial murder of the Reno Brothers. There are also a few woman of interest although they obviously play a minor part compared to young male sociopaths. They were generally but not exclusively drawn from life in the bordellos - Laura Bullion, China Polly, Cattle Kate, Etta Place. Some were simply crime family members. The second narrative theme is the effect of external events. We have mentioned the Gold Rush which brought many impecunious and ambitious young toughs into California but the two central events were the American Civil War and the collapse of the cattle market in the late 1880s. The American Civil War turned 'Bleeding Kansas' into a violent quasi-sectarian hell-hole in which atrocities were normalised. When the War ended, men who could not settle down gravitated into crime as a form of guerrilla activity (mostly former Confederates) or law enforcement (Union). This was the source of Jesse James' ability to survive for so long (dying only by betrayal for a reward). Mostly criminal, his criminality was also that of popular guerrilla leader to a population hurting from defeat and happy to protect him. Similarly when the cattle market collapsed a lot of 'working class' cowboys were not merely unemployed but had to feed a horse as well as themselves. Rustling rich men's cattle, bank robbing and train robbing were as much getting back at the Man as crime. It is a common theme that crime operations were protected within their local communities and it cannot simply be put down to fear. The thieves stole and then spent and when they spent, they tended, unless on the run, to spend locally. Spending locally meant not having to go on the run. The Jackson County Wars are fascinating in this respect because cattlemen, with the undoubted connivance of the federal government, raised a private army that, sent against the rustling communities, was defeated in what amounts to a battle by a full local turnout. In the 1950s (when the book was researched) that war was still a live memory for the very old. Local people clammed up to the researchers because old grudges clearly still remained. Popular resistance to cattle barons, railroads, banks and feds lies deep in the northern plains. The story of Butch Cassidy and the Wild Bunch, on the other hand, is the story of the death of the Wild (aka violent) West before the next stage of Mid-Western machine gun robberies with no local base. The West is now fully integrated into not only the US but the world economy. Cassidy, the Sundance Kid and Etta Place create one of the few legends that stands up to scrutiny. They evade the remorseless Pinkertons to enjoy the high life in New York before entrepreneurially getting out just in time to open up business at a new frontier in South Africa. Cassidy is finally taken out in 1908 (actually he shoots himself rather than be captured) by the Bolivian military in a straight fight. In 1967, Che Guevara was taken out by that same military in a not-so straight fight (he was simply executed). Two very different cases - one criminal and one political - but the processes underpinning revolt against the system may not be so different and the hunt to bring order by any means necessary with Pinkertons and CIA also not quite so different. The book is also good on the 'legendary' surrounding the characters and gunfighters of the West, most of it (though not all) guff and tosh manufactured by the same sort of manipulative villain who remains the curse of our times - the journalist and 'popular author'. 'Fake news' is probably as embedded in the system as a whole as are criminality, the steady increase in the State's monopoly of force and the close links between justice and capital. Romantic bandit stories are often nonsense whether we are speaking of Jesse James or Salvatore Guilian0. The book must be considered in its own time (1961) as an attempt to remove a lot of the 'noble bandit' mythology of the West, by then completely Hollywoodised, and tell the real story which was mostly of tough young males trying to survive and having among them some very bad sociopaths. The bottom line though is that Hobbes may have been close to the mark - in a state closer to nature with resources limited and all eyes on the main chance, the sociopath will rise to the top of the food chain so communities can only be defended by having one's own sociopath to hand for protection. On the other hand, the remorseless power of capital is not kind. It builds and represents 'progress' and eventually enables better community protection through sponsoring (in effect) the modern State but the price in freedom is always going to be high. So, go elsewhere for that full narrative but, for fascinating anecdotes that counter the mythologies of Hollywood, this may be the book for you if you can find it. The authors tend to be firmly on the side of the law men rather than the outlaws but you can make your own decision on that. ...more |
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May 14, 2022
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Jul 17, 2021
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Feb 28, 2021
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Feb 06, 2021
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