The recent massacre of Muslims in Aotearoa/New Zealand by white supremacist terrorist Brenton Tarrant must, I think, be seen as the latest morbid symptom of world capitalism's death drive - its descent into barbarism. The poisonous bulletin board messages on cesspit websites such as 8chan no doubt played a big part in reflecting and reinforcing Tarrant's abhorrent beliefs. And along with other social media platforms, Facebook, which inadvertently hosted Tarrant's livestream of the event, is on the backfoot, as several corporations threaten an advertising boycott of the platform. But if any quarter of the mainstream media world should feel ashamed after Christchurch, it is surely the right-wing tabloid press. It is all very well for The Sun identify Tarrant on its front page as a 'Facebook Terrorist', but the tabloids must bear at least some responsibility for the Christchurch carnage, having spent years decrying Muslims as thugs, fanatics and sexual groomers.

That said, even right-wing journalists and politicians described the Christchurch killings relatively respectfully in the hours after the attack: The Express, one of Britain's most malicious anti-Muslim newspapers, went with the headline 'Hate-Fuelled Attack on Values That Unite Us All'. This was sheer hypocrisy, of course; but when a hundred people have been killed or injured by an Islamophobe with views about society very similar to your own, it's probably best to wind your neck in until the dust settles.

A few right-wing rabble-rousers, however, were undaunted by considerations of taste or timing. Australian senator William Fraser Anning, in particular, saw an opportunity to make a splash, blaming the atrocity on the "the growing fear within our community, both in Australia and New Zealand, of the increasing Muslim presence". He was widely condemned - and rather deftly 'egged' - for his bigotry. But British blabbermouth Katie Hopkins - a woman ever keen to fan the flames of social discord - waded in to defend Anning in a bizarre video rant posted on twitter, in which she expressed more concern for the media's supposed depreciation of 'whites' than for the victims of the attack.

Mainstream politicians and media commentators, meanwhile, took a different tack. Many of them went wild for New Zealand's Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, after the latter showed a degree of sympathy for the victims lacking among more conservative pundits. In The New York Times, for example, Sushil Aaron wrote an article entitled 'Why Jacinda Ardern Matters', hailing the PM as a "progressive antithesis to right-wing strongmen like Trump, Orbán and Modi". And in Britain's Guardian newspaper, Suzanne Moore opined that "Jacinda Ardern is showing the world what real leadership is: sympathy, love and integrity" and even went so far as to claim that Ardern "has given us a vision of a better world". Many ordinary people seem to have been caught up in this Jacinda-mania, too: memes depicting a sorrowful Ardern wearing a hijab have been circulating on social media, captioned with lofty panegyrics to her compassion and - that word again - leadership. But the height of absurdity was reached in a letter co-signed by British Labour politicians Jeremy Corbyn, John McDonnell, Diane Abbott and Emily Thornberry, which praised Ardern as "an inspiration to the international working-class movement".

We should absolutely reject this lionization of Ardern. A former advisor to Tony Blair - a man hardly famed for his contribution to world peace - Ardern is known for her policy of reducing immigration into New Zealand. Together with its far-right coalition partners New Zealand First, Ardern's Labour Party has been whipping up anti-Chinese xenophobia and racism and New Zealand's military forces have played their part in the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere.

Indeed, while much of the press in New Zealand have argued that Christchurch signals an 'end of innocence' for the country, New Zealand was already fully implicated in the horrors of imperialism and its Prime Minister, like any other capitalist politician, represents a system of nationalism, exploitation and alienation that cannot but give rise to regular explosions of war and terrorism across the globe. Atrocities like Christchurch perfectly reflect the necropolitics (Achille Mbembe's term) of the contemporary nation state, its formidable power over the very existence of black and brown civilian bodies. Faced with events like these, then, we would do well to reject both the racist nationalism of deranged xenophobes like Tarrant and the hypocritical condemnation of it by world leaders. What neither the liberal nor the right-wing media can acknowledge is that only way of halting racist violence, of banishing the scourges of social antagonism, fear and alienation, is for working-class people to come together - peacefully if possible - to end the system that causes them.

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.

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.

First, we must not blame Muslims for the recent Al-Qaeda massacres in Paris, as many European politicians and much of the right-wing media have been doing. True to form, Rupert Murdoch, for example, tweeted that Muslims 'must be held responsible' for the attacks. Marching under the slogan 'Je suis Charlie', politicians, supported by mainstream media, are currently exploiting the tragedy in order to promote the ideologies of democracy and 'national unity' in France through 'solidarity marches', photo-opportunism, patriotic declamations and lofty rhetoric about freedom of expression. Given that these politicians are themselves routinely involved in suppressing free speech through the bombing and torture of journalists and the suppression of critical journalism, this is nothing other than a 'circus of hypocrisy', as Jeremy Scahill has put it. The Hebdo massacres, like all terrorist actions, have been a gift from heaven for the French, and indeed European ruling classes, who have been milking the tragedy for all it's worth and stoking Islamophobic sentiment (following a depressingly familiar pattern, Hebdo has been followed by a wave of Islamophobic incidents in France). In the wake of terrorist outrage, the state will always assert its monopoly on security - Hobbes's gambit, as it were.

