Last year, actor Charlie Sheen starred in Martin Guigui's film 9/11, a small-scale drama based on Patrick Carson's a stage play Elevator, which details the experiences of five disparate and desperate people trapped in a World Trade Centre lift during the World Trade Center attacks of September 2001. The film received some of the most savage reviews ever garnered by a Hollywood production and the movie was widely deemed 'offensive' and 'exploitative' by professional critics and online pundits alike. However, I wonder how fair or even intelligible these judgements really are. Is any film about 9/11 necessarily going to be exploitative, as some commentators seemed to imply; and who is to say what is or isn't 'offensive'?

Perhaps the film, by depicting the vulnerability and suffering of citizens during the attacks, offends against the dominant media framing of the event. For most of us, our mental picture of 9/11 is the one that was reproduced across almost all of the newspapers following the event: the searing, archetypal image of the towers engulfed in flames. The widespread reproduction of this image - which recalls nothing so much as a scene from a blockbuster action film - sent the message that the West was at war with the forces of darkness and that bloody vengeance must ensue. But it didn't have to be that way. Other, less martial and more human-scaled images of the attacks could have prevailed. As Brad Evans wonders in the preface to his book Liberal Terror, 'how [...] would the world look today if the images of the falling victims had become the defining emblem of the 9/11 attacks?'

While the public reaction to Guigui's film is undoubtedly tied up with these struggles over how 9/11 should be represented, the blanket obloquy directed against the movie surely also has a lot to do with Charlie Sheen's earlier, apparently unforgivable involvement in the 9/11 truth movement. Indeed, while we still don't know very much about how the event of 9/11 really happened, to express doubts about the official 9/11 story, even today, is to court lasting derision. The jokes about 9/11 'truthers' never stop - and challenges to the received narrative of 9/11 tend to be regarded as a ludicrous outgrowth of the Internet's degraded digital free-for-all. As Mark Renton (Ewan McGregor) puts it in his ironic diatribe in the recent Trainspotting sequel, "Choose rape jokes, slut-shaming, revenge porn and an endless tide of depressing misogyny. Choose 9/11 never happened, and if it did, it was the Jews".

Of course, 9/11 did happen - and I am pretty darned certain that it wasn't the fault of the Jews. But the prevalence of outlandish conspiracy theories makes it difficult to raise questions about the dubious official narrative about the attacks. Although the public was told many lies about the most recent invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq (the claim that Saddam Hussein possessed 'weapons of mass destruction' being the most egregious and now widely acknowledged one), many people struggle to accept anything but the mainstream political-media account of the atrocity that was used to justify those invasions. Anybody challenging that account is usually consigned to what Daniel C. Hallin called the 'sphere of deviance' - a domain outside the 'sphere of legitimate controversy' which contains ideas and opinions that must not be publicly aired. The price of dissent can be high. Over the seventeen years since the attacks, journalists, politicians, military figures and academics who have questioned the endless inconsistencies and absurdities in the official story of 9/11 have faced ridicule or lost their jobs.

Liberals and leftists have tended to be even more disparaging of the 9/11 truth/justice movement than conservatives. Noam Chomsky's response to a question about the authorship of 9/11 was, infamously, "who cares"? I am not the first to point out that this was a strange thing for the world's foremost critic of US foreign policy to say about the biggest terrorist attack on American soil or that that the families and friends of those who were murdered on 9/11 might just have a passing interest in whether their loved ones were killed by Muslim terrorists or by 'their own' government. And does Chomsky really believe that nobody in the US will 'care' if 9/11 were revealed to be, say, an 'inside job'? After all, he himself points out that such a revelation would destroy the Republican party forever and would result in "firing squads".

I must admit that for many years after 9/11, I myself tended to dismiss with a smirk anybody who questioned the official narrative about the attacks as a 'conspiracy theorist'. In doing so I was merely following the crowd. There was little appetite for critical questioning in the wake of the atrocities; after all, it's hard for those exposed to seismic acts of terror to retain their critical faculties. On the contrary, traumatized people often take refuge in group think and myth-mongering or indulge in fantasies of violent retribution. That's why it was so easy for politicians and journalists in 2001 to spin the attacks as an assault on the US and its values by an evil, non-Christian Other. In line with the propaganda dynamics outlined in Naomi Klein's 2007 book The Shock Doctrine, the view prevailed that 9/11 was an attack on 'our way of life' that demanded not critical analysis, but immediate, bloody revenge against the supposed perpetrators.

Over the last few years I have, rather belatedly, read many books about 9/11 and listened to a lot of the professional critics of the official account. And like many others (a 2016 study suggested that more than half of Americans believe that their government is concealing information about the attacks), I've concluded that the official version of events makes no sense at all. It is undermined by, inter alia, the failure of all air defences (for which multiple, mutually contradictory explanations have been supplied by officials); the lack of any photographic evidence that the alleged attackers even boarded the planes; the mismatch between the alleged hijackers' extraordinary aerial manoeuvres and their almost total lack of pilot training; the refusal of official investigators to consider first-hand accounts of multiple explosions before the planes hit; the near-miraculous discovery of an incriminating passport amid the ashes of the Twin Towers (shades of the London 7/7 attacks there); and so on. The full catalogue of absurdities and improbabilities was usefully summarized back in the noughties in the books of David Ray Griffin, but they have never been adequately dealt with by defenders of the official story. Of great significance, too, are the so-called 'intelligence failures' at Alec Station, whereby the CIA did not pass its information about Khalid al-Mihdhar and Salem al-Hazmi to the FBI, and the recently recrudescent question of Saudi complicity in the organization of the attacks. To discuss these questions is not to fall prey to 'conspiracy theory', but to acknowledge that we still lack a coherent account of what happened on 9/11. There are still more questions than answers.

