This is an expanded version of an article first published in The Socialist Standard and Star and Crescent

Perhaps I’m not the best person to be writing this article. Self-isolating at home for the last few weeks, my media consumption has mainly revolved around my three-year-old son’s favourite TV animations. But in between episodes of Paw Patrol and Peppa Pig, I’ve been watching the Covid-19 news narrative unfold. Media revenues have generally plummeted as advertisers withdraw their spends and even the big digital players like Facebook and Twitter have seen big falls in profits. But news is in demand as never before from a locked-down (or, in the case of Britain, semi-locked-down) public. The audience for television news, especially on BBC, has skyrocketed. And while their print circulations have been in long-term decline, the big newspapers have also strongly influenced public debate about the pandemic, providing many of the stories we access through social media.

Journalists have been using the word 'unprecedented' to describe the present situation. But this pandemic is not some 'black swan' event; there have been similar viral pandemics before and scientists had been warning that something like the present emergency was going to happen. What is new is the scale of the political and cultural reaction to the virus: in the modern era, there has never been a global lockdown of healthy populations and this has helped to make Covid-19 the biggest media story in history.

Much of the mainstream coverage of this emergency has been informative and I don’t agree with the view, popular in online alternative media, that journalists have simply been fuelling panic or fear about the coronavirus. In Britain, at least, politicians and media were blasé about its potential threat for far too long at the beginning at the year, although there is certainly some room for debate about how much 'overreaction' there might have been to Covid-19 since then. Experts are not unanimous on this question and there are obviously going to be fierce debates in future about the relevance of the pandemic measures that have been implemented; perhaps in a year's time we will have good enough data to judge whether the total number of excess deaths caused by this coronavirus really justified global lockdown.

But this is a genuine crisis, if only because the countries the virus is impacting have mostly been very badly prepared for it: having placed profits before people, they completely failed to invest in the scientific research and healthcare equipment needed to cope with a widely foreseen pandemic. In 2017, for example, the British government rejected a recommendation for all frontline NHS staff to be given protective equipment during a flu epidemic on the grounds that it would be too costly. For the most part, mainstream media have acknowledged the scale of the resulting problem. Yet there’s much to criticise in the media coverage of the emergency. After all, a media system owned and directed by the exploiting class is bound to discuss Covid-19 in ways that reflect capitalist interests and ideologies. Here are just a few of those ways.

Fighting Talk

Over recent weeks, the media have introduced us to several neologisms, such as 'social distancing' and 'contact-tracing' (which cynics might say is just a less alarming word for 'surveillance'). But the media have also used some more familiar discursive techniques. For example, many media and political discussions of this crisis have been wrapped in the language of patriotism and war. Trump called Covid-19 the “invisible enemy” and across the major media outlets, journalists have routinely talked of the ‘fight’ or ‘battle’ against the virus. “WAR ON CORONA” went the headline of Scotland’s Sunday Mail on 15th March. Other British papers have praised the ‘Dunkirk spirit’ of the population. Of course, war metaphors are always popular among politicians and journalists seeking dramatic effect, especially when the state perceives a threat to its authority (British newspapers were full of them during the 2011 riots). Boris Johnson's talk about “beating” the enemy virus helped him to project his strength and ‘leadership’ skills at a time when even other members of his class were questioning his abilities.
 
For the rest of us, however, this war talk is quite unhelpful. For one thing, it might have distorted public perceptions of the crisis. In one of their online broadcasts in March, Novara media showed footage of an elderly Londoner (a woman clearly in the ‘high risk’ category) declaring that she would not stay at home to curb the spread of infection because that would be “giving in to the virus” – as though Covid-19 were a group of jihadists hell-bent on destroying ‘our way of life’! It has also been suggested by the chief executive of the organisation Suicide Crisis that describing the crisis as a war is potentially distressing to people with mental health conditions, who might feel ashamed that they're not tough enough to cope. And from a more macro-political angle, presenting this emergency as a ‘war’ conditions the public to accept the tougher new policing and digital surveillance measures being put in place by governments across the world and which many people fear will continue after the lockdown has ended. You don't have to be a 'conspiracy theorist' to have concerns about this - you only have to look at what is already happening in China.

Finally, militarist language tends to channel working-class dissatisfaction with capitalism into admiration for the nation state. Before the first ‘Clap for our Carers’ event which swept across Britain on 26th March (and which then became a weekly occurrence), Leo McKinstry of the right-wing Express came over all Churchillian, asking readers to “salute our NHS heroes in this their finest hour”. And after the event, the front page of the left-leaning Mirror newspaper was given over to photographs of smiling NHS workers being publicly applauded. “Your country LOVES you”, gushed the newspaper, along with “NATION SALUTES VIRUS HEROES”. Not to be outdone, the BBC’s Breakfast programme started a daily Hero Half Hour segment, in which viewers were invited to share praise for key workers “on the frontline”.

But there’s something fishy about this newfound love for often low-paid workers and as for NHS ‘heroism’, perhaps we should recall Albert Camus’ novel The Plague, whose central protagonist, a doctor called Bernard Rieux, states that his work “is not about heroism”, but about doing what’s necessary in an absurd situation. In fact, ‘Clap for our Carers’ has been a well-camouflaged propaganda campaign. It has certainly tapped into positive public feelings of solidarity with hard-pressed healthcare workers who are saving lives under difficult circumstances; however, those circumstances are due in no small measure to healthcare cuts imposed by successive governments, including the present one.

