The other day I finally managed to see Lawrence of Belgravia, Paul Kelly's documentary film about Lawrence Hayward, the frontman of the underrated groups Felt, Denim and Go Kart Mozart. I've always liked Lawrence's music and - even more - his deadpan and often perverse take on contemporary life ('I knew it was crap, the Internet', he opines at one point in the film). Using a visual style that recalls the work of Patrick Keiller (another of my faves), Kelly's film meditates on the injustice of Lawrence's lack of commercial success. It is funny and moving, so go to see it now if you can. But since the film assumes knowledge of Lawrence's musical background, it would be a good idea first to familiarise yourself with the man's oeuvre. I recommend the following, very beautiful, song by Felt:

Also check out this comic gem by Denim:

And this from Go Kart Mozart, which I always think of as a neat rejoinder to news media stereotypes of the lazy working class (I think Foucault would have called it reverse discourse):

It's been a fun-filled few weeks for the left-liberal commentariat, who have been all-too-smugly savouring the humiliation of the Murdochs at the Leveson Enquiry. Now, the publication of a damning House of Commons report on the News of the World phone-hacking scandal has deemed Murdoch senior to be 'not a fit person' to run a major company, providing a further shot of schadenfreude for the bien pensant pundits of the left. And as the Culture Secretary continues to feel the heat for his part in oiling the wheels of the News Corporation juggernaut in the run-up to its BSkyB bid last year, the same commentators have been enjoying the thrill of the Hunt.

That many on the left should harbour mortal animosity towards Murdoch is perfectly understandable, given Murdoch's role in attacking the working class, both in the media and in actuality, over the last few decades. But the problem is that this hatred is now being recuperated by left-liberals in defence of the status quo. For campaigning MPs like Labour's Tom Watson, the humbling of Murdoch and his political supporters represents a victory for the forces of democracy and transparency over the corrupt networks of power represented by News International and its political allies. It also, we are assured, demonstrates the adamantine impartiality of the British state. As Timothy Garton Ash enthuses in today's Guardian: 'Imagine a fiercely independent judicial enquiry, a cross-party parliamentary committee and a largely free press all investigating the Bo Xilai case in Beijing'.

It is indeed a heartening narrative if you believe it. Unfortunately, however, the story of Murdoch's fall from grace attests less to the marvels of British freedom and democracy than to the ability of the state to discipline elements that fall out of step with its agendas. Let's be clear about what happened last year: a dominant faction of the British establishment, clustered around the figures of Gordon Brown and Vince Cable, had grown increasingly anxious about News Corporation's market share and the organisation's pro-US politics - and went gunning for Murdoch. They finally brought down their prey on the eve of News Corp's bid for BSkyB. Ever since then, parliament, the judiciary and the press - far from exercising their independence, as Garton Ash maintains - have largely fallen into line with the Murdoch-bashing consensus.

In short, the humiliation of Murdoch was a classic take-down in which all of the apparatuses of state played their part. And the beauty of it all - from the ruling class's perspective, at least - is that, as in the case of Watergate forty years ago, a state-orchestrated campaign to discredit a political faction has been presented to the public as a moral crusade that demonstrates the virtues of a 'free press' and a democratic, self-regulating state.

None of this, of course, is to defend the Murdochs or their newspapers, as a few rogue Conservative Party politicians, such as Louise Mensch, and some journalists working for the Murdoch press, like David Aaronovitch, have been trying to do (as a cheerleader of the Iraq invasion, Aaronovitch has something of a history of defending the indefensible). But we should not confuse the state's battles against its enemies with our own struggle for a free, classless society and a genuinely democratic media.

Below is a draft of a textual analysis of Peter Bowker's Iraq war drama Occupation that I wrote recently. Feedback and comments welcome...

Given the hugely controversial nature of the 2003 allied invasion of Iraq, Western film and television representations of the conflict have generated less public enthusiasm – and less revenue – than might have been expected. In the United States, for example – at least until the release of Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker in 2009 – Iraq war films have fared poorly at the box office (Tofoletti and Grace 2010, 64-65; Barker, 2011: 1) and television depictions of the war have been relatively few and far between, notwithstanding Steven Bochco’s short-lived series Over There (FX, 2005) and David Simon and Ed Burns’ Generation Kill (HBO, 2008). On British television, as Tom Sutcliffe (2009a: 6) remarked in The Independent newspaper early in 2009,

"Iraq is the dog that didn’t bark. And when you think about that it seems more than odd. Here’s a hugely significant event – one which continues to engage British citizens in all sorts of ways (some of them fatal) and yet it barely registers on the most significant storytelling medium we have".

A small number of British television dramas have included storylines relating – tangentially, at least – to the war. Peter Kosminsky’s docudrama The Government Inspector (Channel 4, 2005), for example, investigated the life and death of the British government weapons expert David Kelly and indicted the British government’s decision to participate in the US-led invasion of Iraq, while The Mark of Cain (Channel 4, 2007), set in Iraq during the war, explored the problem of bullying in the British army. It was not until 2009, however, that the subject of the Iraq war itself was given significant treatment on British television. Written over five years by Peter Bowker, directed by Nick Murphy and produced by Laurie Borg for the production company Kudos, the three-part BBC television drama Occupation chronicles the involvement of three British soldiers from Manchester in the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Broadcast in the summer of 2009, when the occupation of Iraq was stuttering to a drawn-out close, the mini-serial reflects upon the rationale for the Iraq invasion, the consequences of the war for those who fought in it, and the effects of the occupation on the population of Iraq.

Occupation was well received at the time of its broadcast. Screened at nine o’clock – ‘when television time is most likely to become special time’ (Caughie 2010: 420) – the drama went on to win the British Academy of Film and Television Arts award for Best Drama Serial and television critics applauded Occupation as a sophisticated and moving production. Stuart Jeffries (2010: 10), in The Guardian, praised the drama as a ‘triumph’, while The Independent’s Tom Sutcliffe (2009b: 32) called it ‘one of the best things on television for some months’. The Sunday Express hailed Occupation as ‘a quality drama from the national broadcaster’ (Stephenson 2009: 70) and, writing in The Telegraph (2009), Serena Davies opined that the production was ‘truly excellent’, admiring the dialogue’s ‘pithy, sharp exchanges’ and ‘complex, conflicted characters’ and describing the drama as ‘a thriller, a love story and a stirring lament over the awful injustices that a military occupation such as this can throw up’. Occupation has drawn some academic approbation, too. While noting that ‘the serial deserves more extended analysis’, John Caughie (2010: 420) avers that, ‘in the long tradition of British television drama, Occupation seems to me to be as good as it gets, and to be a “serious” drama in a way that allows me to shed some of the embarrassment of “seriousness”’. Caughie (2010: 420-421) goes on to suggest that the drama represents

"an ethical television ‘working through’, in a sense, of television’s own complicity in sanitizing and rationalizing a dirty and chaotic occupation. It was serious in a way that perhaps only television among modern media can still occasionally be: the domestic threat lurking in the corner of the living room; television which, defying Adorno, does not simply ‘make us once again into what we already are, only more so’; television, on the contrary, that for a moment breaks the contract, takes us by surprise and changes the perspective – precisely because we least expect it on television; television drama reminding us, as Artaud said it was the function of theatre to do, that the sky can still fall on our heads".

