The Lesser Evil: Political Ethics in an Age of Terror by Michael Ignatieff (2004)

How should democracies respond to terrorist attacks? In particular, How much violence, secrecy and violations of human rights should a Western government deploy in order to safeguard a democratic state which, ironically, claims to deplore violence, secrecy and loudly promotes human rights?

How far can a democracy resort to these means without undermining and to some extent damaging the very values it claims to be defending?

How far can it go to deploy the lesser evil of abrogating some people’s human rights in order to ensure the greater good of ensuring the security and safety of the majority? These are the questions Ignatieff sets out to address in this book.

The book is based on a series of six lectures Ignatieff gave at the University of Edinburgh in 2003. Obviously the context for the lectures and their starting point was the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on America.

Historical context – the War on Terror

It’s difficult now to recreate the mood of hysteria which gripped so much public discourse in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. US President George W. Bush declared a War on Terror (18 September 2001) which justified major military attacks on Afghanistan (Operation Enduring Freedom starting 7 October 2001), then Iraq (Operation Iraqi Freedom starting 20 March 2003), alongside combat operations in a number of other Muslim countries (the Philippines, Sudan et al). The US Congress passed a law allowing the President to declare war on anyone he thought was a threat. In his State of the Union speech, 29 January 2002, Bush singled out three likely contenders as the so-called ‘Axis of Evil’, being Iran, Iraq and North Korea.

Apart from the mismanagement of the two major wars, in Afghanistan and Iraq, the most contentious aspect of the so-called War on Terror became what many perceived to be the egregious breaches of human rights which a newly bullish America began to practice. Critics claimed the so-called war was in reality an excuse for creating a hi-tech surveillance state, for reducing civil liberties and infringing human rights.

Within a month of the 9/11 attacks the US government passed the Patriot Act which included three main provisions:

  • expanded surveillance abilities of law enforcement, including by tapping domestic and international phones
  • easier inter-agency communication to allow federal agencies to more effectively use all available resources in counter-terrorism efforts
  • increased penalties for terrorism crimes and an expanded list of activities which would qualify for terrorism charges

The law upset human rights groups on various grounds, for example, the powers given law enforcement agencies to search property and records without a warrant, consent, or even knowledge of the targets. But the single most contentious provision was its authorisation of indefinite detention without trial, which became associated with the notorious detention centre at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba,

Ignatieff’s approach

The lectures were given at the heart of this period (2003), 18 months into the War on Terror, as the Patriot Act was still being rolled out, just after the US government launched its invasion of Iraq (March 2003).

In his introduction Ignatieff makes the point that already, by 2003, there was a well-developed legalistic literature on all these issues. He is not going to add to that (he isn’t a lawyer). He wants to take a broader moral point of view, bringing in philosophical and even literary writers from the whole Western tradition, to try and set the present moment in a much broader cultural context.

My purpose is…to articulate what values we are trying to save from attack. (p.xvii)

It’s worth noting that at the time he wrote and delivered these lectures, Ignatieff was the director of the Carr Center for Human Rights at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. I.e. he didn’t have an amateur, journalistic interest in these issues, but was a senior academic expert in them.

Contents

The text is full of Ignatieff’s trademark complex, subtle and often agonised moral reflections, mixing reportage on contemporary politics with references to writers of the past, continually teasing out subtle and often very illuminating insights. At the same time, as I worked my way through the rather laborious networks of arguments, I began to have less and less confidence in his arguments. Fine words butter no parsnips and seminars on moral philosophy can go on forever. What were his practical conclusions and recommendations?

Chapter 1. Democracy and the Lesser Evil

Democracies have often deployed coercive measures, seeing them as the lesser evil deployed to avert the greater evil of terrorism, civil conflict and so on. But it requires that the measures can be justified publicly, subject to judicial review, and have sunset clauses i.e. fixed lengths so they don’t become permanent features of the society.

Government infringement of its citizens’ rights must be tested under adversarial review. This idea recurs again and again in the text. The defining feature of democracies is intricate sets of checks and balances. If some rights have to be abrogated during emergencies, these suspensions can still be independently tested, by judges, by independent advisers, and they will eventually have to be revealed to the citizens for ultimate approval.

There is a spectrum of opinions on suspending civil liberties. At one end, pure civil libertarians maintain that no violations of rights can ever be justified. At the other end, pragmatists eschew moral principles and judge restrictive legislation purely on practical outcomes. Ignatieff is somewhere in the middle, confident that actions which breach ‘foundational commitments to justice and dignity – torture, illegal detention, unlawful assassination’ – should be beyond the pale. But defining precisely what constitutes torture, which detentions are or are not legal, where killing is or is not justified, that’s the problem area.

If lawyers and politicians and intellectuals are going to bicker about these issues forever i.e. there will never be fixed and agreed definitions, the one thing all good democrats can rally round is ‘to strengthen the process of adversarial review‘ i.e. to put in place independent review of government measures.

Chapter 2. The Ethics of Emergency

If laws can be abridged and liberties suspended during an ’emergency’, what remains of their legitimacy in times of peace? If laws are rules, and emergencies make exceptions to theses rules, how can their authority survive once exceptions are made? (p.25)

Chapter 2 examines the impact the emergency suspensions of civil liberties has on the rule of law and civil rights. Does the emergency derogation of normal rights strengthen or weaken the rule of law which we pride ourselves on in the Western democracies?

Ignatieff takes the middle ground that suspension of rights does not destroy them or undermine the normal practice of them, indeed helps to preserve them – provided they are ‘temporary, publicly justified, and deployed only as a last resort.’

Chapter 3. The Weakness of the Strong

Why do liberal democracies to habitually over-react to terrorist threats? Why do we seem so quick to barter away our liberties? One way to explain it is that majorities (i.e. most of us) are happy to deprive small and relatively powerless minorities (in the War against Terror, Muslims and immigrants) of their rights in order to achieve ‘security’.

But our opponents have rights, too. Just as in the debate over freedom of speech, any fool can approve free speech which they agree with, it’s harder to fight for the right of people to say things you dislike or actively think are wrong. But that is the essence of free speech, that is its crucial test – allowing the expression of opinions and views you violently disagree with, believe are wrong and immoral. It is precisely these kinds of views we should make every effort to allow free expression. ‘I may not agree with what you have to say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it,’ as Voltaire famously put it.

It’s easy and uncontroversial to defend the human rights of poets and activists who protested against apartheid or communist oppression. Much harder to insist that detainees being grabbed in Iraq or Syria or anywhere else in the Arab world and flown half way round the world and who might well be members of al Qaeda or ISIL, are provided just the same level of legal representation and rights as you and me. But that is exactly the test of our commitment to human rights: whether we extend them to our bitterest enemies.

Same goes for the other elements in the system of checks and balances, namely the other wings of government, the courts and the media. The temptation and the tendency is for everybody to ‘rally round the flag’ but this is exactly the opposite of what ought to happen. The American constitution vests power in the Presidency to take extraordinary steps in times of crisis or war but that is precisely the moment when the other elements in the division of power should increase their oversight of executive actions.

In his searing indictment of America’s mismanagement of the war in Iraq, Thomas E Ricks makes just this point. The build-up to the war involved questionable evidence (about weapons of mass destruction), wrong assumptions (about the response of the Iraqi population to foreign invasion), criminal mismanagement and the complete absence of a plan for the aftermath. While describing all this in forensic detail, Ricks points out that this is precisely the point when the administration’s plans should have been subjected to intense and critical scrutiny, something which might have saved tens of thousands of lives, billions of money, untold materiel. Instead, in the atmosphere of hysterical patriotism which gripped America, Congress rolled over and approved the plans with little serious examination and the press turned into bombastic cheerleaders. Both miserably failed to live up to the roles assigned to them in a free democratic society.

