The Cedar Lounge Revolution

Science fiction and the right. December 30, 2017

Many years ago it so happened that the third level educational institution I was in was linked vaguely to TCD. Which meant that we were, should we make the twenty minute walk (or thereabouts) to TCD, be able to join some of their societies. This held zero interest in me bar one. That being the Science Fiction society (actually just thinking of it, were I not in the WP at the time I could have wound up in CPI (M-L), or not, given that there were already two members of that org where I was a student. Wouldn’t that have made this site a bit different. Or perhaps not.).

So of a weekday myself and a good friend who had the same interest in SF would make a journey to the rooms said society had in an old Georgian building on Westland Row. The reason for this was that the society had a small but good library of books which we’d borrow.

I remember on one occasion talking to some of the other members – who seemed to regard us as interlopers and only tolerated us I suspect because we were willing to pay the small membership fee – and the issue of politics came up. I wouldn’t say I was starry eyed about the left. It might have been the new members educationals in Gardiner Place, or perhaps paper sales around the pubs in Kilbarrack and Raheny on a Sunday morning likewise, or perhaps annual collections, or just canvassing the large housing estates of the north side. But somehow uncritical youthful idealism tended to flee the building given all that and the sense of just how much hard work it was. Which I think was a good thing in retrospect. And anyhow, I wasn’t much given to proselytising. That said in the course of a conversation where I was making a case, almost an unthinking case, that science fiction was left-wing it transpired that the society members I was talking to were pretty right wing and baffled by my views.

And you know, in retrospect I think perhaps they had a point. It wasn’t that SF wasn’t at least in part progressive, there were many many writers who were leftist or anarchist or liberals of one stripe or another. Arthur C. Clarke was definitely in the latter camp, Asimov likewise. A tranche of New Wave authors were perhaps more in the anarchist camp, but it was broadly speaking left anarchism. By the 1980s feminist SF was a strong field and again progressive currents in that tended in a left-wing direction – Le Guin, James Tiptree Jnr, etc (one of my favourites from one such writer was a story, whose name I forget where there were no gendered pronouns for characters. It was remarkably effective). The counter culture too had left its mark though as we know at this remove that could tilt left or right.

But then again there was also a weight of authors who, at its most kind, could be termed centre-right. Kenneth Roberts, Edmund Cooper, John Christopher, perhaps even Richard Cowper whose work dipped into the spiritual. And many more. I pick those names because they weren’t hacks. All could when necessary write good prose. Cooper was a man whose writings, while entertaining, had gathered the label of misogyny about them. I’m not sure that’s entirely accurate but he sure couldn’t write women characters and the sexual politics were primitive. Roberts was more nuanced but similarly had issues with female characters and there was that sense of reactionary social structures. John Christopher had better female characterisation but had an almost overtly reactionary thread to some of his work (the Death of Grass in particular). And so on. Tellingly both Christopher and Roberts had started out as “school of John Wyndham” writing about often unlikely catastrophes but where Wyndham’s work earned the prefix of ‘cosy’ in front of catastrophe both Christopher and Roberts had a much darker vision, one that, ironically accorded with the New Wave and its upending of science fictional tropes and conventions.

Whether that further inflected their later work is an interesting question. Or was it that this was a functional of generational influences. They’d started writing in the 50s and never quite shrugged off the mores that informed that decade. For them what happened next must have been deeply and profoundly challenging. Still, if you write SF you have to roll with the punches.

But, and I have to admit to an affection for them all in different ways – Christopher and his Tripods novels and other juvenile oriented works. Pavane by Roberts is a fantastic novel. His Kiteworld perhaps less so but even today I remember the emotional response I had to it on first reading it. The Cloud Walker by Cooper is pulpy but fun. Transit – another novel by him – is problematic but interesting. His efforts to engage with race and gender equally problematic but in an odd way fascinating.

But there’s another point that is worth making – there’s been no end of controversy in recent years about who writes SF and what is written. And frankly there’s been incredibly ignorant comments made about what SF is and isn’t. So, for example, some rather self-serving conservative and worse reactionary analyses have sought over the last few years to argue that science fiction that focuses on the political, on race, class, gender and sexuality is not part of the genre. There’s an extension of that argument that seeks to see only very narrow forms of SF as legitimate – space opera being an example. The most absurd iteration of this is found in the recent complaints about the new Star Trek: Discovery being a problem for having lead female and non-white characters which betrays a breath-taking lack of knowledge of Star Trek.