 Clearly, for Caughie, Occupation is an example not just of ‘quality’ television, but of challenging, even radical television drama. Despite this high praise, however, Occupation has been subjected to very little detailed critical analysis and the drama’s perspective on the Iraq war remains largely undiscussed. In pre-broadcast press releases, the drama’s producers were themselves at pains to stress that they did not intend Occupation to be polemical or overtly political; yet it is clearly impossible for critics to ignore the political dimensions of British television’s only significant dramatic treatment of a hugely contentious war.

Indeed, Occupation’s importance as a popular cultural representation of the Iraq conflict – and its potential to cause controversy – is hard to overstate. In 2007, the journalist Madeleine Bunting (2007: 29) argued that the high death rate among reporters in Iraq meant that ‘this war is near private – the images and people who might make the horror of this war real don’t reach our screens. It’s no longer a war that is accessible to public scrutiny or to democratic engagement’. In such a context, dramatic representations can be argued to play an important informational role, bringing otherwise inaccessible scenes of horror to public attention and shaping the public understanding of war. Yet the BBC had every reason to be nervous about the perspective on the war that the production might take. For one thing, Occupation was the only significant television drama about the Iraq war to be broadcast by the BBC in the wake of the Hutton report, which had severely criticised the broadcaster for raising suspicions about the legitimacy of the British government’s case for war. The fallout from Hutton, many have suggested, made the BBC politically and aesthetically timid (Kampfner, 2006; Hyde, 2010). It has been argued, for example, that BBC news reporting of the Iraq war contained an even stronger pro-war bias than its commercial competitors (Lewis 2004; Pilger 2010), while post-Hutton BBC drama has been attacked by politically progressive filmmakers such as Peter Kosminsky for its failure to ‘rock the boat’ or to ‘make things hot for people in power’ (Kosminsky, cited in Khan 2009: 7). After Hutton, the BBC certainly needed to proceed carefully and the production of Occupation appears to have been punctuated by many meetings at the BBC to discuss the drama’s ‘tone’ (Rumbelow 2009: 18).

In light of the BBC’s savaging by Hutton and what some have seen as the BBC’s post-Hutton pusillanimity, the BBC might have been expected to deliver a politically emollient, uncontroversial treatment of the invasion and occupation of Iraq. On the other hand, the significant level of public opposition to the war made it unlikely that the drama would present an entirely one-sided view of the Iraq war. In 2003, public opposition to British military involvement in Iraq was far more widespread than it had been to Western military action in the Balkans during the previous decade. One month before the aerial bombardment of Baghdad in February 2003 and the subsequent coalition invasion of Iraq, millions of people worldwide demonstrated against the war. Meanwhile, claims that the justification for the Iraq war was supported by faulty and false information disseminated in the Western media (Miller 2003; Kellner 2004 and 2007; Allan and Zeliger 2004: 8; Kramer and Michalowski 2005; Chomsky, 2006: 24-27; Kumar 2006) circulated widely in the public sphere in the years following the invasion. Thus, while almost all Western intellectual commentary and media opinion supported the invasion of Iraq as a ‘noble and generous’ endeavour (Chomsky, cited in Edwards and Cromwell 2005: 75), public scepticism about the official justification for the war was significant. Given the strength of the anti-war movement in 2003, the widespread public disapproval of the occupation of Iraq, and a somewhat heightened public suspicion of media propaganda, there was little likelihood that Occupation’s perspective on the war would be simplistically pro-interventionist or openly jingoistic.

This article assesses the extent to which Occupation can be considered a progressive or radical television drama that questions or critiques official justifications for the British military involvement in Iraq – that ‘breaks the contract, takes us by surprise and changes the perspective’, in Caughie’s terms. In an interview about Occupation (Kalina 2010: 48), James Nesbitt, who plays Sergeant Mike Swift in the drama, noted that:

"Peter Bowker did so much research that what he was able to do, within the context of rolling news networks giving us information on a constant basis, was to present something different, to press the pause button on all of that and look at how lives are affected".

By means of a historically situated textual analysis, this article considers how far the drama does indeed succeed in presenting ‘something different’ to the dominant news media narrative of the Iraq war. In particular, it focuses on the ways in which narrative focalisation and dialogue both create oppositional viewpoints about the war and, all too often, recuperate these same viewpoints. But since the progressiveness of television drama often depends as much upon context as it does upon content (MacMurraugh-Kavanagh 1997), it will also be necessary to consider the production’s critical reception, its intersections with journalistic framings of the war, and its dialogues with other dramatic treatments of the Iraq conflict on British television.

Occupation focuses on the experiences of three friends – Sergeant Mike Swift (James Nesbitt), Corporal Danny Peterson (Stephen Graham) and the younger Lance Corporal Lee Hibbs (Warren Brown) – who are first dispatched to Basra in 2003. On their return home after their first tour, each of the men fails to adjust to civilian life in Manchester and is inspired to return to Iraq: one for love, one for money, and one out of a fervent belief in the supposed mission to ‘rebuild’ Iraq. In the following paragraphs, I outline and comment upon some of Occupation’s key plot points and exchanges of dialogue, before drawing some more general conclusions about the drama’s representation of the occupation of Iraq and, finally, comparing the production with some other British television dramas about the war.

Occupation begins in medias res, as the soldiers prepare for a dangerous mission. The opening scenes cast the British soldiers in a distinctly heroic role, especially Mike Swift (indeed, James Nesbitt brings to his character both the geniality of his long-running role in the romantic comedy Cold Feet [BBC, 1998] and the quasi-heroic connotations of the SDLP MP and civil rights organiser Ivan Cooper, whom Nesbitt played in Paul Greengrass’s Bloody Sunday [ITV, 2002]). Having first evacuated civilians from the building, the soldiers enter an apartment block in which some ‘insurgents’ are holed up. After a tense stand-off with the militants, Mike saves an injured child from the midst of the fray and carries her, through enemy fire, from the apartment block to a hospital that is full of badly injured people. There the British soldiers manage to prevent looters from stealing hospital equipment. Mike, meanwhile, meets a married Iraqi doctor, Aliya Nabil (Lubna Azabal), with whom he begins to fall in love. Later in the episode, Mike returns to his wife and children in England and the injured young girl is also brought back to Britain for specialist treatment. Mike’s return home is, however, far from glorious: although he has become a hero in the eyes of his family and the news media, his guilt over his affection for Aliya vitiates any feelings of satisfaction (his awkwardness is physically embodied in a minor confusion over whether he, or his wife, will switch on the kettle to make tea).

