"His cupboard bare; his vision hardwired" - Wire, 'Internal Exile'

As some wag tweeted after the recent presidential election, orange is the new black: Trump the Terrible will soon replace the oleaginous Obama as the leader of the world's most powerful nation. Trump's white nationalist supporters and hangers-on are naturally ecstatic - and some of them may even find positions of power in the new administration.

Trump himself, of course, is a thoroughly rebarbative figure, a blundering clown in the freakshow of American democracy. Every element of his face betrays his nastiness and narcissism: the florid cheeks with their expression veering between phoney solemnity and leering frivolity; the puckered, hole-in-a-pie mouth, twisted at the corners into a rictus of sneering contempt; the cold, watchful eyes of a deep ocean predator. Groucho Marx once said, 'I never forget a face, but in your case I'll be glad to make an exception'. But we will not be allowed to forget: for the next four years at least, Trump's fleshy fizog will be squinting and gurning from every television screen and social media feed, a demented icon of capitalist degeneracy.

The man who publicly said 7-Eleven when he meant 9/11 may also be the most dimwitted president in US history - although the competition is fierce. And in any case, accusations of stupidity achieve little beyond making liberals feel superior. A more significant concern is that Trump is highly dysfunctional, hailing from a traumatizing and traumatized family. Like his father, Trump is a bully, a psychologically damaged man who is now projecting his own malignancy onto a range of politically approved Others: Mexicans, Muslims and women. The 'traumatic bond' between victim and abuser, which in Trump's case was likely formed with his father in childhood, may partly explain Trump's tough-guy persona. It may also explain the appeal of Trump for the disgruntled left-behinds who voted for him. We are dealing here with the defence mechanism described by the psychoanalyst Sándor Ferenczi as 'identification with the aggressor': in a harsh and unforgiving world, best to keep on side with Big Daddy, however obscene his behaviour.

While it is unlikely that Trump will go through with all, or even many of his pledges, we can expect the policies of Trump's administration broadly to match the reactionary rhetoric of his presidential campaign. Disaster certainly beckons - for workers, minorities and the environment. But some context is also needed. Judging by mainstream journalism and social media commentary, most liberals reckon a Trump presidency to be a worse outcome than a Hillary Clinton one would have been. I am not so sure. While The Orange One is undoubtedly a monstrously vulgar reactionary, Clinton is a thoroughgoing neoliberal and a corrupt sadist. Who can forget her derisive quip following the butchering of Libya's Muammar Gaddafi in a drainage pipe: 'we came, we saw, he died'? And as Secretary of State under Obama, 'Killary' was responsible not just for cruel words, but for spreading actual death and destruction across the globe. There is no reason to assume that she represented the lesser of two evils in the recent election.

Similar points could be made about the relationship of Trump to his predecessor, Barack Obama. Many liberal commentators see the passage from Obama to Trump in terms of what Carl Jung called enantiodromia, a radical transition from good to evil. Throughout the election campaign, they execrated Trump's every racist remark and lewd confession - and even seemed to derive a perverse enjoyment from doing so. And when Trump emerged victorious, some US liberals even expressed a desire to emigrate before the nasty stuff got underway (I'm a cosmopolitan individualist, get me out of here). But while liberals have revelled in the daily reports of Trump's bigotry, they have generally been silent on the crimes of the man who was US president for the past eight years. When these crimes are considered, Trump's succession appears less like a break with the past and more like business as usual.

So let's briefly consider Obama's track record. Obama implemented - and lied about - an unprecedented surveillance campaign against his own population, waged a veritable war on whistleblowers, normalized extrajudicial killing, deported more immigrants than Clinton and Bush combined, and presided, with Hillary Clinton, over the destruction of Libya. Nor was Obama averse to expressions of Trump-style narcissism. In reference to his global drone murder programme - described by Noam Chomsky as 'the biggest terrorist campaign in history' - Obama is reported to have made a typically creepy joke to his aides: 'it turns out I’m really good at killing people' (an example, perhaps, of what psychoanalysts call 'defence through admission'). And who can forget his disgusting Correspondents Dinner 'joke' about using predator drones to take out potential suitors to his daughters. During the financial crisis, meanwhile, Obama showed himself to be the friend of the bankers and the hammer of the working class, bailing out the banks and opposing a moratorium on home foreclosures.

Indeed, it should surprise nobody that the Obama years saw an unprecedented transfer of wealth in the United States from the poor to the rich. Trump, should he actually manage to survive as President, will surely bring misery to the working class at home and abroad; but Obama, the slick desk-bound assassin, has been doing precisely that for the last eight years, even if the US liberal-left, hopelessly lost in the labyrinths of identity politics, has largely proved unwilling to criticize his administration. Whatever else it stands for, then, Trump's triumph hardly represents a rolling back of eight years of enlightened governance. This is no Orange Thermidor.

Nevertheless, the shift from Obama to Trump is not just a changing of the guard, a transition from Tweedledum to Tweedledumber. Trump's victory, like the Brexit vote in the UK, does seem to signal a certain reconfiguration of forces in the post-crisis political landscape. The so-called 'neoliberal' political consensus of the past few decades is facing a challenge to its legitimacy and this, it seems, is giving rise to new strategies of ideological containment. This not a resurgence of fascism. Some ultra-right elements in the US have certainly been emboldened, even empowered in the wake of Trump's success. But this is not the 1930s and Trump is not a new Hitler, popular as such tropes are among many liberal activists. Rather, it is right-wing populism that is the order of the day and Trump's rise is mirrored in the ascendance of regressive strongmen all across the international stage: Duterte, Orbán, Erdoğan and other xenophobic demagogues.

The precise meaning of this populist turn is not yet clear. Some radical analysts argue that the populist surge actually operates against the interests of dominant ruling class factions and thus represents a certain strategic impasse and even a loss of control among the bourgeoisie in the established democracies. According to this view, all is not well with the ruling order. Yet even if this analysis is correct, given the current absence of almost any serious working-class struggle (or even, let's be honest, basic organization) in most parts of the world, this destabilization of global politics is a potentially dangerous development.

As socialists, we can only reiterate that populism and charismatic leadership, whether in its right-wing or left-wing form, is not the answer to our problems. To those seeking a world without exploitation, war, xenophobia, racism and sexism, it matters little which butcher is currently wielding the cleaver over the 'slaughter bench of history' (Hegel). As Marx insisted, the liberation of the working class must be conquered by the working class itself. With this in mind, we should, I think, reject the idea that salvation lies in a nicer president or more enlightened prime minister. Whether black, white or tangerine, these politicians speak and act in the interests of the ruling class. In the immortal words of the punk group Crass, 'we've got to learn to reject all leaders, and the passive shit they feed us'. When Trump fails to make America - or anything else - great, we socialists will still be around, arguing that our future rests in our own hands.

On Thursday, British people will be offered a vote to decide whether Britain should remain in an undemocratic bosses' club or leave it in pursuit of 'national sovereignty'. The EU referendum debate has played out as a clash between what Lacan called the University discourse and the Hysteric discourse, that is, between a discourse invested in knowledge and expertise and another characterised by populist defiance (of which Justice Secretary Michael Gove's attack on 'experts' was a notable and controversial expression). Both sides present their case in terms of decency, fairness and common sense; but in my view, neither Leaving nor Remaining will bring any good for the majority of working-class people in Britain.

Many Remainers are apt to cloud the issue of EU membership by appealing to a sentimental Europhilia (conveniently forgetting the EU's current, scandalous role in pitching thousands of desperate refugees into the Mediterranean, for example) or to denounce all Brexit supporters as racists and thickos (you can't have a plebiscite, you know, without plebs). Other Remainers - such as the Guardian's Polly Toynbee - have drawn the recent, horrific murder of the pro-EU Labour MP Jo Cox into the discussion, warning that an exit from the EU will unleash the forces of 'fascism' (the familiar bogeyman of the liberal imagination) or at least pave the way for a right-wing cataclysm led by Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage. I'm not so sure. Johnson and Farage, it is true, have nothing to offer working-class people except hatred and oppression. But politicians on the Remain side of the debate - the Camerons, Osbornes and Hunts of this world - have been responsible for inflicting terrible suffering among the unemployed, disabled and immigrants for many years. They are at least as dangerous as the Brexiteers, not least because they are the ones who have actually been attacking the working class, as opposed to merely bloviating about immigrants and benefit scroungers. The EU is hardly an institution that can be defended by socialists; rather, it is a 'neoliberal' behemoth that threatens the pay and conditions of workers across the continent.

