First published on the Critical Studies in Television blog​

"He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster" - Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

For docudrama obsessives like me, a new Peter Kosminsky production is always eagerly anticipated and the unfolding of The State over four consecutive evenings on Channel 4 last week made for a particularly intense viewing experience. Like most of Kosminsky’s television work, The State is an exhaustively researched drama with a bold premise: four Britons travel to Raqqa to join the Islamic State, but soon discover that daily life in the caliphate is not all it’s cracked up to be by its online advocates. Although some of the new recruits remain true believers until the end, others are repulsed by the slaughter, slavery and torture that they witness.
 
Two characters, in particular, refuse to become the monsters IS wants them to be. A medical doctor, Shakira (Ony Uhiara), travels to Syria with her young son, determined to help build the caliphate; yet she struggles to accept IS’s barbaric treatment of women and finally decides to flee from Syria when she finds her child and other junior recruits playing football with a severed head. The drama’s other central protagonist, the sensitive, doe-eyed Jalal (Sam Otto), also comes to question the actions of his new comrades: why, he asks, do they slaughter their Shia enemies when they are retreating – an action proscribed by the Quran? He is told in reply that the caliphate must brutally ‘establish’ itself and that ‘there will be time for mercy later’.
 
The State shows the essential hypocrisy of the IS demagogues, who rationalize their own viciousness and denounce all others as infidels. Indeed, as Hegel famously observed, ‘evil resides in the very gaze which perceives evil all around itself’ and in a drama that is very much about witnessing and looking, the recruits who resist IS must literally refuse this 'evil gaze': when Jalal attends a public beheading, for example, he averts his eyes at the crucial moment (see image above). Such refusals reveal the ambivalence and fundamental decency of some of the militants. After all, whatever the tabloid newspapers may say, not all of the young zealots who join IS are monsters. Many of them are less evil than misguided, duped by Internet propaganda, disaffected by capitalist modernity, and ignorant of any genuinely emancipatory perspective.
 
Betrayal – especially betrayal by organizations and institutions – is a recurring theme in Kosminsky’s oeuvre. In No Child of Mine (1997), twelve-year-old Kerry is sexually abused by a succession of family members and care workers. In The Project (2002), a group of enthusiastic young politicos enter the Labour Party of the 1990s with high ideals, but are forced to compromise their principles at every turn. The Government Inspector (2005) indicts New Labour even more strongly, going so far as to portray the suicide of the government weapons inspector David Kelly in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq. And 2011’s The Promise depicts the abandonment of Arabs in Palestine by the departing soldiers of the British Mandate, showing its violent consequences in 1947 and the present day. In The State, too, betrayal is a key theme: not only have these young men and women been lied to by the propagandists of IS; in signing up for jihad, they have betrayed their own better natures. The point is emphasized in the final episode when Jalal, whose faith in Daesh is already wavering, is visited by his father Munir (Nitin Ganatra). Munir scolds his son for destroying his family and for betraying the enlightened values of toleration and multiculturalism that, in his view, characterize British society.
 
The question remains: why are some Westerners susceptible to jihadist ideology? More specifically, why would a headstrong and savvy medical doctor like Shakira have any interest in joining a misogynistic death cult? This question has been addressed in several recent films. In Mijke de Jong’s Layla M. (2016), for example, a young Muslim woman living in Amsterdam is increasingly angered by social discrimination against Muslims and by video images coming out of Syria and Gaza; she eventually leaves for a new life in Jordan, but soon regrets her decision. The process of ‘radicalization’ was also explored a decade ago in Kosminsky’s own two-parter Britz (2007), in which another educated and politically conscious medic, Nasima (Manjinder Virk), is driven into the embrace of Al Qaeda in a narrative that moves between the UK and Pakistan.
 
Britz offered a powerful indictment of the British state, linking the political disaffection of young British Muslims to their experiences of Islamophobic prejudice and anti-terror legislation in the wake of 9/11. The State is more limited in its locational range and political scope: after an initial three-minute montage showing the recruits leaving the UK, the rest of the drama concentrates on their new lives in Syria. This surprised and slightly disappointed me, as I had been expecting the kind of interwoven 'home and abroad' narrative structure offered in Britz and some of Kosminsky’s other geopolitical dramas, such as Warriors (1999) and The Promise (2011). While Kosminsky’s depiction of the recruits’ new life in Syria is enlightening, I would have appreciated some exploration of the domestic experiences and political grievances that pushed these intelligent young folk towards the ideological abyss. The absence of such backstory makes The State, for all its contemporary relevance, a less satisfying treatment of terrorism than Britz. While Kosminsky does sometimes hint at the motivations of his central characters, there are rather a lot of unanswered questions at the end of episode 4. Shakira, for example, remains something of an enigma to the end. And while we might guess that he is attempting to atone for past misdeeds, we never discover exactly why a former British soldier, Abu Ibrahim Al-Brittani (Jack Greenlees), has joined the jihadists.  
 
In his book Reason, Faith and Revolution, Terry Eagleton writes that our age is 'divided between those who believe far too much and those who believe far too little'. Today’s Western-born 'Islamic' terrorist belongs to the first category: as Alain Badiou points out in The True Life, he typically rejects the 'empty' subject positions offered by liberal capitalism, namely, individualistic careerism on the one hand, and hedonistic, perpetual adolescence (or what the late Mark Fisher termed 'depressive hedonia') on the other. However nihilistic it may ultimately be, jihadism promises young people an attractive alternative set of values and the sense of social belonging and political purpose that so many of them find lacking in mainstream Western culture. Many recruits are driven by righteous fury at the barbarism of Western imperialism, but unable to see that IS offers only a mirror image of that violence. Some, like Shakira, seem to be motivated by humanitarian impulses. Still others are drawn to IS by the promise of romance: perhaps the drama’s most pitiful character is the naive teenager Ushna (Shavani Cameron), who dreams of marrying a heroic warrior and becoming ‘a lioness amongst the lions’. In an alienating society, some people, it seems, will go anywhere and do anything to achieve a sense of love and belonging. And The State shows just how warm and welcoming IS can be – initially, at least – towards its new recruits.
 
