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Reviews for The Socialist

In the last few years I have been writing reviews for The Socialist and Socialism Today. The Socialist is a weekly newspaper, Socialism Today is a monthly magazine, both produced by the Socialist Party of which I am a member.
The reviews are collected here. I have become an "inactivist" as a result of heart disease but this is one activity I can still enjoy. They are also reproduced in my blog interspersed with a lot of other material.


 

The Apprentice final

When I could drag myself away from the Royal Circus on the Thames, I watched the final of The Apprentice. For those of you unfamiliar with this theatre of cruelty the main character is a pantomime villain, Lord Sugar, who gets to set tasks of varying degrees of daftness and then humiliate the participants.

Sugar is a Labour Peer and acts like a less charming version of Lord Vader. He urges his apprentices to give in to the dark side. After a day of teamwork they are all forced to humiliate and denigrate each other in the boardroom.

And what great ideas did these finalists come up with? One was yet another bloody call centre – even one of Lord Vader's stormtroopers thought this was a tawdry idea! Then there was a website to enable people to buy ingredients for recipes. Lord Vader derided the whole idea that people plan their meals before they cook them. One assumes his Lordship has someone else to do that for him. A recruitment agency proposed by someone who already runs a recruitment agency was the winning idea.

And that leaves one. A fine wine hedge fund. If you want a symbol for the degeneracy of capitalism this will do fine. This is not for people who actually drink wine. No. It is for people who want to invest in fine wine as a hedge against the economic crisis. You can see how this is an idea to set the nation alight and improve the lives of millions of ordinary people. Or perhaps you can't.

The apprentice is undemanding entertainment but if it is an exhibition of the best in British entrepreneurs, heaven help us all.

Fahrenheit 9/11
Written and directed by Michael Moore

The White House has taken Osama Bin Laden off the "Ten Most Wanted" list.
They have put on Michael Moore instead.

Moore's film which smashed its way through a cordon of corporate censorship is an astonishing work of film journalism. The job which a good journalist or an honest politician (hah!) ought to be doing is being done by a TV comic and done brilliantly.

Understandably the establishment has pulled out all the stops to rubbish Michael Moore but the facts in the film speak for themselves and the Republicans have failed to address a single one of those facts.

The links between Bush and the Saudi Royal Family - undisputed.
The assistance given to the Bin Laden family to flee America - undisputed.
The pressure on the intelligence services to "prove" Iraq the villain of the piece and exonerate Saudi Arabia - undisputed.

There are two points in the film where anyone not made out of stone (or New Labour!) would be moved to tears. They both show mothers crying out in anguish against the war...one Iraqi and the other a patriotic right-wing democrat from Moore's home town of Flint.

Another memorable figure is the army corporal who said "he would not go back to Iraq to kill other poor people" on behalf of the corporations who are then shown gloating about the wealth which they can reap from Iraq.

In a priceless sequence Moore approaches US politicians to see how many of them will sign up their sons to go and fight in Iraq......guess how many takers he gets.....

Moore is not a socialist but he is an excellent film-maker and the hatred of the Bush camp against him exceeds any feelings they may have for the lacklustre Democratic candidates

Go and see the film. Take the family.


Remember me Rescue me
 
written by Matt Roper
published by Authentic Lifestyle
ISBN 1-85078-479-5
Website: http://www.mattroper.com

"I stormed over to the blue police cabin and entered without knocking. Inside, an inspector was lounging, watching football on a portable TV.
"'Have you any idea what is going on out there? A ten-year-old child is being sold to the tourists!'"
"He waved me towards the door, not unkindly. 'There's nothing I can do, you see, senhor. My job here is to protect the tourists.'"
Matt Roper dropped out of a journalism course...in order to become a first class journalist recording the lives of street girls in Brazil.

The book accurately records the grinding poverty which drives these girls into prostitution and the attitude of the authorities. "Protecting the tourists" including those tourists who have come to Brazil for the sole purpose of picking up underage girls. This is a pattern which emerges in one country after another. As the authorities crack down in Thailand the "sex tourism" trade moves to other areas where the police will "protect the tourists."