On the other hand, many right-wing and some left-wing Brexiteers appeal to racist and anti-immigrant sentiments ('they' are a 'drain' on 'our services' or take 'our jobs', and so, drearily, on) that must be rejected outright. Nor do I see any reason to buy into the 'progressive' Leave campaign's narrative that exiting the EU - once the common goal of most British leftists, of course - will improve the lot of ordinary people in Britain. For the advocates of a certain left-wing, Bennite social democracy, the case for Brexit is clear: this vote is purely about EU membership and the EU is a patently undemocratic neoliberal apparatus that only recently devastated Greek society. Yet even if a Brexit does come about (and it should be remembered that a referendum victory for Leave would not be legally binding), an 'independent' British capitalism will continue to be locked into the structures of global capitalism and will continue to exploit, degrade and divide workers. This is not because the campaign has been hegemonized by the populist right - although it certainly has - but because Britain is a capitalist state that cannot, even without ties to the EU, be truly democratic. The exact makeup of political forces in post-Brexit Britain is largely unknowable at this point; but in the absence of large-scale working-class struggle, the idea promoted by some left-wing Leavers that an exit vote could usefully destabilize the British state seems fanciful. The financiers and business-people funding the Leave campaign are doing so in order to avoid EU financial regulation, bonus caps, and suchlike; working-class people have no shared class interest with them.

This referendum is the stage for a bourgeois faction fight in which the dominant 'neoliberal' faction of British capitalism aims to strike a decisive blow against the anti-EU blowhards. But whichever side prevails on Thursday, the big winner will be the British ruling class as a whole, which will have succeeded once again in persuading us to participate in another of its electoral spectacles. The fight over EU membership is not our fight. Instead of voting for one gang of capitalists or another we would do better, I think, to focus on our own struggles. True internationalists should consider what is going on just across the Channel in France, where the current, massive labour reform bill protests are a reminder that the working class can and must fight on its own terrain, regardless of the capitalist formations - national, European, or global - in which it finds itself.

The text below consists of several passages untimely ripp'd from my latest book on the Bosnian war in screen fiction (forthcoming from Bloomsbury Academic). These chunks were hastily stitched together for a recent talk to Film Studies staff and students at London South Bank University (thanks to Professor Phil Hammond for organizing this and to the students for their patience as I tried to cram all of this into one hour). What follows lacks context/nuance in places (especially in the Introduction), as the aim was to present a highly condensed polemic for thought/discussion rather than a carefully balanced academic paper. The text also omits discussion of many subjects considered in the book, notably that of war rape, concentrating instead on the issues surrounding geopolitics and nationalism. Nevertheless, since several people have asked me what the new book is all about, here are some 'bits and pieces of the working thesis', as The Minutemen once sang.

Introduction: The Bosnian War and the Media

Many of us have vivid memories of horrific scenes from the Bosnian war: the carnage caused by bombs and sniper fire, the burning of villages, rapes and massacres. What caused the conflict is much less clear in most people's minds - after all, the Bosnian war is a massively over-determined event. By the late 1980s, Yugoslavia was in dire economic distress, caused in part by its obligations to a savage IMF ‘restructuring’. Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian Muslim nationalism had been growing for decades, exacerbating tensions in what had been, for most of the post-war period, a relatively peaceful multi-ethnic country. But the break-up of Yugoslavia was also precipitated by the world’s great powers. Germany, and especially Austria, encouraged the secession of Croatia and Slovenia in 1991 and there are strong suggestions that in the spring of 1992 the US encouraged Bosnia’s president, Alija Izetbegović, to reject the Lisbon Agreement, a plan for the partition of Bosnia that might have prevented war. And once the war had started, Western and other global powers defied a UN arms embargo by supplying arms to their regional client states. Indeed, the widespread claim that the great powers passively ‘looked on’ as the Bosnian war raged is, quite simply, a myth.

Responsibility for such myths lies partly with the news media. As Yugoslavia disintegrated into nationalist madness, a ‘paranoid public sphere’ (Adorno and Horkheimer) arose in each of the country's former republics. News bulletins collapsed into absurd and crude propaganda. Western journalists, meanwhile, were mostly confined to their Sarajevo hotels, unable to report from the field and disastrously over-reliant on government propaganda. The conflict was a three-sided civil war, albeit an uneven one, the Serbs possessing more firepower than the Croats and Muslims and perpetrating hideous atrocities, from the brutal siege of Sarajevo to the Srebrenica massacre. But as the US tilted towards its client, the Bosnian government, the conflict was increasingly presented as a one-sided war of aggression, or even a genocide, waged by Serbs against Bosnian Muslims. The Western press transformed Serbian president Slobodan Milošević into a modern-Hitler, when in fact he was less nationalistic than his opposite numbers in Croatia and Bosnia. Holocaust analogies became common, notably in the summer of 1992, when ITN’s images of the 'thin man', Fikret Alić, in the Serb-run detention camp at Trnopolje were exaggeratedly interpreted in the Western media as evidence of Nazi-style ‘death camps’ (although such camps were indeed places of real horror and violence). The same media virtually ignored Croat- and Muslim-run camps.

And when the US and its NATO allies launched a devastating campaign to push back the Serbs in 1995, most Western media praised the attack, despite the thousands of refugees and deaths it created. Western journalists – even, and perhaps especially the liberal ones – were thus responsible for what Ed Herman and David Peterson (2007: 1) call a ‘tsunami of lies and misrepresentations’. These misrepresentations were often justified by recourse to what British journalist Martin Bell called the ‘journalism of attachment’, an allegedly new mode of affective reportage that aimed at infusing a suspect ‘neutral’ journalism with a proper sense of moral outrage, but which in fact became a license for over-simplification and one-sided reporting. Serbs bad; Muslims and military intervention good.

My recent work explores the extent to which screen fictions support the one-sided view of the war propagated by many Western journalists. The following talk examines some of the best-known cinema and TV reconstructions of the war in both the West and the Balkans from the last 20 years. I argue that the cinema of the Bosnia war, East and West, is heavily compromised by misrepresentation, nationalism and racism; however, I end on a more optimistic note, discussing some less partisan treatments of the conflict.

Humanitarianism and Its Others: Three Film Dramas about the Bosnian War

Michael Winterbottom’s Welcome to Sarajevo was released two years after the end of the Bosnian war and would become the definitive cinematic treatment of the conflict. Based on the memoir of British foreign correspondent Michael Nicholson (1994), it focuses on the experiences of journalists in Sarajevo and in particular the quest of one of them, Michael Henderson, to evacuate a young girl from a Bosnian orphanage.
The film has a documentaristic quality. Dramatic reconstructions of civilian suffering, including bloodied bodies strewn across the pavements of Sarajevo, are intercut with real television news footage, suturing Henderson’s reports into the ‘real world’ of the Yugoslav wars. The children in the orphanage are presented to the viewer as part of Nicholson’s news reports, speaking directly to camera with Nicholson’s voiceover translation. It’s an engaging technique that interpellates the audience as witnesses to the horrors of war through a cinematic rendering of the ‘journalism of attachment’.

Nevertheless, Welcome to Sarajevo’s inclusion of actual news footage also reinforces hegemonic framings of the conflict. There is a clip, for example, of one of Bill Clinton’s public statements about the war: ‘history has shown us that you can’t allow the mass extermination of people and just sit by and watch it happen’. Later, television images of the Serb commander Radovan Karadžić are intercut with a speech delivered by George Bush, in which the former president asserts: ‘you can’t negotiate with a terrorist’. As the inclusion of soundbites from both Clinton and Bush suggests, the film reproduces the US media-political script of the war. Serbs are depicted throughout the film as the war’s sole aggressors – as raving psychopaths, in fact. There are also some striking factual reversals: the Serb victims of the 1992 Sarajevo wedding massacre become, in the film, Croatians, while the rescued girl, in reality a Croat, becomes, in the film, a Muslim (Gocić 2001: 42-3). Throughout Welcome to Sarajevo, in fact, Muslims are the innocent victims of the war, Serbs are its villains, and journalists such as Henderson stand for the civilized values of multicultural Europe.

This lionization of the Western journalist who goes beyond the call of duty is combined with an explicit endorsement of Western ‘humanitarian intervention’ when Henderson’s flamboyant American colleague Flynn apologizes to his translator Risto on behalf of the US for ‘failing to deliver on those airstrikes’. In Welcome to Sarajevo, Westerners are thus depicted as the actual or at least potential saviours of Yugoslavia.

Let’s take another example. In 1999, the BBC broadcast a two-part drama, Warriors, which follows the fortunes of British soldiers sent to Bosnia as UN ‘peacekeepers’. It was written by Leigh Jackson and directed by Peter Kosminsky. As in many other Kosminsky dramas – No Child of Mine (1997), The Project (2002), The Government Inspector (2005) and Britz (2007) – a key theme is the betrayal of trust in authority. The drama’s central thesis is that the UN’s non-combat remit prevented the blue helmets from protecting the victims of the war and in many scenes, the soldiers can only look on in frustration as civilians are shelled or displaced.