The overall argument is so incorrect as to be risible. SF has engaged from relatively early on with all those and more. But what interests me is that the authors I mention above were doing so from a socially conservative perspective and doing so in the 1960s on. These authors weren’t writing conventional SF. They eschewed space opera and in their focus on the personal, on gender relations, on interactions, much more clearly are positioned, as noted above, in New Wave SF. One may not like their approaches or conclusions, but at the least they didn’t pretend that those weren’t areas worthy of engagement with. And if their engagement was at times clunky or inept, well, they are in and of themselves evidence of social change.

But further, they and their work stand as testament – along with feminist, socialist, racially aware and other works addressed in SF – to the broadness of the genre and, arguably, to its strength, that there’s room for everything bar outright reaction. And that attempting to define SF in narrow and reactionary ways is pointless and counterproductive. It’s a big genre, it deserves better than that.

This Weekend I’ll Mostly Be Listening to…your suggestions for Irish songs and music December 30, 2017

This year due to a project I was involved in I listened to a lot of Irish music from a broad range of groups and solo artists and across multiple genres. Some I knew before a lot I didn’t.

Here’s a few I liked a lot – some on rehearing them, Clannad, O Riada, the Virgin Prunes and Operating Theatre – others to my shame I only heard for the first time or really paid attention to for the first time which amounts to the same thing.

But what are people’s suggestions for great Irish songs or music? Any or all suggestions appreciated.

Sean O’Riada – Mairseal Ri Laoise

Shaun Davey (Soloist Liam O’Flynn) – The Brendan Voyage

Gavin Friday The Sun And The Moon And The Stars

Donnacha Costello – Blue B

Clannad – Éirigh Suas A Stóirín (Rise Up My Love)

Operating Theatre – Spring Is Coming With A Strawberry In The Mouth

Hat tip to comrade RockRoots for the steer on the next two of these tracks…

Turner and Kirwan of Wexford – Father ‘Reilly Says Goodbye

Real MCCoy- Quick Joey Small

Virgin Prunes – Pagan Lovesong

Jubilee Allstars – Peel Session (11th January 1997) including They’re Not Coming Anymore later on Sunday Miscellany produced by a certain Stan Erraught.

The future of work looks very much like the past… December 29, 2017

Very very interesting Analysis piece from the BBC recently on ‘who speaks for the workers’ and it points to how workplaces far from being futuristic are becoming more like they were fifty or sixty years ago with low-wages and poor conditions. But the difference is that there were unions then, whereas now, post-Thatcher etc they are much less evident on the ground.

And as it notes in 1979 there were 13m union members, half of all workers, whereas now it’s less than 1 in 4. Now in a way I have to say that 1 in 4 isn’t terrible given what’s happened. But… it means there are defensive postures, etc.

Of course there’s a deeper problem, the private sector is not as heavily represented and moreover currently in the UK unions tend to have many more members who are what once would be called ‘professionals’.

And as to work, contracts are now so complex with workers contracted and sub-contracted so that the people they ‘work’ for most immediately are not their employers. And as the programme points out, that makes the ability to organise more difficult.

Entertaining, in a bleak sort of a way, in its analysis of a Deliveroo ‘contractor’ and how that company regards said contractors as not their employees. As the individual said he wears their uniforms, carries their bags, etc and the only real freedom he has is the route, which ‘is no freedom at all’.

But not at all entertaining was the analysis of the garment industry in the UK which is even more exploitative where people are paid sub-minimum wage rates given they have to work up to 60 hours a week but nominally are being paid minimum wage for 20 to 40 hours.

Some useful material on union organisation amongst low paid carers in the US. And in the UK – and the point that besuited essentially public sector unions are simply not fit for purpose.

And a point is made in answer to a question ‘why do breaches in labour laws require unions’… ‘because there is no enforcement of labour laws’.

National identit(ies) December 29, 2017

I’ve a lot of sympathy with Rosemary Jenkinson, the author, in this article in relation to how she feels having a Protestant, British and indeed Irish identity (and by the way she makes some excellent points I think re how certain dynamics in education pushed, understandably so, young Unionist/Protestant people in Northern Ireland to England and Scotland from the North).