The media’s militarist and nationalist framing of the event has tended to obscure such facts, deflecting any criticism of the state with the feelgood patriotism of 'we’re all in this together' - indeed, the appeal of the campaign is libidinal as much as rhetorical. 'Clap for our Carers' works in a similar way to the insidious Help for Heroes campaign: if you criticise it, you'll quickly be accused of disrespecting 'our brave boys and girls'. It also works as a kind of anti-strike propaganda, allowing any future complaints, protests or industrial action taken by key workers (such as the Amazon strikes that have occurred in various countries) to be reframed as acts of intransigence against the national interest. How can you think of protesting when there's a war on?

China Crisis

Britain's tabloid newspapers have a global reputation for sensationalism and racism and they haven't disappointed during this emergency. Back in January, for example, the right-wing Daily Mail and other mainstream media sources published lurid images of a Chinese woman eating a bat in what some claimed was a Wuhan restaurant, although the pictures turned out to have been taken in 2016 in a restaurant in Palau and were therefore not connected with the recent outbreak. But that didn't matter. The ‘fake news’ story went viral, no doubt because it appealed to racist Western stereotypes of exotic orientals with bizarre habits.

It’s hard to prove that the media affects attitudes or behaviours in the real world, but it seems likely that the anti-Chinese messaging of the tabloids has contributed to the present climate of xenophobic hostility towards East Asian people. This has led to harassment and sometimes brutal physical assaults. On the 3rd March a Singaporean student was left needing facial reconstructive surgery after being attacked in London. And on 14th March an Asian-American family, including a two-year-old girl, were stabbed in a retail outlet in Texas by a man who apparently feared that the victims were infectious. Being the cynics that they are, politicians such as Johnson and Trump, who has referred to Covid-19 as the “Chinese virus”, might be hoping to benefit from this popular anti-Chinese sentiment, as they try to sidestep responsibility for their failures in handling the outbreak by shifting the blame onto China – even to the point of asking for ‘reparations’. 'The Chinese' have become a useful scapegoat.

In parts of the left-leaning media, meanwhile, the China card has been played in a very different, but equally questionable way. During an interview on the Kremlin-supporting Russia Today television news channel, Stalin enthusiasts George Galloway and Ranjeet Brar heaped praise on the efficient and organised Chinese response to the outbreak. This is reasonable up to a point. After all, a case could be made that China marshalled its immense state apparatus to deal with the coronavirus outbreak more effectively than many other countries and it seems to have kept its death toll low.

Then again, we surely ought to be suspicious of health-related statistics reported by the Chinese state. And Galloway and Brar conveniently forgot that the Chinese government had initially tried to suppress the warnings of medical professionals about the spread of the virus. It should also be added that just as tabloid stories about the virus have generated widespread anti-Asian sentiment in the West, misinformation about the virus and its origins has also fuelled xenophobia and racism within China. This has been experienced particularly by black immigrants in China, who have been evicted by their landlords, barred from entering restaurants, and so on. One Chinese official, Zhao Lijian, has even tried to spread the rumour that the US army brought the virus to Wuhan last year.

None of this has stopped left-wing ‘anti-imperialist’ publications from praising the glorious People’s Republic. The People's Dispatch even published an article with the title ‘How Chinese Socialism is Defeating the Coronavirus Outbreak’. I can only recommend that the authors of this piece actually visit China to witness its obscene wealth gap, rural poverty and hyper-exploited workers. China's rulers may pay lip service to Marx and communism, but they actively persecute and 'disappear' Marxist activists and university students. So no, China isn't socialist, it's a state-capitalist authoritarian nightmare and this left-wing cheering for China is as disturbing as the right-wing Sinophobia.

Corona Communism

Some very odd ideas about socialism have also been aired in more mainstream media. On 20th March, in the right-wing Telegraph, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard urged that ‘Boris must embrace socialism immediately to save the liberal free market’. But this only shows the capitalist press's confusion about the meaning of socialism - or perhaps its ideological opportunism (as Paul Mattick once noted, Marxism is the last refuge of the bourgeoisie). For Evans-Pritchard, socialism means the state taking over control of the economy from private industry. Ironically, he shares this understanding of socialism as state control with much of the political left, not to mention parts of the Internet-based conspiracy community. For example, one of the more imaginative members of the conspiracy milieu, Max Igan, is currently arguing that the Covid lockdown is a socialist-communist plot organized by modern-day Bolsheviks to harvest the organs of the population! (Assuming we all come out of this with our kidneys in situ, it'll be interesting to see how Igan walks back his macabre predictions).

Of course, the state has indeed taken over aspects of private industry with dizzying speed in recent months, with the nationalisation of the hospitals in Ireland and the suspension of the rail franchise system in the UK, to give just two examples. Genuine socialism, however, means a world without classes, commodities, money and borders. What we have been seeing over recent weeks is not socialism, but the capitalist state putting in place measures to cover a proportion of workers' wages, bail out businesses and keep key services running. The state is simply doing what it must in order to head off any ‘social unrest’ that might arise during the epidemic and to ensure that the wheels of production can grind back into motion afterwards. To a limited extent, governments have been “putting their arms around workers” - but only so that they can get their hands back around our necks when normal business resumes.