The screenplay of Warriors is based on the transcripts of interviews conducted with more than 90 British soldiers and their families. In fact, the drama’s depiction of war is considered so authentic that the film has been used in army training programmes to illustrate the dilemmas and challenges of peacekeeping. And the TV critics went wild. The Times’ Paul Hoggart, for instance, wrote that Warriors ‘was, quite simply, stunning – gut-wrenching, soul-searing, heart-rending, thought-provoking, sensitive, powerful, deeply disturbing and dripping authenticity’.

Yet the drama’s political messages are problematic. Drawing comparisons between the Bosnian conflict and the Second World War, a Muslim woman, Almira Zec, advises Lieutenant Feeley that some form of Western intervention is required to prevent a repeat of the 1940s; ‘history is screaming at us’, she tells him. But the use of WWII analogies to justify military intervention in Bosnia rests on two dubious assumptions: first, that Western military intervention is benevolent; and second, that WWII was a just war against fascism – a proposition unlikely to find favour in Dresden or Hiroshima.

Nor is the drama's historical authenticity beyond question. Muslims here appear only as victims; this is especially problematic since Warriors is set in Vitez – an area of central Bosnia in which most of the fighting between 1992 and 1994 involved Muslim and Croat forces. The omni-presence of a slimy Serb commander is also an historical distortion, since Serb forces were not active in the area. Kosminsky’s productions have often drawn censure from the political establishment; Warriors did not, perhaps indicating how little it departs from the dominant narrative of the war.

This narrative is not exclusive to Western productions. The most extensive treatment of the UN mission in Bosnia is Alpha Bravo Charlie, an epic fourteen-part TV drama about the Bosnian war directed by the acclaimed Shoaib Mansoor and broadcast by Pakistan Television to record-breaking audiences in 1998. The military-themed production was facilitated by Pakistan’s ISPR (Inter-Services Public Relations), a body responsible for producing dramas and documentaries about the country’s armed forces (Ansari 2011: 8).

Alpha Bravo Charlie’s principal character is mild-mannered Gulsher Khan, a captain who is sent to Bosnia a few days after his marriage. Khan’s unit is respectfully received by the Bosnian community, as rebuilding projects are begun and medicines, food and money are distributed. As in Warriors, the Pakistani soldiers form close bonds with the locals, especially their Bosnian translators, and Khan’s burgeoning friendship with his translator Sandra is one of the drama’s key storylines.

A dramatic high-point in Alpha Bravo Charlie involves Sandra revealing to Khan her family secret. As the camera slowly zooms in on her face, Sandra explains that her original name had been Selma, but that this was changed at the insistence of her stepfather, a Serb, who abandoned the family to join the army. Later, Sandra tells Khan a second story about her former boyfriend – also a Serb – who deserted her at the outbreak of the war but later returned to slaughter her entire village with a rifle. Having revealed the truth about her suffering at the hands of Serb men, Sandra becomes psychically emancipated and soon falls in love with Khan. She further tells Khan that the war is a ‘blessing in disguise’ because, she says, ‘it has given us our identity; we had forgotten who we were. But now things will change, inshallah’. The war – and specifically the Pakistani UN presence in it – enhances Sandra’s sense of ethno-religious belonging. Sandra’s only complaint is that the UN mandate does not allow arms. ‘Please don’t give us food’, she implores Khan, ‘it keeps us alive so that we can be killed by Serbs tomorrow’. Instead, Sandra asks for weapons (Pakistan did in fact covertly provide arms to the Bosnian government during the war).

Captured by Serb forces later in the series, Khan is shot dead in the second of two escape attempts, but becomes a fondly remembered martyr in the drama’s patriotic ending. Alpha Bravo Charlie thus celebrates the legacy of the Pakistani UN presence in Bosnia, casting the soldiers as heroic protectors of the global ummah.

All three of these productions, then, reflect the mainstream ‘Western’ narrative of the Bosnian war. And it is important to note that their directors are political liberals. Shaoib Mansoor's 2007 film Khuda Kay Liye depicts the wrongful detention and torture of a Pakistani terror suspect and strongly condemns the US war on terror. Winterbottom and Kosminsky are also liberal filmmakers who have been very critical of Western foreign policy since 2001. Winterbottom’s docudrama Road to Guantánamo (2005) and Kosminsky’s dramas The Government Inspector (2005) and Britz (2007) questioned the grounds for Britain’s invasion of Iraq and the effects of the ‘war on terror’ on British citizens. In fact, all three directors have elsewhere demonstrated an anti-imperialist sensibility that is lacking from their films about Bosnia. Whether consciously or not, it seems that liberal filmmakers in the 1990s, like many liberal journalists, helped to reproduce the hegemonic understanding of the war.

A more recent dramatic intervention has been made by Angelina Jolie – another prominent liberal cultural figure with a background in humanitarian work and a strong interest in the suffering of Bosnian women. Jolie’s first foray into directing, In the Land of Blood and Honey, is an award-winning film about a Muslim woman, Ajla, and a Serb policeman, Danijel, who date each other before the outbreak of the war, their friendship illustrating the multicultural harmony of pre-war Sarajevo. During the war, however, Ajla is transported with other Muslim women to a barracks where Danijel is a captain and where the women are repeatedly raped, reduced to ‘bare life’. Danijel seems more kindly than his fellow soldiers, at least initially – but nevertheless confines Ajla to his quarters, where he rapes her. At the end of the film, seemingly tortured by his conscience, Danijel gives himself up at a UN checkpoint, confessing that he is a ‘criminal of war’. That Danijel will be punished for his crimes is one of the film’s progressive points; after all, in US cinema rape is often punished by vigilante reprisals rather than legal means, or not punished at all (Bufkin and Eschholtz 2000) and rapists are seldom shamed in films about rape in the Bosnian war (Bertolucci 2015).

That said, In the Land of Blood and Honey is deeply embedded within what James Der Derian (2001) pithily calls the ‘military-industrial-media-entertainment network’ (MIME-NET) and Jolie consulted with Wesley Clarke and Richard Holbrooke when researching the film. Unsurprisingly, therefore, Jolie’s film is overly invested in establishing war guilt. Here again, Muslims are heroic resistance fighters and Serbs are cardboard cut-out villains; the regional Serb commander, Danijel’s father Nebojša, is a blood and soil nationalist who smashes wine glasses as he pontificates about Serb greatness. Jolie even reconstructs ITN’s Trnopolje camp images in a scene where Danijel is driving through Sarajevo. Here is Danijel's point of view shot...

Although the scene is meant to take place in the winter of 1994, Danijel drives past semi-naked prisoners resembling those featured in the 1992 footage and Jolie’s camera lingers on one prisoner who bears a strong resemblance to Fikret Alić. By reviving an image that was widely interpreted in the media as evidence of a fascist resurgence in Europe, Jolie draws an equivalence between Serbs and Nazis, exploiting the best-known image of the war for an ideological rewriting of history.
 
Hollywood Action Cinema: Masculinism and Militarism

Action films have played a similar role, although often this has not gone much beyond using Serbs as episodic villains. Curiously, in Hollywood, this vilification has often taken a quite specific form, with Serbs depicted as pornography obsessed sexual perverts. In Michael Bay’s The Rock (1996), a box supposedly holding aid for Bosnian refugees turns out to be a Serb booby trap containing pornographic magazines and an explosive toy doll that spews sarin gas – a detail that inverts a real-life story from the same year, in which NATO officers found booby-trapped toys in a Bosnian Muslim training camp (Pomfret 1996: 25). Gustavo Graef-Marino’s Diplomatic Siege (1999), meanwhile, depicts the invasion of the US Embassy in Bucharest by dead-eyed Serb terrorists, one of whom displays a penchant for pornographic gay magazines. And in John Irvin’s The Fourth Angel (2001), Serb terrorists watch pornographic videos. These details revive a longstanding occidental association of the Balkans with sexual excess (think of Bram Stoker’s Dracula); but they also serve a propaganda function, linking Serbs – and Serbs alone – with sexual depravity.

Other Hollywood actioners go deeper. John Moore’s Behind Enemy Lines (2001) merits particular scrutiny as one of the few Hollywood action films to be set during the war itself. The film stars Owen Wilson as Lieutenant Chris Burnett, an American naval flight officer frustrated by the lack of opportunity for combat action. Eventually airborne on a reconnaissance mission over Bosnia, he deviates from his flightpath and is shot down in a demilitarized zone along with his pilot Stackhouse after photographing mass graves. The film’s fetishization of the Americans’ sophisticated surveillance technologies (Burnett refers to his aircraft’s ‘shiny new digital camera’) reinforces the pre-eminence of US high-tech, immersing the viewer in what Graham Dawson (1994) calls the ‘pleasure culture of war’. Burnett’s photographs reveal that the local Bosnian Serb Army commander, General Miroslav Lokar, is conducting a secret genocidal campaign against the local population. Pursued by the Serbs in enemy territory, Burnett is eventually rescued through the belated efforts of Reigart – no thanks to Reigart’s NATO superior, Admiral Piquet, an uptight Frenchman who represents pettifogging ‘European’ bureaucracy. Piquet, who criticizes US unilateralism, is increasingly identified as the film’s villain (Weber 2006: 62).