Mike’s unease is compounded by his frustration at the banality of civilian life in Britain. Mike’s heroism, encapsulated in the headline of a newspaper that he reads on returning – ‘True Brit: Sergeant Mike Swift saves Iraqi girl after insurgent attack on Iraqi flats’ – is undercut by ironically juxtaposed headlines about dieting and face creams. Later, walking in the street near his home, Mike’s path is blocked by two young men who are smoking and chatting; he is obliged brusquely to push past the youths, who are seemingly oblivious to the soldier’s presence. Such details capture something of the alienation often experienced by returning soldiers, although they also, more provocatively, imply that British civilians often fail to appreciate the heroic work done by soldiers. The latter point of view is strongly suggested throughout the first episode of Occupation. When Mike attends a fund-raising press conference for the injured Iraqi girl with the visiting Aliya, a reporter questions whether the child’s injuries were inflicted by coalition forces, to which Aliya rather tetchily replies: ‘Iraqi people are grateful for the British forces. I mean, terrible things happen in the war. Everyone is trying to do something to help’. Aliya here expresses a heroising view of the British role in Iraq; but her optimism comes at the expense of any explanation of the causes of the war, an elision marked by her use of the de-agentifying passive construction ‘terrible things happen’.

Hibbs’ return to Britain is no more comfortable than Mike’s. On arrival at the family home for his homecoming party, Hibbs embraces his fellow soldiers for a unusually long time, much to the embarrassment of his family and friends. Indeed, the gulf in experience between those who have fought together in Iraq and those who have not is almost tangible, especially when Hibbs’ sister Katy expresses scepticism about the purpose of the occupation. But it is Danny’s return to Britain that is the most lonely and dismal of all. When Danny visits his elderly mother in a nursing home, he finds that she is unable to recognise him. Returning despondently to his bedsit, he gets high on drugs and almost commits suicide by jumping from his balcony. Recovering himself, he decides to meet the charismatic American Erik Lester (Nonso Anozi) and the two men start planning to set up as ‘risk management operatives’ in Iraq (or ‘mercenaries’, as Hibbs’s sister Katy prefers to call them). Having formed a security company, Pacific Solutions, Danny and Lester begin working out of a facility provided by the Coalition Provisional Authority in Basra, protecting foreign contractors supposedly interested in ‘rebuilding’ Iraq, but quickly becoming involved in forgery and corruption. The two are soon joined by the more idealistic Hibbs, who, disillusioned with civilian life and desperate to help in what he believes to be the reconstruction of Iraq, decides to join Danny and Lester’s well-resourced outfit (as Danny quips to Hibbs: ‘It’s like being in the British army, innit, but with equipment’).

In the second episode, all of the men return to Iraq, a country now disintegrating in a vortex of religious fundamentalism. When Mike meets Aliya again, his first conversation with her takes places through a wrought iron window grille. This is the first of several images of confinement – a similar framing device is used in episode three, when the pair gaze at each other through the slats of some window blinds – that signify not only the personal obstacles preventing the pair’s romantic relationship (Aliya now reveals that she, too, is married), but also the lack of freedom experienced by women in the fundamentalist and patriarchal environment of post-invasion Iraq. Aliya, now wearing a headscarf, is regarded with deep suspicion for talking to Mike, who offers to take her out of Iraq. ‘I’ve seen the way things are going here’, says Mike, ‘with the religion and the bombings’. Aliya’s sharp reply – ‘And whose fault is that?’ – provides a counter-hegemonic riposte, even if its critique of the impact of the Western invasion remains implicit.

As the level of violence in Iraq grows, some Shia militia who have infiltrated the local police murder the mercenaries’ local guide, a young man named Yunis, in his new enterprise – a pizza shop. Devastated by Yunis’s death, Hibbs returns home again in 2005. Here, once again, he argues with his sister, who points out that the 7/7 bombings in London show the failure of the so-called ‘War on Terror’ launched against Iraq – a position supported, incidentally, by official reports into the bombings by the intelligence agencies (Chomsky 2006: 19-20; Mazetti 2006). Hibbs reacts furiously, telling his parents: ‘I’m glad they bombed London. Takes that to make people like Katy realise what sort of people they are’. Despite the vehemence of his response, however, Hibbs is an earnest man who is tortured not only by grief for the loss of his friend, but also by a growing sense of doubt about the morality of the invasion of Iraq. In the local pub he asks Mike, who has also returned from a second tour: ‘Do you still think we went in there for the right reasons?’. Mike replies, hesitantly: ‘Maybe. At first. But now… I dunno. A lot of us went back for the very wrong reasons [sic]’. Coming from Mike, who is the most experienced and authoritative of the three soldiers in the drama and something of a father figure to Hibbs, this equivocal evaluation of the reasons for the invasion carries particular weight and thus helps to reinforce the film’s preferred view of the war as a well intentioned blunder – laudable at first, but ending in confusion.

Before long, both Hibbs and Mike – whose wife has now discovered her husband’s affair – are back in Iraq. Wracked by guilt for Yunis’s death, Hibbs bravely visits Yunis’s family and, after an awkward and heartfelt speech, gives them huge sum of his own money. On leaving the family’s house, however, he is kidnapped. Held prisoner in a darkened cell and expecting to be executed, he is interrogated by the ruthless police officer who killed Yunis (and who, ironically, had been trained by Hibbs). The encounter between the two men constitutes one of the drama’s most overtly political and antagonistic exchanges:

Policeman: All you had to do was go home. You got rid of Saddam. But then you should have let us get on with running our own country.

Hibbs: Kill each other, you mean? Like you killed my mate?

Policeman: You know how many Iraqis your bombs kill? Huh? Half a million. So don’t talk to me about killing. Don’t try and [sic] tell me you’re better.

Like Aliya’s earlier riposte to Mike (‘And whose fault is that?’), the policeman’s exposure of Western hypocrisy here raises the prospect of a subaltern perspective on the rights and wrongs of the war. Yet the force of this anti-imperialist critique is somewhat compromised by its being placed in the mouth of the drama’s most unsympathetic character. Furthermore, while the policeman alludes to the massive violence perpetrated by the Western coalition against Iraqis, none of this violence is shown in Occupation and the only acts of deadly force depicted in the drama are committed by Iraqis.

Assisted by Yunis’s son Yasir, Danny rescues Hibbs from his captors; but in part three of the drama things spiral even further out of control in Iraq as fundamentalist violence intensifies. Mike meets Aliya again and the two even establish a sexual relationship, although they are now supposed to be accompanied by a chaperone/translator at all times. Indeed, the increasing repression of women in Iraq is signalled by Aliya’s attire – she now wears an abaya. Mike asks Aliya to promise him that she will ‘leave Iraq before the British pull out’. However, shortly afterwards Aliya is summarily executed for her supposed immorality by the recently ‘radicalised’ Yasir. Immediately afterwards, Mike’s son Richard, who has joined the British army in order to follow in his father’s footsteps, is found dead after being ambushed by a mob when his unit tries to extricate Hibbs and his colleague from a tight spot.