Then, of course, there are the technical debates, such as the dispute over the National Institute of Standards in Technology report's claim that the collapse of WTC 7 (2.25 seconds of which was in free-fall) was caused by office fires. NIST's findings now look to be undermined by preliminary reports from Dr J. Leroy Hulsey's ongoing University of Alaska study. Niels Harrit, Richard Gage and the Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth group have of course long argued that Building 7 collapsed as a result of so-called 'controlled demolition' and in an MSNBC interview on the day itself, FDNY Lieutenant David Restuccio stated that he had "heard reports" that the building was unstable and "would need to come down on its own or it would be taken down". An Emergency Medical Technician, JP Morgan-Chase worker Indira Singh, claimed in a 2005 radio interview that she was told something very similar on the day ("Building 7 was going to come down or being brought down"). Whether or not the Alaska study will support the controlled demolition view is as yet unclear. It is possible, in fact, that we will never know for sure how WTC 7, or indeed any of the New York buildings, came down, since all of the material evidence from the scene of the crime was immediately removed and sent overseas for recycling. Of course, this hurry to get things 'back to normal' after the New York attacks itself involved a cynical deception: despite repeated assurances from the Environmental Protection Agency and New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani that Ground Zero was safe to return to, the area was in fact strewn with toxic debris (sulfur dioxide and asbestos) that has caused respiratory illnesses and cancers in hundreds of cases. It took the courageous action of EPA whistleblower Dr. Cate Jenkins to expose the official lies.

We should, I think, be highly critical of those who use the term 'conspiracy theory' in order to dismiss dissenting opinions about 9/11. After all, conspiracy theories, even though they are not identified as such, are integral to the maintenance of the status quo and mainstream media promote them regularly. Just consider the various evidence-light anti-Russian confections in the British and US media recently, most notably that of the alleged hacking of the 2016 US election (indeed, it is becoming more and more obvious that 'Russiagate' has been coordinated by Western intelligence services). Indeed, it is hardly outlandish to regard the 9/11 Commission's story that the attacks were carried out by 19 Muslim hijackers directed by a very unwell man in Afghanistan as a mainstream conspiracy theory. Even Thomas H. Kean and Lee H. Hamilton, the chair and vice chair of the 9/11 Commission, state in their 2006 book Without Precedent that their investigation was underfunded and 'set up to fail' and that they were lied to by officials.

Precisely which organizations and individuals were behind, or had knowledge of the 9/11 attacks is still unclear. Plenty of ludicrous theories about the attacks have been put forward by assorted lunatics and even intelligence agents. Remember David Shayler, the MI5 officer who, during the high-tide of the 9/11 truth movement, argued that the planes that struck the Twin Towers were in fact missiles camouflaged by holograms? Perhaps in order to ensure that nobody could take his theory about 9/11 seriously, Shayler also claimed to be the Messiah (move over, David Icke) and to be able to control the footballing fortunes of Middlesbrough F.C. The preposterous assertions of Shayler, like those of the absurd Alex Jones, have served over time as a useful distraction, discrediting anybody who dares to ask probing questions about the attacks. But the doubts and questions of independent investigators and victims' family members are not so easily laughed off. To this day, many people are aware that, in the title of Jon Gold's useful recent collection of interviews, We Were Lied to About 9/11 and they are looking for an honest and coherent account of what actually happened.

So what about the 'inside job' theory? I think that it is possible that elements the US state either played a part in orchestrating 9/11 or allowed the attacks to happen, something the US has certainly done before as a pretext for war (Griffin, perhaps the most coherent and persistent of all the inside job advocates, famously termed 9/11 'the new Pearl Harbour', borrowing the Project for a New American Century's phrase from 1997). Contra Chomsky, it would be worth knowing if this was indeed the case. For one thing, it would provide the families of the victims with closure. It might also help to convince those who need convincing that the bourgeoisie is thoroughly Machiavellian. Indeed, fear of being labelled a conspiracy theorist (a fear that is widespread among Marxists and anarchists, it seems to me) should not prevent us from recognizing that ruling classes the world over shroud their activities in secrecy and disinformation. Power prefers darkness.

As Richard Jackson pointed out in his 2005 book Writing the War on Terrorism, the use of the term 'ground zero' to describe the scene of the 9/11 crime recalled the phrase 'year zero' and thus signalled that the attacks had inaugurated a new era requiring different techniques of securitization and counter-terrorism. To paraphrase the U.S. political machinator Rahm Emanuel, the capitalist class never let a serious crisis go to waste. Whoever was responsible for them - and here Chomsky does have a point - the 9/11 attacks were used as a pretext for subsequent resource-grabbing invasions of several Middle Eastern and North African countries that have cost trillions of dollars and killed hundreds of thousands of people.