The result is that "working girls" will go to great lengths to appear younger. The economics are simple: the gringos come to Brazil for underage sex which is illegal in their own countries...and the gringos will pay the highest prices. The prices are still much lower than in their own countries and they do not risk prosecution.

The very real risk of AIDS is the price these children pay. Many also end up addicted to drugs as a matter of deliberate policy on the part of the rich men who control them.

In cases which he documents girls are enticed from Brazil with promises of marriage only to find they are virtually imprisoned in European countries and forced to work as prostitutes there - never seeing the money which changes hands. About 75,000 girls are estimated to be "imprisoned" in this way in Europe.

All too often books and TV programs about child prostitution are either voyeurism or they attempt to patronise the victims. Matt Roper's book does neither of these things. He places the blame clearly enough: "Once Recife was the centre of the Brazilian slave trade. More than one hundred years after the abolition of slavery very little seems to have changed, At Boa Viagem dark-skinned girls are bought and sold on the marketplace, taken from their homes and locked up in foreign countries. And the people who are operating this immensely profitable trade are white Europeans."

As a journalist, Matt Roper is not required to provide a political solution to the evils which he brilliantly exposes in this book. However, he does make clear both in the book and on the website that he believes the answer is Christian charity.

Socialists believe in freedom of religion but recognise the role of the church in the past in defending slavery This is exemplified by Jefferson Davis, President, Confederate States of America "[Slavery] was established by decree of Almighty God...it is sanctioned in the Bible, in both Testaments, from Genesis to Revelation...it has existed in all ages, has been found among the people of the highest civilization, and in nations of the highest proficiency in the arts."

Likewise the Christian church remains an important ideological pillar for capitalism, supporting the very system of exploitation which Matt Roper is exposing. Far from rescuing the victims of exploitation its main role has been to add to their burdens a further burden of guilt for their "sins". The Church has also directly assisted in the spread of AIDS by banning condoms.

Indeed Matt Roper himself recognises the fact that for every child who is saved from prostitution by charity - another one or two are recruited by iron economic necessity. He instances a rural village where people can either work in a factory producing farinha or by selling their bodies at the border post.

The wages at the factory are so low that when there is a drought a day's wages will not buy a litre of water. The dangerous and degrading work of prostitution is better paid.

He concludes "It is always children who bear the brunt of Brazil's unjust society, Girls like Adeidiane, with her scarred and roughened hands and troubling chest pains, are forced to choose between 12 hours of backbreaking work in a sweatshop,and selling her young body in the street. It is a choice no eleven year old should ever have to make."

Remember me, rescue me is compelling reading and the reader is certain to remember these smallest victims of exploitation. It is a tribute to those who, often at considerable personal risk, are trying to stem the tide in Brazil and around the world.


The Exception to the Rulers

By Amy and David Goodman
ISBN 1-4013-0131-2
Published by Hyperion

When you think of a journalist do you think of a sleazy individual only interested in pop stars, royalty and sex scandals? Amy Goodman can make you think again.

Amy Goodman is the reporter who faced the Indonesian military in East Timor in 1991 armed only with a microphone. She placed herself in harm's way hoping to help the brave civilians who were marching against the military and to tell their story to the world. The Indonesian military had a reputation for killing Australian journalists. Almost the first question they asked when they attacked her was "Australian?" "They had stripped us of our possessions, but I still had my passport. I threw it at them. When I regained my breath I said again 'We're from America! America!'

"Finally the soldiers lowered their guns from our heads. We think it was because we were from the same country their weapons were from. They would have to pay a price for killing us that they never had to pay for killing Timorese." Her coverage of repression across the globe has been a dangerous battle to bring the truth to the public, hindered rather than helped by the corporate media. Imagine for example putting her coverage of Chevron's blatant support for vicious repression in Nigeria alongside adverts for Chevron!