The final scenes of the drama take place back in England at the funeral of Richard, who is described by the vicar as ‘a young man who died doing what he felt was right for him, for his loved ones, for his country and for the people of Iraq’. Hibbs has become a counsellor working with ex-servicemen, ‘holding hands with ex-Toms who’ve lost their bottle’, as Danny dismissively puts it. Danny is still working as a private security contractor, much to the disapproval of Mike and Hibbs. In the pub after the wake, Mike confronts Danny, blaming his mercenary activities for endangering his son’s life. In a speech that combines shame and defiance, brilliantly delivered by Stephen Graham, Danny replies that at least he knows what he is risking his life for – although his quavering voice suggests that he is not fully convinced by his own words. Nor can Mike, for all his anger, give a fully satisfactory account of why he went to Iraq. In fact, Occupation begins and ends with scenes pervaded by a sense of uncertainty: in the opening scene of the first episode, the soldiers travel inside a tank, listening to explosions and speculating nervously about what kinds of weapons are being fired in the vicinity, while at the end of the drama, the three men are ‘uneasy compadres rather than fond intimates, their resigned shared looks across plates of half-eaten food at Mike’s son’s wake implying a weariness and lack of answers and conclusion’ (Teeman 2009: p.18). Although there are hints about what the men will do next (for example, Mike threatens to expose, possibly with the help of Hibbs, the misdeeds of Pacific Solutions), the drama eschews any kind of neat closure and an overwhelming sense of doubt is reinforced by the melancholic music that accompanies the final scene – Amy MacDonald’s song ‘Run’, with its refrain ‘I don’t know what you did it for’.

As the foregoing outline suggests, Occupation is a drama that is centrally concerned with the experiences of the British soldiers and – despite the producers’ avowed intention to avoid overt political commentary – with the rights and wrongs of the war. There are, as we have seen, several moments when the dominant Western news narrative of the war is contested by the Iraqi characters and by Hibbs’ sister Katy, whose anti-war arguments are rational and informed. The all-pervasive sense of gloom at the end of the third episode, meanwhile, precludes any triumphalist satisfaction in the success of the Iraq war. Yet considered overall, the drama’s presentation of the British presence in Iraq is less than radical. The invasion’s impact on Iraq is seen in broadly positive terms. In the drama’s opening scenes, for example, the British soldiers rescue a young child and protect a hospital from looters. This characterisation of the soldiers obscures the extent of the violence perpetrated against Iraq and Iraqis by Western forces. The hospital scene, in particular, inverts the details of the US invasion of Falluja, during which US forces raided hospitals, shot at ambulances and civilians and killed hundreds of civilians (Chomsky, 2006, 47-50). Yet in Occupation, the only atrocities portrayed are committed by Iraqis. The New York Times television reviewer Alessandra Stanley (2009: 1) suggests that ‘Occupation does take a long, disturbing look at the chaos, corruption and mayhem that choked the American-led reconstruction effort’; however, the drama would be considerably more disturbing to conventional narratives about the Iraq war if it clearly identified the forces responsible for initiating the chaos. As in news media accounts of ‘the conflict’ in Iraq – a problematically de-agentifying phrase, as Noam Chomsky (2006: 48) points out – the worsening social conditions registered in the drama are not attributed to the coalition invasion; rather, Iraq appears as a place where, in Aliya’s phrase, ‘terrible things happen’ and where Western forces are ‘trying to do something to help’. At the same time, by analogy with standard journalistic practice in Iraq, Occupation ‘embeds’, as it were, the audience with ‘our’ troops, foregrounding the soldiers’ personal struggles and tragedies. The British soldiers’ arguments and perspectives are pre-eminent in the drama and popular songs express the soldiers’ unvoiced fears and aspirations (The Libertines’ ‘Road to Ruin’ plays when Mike’s son Richard joins the army, while Pink Floyd’s ‘The Gunner’s Dream’ accompanies Hibbs’ preparation to be executed at the end of the first episode). Embedding, as Slavoj Žižek (2004: 3) notes, tends to lend representations of war a ‘human touch’, ‘generating an instant identification of the spectator’s perspective with that of the soldier’. But this in turn can be seen as a means of avoiding awkward questions about political agency, so that, watching the drama, ‘we are there, with our boys, identifying with their fears and anguishes instead of questioning what they are doing at war in the first place’ (Žižek 2010: 30).

Occupation’s rather ambiguous handling of the fundamentalist oppression of women is also problematic. The invasion of Iraq arguably led to an increase in the oppression of Iraqi women. Before 2003, Saddam Hussein’s Baathist party, for all its despotism, ‘did allow Iraqi women rights that were unparalleled in the Gulf region’ (Parenti 2005: 69); after the invasion, however, these freedoms were severely curtailed: women were obliged largely to remain indoors, deprived of public education and often subjected to sexual attacks (Parenti 2005: 69). Occupation does illustrate the erosion of women’s rights in post-invasion Iraq, and Aliya’s barbed comment to Mike – ‘whose fault is that?’ – does identify, albeit implicitly, the responsibility of the Western invaders for this state of affairs. But Aliya’s criticism is both implicit and fleeting. By contrast, the clear positioning of Mike Swift as the man who can ‘rescue’ Aliya from Iraq’s dangerous fundamentalist degeneration tends to imply that the Iraq war was a ‘humanitarian intervention’ undertaken with the intention of ‘liberating’ the people of that country.

The argument here, then, is that while Occupation offers some critical perspectives on the war, these are generally recuperated by the production’s silence on the question of Western responsibility. Even the drama’s notably open ending – while far from jingoistic in tone – is consistent with hegemonic framings of the war. The atmosphere of uncertainty that pervades the drama’s final scenes suggests that the Iraq war was a noble misadventure that ended in error and confusion. As Tim Walker (2009: 62), in The Independent, suggests, ‘the producers have […] been at pains to emphasise their apolitical stance, yet Occupation fits the consensus that Iraq is a “bad” war, just as Vietnam was a “bad” war’. Like the Vietnam war, public support for which also declined over time (Hallin 2008: 53), the Iraq war was initially supported by most politicians and most of the press, but was later often wearily regarded as an error of judgement. As Philip Hammond (2007: 59) notes, Jean Baudrillard’s (1995: 62) comment that the first Iraq war ended in ‘boredom’ or a ‘feeling of being duped’ seems just as relevant to the second Iraq war, ‘call[ing] to mind the efforts to build public support for the 2003 invasion with dubious dossiers of “evidence”, and the seemingly endless inquiries and post-mortems which followed’. Certainly, by 2009, the notion that the war was a tragic mistake – now a commonplace even among Labour Party politicians – had already become hegemonic in public and political discourse. As Michael Parenti argues (2011: 43-46), this has allowed a war that was prosecuted in pursuit of imperialist objectives to be framed, very conveniently, as an act of ‘innocent incompetence’ prosecuted by befuddled leaders.