In fact most of this chapter is taken up with a useful and informative history of terrorism as a political tactic, starting with the Nihilists in nineteenth century Russia, then onto the two great loci of political violence, in revolutionary Russia and Weimar Germany, before turning to post-war terrorism in Latin America (Chile, Colombia, Peru), in Sri Lanka, in Israel, before cycling back to Europe and the 1970s terrorism of the Baader-Meinhof Gang and the Red Brigades, before a brief consideration of the separatist/nationalist terrorism faced by Britain in Northern Ireland and Spain in the Basque Country.

Ignatieff’s summary from this brief conspectus is that terrorism never works, it never achieves its political aims. The Russian and Weimar regimes weren’t undone by political violence but by the cataclysm of World War One and the Great Depression, respectively. Marxist terrorism in 1970s Germany and Italy aimed to create media spectaculars and psychological tipping points whereby the population would be woken from their slumber, rise up and overthrow the repressive bourgeois state etc. Complete failure with the terrorists either committing suicide or publicly recanting.

In Latin America political terrorism either produced the exact opposite of what was intended, for example in Argentina, where it helped a repressive military junta into power. Or, as in Sri Lanka and some extent Israel, it became a stalemate that extended over such a long period of time that it became the social reality of the country, giving rise to a society characterised by random atrocities, intimidation of local populations by the terrorists, and repressive state apparatuses. The host society wasn’t liberated and transformed but permanently degraded.

Ignatieff then considers how the British, on the whole, managed the Northern Ireland situation successfully by abrogating various civil rights but under the aegis of government and judicial review.

But part of the reason his review of traditional terrorism is so enjoyable is because it’s so familiar from decades of print and TV journalism – but this itself highlights, I think, a weakness of the whole book: which is that the campaign of al Qaeda and related groups was not to achieve political change (like the Marxist terrorist groups of the 1970s) or to achieve constitutional change / nationalist independence (as with the Basques or, at the other end of the Europe, the Kurdish terrorist groups in Turkey). Those aims could both be handled in Ignatieff’s model i.e. carefully incorporated into the existing political structures.

By contrast Al Qaeda wanted to destroy the West not only as a goal in itself but as part of an even grander aim which was to undermine the contemporary world order of nation-states and re-create the historical umma, the worldwide community of Muslims that was once held together under the caliphate of the prophet Mohammed. Osama bin Laden identified America as the chief bulwark of the existing world order, especially in the Arab world, where it subsidised and underpinned repressive states. So as a first step to remodelling the world, bin Laden ordered his followers to attack Western targets anywhere, at any time.

Ignatieff was writing in 2003. We had yet to have the 2004 Madrid train bombings (193 dead), the 7/7 2005 attacks in London (56 dead), the Boston Marathon bombing on 15 April 2013 (3 dead), the 18 March 2015 attack on a beach in Tunisia (21 dead), the 13 November 2015 attack at the Bataclan theatre in Paris (90 dead), the Manchester Arena bombing on 22 May 2017 (23 dead), plus numerous other Islamist atrocities in countries further afield.

If the central aim of al Qaeda and its affiliates is to kill and maim as many Westerners as possible, it’s difficult to see how this can be incorporated into any kind of political process. And in the next chapter Ignatieff indeed concludes that the organisation itself can only be defeated militarily.

Chapter 4. The Strength of the Weak

An examination of terrorism itself.

In this chapter I want to distinguish among forms of terrorism, identify the political claims terrorists use to justify violence against civilians, and propose political strategies to defeat them (p.82)

Ignatieff considers terrorism the resort of groups who are suppressed and oppressed, who have no voice and no say in the power structures which rule over them. He gives a handy categorisation of six types of terrorism:

  1. insurrectionary terrorism aimed at the revolutionary overthrow of a state
  2. loner or issue terrorism, aimed at promoting a single cause
  3. liberation terrorism, aimed at the overthrow of a colonial regime
  4. separatist terrorism, aiming at independence for a subordinate ethnic or religious group within a state
  5. occupation terrorism, aimed at driving an occupying force from territory acquired through war or conquest
  6. global terrorism, aimed not at the liberation of a particular group, but at inflicting damage and humiliation on a global power

With the last one sounding like it’s been made up to describe al Qaeda-style hatred of America.

Terrorism presents a classic challenge for liberals, who have traditionally been on the side of the underdog and oppressed minorities, from the early trade unions to blacks under apartheid, and so often have an instinctive sympathy for the social or political or economic causes of terrorism but who, obviously, want to stop short of supporting actual acts of violence. Where do you draw the line?

Ignatieff says the only practical solution is to ensure that the oppressed always have peaceful political means to address their grievances. Purely military means cannot solve terrorism. It requires political solutions, above all bringing the voiceless into peaceful political processes. He doesn’t mention it but I think of how the warring factions in Northern Ireland were cajoled into joining a political ‘peace process’ which promised to take seriously the concerns of all sides and parties, to listen to all grievances and try to resolve them in a peaceful, political way.

Mrs Thatcher said ‘we do not talk to terrorists’ but, rather as with free speech, it is precisely the terrorists that you should be talking to, to figure out how their grievances can be addressed and the violence be brought to an end.

Thus even if al Qaeda’s values come from completely outside the modern framework of human rights, even if they base themselves on Islamic traditions of jihad and unrelenting war against the infidel, even if they cannot be reasoned with but only crushed militarily, this doesn’t prevent Ignatieff making the obvious point that we in the West can still bring pressure to bear on many authoritarian Arab regimes to try and remove the causes of grievance which drive young men into these causes. These would include overt American imperialism; repressive police policies which enact brutal violence and deny human rights; lack of pluralistic political systems i.e. which allow subaltern voices a say and some influence. And so on (pages 99 to 101).

The weak and oppressed must be given a peaceful political alternative that enables them to rise up against the violence exercised in their name. (p.106)

The Arab future

Trouble is, a lot of this kind of hopeful rhetoric was claimed for the movements of the so-called Arab Spring of 2011, when authoritarian regimes were overthrown in Libya, Egypt and nearly in Syria. Just a few years later it was clear that the ‘spring’ comprehensively failed: an even more authoritarian regime was in place in Egypt, Libya had split into warlord-run areas and a ruinous civil war had bedded down in Syria which would pave the way for the rise of ISIS.

Personally, I think the countries in that part of the world which aren’t lucky enough to be sitting on vast reserves of oil will be condemned to perpetual poverty and conflict, because of:

  • the lack of traditions of individual civic responsibility and the complex matrix of civil society organisations which make the Western countries stable as politically stable as they are;
  • as the main offshoot of the above – universal corruption
  • the entrenched political tradition of strong rulers invoking ethnic nationalism or Islamic models of rule or both (Nasser, Gaddafi, Saddam)
  • what Ignatieff calls ‘the corruption and decay of the Arab and Islamic political order’ (p.152)
  • the economic backwardness of most Arab countries i.e. preponderance of subsistence agriculture
  • widespread lack of education
  • marginalisation / lack of education or political rights for women
  • the extraordinary population explosion (when I first visited Egypt in 1981 it had a population of 45 million; now it’s 110 million) which ensures widespread poverty
  • and now, the speedy degradation of the environment by climate change (loss of water and agricultural land)

One or two of these would be tricky challenges enough. All of them together will ensure that most countries in the Arab world will remain breeding grounds for angry, aggrieved and unemployed young men who can be persuaded to carry out atrocities and terrorist acts against domestic or Western targets, for the foreseeable future.

Chapter 5. The Temptations of Nihilism

This chapter addresses the way that, in the absence of peaceful talks, terrorist campaigns tend to degenerate into destruction and killing for their own sake, as does the behaviour of the authorities and security services set to combat them. Tit-for-tat killing becomes an end in itself. Violence begets violence in a downward spiral.

This is the most serious ethical trap lying in wait in the long war on terror that stretches before us. (p.115)

Ignatieff realises that this well-observed tendency can be used by opponents of his notion of ‘the lesser evil’ i.e. the moderate and constantly scrutinised, temporary abrogation of human rights. Their argument goes that what begins as a high-minded, carefully defined and temporary ‘abrogation’ of human rights law has so often in the past degenerated into abuse, which then becomes standard practice, becomes institutionalised, and then causes permanent damage to the democracies which implemented it.