Another, particularly daft media myth has been that the virus is a social leveller. This idea gained some traction in the major media when, on 25th March, the British public learned that the virus had pulled off its most audacious stunt so far, shamelessly infecting the first in line to the throne, Prince Charles. In the Express, Dr Hilary Jones was quoted as saying that the virus “is a great leveller” that will be “just as virulent for politicians and celebrities and the monarchy as it will the homeless and destitute”. A few days later, Clare Foges of The Times waxed lyrical on the theme, writing: “Coronavirus: the great leveller. Infecting princes and prime ministers, making hermits of most, hushing the concrete council estate and the millionaires' leafy square”.

Fortunately, not many people seem to have been fooled by this sort of twaddle. Sceptics on social media have argued that Prince Charles, who had shown only minor symptoms of C-19, had ‘jumped the queue’, having been given a coronavirus test despite NHS guidance that only hospitalised patients could receive one. The public has also given short shrift to celebrities claiming to be ‘just like us’ when faced with the threat of the virus. Wonder Woman actress Gal Gadot’s attempt to prove that “we’re all in this together” by leading a star-studded singalong to John Lennon’s ‘Imagine’ was widely ridiculed on social media. And megastar Madonna, the world's wealthiest female musician, was mocked for an Instagram video in which she called Covid-19 “the great equaliser” while sitting in a petal-filled bathtub.
 
Far from thrusting us towards socialism or uniting the celebs with the plebs, the corona emergency has brought the savagely class divided nature of our world into sharp focus. It is true that anybody can catch the virus and this is surely one reason why the capitalist class is taking it very seriously. But this has been a tale of two pandemics. On the one side, the super-rich have headed for their disaster bunkers in private jets; on the other, workers on temporary or insecure contracts have faced destitution (by early April in Britain there had been one million new registrations for Universal Credit), while the most vulnerable groups in society, such as refugees, homeless people, those with pre-existing conditions, or the many low-paid key workers who cannot simply ‘stay at home’, are widely exposed to the virus.

Of course, the mainstream media cannot cover up these grotesque social inequalities completely. In April it was widely reported that the world's richest man - Amazon founder and boss Jeff Bezos - had added $24 billion to his wealth since the start of the year, owing to the growth in demand for online shopping. At the same time, workers in Amazon-owned Whole Foods Stores in the US were given a t-shirt emblazoned with the word 'Hero' on it, which I'm sure more than made up for being in a public-facing job without union protection or face masks. Perhaps they could wrap their t-shirts around their mouths.

Their Media and Ours
 
Despite all of these myths and mystifications, the mainstream media are not entirely bad and they cannot simply ignore the widespread public awareness of the government's incompetence. That's why tough questions have sometimes been asked of the government. For example, on 26th March the editor of The Lancet, Richard Horton, appeared on the BBC's Question Time discussion panel, condemning Britain's unreadiness for the pandemic as a “scandal”. Throughout April, much of the British media castigated the British government’s inability to guarantee adequate testing and protective equipment for NHS workers. A BBC Panorama investigation (27 April) has detailed the British government's failures and The Sunday Times (19 April) has also put the boot in, perhaps suggesting that Rupert Murdoch is distancing himself from the Tories.

But the general perspective of the mainstream media has been narrow and anti-working class. There have been plenty of stories about people flouting the social distancing rules, but none questioning how the profit system has hampered the medical response to the crisis. It has been primarily through the social media that working-class people have found solidarity via community information and support groups. And only socialist publications such as The Socialist Standard have been cutting through the nationalist claptrap and geopolitical blame games of the politicians and mainstream media to expose the underlying problem: the global capitalist system, which exists to protect profits rather than human life.

In his 2000 book Liquid Modernity, Zygmunt Bauman wrote that “dystopias are no longer written these days. The post-Fordist, ‘fluid modern’ world of freely choosing individuals does not worry about the sinister Big Brother who would punish those who stepped out of line”. You can understand where Bauman was coming from. After all, the years of the 1990s were relatively peaceable. For white Westerners like me, at any rate, this was the decade of the slacker and the alienated cubicle worker, a boring age of colourless icons, of John Major and Pete Sampras - the era of 'no surprises', as Radiohead put it. But the end of history has, well, ended and in the current post-9/11, post-crash, post-truth age of austerity and anger, it’s hardly surprising that dystopias of every type have made a return to Western screens, from teen dystopia franchises like The Hunger Games and Divergent to the recent television reworkings of Westworld and The Handmaid’s Tale. And we can now delight in watching the total eradication of democracy and freedom in an exciting variety of global settings via Netflix dramas such as Brazil’s 3%.

In Britain, dystopian drama - having had its heyday in the 1970s and 80s - has also returned to television screens in recent years, most notably in the form of Channel 4 offerings such as Black Mirror and Utopia. Russell T. Davies’s recent BBC television drama Years and Years has garnered largely favourable reviews from critics. The six-part story reflects the increasingly febrile character of British, indeed Western public life, constituting what Fredric Jameson has called a ‘critical dystopia’, that is, a warning about what will happen “if this goes on”. Here Jameson is drawing upon François Hartog’s claim that in our current moment “the future is perceived as a threat not a promise. The future is a time of disasters, and ones we have, moreover, brought upon ourselves”. More on that point later.
​
Years and Years follows the multiple misfortunes of the Manchester-based Lyons family. Paterfamilias Stephen (Rory Kinnear) loses a million pounds when the banks crash. His brother Daniel (Russell Tovey) fatally tries to help immigrant Viktor (Maxim Baldry) to escape from homophobic persecution. Stephen’s anarcho-warrior sister Edith (Jessica Hynes), meanwhile, is poisoned after exposure to a nuclear bomb detonated on Chinese territory by a lunatic US president. Restless daughter Bethany (Lydia West), apparently seeking to escape from her dysfunctional family, wants to be a post-human, integrating smart technology into her body at an alarming rate in a Black Mirror-style warning against the perils of unregulated biotech. And several minor characters seem to be in the grip of outlandish conspiracy theories.