Another of the drama’s political implications is that a well-intentioned invasion of Iraq was undermined by mercenary activity. Fredric Jameson (1979: 146) has proposed that the ideological function of the mafia in popular film is essentially mystificatory, refocusing the critique of capitalist social relations onto corrupt groups of individuals and substituting moral condemnation for structural analysis. Such mystification is widespread in contemporary films about war; for example, at the beginning of James Cameron’s Avatar (2009) – a film with a thinly disguised Iraq war subtext – we learn that the soldiers involved in eradicating the native population from their unspoilt paradise ‘used to be marines, fighters for freedom’, but that they subsequently became mercenaries. By invoking a distinction between the state’s noble ‘freedom fighters’ and greedy soldiers of fortune, responsibility for the state’s military violence can be shifted onto the commercial ‘security firms’ that provide logistics and ‘protection’ to private contractors (International Communist Current, 2010). A similar displacement of responsibility is apparent in Occupation. The drama’s exposure of corrupt mercenary activity in Iraq is certainly welcome, illuminating a particularly murky aspect of the war; as Noam Chomsky (2006: 59) points out, at the end of the Coalition Provisional Authority’s rule in Iraq, ‘the fate of the estimated $20 billion of Iraq funds that passed into its control […] remained a mystery’, fuelling questions about corrupt practices and the lack of competitive tender for contracts (see also Chatterjee, 2004). The problem is that this focus serves to offload much of the responsibility for the destruction of Iraq onto a relatively small group of opportunists, obscuring the imperialist motives for the coalition invasion. Mercenaries are, by definition, motivated by the desire for financial gain; but it should not be forgotten that the US and its allies launched the war in Iraq in pursuit of a regime change that would facilitate what Michael Parenti (2011: 108), referring to Iraq’s oil supply, calls ‘potentially the biggest resource grab in history’. Indeed, as David Harvey (2007: 7) argues, the war in Iraq was manufactured – by nation states, not mercenaries – in order to ‘impose by main force on Iraq […] a state apparatus whose fundamental mission was to facilitate conditions for profitable capital accumulation on the part of both domestic and foreign capital’.

In what might be seen as a further displacement of responsibility, Occupation’s mercenaries are led by an American, the ex-US Marine Lester, who, as Jason Jacobs (2011) notes, is an ‘unpleasant […] national stereotype’ and ‘a particularly childish depiction of an evangelical monstrosity whose pursuit of money is offered as an insane Divine Right’. Indeed, Occupation generally evinces a certain suspicion of US forces; in the third episode, for example, Mike, seeking Aliya’s missing husband, comes to believe (mistakenly, as it turns out) that the Americans have wrongly imprisoned him. At an extra-textual, institutional level, Occupation’s ‘soft’ anti-Americanism – and in particular its articulation of America with commercialism – resonates with criticisms of US news coverage made by the Director-General of the BBC, Greg Dyke: in 2003, for example, Dyke attacked US media coverage of the Iraq conflict, saying the American networks had ‘wrapped themselves in the American flag’ since 9/11 and warning that the BBC ought to be protected from the forces of commercialisation and “Americanisation”’ (cited in Wells 2003: 7). Just as the condemnation of the patriotic excesses of the US media can be used to defend British reporting, Occupation’s distinction between the behaviour of British and US forces in Iraq can be seen to serve an exculpatory purpose, allowing the worst excesses of exploitation to be attributed to American influence.

By way of conclusion, we might return to John Caughie’s admiring comments about Occupation. Caughie (2010: 420) contends that the drama’s ‘untidy narrative'

"plays out contingency which is both tragic and absurd, engaging the surreal insanity of an absurd situation, the sheer craziness of invasion and occupation, the humanity and the lack of it, the fear and the panic and the pain of this war".

There is much truth in this judgement; but at least two objections can be made to it. First, as Jacobs (2011) has suggested, the narrative structure of Occupation is not particularly ‘untidy’, but rather formal and balanced, with screen time apportioned equally among the three central characters; nor, incidentally, is the drama formally adventurous, especially when compared with other Iraq war films which have used various types of screen and modes of address, including video diaries and surveillance cameras, in order to render a variety of perspectives (Pisters, 2010). Moreover, while Caughie rightly identifies Occupation as progressive in its depiction of the ‘horror of war’, his highly nominalised language (‘insanity’, ‘situation’, ‘craziness’, ‘invasion’, ‘occupation’) has the same de-agentifying effect that, within the drama, serves to obfuscate controversial questions about geopolitical responsibility. Roland Barthes (1997/1979: 103-104) once described how colonialist discourse serves to erase signs of political struggle:

"The state of war is masked under the noble garment of tragedy, as if the conflict were essentially Evil, and not a (remediable) evil. Colonization evaporates, engulfed in the halo of an impotent lament, which recognizes the misfortune in order to establish it only the more successfully".

In both Occupation and Caughie’s discussion of it, the emphasis on the ‘madness of war’, combined with the elision of any reference to Western responsibility for it, produces a similarly depoliticising effect.

Occupation’s political evasiveness may account for the relative absence of criticism directed at the production by critics and politicians. Caughie (2010: 421), having highly praised the drama, laments that:

"despite its recognition by television professionals in the BAFTA award, at the point of transmission and public reception Occupation seemed to pass unnoticed. No Conservative Member of Parliament denounced the BBC; the tabloid press did not call for the head of the BBC Director-General, Mark Thomson; no retired Colonel pointed out that they had got the regimental uniforms wrong; the programme was not debated on Newsnight immediately after the screening to restore the cherished ‘balance’ of the BBC. It was just television, absorbed into Godard’s paysage audiovisuel. It was private affect rather than national trauma, the kind of national trauma which, famously, Cathy Come Home(1966) or Up the Junction(1965) had once been. It was approved by the television critics of the quality press and by the professional elite, but it barely seemed to register on the Richter scale of the polity: it was apparently business as usual, ‘the relentless spectacle of the present’".

The failure of Occupation to register with the public or to trouble the establishment might be related to the ‘indifference’ that seems to have characterised US audiences’ attitudes to Iraq war films (Tofoletti and Grace 2010); but it might also be related to Occupation’s failure – despite its oppositional moments and its sceptical, doubting tone – seriously to challenge official justifications for the invasion.

At least one other British television drama has, however, done precisely this. Peter Kosminsky’s The Government Inspector (Channel 4, 2005) dramatises the events surrounding the suicide of the government weapons inspector David Kelly and expresses a clear moral opposition to the Iraq war. Predictably, Kosminsky had to overcome significant obstacles to make the docudrama, including a government ban on interviews with civil servants and military personnel (Kosminsky, 2005; Rampton 2005). Other television dramas have shown the actions of the British army in Iraq in a less than complimentary light. A Channel 4 production, Tony Marchant and Marc Munden’s The Mark of Cain (2007), explores bullying in the British army in Iraq through the eyes of Shane Gulliver (Matthew McNulty) and Mark Tate (Gerald Kearns), young British soldiers who observe the torture of Iraqi prisoners by British soldiers and who must find the courage to resist participating in the abuse and to report it. Both men pay dearly for their objections to the torture and are victimised by their superiors. Haunted by flashbacks, Mark commits suicide on his return to Britain. Later, at a court-marshall, Shane finds the courage to report the abuse perpetrated by his colleagues (and sanctioned by his superiors); provocatively, his account of prisoner abuse is not merely described in the courtroom, but rendered visually as a Boschian hell scene in which soldiers sexually abuse, urinate and jump on prisoners, pressing scorpions against their flesh. Unlike Occupation, The Mark of Cain certainly did provoke reaction from the politicians. For example, The Telegraph reported the concerns of the Defence Secretary, Des Brown, that the drama might increase hostility towards British forces abroad, endangering the lives of soldiers (Gardham, 2007).