The Serb soldiers, meanwhile, are heavily racialized ‘mono-dimensional demons’ (Watson 2008: 55) who must be vanquished by angelic American forces. Cowardly and merciless and seemingly unable to speak Serbo-Croat, the Serbs execute Stackhouse by shooting him in the back. And unlike the ‘cool’ white Americans and the Americanized, clean-looking Muslim youths who help Burnett during his ordeal, the Serbs are ‘minstrels of mud and dirt’ (Miskovic 2006: 450).

Burnett is successful in his mission and his photographic evidence results in Lokar appearing at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia to face justice for his crimes. As in Welcome to Sarajevo, constructed news bulletins reinforce a pro-American perspective. At an affective level, meanwhile, a high-octane rock music soundtrack shores up the assertion of US cultural hegemony. By these means, Behind Enemy Lines promotes a Manichean worldview in which US military masculinity, freed from ‘the constraints of multilateralism and diplomacy’ (Ó Tuathail 2005: 361), guarantees moral clarity. It’s therefore unsurprising that the film, although made before 9/11, was rush-released after the Twin Towers attack.

Serb screen villains often exhibit a backwardness and a desire to ‘return’ to the war, or carry it on by other means, in order to avenge past humiliations. A well-known example is Victor Drazen, the chief villain of the first season of the Fox television series 24 (2001-10), a Serb ethnic cleanser whose wife and child were killed during an undercover CIA operation. Yet a desire for revenge is not entirely the preserve of atavistic Serb villains. The heroes of male action melodramas are themselves typically wounded (and thus, etymologically, traumatized) figures (Rehling 2009: 55-82) and the Western soldiers and journalists who return to Bosnia have their own grievances to avenge, even if they do so under the civilized pretext of bringing Serb war criminals to justice.

From the late 1990s, as Western bounty hunters charged into the Balkans in search of war criminals, Western film and television dramas began to reflect their experiences in a series of ‘back to Bosnia’ storylines. The most high-profile of these, Richard Shepard’s 2007 film The Hunting Party, is set five years after the Bosnian war. It is based on an Esquire article by Scott K. Anderson (2000) about an unconventional plan hatched by a group of three journalists, who decide to spend their holidays finding and arresting Radovan Karadžić (‘It’s payback time for that fuck’, as one of the reporters robustly puts it). The posse of journalists ventures into what one of them calls ‘the heart of this Balkan madness’ in order to track down ‘the most wanted war criminal in Bosnia’, Dr Radoslav Boghdanović, also known as The Fox, and his bloodthirsty bodyguard Srđan.

The Hunting Party’s central protagonist, Simon Hunt, is an American TV journalist whose Bosnian girlfriend was raped and murdered by Boghdanović in 1994. Like Flynn in Welcome to Sarajevo, Hunt is a fearless journalist, stopping in the heat of battle to smoke cigarettes to a rock music soundtrack. But Hunt loses his composure – and consequently his job – during a live TV interview from Bosnia with his channel’s veteran news anchor, Franklin. When Franklin, during a discussion of a massacre of Bosnian Muslims, tries to raise the question of Muslim responsibility for violence, Hunt explodes: ‘These people were butchered. Women were raped. Children were murdered. Come on, Franklin!’. Hunt’s outburst reveals his commitment to the ‘journalism of attachment’. By contrast, the older anchorman Franklin embodies the conservatism of a compromised establishment and his vacillations compel Hunt to seek justice on his own terms. Like Behind Enemy Lines, then, The Hunting Party has a distinctly oedipal subtext: the failure of paternal authority pushes Hunt, like Chris Burnett, to defy that authority and restore moral order by force.

The Fox and his bodyguard, meanwhile, are presented as Balkan Wild Men, animalistic avatars of a ‘volatile masculinity gone mad’ (Longinović 2005: 38). The journalists eventually capture The Fox – no thanks to a laughably ineffectual UN police bureaucrat. Indeed, as in Behind Enemy Lines, US unilateralism trumps slow-moving, corrupt European diplomacy. That this unilateralism is covert and possibly illegal aligns the film with other Bosnian war thrillers, such as Mimi Leder’s The Peacemaker (1999) and John Irvin’s The Fourth Angel (2001), as well as what Ross Douthat (2008) calls the ‘paranoid style’ of post-9/11 Hollywood.

Although it is set in the US, Mark Steven Johnson’s 2013 film The Killing Season also focuses on the settling of old scores. Here Robert de Niro plays Benjamin Ford, a US Bosnian war veteran who has retreated to the Appalachian mountains in order to forget the war. Ford is tracked down, however, by Emil Kovač, a sadistic Serb soldier who had been shot by Ford during the war and now seeks revenge on the American. Most of the screentime in The Killing Season is devoted to the brutal to-and-fro combat between the two men as they chase, torture and occasionally speechify to one other in a battle for physical and moral supremacy.

Critically maligned and a commercial flop, The Killing Season has incurred widespread ridicule for its raft of cultural solecisms (Kovač’s un-Serbian name and incongruously Islamic beard being the favourite targets of the film’s online detractors). More troublingly, Balkanist stereotyping abounds. As Dina Iordanova (2001: 162) notes, the Balkans have often been viewed by Westerners as a place of ‘face-to-face sadistic fervour involving blood, spilled guts, severed limbs, tortured and mutilated bodies’. Kovač brings this savagery to America, his preference for a bow and arrow marking him as a pre-modern savage.

Even worse is the film’s opening depiction of the Bosnian war, which is provided by way of backstory. Purporting to depict to the final stages of the conflict, the film shows the liberation of a Serb-run concentration camp - complete with Trnopolje-style barbed wire fence - as part of an American ground operation in which US infantry fight a close range battle with the Serbs.

This ‘Trnopolje liberation’ scene is, of course, an invention: US ground troops did not enter Bosnia in 1995, let alone ‘liberate the camps’, which in any case had been closed down by the end of 1992. Rather, the scene re-stages the Bosnian war for the purpose of establishing American heroism and Serb depravity. The allusions here to the liberation of the Nazi death camps (notably, a soldier’s discovery of a freight train carriage stuffed with corpses) also serve to re-temporalize the action: 1995 becomes 1945.

Post-Yugoslav Cinema: Nationalism to Normalization

Most Western films about the war are superegoic, calling for action to restore political and moral order in the Balkans. By contrast, Balkan films – especially Serbian films – often display a dark sense of humour and fatalism, exploring the nature of war in more ironic and allusive modes. The elevation of poetics over politics in these distinctly Dionysian films (Gocić 2009) complicates and often confounds critical analysis. Interpretation is further complicated by the generic diversity of these films, which move beyond the drama and action genres favoured by Western directors to encompass satire, comedy and horror. In this final section of my talk, I shall briefly evaluate some negative and positive trends within post-Yugoslav cinema.

As several critics have argued, the cinema of the former Yugoslavia’s most celebrated director, Emir Kusturica, bends Hollywood’s anti-Serb stick in the other direction, betraying his strong pro-Serb political sympathies. In the 1940s storyline in Kusturica’s Underground – a film ‘supported and endorsed by government-controlled cultural institutions of Milošević’s Yugoslavia’ (Iordanova 2001: 122) – the heroes Marko and Crni ‘fight on relentlessly in occupied Belgrade, while the Slovenes and the Croats welcome Nazi troops, [and] Muslims and Croats steal weapons and money from the resistance fighters’ (Magala 2005: 195). Nor does Kusturica, either here or in his subsequent Bosnian war film Life Is a Miracle, acknowledge Serb atrocities in the 1990s. A great deal has already been written about Kusturica’s nationalist affiliations, so here I shall say only that agree with the majority of critics that Kusturica’s films are as compromised by political bias as any Hollywood production.