The political climate is also going haywire. The Lyons are led not by donkeys, but an unscrupulous right-wing populist Prime Minister Vivienne Rook (Emma Thompson), who progresses from flouting the rules of civilised democratic discourse to setting up death camps for immigrants and other undesirables known euphemistically as ‘Erstwhiles’. Downwardly mobile and morally conflicted, Stephen finds himself working for the ruthless tech corporation that is running the camps and which in no way resembles Amazon. Indeed, in the age of Trump, of concentration camps from China to the US, of immigration crisis and right-wing resurgence, the contemporary resonance of all these storylines hardly needs to be stated. As a warning about the threat of fascism to liberal democracy, Davies’s drama stands in a tradition of fiction that includes Sinclair Lewis’s 1935 novel It Can’t Happen Here, in which a fascist politician institutes a corporatist regime and introduces concentration camps in the US, and Stephen King's 1979 novel The Dead Zone, which portrays the rise of a Trump-like populist demagogue.

But all’s well that ends well. In the drama’s denouement, the concentration camps are infiltrated and exposed by Edith, who livestreams footage of one of the camps to the world. It is an ending that follows a time-honoured narrative convention, especially common in science fiction, by which state-corporate malfeasance is revealed to the population via the very same screens that had previously broadcast state propaganda and mindless entertainment. An ignorant, brainwashed population is suddenly woken from its slumber and its exposure to the truth is sufficient to save the day.

Of course, in the real world it is not at all obvious that supplying one more piece of ‘information’ is ever sufficient to bring about radical social change. In fact, this difficulty is raised in Years and Years when Edith is mocked in the middle of her livestreaming by a camp guard who tells her “Nobody will believe you”. The implications of this taunt are sidestepped by the drama: fortunately for Edith, it appears that those who watch her livestream do not question its veracity. But the guard’s challenge is worth taking seriously. In a media environment abounding in propaganda and ‘fake news’, is it even possible for us to recognise the truth, let alone act upon it?

Besides, if we have failed to get rid of capitalism, it is not simply because we don’t know what is really going on. Sure, there are conspiracies among the ruling class. And yes, the capitalist-controlled media do obscure the harsh realities of the world with bread and circuses and outright lies; as socialists, it is very important to expose these lies and to put forward an accurate view of world events where we can. But most of us already know a lot – too much, perhaps – about what is happening in the world. We are aware that the planet is on fire with war and terrorism, that children are starving, that much of the world lives in poverty, that the long-term habitability of the planet is hanging in the balance, and so on. Wikileaks revealed much about the atrocities committed in the name of Western ‘democracies’ and the surveillance of their populations. And many British people know that their ruling class has been materially supporting Saudi atrocities in the ongoing war in Yemen.

No, the problem is not so much that we lack facts, so much as we lack a framework for understanding them. As the philosopher Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi puts it, “the process of social subjectivation is not based on disclosing the secret; it is based on the process of interpretation”. At present, most people do not accept that the profit system is the cause of the horrors that surround them and they do not believe that abolishing the profit system offers the solution.

It certainly doesn’t appear that Davies believes this, either, despite the drama’s passing nod to a supposedly “socialist” Spain as a beacon of progressive politics. This becomes clear in the drama’s final episode, set in 2029, when the Lyons family matriarch Muriel (Anne Reid) delivers a dinner-table sermon about why the twenty-first century went to hell in a handcart (by this point, we know that things have gotten pretty bad, because the BBC has had its charter withdrawn). Muriel, who overcomes some of her bigoted attitudes during the course of the six episodes, is one of the drama’s most likeable characters and the positioning of her speech at the end of the drama gives it an authorial feel, as though this is Davies’s own ‘last word’ on our contemporary malaise. In her speech, Muriel recognises that right-wing politicians played their part in the social breakdown they have all lived through. She had been, she admits, too smug about the triumph of “the West” and had failed to see “all the clowns and monsters heading our way”. The allusion here to Trump, Johnson and the other rough beasts of our current political scene seems apt.

Less convincing is Muriel’s next assertion, namely, that “we” are also collectively responsible for everything bad that has happened. “Every single thing that’s gone wrong, it’s your fault”, Muriel tells her family. Warming to her theme, Muriel identifies consumer apathy as the root cause of the global democratic collapse. She complains that we bought £1 tee-shirts (“The tee-shirt that costs one pound – we can’t resist it”) but didn’t think of the economic consequences for “some little peasant in a field” who gets paid a pittance. She also blames “us” for creating unemployment by making use of automated checkouts in shops. “We built this world”, she testily concludes.

Muriel’s speech is a well-staged set piece and it’s easy to see why clips of it have been shared widely on social media, where it has been typically described as a political ‘truth drop’. But its explanation for why the twenty-first century West went to pot is moralistic and superficial, suggesting that Davies is more confident in detailing the symptoms of societal decline than he is in providing an accurate diagnosis of them. The horrors of our age – exploitation, poverty, bigotry and war – are not caused by ethical lapses in consumer behaviour and working-class people cannot be blamed for buying goods at affordable prices or for using convenient technology; so let's not chuck our iPhones into the bin just yet. In fact, neither production nor consumption can be carried on ethically within a profit system.