Kosminsky’s style is, as ever, understated and effective here. The preponderance of following shots and over-the-shoulder shots allows the viewer to move with the protagonists and thus to discover the horrors of religious extremism from their perspective. And while the tone of the drama becomes progressively more sombre, there are some darkly droll touches throughout. The wall of the schoolroom in which the female recruits have their induction session, for example, displays a cheerful rainbow composed of brightly coloured strips of paper – a bitterly ironic symbol of hope for the future. The bright pink suitcase with which Ushna travels to Syria (the other, more practical recruits carry rucksacks) is similarly absurd, but serves as a touching reminder of the teenager’s childish innocence.
 
Given Kosminsky’s record as a maker of ‘controversial’ television, it was inevitable that he would be accused by right-wing pundits of glamorizing terrorism. Such criticisms are, however, quite wrong-headed: Kosminsky’s sympathies lie with the betrayed recruits of IS, not with the organization itself, which he thoroughly condemns. If anything, The State should be seen as a counter-narrative to IS propaganda. These days, of course, politicians and filmmakers are eager to promote an anti-terror agenda via the cultural industries: in February 2016 US Secretary of State John Kerry even met with the heads of major studios to discuss ways of incorporating anti-IS messages into Hollywood films. Kosminsky, however, avoids the racial stereotyping that so often characterizes Hollywood portrayals of terrorists – especially when they are Muslim. The State may not be Kosminsky’s most penetrating or critical drama, but it provides a rare insight into the workings of a terrifying organization and the strange attraction it holds for its deluded acolytes.

I generally tend not to reproduce other people's writing on this blog, but Juraj Katalenac's essay at the Adidas Marxism site (here) provides quite a useful summary of some problems with contemporary 'American' leftist theory. While none of these points is original, Katalenac points to: the conservatism of concepts such as 'cultural appropriation'; the limited applicability of US-centric notions of race to other national contexts; and the tendency to regard the working class as an identity - one which enjoys a particular moral status as the 'salt of the earth' (i.e. what Gáspár Tamás calls the Rousseauian view of the working class).

Interesting lecture by Sut Jhally on the organization of digital technology in capitalism, via Aldous Huxley and Neil Postman...

According to my late mother, my grandad was evacuated on 'the last boat out of Dunkirk'. I didn't discuss this with the old guy before he died - I was too young and lived too far away from him - but after his death I read more about Operation Dynamo and often wondered about his story. Christopher Nolan's much-heralded extravaganza is the latest of several attempts to put that story on the big screen.

It's only fair to begin by saying that I'm no great fan of Nolan's work. I found Interstellar (2014) overblown, and several critics have - rightly, I think - identified films such as The Dark Knight (2008) and The Dark Knight Rises (2012) as politically conservative. Let's just say I prefer Nolan's early work. Nevertheless, stylistically, the new film is innovative and sometimes captivating: throughout Dunkirk, sea and sky twist and spiral in a mesmerizing kaleidoscope of blue-grey fractals. And Nolan builds tension well, emphasizing the soldiers' desperate plight by showing men in various types of trap: Harry Styles and company are trapped in a boat that is being shot at by the enemy; a Spitfire pilot is unable to escape from the cockpit of his sea-ditched plane as the water level rises; a traumatized and unpredictable soldier (Cillian Murphy) is locked inside a room below deck on a rescue boat - and presumably locked inside himself, too. All are encased and in danger.

On the other hand, we are hardly invited to empathize with these imperilled men. The ensemble nature of the film - together with Hans Zimmer's bombastic musical soundtrack - leaves little room for expressions of interiority or, indeed, for any sort of character development; as one might expect from a film shot on 70mm, this is experiential, immersive cinema rather than character-driven drama. Of course, ensemble war films can work well: one thinks here of The Thin Red Line, whose metaphysical voiceovers provide a ruminative and arguably subversive perspective on war; but in Dunkirk there is no such narrative device to shed light on the soldiers' feelings or thoughts, making this a rather unengaging film at the emotional level.

The film’s ideological register, meanwhile, is distinctly British-patriotic. While the opening scene (easily the film's most exciting) fleetingly depicts some glowering Frenchmen manning the town's barricades, the very significant French presence on the beach at Dunkirk is all but ignored (for that side of the story, see Henri Verneuil's superior, irony-laden 1964 film Weekend at Dunkirk). Whether in the air with an impossibly deadly Spitfire ace played by Tom Hardy (who single-handedly seems to down the entire Luftwaffe), at sea with saturnine sailor Mark Rylance, or on the beach with the harried and frustrated evacuees, we see through British eyes. At times the national-chauvinist sentiment grates: Rylance, sailing towards a deadly warzone, finds time to wax lyrical about the beauty of the overhead Spitfires 'with their Rolls Royce engines' and the film ends, all too predictably, with the words of Winston Churchill, solemnly read aloud from a newspaper by a returning soldier.

None of the soldiers, meanwhile, expresses a view about the political causes of their plight and there is thus no counterweight to the film's patriotism. Indeed, while Dunkirk is a film about an inglorious defeat, the mood slowly lists towards sentimental nationalism (recalling a motif from Interstellar, 'Home', as uttered by Kenneth Branagh's naval officer Commander Bolton, becomes the film's most resonant utterance). Evacuated of the French allies, the German enemies, and any political frame of reference beyond Churchillian bluster, Nolan’s film feels strangely insular and abstract (perhaps, as Adam Nayman suggests, Nolan should be seen as a Platonic rather than a humanist filmmaker). And so, for all its audio-visual Sturm und Drang, Dunkirk is ultimately a rather tame affair in which character development and political context are sacrificed for grand spectacle and bland sentimentality.

First published in Star and Crescent

At the end of last year, a supposedly new threat to the integrity of Western public discourse hove into public view. I am referring, of course, to ‘fake news’. This blunt, monosyllabic phrase strikes the ear as childish and naïve and its association with Donald Trump, whose boastful speeches and vulgar tweets represent an unprecedented debasement of political communication, hardly commends it as a serious analytical concept.