Nevertheless, we mustn't flip over this position and imply that a bunch of liberal French cartoonists - puerile Muslim-baiters as they may have been - somehow brought the tragedy upon themselves. Focusing on the racist imagery of many of the Charlie Hebdo cartoons, many leftists have spent more time condemning the victims than the attackers and they have tended to see the massacres purely in terms of ‘blowback’, as though they were merely a reflex response to Western Islamophobia. Tankie Chavista and cult-studies edgelord George Cicariello-Maher, for example, busted out his best Internet meme-speak, tweeting "Yeah but for real, tho, fuck #CharlieHebdo". Seriously? Twelve people are brutally shot dead in a Paris office and the real villains of the piece, we are supposed to believe, are a bunch of liberal journalists who have drawn some arguably racist cartoons?

Of course, these kinds of simplistic, 'anti-imperialist' responses to Islamic terrorism have always been widespread on the left. Another example: in their book Nihilist Communism, the writers known as Monsieur Dupont rightly condemn the left-wing journal Schnews's response to the 2002 Bali nightclub bombing. According to Schnews, the Islamic terrorists in Bali were attacking "a hated symbol of western imperialism", while the victims, mostly working-class Aussies, were described as "drunken, obnoxious, youngish Australians... (who) flaunt their money and feel like royalty for two weeks". Talk about blaming the victims! And then of course there are the leftist equivocations around 9/11, many of which sailed close to exonerating the atrocity. A few hours after the Twin Towers attacks, left-wing journalist Seumus Milne wrote in The Guardian that the attacks "'visited upon" Americans were a consequence of "unabashed national egotism and arrogance". In other words, those imperialist Yankees got what was coming. In both of these cases, no sympathy is expressed for the mostly working-class victims of the atrocities.

In his interesting essay 'History and Helplessness', Moishe Postone argues that those leftists who saw the 9/11 attacks in New York only as an 'understandable response' to US imperialism were in effect positing 9/11 as a 'reaction of the insulted, injured and downtrodden, not as an action'. This perspective, Postone argues, fetishises the US as the world's only geopolitical actor. Not only is this tantamount to excusing terrorism; it is also de-agentifying and racist, as it implies that 'they' are mandated to act only by 'our' oppression. And in common with the right-wing response to terrorism, the leftist blowback theory rests upon a binaristic 'them and us' framing of terrorism, which overlooks evidence of active collusion between 'our' security services and 'their' terrorists. But that's a whole other story.

A principled communist approach to events such as those we have seen in Paris must involve condemning both the actions (not simply reactions) of the Wahhabist terrorists and the hypocrisy of the mainstream media and the world leaders, who are the principal purveyors of chaos and destruction around the planet.

The Sunni rebel group Isis (Islamic State in Iraq and Syria) is currently enjoying spectacular military success in Iraq and some young British Muslim men, often emboldened by online propaganda, are heeding the group's call to join its holy war against the Infidel. Unlike the anarchist or nationalist terrorists of a previous era, who at least directed their attacks against heads of state or the emblems and infrastructure of an oppressor, these young men are joining a league of out-and-out nihilists for whom non-Muslim is innocent and almost everybody is a legitimate target. Isis represents a totally regressive and self-destructive retreat from the confusions and compromises of modernity.

British politicians refer to Isis as 'extremists' and deplore the 'radicalization' of young people and the mainstream media, from the liberal Guardian and BBC to the more conservative Express and Sun, largely follow suit. Yet the layers of hypocrisy here are many. For one thing, many of the politicians currently decrying the 'extremism' of Isis supported the British state's own bloody adventure in Iraq - the 2003 invasion that destabilized the Middle East and contributed to the vortex of violence now sweeping the region. The mainstream media, meanwhile, were mostly supportive of the deadly invasion of Iraq, reporting the attack and occupation in decidedly neutral tones. The title of a Panorama documentary forthcoming on the BBC - Isis: Terror in Iraq - reminds us that for the mainstream Western media, 'they' are always the extremists. The democratic state, by contrast, is the epitome of moderation, however monstrous its atrocities (let's not forget that Obama's drone strikes have killed more people in the Middle East than Isis - and Western politicians show little concern about Saudi Arabia, which outdoes Isis on the head-chopping front). We are dealing here with what the psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas calls 'violent innocence', a self-idealizing projection of terrorism onto the Other. As David Hume put it nearly three hundred years ago in his Treatise on Human Nature, 'When our own nation is at war with any other, we detest them under the character of cruel, perfidious, unjust and violent: But always esteem ourselves and our allies equitable, moderate, and merciful.'