Muriel is right to say, however, that we are responsible for building our world, so our primary task must be to get rid of the ruling class that is currently keeping the planet's resources under lock and key. "Dystopias", Doug Henwood wrote a few years ago, "are for losers". Catastrophism of the kind indulged throughout most of Years and Years, is an appealing, but ultimately disabling perspective. Humanity has a shot at survival - but only if we can correctly identify the root cause of our problems and act decisively to remove it.
 
References

- Bauman, Z. (2000) Liquid Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press, p.61.
- Berardi, F. (2019) The Second Coming. Cambridge: Polity Press, p.100.
- Hartog, F. (2015) Regimes of Historicity: Presentism and Experiences of Time, trans. S. Brown. New York: Columbia University Press, p.xviii.
- Jameson, F. (2005) Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions. London; New York: Verso, p. 198.

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.

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

Introduction: The Bosnian War and the Media

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Post-Yugoslav Cinema: Nationalism to Normalization

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

At the start of what promises to be a bumper year for crypto-patriotic television 'commemorations' of the First World War, the BBC has begun broadcasting its four-part documentary series Britain's Great War, fronted by Jeremy Paxman. Predictably enough, neither Paxman, nor the programme's interviewees (including Julian Fellowes, who delivered a paean to the brutal Lord Kitchener of Battle of Omdurman and Boer War infamy), offered many opinions to which Michael Gove or Max Hastings would object. You 'can't fail to be impressed' by the numbers of men who signed up for the war, enthuses Paxman, who also refers repeatedly to 'the war effort' - a phrase whose nominalized neutrality elides the chaos and murder that this 'effort' entailed.

Even less subtle is Paxman's interview in the second episode with two contemporary Clydeside unionists. When these men express their admiration for the Glasgow shipbuilders who struck against their profiteering owners during the war, Paxman responds by jovially dismissing the workers as 'difficult buggers'. In a similar vein, Paxman asks the relative of a conscientious objector who refused conscription whether such men were not 'just being awkward'. This is psychologism as historiography. Just as Paxman, in a recent interview, regarded Russell Brand's rejection of bourgeois electoral politics as an expression of apathy ('you can't even be arsed to vote'), he regards those who objected to war on principle as having an attitude problem. Clearly, these men needed to buck up their ideas. Indeed, the list of those too dense or perverse to get behind the war effort includes such irredeemable dunderheads as Bertrand Russell, Eugene Debs, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, all of whom were jailed for their opposition; what a bunch of losers!

It is in summing up his own attitude towards the 'conchies' that Paxman makes explicit his opinion about the war in a direct address to camera. Describing 'absolutist' objectors as 'cranks', he emphasizes that the war 'had to be fought' to save Europe from becoming a gigantic German colony. Yet the moral force of this argument would be easier to accept if Britain in 1914 had not presided over the most extensive empire in the world - a feat achieved by an unparalleled dedication to deadly force. But Paxo does not register Britain's history of colonial violence; he even opines that military conscription was a tough sell in Britain, since it contradicted the country's 'respect for individual freedoms'; these were, presumably, the freedoms that Britain was safeguarding through its pre-war terrorisation - including rape, torture and murder - of India, China and South Africa.

If the working-class perspective on the war is absent from Paxman's own commentary, it a structuring absence: Paxman often seems to be arguing against the anti-war position he knows many of his viewers will share. What else could people do, he asks exasperatedly, except join the 'war effort'? This is a rhetorical question, no doubt, but it is one to which Lenin had a fairly convincing answer: the working class had to turn the imperialist war into a class war by overthrowing the butchers who had led their friends and family members to the slaughter. And this is precisely what workers attempted to do, with tragically limited success, in Russia and Germany at the end of the conflict.

One might wonder whether there is any real reason to worry about how the First World War is being spun in the media. James Heartfield writes in a recent article on the subject:

"Those arguing over the First World War will find out soon enough that there is neither the opportunity nor the danger that there will be an upsurge of nationalistic identification with the British war effort. The depleting forces of popular militarism are clear for all to see."

I'm not sure about this. Certainly, a third world war is not immediately on the horizon - and even if it were, it would likely be fought with nuclear weapons, conveniently dispensing with the need for a mass mobilisation of brainwashed, jingoistic conscripts, even if these could be created. Nevertheless, programmes like Paxman's - together with popular 'militainment' documentaries and dramas on television and campaigns such as Help for Heroes - have the general effect of instilling a sense of nationalism and rationalising the horrors of war in ways that serve to justify current imperialist adventures. For this reason, they must be clearly exposed for what they are: nationalist and militarist state propaganda.

It is unsurprising that Gove dislikes the drama; and unsurprising, too, that the production got into hot political water in 1986, when the future of the BBC as a public service broadcaster hung in the Thatcherite balance (then again, political opprobrium is always the fate of contestatory docudrama, from The War Game and Death of a Princess to The Government Inspector). And it is certainly hard to imagine how such bold, proletarian perspectives on war could make their way into British television dramas today (good as they are, Tony Marchant's The Mark of Cain and Jimmy McGovern's 'Frankie's Story', in his Accused anthology, only suggest that life in the British army isn't all that it's cracked up to be). That, surely, is part of the reason why it is important to keep the working class view of World War I alive in critical debate. Now that the last surviving veterans of the war have passed away, we must remember what the most clear sighted of these men, such as Britain's 'last Tommy' Harry Patch, understood only too well: that the conflict was a senseless shambles in which young, mostly working class men were turned into meat and bones to serve the ends of their rulers. In the words of the British Private D. J. Sweeney, this was 'murder, not war'.