Amy Goodman and her brother have pioneered independent media in the United States. The hour-long TV program produced in New York and available over the internet at http://democracynow.org is a daily indictment of the war and the attack on civil liberties in the US and worldwide. It is surprising to watch as it has the format of a news program like any other but deliberately includes all the voices which the corporate media excludes.

That includes voices like that of Rita Lasar who lost her brother in the terrorist attack on the twin towers, a few blocks from the studios where Democracy Now! is broadcast. Rita's brother stayed in the building because he would not leave his quadraplegic friend behind. On September 14th Bush used his name and his story in his speech at the National Cathedral in Washington. "Rita quickly understood how her brother's gentle heroism was being used. She wrote a letter that appeared in the New York Times on September 18th 2001. "It is in my brother's name and mine that I pray that we, this country that has been so deeply hurt, do not do something which will unleash forces we will not have the power to call back." and of the fireman who lost four of his squad "As a rescue worker I can't say: we lost so let's kill six thousand more."

It is no accident that when the Democrat witch-hunt against Nader was at its height, when Michael Moore and Naomi Klein had crossed the picket line and supported Kerry, Democracy Now! Interviewed Nader and enabled him to expose the dirty tricks and the lies being used against his campaign.

Her book "The Exception to the Rulers" is a withering and closely argued indictment of "Oily Politicians, War Profiteers and the Media that loves them." If you want chapter and verse on the links between Big Business and the Bush administration; between the corporations and corrupt totalitarian regimes around the world and all of them with the media in the US: this is the book to read.

One example of the power of independent media among the many in the book is the battle of Seattle in 1999 - "My colleagues and I from Democracy Now! Spent long hours in the streets with journalists from the independent media centre, being gassed and harassed by police dressed in black futuristic body armour as we attempted to report what was happening to the world. "While the networks were quoting the police saying that they were not using rubber bullets, independent media reporters were uploading minute-by-minute images as we all picked up the bullets off the street by the handful."

In advocating independent media, Amy Goodman does not ask to be admired. She asks to be emulated.

You can get your local library to get a copy. It is very useful work of reference for socialists and for students of the media.

The Media in Question

Robert Ferguson

ISBN 0-340-74078-7


Media Studies appears on the curriculum in your child's school but a popular front stretching from Polly Toynbee in the Guardian to Chris Woodhead in the Telegraph denigrate it as a "soft option" and suggest that anyone who studies or researches it is wasting their time. They would much prefer it, for example, if their prose were read without any analysis. Not only does Robert Ferguson champion this much-maligned subject but he also adopts a heretical view on teaching it. For him it is not a subject which casts the teacher in the role of a sheepdog directing pupils to pre-determined answers but one in which students and researchers work together both on the skills of media production and on the analysis of media texts.


The TV or movies are often seen as realistic because "the camera cannot lie." However, for example, the people taking the decisions on how to represent a war can decide whether to focus on faithfully showing "the action on the front line" or (like Michael Moore) also pay attention to the grieving mothers, the recruitment of disadvantaged youngsters into the army and to the big business interests which profit from warfare. As Ferguson puts it:

"realism, while dependent partly upon verisimilitude1, is also dependent on creating, sustaining or challenging the audience's understanding of the world being represented. It is not necessary to agree with what a text offers in terms of dialogue, acting and so on, in order to accept it as realist. The irony is that realism is often most persuasive when any superficial criteria ('that looks like a battlefield') are transcended by thosewhich are more complex ('after the film, you knew more about the nature of warfare and those in whose interets it is pursued.') and are not dependent upon surface appearance."


If "Media Studies" is divorced from ideology it is reduced to issues of technique in a vacuum. Understanding the "how" without tackling the "why" is sterile. Studying the media also involves studying the society which produces media images. Questioning is central to Robert Ferguson's approach and time and again he causes the reader to go beyond simplistic analyses.


For example when dealing with 'race' in the media, he invites the reader to go beyond the basic semiotic2 analysis and look at the contradictions and tensions within media messages. Media messages draw on what he terms a "discursive reserve". This is a set of ideas which the media both "feeds" and reinforces. A media text will not have a single meaning for a single audience, it will have *meanings* for *audiences* and an analysis of how these "work" is more fruitful than seeking the one meaning of the text.