Nevertheless, fake news is both real and ubiquitous. It is, as the writer Richard Seymour puts it, ‘the chemically distilled version of “churnalism”’, an epiphenomenon of a journalistic economy that increasingly relies on attracting eyeballs to weird, scandalous or sensational content. And it can have alarming consequences. In December 2016, for example, it emerged that Pakistan had issued a nuclear attack warning to Israel after the appearance, on the Pakistan-based conspiracy website AWD News, of an entirely fictitious story claiming that Israel had threatened the country with annihilation.

Yet the fake news phenomenon is hardly new, especially where wars and geopolitical conflicts are concerned. Nor is it a problem particular to the age of the Internet. The reporting of the Bosnian war, which began in the spring of 1992 – just before the widespread commercialization of the World Wide Web – provides an object lesson in how media manipulation, up to and including outright fabrication, can deform public understanding of world events. The media presentation of Bosnia, I would suggest, parallels that of the current conflict in Syria and is therefore worth briefly rehearsing.

Although the Serbs possessed significant advantages over Croat and Bosnian forces in military hardware, the Bosnian war was a multi-lateral civil conflict. Most journalists, however, cast it as a one-sided war of Serb aggression instigated by one man: Serbian president Slobodan Milošević. Although his counterparts in the governments of Bosnia (Alija Izetbegović) and Croatia (Franjo Tuđman) were men with well-known fascist inclinations who played key roles in pursuing and prolonging the war, Milošević, as the Western media’s designated demon, was the only leader blamed for hostilities.
 
Throughout the war in Bosnia, it was seldom acknowledged that atrocities widely blamed on the Serbs, such as the Sarajevo marketplace bombings, had disputed authorship. At least some of these ‘Serb’ atrocities were Bosnian Muslim operations aimed at provoking a Western military response; as the British diplomat David Owen, the EU peace negotiator in Bosnia, noted in his memoir Balkan Odyssey, no seasoned observer of the war doubted that such deception went on.

Unreliable statistics, meanwhile, were reported as facts. To take only the most egregious example, it was widely claimed by the end of the Bosnian war that 250,000 people had lost their lives in the republic (US diplomat Richard Holbrooke, in his book To End A War, puts the tally at 300,000), whereas the true death toll is likely to have been more like 100,000. The inflation of this figure – which is horrific enough as it is – helped to bolster the case for military intervention.

Moreover, Western journalists’ descriptions of the Bosnian war often drew upon historical analogies that were at best strained, at worst downright propagandistic. Looking back at the coverage of Bosnia in his book Strange Places, Questionable People, the veteran BBC reporter John Simpson complained that ‘everything came to be seen through the filter of the Holocaust’. This dubious historicization resulted in a grossly simplified narrative of villains (Serbs) and victims (Bosnian Muslims) that licensed well-meaning liberals to argue for US/NATO intervention on humanitarian grounds.
 
As I show in my recent book Screening Bosnia, even Hollywood played a part in reinforcing a misleading picture of the Bosnian conflict. Michael Winterbottom’s film Welcome to Sarajevo (1997), for example, alters the identities of those involved in the infamous Sarajevo wedding party massacre, transforming its Serb victims into Croats, and so on, in line with the Western media script.

If the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s were thoroughly misrepresented in the Western media, fake news was hardly less prominent in the following decade, most notoriously in the fictitious claim, repeated mantra-like by politicians and journalists in the lead-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, that Saddam Hussein possessed ‘weapons of mass destruction’ primed for use against the West. More recently, the disastrous NATO bombing of Libya, which plunged the country into a vortex of violence, was justified by sordid lies about Viagra-fuelled rapes and a supposed plan to massacre civilians in Benghazi – a deceit that tricked many leftists into supporting intervention against Gaddafi.

But it is perhaps the Western reporting of the ongoing devastation of Syria that bears the closest similarity to that of the war in Bosnia. As in Bosnia, what is unfolding in Syria is a civil war in which one of the belligerents possesses a significant advantage in ordnance and destructive capability. Indeed, like the Serbs in the former Yugoslavia, the ‘Syrian regime’ is responsible for more atrocities than its opponents. Yet its dominance has been absolutized and, as in Bosnia, the war has generally been presented as an entirely one-sided affair.
 
Bias and over-simplification are the order of the day. As Stephen Kinzer complains, US and British journalists routinely criticize the crimes perpetrated by Assad and his allies, but devote less attention to atrocities carried out by the groups they variously describe as ‘moderates’ or ‘rebels’. The April 4 chemical attack on civilians in Idlib, probably perpetrated by Syrian government fighters, was framed by Western journalists and politicians as an explosion of evil of world-historical magnitude; it even prompted Trump to lament the slaughter of so many ‘beautiful babies’. Yet the even more deadly ‘rebel’ bombing, a few days later, of Shia refugee buses attracted relatively little media attention. The civilians killed in the former event were, to use Ed Herman and Noam Chomsky’s terms, ‘worthy victims’ of a hated enemy; those killed in the latter were ‘unworthy’ and easily ignored. As Robert Fisk wrote acerbically in The Independent following the bus attack, ‘Some dead Syrian babies matter, I guess. Other dead Syrian babies don’t’.
 
As in Bosnia, ‘facts’ about the Syrian war change at such a rapid pace that few notice – and even fewer apologize – when they are shown to be false. As Fisk points out in another Independent article from last year, Western news sources widely reported that 250,000 people were ‘trapped’ by Syrian army forces in East Aleppo in late 2016, yet this number turned out to be probably less than 90,000. It is hard to know for sure, since no independent foreign journalists were present in the city. As Fisk observes, Western news media have become reliant on social media and testimony drawn from potentially compromised sources operating out of jihadist-controlled zones. This recalls the situation of international journalists in Bosnia, who for safety reasons were mostly confined to Sarajevo’s Holiday Inn and were therefore unable to witness the events of the war at first hand.

And as in the case of Bosnia, liberal journalists have often been the most vigorous advocates of war in Syria. The New York Times and the self-styled ‘world’s news leader’ CNN, who were the loudest supporters of military intervention in the Balkans, have been pushing hard for ‘action’ to be taken against Assad and veteran journalists such as CNN’s Christiane Amanpour are once again producing the sort of advocacy journalism they first practiced during the Yugoslav wars.
 
