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 intelligence services. 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 accused of deleting the accounts of individuals and political groups, such as Palestinian activists and the political commentator Caitlin Johnstone, 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. Whether we are aware of it or not, we are most likely the most manipulated society in human history.

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. We live today in what Christopher Bollas calls 'Id capitalism', where control is exercised not through prohibitions and taboos, but through encouragements to share, like, express and indulge our every thought and desire.

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. It is not, and never will be a panacea. 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 merely 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.

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.