As you’d expect, Ignatieff meets this claim by breaking the threat down into categories, and then analysing them and the moral problems and issues they throw up.

First, though, he starts the chapter with some low-pressure, enjoyably colourful discussion of Dostoyevsky’s novel, The Possessed – which describes a terrorist group which takes over a remote Russian town – and then of Joseph Conrad’s novel, The Secret Agent, which features a nihilistic character named the Professor, who walks round London with an early version of a suicide vest.

Part of the chapter addresses the practical, administrative problem of preventing anti-terrorist campaigns from descending into violence. But, as mention of the novels suggest, he also explores (as far as anyone can) the psychology of the nihilistic terrorist i.e. people who just want to destroy, for no purpose, with no political aim, for destruction’s sake.

It can be an individual who wants to make a name for themselves through a spectacular, for example Timothy McVeigh who carried out the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing that killed 168 people and injured 680. Lone actors like this are always going to be very difficult to detect or deter.

Then he discusses the Japanese doomsday cult known as Aum Shinrikyo which carried out the deadly Tokyo subway sarin attack in 1995, killing 13 commuters, seriously injuring 54 and affecting 980 more. Terrorists who (claim to) represent an ethnic or nationalist cause can, in principle, be negotiated with for at least two reasons: one is that negotiations may hold out the hope that some at least of their goals may be achieved; the other, is that, insofar as they represent an ethnic group, a population, this population can be worked on to reject the group or moderate its behaviour.

With single actors or death cults, levers of negotiation and bargaining are obviously absent. Having established the key characteristics of these kinds of actors, Ignatieff moves on to a detailed consideration of al Qaeda. In his view it has twisted Islamic teachings so completely as to become a death cult. The 9/11 bombers didn’t leave demands or any way to negotiate – they just wanted to strike a blow at the West, specifically America, and that meant killing as many Americans as possible.

His analysis is on the brief side (there are, obviously, hundreds of books about bin Laden and al Qaeda) but, as usual, throws up fascinating insights and ideas. a) It is impossible to negotiate with a suicide bomber because being negotiated out of detonating is, by definition, a failure of the mission they’ve taken on.

b) More subtly, an organisation that sets out to use suicide bombing as a strategy cannot fail because it has no defined, workable political goals or aims. Bin Laden’s aim of clearing Westerners out of Arab lands, overthrowing the existing Arab states, recreating the 7th century caliphate and implementing Sharia law in full, is not a practical programme, it is a utopian millennarian vision. It is so impractical, it is such a long-term and enormous goal, that true believers can’t, in a sense, be demoralised.

c) And this is where the promise of immortality comes in. Once true believers are promised direct entry into heaven, they have ceased to be political actors and, in this narrow sense, Ignatieff defines them as fanatics.

He adds a distinct and fascinating idea which is that all death cults, and most terrorist groups, have to have a theory which discredits the idea of civilian innocence. Obviously blowing up a load of people going to work in their offices is murder. So, just as obviously, terrorists who do it have been re-educated or indoctrinated not to see it that way. The most basic route is for their ideological leaders to persuade them that nobody is innocent; that so-called ‘civilians’ are as guilty as the acts of repression or infidelity or murder as the armies or forces of their countries.

The Algerian National Liberation Front used this defence to justify blowing up cafes full of civilians as part of their ‘war’. Scores of other terrorist groups use the same justification, erasing the difference between the soldier (a figure defined and attributed specific rights and responsibilities under international convention going back at least as far as the Geneva Conventions) and the civilian (who, under human rights law, is not responsible in warfare and should not be a target).

But this works both ways. For when terrorists are embedded in local populations, emerging to ambush soldiers then disappearing back into the crowd, a tendency develops for those soldiers to come to hate the civilian population and take out their anger and frustration on them. Happened in Vietnam (My Lai etc), happened in Iraq (Haditha etc). And of course all such breakdowns of military discipline it play into the terrorists’ hands by getting the population to move over to support them. That’s why terrorists work hard to trigger them.

So, blurring the difference between soldier and civilian can be practiced by both terrorist and security forces and always heads in the same direction, towards ever-growing atrocity and massacre. Eventually both sides are murdering unarmed civilians, as happened in Bosnia and Kosovo.

Something which distinguishes us from the terrorists is that liberal democracies put huge value on human life, and this particularly applies to civilian human life. Therefore the kinds of massacres which US troops carried out in Vietnam and Iraq sully the reputation and undermine the meaning of liberal democracy itself. I.e. they drag us closer to the indiscriminate violence of our enemies.

These pictures of fanatical death cults are by way of preparing the way for the second half of the chapter which moves on to try and define precisely when two anti-human rights tactics may be used, namely selective assassination and torture. Ignatieff is not an absolutist or civil libertarian i.e. he reluctantly admits that, in addressing the kind of nihilistic fanatics he has described, assassination may be the only way to eliminate people you can’t bargain with, and that extremely ‘coercive’ interrogation may be necessary to extract information from fanatics which may save lives.

This is a detailed discussion of contentious issues, but the bottom line is Ignatieff things they may be permitted, but so long as his basic criteria are fulfilled, namely that they are a) approaches of last resort, after all else has been tried b) and that some kind of independent judicial review or oversight is in place. It is when these kind of policies turn into secret death squads that a rules-based liberal democracy starts to be in trouble.

Ignatieff repeats some familiar objections to torture, namely that it simply doesn’t work, that it produces intense hatred which can motivate those who survive and are released into going on to carry out atrocities, and it degrades those tasked with carrying it out. There’s evidence of post-traumatic stress disorder suffered by American operatives tasked with torturing during the War on Terror.

Typically, Ignatieff adds another point I’d never considered which is that there is a slippery slope from torture to plain murder. This may be for two reasons: the tortured may be converted by the process into such inveterate enemies of the state that their interrogators realise they will never be rehabilitated; and, more sinisterly, the torturers realise they can never release their victims because they themselves, will eventually be implicated i.e. the truth will out. Therefore it’s easier all round just to bump them off. Hence the ‘disappeared’ in South American dictatorships, all those detainees who, after extensive torture, were taken out in helicopters and thrown into the sea. Torture doesn’t just not work, create new enemies and degrade the torturers – it creates a problem of what to do with the tortured? A downward spiral all the way.

Chapter 6. Liberty and Armageddon

The book ends with a bleak discussion of what may happen as and when terrorists acquire weapons of mass destruction i.e. terror attacks on a devastating scale. Are our democracies strong enough to withstand such attacks? How can we strengthen our institutions to ensure that they are?

Ignatieff has a number of suggestions about how to prevent the proliferation of terrifying WMDs. But he comes back to his fundamental position which is that the way to defend and strengthen liberal democracies in the face of increased terrorist threats is to make them more liberal and democratic, not less.

Other thoughts

1. Internecine killing

The text is continually spinning off insights and ideas which I found distracted me from the main flow. For example, the notion that every terror campaign, sooner or later, with complete inevitability, ends up terrorising and killing people on their own side – moderates and ‘sell-outs’ and anybody in their ethnic group or repressed minority who threatens to engage in political discussion with the oppressors. In a sense, moderates are more threatening to a terrorist group than their overt enemy, the repressive state, which is why so many terrorist groups end up killing so many people on their own side (p.104).

2. The threshold of repugnance

The savagery of the Algerian fighters for independence in the 1950s left a permanent scar on the national psyche of all concerned so that when, 30 years after independence (1962) in 1992, the ruling elite disallowed an election which would have given power to the new radical Islamist party, the country very quickly descended into a savage civil war, with Islamic terrorists and government security forces both murdering unarmed civilians they considered guilty of aiding their opponents.

Both sides, with generational memories of the super-violence of the struggle for independence, invoked it and copied it in the new struggle. There was little or no threshold of repugnance to deter them (p.105). Violent civil wars set new lows of behaviour with after-comers can then invoke. The whole process ratchets ever downwards.

3. The world is watching

There’s plenty of evidence that if a movement judges that it needs the help of the outside world (of the ‘international community’ which Ignatieff is so sceptical about in his previous books) then it will tailor its behaviour accordingly. It will, in other words, try to restrain violence.