Amanpour draws comparisons between Syria and Bosnia, warning that the Western powers ‘cannot stand by’ as she claims they did in the 1990s. In fact, along with politicians such as Hillary Clinton, Amanpour is part of a powerful establishment consensus promoting the doctrine of ‘humanitarian intervention’. Trump’s recent missile bombing of the al-Shayrat airfield – an attack that killed several people, including children, according to the Syrians – was most likely a reluctant attempt to placate this lobby. The action certainly drew widespread approbation from establishment quarters; the New York Times’s Mark Landler was just one of many liberal journalists who applauded Trump for finally taking a stand on Syria, claiming that the bombing was the righteous action of ‘a man suddenly aware that the world’s problems were now his’.

And yet there is a possibility that the horrific chemical attack on civilians in Idlib, to which Trump’s bombing was a response, was not in fact carried out by Syrian forces, as CNN and other liberal media have been insisting with what could be seen, in psychoanalytic terms, as psychotic certainty. As in Bosnia, much is uncertain and the capacity of all of the war’s belligerents for duplicity and misdirection should not be underestimated. Assad and Putin are mass murderers who are routinely committing sickening atrocities against the people of Syria, a reality obscured by pro-Putin/Assad news media organizations such as RT, which serve as apologists for state terror; but so too are the Syrian government’s brutal jihadist opponents, who are responsible for threats, abduction, torture and mass murder.

Even if the Syrians and/or Russians did orchestrate the Idlib chemical attack, this is no reason for the US to add to the death toll in Syria with its own missile strikes. As many radical commentators have suggested, a truly internationalist response to the Syrian horror cannot possibly involve backing one group of imperialists against another; rather, it requires support for Syrian refugees and the subversion, wherever possible, of the military apparatuses on all sides.

The mainstream media’s propaganda blitz over Syria has not gone uncontested. Counter-hegemonic articles – such as the Independent articles of Robert Fisk referenced above, or this one by Patrick Cockburn, also in The Independent – have challenged the Western media consensus, highlighting its selectivity and hypocrisy. Yet the majority of the Western reporting of Syria bleakly illustrates the role of journalists in generating public support for prevailing foreign policy and, when it is desired, military intervention.

In relation to the latter, the lessons from Bosnia – not to mention Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya – should be heeded. At the end of the Bosnian war, the US-approved Operation Storm, in which Croat troops moved to drive the Serb population out of the Croatian Krajina in 1995, resulted in the deaths of several hundred, possibly thousands of ethnic Serbs and constituted the most extensive case of ethnic cleansing since World War II. And in 1999, NATO’s 78-day bombing campaign against Yugoslavia – lauded by the murdered British politician Jo Cox and other liberal commentators as the epitome of benign military intervention – in fact greatly exacerbated the inter-ethnic violence it was supposed to prevent.

By the same token, an extension of Western military aggression against Syria, a far more dangerous theatre than the Yugoslavia of the 1990s, would only result in even more violence in the region. The US-led coalition, which is responsible for killing hundreds of civilians in the Middle East each month, is not a force for global peace. We should condemn the barbarity of the Syrian government and the cynicism of its political allies and media apologists; but if we are mindful of history, we must also reject the Western media’s ‘fake news’ about Syria and the dangerous imperialist agenda it serves.

The new Netflix film Sand Castle (2017), directed by Fernando Coimbra, deserves better, I think, than the lukewarm reception it has generally received among critics. The film stars Nicholas Hoult as Private Matt Ocre, an army volunteer who finds himself in Iraq at the start of the 2003 war. Its writer, Iraq veteran Chris Roessner, claims that his film is 'apolitical'. Now, of course, they all say that. Many US reviewers described Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker (2009) as 'non-political', even though the film depicts Americans as heroes and Iraqis as murderous hajis lurking in the shadows. And Bigelow herself, in interviews, elided her own film's political import by asserting that 'there's no politics in the trenches' - a sophisticated way of telling critics to shut up and support our boys. Bradley Cooper, to take another example, asserted that American Sniper (2015), a film of almost parodic patriotism, is not political. And so on. Sand Castle, however, is a more searching production than the films mentioned above; in fact, it has even been described by some - and denounced by others - as an anti-war film.

Sand Castle certainly has some anti-war credentials, although this has not impressed everybody. Bemoaning the film's lack of originality, Brian Tallerico complains: 'we’ve seen this story before, at least a dozen times. Sure, the particulars are different, but the futility of war, especially in the 21st century, has been well documented'. Tallerico is right that the futility of war is a hoary, perhaps even conservative theme; but Sand Castle goes beyond this banality, mounting some trenchant criticisms of the allied presence in Iraq after the invasion of 2003.

The film's title implies the unsustainability of the American adventure in Mesopotamia and an anti-war sensibility is also communicated via a number brief, mostly silent scenes. Travelling through Iraq, Ocre sees, through the window of his Humvee, US troops ushering a family out of their home at gunpoint and an Iraqi boy pointing a 'gun finger' at him. Perhaps the film's most gruesome atrocity image is of a headmaster who has been hanged upside down outside his school and burned for collaboration with the Americans. Ocre's horrified gaze at the headmaster's charred corpse, seen in the shot above, is aligned with that of several local women, suggesting that he shares in their horror and disgust. Ocre thus comes to perceive the truth about US imperial oppression and the hatred and resentment it generates among locals. In another silent scene towards the end of the film, the soon-to-be-discharged Ocre hesitates to wash himself in the shower, suddenly conscious, it seems, of a deep injustice: he has access to water in abundance, but the Iraqi villagers he has encountered do not - a consequence, as Ocre is painfully aware throughout the film, of the US invasion.

As the shower scene suggests, this is a film about the sense of shame experienced by the soldier of conscience. The theme of shame is announced at the start of the film in Ocre's voiceover ('A war story can't be true unless it's got some shame attached to it'). It also arises, obliquely, in another short scene at the film's halfway point when the soldiers seem to be playing some kind of guessing game as they drive in the Humvee: 'Is it a thing?', 'Do we all carry it?', the soldiers ask. 'We all carry it', comes the definitive answer. The game ends abruptly when the men's vehicle is attacked by insurgents; but the answer to the riddle is clear enough.