He also draws attention to the very real consequences of racism beyond the media.

"On the one hand it is clear that much of the construction of otherness, the exotic and issues of 'race' is accomplished through complex modes of discourse and representation. On the other it is apparent to all but the most solipsistic that people's lived existence, and their deaths, cannot be reduced to the discursive. We have to face the contradictions and dilemmas thrown up at the interface of the discursive and the material. We must also recognise that, as media students and researchers, our relationship to our field of study cannot be that of a 'free floating' intellectual, questioner or researcher."


Postmodernism sheds light and casts shadows in roughly equal measure. The book evaluates the contribution of postmodernism whilst dealing ruthlessly with its shortcomings.


"The main challenge offered by the concept of postmodernism for the media studies student and researcher is that it invites a debate to which there is no easy or final conclusion. Postmodern media texts open the door for the celebration of consumerism and liberation from the constraints of some forms of totalitarianism. At the same time, postmodernity is a period of intense insecurity. In its denial of totalizing theory, it is prone to a new totalitarianism which is insistent upon fragmentation and difference. Political solidarity does not sit happily beside the postmodern."


The book intentionally raises more questions than it answers but anyone who really wants to know what media studies is about and why it is important for socialists could do a lot worse than start with this book.

1 Verisimilitude means the attempt to make the media image look like the real thing.

2 In the same way that linguistics studies language, semiotics extends this to a study of all the signs used in discourse, including pictures and icons.


A Child called 'It'

by Dave Pelzer
ISBN 1558743669

"A Child called 'It'" was recommended to me as a book teachers ought to read. It is an account of the abuse of a child written from the child's viewpoint. It is autobiography. It sounde the most unpromising thing to read, something you might read out of duty.

In truth it is "unputdownable" and you might read it in one go, reluctantly putting it down to eat or go to work etc. What makes it so is the 'strength of the weak' - the sheer will to survive of a child who was being treated so badly.

The only thing I can compare it with is the Russian writer Solzhenitsyn who writes about the prison camps. You would expect that to be pretty bloody grim - yet "A Day in the life of Ivan Denisovitch" is about the triumph of the human spirit - Solzhenitsin would say the soul - over awful conditions. It makes compelling reading.


As a reader I felt as the child felt, it is really powerful writing. When he was bad he was punished by missing meals. Then he was a "bad boy" because he stole food, so he was punished by not being fed and the punishments escalated. Some of the punishments (and I do not doubt the story) seem beyond belief.

Extraordinarily, he believes his teachers "risked their jobs" by arranging for the police to investigate and take him away from his abusive mother. There must be some differences between American and British custom and practice in child abuse cases. The immediate involvement of the police rather than social services would be one difference but the idea that teachers feel their job is on the line if they take action is a considerable difference. This also reflects the time of the story, the author is now an adult.

The Root of All Evil
Written and directed by Richard Dawkins

Richard Dawkins two-part program on religion on Channel 4, “The Root of All Evil” has provoked a massive over-reaction from the religious right who show no sign of turning the other cheek and forgiving him.

Socialists support the right of people to practise their religion without imposing it on others, but that would include the right of scientists like Dawkins to put a contrary view.

Dawkins does not confine his strictures to the soft targets of Militant Islamic Fundamentalism. He draws attention to its mirror images on the fringes of Judaism and in the religious right in the United States.

“Hellhouse movies” as they are called are a new growth industry in the USA today. Graphically filmed, they quite literally “demonise” abortion and homosexuality with the explicit aim of scaring the viewers. Pastor Keenan Roberts explains that the aim is 'to leave an indelible impression on their lives that sin destroys and Jesus saves'. He is quite happy for children to have nightmares after watching because otherwise they might commit sins like homosexuality.

The result, says Dawkins, is a mindset which can justify the murder of a doctor like Dr. Barnett Slepian who carries out abortions on the grounds that he is destroying a being created in God's image! There are websites in the USA which openly advocate the murder of doctors who carry out abortions.