But while we are at it, we should also challenge nationalistic and patriotic understandings of the Second World War. This is, of course, much harder to do, since the myth that World War II was a 'Good War' fought for 'democracy' is deeply entrenched institutionally, politically and culturally. One struggles to name many popular films, novels or television dramas that question the purpose of the war. Popular culture has thoroughly heroised the allied 'war effort', registering only the atrocities of the axis powers, as though the terror bombings of Hamburg and Dresden, the manufacture of the Bengal famine, and the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki never happened. To take only the most recent example, Jonathan Teplitzy's Second World War-themed The Railway Man, starring Colin Firth, depicts the Japanese guards and Kempeitai who harass and torture their British prisoners as witless and bestial, while the Australians who finally rescue the British from captivity are 'civilised' (the adjective is emphasised by an Australian officer in an address to his new Japanese captives).

In reality, however, the allied treatment of the Japanese in World War II was rather different: as James Heartfield notes in his Unpatriotic History of the Second World War, for example, US forces made no accommodation for Japanese prisoners; rather, they often simply slaughtered them, a practice consistent with the propaganda message that the Japanese were subhuman. Heartfield points to the description of the Pacific war given by the British serviceman and Atlantic Monthly correspondent Edgar L. Jones in 1946:

"We shot prisoners in cold blood, wiped out hospitals, strafed lifeboats, killed or mistreated enemy civilians, finished off the enemy wounded, tossed the dying into a hole with the dead, and in the Pacific boiled the flesh off enemy skulls to make table ornaments for sweethearts, or carved their bones into letter openers"

The racial thinking underpinning such barbarism, which allowed the Western public to accept the vaporization of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, has been a staple of US military propaganda, as Nick Turse's recent book on the American war in Vietnam, Kill Anything That Moves, makes all too clear. By presenting a one-sided narrative of white victimhood and Japanese brutality, The Railway Man participates in this racist imaginary.

The Second World War was, like its forerunner, a war fought between rival, and equally brutal, imperialist powers - a truth almost totally obscured by the Manichean narratives of popular culture, which continually reinforce the comforting myth that 'we' - the 'democratic powers' - were the good guys. Nevertheless, books such as Jacques Pauwels's The Myth of the Good War and Heartfield's Unpatriotic History point the way out of this labyrinth of lies, providing counter-hegemonic narratives of the conflict and exploding the myth that the mass slaughter of soldiers and civilians was 'just' and necessary to the defence of civilisation. I recommend both books to Michael Gove, whose understanding of the Second World War is doubtless as chauvinistic as his view of the First.

So, cheeky Cockney trickster Russell Brand has gone bec à bec with the BBC reactionary Jeremy Paxman on Newsnight. In a witty and intelligent performance, Brand got the better of Paxo in an argument about the merits of voting that the veteran anchor seemed unable or perhaps unwilling to follow (as Upton Sinclair once quipped, 'It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it'). Brand indicted capitalism and questioned the necessity of voting for capitalist parties. Not since the 'radical press' of the early nineteenth century has there been a mass media discourse condemning the profit system tout court, so it is pleasing to hear these sentiments expressed, however briefly. From recent discussions with friends and colleagues, it seems to me that Brand's comments strike a chord with many people, who can see that capitalist politicians and political parties do not represent their interests. 

Brand's remarks have been critiqued not only - or even primarily - by right-wing pundits, but by liberal and left-wing commentators. Brand's stance was challenged, for example, by the actor Robert Webb, who responded by publicly announcing his (re)commitment to the Labour Party, while smugly averring that all revolutionary politics leads to the gulag. A more sophisticated, but totally contradictory version of this response was offered by Jeremy Gilbert and Mark Fisher, who combined praise for Brand with a defence of the Labour Party (they mention the national minimum wage as one of New Labour's recent achievements - as though it had not been more than paid for by the outsourcing of 'British jobs' elsewhere, and indeed offset by the party's sanctioning of the use of deadly force against working people, from Belgrade to Baghdad).

In contrast to such equivocations, Brand's basic message is clear: the profit system is destroying the lives of poor and ordinary people everywhere and it is time to organise society differently. Certainly, Brand does hold some pretty bizarre New Age notions and has a dubious track record when it comes to gender politics (something that has earned him a proper dissing from the intersectional left). But neither his quirkiness nor his supposed sexism invalidate his fundamental political point about the need to stop voting for capitalist parties. I hope he sticks to it.

'No matter how brutal the crime, you will always get glorification of heroism and tradition from the eunuchs of bourgeois culture' (Amadeo Bordiga)

Guy Hibbert is no stranger to controversial drama. No Child of Mine - his rendering of an horrific real-life child abuse case brilliantly directed by Peter Kosminsky - was one of the most disturbing and moving British television productions of the 1990s. So I had high hopes for his recent Channel 4 one-off drama Complicit, which follows MI5 agent Edward Ekubo (David Oyelowo) in hot pursuit of a suspected terrorist, Waleed Achmed (Arsher Ali), from Britain to Egypt in order to foil a suspected ricin attack on the United Kingdom. Slow and stylistically unostentatious, Complicit marks a welcome departure from the high octane formula of US 'war on terror' dramas such as 24, Threat Matrix and Homeland; but its take on the relationship between terrorism and the British state nevertheless reproduces some of the conservative elements of those shows.