And while much of the soldiers' behaviour here is certainly the standard, clichéd fare of the grunt film - the high jinks during downtime, the 'faggot' and 'I fucked your mother' quips, the ignorant comments about towel-heads - this behaviour does not go uncriticized. Ocre often challenges some of his colleagues' prejudiced remarks about the locals and some of the soldiers come across as idiotic (in a rare comedy moment, one of them is unable to understand his translator's word 'apothecary').

Perhaps the film's progressive credentials should not be overstated. The rationale for the war is never seriously questioned in Sand Castle and Iraqi insurgents are responsible for all of the film's outbreaks of fighting. Yet while not quite as bold as Stone's Platoon or De Palma's Casualties of War, the film is characterized by the same kind of critical retrospection that animated the post-Vietnam war films of the 1980s.

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Watching Sand Castle I couldn't help thinking about the similarities between Ocre and the real-life anti-government terrorist Timothy McVeigh, the subject of another film recently added to Netflix UK, Barak Goodman's documentary Oklahoma City (2017). Goodman's film focuses on the build-up to Timothy McVeigh's bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in 1995, which claimed 168 lives, including those of 19 children in a daycare centre, and injured many hundreds more. The film combines interviews with victims' families and first-responders with extensive footage and analyzes the experiences that turned McVeigh towards mass murder - notably his sense of outrage and horror at the government's violent raids at Ruby Ridge and Waco in the early 1990s.

The documentary also mentions - all too briefly - McVeigh's time in the army during the first Gulf War and its influence on McVeigh's state of mind. An interviewee notes that McVeigh, by all accounts a highly regarded sharpshooter, felt ashamed when he shot an Iraqi soldier in the head from range, realizing that the Iraqis he had been trained to hate were 'human beings no different than myself'. McVeigh was clearly appalled at the meaninglessness of his own action and at the depravity of the military machine that instructed him to kill.

Yet Goodman's film, perhaps out of a desire not to rationalize or mitigate McVeigh's crime, does not make clear that McVeigh, according to his authorized biography American Terrorist, was present when US forces massacred Iraqis (and unknown others) fleeing from Kuwait towards Basra on Highway 80, the so-called 'Highway of Death', and was himself forced to execute surrendering prisoners. This attack - one of the greatest US war crimes of the twentieth century and one that McVeigh and colleagues saw repeated a few days later on Highway 8 - is glossed very briefly in a subordinate clause of the voice-over. And, extraordinarily, in this voice-over, US responsibility for the killings is disavowed and allocated solely to McVeigh: 'When he [McVeigh] killed Iraqis...'. Corresponding with this phrase, some dead bodies on the Basra road are shown, but a context for these images is not supplied either by subtitle or voice-over and the US responsibility for the massacre is elided. In fact, the argument being made in this section of the documentary is opaque - an aporia, if you will. What we do hear is an interviewee's description of McVeigh's response to the massacre: 'He sees the American government as a bully'. By focusing on McVeigh's subjective interpretation of the Gulf War, Goodman avoids taking any position on the state-sanctioned violence of Desert Storm, just as he elsewhere underplays and rationalizes the extreme, surplus violence used by the federal authorities at Waco, opting once again to foreground McVeigh's personal perceptions ('He felt it was murder').

To fill in some of the historical context that has been elided in Goodman's film, we must turn to other tellings of the McVeigh story. In her book Aberration in the Heartland of the Real: The Secret Lives of Timothy McVeigh (2016), Wendy Painting provides a less sanitized view of the US army in which McVeigh served and thus helps us to understand McVeigh's feelings of anger and frustration as a serviceman. Painting shows that while he felt at home in the army and sometimes seemed to take great pride in his achievements, McVeigh at was other times deeply ashamed of what US forces were doing in Iraq. This was a deep ambivalence. In letters he wrote home, he described his fury at being ordered not to feed starving Iraqi children (McVeigh and another soldier would later defy this order by leaving fruit cocktails at the roadside for the locals). And after his arrest, McVeigh also spoke of his dismay at the 'intrusiveness' of fellow soldiers who would secretly watch Iraqi women going to the bathroom at night using their thermal imaging cameras. While he was ultimately responsible for staggering brutality and callous disregard for the lives of others, there is no doubt that he was also capable - during his time in the army, at least - of generosity and humanity. Like Ocre in Sand Castle, he was a soldier of conscience.

McVeigh described the Oklahoma bomb as a 'counterattack' on the US government. It was, of course, nothing of the sort: those slaughtered by McVeigh were ordinary folks and young children. But the vocabulary of war was deeply ingrained in McVeigh, as can be seen from his subsequent, queasy acknowledgement that the deaths of the children in the Murrah daycare centre constituted 'too much collateral damage'. In jail, McVeigh had his Marquis de Sade moment, railing against the double standards of the US political establishment in his post-arrest tract 'Essay on Hypocrisy' and arguing that his act of individual terrorism was merely the corollary of US imperial violence abroad. Why, he protested, should his crime should be condemned while US terror overseas is legitimized?

In his 1916 essay 'Some Character-Types Met with in Psycho-Analytic Work', Sigmund Freud identified the character type of the 'Exception' - one who uses his early experiences of suffering to justify his disregard for the moral scruples of his community. Freud discussed this character type as a defensive reaction to the shame of disability and deformity, taking Shakespeare's Richard III as his illustration. McVeigh seems to fit the profile of the Exception well: after all, he was bullied at school on account of his lankiness and failed his physical for the Army Rangers. But while McVeigh can certainly be understood as having a disordered personality, we must also acknowledge the pressures that he was placed under throughout his life and the evils he witnessed during his time in the army. As W. H. Auden had it, 'Those to whom evil is done do evil in return' and, to borrow Slavoj Žižek's terms, we can only properly understand the 'subjective violence' of the individual in the context of the 'objective violence' of capitalism - with imperialist warfare as its highest expression. This context is elided in Oklahoma City, as are all of the troubling questions surrounding the bombing itself (such as the not-inconsiderable evidence that McVeigh did not act alone and that the FBI had foreknowledge of the attack). By downplaying the traumatizing military madness to which McVeigh was exposed as a young man, Goodman's documentary inadequately accounts for the act of savagery he went on to commit.