It is easy for a British audience to ridicule this kind of thing in the United States but the government’s proposals for education will include the takeover of swathes of the education service by organisations of the religious right. More than half of New Labour’s City Academies are to be run by far-right evangelists

Evolution will be out. The “one-sided cult of Darwin” will be replaced with a more rounded view in which the creation of the Earth in six days is taught as an equivalent theory.


Dawkins programs on Channel 4 are a valuable contribution to the debate and very timely in the light of the crusade against science being mounted by the religious right.

Les Miserables

Cameron Mackintosh. Adapted from Victor Hugo's novel

(Queens Theatre London)

To go and see Les Miserables, like any walk through London’s streets, means running the gauntlet of people asking for money. “Les miserables” ( a powerful word inadequately translated as “the poor”) People so poor in many cases they have given up hope.

Inside the warmth of the theatre you are surrounded by comfortable and respectable people watching a brilliant colourful musical about the poor people outside in the street.

And the musical, based on a two-volume 19th Century novel by Victor Hugo, is not miserable at all because it contains within it a message of hope that things can be changed.

It is worth comparing the revolutionaries in Les Miserables with those other revolutionaries in a 19th Century novel – the bloodstained monsters depicted in Dickens’ “a Tale of Two Cities.” Although the revolution of 1830 was defeated, Victor Hugo sees the revolutionaries as human beings and evokes sympathy for the cause for which they are fighting.

To say it is a revolutionary musical would be pushing it. It is a musical about revolution and about the appalling injustices of society but the message of the musical and the book is about individual salvation through love.

The central character Jean Valjean is imprisoned for five years for stealing a loaf of bread, then another 14 for trying to escape (not an exaggeration of the penal code of the period). On release he is condemned to carry a yellow passport – an ID card which is as effective as a brand – even outside the prison he is not free.

A priest who takes the message of Christianity seriously (and thus has no future in the Church!) seeks to redeem him with an act of kindness and (without retelling the whole story) the narrative rests on the consequences of that act of kindness.

Perhaps the most shocking aspect of the original story is the casting of a policeman, a perfectly respectable upholder of the law with no sympathy for the poor, as a villain. We are accustomed to seeing “crooked cops” but he isn’t crooked, he is as straight as he can be according to his lights. He simply enforces an unjust law because it is not his place to change it. He would be at home in the modern Labour Party wouldn’t he?

The most powerful scenes involve the street fighting in Paris during the 1830 revolution and the idealism of students and young people who are depicted as simply and selflessly fighting for the poor of their own city.

“Do you hear the people sing?
Singing a song of angry men?
It is the music of a people
Who will not be slaves again!
When the beating of your heart
Echoes the beating of the drums
There is a life about to start
When tomorrow comes!”

Without the music the words give you some idea of the emotions stirred by the powerful song. I am aware that people talk cynically about “not a dry eye in the house” but it really is an accurate description of how people in the audience respond to this.

In the final scene the selflessness is rewarded when with Les Miserables they ascend to heaven. Dickens, for all his compassion, would have had them going to the other place!

And at the end of the play you walk back to the tube station. There are people bedding down for the night in cold wet shop doorways. It would take a revolution to put an end to this injustice.


“At the end of the day there's another day dawning
And the sun in the morning is waiting to rise
Like the waves crash on the sand
Like a storm that'll break any second
There's a hunger in the land
There's a reckoning still to be reckoned and
There's gonna be hell to pay
At the end of the day!”

Battleship Potemkin

Battleship Potemkin was on BBC4 last night. I thought
they were pushing the idea of having repeats for
Christmas to the limit with a 1925 film. Then I
watched it for a bit and ended up watching the whole
thing.

It was a film Hollywood could not have made and couldn't make today. The corporations would not be happy with the whole idea. Eisenstein could experiment with
technique and make a silent black and white film come alive. The actors (and they were not all actors, some were members of the public roped in by his enthusiasm)
have to express themselves without words and put across a story which can be understood in any language.