They were also a pretext for a refreshed assault on civil liberties and human rights across the world. For the US and many other national governments around the world, 9/11 has provided a golden opportunity to ramp up the repression and surveillance of Muslims and other 'suspect communities'. Judicial and spatial 'states of exception' have multiplied, from the Patriot Act and Guantánamo Bay in the early days of Bush's War on Terror to the Uyghur internment camps of China's Xinjiang province and the oppression of Muslims by the Indian state today. On a more banal level, the rhetoric of the War on Terror has normalized anti-Muslim prejudice, so that Boris Johnson's recent quip about burka- or niqab-wearing Muslim women looking like 'bank robbers' seems almost unremarkable (it certainly didn't seem to do Johnson's career any harm). Social attitudes and priorities have also shifted in the direction of xenophobia and paranoia. A World Values Survey in 2015, for example, found that in the decade following 9/11, U.S. citizens more and more prioritize 'survival' above 'self-expression'.

Perhaps these points should not be pushed too far. In their 2012 book Icons of War and Terror, John Tulloch and R. Warwick Blood cautioned that the proposition '9/11 changed everything' - widespread among opportunistic politicians and CEOs following the attacks - was always problematic and ideological, eliding among other things the longer history of terrorism. Tulloch and Blood also point to the arguments of Slavoj Žižek, who has suggested that 9/11 represented not a break with the past, but on the contrary a kind of resetting of the U.S.'s basic ideological co-ordinates. Yet be that as it may, from the vantage point of 2018, the post-9/11 world looks and feels more dangerous. Shortly after the attacks, U.S. Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld declared that 9/11 presented 'the kind of opportunities that World War II offered' to 'refashion the world'. In numerous big and small ways, 9/11 has helped the world's rulers in their attempts to do that - although the U.S. bid to become the sole global hegemon has arguably failed.

The events surrounding 9/11 itself remain, to a great extent, cloaked in mystery. I have no idea whether we might one day have a clearer understanding of what happened on that day, or whether a new official investigation would be useful or even possible; at this point, the 9/11 truth movement has been largely dormant for a decade. But the families and friends of those who died, and of those tortured and killed across the globe in the name of the war on terror, certainly deserve answers.

In my 2012 polemic Beyond the Left - and elsewhere on this blog - I criticize Western journalists for their fawning treatment of Aung San Suu Kyi, known to viewers of Luc Besson's cinematic hagiography as 'The Lady', who by then had long been feted as the poster-girl for Western-style democracy in Myanmar. I suggested that there can be no such thing as a 'progressive' world leader in a global economy driven by profit. And indeed, the liberal commentariat's love affair with Aung San has now ended in tears.

With Dame Suu now in power, Myanmar is now seen by many mainstream commentators as a genocidal state and its Buddhist monks are promoting the military's savage violence and ethnic cleansing against the Rohingya minority in Rakhine State (as the American physicist Steven Weinberg is supposed to have said: "With or without [religion] you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion").

As the UN yesterday condemned the violence, even the Western media have been obliged to start wagging their fingers. Under fire for failing to curtail calls for genocide on its Burmese platform, Facebook, for example, has just launched its latest high-profile geopolitical intervention, banning several prominent Burmese organizations and individuals from the network and citing the need to get tough on 'hate speech'.

​'The Lady' has well and truly vanished. But Aung San Suu Kyi herself, so far, has survived politically. Most commentators have stopped short of damning her outright or of calling for her to step down from power. There is already too much egg on too many faces and no doubt Suu Kyi, for now, at least, is still seen as the West's best leadership option in the resource-rich region. And anyway, there's no reason why a massacre or two should tarnish one's international reputation when inveterate warmongers like Henry Kissinger, Barack Obama or the recently deceased John McCain are lauded for their contributions to global human rights.

A few takeaways from all of this might be:

​1) The liberal media, no matter how 'progressive' they appear, will always tend to serve the interests of profit and power, not those of ordinary people.

2) While commentators rightly deplore the resurgence of right-wing Christian nationalism across the Western world, we are seeing the rise of reactionary, violent religious nationalism all over the world, for example, in the attacks on Muslims in Modi's India. As for Buddhism, it is just as reactionary as any other religion: even the Dalai Lama, its prime representative and a man who is feted by New Agers and Hollywood celebrities, has equivocated on the war on Iraq and has expressed anti-immigrant and other abhorrent social views

3) The people of the world don't need leaders - even supposedly enlightened, female ones like Aung San Suu Kyi.

Below is the text of a talk I gave at a meeting of the Socialist Party of Great Britain in Hammersmith, London in May 2018. A caveat: some of the points made here are rather truncated as the text was conceived as the basis for a 20 minute talk and group discussion rather than a well-rounded treatise.

At their best, the media provide us with pleasurable distraction and vital information, a playground for the imagination and a window on the world. Socialists, however, are all too aware of mainstream media’s systematic biases and distortions of the truth. Despite considerable advances in communication technology and a dramatic shift in the directionality of information flows, we live, perhaps more than ever, in a world of disinformation and propaganda – ‘fake news’ in today’s fashionable phrase. The press tells us lies, sometimes small ones, such as The Sun newspaper’s infamous report about swan-munching asylum seekers, sometimes large ones, such as the same newspaper’s fabrications about the Hillsborough disaster and Iraq’s non-existent ‘weapons of mass destruction’ - the lie that launched a thousand missiles. There is also a constant undermining of the working class. In Britain, news and current affairs programmes regularly demonize strikers, immigrants, Muslims, the disabled, and so-called ‘chavs’, deepening social divisions and discouraging solidarity by pitting workers against one another on the basis of race, nation, religion, sexuality and so on.