The African National Congress knew it had strong support across the Western world and put its faith in international pressure eventually bringing a settlement, so that its political leaders (and its defenders in the West) chose to play down the violence of the movement’s activist wings (which, as per rule 1, above, were mostly directed against their own i.e. the black community, witness the invention and widespread use of ‘necklacing).

In other words, the international community counts. It can exert pressure. It can use its leverage to turn liberation movements away from terrorist methods. Up to a point. As long as the movement is well organised, as the ANC was and is. At the other extreme is the Revolutionary United Front (RUF), little more than a rag-tag band of psychopaths, who led an 11-year ‘civil war’, little more than a campaign of terror against their own populations (as described in stomach-churning detail in Anthony Loyd’s book, ‘Another Bloody Love Letter’). They had nothing whatsoever to gain from outside influence except being shut down. So with nothing to lose, they continued their killing sprees for 11 long years (1991 to 2002).

At the other end of the organisational scale, Russia was able to carry out atrocities and conduct a war of total destruction in Chechnya because they know no-one was looking (it was almost impossible for foreign journalists to get in) and nobody cared (it wasn’t a location of strategic significance, no oil, none of the racial discrimination the West gets so worked up about) so mass murder proceeded with barely a ripple in the Western press.

These examples prove a general rule which is that the ‘international community’ can have some moderating influence on some insurgences, terrorist campaigns and wars (p.98).

Notes and thoughts

This is a complex and sophisticated book. The language of human rights often segues into discussion of particular conventions and international declarations in such a way that to really follow the discussion you have to be pretty familiar with these documents and laws and rules.

I also found some of the political concepts which Ignatieff routinely throws around quite obscure and unfamiliar – communitarianism, the conservative principle, adversarial justification, the decision cycle and so on.

I got along with his first political book, ‘Blood and Belonging’, very well. Ignatieff began his discussions with detailed descriptions of the political situations in half a dozen countries, giving plenty of colour and a good feel for the place, its history and issues and people, before getting on to the philosophical discussion, and only applied a handful of relatively simple ideas in order to shed light on the nationalist conflict he was covering.

This book is the opposite. It is sustained at a high academic level, continually introducing new concepts and making fine distinctions and drawing subtle conclusions, with only passing reference to real world examples. It sustains a level of abstraction which I eventually found exhausting. I wasn’t clever enough, or educated enough in the concepts which Ignatieff routinely throws around, to really make the most of it. Probably the best way to read it is one chapter at a time, going back and working through the logic of his argument, chewing over the tumble of clever conclusions. It’s certainly the most demanding of Ignatieff’s half dozen politics books.

Seven days later

Having pondered and revisited the book for a week, maybe I can offer a better description of how the text works. The best bits of ‘Blood and Belonging’ were where Ignatieff shed light on the psychology of different types of nationalism (especially the crude sort of ethnic nationalism which so quickly degenerates into violence).

The same is true here, as well. The best bit about, say, the chapter on nihilism, is Ignatieff’s categorisation of different types of terrorist psychology, and then his exploration of what each psychology is, how it comes about and works in practice. This is fascinating and hugely increases the reader’s understanding, especially when he applies the categories to real historical examples.

What I found harder going, where I think the book comes adrift, is when he moves on to discuss how ‘we’ in liberal democracies ought to deal with the new post-9/11 terrorism threat. It’s at this point, throughout the book, that he keeps using his concept of ‘the lesser evil’ i.e. we should, temporarily, and with supervision by some kind of objective person like a judge, abrogate some of our treasured human rights in some circumstances, where it’s absolutely necessary – it’s these passages, and the entire concept of ‘the lesser evil’, which I sometimes struggled to understand and never found completely clear or convincing.

Ignatieff’s categorisations and definitions of types of society or politics or terrorism, and his descriptions of the psychologies behind them, I found thrilling because they’re so incisive and instantly clarified my own thinking; whereas his discussions of the ‘morality’ of the political response to terrorism, I found confusing and unsatisfactory.


Credit

The Lesser Evil: Political Ethics in an Age of Terror by Michael Ignatieff was published by Vintage in 2004. All references are to the 2005 Edinburgh University Press paperback edition.

New world disorder reviews

Another Bloody Love Letter by Anthony Loyd (2007)

Raised by talkative women, my childhood perception of what it took to be a man had long before attached itself to the wartime experiences of my family’s silent males…
(Another Bloody Love Letter, page 45)

Although I am going to subject it to detailed analysis and criticism, this is a bloody good book. It is deeply readable and hugely enjoyable, predominantly, for me, because of Loyd’s confident insights into the political, military and cultural conditions of the four conflicts he reports on – Kosovo, Sierra Leone, Afghanistan and Iraq – are profoundly interesting and illuminating. As in his first book, My War Gone By, I Miss It So, as well as the war reporting there are extended passages about his family and his drug habit which I find a lot less interesting, but every paragraph he writes, about more or less any subject, is instinct with intelligence, reefed with psychological insight and written in an often gloriously over-the-top, deliquescing prose. A real pleasure to read, I hope he publishes another volume soon.

My War Gone By, I Miss It So (1999)

Anthony Loyd is an award-winning war correspondent. He works mostly for The Times of London. He’s published two volumes of war reporting. The first one, 1999’s My War Gone By, I Miss It So, was a critical and popular success for several reasons. It contains blisteringly intense, visceral descriptions of the author’s experiences during the Bosnian War of 1992 to 1995, namely the sites of atrocities and massacres he visited. Then, emerging from these vivid scenes, are numerous insights and commentary on the reasons for the start and development of the war, which I found very useful.

Between 1992 and 1995 just over two hours flying time from Heathrow more than 200,000 people, the majority of them Muslims, were slaughtered. Set free by Europe’s stunning moral failure and refusal to intervene, the forces of nationalism and religious intolerance, emanating principally from Bosnia’s Serbs and Croats, were allowed to crush the more tolerant aspirations of the state’s Muslim community then reform them in their own mould. (Another Bloody Love Letter, page 48)

But what lifted it far among the usual run of war correspondent books were two further elements. One is the fact that Loyd was, throughout the period in question, a heroin addict. The book includes a surprising amount of material covering the origins and development of his addiction, along with frequent passages describing his struggles to give it up.

But the heroin sections fed into something even more unusual in a war correspondent book, which was the inclusion of a lot of autobiographical material, his unhappiness at boarding school then Eton (!) which he managed to get kicked out of; in particular describing his awful relationship with his father, who divorced his mother when Anthony was just 6 years old but continued to be a cold, domineering presence in his life.

As the book progresses it becomes clear that Loyd’s motivation to become a war correspondent was driven by the same compulsion as the drug addiction, and that both were ‘ways of escape’, ways to submerge, obliterate and repress the deep misery he felt if he found himself just living ‘normally’, in London. He tells us that trying to live the kind of everyday commuter life which he sees going on around him in London –

the clustering barnacle growths of life’s trivia and problems…my London world of rehab, relapse, routine normality and unutterable boredom… (p.22)

– drives him into deep despair at its futility and emptiness. At one point he discusses his descent into non-stop, all-day drinking and thoughts of suicide.

Only the effort required in a weekly visit to a therapist helped him at least partly emerge from his unhappiness, and it was out of this feeling of desperation that was born the idea of heading off to Bosnia as the war there started to kick off (in spring 1992) to busk it, to wing it, to see what happened. He went without a job, with no contacts, and with only a flimsy post-graduate qualification in photography to fib and bluster his way through. But on this basis (and with the kind of confidence which a top public school education gives you) he blagged a UN press pass, which he then used to travel to war zones, to get to know other correspondents, to prove himself as a man in the face of terrible suffering and real danger.

Eventually one of the journalists he was hanging out with was wounded enough to be sent back to England and he asked Loyd to temporarily replace him, giving Loyd the number of his editor in London. Again, Loyd’s posh bluffing paid off and he found himself a freelance war correspondent.