And what a story! The sailors have to suffer appalling conditions and lack of food; their officers lie to them and meet discontent with brutal repression. In the end the sailors outrage finds a focus when the vicious Tsarist officers put a tarpaulin over the heads of some rebel sailors and orders the marines to shoot them. This is too much for the sailors and they appeal to the marines to think about who they are shooting and they rebel. The leader of the revolt is killed but his death becomes the focus of solidarity and revolution in Odessa.

Even eighty years after the film and a century after the events it depicts it is still a moving tribute to the men and women who took the first faltering steps towards the revolution of 1905 and it the last reel accurately portrays their apprehension and anxiety and then their joy and enthusiasm at their successes.


It was the last time Eisenstein had complete cotrol over one of his films. His next film October was cut by about a third as Stalin sought to rewrite history so that Trotsky did not appear and Lenin was made to sound like a Stalinist!

I doubt if they will show it on American TV, but you can download it from the internet and there are various sites which have streaming video which let you watch the film for free.

Lady Chatterley’s Lover

I read this as a result of watching the TV program The Lady Chatterley Affair. It is not the best book in the world but rereading it after all these years the notorious sex scenes do seem more human than a lot of writing on the subject. You find sexism, racism and homophobia in what Mellors says, but his conversation is very human if some of his ideas are weird.

It could have been called “When Ollie Met Connie” because the first 119 pages feel a bit empty and listless because they show how empty and listless Constance Chatterley’s life is and the story comes alive when she gets together with the gamekeeper. He is referred to as Mellors and “The Gamekeeper” more often than by his first name.

“When John Thomas met Lady Jane” would make a nice title too – these are the pet names for his cock and her cunt :)

Of course it was the idea of one of the lower classes having sex with an aristocrat which was really immoral to the prosecution in the court case. I mean you wouldn’t want your wife and your servant to get ideas!

The Chatterley Affair

The Chatterley Affair
A victory over hyprocrisy

"Is it a book that you would even wish your wife or your servants to read?" In 1960, prosecutor Mervyn Griffith-Jones tried to persuade an Old Bailey jury to ban DH Lawrence's novel Lady Chatterley's Lover. The victory for Penguin Books was a turning point in recent history and represented a massive defeat for the ruling class.

Censorship has been used by privileged elites throughout history. For instance, the works of Milan Kundera were banned by the Stalinist regime in Czechoslovakia. They said the works were offensive to Czech women. Anyone who reads them finds them much more offensive to the Stalinist regime itself!

The Chatterley Affair on Channel 4 mixed fact and fiction to bring this story to life. Two members of the jury fall in love under the influence of the novel. The progress of their affair is shown interspersed with extracts from the case based on the court record.

The novel uses language which even today has shock value and would be out of place in The Socialist. However, Lawrence recontextualises the language and transforms the four letter words from obscenities into the language of love.

It is not the best novel in the English language. The first chapter for example is one long “miaou” about women’s rights. Nevertheless the stand which the jury made against hypocrisy threatened the very right of the ruling class to decide what we can read.

Andrew Davies’ play which was shown twice on BBC4 is well worth the time taken to view it. And let your wife or your servants watch too!

V for Vendetta

"V for Vendetta" is great fun. It is an adventure film with some serious messages included. It is usually possible to wade through the deepest ideas in an adventure film (for example, X men, Catwoman) without getting your ankles wet. This is a bit different.


John Hurt and Stephen Fry are always good value for money and Hugo Weaving in the title role was a revelation with his ability to create a role brilliantly while hiding behind a mask for the whole of the movie.

Terrorism, homophobia, racism and islamophobia are all dealt with in the film in different ways. There are chilling insights into the secret camps where alleged terrorists are tortured for the good of the state. And the media are not exonerated either.

Most crucially the plot shows the way the religious right can use terrorism as an excuse for repression. In the course of the narrative responsibility for a terrorist outrage is shifted to whoever is the current enemy of the state. It comes as no surprise to find out that the author of this "9/11" turns out to be the dictatorship itself.