This process is all too apparent in the torrents of outrage directed against so-called ‘benefit claimants’ (people in receipt of social security payments). British newspapers regularly condemn these supposed scourges of society and in the last decade, in particular, the country’s television schedules have abounded with largely malicious, luridly titled documentaries: Nick and Margaret: We All Pay Your Benefits (BBC), Benefits Street (Channel 4), On Benefits and Proud (Channel 5), or even Gypsies on Benefits and Proud (Channel 5). Despite relatively low levels of benefit fraud, these programmes encourage us to revile some of the poorest and most vulnerable members of society.

What the mainstream media does not encourage us to do, of course, is to question the system that makes people poor and vulnerable. On the contrary, to read the news or to turn on the television or radio is to expose oneself to the capitalist worldview of our rulers. According to this worldview, there is no alternative to our current system of leaders, nation states, markets and exploitation. This holds true for liberal, as well as right-wing media. In fact, in their support for certain capitalist imperatives – such as the need for imperialist war – liberal and leftist commentators are sometimes more enthusiastic than conservatives.

Whether conservative or liberal, the loudest voices in the media are those of the bourgeoisie. Professional newsgathering draws heavily on the opinions of business and military leaders, professional politicians and other official sources. As a result, news agendas reflect the priorities and interests of the capitalists rather than those of ordinary people. And it gets worse: these days, as Nick Davies's book Flat Earth News points out, most news stories are produced not by journalists as such, but by private and state-owned public relations agencies, which have even less incentive to produce unbiased reporting. But why is this so? In a world of growing economic and ecological crisis, poverty and military violence, why do the mainstream press and broadcasters, for the most part, continue to support the status quo? Why do they tell lies, attack working class political action, support capitalist wars, and insist that capitalism is the only viable system?
 
Ownership and Control

The most obvious answer to this question, of course, is that the media industries are owned and controlled by the bourgeoisie, such that, as Marx famously put it in The German Ideology, “the ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas”. Very true. In his unpublished preface to Animal Farm in 1945, George Orwell commented that “The British press is extremely centralised, and most of it is owned by wealthy men who have every motive to be dishonest on certain important topics”. And as Chris Pallas, a.k.a. Maurice Brinton, wrote in 1970, “the means of moulding public opinion (press, radio, TV, churches, schools and universities) are in the hands of the ruling class. The media consequently disseminate ruling class ideas, values and priorities”.

The ownership of the means of media production tends to be highly concentrated, giving enormous power to a small number of media owners. These moguls develop close relationships with government. In Britain, the early press barons even held key government positions. For example, Lord Northcliffe, whose newspapers during World War 1 helped to condition the public for total war, became Director for Propaganda in enemy countries. Throughout the twentieth century, moreover, senior politicians and media moguls have established quid pro quo relationships. In 1981, for example, Rupert Murdoch’s newspapers strongly supported Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who in turn helped Murdoch to buy Times Newspapers, bypassing referral to the Monopolies and Mergers Commission. The back-scratching continued a few years later, when Thatcher facilitated Murdoch’s smashing of the print unions at Wapping.

From the mid-1990s until he switched his support back to the Conservatives in 2010, Murdoch also fostered a close relationship with Tony Blair’s New Labour party. Lance Price, a former media advisor to Blair, even called Murdoch “the 24th member of the Cabinet”. It therefore surprised nobody that, when the US and British armed forces invaded Iraq in 2003, every one of the newspapers owned by Murdoch’s News Corporation gave the military action its full-throated support. On television, meanwhile, Murdoch’s Fox News Channel made a fluttering US flag a permanent on-screen fixture and described the deadly invasion as ‘Operation Iraqi Freedom’. While Murdoch’s star might have faded in the wake of the News of the World phone hacking scandal, his story illustrates the power of media moguls to shape editorial content and mould the public mind.
           
The Power of Advertising

Advertising plays a part, too, in ensuring that the mainstream media content seldom strays far from ruling class opinion. Advertising is not only poisonous in its own right – since the beginning of the twentieth century, in particular, it has promoted false or dangerous needs and created uninformed consumers through distorted and exaggerated claims – but it also contaminates the surrounding media environment.

In early nineteenth-century Britain, in fact, the growth of advertising helped to destroy the working-class press. This so-called ‘radical press’ included titles such as The Poor Man’s Guardian, which supported the Chartist movement. Henry Hetherington, the newspaper’s editor, condemned capitalism as a “competitive, selfish, scrambling” system and vowed that “workers will be at the top instead of the bottom of society or rather there will be no bottom at all”. Clearly, these newspapers posed a threat to the bourgeoisie. Yet as the advertising industries and printing technologies developed in the nineteenth century, only the bourgeois press could afford to meet their production costs. The working-class publications disappeared, not because they were unpopular (on the contrary, they enjoyed the highest circulations in British newspaper history) but because they did not attract advertising sponsorship. Such situations are not unfamiliar today, almost 200 years later, as Facebook and Google hoover up advertising revenue to the detriment of traditional journalism.