The rest of ‘My War Gone By, I Miss It So’ alternates between 1) eye-witness accounts of the terrible atrocities he saw in Bosnia; 2) descriptions of his father’s illness and death, with the revelation of more upsetting family secrets which have clearly damaged him; and 3) his ongoing trials and tribulations as a heroin addict, whose addiction serves as an escape from normal life back in London – which he just can’t handle – and also as a substitute for the intense experience of life under fire in Bosnia.

He is quite frank and open about all of this, especially the way that the heroin high and the buzz of war are related, cousins, sisters, extreme experiences which both stop him falling back into profound ennui and despair.

For months at a time I had exchanged the abandonment of the drug for the fulfilment of the conflict, then come home for a break and swapped mistresses. War for work, heroin for holidays. (p.56)

Another Bloody Love Letter (2007)

So this is Loyd’s second and, to date, final book, and it very much carries on the theme and style of the first one. With the war in Bosnia concluded by the Dayton Agreement of December 1995 there followed a lull in opportunities to feed his war addiction. But the new book finds him in Kosovo in the spring of 1998 as the political situation there unravels and this is the theme and setting of the first hundred pages or so of this 300-page book.

Heroin

Loyd is still on heroin and the book describes the rehab centre in West London he visits (CORE), the other outpatients he meets there and delves extensively into the psychology of the junkie. It covers his relationship with his dealer, Dave (who dies, during the course of the book, but whose job is immediately taken over by his junkie wife, Cathy, page 65). More importantly, it contains extended passages on the mind-set of a junkie, continually trying to give up, continually failing, in an endless ‘Sisyphean’ cycle (p.71).

There is always more to lose as an addict (p.59)

The thrill of war

Again and again he compares the highs of heroin with the thrill of being in a war zone, hanging with his homies, a tight crew of super-cool war aficionados. He repeatedly describes the buzz and kick and fulfilment to be got from close encounters with extremes of human suffering and danger.

The sheer high-octane thrill I had got out of the war. It had taken me to peaks of excitement, life affirmation and sensory enhancement. (p.48)

In his seemingly endless search for kicks, highs and intensities, his life is ‘a quest for event and happening’ (p.133).

Hero-worshiping colleagues

If the third element of the first book was the extended passages about his wretched childhood and his terrible relationship with his father, there’s some of that here (in particular his mother’s tearful terror that he’ll be found dead on a toilet floor somewhere or she’ll get a call from his employers saying he’s been killed in a war zone) – but the really deep emotional/relationship content of the book derives from his close friendship with a superstar American war correspondent who he calls Kurt.

In my review of the first book I commented on the odd dynamic whereby Loyd’s unblinkingly honest reporting of the atrocities he saw in the war zone was accompanied, in a strange logic, by idealisation of other aspect of the narrative, namely the British Army – whose officers he tends to see in a rosy light – and encounters with a succession of women who all turn out to be beautiful, statuesque, intelligent, passionate etc etc. A very James Bond litany of gorgeous babes he keeps tumbling into bed with, impassioned fucking amid the bombs and bullets.

The same odd dynamic between super-real and super-idealised elements obtains here. On the one hand he describes children with their heads blown off, just-raped young women weeping, old men dying in the snow, burned-out houses containing incinerated human remains, with clear-eyed accuracy. Yet when he comes to describe his closest friends among the war correspondents, and especially Kurt, his attitude descends into gushing, schoolboy hero worship.

Kurt was a man unlike any other I have met, or ever expect to, a rare and inspirational comet who one way or another affected the lives of almost everybody who met him, and many who did not. He was a pure force in a tainted world, a beacon of integrity: brilliant. And such essence needs protection for the world crushes fast…

Difficult and uncompromising, as a war correspondent he was a one-man Zeitgeist to the small band of Balkan war reporters, the standard bearer to our values. His work was succinct, sincere and consistently credible, its power singly lifting the level of reportage throughout the Bosnian and Kosovo conflicts. Innumerable journalists can crank out professional reports, observe and criticise. Kurt was different because of his vision and profound, Solomon-like sense of justice. Fuelled by an angry compassion, contained by common sense, this foresight and talent to discern righteousness beyond simple truth set him apart and, in allowing him to reveal a moral context within his stories it took him far beyond what most reporters are capable of doing. (p.27)

There’s more, much more:

[Kurt]’s extreme IQ and zero bullshit tolerance made him the terror of military and civilian spokesmen…

His involvement with war was the inevitable product of his being, for he was a man physically and mentally at his best in conflict and he glowed in that environment. War both completed and complimented him.

The man was the embodiment of purpose. He was vital… (p.139)

It’s odd. As if the brutal reality of the one aspect of his experience (war) can only be managed and coped with, by assigning a romantic glow and almost supernatural powers to the other aspect (friends and lovers).

He was my friend, my mentor. I was not looking for another father to replace my own, dead four years by then but absent much longer. Nevertheless, Kurt embodied goodness and wisdom to a degree I could never have imagined should I have had a thousand fathers.

Whatever the darkness of addiction or life’s other pitfalls, I could fall back on the certainty that Kurt was somewhere out there, and that his continued existence meant everything would work out fine in the end. He had a shine about him, the glow of assurance and invincibility that encouraged me to stick close and believe in hope. And, in my mind, he was never going to die. (p.28)

Of course, the second I read that final sentence, I realised that Kurt would die. The blurb on the back says this book is ‘a moving and painfully honest memoir of love and friendship, betrayal and loss, war and faith’ so I figured that the friendship and loss parts would be about Kurt. As the book progresses the hints get heavier.

Like his life force, his faith in both himself and his decision-making was so strong that I assumed him to be one of those rare men destined to survive while all around him died… (p.77)

Yep, he’s definitely going to die, and (spoilers) sure enough he does, in chapter 8, providing Loyd with a motive to fly to Freetown and obsessively try to track down the militia unit and officers who staged the ambush in which Kurt – and another old friend, Miguel – died in a hail of bullets.

Women

In true James Bond style, there’s references to the heroes success with women, to the number of beautiful, brave women Loyd has had hurried affairs with in the past. This book’s Bond girl is the tall, intelligent, beautiful Alexandra, with whom he has ‘a chariot race of a love affair’ (p.83) and ‘on-the-run relationship’ (p.140). Kurt’s death affects them in different ways (Loyd becomes cold and withdrawn) and they split up soon afterwards as a direct result.

Tall

Loyd’s number one attribute of praise is when someone is tall. All good people in his narratives (British officers, sexy women, valiant colleagues) are tall.

  • [Sami was] one of five brothers, born in Lausa, a small Drenica town with a long history of nationalist sentiment and armed resistance, he was a tall, rangy, thirty-year-old, bearded and with the shining eyes of a Biblical prophet. (p.32)
  • Miguel was not drinking either. The long, tall Spaniard, beak-nosed and gaunt like a young Jean Reno, preferred coffee and cigarettes. (p.43)
  • Alexandra [was] a Parisienne, striking in looks and temperament, she was a photographer in her thirties, tall, long-haired and veteran of Bosnia and numerous other conflicts. (p.83)
  • A tall, heavily built man with a shaven head and a goatee beard, Jago had once been the party king in the court of our early nineties London gang of revellers, able to work and play on minimal sleep and seemingly oblivious to comedown… (p.141)

It’s another aspect of the oddly comic-strip aspect of a lot of the text. The tall, striking men and women, the super-hero Kurt, his beloved grandmother in her ideal rural cottage etc. I dare say it’s all true. But it also has a kind of super-real, idealising feel to it. Sunday supplement perfection.

More wars than last time

The first book almost entirely described Loyd’s experiences in Bosnia and so had a geographical and geopolitical unity. (The exception is one long chapter about the completely unrelated war in Chechnya which he was sent to cover, but Bosnia is the main setting and backdrop to his various personal dramas.)