I recently, rather belatedly, caught up with Angelina Jolie's second directorial effort, Unbroken (2014), a biopic adapted from Laura Hillenbrand's 2010 book about the tortures experienced by the American Olympic athlete Louis Zamperini in a Japanese prisoner of war camp during the Second World War. Although the Coen brothers are on the writing credits, it's a rather formulaic film featuring a square-jawed hero, a monotonously fiendish camp guard, and predictable geopolitical biases. As Adelaide Martinez puts it, Unbroken

"tells a pretty standard US centric story about the Pacific theater during WW2. In the standard story, there is usually a single white hero, the person who sets and interprets the story for the viewer. They are like Cool Hand Luke, getting up over and over again, no matter how many times they are struck down, overcoming the great challenges put in front of them – usually put there by the Japanese. If Japanese are given roles at all, it’s either non-speaking ‘people who sit in a room planning war actions’ or the single sadist that tortures and violates the hero of the camp."

The Cool Hand Luke reference is apposite here, since Jolie's film doesn't stint on the Christic imagery, most obviously when Zamperini is forced to hold aloft a wooden beam as a punishment - a feat that he accomplishes with the superhuman stamina that is statutory in this genre. Indeed, Zamperini is crudely heroised here and as several critics have noted, the film elides some unhappy biographical details, such as Zamperini's post-war struggle with alcoholism, that, had they been kept in, might have made for a more complex tale. Indeed, Unbroken lacks the psychological subtlety (and musical delights) of Nagisa Oshima's classic Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence, the film it most obviously invokes.

The problem is not just that the film is oversimplified and bowdlerised. There's also a sort of false balance at work here. Jolie draws a parallel between Zamperini's brutal mistreatment in the Pacific and, through a series of flashbacks, his experiences of anti-Italian racism in the US. Superficially, at least, this seems an even-handed gesture aimed at establishing some kind of equivalence between racism at home and abroad. Yet a fairer and more salient comparison would have been between the undeniably appalling suffering of US soldiers in the Pacific - which Jolie actually depicts with restraint - and the savage treatment of the Japanese by the Americans in the same theatre, up to and including the dropping of the atomic bombs. That would have made for a far less patriotic picture and it is clear that Jolie et al did not want to go there. The Yanks, after all, were supposed to be the good guys.

I wasn't entirely surprised by the film's national chauvinism. As I argued in a previous blog post, Jolie's 2011 directorial debut In the Land of Blood and Honey is a tendentious effort in which the complexities of the Bonian war are reduced to a morality tale of heroic Bosnians and cartoonishly monstrous Serb villains - the standard presentation of the conflict in Western media and political circles (indeed, Jolie's research for that film included a meeting with US General Wesley Clark). And let's face it, it's not easy to make a critical film about WWII, which was, according to patriotic myth, a 'good war' fought by America's 'greatest generation'.

Nevertheless, it is possible to do better. In the best war films we witness the chaos of conflict, the dissent in the ranks, the soldiers' cowardice and bravery, heroism and meanness, and the sufferings of 'the enemy'. Such films communicate what the psychologist Lawrence Le Shan calls the 'sensory reality of war'. Take, for example, Terence Malick's richly phenomenological The Thin Red Line, a Pacific War film in which the overwhelming force of this 'sensory reality' exposes the narrowness of military discourse and poses a direct challenge to official propaganda ('They want you dead - or in their lie', in the stark words of First Sergeant Edward Welsh). The island of Guadalcanal is perceived by many of the film's soldiers in a highly subjective mode as a liminal space between life and death, a contradictory place of man-made horror and natural plenitude that is filled with the sights and sounds of human suffering but which also pullulates with exotic plant and animal life (Malick's earlier Badlands also exploits such narratively 'unmotivated' images of the natural world). It is a heterotopia, in Foucault's sense, an 'other' place which facilitates different ways of seeing and knowing and which opens a minimal space for social critique. Here idealized conceptions of the Good War or martial heroism are rendered absurd by the sheer abundance and diversity of Life. But in Unbroken, as in In the Land of Blood and Honey, we are taken to a very different place; here we enter into Le Shan's 'mythic reality of war': a Manichean realm of good versus evil in which the confusions and contradictions of armed conflict - and the experiences of enemy Others - are imperceptible, foreclosed by convention and cliché.

These failings matter not just because Unbroken was a huge box office draw, but also because Jolie, as a result of her work with the UN and her earlier cinematic performances in 'humanitarian' films such as Beyond Borders, has achieved a certain global standing as a celebrity liberal philanthropist. In its pro-US sentiment and soft orientalism, Unbroken recalls some of Hollywood's earlier gung-ho and historically dubious treatments of the war in the Pacific, such as Michael Bay's 2001 turkey Pearl Harbour. But Bay could never be mistaken for anything other than a conservative jingoist; Jolie, by contrast, has a reputation as a thoughtful humanist devoted to 'good causes'. To earn this reputation, Jolie will have to use her considerable resources - including her evident passion for political filmmaking - to better effect in future projects. Her forthcoming Netflix drama about the Cambodian genocide has been produced by the brilliant Rithy Panh, so all hope is not yet lost.

Given that Stephen Poliakoff's latest drama, Close to the Enemy, is currently screening on BBC2, now seems an appropriate time to offer some reflections on the Great Man's work. Next year an essay of mine about Poliakoff's television dramas will appear in David Forrest and Beth Johnson's collection Social Class and Television Drama in Contemporary Britain and what follows is a short extract from a draft of that chapter:

[...]