Indeed, since the early days of capitalism, advertiser influence over the media has continued unabated. Advertisers prioritize profit, and media content that is critical of the status quo or which simply highlights social problems, is less attractive to them than more light-hearted fare (see Brown and Cavazos's 2005 article "Why is this show so dumb?"). In fact, companies such as Coca-Cola have even refused to advertise during news broadcasts, on the grounds that “bad news” might affect consumers’ perceptions of their product. And when programme makers become too critical of the system, the consequences can be serious. In their influential book Manufacturing Consent, academics Ed Herman and Noam Chomsky cite the case of the US public-television station WNET, which “lost its corporate funding from Gulf and Western in 1985 after the station showed the documentary Hungry for Profit, which contains material critical of multinational corporate activities in the Third World”.

In today’s digital environments, too, media organizations often face advertiser backlash. Last year, for example, a host of corporations including Volkswagon, Tesco and McDonald’s withdrew their advertising spending on Google and its subsidiary YouTube over concerns about video content they deemed inappropriate or ‘extremist’. Youtube is also ‘demonitizing’, that is, withdrawing advertising for, channels that are less viewed and those whose content is deemed to be advertiser-unfriendly. Indeed, by insisting that their products and services appear in high-profile, ‘brand safe environments’, advertisers exert a conservative influence over what the public is able to see and hear.
 
What about the ‘Public Service’ Media?

So much, then, for the commercial media. But in Britain and elsewhere, of course, there exists a broadly non-commercial or ‘public service’ model of media ownership, represented by the license-fee funded BBC. The public service model offers certain advantages to viewers and listeners. In exchange for the license fee, the BBC provides welcome relief from interruption by commercial breaks. And it must be admitted that today’s BBC, followed closely by the commercially-funded public service broadcaster Channel 4, is responsible for some of the UK’s most sophisticated and stimulating television and radio programmes.

The politics of the BBC, however, are another matter. ‘Auntie Beeb’ claims to be objective and independent, stating in its editorial guidelines that it “will never promote a particular view on controversial matters”. But throughout its history, the Beeb has been a bastion of ruling class opinion. In 1926, one of the very first actions of the newly established BBC was to support the government against the workers during the General Strike; as the organisation’s first Director General John Reith candidly remarked at the time, “the government knows it can trust us not to be really impartial”. In fact, the BBC has a long history of backing the establishment – most obviously in its patriotic role as the ‘Voice of Britain’ during the Second World War and its unwavering support for the British monarchy. Like ‘state broadcasters’ the world over, the BBC advances the interests of the domestic ruling class and its international allies.

Given all of this, it is unsurprising that the BBC, like most major media organizations, has long-standing connections with the British security services (which are, incidentally, the most extensive in the world outside of the US). Of course, the BBC is hardly unique in this respect. The investigative journalist David Rose has spoken about his own interactions with British and US intelligence sources, criticizing the often misleading information he was given (including cast-iron reassurances about the existence of Saddam’s ‘weapons of mass destruction’) and the unaccountable influence of anonymous ‘Whitehall sources’ over British journalism ('Spies and their lies', New Statesman, 27 September, 2007). Nevertheless, the BBC’s connections to state power are particularly deep. The organization sees one of its roles as the projection of British ‘soft power’ on the global stage and its journalists and senior managers meet and communicate regularly with the Ministry of Defence, GCHQ, MI5 and MI6. For fifty years, BBC staff were vetted by MI5 and today, many prominent BBC figures, such as Security Correspondent Frank Gardner, a former Territorial Army captain and investment banker, have links with the secret state (for more on these kinds of connections, see Tom Mills's 2016 book The BBC: Myth of a Public Service).
 
The Internet: A Brave New World?

In the parts of the world where it is accessible (at the time of writing, only a little over half of the planet has access), the Internet is transforming public communication. Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, so-called Web 2.0, with its potential for multimedia collaboration and networking, has opened up new possibilities for instantaneous ‘many-to-many’ political communication. A dramatic example of this is provided by the Arab Spring of 2011, when demonstrators in countries such as Egypt and Libya organized protests using social media. These activists became ‘citizen journalists’, bypassing highly restrictive broadcast media systems to expose state oppression and social unrest. Nevertheless, such examples do seem marginal when one considers that the main uses of the Internet are pornography and shopping.

Moreover, the liberatory potential of the Internet is highly circumscribed by state and corporate power. In his book Move Fast and Break Things, Jonathan Taplin details how the theoretically 'open' architecture of the Internet was captured by libertarians like Jeff Bezos, Peter Thiel and Larry Page, who built up massive media empires on the basis of sharp practice, piracy and the trampling of individual privacy. As in traditional media, content online is shaped by advertisers and other powerful interests, who have shifted much their spending from traditional to online media. The results obtained from a simple Google search, for example, are largely determined by the companies and political parties who pay for the keywords. In fact, despite its cutesy (and recently abandoned) motto ‘don’t be evil’, Google has been fined for abusing its dominant market position in the search domain by favouring its own products in search results pages and Google algorithms increasingly serve to remove oppositional and critical websites from search results. The social media giant Facebook, to take another example, filters the content that can be accessed by users and has been widely accused of deleting the accounts of individuals and political groups from its site on political grounds.

We are dealing here with good old-fashioned monopoly power. Like the press barons of old, today’s big tech companies cultivate close relationships with politicians in order to maintain their market positions. In the US, Google, for example, spends millions of dollars each year on political lobbying. The company has even secretly funded academic research to ward off regulatory challenges to its market dominance.