A rather more complicated case is presented by Srđan Dragojević’s 1996 tour-de-force Pretty Village, Pretty Flame – the Ur-text of Bosnian war cinema. Rich in symbolism and dripping in irony, it is arguably the most sophisticated film about the war. It is set in the Višegrad tunnel (also known as the Brotherhood and Unity Tunnel) in 1992, where a Serbian fighter, Milan, is trapped with his comrades, surrounded by Muslim soldiers. The film regularly flashes back to Milan’s happy adventures with his childhood friend Halil, one of the Muslims now outside the tunnel; many of these adventures take place near the tunnel, which the boys will not enter, convinced that an ogre dwells there. The film also jumps forward to Milan’s post-war experiences in hospital, where, consumed with thoughts of vengeance for the murder of his mother, he determines to kill a young Muslim patient. Milan’s journey from amity to animosity illustrates the poisonous power of nationalism. Yet an American journalist who finds herself in the tunnel with the Serbs undergoes a reverse process: blinded by Western stereotypes, she is initially horrified by the men; but her antipathy towards them lessens with familiarity. Indeed, Pretty Village, Pretty Flame delivers a riposte to Western ways of seeing, expressing ‘frustration with the Western representation of the war, of Serbs and the Balkans in general’ (Radović 2014: 51). Yet Dragojević also shows the depravity of the Serbs, as they drunkenly loot and burn Muslim villages, proudly sporting the kokarda. Milja Radović (2009: 195) therefore rightly argues that the film contains much indirect opposition to the idiocies of Serb nationalism; this is no doubt why the film was treated with suspicion by the Serbian elite and the production ran into significant problems with the authorities.

On the other hand, the film’s only visible Muslim victim appears in a scene in which the Serbs loot a home, the dead body of its owner, Ćamil, appearing in the background of the shot. As Pavle Levi (2007: 148-9) points out, Dragojević’s camera only briefly shows Ćamil, eventually refocusing on the Serb soldier in the foreground and blurring out the victim behind him. It might be added that Ćamil appears not only in the background of this shot, but through a window, a distantiating framing that positions Ćamil as a mere ‘representation’ existing outside the Serbs’ – and perhaps the viewers’ – sphere of interest. Also problematic in Pretty Village is the dismissive representation of the effete anti-war demonstrators who protest in front of the military hospital, risibly chanting John Lennon’s ‘Give Peace A Chance’. Ultimately, then, Pretty Village is an ambiguous text that criticizes some aspects of Serb nationalism while marginalizing Muslim suffering and the aspirations of the peace movement.

Where then to turn for an unpatriotic imagining of the Bosnian war? Many scholars of post-Yugoslav cinema regard Danis Tanović’s No Man’s Land (2001) as an exemplary anti-war film; but even here there are problems. The film focuses on two combatants from opposing sides of the conflict – Čiki, a Muslim, and Nino, a Serb – who find themselves trapped between the Serb and Muslim front lines, as piranha-like international reporters seek to exploit the men’s predicament and UN officials uselessly look on. Despite its welcome satire on the pretensions of Western journalism, however, No Man’s Land frames the war and the trench-bound duo quite conventionally. The action in the trench is interspersed with a British TV news programme showing Radovan Karadžić threatening the Bosnian Muslims and an argument between the film’s two protagonists about the origins of the war identifies the Serbs as the only aggressors. The film’s presentation of the unlikely trenchmates, meanwhile, is far from even-handed. The Bosnian Muslim, Čiki, is coded as the compassionate hero and his Rolling Stones tee-shirt reminds the audience that Muslims represent liberal, Western values. His Serb counterpart, on the other hand, is neurotic and duplicitous, attempting at one point to stab Čiki with his own knife. Notwithstanding the widespread critical assessment of No Man’s Land as an anti-war film, then, Tanović, I argue, tends to present the Bosnian war as a morality tale of good Muslim and bad Serb.

I’d like to end by discussing two post-Yugoslav films about the Bosnian war that are very different in tone yet which indicate potential lines of flight away from ethno-nationalism. The film that has attracted most international attention for its depiction of the after-effects of war trauma on Bosnian women is Grbavica/Esma’s Secret (2006). Written and directed by Bosnian Jasmila Žbanić, Esma’s Secret is, along with No Man’s Land, the most watched film in post-war Bosnia (Zajec 2013: 200) and its success led to the Bosnian government belatedly agreeing to provide financial support for the war’s rape victims. A ‘film with very few men’ (Pavićić 2010: 49), it tells the story of a working class single mother, Esma, and her wayward daughter Sara, who was conceived when Esma was raped during the war, but who has been brought up believe that her father was a šehid, or war hero. The film alludes subtly to the nature of Esma’s experiences during the war and critiques the sexist social norms of post-war Bosnia: Esma works as a waitress in a nightclub and her abhorrence of the crass philandering of its patrons, together with her unease when in close proximity to men, hint at the nature of her prison camp ordeal and suggest that gender relations have barely changed in Bosnia since the war.

Unlike Angelina Jolie’s film about war rape, Esma’s Secret shows little interest in political demonization. The film’s quiet social realism constitutes an implicit critique of the wild, self-Balkanizing cinema of Kusturica and Dragojević (Pavićić 2010: 48). Žbanić’s use of space reinforces the point. In Kusturica’s Underground, the above ground/below ground dichotomy symbolizes the discrepancy between Yugoslavia’s Communist superstratum and the deceived masses who live under its auspices. In Esma’s Secret, this topography is reversed: Esma and Sara often occupy hilltop spaces overlooking the Bosnian capital city from which Sara derives her name. In contrast with Kusturica’s and Dragojević’s enclosed spaces (basements, tunnels and graveyards), these locales convey a sense of possibility; and unlike the doomed, irredeemable characters of Kusturica and Dragojević, Esma and Sara are capable of change (Pavićić 2010: 49). Once Sara is apprised of her mother’s secret, mother and daughter may begin a new life together.

Some other impressive Balkan films about the war and its effects focus on the perpetrators, rather than the sufferers of trauma. The Enemy, directed by Serb Dejan Zečević and co-produced between Serbia, Republika Srpska and Croatia in 2011, is a supernatural, allegorical drama with a distinctly Tarkovskian tone. Set in the immediate aftermath of the war, the film begins with Serb soldiers, under the supervision of American IFOR troops, removing mines that they themselves had laid several years before. All of the men are damaged – whether by fear, aggression, or excessive religiosity – becoming increasingly abusive and eventually murderous towards one another. Searching a factory, the soldiers unearth a strange figure with the diabolical name of Daba, who has been walled into the building and who, disconcertingly, feels no cold, hunger or thirst. Initially, the chthonic Daba seems to be implicated in the violence, especially when the soldiers discover a mass grave underneath the factory, and at several points various frightened soldiers try – and fail – to kill him. Yet Daba tells the men that he deplores the killing of the war and as the film progresses it becomes clear that Daba is not the source of the growing tension among the men, but rather what Slavoj Žižek (1999: 121) calls an ‘Id-machine’, an uncanny externalization of the soldiers’ hostile proclivities. Craving an enemy, even after the end of the war, the soldiers have collectively conjured one up.

Daba epitomizes Zygmunt Bauman’s figure of the Stranger: a liminal, ‘undecidable’ figure who is neither a friend nor an enemy and thus poses a threat ‘more horrifying than that which one can expect from the enemy’ (Bauman 1991: 55). For the soldiers, Daba is terrifying not because he is an enemy (enemies can simply be killed), but because his uncertain identity unsettles the binary categories of good and evil, friend and foe, that still define the soldiers’ world. Like Pretty Village, Pretty Flame, in which the Bosnian war is attributed to a malevolent, tunnel-dwelling ogre, The Enemy could be accused of supernaturalizing and thereby depoliticizing the war. Nevertheless, the film does offer a memorable philosophical deconstruction of sectarianism. While Western cinema à la Angelina Jolie continues to engage in enemy construction, post-Yugoslav cinema is moving beyond the simple satire of Western normativities, and shows signs of sloughing off its nationalist legacy.

(First published in Star and Crescent)

These days, the name of Jeremy Corbyn is on everybody’s lips. Or so it seems to me. In a canteen yesterday, I misheard a fellow diner’s order of ‘spaghetti carbonara’ as ‘Corbynara’. And who knows, if Corbyn’s star continues to rise, we might yet see the day when the Labour leftist – who is already considered a savoury dish by many of his admirers – has a pasta named after him.

For the time being, though, Corbyn is under fire from his many adversaries. The right-wing press attacks Jezza at every turn, often in the most salacious, moralizing and trivialising terms. Article after article excoriates Corbyn as a scruffy love rat who once had a habit of eating cold beans from a tin. Such is the all-too-familiar viciousness of the British tabloid press. Yet the chorus of mockery isn’t confined to the redtops and the Daily Mail. In a recent BBC Panorama presented by former Sun journalist John Ware, Corbyn was subjected to a tabloid-style whacking, and even the liberal journalists at The Guardian have been putting the boot in. Raphael Behr, for instance, has provocatively compared Corbyn’s ‘populist’ politics to those of UKIP’s ultra-nationalist Nigel Farage.