John Hurt is very good as a dictator and he also plays a caricature of himself on a TV show hosted by Steven Fry's character, Deitrich. Deitrich falls foul of the secret police for his pains. He expected to get away with a grovelling public apology. Instead he is killed when a copy of the Koran, which he kept because of its poetry, is found in his house.

If you have ever had a sneaking suspicion that Guy Fawkes was the only man to enter Parliament with honest intentions, the sight of millions marching in Guy Fawkes masks to overthrow a corrupt government based on lies is inspiring.

And that is where the film falls short. What happens next? It is here that the emasculation of the original story is most keenly felt. The "politics" were not exciting and spectacular enough so they remained on the cutting room floor. The original story of V was not from a socialist but an anarchist perspective but at least didn't leave the basic questions unasked; the original message of the story has been toned down and given the Hollywood treatment.

I still think the film does fulfil in an attenuated form, the concept of the original writer, Alan Moore "../the central question is, is this guy right? Or is he mad? What do you, the reader, think about this? Which struck me as a properly anarchist solution. I didn't want to tell people what to think, I just wanted to tell people to think, and consider some of these admittedly extreme little elements, which nevertheless do recur fairly regularly throughout human history."/

You have to like action/adventure films to appreciate it but if you do, this film is for you.

"People should not fear their governments. Governments should fear their people!"

Forget you had a daughter

There is a clear implication in many of the books written about European or American prisoners in jails abroad that it is all very well for the "natives" to have to put up with disgusting conditions but it is just not cricket to expect us to.


For example, anyone who has read Midnight Express will have felt sympathetic to the protagonist but still felt, 1) he was a drug smuggler carrying an improbable amount of dope for his own use and 2) he seemed to have a contempt for the people and the country where he was imprisoned.

"Forget you had a daughter" by Sandra Gregory is the story of a drug smuggler who wound up in prison in Thailand and how she coped with the experience. She wound up in the infamous Lard Yao prison, jokingly referred to as the "Bangkok Hilton". If anyone begins this book thinking it is another "Midnight Express" they are soon disabused.


Sandra Gregory, who wrote the book with Michael Tierney, steers clear of that. The early chapters express her love for Thailand and the story ends with her regret that she can never go back there. She makes no bones about her guilt and/or stupidity. Moreover, she earned the disapprobation of some white prisoners because of her friendships with Thai prisoners and she has harsh words to say about the treatment of prisoners in British jails where she spent the last years of her sentence.

It doesn't sensationalise the sexual tension in a women's prison but doesn't skirt round it either.

The corruption in the prison was remarkable, prisoners could get most things on the black market but woe betide them if they couldn't pay their debts: "On one occasion a Nigerian woman had her bottom lip bitten off and fed to a cat, for not keeping up the repayments." I have to warn you that that is mild compared to some of the things reported in this book. It is not for those who are too fastidious.

Sandra Gregory is not obsessed with herself, throughout the book she observes and tells the stories of other prisoners. This is no sob story. Although it contains graphic descriptions of the conditions in prison it is written with some humour and is a very readable narrative.

Two lives

Vikram Seth ISBN 0-316-72774-1
Published September 2005

“Don’t take the black man” were the first words Henny Caro first said about Shanti Seth when he was proposed as a lodger in her family home – hardly a promising start to a relationship which was to last the rest of their lives.

Shanti and Henny Seth were not famous, at least prior to the publication of this book. Their lives spanned a fair proportion of the twentieth century and they were dominated and changed forever by the rise of Nazism and the second world war.

Shanti, born in 1908 and brought up in India, was sent to study dentistry in Berlin in the 1930s although he did not speak a word of German. It was there that he met Henny who came from a patriotic “intensely German” family. In addition to her initial hostility, she was also engaged to someone else.

She was able to get out of Germany and went to reside in London where they became close friends. He lost his arm at the battle of Monte Cassino but went on to pursue a successful career despite his disability. It was only after the war that she learned that her mother and sister died in Auschwitz. The book traces her search for the truth about their fate.