And what about us, the users of Internet platforms? Like readers and audiences in traditional media, Internet users become commodities to be sold to advertisers and as the recent fuss over the activities of Cambridge Analytica has highlighted, their personal data is traded by corporations. Yet those same users also produce this data with little or no payment. Google and Facebook, in other words, make their profits by exploiting our unpaid digital labour. They have also, as sources told the New York Times in 2013, passed data to the National Security Agency. Indeed, we should not forget the role of the state in monitoring and policing online communication. Across the world, capitalist states access emails and social media messages, block websites and even, when necessary, shut down the Internet, as happened in several countries during the Arab Spring. Online, covert intelligence operations are also used in order to sow confusion and undermine critics of the system. In Britain, for example, JTRIG, a branch of GCHQ, uses ‘dirty tricks’ to “influence and disrupt” the online communications of its ‘targets’, generating fake emails and videos, blogs and forum memberships - a kind of modern-day Zersetzung.

The fiendish part of all this is that, in what Gilles Deleuze called 'societies of control' such as our own, corporations and the state do not so much restrict our use of communications technology as encourage us voluntarily to produce the means of our control through our participation in social media and other data-generating activities such as the use of search engines and virtual assistants. Contemporary society is characterised by what Christopher Bollas calls 'Id capitalism'; today, we are controlled not so much through prohibitions and taboos, but through encouragements to share, like, express and indulge our thoughts and desire - and, of course, to monitor the online interactions of our peers, a practice the media sociologist André Jansson has termed 'interveillance'.

In light of all this, it is useful to take a dialectical perspective on the Internet. The World Wide Web provides many opportunities for socialist education and organization; but it also allows private companies and the state to surveil and even deceive the public. In her book Blog Theory, Jodi Dean argues that under conditions of what she calls 'communicative capitalism', messages on the Internet tend to lose their 'symbolic efficacy' and critical edge to become so many circulating 'contributions'; it is their exchange value rather than their use value that comes to matter. Meanwhile, the digital giants that capture and exploit our communications continue to accrue more and more power and wealth. Indeed, within academic Media Studies there is a growing appreciation that rather than representing a radical counterbalance to mainstream, established media - a perspective that was always too simplistic - Facebook, Google and Amazon are very much part of that mainstream.
 
Conclusion

There is, of course, much more to be said about the ways in which state and commercial interests influence our media than can be addressed in this short overview. In fact, a properly materialist account of the media would consider not just the media industries’ manipulation of ideas and information, but also the material conditions of media production. All across the planet, the entire media infrastructure of transmitters, cables, studios, offices, cameras, computers, and so on, is produced and operated by exploited workers, often in appalling conditions. Our digital devices – phones, tablets, and so on – are made from minerals mined in life-threatening conditions by workers in African countries (cassiterite, cobalt and coltan mines in Congo), assembled by suicidal factory workers in China (Foxconn) and distributed by hyper-surveilled, overworked workers in the West (Amazon's warehouse drudges). This is to say nothing of the damaging environmental effects of producing so much soon-to-be-obsolescent hardware.

But what is to be done about the problem of the media? Proposals for reforming the media industries are advocated and implemented constantly. In Britain, many liberals and leftists welcomed the Leveson Enquiry set up under Prime Minister David Cameron as a means of challenging unaccountable media power following revelations about phone hacking at Murdoch’s sleazy News of the World newspaper. Although it was billed as an investigation into the “culture, practices and ethics” of the British media, it might better be seen as an effort to humble the pro-American Murdoch by more independently-minded factions of British state. In any event, Leveson has not led to any significant changes in the quality of British journalism and did not even mention the hacking of the Internet by the intelligence services. If anything, the enquiry may have served to shore up belief in the fundamental decency of the state.

Reforms to Internet ownership and control are also regularly proposed. In his 2015 book The Internet is Not the Answer, the incisive critic of 'big tech' Andrew Keen, for example, has welcomed the 'regulatory turn' against the technology giants in recent years. But regulation is always playing 'catch up' with the capitalists, and is thus always liable to be circumvented, especially in the fast-moving tech sector. Then there is Nick Srnicek’s suggestion, in a 2017 Guardian article, that platforms such as Facebook, Google and Amazon are ‘natural monopolies’ that should be nationalized in order to curtail the power of private corporations. Such suggestions are widely shared by liberal and left-wing commentators. But as with many such social democratic reform proposals, it is not at all clear how Srnicek’s scheme to fund such a move by wealth taxes could actually be implemented, or how nationalization (by which country?) would protect Internet users from state surveillance. And, of course, such reforms do not abolish the exploitative social relations that underpin all media production; in fact, they depend upon them.

One thing we that we can do, as socialists, is use what purchase we have in traditional and ‘new’ media to put forward the case for socialism as an urgent necessity and to organize class struggle activity. We can also expose mainstream media bias and misinformation, providing a critical framework for making sense of what we see, read and hear. This is not a hopeless task. After all, people don’t believe everything they are told. Even many media workers are highly sceptical about the system they work within. Take journalists, for instance. Highly paid, elite journalists like Andrew Marr or Jeremy Paxman are predictably conservative in their political views. Most ordinary journalists, however, are workers who, while having to go along with management demands in order to keep their jobs, are all too aware of the media’s role in producing capitalist propaganda and have sometimes even opposed it. You can't fool all the people all the time. But we should have no illusions about the value of piecemeal reforms or small-scale acts of resistance: we will only see the end of media propaganda and the exploitation involved in media production by ending the capitalist ownership and control of the media. That means nothing less than the overthrow of the capitalist class itself.