Poliakoff and the Proles: From Demonisation to Idealisation

A certain anxiety about the disruptive potential of the working class mob is evident even in Poliakoff’s earliest works. Written by Poliakoff and directed by Stephen Frears, the 1980 television film Bloody Kids (ATV) is a ‘state of the nation’ drama whose depiction of social decline and violence among working class youths in Southend-on-Sea is characterised by an ambiguous representation of the working class. Set against a decaying urban landscape that recalls the brutalist environments of Poliakoff’s earlier stage – and later television – play Hitting Town, Bloody Kids, like Caught on a Train (1980), comments on the theme of hooliganism. In a misguided bid for celebrity, a mischievous and manipulative child, Leo (Richard Thomas), encourages his friend Mike (Peter Clarke) to pretend to stab him with a knife outside a football stadium; yet the prank goes badly wrong and the hospitalised Leo tells police that Mike is guilty of attempted murder. Mike goes on the run from the police and falls in with a group of older teenaged hooligans led by Ken (Gary Holton). After involving Mike in a series of minor crimes, such as joyriding, smashing shop windows and leaving a restaurant without paying the bill, the increasingly frenzied Ken jumps from the top of a double decker bus, in a desperate and fatal attempt to impress his gang with a display of bravado.

Hooliganism was, of course, a distinct social concern throughout the 1970s and was by no means always condemned in cultural texts of the era. The novels of Richard Allen (the pseudonym of James Moffatt), for example, depicted the violent anti-authoritarianism of Britain’s white working-class youths with a good deal of psychological insight and sympathy. On stage and in film, meanwhile, the work of artists including David Hare, Barrie Keefe, and Derek Jarman reflected a widespread sense of despair and cultural collapse among British youth. So too did Franc Roddam’s film Quadrophenia (1979), which, like Bloody Kids, stars Gary Holton as an aggressive young rocker. But in contrast to Quadrophenia’s kindly take on the subject, Bloody Kids seems more ambivalent about the meaning of youth rebellion. On the one hand, the film seems to encourage sympathy for those young people, like Mike, who are caught up in hooliganism, especially since the adults in the film are presented as the detached and uncaring functionaries of a panoptical Establishment whose surveillance cameras are kept in view throughout the film. On the other hand, the violence and mayhem caused by Ken’s gang is accompanied by a threatening synth soundtrack and the crescendo of militaristic drumbeats that accompanies Ken’s fatal leap seems to cast his riotousness as the expression of a ‘totalitarian personality' and an amoral and degenerate youth culture.

In some of Poliakoff’s later television plays, the aggression of the working class mob is even more troublingly presented. Throughout The Tribe (BBC, 1998), for example, the working class denizens of the area where the goth-like tribe lives are threatening and abusive. As Jamie’s colleague Forester (Julian Rhind-Tutt) puts it, the tribe’s house is located in ‘the badlands’, ‘the most violent part of town’. Indeed, on arrival at the tribe’s house, Jamie is verbally abused by a gang of mostly white male hooligans, who hang out on street corners bullying young members of the community. The tribe is also subjected to constant harassment from the hooligans and in one scene its members are brutally beaten up by them in a seemingly unmotivated attack. The thugs later attack the tribe’s vehicle, daubing it with a symbol that resembles the circle-A used as a mark of identification by some anarchists (a detail that problematically associates the political movement of anarchism with mindless violence). Like Poliakoff’s 1990 film Close My Eyes, The Tribe is in part a drama about the changing face of London and, in particular, the gentrification of the city that hit the headlines when the incoming Prime Minister Tony Blair moved to the London borough of Islington in 1997 (Cadwalladr 2015). In Poliakoff’s telling, however, working class people are not the victims of gentrification, but a lumpen mass of anti-social proles. This is precisely the kind of stereotypical representation of London’s 'white working class' that entered popular consciousness in the New Labour era and which was angrily denounced in Michael Collins’s 2004 book The Likes of Us (and, more recently, in Owen Jones's Chavs).

Although they are not lengthy, other scenes in Poliakoff’s dramas depict the working class as a riotous mob. In Friends and Crocodiles (BBC, 2005), a dissolute yet generous millionaire, Paul (Damian Lewis), throws a party at his country manor house to which he invites all sections of society; yet his working class guests become a minatory presence at the event, running amok, driving quad cars across the lawns and drinking heavily, much to the alarm of Paul’s assistant Lizzie (Jodhi May). What makes this scene of mayhem so strange is the absence of any apparent diegetic justification for its inclusion; the working class, it seems, are simply ‘like that’. To take another example, the sensitive Joe, in Joe’s Palace (BBC, 2007), is verbally abused by a mob of working-class youths who pass outside the tower block where he lives. Later, Joe is physically threatened by a homeless man whom he tries to help; once again, there is no clear narrative rationale for inclusion of these scenes.

Because they are so decontextualised, the frequent depictions of working class delinquency and aggression in Poliakoff’s recent dramas seem to point less to a progressive anxiety about social breakdown and alienation (as could be argued of Poliakoff’s earlier, rather more sympathetic dramatic images of working-class youth in the 1970s) than to a fear of the working class masses as such. This is especially apparent in 2003’s The Lost Prince (BBC), in which collective working class agency is explicitly deplored. Set in the court of George V, here the Russian Revolution is described as an outbreak of barbarity and is condemned as such by the drama’s most sympathetic character, the king’s Private Secretary, Baron Stamfordham (Bill Nighy). In fact, the only occasions on which groups of workers are presented approvingly by Poliakoff is when – as they do in The Lost Prince – they form an orderly row of smiling servants, lining up for inspection by their masters.

These stigmatising images of the working-class mob in Poliakoff’s work are regularly juxtaposed with rather idealised images of virtuous working-class individuals. Often in Poliakoff’s dramas, working-class characters serve as narrative helpers whose role is to enlighten their powerful yet bewildered masters. In Gideon’s Daughter (BBC, 2006), the shop worker Stella helps the stuffy and privileged Gideon to ‘find himself’ and ‘do the right thing’. She also introduces Gideon to the pleasures of ‘ordinary life’, bringing him to her favourite Indian restaurant in the West London suburb of Southall, a place that is socially and economically far removed from Gideon’s glamorous yet stultifying central London bubble. In Joe’s Palace, another shop worker, Tina (Rebecca Hall), is enlisted by Elliot as a family historian and eventually uncovers Elliot’s family secret. And in several Poliakoff dramas, young, childlike innocents or savants (Oliver in Friends and Crocodiles; Joe in Joe’s Palace) serve as exemplary figures of moral purity.