This close intimate portrayal of their lives by their nephew is a powerful work of art and will not leave any reader unmoved.

Interestingly as well as dealing in detail with the plight of the Jewish families in Berlin during the war it also deals with the less well-documented suffering of Germans in the post war period.

It also deals with the effect on Henny’s group of close friends in Berlin, Jewish and non Jewish, one of whom became an apologist for the Nazis. The personal is political in this novel but there is nothing but the most superficial of political analysis on the part of the writer; the reader has to provide that.

In addition to spanning the century, the narrative spans the globe, from India, Germany, Israel and Palestine to Britain where they lived most of their lives.

Reflecting on the story which he has been telling, the author concludes, “Behind every door in every ordinary street, in every hut in every ordinary village on this middling planet of a trivial star, such riches are to be found.”

Read it.


Life on the Screen
By Sherry Turkle, Touchstone Books, 1997


WITTY AND well-written, Life on the Screen explores the strange world of cyberspace and the even stranger world of 'postmodernist' theories. Although not a Marxist, Sherry Turkle attempts both to clarify postmodern ideas and make explicit the differences between postmodernism and Marxism.

Multi User Domains, or MUDs, are areas in cyberspace where people interact who often will never meet in RL (real life). To users in the USA, predominantly middle class, male and white, MUD has become "an object to think with". They increasingly use the Internet to explore alternative gender and ethnic roles in the apparently safe environment of MUD.

Turkle deals with the increasing importance of simulations both in computer games and for applications such as warfare and economic planning, and compares the popular game Sim City 2000 with the planning software used in Washington. With both, the user is a prisoner of the implicit assumptions used by the programmer. In Sim City for example, race is never a factor in inner-city conflicts, and the solution to crime is to flood the streets with police.

A sociologist's child told him that the built-in bias of the programme against mixed-use development was 'just the way the game works': "My daughter's words seemed oddly familiar. A few months earlier someone had said virtually the same thing to me... while I was working at the White House. We were discussing the simulation model likely to be used by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) to score proposals for health care reform. When I criticised one assumption, a colleague said to me 'Don't waste your breath', warning that it was hopeless to try to get CBO to change. Policy would have to adjust". Sherry Turkle does not reject simulations as such but believes that criticism should lead to simulations which help players challenge the inbuilt assumptions.
 
  Turkle uses the changing emphasis in computer science as a metaphor for the difference between Marxism and post-modernism, mentioning one philosophy student who believed that society could not "be understood in terms of any systematic theory. But he does believe that if we accept society's opacity we can learn at least to navigate its contours more effectively".
The rise of post-modernism is associated with the aftermath of the 1968 events in France, when a mass movement of the working class was derailed by the French Communist Party who, not for the first time, sought to confine it to legal and parliamentary channels. Several leading French intellectuals then responded to this defeat by retreating into non-Marxist or even pre-Marxist ideology.

In place of a battle to change society, they put a continual struggle to constitute the 'self'. In place of a battle against the ideology of the ruling class, they advocated manipulation of a kaleidoscope of competing ideologies. No longer concerned to change the world, they believed it impossible even to explain it.

While explaining these ideas in detail, the author also provides a fascinating insight into the developments of artificial intelligence, and the evolving debate around the ability of computers to show intellect or emotions.

In the 'Turing Test', humans and machines interact, and the machine makes the grade if it can pass for human. Turkle gives the example of a college student using the name 'Barry' who spent days in a Multi User Domain trying to seduce a piece of software called 'Julia', before concluding that "It is not clear whether Julia passed a Turing test or Barry failed one".

Turing tests are taking place in cyberspace all the time and Turkle was a little surprised to find a character in a MUD calling itself 'Dr Sherry' and conducting research in a virtual room. It was not clear whether the character was a real person or a programme written to simulate a character (known as a `bot) but she could be fairly certain that it wasn't her!

I found Life on the Screen a first class read. Whatever you think about the book, you can always contact the author on the Internet and give her your thoughts. Someone will respond... but will it be the `RL' Sherry Turkle?




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