In recent days, The Guardian has published some more sympathetic pieces about the Labour leader; but Corbyn is likely to be vilified by most of the media for as long as he remains at the helm of the Labour party. The British public now breathlessly awaits the further revelations that Corbyn is a paedophile, eats babies, or shot a man in Reno just to watch him die. But why is so much of the media so hostile towards Corbyn? And does this hostility mean that Corbyn is a radical? Can the politics that he represents really help to bring about socialism and a ‘fairer society’, as many of his supporters believe?

Corbyn’s ascendancy comes as something of a shock for those of us old enough to remember him from earlier decades. We knew Corbyn as a campaigning leftist politician, but few of us could have guessed that he would become Labour leader. His extraordinary rise is a consequence of his ability to attract the support of a broad range of leftists and party members, many of whom recently joined Labour specifically to vote for the man they believe represents ‘a new kind of politics’.

The media are hostile towards Corbyn largely because they – and their advertisers and owners – fear the ideological reorientation he seems to represent. Corbyn’s election as leader has restored the dreaded word ‘socialism’ to public discourse. And many of Corbyn’s ideas are certainly radical. For example, on foreign policy, Corbyn opposes airstrikes on Syria, and on education, the scrapping of university tuition fees. Sounds good. And it’s great to hear Corby talking of the need for a ‘kinder society’ in which refugees are treated with respect. To oppose such sentiments one would have to be an idiot or a Tory (or, as is often the case, both).

But even if a Corbyn-led government were elected – and the next opportunity for that is a full five years away – it is doubtful that any of Corbyn’s enlightened policies would by then be intact, let alone implementable. And we’d do well to remember that radical promises are easily broken. Before the 2010 election, Nick Clegg, of the Liberal Democrats, promised the end of university tuition fees, only to renege later upon his pledge. That’s how politicians roll. In fact, we don’t even have to wait for promises to be broken: earlier this year, Corbyn voted in support of Labour’s Compulsory Jobs Guarantee, a scheme involving an element of ‘workfare’ – unpaid work in return for benefits – something Corbyn has elsewhere claimed to oppose.

Here’s the thing. The political system in a country such as Britain has both a right-wing and a left-wing ‘face’. For the last five years we have been staring into the former, and view has not been pretty. Under the Conservatives, many British workers have seen drastic reductions in their wages and living conditions. Disabled people and welfare recipients (dubbed ‘benefit claimants’ in the tabloid media) have been particularly hard hit. In London, rents and house prices have reached insane levels, leading to a veritable social cleansing of the poor. While no mass movement has yet emerged to oppose them, these developments have left people bitter, furious and in many cases suicidal.

It’s hardly surprising that those seeking an end to this miserable state of affairs eagerly embrace political promises of a ‘fairer society’, or even ‘socialism’. And it is here that the left-wing ‘face’ of capitalism hoves into view. At moments when people become disillusioned with the system, left-wing political parties can help to contain and dissipate public anger. The ‘anti-austerity’ party Syriza has recently played this role in Greece.

There’s no reason to think that a newly ‘radical’ Labour party, were it elected, would do any better than Syriza. On the contrary, we’ve been here before. I vividly remember the celebrations in Glasgow in May 1997 when ‘New’ Labour came to power after 18 years of Conservative rule. As the parties spilled into the streets, one man bellowed ‘SOCIALISM NOW!’ into the night sky. But such hopes were quickly dashed. After 1997, Tony Blair’s party did not contribute to the creation of a more decent society, either at home, where inequality deepened, or abroad, where the ‘humanitarian’ bombs rained down, from Belgrade to Baghdad.

Corbyn, of course, rejects Blairism and New Labour. His ideal Labour party, by his own admission, would resemble that of the Wilson/Callaghan government of the 1970s. In fact, Corbyn was a close friend of a key member of that government, the late Tony Benn, a man who delivered searing indictments of the capitalist system when he no longer played any part in government, but who, as Secretary of State for Energy, was partly responsible for devastating pit closures and the repression of striking workers. Whatever fine phrases he uttered in the 1980s and 90s, as a minister Benn was hardly on the side of the British working class. In assessing the meaning of Corbyn, too, we should take into account the gap between left-wing rhetoric and the historical reality of the left in power.
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In terms of personal authenticity and genuine commitment to his constituents, Corbyn scores highly and his many radical statements show that it is possible to oppose and humanize the political discourse of the right. This is no small thing after many years in which the media and political parties in Britain have poured vitriol on immigrants, the poor and the unemployed. Ultimately, however, I think that it’s a mistake to support Corbyn or the Labour party, which is, whatever the rhetoric or intentions of its more radical members, a capitalist party. A genuinely ‘new kind of politics’ can only come about through the self-organization of ordinary people working to resist – and perhaps one day overcome – capitalism.

"Although it ain't no party, you're dying to get in" - David Byrne, 'The Civil Wars'

The right-wing and tabloid media reaction to the ongoing refugee situation in Europe has been predictable enough. In July of this year, the breakfast TV cockalorum Eamonn Holmes bemoaned how 'everybody' is 'pussy-footing' around the migrant issue, suggesting that electric fences be used to keep them away. Holmes was not a lone voice. Back in April, Sun columnist Katie Hopkins boldly recommended using gunships to stop the migrants, whom she described as 'cockroaches'. This turns an entry from Winston Smith's diary in Orwell's 1984 ('Last night to the flicks. All war films. One very good one of a ship full of refugees being bombed somewhere in the Mediterranean') into a policy suggestion. And Hopkins is seemingly valued for her controversialism: she is currently enjoying more public exposure - and no doubt financial remuneration - than ever, and now hosts phone-in programmes on LBC radio.

That Hopkins can be allowed to continue as a high-profile media commentator indicates the astonishing callousness of public attitudes to the most desperate global others. Something of this callousness is reflected in the recent British zombie film The Rezort, in which it is discovered that a corporation, with the help of a humanitarian organization, is deliberately turning refugees into zombies to be shot at and abused in a kind of undead theme park.

Day after day throughout this summer, meanwhile, the Daily Mail has been wailing about the 'tides' and 'swarms' of immigrants entering Europe. Even the BBC is getting in on the act. In recent weeks I have heard BBC radio journalists refer to the 'flooding' of migrants into Europe. One Radio 4 journalist, on the very same day that David Cameron was criticized for talking of migrant 'hordes', referred to an 'influx'. Well, here is a picture - one of several banned by Facebook - showing what an influx looks like when it hits the beach. This girl was one of several Middle Eastern children washed up on a Libyan shore, seemingly after a failed attempt to reach Europe via the Mediterranean.

In recent days, some of these pictures have been circulating on social media and even in mainstream news media, although notably the images that have gained most mainstream traction have been a less overtly upsetting, long shots photograph of a drowned Syrian boy, Aylan Kurdi, being removed from a Turkish beach. Humankind, it seems, cannot take very much reality. But as public consciousness of the scale of this suffering grows, and as ordinary people across Europe mobilize to assist the refugees, much of the mainstream media has been forced to tone down its dehumanising discourse. Hegemony in action, you might say.

Yet the priorities of the capitalist media are fundamentally unchanged. Although The Sun has of late adopted a more sympathetic tone, a recent editorial nonetheless calls, absurdly, for the closure of borders and the (further) bombing of the Middle East as 'solutions' to the refugee crisis. And by failing - or perhaps we should say refusing - to articulate the structural causes of this tragedy, the news media demonstrate what the sociologist Chris Rojek calls 'event consciousness', separating event from process and framing humanitarian emergencies as singular happenings unconnected with wider social and economic processes.

This de-contextualization should be resisted and the origins of these horrific events should be made clear. The roots of today's refugee crises lie in the crisis of capitalism, with its increasingly militarized borders, refugee-creating wars and socio-economic chaos. Capitalism is a deadly and inhuman system: according to its logic, only employees (who can be exploited) and consumers (who can raise profits) exist. Any project aimed at ending capitalism, by contrast, must embrace all of humanity, recognizing and empowering those who, from the point of view of the current social order, do not exist.

"Beware of all those in whom the urge to punish is strong" - Nietzsche

To twist the classic Tolstoyan aperçu: all good relationships are alike; but each bad relationship is screwed up in its own way. The reasons why some people may betray their marriage vows of sexual and emotional fidelity are legion: disabilities, sexual dysfunctions, state prohibitions against certain kinds of sexual behaviour, marriages - whether chosen, forced or arranged - that have turned sour, or simply boredom may all come into play. To condemn extra-marital infidelity with no knowledge of the context - of the 'full story' - is moralism, pure and simple. 'Cheating' is a phenomenon to be figured out by those who are directly involved in a relationship. Unless invited to do otherwise, the rest of us should, quite frankly, butt out.