I come at this from a different direction. Born in London, one English parent, growing up in Dublin in the 70s and 80s. I had an odd somewhat English accent, so West Brit occasionally came my way as a jibe,as did ‘posh’ but not too frequently. That didn’t bother me too much (though one Protestant from the South in comments notes how his childhood could be pretty miserable for not dissimilar jibes).

But Jenkinson’s sense of multiple identities is very familiar to me. Irish, yep, English, ish – to an extent, not British for me, Protestant and Catholic, well a direct experience of both in my immediate family was certainly positive for me (and politically immediate family were active in the BLP in the UK and others formerly in SF in the Republic so that was pretty mixed too – though less so). But then unionism right into the 20th century never wrestled with Irishness in quite the way Ulster Unionism did later. For Carson et al it was a given that they were Irish and British.

I wonder was it that localisation into Ulster that both accentuated a non-Irish aspect to it and exaggerated a sort of British (or was it English) aspect? That somehow Ulster could be seen as a place apart in relation to Irishness and Britishness that the rest of Ireland couldn’t be?

State paper release December 29, 2017

This is depressing, from the IT:

British officials raised the prospect of erecting a physical border along the entire frontier between Northern Ireland and the Republic 30 year ago, declassified files show.
At a meeting between officials of both governments, the British said the idea of erecting a physical border along the lines of that separating East and West Germany was being considered.
The Irish officials responded strongly against the suggestion urging the British to drop it immediately.

This from RTÉ is pretty good, an overview of some of the more interesting ones.

“In 1985 we were approached by a MI5 officer…he asked us to execute you,” so read a letter purportedly penned by the UVF and sent to the Taoiseach Charlie Haughey in August 1987.

After 30 years it has been released in the State Papers published today.

The correspondence signed by Capt W.Johnston makes the sensational claim that the UVF had been supplied with details of Mr Haughey’s cars, his trips to Farranfore airport in Kerry, his private yacht, the Celtic Mist, plus aerial photographs of both his homes in Kinsealy in north Dublin and Inishvickillane off the Kerry coast.

Charlie Haughey’s son Seán has revealed that his family was aware of a threat from the UVF around this time and it was taken seriously.

A very interesting account of attitudes in relation to the AIA:

[Thatcher] did not expect unionists to be so disaffected when the agreement was signed two years previously and “it is not logic but emotion that governs their actions.”

The Taoiseach attempted to reassure Mrs Thatcher and told her that she was the first Prime Minister who indicated to unionists that there must be progress. He said, “You have stood firm and that is an historic contribution to Anglo-Irish relations. You must not forget.”

But the Prime Minister believed as a result of the agreement “the minority community would not harbor the IRA. But the security situation has got worse. It is all very worrying.”

The Taoiseach agreed and suggested that when things settle down the two leaders should look at ways of making progress and ways to “placate the unionists.”

Then there were…

“the strongest reservations” about sanctioning repairs in an Irish dockyard of what were described as “support vessels to the Soviet Navy”.

The Department of Foreign Affairs f official warned that the North Atlantic was a “highly sensitive area of naval operations” and it should be turned down on the basis of our neutrality.

More on the Border…

In December 1987, the Department of Foreign Affairs contacted the British authorities to ask them about reports of a British Army incursion south of the border.

The British authorities responded that they were “greatly embarrassed” by the incident involving a pilot who had just arrived in the North.

Before being sent on a surveillance exercise in a beaver aircraft, the pilot asked his commanding officer if he was “cleared for the border”.

More and more to come tomorrow from all media.

And this from the UK… one could build an interesting counterfactual around it…

JAs the USSR entered its final months of existence, the chancellor of the exchequer, Norman Lamont, warned Major in September 1991 about the risks of becoming financially involved. “The view shared among G7 countries,” he said, is “that now is certainly not the time to be risking large sums of public money in the Soviet Union.”