By contrast, this book is more varied in location. It includes descriptions of wars in not only Kosovo but also Sierra Leone, Afghanistan and Iraq. ‘My War Gone By, I Miss It So’ was very focused on the Bosnia War 1992 to 1996. This one covers the period from February 1999 to spring 2004, when a lot of other major conflicts kicked off and Loyd, now no longer blagging his way into the role, as he’d done in Bosnia, is now a full-time professional working for an employer and so goes where he is told.

1. Kosovo

In Yugoslavia ruled by the communist leader Josip Broz Tito from 1945 to 1980, Kosovo was a province of Serbia, one of the 6 republics which made up the federation of Yugoslavia. Tito held the country together by, in the cultural realm, the force of his personality and charisma; in politics, by shrewdly distributing power among Yugoslavia’s fractious ethnic groups; but mostly, like any communist state, by the rigorous deployment of the army and secret police to repress any serious opposition.

In one sense the mystery is how the complicated power sharing structures he set up survived so long after his death in 1980. The answer is that the heads of each republic remained communists and had a vested interest in keeping the existing power structures in place. It was the collapse of Soviet power in Eastern Europe which precipitated the Yugoslav wars. Because the leaders of the three relevant republics realised they could use nationalism as a force to maintain their hold on power.

1. Slovenia The Slovene Republic in the north was the first to declare independence from Yugoslavia, in June 1991, which led to a brief ten-day war between Slovene nationalist forces and units of the Serb-dominated Yugoslav Army. It was so brief because Slovenia was ethnically homogenous i.e. there was no substantial ethnic minority to contest Slovenian rule (unlike all the other republics) and also because the leader of Serbia, Slobodan Milošević, wanted to keep all units of the Yugoslav Army, predominantly Serb in character, for the war which was kicking off in neighbouring Croatia.

2. Croatia The war moved steadily south like a plague. The war in Croatia was caused by the fact that the tough Croatian nationalist tone of the new regime under president Franjo Tudjman led Serbs in the eastern part of the country to rebel and win backing from the Serb government and Yugoslav Army. The resulting war lasted from March 1991 to November 1995.

3. Bosnia Long before it was over, however, the infection moved south into Bosnia where the Serb minority again rebelled against the country’s declaration of independence in April 1992. The war in Bosnia was the central and longest lasting conflict of the Yugoslav wars and changed character during its course. The Bosnian War is generally agreed to have lasted from April 1992 to December 1995 when the Dayton accords were signed. What made it so cruel was that, to begin with, adherents of the country’s multi-ethnic identity i.e. the country’s Croats and Bosnian Muslims (or Bosniaks), fought alongside each other against the Serb nationalists who seized Serb-majority territory in the east and north of the country.

But then, like a plague, the infection of nationalism spread among Bosnians and, eventually, turned Bosnian Croats and Bosnian Muslims against each other, turning the war into a three-way conflict. Often the Serbs, always the best supplied of the warring parties because of their links with economically dominant Serbia and the former Yugoslav Army, stood aside and watched the Croats and Bosniaks slaughter each other.

Loyd’s first book, ‘My War Gone By, I Miss It So’, is a vivid and heat-breaking record of this process, how the split between the former allies, Croats and Bosniaks, spread from valley to valley, from village to village, with disgusting consequences of civilian slaughters and massacres.

4. Kosovo There was a lull between the end of the Bosnian War and the start of the conflict in Kosovo in spring 1998. Under Tito, Kosovo had been an autonomous part of Serbia i.e. had a lot of autonomy but ultimately came under Serb administrative control. The population was made up of about 1.8 million people of Albanian ethnicity and Muslim religion, and 200,000 or so Serbs, ethnic Slavs and believers of Eastern Orthodox Christianity. Serbs tended to hold all the positions of power, and derived their control from Belgrade (capital of Serbia), something which had rankled for generations with Kosovo separatists.

Once the lid of communist rule was removed the way was open for nationalists of both sides to rouse ‘their’ people. Scattered militias, criminals and freedom fights came together to form the loosely organised Kosovo Liberation Army or KLA who carried out violent but ineffectual and counter-productive attacks on symbols of Serb power, like police stations. They began doing this following the end of the Bosnian War in what has become known as the Kosovan Insurgency, starting in 1996.

In 1997 there was anarchy and a brief civil war in neighbouring Albania early 1997, following the fall of President Sali Berisha. In March the police and Republican Guard deserted their posts, leaving their armouries open. Large amounts of guns and ammunition were stolen from barracks and smuggled across the porous border into Kosovo to equip the KLA.

What complicated the picture was that Kosovo happened to be the location of a famous battlefield, where Serbian defenders of Christendom and Europe had been defeated by the advancing Turks in 1389. On the anniversary of the battle, Serb leader Slobodan Milošević travelled to the site of the battle and made a highly publicised speech telling the Serbs in Kosovo that they would never be bullied or defeated again.

Thus, when in early 1998, KLA attacks increasingly targeted Yugoslav authorities in Kosovo, the Serbs responded by increasing the presence of army units and battle-hardened Serb paramilitaries. These set about pursuing a campaign of retribution, targeting KLA sympathisers and political opponents. In February 1998 this situation was recognised as being a war.

Extremists on both sides came to the fore. The KLA’s aim was to declare an independent Kosovo republic and take all the positions of power and administration out of Serb hands, driving all Serbs out of Kosovo if necessary. The Serbs, far more organised and better equipped, wanted to take full control of Kosovo and absorb it into their notion of a Greater Serbia. To do this required terrorising as many ethnic Albanians as possible into fleeing the country. So, as in Croatia and Bosnia, the Serbs set about ‘exemplary’ massacres, entering rural villages and killing everyone they found, rounding up civilians and shooting them in front of mass graves, letting some escape and shooting them as target practice, round them up into houses which they set fire to burn them to death.

Loyd reports on the KLA’s supremely cynical tactic which was to let the Serbs do it. The KLA gambled that, if the Serbs carried out enough well-publicised atrocities, NATO would be forced to intervene and then their moment would come. They were right but thousands of their own people had to die wretched, agonising deaths first.

But they were also wrong for they and NATO miscalculated and Slobodan Milošević showed himself to be a canny strategist. For Milošević realised that NATO was badly split. The Europeans were reluctant to intervene militarily, it was the Americans pushing for decisive action. So Milošević anticipated a NATO attack but banked on NATO lacking the resolve to follow it through.

Not only that but he realised that as soon the NATO air campaign began (as it did on 24 March 1999) he would be able to let loose his forces in a real wave of ethnic cleansing. Thus as the first NATO planes flew sorties against Serb targets, Serb forces unleashed a tsunami of ethnic cleansing across Kosovo. The air campaign was not as effective as anyone thought, due to bad weather and the strict limits NATO set itself to avoid all ‘collateral damage’. Nonetheless NATO planes hit a number of civilian targets, killing as many civilians as the Serbs. Moreover, if the aim was to protect Albanian civilians the air campaign had the opposite effect: the death toll among all concerned (including ethnic Albanians) skyrocketed following and a post-war report by the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe noted that ‘the pattern of the expulsions and the vast increase in lootings, killings, rape, kidnappings and pillage once the NATO air war began on March 24’.

After a total of 78 days the Serbian Parliament passed a resolution to comply with NATO requirements and the air campaign ceased. The NATO-led peacekeeping Kosovo Force (KFOR) of 30,000 soldiers began entering Kosovo but Loyd is acid, not only about the West’s miscalculation about Serb resolution, but what happened next. He devotes some scathing pages to NATO’s complete unpreparedness for the levels of ethnic hatred and vengeance they were about to encounter. They didn’t realise the extent to which returning Kosovar Albanian refugees, and emboldened units of the KLA, would wreak the kind of massacre on unarmed Serb civilians that Serb paramilitaries had meted out to Kosovars. So now it was the turn of many innocent Serb villagers to be shot out of hand and have their homes and villages burned. The NATO force lacked the manpower, and legal expertise, to intervene into the tens of thousands of grievances which flared across the country.