But we don't. Even as we condemn them, we relish peeking in on the sexual transgressions of others, as the popularity of celebrity sex scandals or the hidden-camera TV reality documentary Cheaters suggests. In fact, the widespread use of the juvenile term 'cheating' - which implies that an illicit path has been followed towards a desirable end - is indicative of the tremendous confusion and hypocrisy in our attitudes towards sexual behaviour.

As Glenn Greenwald writes, the media responses and public reactions to the recent data hack of the 'extra-marital affairs' website Ashley Madison suggest that little has changed in Western attitudes towards bedswerving since the days of Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter. Greenwald notes some of the ways in which the media have been facilitating public access to the hacked data. Public reactions to the hack, meanwhile, run from prurience to physical violence, as reports of suicides and revenge crimes begin to surface. Conceivably, some people whose names appeared in the hacked data may even face the death penalty, since adultery is illegal in some countries. And yet the hackers, as I understand it, will face no repercussions. Contrast this with the fate of Chelsea Manning, whose hacking activities helped to reveal the depredations of US military power and who is now languishing in prison for her 'crimes' - possibly for the rest of her life.

We are, it seems, incorrigibly puritanical stickybeaks. Increasingly, as Michel Foucault argued in his History of Sexuality, we have come to regard sexuality as our ontological foundation - the very essence of our social and moral identity. Little wonder, then, that we tend to overrate the importance of sexual behaviour in our moral reckoning. As the Ashley Madison story broke, I was reading one of several autobiographical works by the largely forgotten British writer Ethel Mannin. Confessions and Impressions was written, precociously enough, when Mannin was barely 30 years old. By comparison with her engaging novels, Mannin's non-fictional writing is mostly rather trite; but here Mannin - writing in 1930 no less - makes the sharp point that morality is often equated with sexual conformity. Bemoaning 'English' hypocrisy and 'humbug', she notes that

"Our code of morality is exclusively concerned with sex; when we talk of 'immorality' we mean a deviation from the sex code; with the larger immoralities of hypocrisy and pretence and spiritual dishonesty we are not concerned. We have reduced morality as we have reduced passion to a question of sexual ethics"

Indeed. How many deeply unpleasant people present themselves - and are regarded by others - as 'moral', simply on the basis of their conformity to a conventional sexual code (a code that has always been mobilized by the bourgeoisie for purposes of social control)? This is not to say, of course, that sexual infidelity is always, or even often, justifiable; but humanity is, to quote Goethe, 'mixed and erring' and our zeal for making absolute judgements about the sex lives of others is symptomatic of a shrunken ethical sensibility.

Twenty years ago, thousands of Bosnian Muslim men and boys were killed by Serb forces at Srebrenica. The victims of this atrocity - the worst crime of the 1992-95 Bosnian war and the largest massacre in Europe since the Second World War - deserve to be remembered and properly commemorated. Yet the Srebrenica massacre has often been mobilized to serve dominant geopolitical agendas.

At the time of its occurrence, as George Szamuely argues in his recent book Bombs for Peace, the killings at Srebrenica constituted a golden propaganda opportunity for the US, helping to redirect public attention from Operation Storm - the Croatian-US led assault that drove the Serb population out of Croatia's Krajina region. In the present day, meanwhile, the tragedy of Srebrenica continues to be used for propaganda purposes. In the week in which the UN - whose forces, ironically, played quite a significant part in allowing the massacre to happen - has been called upon to officially classify the massacre as a 'genocide' (a call vetoed by Russia, of course, and opposed by Serbia and the Bosnian Serbs), the BBC has broadcast a documentary Deadly Warning: Srebrenica Revisited. Presented and narrated by journalist Myriam Francois-Cerrah, the film follows a group of British schoolchildren as they visit the Srebrenica memorial and talk about the massacre with local people.

Some of the testimonies of these people are very moving. Yet the one-sidedness of the documentary's account of the war is apparent in numerous details. Early in the production, for example, the Bosnian capital Sarajevo is praised as having been, before the war, a multicultural European city; this is true, but it is revealing that nobody notes that Yugoslavia itself was multicultural before it was broken apart with the encouragement of the US and European powers and the forces of nationalism within the former federation. In this documentary, as in most Western media narratives about the Bosnian war, Bosnian 'independence' is simply taken for granted as a positive and 'natural' development that was opposed by intransigent, backwards-looking Serbs. Here is perhaps not the place to explore in great detail the background to the war; but anybody with an interest in an alternative view of the events that led to the conflict would do well to consider intelligent counter-narratives, such as this documentary from George Bogdanich.

Strikingly - and this cannot simply be a function of the documentary's limited, 30-minute running time - Deadly Warning offers almost no historical contextualisation of the Srebrenica massacre itself.  Numerous barbarities were committed against Serbs in the area prior to July 1995 during attacks launched from the so-called Srebrenica 'safe area' (which in fact served as a protection zone for Muslim forces) and the UN played a role in allowing these murderous raids to be carried out.  While these attacks are briefly mentioned, the fact that they are introduced by a shady-looking Serb commander suggests that they are merely the rationalizations of a war criminal. This is deeply problematic. As Janine Clark has written in an academic article about responsibility for the war, ‘It is undeniable that Serbian forces, both the regular army and various paramilitary organizations, committed heinous crimes during the Yugoslav wars. Yet terrible crimes were also committed against the Serbs – in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo’. While we should certainly be wary of what the historian Peter Gay, in relation to the Nazi Holocaust, once called the ‘comparative trivialisation’ of atrocity, we must acknowledge that crimes were committed on all sides during the war, even if Serb - and Croat - forces were responsible for rather more of them than were the Bosnian Muslims.

And what does the documentary have to say about the involvement of the world's great powers? Discussing the consequences of Srebrenica, Francois-Cerrah comments that the 'international community' was finally 'galvanised into action' by the killings at Srebrenica, but neglects to mention that this 'action' involved massive and deadly force directed against Serb civilians, as well as ethnic cleansing, which even continued in 1996, after the Dayton Accords had been implemented. Indeed, Deadly Warning elides any discussion of the military and political complexities of the Bosnian war, resorting instead to the psychologistic platitude that its horrors were simply the result of 'intolerance' towards Bosnian Muslims.

In line with the current preoccupation of the UN, the aim of this documentary is to ensure that Srebrenica is remembered as a genocide. I have no particular problem with this description - or rather, I would have no problem with it, were such descriptions ever remotely objectively applied. We should remember that the designation of a massacre as a 'genocide' is always an ideological operation. How interesting it is that Srebrenica - a massacre committed by the US's de facto enemies, the Serbs - is regarded as a 'genocide' by the US and its allies, whereas the 2003 invasion of Iraq led by the US, in which a million people were killed, is described as 'humanitarian intervention' or tamely written off by its former cheerleaders as a mistake. If we are to call Srebrenica a genocide, let us be under no illusions that to do so is a political language game on the part of the Western powers and part of a wider process of highly partial historical commemoration.

Since I first listened in awestruck reverence to The Ideal Copy and A Bell Is a Cup in the late 1980s, I have regarded Wire as that most embarrassing object of white male obsession: 'my favourite band'. As a teenager growing up in Thatcher's Britain, Wire spoke to my sense of living in a decomposing society in which everything was for sale. And while the country's social and moral degradation persists, so too, thankfully, do Wire.

The post-punk cinq glorieuses of 1977-1982 saw new wave, art rock bands like The Cure (Three Imaginary Boys, Seventeen Seconds, Pornography) and Talking Heads (More Songs About Building and Food, Fear of Music, Remain in Light) make astonishing artistic progress - progress that in most cases was not continued thereafter. Wire were part of this movement but did not lose their impetus, even if temporary loss of momentum led to some hiatuses in the 80s and 90s. After forty-years of development, Wire's music - as many reviewers of their new, self-titled album observe - still sounds fresh. Yet the new album preserves the essential Wire formula: a tight, pulsating musical minimalism that manages to sound both portentous and playful.

And then there's the words. Edvard Graham Lewis may be the most talented lyricist of his generation. What attracted me most to Wire more than a quarter of a century ago was the angry irony, alliterations and twisted idioms, all placed in the service of social criticism. In 'The Queen of Ur and the King of Um' yuppies are described as 'crack-head mirrors licking the soiled mint'. In 'Life in the Manscape', meanwhile, the contemporary popular music industry is summed up with the withering line: 'The pope of pop drives a church of steel'. I'm not aware of any other rock lyricists operating at that level of literary sophistication. There's a Shakespearian quality to these pentameters and their pugnacious poetics recall the righteous fulminations of a Langland.