News from Syria continues to be stomach-turning. After a brief hiatus following the virtual collapse of Islamic State, appalling images of civilian suffering have once again hit the front pages. Still, the British media's coverage of the war is quite badly distorted. The Guardian, for example, has recently been publishing harrowing photographs of the victims of Assad's bombs in Eastern Ghouta, with the White Helmets looking desperately on. But these photographs do not include any images of the oppositionists who control the area, many of whom are Islamic militants whose armed rebellion is endangering the lives of the Damascus suburb's beleaguered population. And whatever else is said about the White Helmets (the controversy over their activities and affiliations has been bitter), their claim to be politically neutral first responders is not credible, not least because they have endorsed a no-fly zone.

On television, BBC and especially Channel 4 coverage of Syria has also tended to defer to explanations of the war that implicate Syrian government responsibility for atrocities, even where there is uncertainty about authorship. This is no surprise. When your reporting is reliant on information and video coming out of opposition-controlled areas, bias is more or less inevitable. In an era of austerity, meanwhile, the British state has been pouring millions of pounds into the creation of propaganda for Arabic media in support of the so-called 'moderate rebels'.

In light of all this, we should cautiously welcome views that dissent from mainstream media narratives about the war. While they certainly have their own blindspots, reporters such as Patrick Cockburn and Robert Fisk of The Independent have at least provided a valuable mainstream counterweight to Western media reporting. Other critical commentators, however, are less defensible. Consider this oddly chirpy philippic from 'independent' journalist and sometime RT contributor Rania Khalek:

As my comments above probably suggest, I'm sympathetic to this analysis (although I wonder if the US's Syria policy is not so much 'regime change' as the weakening of both sides through the prolongation of the conflict). Syria is certainly a multi-sided war which the Western powers, just like Russia and its allies, are fuelling with weapons and propaganda. Nevertheless, Khalek does forget to mention the little matter of Assad's ongoing campaign of mass murder against the Syrian population, contenting herself with pointing out that the Syrian government is (heroically?) 'battling' its enemies.

This kind of 'omission bias' - some would use less polite phrases - is widespread in the rancorous public discourse about Syria. Broad swaths of the 'anti-war' left, from the respectable end of the spectrum (Pilger, Medialens) through to the Internet's wilder 'anti-establishment' crowd (Global Research, 21st Century Wire and the other 'anti-globalists') promote a simplistic, US/Israel-focused 'anti-imperialism' and ignore the military aggression of Syria, Russia and Iran. While these commentators quite rightly deplore the biases of the 'corporate media' coming out of Washington and London, they themselves often receive encouragement and financial remuneration from the enemies of the West. To put it cynically, there are careers, reputations and big bucks to be made on both sides of the war of words over Syria.

But it's hard to escape the gravitational pull exerted by both camps. After writing a short article recently about the biased Western reporting of the Syrian war, I myself was accused by one or two people of pro-Assad bias. I don't accept this. My article made it clear that my focus was on the inadequacy of Western - US and British - reporting. Such a focus is not unreasonable: after all, I live in the West and my article was written primarily for Westerners who mostly watch and listen to Western news media. The main enemy, to quote Karl Liebknecht, is at home and, as Brendan Behan once quipped, 'the first duty of a writer is to let down his own country'. Nevertheless, I also unequivocally stated in my article my utter contempt for the actions of Assad and Putin, which can only be described as murderous. It is one thing to condemn the record of Western involvement in Syria. It is quite another to soft-pedal Syrian and Russian violence on the 'campist' grounds that 'my enemy's enemy is my friend'. The disaster that is unfolding in Syria will not be ameliorated by any of the conflict's warring factions, all of which helped to ensure that the social uprising of 2011 had no revolutionary content whatsoever. A plague on all their houses.

And since no 'side' in the Syrian war should be given any quarter, we should be highly sceptical of all commentary about Syria, whether it emanates from The Guardian, the BBC and liberal journalists and academics such as George Monbiot and Rupert Read, or from RT, Press TV and one-sided alt-media 'anti-imperialists' like Rania Khalek, Patrick Henningsen and Vanessa Beeley. It's not so much that all of these organizations and individuals are necessarily lying - although some of them might be. The deeper problem is that all of them are telling only one side of the story of the war and channeling the political agendas of one or another geopolitical bloc. In my view, only non-aligned commentators can tell the truth about Syria, an inter-imperialist proxy war which serves as primary evidence that capitalism has outlived its usefulness and is now dragging humanity into barbarism.

Johann Hari's career in journalism has not exactly been covered in glory. Back in the noughties, Hari supported the devastating war in Iraq, plagiarized parts of an interview with Toni Negri, and maliciously edited Wikipedia pages about his critics. But he did at least publicly apologize for his misjudgements and misdemeanours and in recent years he seems to have turned over a new leaf. His latest book, Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression - and the Unexpected Solutions, is the outcome of another of his turnarounds, this time on the subject of mental health.

Several years ago, Hari was a user of - and staunch advocate for - anti-depressant medications; but he gradually became aware of the limited efficacy and disagreeable side effects of these drugs. In fact, Hari might have gone even further here - there is evidence that anti-depressant drugs cause more harm than good, as argued by critical psychiatrists like Peter Breggin. In any case, as Hari learned more about the science of mental health, he came to realize the inadequacy of the 'chemical imbalance' theory of depression and became increasingly concerned that the psychological and social underpinnings of the condition are being largely ignored in Western culture. Indeed, Hari's book is a powerful indictment of the highly circumscribed nature of our public discourse about depression, which has for many years been pressed into a biomedical straitjacket.