It is curious that some television reviewers have praised the moral complexity of Complicit on the grounds that the drama gives us no 'goodie' to root for and no 'baddie' to condemn. In fact, Ekubo and Achmed are clearly identifiable as the hero and villain of the piece, respectively. The latter is a shady, sneering figure whom Ekubo observes on surveillance tapes bellowing 'British troops burn in hell!' at an anti-war demonstration (this chanting is heard in sinister extradiegetic overdub when Achmed appears later in the film). Achmed is also a malicious racist. Ekubo, on the other hand, is a decent, hardworking and competent agent who nevertheless remains something of an outsider at MI5, under-promoted and alienated from his Establishment colleagues. There are strong implications that racism has played a part in his marginalisation. Frustrated by these workplace problems and his lack of progress in the case - and horrified by Achmed's apparent disregard for human life - Ekubo allows his suspect to be tortured by the Egyptian police.

This turns out to be a big mistake, for the twist in the tale is that Achmed has played Ekubo like a fiddle. There is no ricin attack and Ekubo realises too late that he has been cleverly manipulated by his quarry so that the latter can gain a propaganda advantage. Drawing attention to his torture in the media, Achmed subsequently presents himself to the world as a victim of anti-Islamic prejudice. The disgraced Ekubo, meanwhile, is indefinitely suspended from his post for breaking the rules. For Ekubo, torture - in this case, at least - not only fails to bear fruit, but proves to be counter-productive.

The producers of Complicit certainly deserve credit for problematizing the use of torture; yet viewers are hardly encouraged to adopt a critical stance towards either Ekubo or the 'war on terror'. The film's crucial scene is a tense interrogation-room confrontation in which Ekubo and Achmed exchange their conflicting views of the world. Formally, this is an equally balanced battle of wits between a jihadist and state 'spook'; yet even when Achmed advances some reasonable arguments, the viewer is left in little doubt where her sympathies ought to lie. When Achmed condemns the British invasion of Iraq and other countries, he is ridiculed by Ekubo, who counters by enumerating the freedoms supposedly enjoyed by British people, including 'free schools', 'state handouts' and the 'freedom to say and do what you want'. And any lingering sympathy the viewer may have with Achmed's arguments about the brutality of British imperialism dissipates when Achmed calls Ekubo a 'fucking kaffir' and a 'nigger'. How can the viewer take seriously any point of view articulated by such a monstrous bigot - or, for that matter, object to his torture?

The ending of the drama is equally problematic. In his exit interview with his boss at MI5, Ekubo is taken to task for allowing Achmed's torture; but he protests:

"What else could I have done? Weighing up the illegality against the consequences of doing nothing? I've always understood that we work with politically unacceptable regimes if it means we are safeguarding our people from attack at home [...] Everything I've done has been for my country, for the people of my country"

The patriotic message here is clear enough: the security of 'our people' can only be achieved through the suspension of human rights and the illegal but necessary use of force by agents of 'our' state (an 'acceptable' regime, no doubt). This is in essence the perspective of Kathryn Bigelow's recent film Zero Dark Thirty, whose 'normalisation' of torture has been challenged by Slavoj Žižek in terms that are highly relevant here: 'Torture saves lives? Maybe, but for sure it loses souls – and its most obscene justification is to claim that a true hero is ready to forsake his or her soul to save the lives of his or her countrymen'.

Ekubo is certainly a troubled figure at the conclusion of the film, as he stands on the banks of the Thames watching the world go by and presumably reflecting on the wisdom of his actions (a reprise, strangely enough, of Oyelowo's pose in the final scene of the 2006 BBC drama Shoot the Messenger). Indeed, we end on a rather questioning note: in the final shot, Ekubo looks directly into the camera, as if to ask viewers what they would have done in his position. But this 'open' gesture is hardly sufficient to override Ekubo's explicit, patriotic justification for torture. Moreover, the preceding shots of Londoners happily going about their daily business seem to confirm that Edward has indeed done the right thing and that only similarly decisive actions in the future can safeguard the 'British way of life'. In the drama's conservative framework, people like Achmed simply hate 'us' for who we are and are hell-bent on destroying Western society and its supposedly liberal values.

Defenders of Complicit may point to the the production's unglamorous style, as well as its troubled hero and the supposed moral complexity of the situation he finds himself in. Indeed, the film is pervaded by a sense of indeterminacy: Ekubo often seems to be distracted, homing in on seemingly irrelevant details (for example, during a visit to his superior's office, a point of view shot reveals that he is focusing on a box of antacids) and he is often shot in shallow focus, creating blurred backgrounds that seem to reflect his uncertain state of mind. Yet despite these markers of uncertainty, complexity, 'seriousness ' and, indeed, 'quality', the production tends to foreclose criticism of the state's anti-terrorism methods or the relationship between jihadist terrorism and imperialist aggression. Complicit, like so much 'terrorism TV' (I borrow the phrase from Stacy Takacs's superb book on the subject), contributes to the naturalisation of the 'state of exception' along with its disciplinary apparatuses of surveillance, detention and torture.

For anybody with a critical perspective on these topics, however, the one-off in-house BBC drama Our Girl, written by veteran Tony Grounds and starring EastEnders actress Lacey Turner, is even more troubling.