This is not as far-fetched as it may sound. Wire songs often contemplate contemporary society through motifs borrowed from medieval literature and art, resulting in strange, angular visions of a 'world turned upside down' ('What Do You See'?) with lyrics that reference the folly paintings of Bosch ('Madman's Honey') and Bruegel ('Silk Skin Paws'). The songs trade in coded messages and enigmatic reportage. They do not so much conjure new or fantastical worlds as defamiliarize the one we are living in now, highlighting its absurdities through wordplay, condensed metaphor and ostranenie. For example, the first track on the new album, 'Blogging', imagines the biblical magi arranging to attend the birth of Christ via the Internet; its wry take on social media is equalled in cleverness only by St. Vincent's recent track 'Digital Witness'.

Anther intriguing facet of Wire songs is that many of them consist entirely of questions, usually delivered by Colin Newman in a tone that mixes aggression, amusement and accusation. Along with their atmosphere of menace, the interrogative disposition of Wire's songs captures the psychological and ontological insecurity of our times, the constant, bewildering liquefaction and reconstitution of identities and roles in today's society. It's just one of the elements that makes Wire such a distinctive and contemporary band, despite their advanced years. Indeed, few post-punk groups were as innovative as Wire, and they remain sui generis. They are still the flies in the ointment, the buzz in the drum of the ear, and the foremost British exponents of what Mark Fisher calls 'popular modernism' in music.

"It's painful to submit to our bosses; it's even more stupid to choose them" - May 1968 graffiti

"One more time around might do it" - Soundgarden

Russell Brand is a likeable figure and one of the few celebrities to become involved in working class struggles in the UK. But his recent volte face over electoralism - shifting from an anti-electoral position to supporting the Labour party - does him no favours. Remembering 1997 and its aftermath should be enough to dispel any illusions that Labour offers a real alternative to the Conservatives (dreadful as they have been over the past five years). In fact, the Labour party has not even tried to disguise its intention to continue the ongoing attacks on working class people, pledging a continuation of workfare and welfare caps that will devastate the lives of Britain's poorest and vowing to clamp down on immigration.

Brand is not the only left-wing commentator beckoning us towards the ballot box on Thursday. In a piece that leaves no leftist cliché unused, the supposed anarchist John Sheil urges the reader to cast her vote in order to block the progress of 'neoliberalism'. Mark Fisher, in a more sophisticated register, argues similarly, applauding of the recent resurgence of 'popular leftism'. For both Fisher and Sheil, this movement includes the Scottish National Party - a party so radical that it is backed by top Scottish businesspeople and the Scottish Sun. Indeed, like teenaged hipsters who have just discovered their latest favourite band, many on the English, as well as the Scottish left are now hyping the SNP as the next big thing, a supposed 'anti-austerity' party à la Syriza.

In her recent New Statesman article on the election, Laurie Penny acknowledges that the most widespread arguments made in support of electoralism (e.g. 'if you don't vote you can't complain') are nonsensical and that voting cannot be the only route to radical political change; but she nonetheless advocates voting in order to keep the right-wing rotters, such as UKIP, from power. This is a fundamentally conservative position. Nothing is more serviceable to the British ruling class than the notion that parties such as UKIP pose a 'threat to democracy': it's an idea that can be used to sow illusions in the system. That is why UKIP and its representatives are excoriated by mainstream politicians and company CEOs and are the butt of endless jokes in social media memes and BBC comedy programmes, from The Now Show to Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle (much as I love Lee, his UKIP-bashing is easily the cheapest part of his act). The mockery of fatuous bigots and extremists gives the liberal soul the warm glow of moral superiority; but in the end it only serves to insulate the mainstream parties - parties that have brought far more misery to immigrants than UKIP ever could - from criticism. It is dominant ideology dressed up as satirical subversion.

By way of full disclosure, I must admit that I did once vote in a British general election and at each election there is always something that makes me consider - just for a moment - casting a ballot. This time around, for instance, rent-a-gob Katie Hopkins has pledged to leave the UK if Labour wins the election and in light of this I have never been so tempted to vote. In the present era, however, there is no 'progressive' capitalist party that can halt, let alone reverse the evident decline of the system. Every vote is a Yes for capitalism.​

George Santayana famously claimed that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. For nearly two centuries now, the British ruling class has been unable to leave Afghanistan alone, although its various shows of force have often ended in humiliation.

Available only via BBC iPlayer, Adam Curtis’s new documentary, Bitter Lake, takes a sceptical, sideways look at the calamitous history of Western military and cultural intervention in the so-called 'graveyard of empires' and the concomitant rise of Wahhabism there since the 1950s. As such, the film is to some extent a reprise of Curtis’s earlier exploration of East-West geopolitical entanglements in The Power of Nightmares (2002). In a tour-de-force of television storytelling, Curtis shows how the manoeuvres of the great powers in Afghanistan have often been self-defeating, as Western states support allies who will later be enemies and attack enemies who will later be friends. In doing so, he emphasizes the decompositional tendencies of twentieth-century imperialism. Indeed, while some left-wing commentators, such as Michael Parenti, stress the coldly calculating, clinical nature of Western interventionism, Curtis suggests that its operations are often quite irrational – perhaps increasingly so – as he sets out to show the often unintended and frequently deadly consequences of Western meddling in the Middle East.

Images of some of the abuses and indignities suffered by Afghans at the hand of Western forces in recent years – bombings, detainments, retinal scanning – are mostly presented without voiceover; but together they present a picture of the West’s recent Afghan campaign that is starkly at odds with the one presented by mainstream news media and television drama. Yet much of the film’s interest lies in its documentation of the cultural, as well as the military implications of Western intervention in Afghanistan. One of its most wince-inducing scenes, in fact, shows an earnest British art critic rather haplessly trying to explain the momentousness of Marcel Duchamp’s urinal installation to a classroom of understandably perplexed Afghan women. This is cultural imperialism gone horribly wrong.

Bitter Lake is oddly evocative, its argument illustrated and enriched by haunting music, archive film and revealing rushes of television news footage. Curtis works in the tradition of what film theorist Patricia Pisters, drawing on Deleuze and Guattari, has recently called 'filmmaker-metallurgists', bending the 'matter-flows' of the archive to create alternative histories. Watching Curtis's ‘outtake’ sequences - the news films that never made it to our screens - one feels a strong sense of the uncanny. Curtis’s material exposes, in Freud's famous formulation, that which ‘ought to have remained hidden and secret’. As we listen to US marines - shrouded, symbolically enough, in darkness - boasting of being ‘natural born killers’, we are made privy to the obscene underside of Western rhetoric about democracy and freedom. The footage of an armed attack on President Karzai's motorcade, meanwhile, is both horrific and - perhaps because of its graininess and the absence of any voiceover - distinctly dreamlike. But however unreal such scenes may seem, they reveal ugly truths about Afghanistan then and now. At its best, Bitter Lake invokes a form of political uncanny, staging a return of our repressed knowledge about Afghanistan's bloody history, unearthing 'strangely familiar', half-forgotten stories about the country’s imperialist past. 

Curtis also suggests something of how the confusions and contradictions of Western geopolitical strategy are reflected and refracted in popular culture via references to the Afghan version of The Thick of It and Solaris, repeatedly comparing the effects of Soviet (and later Western) involvement in Afghanistan with those of the noxious, hallucinogenic ocean in Tarkovsky's classic film. Such points are mostly left implicit. In fact, Bitter Lake, perhaps to a greater extent than other Curtis documentaries, is largely a writerly text: the viewer is invited to forge connections between seemingly disparate textual elements.

When Curtis himself tries to join the dots, however, he is not always convincing. While the elliptical nature of this film sometimes makes it is hard to be certain what is being claimed, there is something disingenuous about some of Curtis’s arguments. As in The Power of Nightmares, Curtis seems to take at face value the US ruling class's post-9/11 claim to want to ‘liberate’ the Middle East into democracy, arguing that this noble vision failed. I'm not so sure: no doubt many US politicians and top brass genuinely bought into their own rhetoric - but surely not all of them did. Curtis also claims that Western politicians since the close of the twentieth century have collapsed their explanatory narratives into ‘simple stories of good versus evil’, thus obscuring the truth, for example, about what has been happening in Afghanistan and why allied troops were sent there - an odd proposition insofar as Manichean simplifications have always been a key element of Western propaganda.

By acknowledging of the role played by Saudi oil and opium production in the fortunes of Afghanistan, Curtis mostly avoids the impression given in some of his other documentaries that history is driven by the ideological convictions of political cliques, leaders and Great Men, rather than material imperatives - although there are still traces of idealism in some of Curtis's faux-naif pronouncements ('In 1978, they decided to have a revolution'). At such moments one become aware of the contrast between the rich, materialist analysis of Curtis's archive material and the rather attenuated, idealist nature of some of his theses. But these are relatively minor objections to what is an engaging film that brings to light some of the brutality and bloodshed caused by Western imperialism in the Middle East.