Outside Pristina, Serbs and gypsies were slain in their dozens and their property burned. Once the dominant minority, in the months following NATO’s arrival most of the province’s Serbs simply packed their belongings into their vehicles and fled north to Serbia…The list of the international community’s excuses for failing to protect the Serbs was endless…So many of the war’s good intentions died in the peace, as the result of the failure by Western powers to anticipate the level of hate that would remain in Kosovo after the arrival of their troops there…It was difficult even for a believer in NATO’s intervention such as me to swallow… (pages 130 to 132)

Incidentally, the point about ‘the Western powers’ not being prepared for the level of ethnic hatred they encounter in Kosovo is echoed by Michael Ignatieff who, in his 2003 book, Empire Lite, says the UN’s humanitarian ambassador to Kosovo once the fighting ended, Bernard Kouchner, was taken by surprise by ‘the ferocity of the hatred in Kosovo’, p.63. What Ignatieff’s book brings out that Loyd’s doesn’t is that the Kosovars came to think of themselves as the intended victims of a genocide. Ignatieff quotes the NATO estimate that between March and May 1999 Serbian police and paramilitaries killed some 10,000 Kosavar Albanians and would have carried on killing as many as they could had not the bombing campaign eventually brought it to a halt. When you believe an enemy force has tried to exterminate your entire race, then no amount of revenge is enough. Hence the virulent hatred the West, NATO and Kouchner were astonished by.

Recent news from Kosovo

When this kind of ethnic hatred has been created, can it ever go away?

2. Sierra Leone

Sierra Leone was granted independence by the UK in 1961. It is a poor country whose main assets are diamonds, gold, bauxite and aluminium in the east of the country. In 1991 a brutal civil war broke out which was to last 11 years. In part it was a spillover from the civil war in neighbouring Liberia whose dictator, Charles Taylor, sent forces to overthrow the Leonean government of Joseph Momoh. Nigeria sent peacekeeping forces in to try and secure stability. The main element of the conflict was the rise of the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) which became notorious for:

  • abducting children who they brainwashed and drugged into becoming psychopathic killers; as many as 11,000 child soldiers were recruited
  • amputating the hands or arms of defenceless civilians as a form of intimidation and terror

The Sierra Leone civil war lasted 11 years, destroyed large parts of the country, and left up to 200,000 dead and tens of thousands disfigured and handicapped.

In Sierra Leone, in the west of the continent, the Revolutionary United Front, possibly Africa’s most infamous rebel army, had routed government troops, killed numerous United Nations soldiers, taken others prisoner, encircled many more, and was moving on the capital, Freetown. (p.134)

And:

The RUF was about as raving and insane as rebel groups get, its operations hallmarked by savage and wanton cruelty, utilising terror as a delight rather than as a tool…

The RUF’s political leader was Foday Sankoh, a clinically mad former corporal, by 2001 in jail on war crimes charges, whose manifesto was a mix of archaic Marxism and voodoo, and whose forces’ battle honours included class acts such as ‘Operation No Living Thing’, in which thousands of civilians had been butchered. The cutting off of prisoners’ hands with machetes was so commonplace that the rebels even had a terminology for it: ‘long sleeve’ and ‘short sleeve’ describing whether victims received their amputation at the wrist or elbow. (p.147)

So much for the grisly specifics. Loyd then delivers the kind of pithy and insightful summary which recur throughout the text and help you understand not just the specific conflict but the world we live in.

The RUF was an enduring manifestation of the general West African malaise: a lumpenproletariat of angry, ill-educated young men produced by the extreme poverty, rampant government corruption, spiralling disease and exploding population of the region. (p.147)

It was here that Loyd’s hero, Kurt, was killed, in a pointless roadside ambush carried out by the RUF, and which Loyd then devotes weeks to tracking down the killers, although he hasn’t really succeeded before he is badly injured in a car crash caused by his reckless local driver.

3. Afghanistan

Life for most Afghans was a subsistence battle in a year-zero world (p.197)

Loyd’s account brilliantly conveys the wrecked, devastated nature of the country, shedding light on its harsh, basic but attractive culture (Islamic fundamentalism, hashish, beards). But I thought the most interesting part was his dwelling on the cultural acceptance of Afghan fighters switching loyalties (pages 206, 223 to 230)

Afghan timeline

1953
General Mohammed Daud becomes prime minister of Afghanistan and turns to the Soviet Union for economic and military assistance, the start of a long association with the USSR.

1963
Mohammed Daud forced to resign as prime minister.

1964
Constitutional monarchy introduced but leads to political polarisation and power struggles.

1973
Mohammed Daud seizes power in a coup and declares Afghanistan a republic. Daud tries to play off the USSR against Western powers.

1978
General Daud is overthrown and killed in a pro-Soviet coup. The People’s Democratic Party comes to power but is paralysed by infighting and faces opposition by US-backed mujahideen groups.

1979 December
With the communist government in danger of collapsing, the Soviet Army invades to prop it up.

1980
Babrak Karmal is installed as ruler, backed by Soviet troops, but the opposition from mujahideen groups intensifies, with the muj armed and equipped by the US, Pakistan, China, Iran and Saudi Arabia. Low level guerrilla war spreads across the country.

1985
The mujahideen come together in Pakistan to form an alliance against the Soviets. It’s estimated that half the Afghan population is displaced by war, with many fleeing to neighbouring Iran or Pakistan. In the same year Mikhail Gorbachev becomes General Secretary of the USSR and institutes his policies of perestroika and glasnost.

1986
The US starts supplying the mujahideen with Stinger missiles, enabling them to shoot down Soviet helicopter gunships. Babrak Karmal is replaced by Mohammad Najibullah as head of the Soviet-backed regime.

1988
Under Gorbachev’s aegis, the USSR signs peace accords with Afghanistan, the US and Pakistan and starts pulling out troops but leaving the communist government under Najibullah in place.

1989
The last Soviet troops leave but civil war continues as the mujahideen unite to overthrow Najibullah.

1990
Najibullah wasn’t a Soviet stooge. He tried to build support for his government via the National Reconciliation reforms, he distanced himself from socialism, abolished the one-party state and let non-communists join the government. He remained open to dialogue with the mujahideen, made Islam an official religion, and invited exiled businessmen back to re-take their properties. In the 1990 constitution, all references to communism were removed and Islam became the state religion

1992
Following the August Coup in Moscow and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in December 1991, Najibullah was left without foreign aid. His government collapsed and he resigned in April 1992. The mujahedin were triumphant but immediately relapsed back into regional factions and a devastating civil war began.

1996
A new, much more hard-line Islamist faction, the Taliban, seize control of Kabul. They ban women from work, and introduce Islamic punishments which include stoning to death and amputations. They do not, however, control large parts of the country.

1997
The Taliban are recognised as the legitimate government of Afghanistan by Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. They now control about two-thirds of the country.

1998
US embassies in Africa are bombed. US intelligence points the finger at Osama bin Laden who runs a terrorist organisation called al-Qaeda. The US launches missile strikes at suspected al-Qaeda bases in Afghanistan.

1999
The UN imposes an air embargo and financial sanctions to force the Taliban government to hand over Osama bin Laden for trial.

2001 September
Ahmad Shah Masood, leader of the main opposition to the Taliban – the Northern Alliance – is assassinated on 10 September. This is the point where Loyd enters the picture, with reminiscences of meeting Masood on previous visits to the country.

11 September, the attacks on the World Trade Centre in New York, quickly traced back to al-Qaeda and bin Laden.

2001 October
When the Taliban government in Kabul refuses to hand over bin Laden, the US commences a bombing campaign against the Taliban, co-ordinated with ground attacks by the Northern Alliance of mujahedin, formerly led by Masood. Loyd is with these forces when the first air strikes begin and then follows the escalating pace of the war, and is with Northern Alliance troops when they enter Kabul (which has largely been abandoned by the Taliban).

2001 December
Leaders of the various mujahedin groups are brought to Germany, where NATO i.e. the US, lean heavily on them to agree to create an interim government.

2002 January
Deployment of the first contingent of foreign peacekeepers – the Nato-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) – marking the start of protracted fighting against the Taliban.