This figure of the uncorrupted working-class innocent is, of course, hardly unique to Poliakoff; it has a literary pedigree that can be traced back at least as far as Dickens (Brown 1982: 49), with whose novels Poliakoff’s melodramatic narratives are sometimes compared, and it appears often in contemporary television drama. In a 2005 drama, The Girl in the Café (Channel 4), written by Richard Curtis and directed by David Yates, a young working class woman named Gina (Kelly Macdonald) softens the heart of a jaded civil servant (played by Poliakoff favourite Bill Nighy). The official invites the ‘girl’ to accompany him to a G8 summit meeting, where she urges world leaders – in particular the Americans, who are stalling the process – to ‘make poverty history’, as the campaigning slogan of the day had it. The Girl in the Café resonates with Poliakoff’s later television work in several ways. Its soft anti-Americanism, for example, is apparent throughout Poliakoff’s work: the corporate drone Christopher Anderson, in Shooting the Past, is an American, and it is American businessmen who lead Elliot Graham’s father into business with the Nazis in Joe’s Palace; indeed, as D. Keith Peacock (1984: 503) noted many years ago, the vulnerability of British society to pollution by ‘alien’ influences is a perennial Poliakoff theme. More important, from the point of view of the present chapter, is the drama’s idealisation of the working-class character as a beacon of integrity and enlightenment. While this may, on the face of things, seem an unobjectionable or even progressive positioning, here again Slavoj Žižek’s writings about ideology help to problematize such ostensibly ‘positive’ representations. Discussing James Cameron’s film Titanic, Žižek (2008: 58) detects an ‘all too obvious privileging of the lower classes and caricatured depiction of the egotism and cruel opportunism of the rich’. Underneath the apparent concern for the lower orders, Žižek identifies another, reactionary narrative in Titanic, namely that of ‘the young rich kid in crisis whose vitality is restored by a brief intimate contact with the full-blooded life of the poor’. In fact, as Žižek points out, Titanic ends with Rose, having listened to her lover’s sermon about ‘never giving up’, actually pushing Jack away from her towards his death. For Žižek, this indicates a patronising conception of the working class as mere catalysts for the moral transformation of the rich.
 
Conclusion

There are far more – and far more positive – things to say about Stephen Poliakoff’s television dramas than can possibly be discussed in this short chapter. Through his use of the techniques of ‘slow television’ (Holdsworth 2006) and ‘accented text’ (Hockenhull 2012: 638), Poliakoff has created a highly distinctive, off-kilter aesthetic that has rightly earned him the status of a respected auteur in British television. His dramas contain many sequences of intense lyrical beauty, his characters are often charmingly drawn and he can be seen as a metaphysical dramatist whose detailed evocations of place and space are unparalleled in contemporary television drama. Moreover, in an era of aggressive turbo-capitalism, Poliakoff’s criticisms of capitalism’s functionalism and inhumanity are highly pertinent.

These criticisms are, however, romantic rather than radical in nature. Poliakoff’s plays tend to echo the lament of the Georgian poet W. H. Davies for those who, ‘full of care […] have no time to stand and stare’ and in his critiques of the baleful social effects of materialism and technology he is closer to Lawrence than to Lenin. Indeed, Poliakoff can be understood as an author in the Romantic tradition, or, more specifically, drawing on Sayre and Löwy’s (1984) typology of ‘Romantic anti-capitalism’, as a ‘liberal Romantic’ who disdains the sterility of the contemporary status quo and harbours a limited critique of capitalist alienation. Poliakoff’s prescriptions for social and political change, meanwhile, are largely moralistic and idealist in character. While Poliakoff’s conflicted white, middle-class protagonists are forced to acknowledge their privileges and to contemplate the cultural, political and moral decline of the world around them, his working-class characters, especially in his post-millennial plays, take little part in the making of history and are portrayed either as degenerate yobs or idealized helpmates. This bifurcated representation of the proletariat is all too suggestive of the Victorian, yet currently recrudescent, distinction between the ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ poor (Bochel and Powell 2016).

"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 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.

Although the competition is fierce, Trump might just be the most dimwitted president in US history. This is, after all, the man who publicly said 7-Eleven when he meant 9/11. He is certainly highly dysfunctional, hailing from a traumatizing and traumatized family. Like his father (by all accounts), Trump is a bully, a psychologically damaged man who is now projecting his own malignancy onto a range of officially sanctioned Others: Mexicans, Muslims and women. From a psychoanalytical point of view, his tough-guy persona might be explained in terms of the 'traumatic bond' that often forms between victim and abuser, which in Trump's case was likely formed with his father in childhood. This 'identification with the aggressor', as Sándor Ferenczi famously called this kind of defence mechanism, might also explain the appeal of Trump for the many disgruntled left-behinds who voted for him: in a ruthless world, it's best to keep on side with the guy with the big stick.

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 and a sense of proportion 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 capitalist, 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 real 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 violent and patriarchal 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. Obama's rhetoric was slick and euphemistic - his administration re-branded the War on Terror an 'Overseas Contingency Operation', for example - but his actions bespoke his full commitment to capitalism and imperialist war.

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 what Hegel called the 'slaughter bench of history'. As Marx insisted, the liberation of the working class must be conquered by the working class itself. With this in mind, we should 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 Jacques 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 denouncing Brexit supporters as racists and thickos (you can't have a plebiscite, you know, without plebs) or by appealing to a sentimental Europhilia. But such appeals overlook the very pragmatic, political motives for EU membership. European states joined the EU in the first place largely to exempt themselves from the criticisms of their own populations, bypassing democratic accountability for capitalist 'reforms', as writers such as James Heartfield have argued. And for all their supposed anti-racism, most Remainers do not seem to understand the EU's current, scandalous role in effectively pitching thousands of desperate refugees into the Mediterranean and the mass deportation camps in Turkey. The EU is not an institution that can be defended by socialists; rather, it is an inhuman behemoth that threatens the pay and conditions of workers across the continent and shows a callous disregard for human life.

Some 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.

On the other hand, it is true that 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). Such appeals 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 - 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 hammered Greece over its debt repayments. 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.