From the genuinely radical perspective of the working class, any group that slaughters working class people in pursuit of its political and economic objectives - whether it be the caliphate-craving jihadi cell that detonates explosive devices in the market place or the 'democratic' state that bombs and tortures civilians - is 'extremist'. Indeed, both jihadists and imperialist nation states - 'religious fundamentalists' and 'market fundamentalists' - display a callous disregard for human life. In this sense, it should not surprise anybody that the British jihadist Nasser Muthana (above, right), currently in Iraq fighting with Isis, once expressed an ambition to be the British Prime Minister.

But if all bourgeois groups are extremists, who or what is 'radical'? The adjective is overused these days. Politicians and journalists often talk of 'radical' reforms to the system that are precisely the opposite (a few years ago, for example, David Cameron announced that the Conservative party in Britain would introduce 'radical reform' to the welfare state - reform that is resulting in more and more working class people losing their so-called 'benefits' and falling into poverty). Alternatively, the word is used to describe violent expressions of Islamism ('radical Islam'). But those who want to make the world a better place ought to have a very different understanding of 'radicalism'.

As Marx said, to be radical is to 'grasp things by the root'. This means understanding that capitalist society is premised on the struggle between the ruling class, with its multiplicity of competing nations, 'races' and sects, and the working class, which, as the only 'universal class', struggles for the liberation of all humanity. Nationalism and its mirror image, 'anti-imperialist' terrorism, foster only division and hostility: nation against nation, Shia against Sunni, etc. True radicals reject the poisonous ideologies of both the nation state and its terrorist adversary. The class struggle is the only really radical struggle, because the abolition of capitalism will utterly transform the structure of society, paving the way for the creation of a society based on solidarity and co-operation.

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.

Today I went to see Duncan Jones’s Source Code. Jake Gyllenhaal plays Colter Stevens, a US army helicopter pilot who must repeatedly relive the last eight minutes of a journey on a Chicago commuter train in an attempt to identify the train’s bomber. On the train, Stevens forges a romantic relationship with the puckish Christina Warren (Michelle Monaghan), who is perplexed by Stevens' increasingly desparate attempts to identify the bomber. But here is the eminently guessable thing: Stevens is already dead, having perished in a helicopter crash in Afghanistan. The soldier is able to undertake his heroic mission only with the help of pioneering neuro-technology and an electronic link to his military handler, Colleen Goodwin (Vera Farmiga). This scenario put me in mind of Marcuse's comment, in One Dimensional Man, about the totalitarian potential of 'technological rationality' to keep 'society and nature, mind and body' in 'a state of permanent mobilisation for the defence of this universe'.

The terrorist is eventually revealed to be a disturbed psychopath named - with chilling obviousness - Derek Frost (Michael Arden). Frost tells Stevens that ‘the world is hell’ and that he plans to reduce the planet to ‘rubble’ in order that humanity can start afresh. The brevity and incoherence of this explanation is unsatisfactory - even for a 'deranged' mass murderer - and, combined with the later revelation that Frost harbours ‘anti-government’ views, tends to imply that anybody who opposes the state is a violently dysfunctional misanthropist. Those who have spent time with anarchists will know that this is quite untrue (well, OK, largely untrue).

Source Code is the perfect US propaganda film: the soldier saves America, gets the girl and thwarts the ‘insane’ enemy of the state. In fact, the film’s ideological conservatism is remarkable, even by the standards of contemporary Hollywood. Although Source Code’s premise – a disabled soldier redeems the planet – clearly recalls that of 2009’s Avatar, the film eschews the subtextual references to social antagonism that characterise James Cameron’s films (or what Slavoj Žižek calls Cameron’s ‘Hollywood Marxism’). From the slick aerial shots of Chicago with which the film begins, urban America is a vision of sanitised and corporatised perfection, its geometric matrices of steel and glass gleaming in the sunlight. Like Anish Kapoor’s mirrored Cloud Gate sculpture, at which the film's romantic couple gaze contentedly in the scene towards the end of the film in Chicago's Millennium Park, the film’s storyworld constitutes a smooth bubble with no rough edges; but its depiction of terrorism and the reasons for its prevalence in the post 9/11 world is horribly trite.

Source Code is an engaging enough thriller and the performances are excellent all round; fans of films such as The Butterfly Effect, The Jacket, Déjà Vu and Inception will enjoy this latest addition to the genre. But from a film about terrorism, some reflection upon the causes and contexts of political violence does not seem too much to ask for.