Molly Dawes (Turner) is a working class girl from East London who joins the British army in order to escape from her obnoxious Albanian boyfriend Artan (Dan Black) and her selfish and racist father (Sean Gallagher), who spends his days smoking, drinking and playing violent video games. Commencing her training programme, Molly soon adapts to the rigours of military discipline and the army becomes her surrogate family.

Our Girl reproduces many of the generic scripts of military-themed 'human interest' documentaries, such as BBC3's Girls on the Frontline (2010): an emphasis on personal sacrifice, an unquestioning acceptance of the necessity for military intervention overseas, and a focus on its subject's transition from a restricting working class milieu to the excitement and challenge of army life. As several television critics have noted, the rather idealised depiction of Molly's military training resembles an army recruitment video. Indeed, the drama offers a highly affirmative view of the army and its mandate, counterposing Molly's desire to 'do something' with her slobbish father's goal of securing long-term incapacity benefit (at a moment when benefit claimants are under attack in the mainstream media, this portrait of a 'benefit scrounger', like Ekubo's reference to 'state handouts' in Complicit, is problematic). At the end of the drama, Molly proudly 'passes out' as a soldier and goes to Afghanistan, while her father lounges at home watching news reports about Al Qaeda bombings. The implication of this parallel editing is clear: Molly is about to play her part in tackling terrorism, while her feckless father rots on the sofa.

Our Girl's sympathetic representation of an army woman fighting prejudice at home is not the only narrative of its type. A similar transference of regressive attitudes from the 'serving' female soldier onto an unpleasant male relative is apparent in the British director Brian Welsh's 2010 film In Our Name, in which Joanne Frogatt plays Suzy, a female soldier returning home from a tour of duty in Iraq. Suzy is traumatized, not after killing children herself, but after witnessing Iraqis killing children and feeling 'powerless to protect those we were sent to help'. On returning to her Middlesborough home, she is applauded by her father for 'making this country safe for us all', but viciously abused by her racist, psychopathic husband. As in Complicit, any potential critique of British imperialism is displaced into the text's anti-racist and anti-sexist politics.

Yet the drama's most direct pro-war statement comes earlier in the film, when Molly returns to London on leave with her meek training colleague Katy (Katherine Pearce). Here Molly must cope with the incomprehension of her friends, who cannot understand why she has 'joined up', and her father's insistence that she stay in England and get married. It is at this point that Katy finds her voice for the first time, drawing a parallel between Molly's father and boyfriend and the patriarchal control of women in Afghanistan: 'You know, that's exactly what we're fighting for in Afghanistan', she tells Molly's father, 'So that women can have a say in who they marry or if they get married at all'. Since Molly's father can only respond with a racist rant, Katy's 'feminist' argument prevails.

But here the drama is on very thin ice. Certainly, the argument that the invasion of Afghanistan was undertaken for the benefit of Afghan women was widely touted in the news media in the run-up to the war, and, as Wikileaks has revealed, was promoted by the CIA in order to boost flagging public support for the occupation. Yet it is difficult to believe that this was ever anything more than a flimsy pretext for imperialist intervention. In a devastating critique of the 'progressive' argument for the invasion of Afghanistan, Carole Stabile and Deepa Kumar note that the liberation of women was neither the aim of the war nor its result. Pointing to the Orientalist dimensions of the supposed drive to 'save' Muslim women, they argue that 'the rhetoric of women's liberation' was 'a cynical ploy' and even 'a lie as monumental as the claims about WMD'. It is therefore unfortunate that the producers of Our Girl are content to give such rhetoric a free pass.

All too often in British television dramas about the 'war on terror', criticisms of Western imperialism are either absent or articulated by such unpleasant characters that they cannot be taken seriously, while the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq are justified by appeals to the feminist discourse of 'liberation'. In the three-part Occupation (2009), for example - the BBC's only drama about the Iraq war - the most trenchant criticism of the coalition invasion is placed in the mouth of a corrupt Iraqi policeman-turned-terrorist, while the drama as a whole casts the British forces in Iraq as liberators rather than invaders, victims rather than perpetrators of violence.

Yet British television audiences have been offered more critical perspectives on the war on terror over the last decade. Peter Kosminsky's The Government Inspector (Channel 4, 2005), for instance, questioned the role of the Labour government in taking Britain to war in Iraq, while his later Britz (Channel 4, 2007) was equally critical of the effects of domestic 'anti-terror' laws on British Muslims following 9/11. Tony Marchant's The Mark of Cain (Channel 4, 2006), meanwhile, remains the only television drama to have seriously engaged with the issue of prisoner abuse by the British army. These dramas interrogate the conduct of 'our' state in the war on terror; dramas such as Complicit and Our Girl, on the other hand, emphasize - one implicitly, the other explicitly - the threat posed by the terrorist 'other'.

In his book Democracy Incorporated, Sheldon Wolin warns that 'in the reality of the war between imperialism and terrorism, the contemporary citizen, far from being invited into a discussion, is, as never before, being manipulated by "managed care" and by the managers of fear'. We need television fictions that challenge rather than reinforce this state of affairs, that 'invite discussion' about terrorism and imperialism and their interrelationship. Controversial as they may be, the dramas of Kosminsky and Marchant certainly do this. They show the way forward for writers and producers who are prepared to criticise the 'home team', to cut through the bias and distortion that has so often characterised the treatment of the war on terror in both journalism and screen fiction.