In light of the highly provocative political representations in The Government Inspector and The Mark of Cain, Channel 4 might be thought to be more hospitable towards controversial drama than the BBC. Yet the second episode of Jimmy McGovern’s 2010 BBC drama anthology Accused (‘Frankie’s Story’) also examines bullying among soldiers in the British army – albeit in Afghanistan rather than Iraq. Its broadcast was roundly denounced by the right-wing press and led to a complaint from the British army’s Chief of General Staff to the BBC’s Director-General (Naughton 2010: 34). It is precisely this sort of controversy that Occupation, according to Caughie, ought to have provoked. Yet the political differences between Bowker’s drama and these other productions are stark. Unlike Occupation, for example, both The Mark of Cain and ‘Frankie’s Story’depict conflict in the ranks of the army, the brutality that sometimes attends army life, and the violent injustices perpetrated upon the people of the countries invaded. By comparison with these dramas, Occupation’s political tone seems positively conservative. It should be noted, however, that The Government Inspector, The Mark of Cain and ‘Frankie’s Story’ are all single episode dramas that deal only with certain aspects of Britain’s recent wars. Unfolding over three episodes and appearing a full six years after the invasion, Occupation is rather more ambitious in scope and – whether or not this was an explicit aim of the producers – presents something like a final reckoning of the Iraq war per se. This raises the representational stakes considerably. It is perhaps unsurprising, therefore, that the sensitive, post-Hutton BBC offered, in Occupation, only a rather equivocal critique of the war.

It could be argued, in fact, that Occupation’s closest dramatic relative is neither The Government Inspector nor The Mark of Cain, but an earlier production, Warriors – a two-part drama set in the Bosnian war written by Leigh Jackson and Peter Kosminsky and broadcast by the BBC in 1999. Featuring ensemble casts of well-known acting talent, both Occupation and Warriors have been widely hailed as ‘serious’, ‘quality’ dramas about war; indeed, in her Observer review of Occupation, Kathryn Flett (2009) enthused: ‘I’ve been waiting for a British war drama this good for a decade, since Peter Kosminsky’s Warriors’. But the similarities do not end there. Like Occupation, Warriors gives an overview of a war from the perspective of the soldiers and was broadcast more than half a decade after the start of the war it documents; like Bowker’s drama, therefore, itstakes a claim to being a definitive dramatic statement on British involvement in a long-running war. Also like Occupation, Warriors focuses on the ‘humanitarian’ aspects of the British presence in Bosnia, emphasizing the soldiers’ desire to help the local civilian population and cutting between the horrors of war and the personal anxieties and domestic trials of the soldiers. This narrative focus on the domestic foregrounds ‘soft’ and traumatised – rather than aggressively heroic – military masculinities. Nearly two decades ago, Robyn Wiegman (1994: 175) noted a shift in Western cinematic discourses of war ‘from corporeal phallic performance to domestic sentimental plottings’. Indeed, both Warriors and Occupation are characterised by a certain humanist sensitivity. Yet as I have argued elsewhere, Warriors – for all its moving depiction of tortured masculinity, its outstanding acting and its extraordinary attention to detail – nonetheless takes a problematically pro-interventionist stance on the Bosnian war (Harper 2012). A similar criticism, as I have suggested here, can be levelled at Occupation. Bowker’s drama, like Warriors, eschews the hypermasculine jingoism of more overtly patriotic war films and stresses the responsibilities of Western powers to protect the rights of global others in a way that is consistent with the post-Cold War ideology of ‘humanitarian interventionism’; and like its predecessor, it establishes a progressive, questioning perspective on the ‘madness of war’ and even contains flashes of counter-hegemonic insight, but stops short of exposing or critiquing the imperialist imperatives that, according to radical critics such as David Harvey and Michael Parenti, underpin capitalist wars.

As far as television drama representations of the Iraq war go, Occupation may be, in Caughie’s phrase, ‘as good as it gets’. But if, as Karl Marx famously stated, ‘to be radical is to grasp the root of the matter’, then Occupation, which avoids the issue of Western responsibility for the chaos created by the invasion of Iraq, cannot be classified as a radical drama. Six years after the beginning of a war whose prosecution provoked widespread public dissent, the limited nature of Occupation’s critique of the war may suggest something of the BBC’s difficulty in creating contestatory drama in what some have argued to be the conservative moment of post-Hutton public service broadcasting. Yet Occupation’s narrative and political similarities to the earlier Warriors suggests that it also needs to be considered in relation to a slightly longer historical context, as a form of ‘sensitive’ and questioning, but politically cautious ‘event drama’ adequate to the post-Cold War global order of ‘human rights imperialism’ (Hobsbawm 1996).

References

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In case anybody is interested, I just did an interview with Tom Mills at New Left Review about my recent book, Beyond the Left: A Communist Critique of the Media (Zer0 Books).

I have been very busy at work this month and so haven't had much time to think about blogging; but it has certainly been a fascinating few weeks for those of us interested in critical media analysis, not least because of the Kony 2012 viral video, which - apparently backed by Justin Bieber, Oprah Winfrey, Lady Gaga and Rihanna - brought imperialist propaganda into the age of social media and celebrity clicktivism. The video's argument, which promotes armed intervention in Uganda, have been suitably demolished elsewhere, so I don't feel too bad about ditching a half-written blog entry on the subject a few weeks ago.

Kony 2012 was also endorsed, predictably enough, by Angelina Jolie, whose new Bosnian war film In the Land of Blood and Honey premiered this month. For now, at least, I shall refrain from indulging in another diatribe against anti-Serb filmmaking (see previous blog post). Suffice to say that, like the Kony 2012 video, the film is a well-timed pro-imperialist treatise, in which the Serbs, as usual, stand for the kind of 'bad men' that Jolie is now arguing should be stopped by Western 'intervention' in Syria. Bosnia continues, it seems, to serve as a model for those who advocate military violence in the name of humanitarianism.

I do just have time, however, to have a moan about Niall Ferguson. The professor’s recent three-part Channel 4 series China: Triumph and Turmoil attempts to understand the recent economic, political and social development of China. It fails, however, to shed much light on any of these and Ferguson’s analysis is undermined by its one-sided argumentation and its confused understanding of Chinese history and politics.

Throughout the three episodes of the documentary, Ferguson consistently refers to Chinese people as ‘they’. Indeed, a nationalist and antagonistic ‘them’ versus ‘us’ framework structures Ferguson’s narrative and underpins the kinds of questions he asks. How do the Chinese think? What has kept ‘their’ society together for so long? Why do ‘they’ admire Mao? And how might all of this one day become ‘our’ problem? As these questions suggest, Ferguson assumes that nationality is the only category through which it is possible to distinguish the peoples of the world. But is it not possible that a worker in the UK has more in common with a worker in China than she does with her British boss? Such questions do not occur to Ferguson, who, as a self-confessed academic 'on the side of the bourgeoisie', tends to interpret geopolitical issues in terms of competing nation states and economies, rather than classes. There's also a good deal of cultural stereotyping going on here. The scene in which Ferguson scratches his head over the intricacies of the infamously arcane eight-legged essay, for example, put me in mind of the mock xenophobia of Ricky's Gervais's An Idiot Abroad (these Chinese, you see, are just so darned inscrutable).