Priceless December 28, 2017

Loving the examples of edits of a notorious never to be published book… My sympathies are entirely with the editor. I’ve done some horrible jobs in my time, worked for people I’ve not necessarily liked etc, but that job there? Urgghhhhh…

Forgetting fascism… December 28, 2017

Reading this in the Guardian a while back about the work of The Central Office for the Investigation of National Socialist Crime which continues to seek to bring Nazi’s to trial, there was a paragraph that set me thinking:

The question of whether Nazi trials should continue in spite of the increasingly unrealistic odds of success – whether the work of the Central Office remains essential, or if it needlessly litigates crimes that belong to the past – lingers over the Ludwigsburg headquarters. “How much does Germany need to do to render justice on its own prior crimes?” Pendas said. “And how long does it need to make those kinds of efforts?” These questions have haunted Germany since the war’s end, but have gained renewed currency with the rise of rightwing populist movements such as Alternative for Germany, which may become the third-largest party in the German parliament after the country’s upcoming September election, though the party’s support has declined in recent months. Earlier this year, an AfD politician called for Germany to stop atoning for its Nazi crimes.

And another:

Yet the very fact of the Central Office’s continued existence is a testament to the gravity and extent of Nazi crimes, a reminder of just how much is threatened by the rise of reactionary nationalism both in Germany and abroad. In the US, parallel institutions are under threat of closure. The Trump administration has plans to close the State Department’s modest Office of Global Criminal Justice, which is tasked with supporting international prosecutions for perpetrators of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide; its director, Todd F Buchwald, has already been reassigned. As his predecessor, Stephen J Rapp, told the New York Times earlier this year, “The promise of ‘never again’ has proven hard to keep.”

It seems to me that there’s been a sort of forgetting about fascism and Nazism – that somehow they’ve been, in the early part of this century and perhaps in the latter part of the last one, reduced in terms of the historical political uniqueness from the worst ideologies imaginable to, to some degree, merely an extension rightwards of the right.

On another blog a while back I got into an interesting discussion with a self-described ‘nationalist’ who was defending those protesting at the removal of a statue at Charlottesville against what he saw as the violence of antifa. To him there was nothing odd about the protestors being far right or outright fascist, nothing about their presence that invalidated or delegitimised (in any sense) the proximate issues at play. Their ‘freedom of expression’ was sufficient to wave them through as long as they weren’t ‘violent’. It seemed to escape him that fascism and Nazism are intrinsically and overtly ‘violent’ political ideologies.

Now granted, he could have been pretending such innocence, but I think even were he doing so, that there is a broader issue of forgetting. And ironically (given this is the right we’re talking about) a degree of relativism – in other words fascists and Nazi’s are explicable, or even acceptable, because others are as bad (or worse).
None of this is novel, Nazi’s and fascists have always struck a pose as defenders of the ‘nation’ albeit a very constrained definition of the nation, but perhaps what is is how relatively widespread this sentiment is – and perhaps that explains how easily it all has meshed with anti-immigrant sentiment, or concepts of ‘nationalism’.
The question is how this manifests politically. We’ve seen how those who are anti-immigrant have flirted with the far right, and vice versa, but are residual barriers falling between those, and is it a case that the far right is becoming, as it were, respectable and viable as a political home?

Consider too the AfD’s complaint expressed in the quote above – that Germany should stop ‘atoning’ for Nazism. On one level that’s obvious – individually and collectively Germans today are not responsible for Nazism. However, turning it around I’d argue that Germany provides the potential of an exemplary voice in terms of pushing back against fascism and Nazism because it experienced that directly. And in that sense this is where the AfD line is so wrong, because Germany can be (and in some respects is) a beacon shedding light on this area in a way others can’t. Not because of some intrinsic propensity of Germans to fascism and Nazism, but rather because if it could happen there it could happen anywhere, and that’s the danger.

Small wonder the AfD are exercised by this because their policies while still falling far short of fascism, though some statements have not been lacking in extremism, have commonalities that are – shall we say – problematic, and they know this. How much easier for them if the history of Germany didn’t exist. How much easier if they just had a blank sheet rather than the reality of a guide from history as to how certain dynamics tend to work out.
So, in a sense the old line about ‘never again’, is absolutely correct in all its meanings. But that seems to me that that means ‘never forgetting’ and that means also keeping a sense of that history alive.

Signs of Hope – A continuing series December 28, 2017

Gewerkschaftler suggested this recently:

I suggest this blog should have a regular (weekly) slot where people can post happenings at the personal or political level that gives them hope that we’re perhaps not going to hell in a handbasket as quickly as we thought. Or as the phlegmatic Germans put it “hope dies last”.