​According to today's standard medical narrative, depression is caused by a faulty brain and best treated with pharmaceuticals. Hari rejects this script. Mental health, he proposes, depends largely on our ability to connect with other people and with nature, to have meaningful work and values and to understand the part played by childhood trauma in conditioning adult thoughts and behaviours. These connections and understandings are largely frustrated in our society, which, even for those of us living in the 'developed' world, is characterized by an endless cycle of overwork and ruthless, individualistic competition that leaves us with little time to care for others or ourselves. These social stresses, Hari points out, play an enormous role in generating illness. As Hari puts it, 'the primary cause of all this rising depression and anxiety is not in our heads. It is, I discovered, largely in the world, and the way we are living in it' (p.14). Overcoming mental distress therefore requires not just 'insight', but also, to borrow a term from the British psychologist David Smail, 'outsight' into the ways in which our minds are moulded by prevailing social arrangements.

Of course, this emphasis on the psychological and social determinants of mental distress is hardly new and - contrary to the allegations of some of his critics - Hari does not claim that it is. In fact, he acknowledges that his argument rests on an existing body of research, albeit one that is well-known to anybody familiar with the sociology of mental health. What makes Hari's book so valuable is the elegance with which it synthesizes that research for the lay reader and the power of its journalistic reportage and personal reflections on depression. Drawing on interviews with researchers as well as sufferers, Hari intersperses passages explaining academic findings with moving accounts of the depressive experience. Crucially, too, he details how some sufferers have managed to 're-connect' to themselves and others through self-analysis and involvement in collective, community-based projects.

This book is a tonic, since we so seldom reflect on either the psychological or socio-political determinants of mental distress and our treatment of mental health - like that of physical health - primarily consists in suppressing symptoms rather than examining causes. Scientific research has established that depression has biological, psychological and social roots and the so-called 'bio-psychosocial model' of mental health is now unassailable; yet contemporary medical practice focuses almost exclusively on depression's biological correlates. The same is true, in fact, of popular culture: as I argued in my own book Madness, Power and the Media, the biomedical model of depression prevails in the contemporary media, from soap operas to high-profile television documentaries like Stephen Fry: The Secret Life of the Manic Depressive. In our society, the understanding and treatment of mental distress, as the late Mark Fisher argued, have been privatized and many of us have come to regard depression, as Hari once did, as an idiopathic brain disease.

This view is not only hopelessly reductive, but socially damaging: a substantial body of research suggests that people who subscribe to it are more inclined to stigmatize sufferers. But challenging the biomedical paradigm requires us to adopt a radically different perspective on health and illness - one that acknowledges that individuals are inseparable from their environments. Here it is worth pondering the words of Gabor Maté, whose ideas underpin many of Hari's own reflections:

​Lost Connections has garnered numerous stellar endorsements from celebrities, culture-makers and politicians. Some of the book's supporters are broadly leftists (Russell Brand, Glenn Greenwald, Brian Eno), while others are avowed capitalists (Hillary Clinton, Alastair Campbell). That the book is endorsed by the latter indicates the political limitation of its argument: while Hari makes a convincing case that we live in a sick and disconnected society, he cannot bring himself to identify capitalism as the cause of our lost connections, let alone endorse the socialist project to abolish it. And because of this, some of Hari's suggested remedies are equally limited. While he sagaciously recommends collective social or political activity as potential paths to re-connection, other proposals are less convincing: at one point, for example, he tentatively advocates Universal Basic Income as a means of providing working-class people with some relief from the pressures of wage labour; but it is far from clear that UBI would work in this way - one of its most likely effects, in fact, would be to lower wages and thus serve as a subsidy to employers.

We should, I think, be more radical. Our task today must be to eliminate wage labour and the exploitation and suffering it entails. In the nineteenth century, Marx recognized that capitalism alienated human beings from nature, from themselves, from work and from others (more or less the same set of disconnections that Hari discusses). Even then, Marx saw that this system would have to be overthrown after a certain point in its development. In the twenty-first century, capitalism has gone global and, having made possible a world of plenty, now shows the morbid symptoms of a system in terminal decline, with devastating consequences for human health. The people of the Global South are often involved in a desperate struggle for survival, facing poverty, starvation, war and environmental chaos. But even in the relatively affluent West, depression, anxiety and addiction are rife and well-off workers increasingly experience 'burnout' resulting from the pressures of overwork in the always-on 'achievement society', as the philosopher Byung-Chul Han has described it. The proliferation of disorders such as ADHD, meanwhile, seems too rapid to be attributable to 'genetics' or improved methods of diagnosis. All of these conditions are best seen not as diseases, but as adaptations to the manifold social and political pressures of contemporary capitalism.

As William Morris put it in his 1884 lecture How We Live and How We Might Live, the socialist society of the future will be one of 'combination, not competition'. We have now developed the productive capacity to do away with capitalism, along with the massive stress, neglect and abuse it engenders, and to create a truly human society of material abundance and mutual aid. In a world without wage labour and money, human beings will need to work for perhaps just a few hours a week; we will then have time to develop our connections with others and to explore our innate creative potential. But until we come together to create this new kind of society, our miseries will only multiply.

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

"Nobody is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart" - James Baldwin, Nobody Knows My Name

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.