Exploring the forces that have held China together as a nation over the past two thousand years, Ferguson finds the answer in autocracy. From China’s first emperor, Qin Shi Huang, to the present, Chinese rulers have sought to stave off the threat of dòng luàn (turmoil) with the iron fist of repression. Yet autocracy, Ferguson believes, is antithetical to the smooth functioning of ‘free market’ democratic capitalism and the liberties it supposedly underwrites. Indeed, like an ideological Cold Warrior from the 1950s, Ferguson worries that the ‘individual freedom’ supposedly enjoyed in the West (you really do need to get out of that ivory tower, Niall) has too often been denied to Chinese people by their dictatorial leaders.

It is one thing to worry about the lack of freedom experienced by many people in China. But Ferguson does not explain how the existence of two or three almost identical political parties – the democratic façade of Western capitalist states – constitutes an advance over China’s one-party system. And he overlooks the simple fact that the reproduction of the profit system depends precisely on autocracy: no liberal democratic polity would last a day unless it was underwritten by a bourgeois dictatorship equipped with an arsenal of ideological and repressive apparatuses of surveillance and control. And whatever ‘freedom’ capitalism may have brought to some, the economies of capitalist states are based on wage slavery and imperialist wars (such as the recent slaughter in Iraq, which was endorsed, of course, by Ferguson). In fact, it is only by ending wage slavery that the majority of human beings – and not just Harvard professors – will be able to enjoy the freedom Ferguson extols.

In the second episode (‘Maostalgia’), Ferguson meets groups of Chinese citizens dedicated to the celebration of Chairman Mao. The professor is perplexed. Visiting a restaurant whose patrons indulge in songs and dances with a Cultural Revolution theme, he turns in open-mouthed astonishment to the camera, noting breathlessly that:

"I’ve never seen anything crazier than that in my life. It’s just surreal. It’s as if you walked into a German restaurant and saw everybody standing on the chairs singing the Horst Wessel Song and waving swastikas! Or if you went into a restaurant in Moscow and everybody was dressed up as Stalin or gulag guards […] Just take a look at this madness!"

Madness perhaps. But Ferguson shows little inclination to speculate about the possible motivations for such misguided nostalgia; for could it not be that some Chinese people hark back to a bowdlerised version of the country’s Maoist past because of their disappointment in the alienated social order of the present?

Ferguson refers repeatedly to the ‘airbrushed’ nature of official history in China. ‘In the case of Mao’, he notes disapprovingly, ‘there’s a huge difference between the man and the myth’. Ferguson certainly has a point here; but one needn’t travel to China to find such a dichotomy between reputation and reality. After all, in the land of Ferguson’s birth, Winston Churchill – a racist warmonger and a mass murderer – is today revered by many, including the overwhelming majority of the British ruling class, as a hero. Airbrushing, it seems, is a something of a feature of capitalist propaganda and is hardly exclusive to China. By the same token, in the wake of Hackgate, Ferguson's revelations about elite corruption in present-day China may be less than shocking to British audiences.

Ferguson cannot understand why nobody he meets in China is prepared to acknowledge the contradiction inherent in their belief that Mao, a ‘hardline Communist’, is the father of capitalist China – and his incomprehension on this point reveals profound historical and political confusions. Ferguson believes that China was – and to a certain extent remains – ‘communist’ and that Maoism represented a disastrous departure from capitalism. In fact, however, Maoism arose only after the proletarian movement of the 1920s had been drowned in the blood of the Shanghai working class. The Maoist 'communism’ which Ferguson believes underpinned the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution was nothing of the sort (you don't become a communist just by calling yourself one, any more than I can become Paris Hilton simply by changing my name). Rather, Maoism was a form state capitalism (Ferguson himself acknowledges that Mao replaced the old ruling class with a new one). If the myth that Mao's totalitarianism had something to do with communism were not so entrenched, Ferguson’s blindness to the real nature of Maoism might seem bizarre; but such is the common sense wisdom of bourgeois historiography and Ferguson regurgitates it faithfully.

Ferguson’s is a simple but effective strategy of attributing the horrors of China’s capitalist past to ‘communism’. This is, appropriately enough, a version of the ‘No True Scotsman’ fallacy: capitalism, Ferguson asserts, brings freedom – so if Maoism was a bloody disaster, well, then it must have been something else! And that’s not all. While Ferguson busily denounces the madness of Maoism, he says almost nothing about the horrors of capitalism – East and West – today. That looks like airbrushing to me, Niall.

In the third episode, Ferguson turns to the military situation, worrying that the growing military power of the Chinese state and the increasing nationalism of the Chinese population might be exploited by the Chinese in the event of a slowdown in domestic growth. Again, so far as it goes, this is a reasonable point to make and it is one that has been echoed by Marxist commentators on China. In fact, nationalist sentiment in China is regularly stoked in the media - for example, in the ongoing multilateral dispute over the Spratly Islands. But it is important to put this into geopolitical perspective: it is the US - not China - that has by far the largest and most belligerent military presence in the world and the US is currently increasing its activity in the Pacific as part of its 'return to Asia' policy.

Ferguson also takes a look at cyber-activism among Chinese nationalists and meets the members of the notorious anti-CNN group, whose work raises concerns about Sinophobia in Western media. The points raised by activists such as anti-CNN are haughtily dismissed by Ferguson; but they are rooted in reality. Anti-Chinese sentiment is a widespread feature of Western media coverage of China, as the reporting of the Tibet protests and the Olympic flame incidents in 2008 attests. In fact, Ferguson's own documentary is itself just the latest in a growing number of misleading and one-sided media representations of China - representations which, taken together, reflect a huge nervousness among Western elites about the global economic influence and military might of China.

Tonight I watched Juanita Wilson's As If I Am Not There (2010), a simple, brutal film set during the outbreak of the war in Bosnia in 1992. Based on evidence submitted to the International Criminal Tribunal at the Hague as related in the work of Croatian journalist Slavenka Drakulić, the film depicts the sexual abuse of Samira (Natasa Petrovic), a Muslim schoolteacher from Sarajevo who moves to a country village shortly before it is overrun by Serb forces. Samira is evacuated from the village to a hut in a desolate location, where, along with other female villagers, she is subjected to repeated gang rape by the soldiers.

With the exception of regular and unsparing depictions of sexual violence, the film's action is sparse and dialogue is minimal. This seems appropriate to the film's subject matter; after all, as Judith Lewis Herman argues in her book Trauma and Recovery, traumatic memories are concerned with corporeal and visual sensation rather than verbal narrative. Perhaps this is why the camera lingers so long, so often on Samira's enormous, fear-filled eyes. Landscape is important, too: the barren flatlands on which Samira's hut has been built contrast starkly with the verdant beauty of the hillsides surrounding the compound - a distinctly gendered topography.