Misplaced documents? December 28, 2017

It’s almost that time of year again when the papers both here and elsewhere detail newly released files from state archives. Well, some files anyhow. Many thanks to Gearóid Clár for pointing to this in comments…

Thousands of government papers detailing some of the most controversial episodes in 20th-century British history have vanished after civil servants removed them from the country’s National Archives and then reported them as lost.

Documents concerning the Falklands war, Northern Ireland’s Troubles and the infamous Zinoviev letter – in which MI6 officers plotted to bring about the downfall of the first Labour government – are all said to have been misplaced.

Other missing files concern the British colonial administration in Palestine, tests on polio vaccines and long-running territorial disputes between the UK and Argentina.

And:

Almost 1,000 files, each thought to contain dozens of papers, are affected. In most instances the entire file is said to have been mislaid after being removed from public view at the archives and taken back to Whitehall.

An entire file on the Zinoviev letter scandal is said to have been lost after Home Office civil servants took it away. The Home Office declined to say why it was taken or when or how it was lost. Nor would its say whether any copies had been made.

Nothing to see here. Move on. Entirely unsuspicious.

As Gearóid notes, a good time to release bad news…

Talking about infiltration and dirty tricks… December 28, 2017

I don’t know how many of us have been following the fall of Tory Damian Green closely – to be honest I wasn’t aware of all the details involved – but got to say that as more information emerged, and in this article in particular in the Guardian some of it has been extremely illuminating.

One of the most curious aspects has been what has been characterised as a feud between former Met officer Bob Quick and Green which led to Green’s resignation as deputy prime minister.

But check this out:

The reasons why Quick raided Green’s Commons office nearly nine years ago can be traced back even further, to a day in 2006 when a young civil servant called Christopher Galley, working in Jacqui Smith’s Home Office, was allegedly told by Green, then opposition immigration spokesman, to get “as much dirt on the Labour party, the Labour government, as possible”.

Galley had been introduced to Green by his then boss, the shadow home secretary, David Davis, whom he had approached saying he was a committed Conservative and was willing to leak material. Galley had also mentioned he wanted a “parliamentary job” with the Tories.

And:

Over the next two years, during which time Galley got a job in the home secretary’s private office, he passed at least 31 separate documents, some classified restricted, from the heart of the Home Office, including from the private office inbox and the private office outer safe.

Green made maximum use of the documents to secure headlines damaging to Labour in the Daily Mail, Sunday Telegraph and other papers on immigration, criminal justice and other Home Office issues.

This sustained and high-profile campaign went far beyond the normal trade in leaks between whistleblowing civil servants and opposition MPs. In the belief that as many as 40 other documents involving national security had also been leaked, the Cabinet Office called in Scotland Yard.

And:

As head of SO15, the counter-terrorism command, which also took on politically sensitive operations, Quick was given the job to investigate. A Cabinet Office investigator pinpointed Galley as responsible for a handful of the leaks but none of them involved national security material.

Keir Starmer, as director of public prosecutions, advised SO15 that an Official Secrets Act prosecution was not possible but that Galley may have committed a crime of misconduct in public office.

So that:

Quick pressed on and first arrested Galley, then secured a warrant from a judge to search Green’s constituency office and his home. The police arrested Green at his home on 27 November 2008 for “aiding, abetting, counselling or procuring misconduct in public office” by Galley.

And then without a warrant Quick raided Green’s Commons office. This was regarded as ‘wildly overstepping the mark’ and while Galley was dismissed from the Home Office the conclusion was that he hadn’t leaked national security documents (though his wish to get a parliamentary job and so on would appear most problematic etc). Quick resigned himself relatively soon after over an inadvertent leak of national security documents and all was quiet until a month or so ago when the porn on the computers story came out, with Green denying – inaccurately – that any had been found. Perhaps he assumed that Quick’s raid was so discredited that any information gleaned from it would be regarded as tainted or inadmissible.

But in the current febrile context that was an assumption too far. Note this following:

By the time the Cabinet Office inquiry concluded that Green had made “inaccurate and misleading statements”, May had little choice but to sack her friend, whom she has known since Oxford University. The PM made clear she remained unhappy with retired police officers leaking confidential details of their investigations, but it will now be left to the information commissioner to decide what, if any, action is taken against Quick and Lewis.

Well, indeed. But the events that triggered this appear extremely curious and the fact that some names that have achieved an even greater political prominence were so clearly central is – if not curious, perhaps telling.