Yet neither the film's undoubted impressionistic power nor the seriousness and horror of its subject matter should prevent us from asking searching questions about its historical accuracy or political orientation. The film's depiction of Serbian aggressors and Muslim victims is not, in itself, problematic; or rather, it would not be if the overwhelming emphasis on Serb criminality and Muslim innocence were not tediously familiar from the many Western books, media reports, television dramas and films about the Bosnian war over the last two decades. Along with the mainstream media, liberal pundits and academics - including Christopher Hitchens, Michael Ignatieff, Jürgen Habermas and Todd Gitlin - have relentlessly insisted that the Bosnian war was a one-sided war of aggression waged by Milosević's Serbia against its neighbours and that Western military 'intervention' was therefore justified. The author of the film's source, Slavenka Drakulić, has done little to correct this impression: her 2004 book They Would Never Hurt A Fly: War Criminals on Trial in The Hague predictably drew attention to Serb (and two Croat) war criminals - but not to Muslim perpetrators.

Particularly problematic is the film's depiction of something like a 'rape camp'. Claims of Serb-run rape camps have been seriously challenged - to put the point politely - by excellent historians such as Diana Johnstone and David Gibbs. As I discuss in detail here, there is no evidence that Serb forces used rape systematically (that is, on orders 'from above') during the war and no evidence of rape camps has been discovered by investigators. Moreover, while stories about the rape of Muslim women were used to construct a 'feminist' argument in favour of military intervention in Bosnia, Serb rape victims have tended to be ignored in the dominant Western narrative of the war, even though - as Peter Brock shows in his book Media Cleansing, Dirty Reporting: Journalism and Tragedy in Yugoslavia - the documentation of Serb rape victims was more extensive than that relating to Muslim victims. No matter: according to the dominant narrative of the Western journalists, the only rapists were Serbs, the only victims Muslims. Yet one seriously has to wonder whether those who take such a one-sided view of conflicts really care about the victims on either side. As the comedian Mark Steel suggests in his book What's Going On?, 'anyone who is deeply moved by one set of tragedies while ignoring, and even justifying, those on the other side, in reality is not genuinely touched by either'.

Rape, as we know, is used by men as a weapon of terror and, indeed, as a weapon of war. But as the history of imperialist propaganda shows - from the allied propaganda around the so-called 'Rape of Belgium' in World War I to the 'rape rooms' of Saddam Hussein's Iraq - claims of systematic rape are all too readily wielded in the service of political propaganda. It is impossible not to feel disgusted by the events depicted in As If I Am Not There; but our disgust ought not to blind us to the film's reinforcement of dubious historical assumptions and stereotypical patterns of representation.

John Molyneux, Will the revolution be televised?: A Marxist analysis of the media. London: Bookmarks Publications, 2011.

John Molyneux's pocket-sized book provides an accessible and enjoyable analysis of the news and entertainment media. Molyneux shows how a variety of British media formats and genres reflect and reinforce ruling class ideologies, concentrating mainly on television programmes with large audiences. Particularly fine is Molyneux's succinct but devastating critique of the British soap opera EastEnders (now there's a phrase I never thought I'd write!), which points to the drama's virtual absence of working class characters (most of the main characters are small business owners), its under-representation of racial minority groups, and the striking and wholly unrealistic absence of political or class consciousness among the good folk of Albert Square.

Happily, Molyneux - a Trotskyist and a member of the Socialist Workers Party - eschews many of the voguish assumptions of liberal media criticism. Mainstream media organisations should be criticised, Molyneux argues, not for being biased towards the right (which, as Molyneux correctly argues, they are not), but for their promotion of capitalist ideology. This point may seem familiar, or even obvious, but it is an important one to make when so many on the left today restrict their criticisms to 'neoliberal' capitalism (as though capitalism would be acceptable and/or workable with just a little more direction from a benevolent, 'democratic' state).

I would, nevertheless, take issue with one or two of Molyneux's points. My principal criticism relates to Molyneux's reading of the News of the World phone hacking scandal, the exposure of which Molyneux takes as evidence that powerful media institutions can be challenged and brought low. This point is fine as far as it goes; but it ignores the political context of the scandal, which was in essence an epiphenomenal manifestation of the ongoing struggle between pro-US and pro-independence factions of the British state (the International Communist Current's article on the scandal remains, to my knowledge, the only article that shows any real understanding of this political context). In view of this, the takedown of Murdoch is best seen not as an assertion of people power, but as a sign of the British state's increasing intolerance of News International's propaganda. Appalling as the activities of the News of the World phone hackers were - and welcome as their exposure was - it is not clear to me why the humbling of one powerful set of politico-ideological interests by the even more powerful forces of the British state and the liberal media should be celebrated as a democratic gain.

I suspect that Molyneux's relatively optimistic reading of Hackgate is informed by the typically left-liberal assumption that the US-supporting media, such as those owned by News International, necessarily constitute a greater ideological menace than the liberal media and public service broadcasters such as the BBC. Even during the Blair years, when British foreign policy tended to follow that of the US, this was questionable (of all the news organisations, the BBC, according to a Cardiff University study, provided the least critical news coverage of the invasion of Iraq). Today, as tensions between Britain and the US grow, and as Britain pursues a more independent foreign policy, I think that it is even less plausible. Indeed, as I have suggested in a recent polemic, the BBC is as clearly an organ of state propaganda as any commercial media institution, despite - or more probably because of - its long-standing reputation for independence, neutrality and objectivity.

Here and there, too, I was not entirely convinced by Molyneux's readings of media texts. Molyneux's assessment of the Rambo movies as 'unambiguously right-wing' (p.33), for example, is questionable. While the subversive elements of its storyline were rudely recuperated in the film's jingoistic sequels, the hero of the original film in the series, Ted Kotcheff's First Blood, is a traumatised and alienated Vietnam veteran who wages a one-man war against a corrupt and violent local police force in the US; that's pretty oppositional stuff in my book.

But these are very minor quibbles. Molyneux's short text offers a convincing, concise and inexpensive introduction to the Marxist critique of the media. I strongly recommend it to anybody seeking to understand the ideological functions of the contemporary mainstream media.

Hot on the heels of Christopher Hitchens, another member of what Terry Eagleton has termed the 'liberal literati' has died. As the tributes to Vaclav Havel multiply in the media, it is useful to remind ourselves of some home truths about the man. To this end, I direct the reader to Michael Parenti's revealing portrait of Havel, taken from Parenti's 1997 book Blackshirts and Reds. While the piece may rather overestimate Havel's personal involvement in some of the developments mentioned, it correctly identifies Havel's reactionary politics. As Parenti reminds us, Havel, like Hitchens, presented himself as a liberal and a 'humanitarian', but was anything but: he was a lifelong enemy of socialism, a proponent of capitalist 'reform' in the fledgling Czech Republic and a cheerleader for US imperial violence.