2002 June
The Loya Jirga, or grand council, elects Hamid Karzai as interim head of state. Karzai is to be a key figure in Afghan politics for the next 15 years.

2003 August
NATO takes control of security in Kabul, its first-ever operational commitment outside Europe.

This map from Wikipedia gives a sense of the landholdings by different Afghan groups between the fall of Najibullah in 1992 and the overthrow of the Taliban in 2001.

The War of Afghanistan in four maps, showing the changing territory held by the major armed militias between 1992 and the October 2001 US-led intervention

4. Iraq

For Loyd’s involvement, see chapter 17, below.

Iraq timeline

28 February 1991
The Gulf War ends, leaving Iraq subject to United Nations sanctions and arms inspections designed to track down weapons of mass destruction (biological, chemical and nuclear weapons). Disputes over inspectors’ access to Iraqi facilities continue for years.

December 1998
US-led air raids on Iraq as punishment for not giving UN weapons inspectors access to facilities.

11 September 2001
Hijacked airplanes are flown into the World Trade Centre towers in New York, at the Pentagon and a fourth one was brought down by the passengers en route to attack a target in Washington DC. A Muslim fundamentalist organisation called al-Qaeda, led by Osama bin Laden, a Saudi citizen living in Afghanistan, is quickly identified as being behind the attacks.

20 September
President of the United States George W. Bush first uses the term ‘war on terror’ in a speech to Congress. The enemy in the war on terror was ‘a radical network of terrorists and every government that supports them’. The phrase was immediately criticised by every literate person who realised that you cannot declare war on an abstract noun, but also by US officials such as Richard Myers, then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

October 2001
US intelligence knows that al Qaeda and bin Laden are based in Afghanistan. When American demands that the Taliban government of Aghanistan surrender bin Laden are rejected, US-led forces begin planning and then implementing military action in Afghanistan. Loyd is with Northern Alliance mujahedin forces as they fight their way south against the Taliban and into Kabul. Though the Americans don’t know it, the struggle to bring peace and security will last for twenty years and, ultimately, be a failure.

January 2002
Flush with success in Afghanistan, US President George W. Bush returns to the Middle Eastern nation which had been a thorn in the side of US policy since the 1991 Gulf War, Iraq. Many hawkish Americans think the coalition led by Bush’s father should not have stopped at pushing the Iraqi invaders out of Kuwait, but should have continued on to Baghdad. In his State of the Union address on 29 January 2002 Bush identifies Iraq as part of an ‘axis of evil’ along with Iran and North Korea i.e. preparing the public and international community for war.

12 September 2002
President Bush addresses the United Nations General Assembly and warns Iraq that military action will be unavoidable if it does not comply with UN resolutions on disarmament.

24 September 2002
Keen to side with a bellicose America, the British government under Prime Minister Tony Blair publishes an intelligence ‘dossier’ which claims to assess the threat posed by Iraq. It includes the claim that Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction which could be deployed within 45 minutes. Even at the time, to anyone of even moderate intelligence, it was clear that this was complete bollocks and, even if it was true, it wouldn’t be London or Paris let alone Washington that Saddam would attack with his useless Russian rockets, it would be Iran, which he’d failed to defeat in an 8-year war, or Israel, which is very capable of protecting itself.

8 November 2002
The UN Security Council unanimously passes resolution 1441, giving Iraq ‘a final opportunity to comply with its disarmament obligations’ and warning of ‘serious consequences’ if it does not. It is obvious to observers that Bush Junior wants to finish off what his pappy started.

November 2002 to March 2003
Despite carrying out over 700 inspections in Iraq, the UN’s Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission fails to find weapons of mass destruction.

15 February 2003
As America continues to ramp up its warlike rhetoric, millions of people around the world conclude that America’s strategy is warlike, destabilising and completely unjustified. On 15 February hundreds of thousands of people – the organisers estimated almost two million – march through London to protest military action in Iraq and Tony Blair’s craven kowtowing to Bush. There are similar marches in Glasgow and Belfast, part of a worldwide weekend of protest. Loyd knows that, despite coming from a military family, his mother and sister go on the march.

25 February 2003
The US and the UK submit a draft resolution to the UN, stating that Iraq has missed its ‘final opportunity’ to disarm peacefully. To their great irritation the resolution is opposed not just by the usual obstructor, Russia, but by two NATO allies, France and Germany. In fact France emerged as the chief opponents of an invasion.

It was during this period that a joke line from the cartoon series The Simpsons, about the French being ‘cheese-eating surrender monkeys’ was revived in the American media, along with the widespread renaming of French fries as ‘freedom fries’.

March 2003
In face of opposition from France and Russia, the UK and US abandon attempts to secure a second UN resolution authorising force. US President George Bush gives Saddam and his sons 48 hours to leave Iraq or face war.

18 March 2003
Tony Blair wins House of Commons backing to send UK forces into war in Iraq, despite a major rebellion by Labour MPs.

19 March 2003
First air raids on Baghdad as part of the so-called ‘shock and awe’ campaign of aerial bombardment. 20 March ground forces invade. The invasion of Iraq lasted just over one month, led by combined force of troops from the US, UK, Australia and Poland. 9 April, 22 days after the invasion, coalition forces took Baghdad after the six-day-long Battle of Baghdad.

Loyd accompanies Northern Alliance forces through the fighting into Baghdad.

1 May 2003
Bush declared the ‘end of major combat operations’ in his Mission Accomplished speech, delivered on an aircraft carrier off the coast of California.

29 May 2003
A BBC report casts doubt on the government’s 2002 dossier stating that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction capable of being deployed within 45 minutes.

18 July 2003
Government weapons expert David Kelly is found dead after being exposed as the source of the BBC story about the dossier.

13 December 2003
Saddam Hussein is found by US troops hiding in a cellar south of Tikrit, his home town.

Late 2003 onwards
Insurgents in Iraq begin targeting US-backed forces and fighting erupts between rival militias.

14 July 2004
The Butler Review on military intelligence finds key information used to justify the war in Iraq was unreliable. MI6 did not check its sources well enough and sometimes relied on third-hand reports. The 2002 dossier should not have included the claim that Iraq could use weapons of mass destruction within 45 minutes without further explanation.

In other words, Tony Blair’s government leant on British Intelligence to distort the information and lie in order to back a course of action he had already decided on, which was knee-jerk solidarity with George W. Bush’s America.

Structure of the book

The text consists of a prologue and 17 chapters. The paperback edition I have consists of 302 large format pages.

Prologue: Iraq, winter 2004

Like ‘My War Gone By, I Miss It So’ the text starts with a scene from the very end of the period being covered, in this case standing with an American NCO named Carlisle at the end of a firefight in a village on the edge of the al Anbar which has become the epicentre of the insurgent opposition to the American occupation, in which one of his soldiers has been killed and is even now being choppered back to the base where his body will be tidied up ready for the long journey home to the States.

Loyd describes the course of this one particular American ‘patrol’ and introduces a recurring leitmotif when he describes Carlisle as ‘a tall, rangy man with an aquiline nose, pale Celtic eyes and a straight mouth that hinted of something mean’ (p.3).

But the main purpose of the prologue is to establish the author as someone who has knocked around war zones for over a decade, knows that all battlefields are haunted, knows there is no rhyme or reason in who will survive and who will die, is haunted by his own cast of characters (naming people we will meet in successive chapters of the book).

The prologue then reverts to Loyd’s experience in Operation Desert Storm back in 1991, when, a fresh-faced 24 and nearing the end of a 5-year contract in the British Army, he volunteered to join a Scots regiment in order to be part of the British military contingent in the huge US-led coalition which kicked Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait in February 1991. But he was bitterly disappointed to see no fighting, just trenches of demoralised conscript Iraqis eagerly surrendering. The war was over in just 100 hours. A few weeks later he was flown back to Britain and officially left the army, with the itch for action, the urge to test his mettle and live up to the challenge of his warrior ancestors unappeased.

And then briefly refers to the scene 13 years later, in post-invasion, occupied Iraq.

  1. Kosovo, February 1999 – Loyd describes his base at the hotel and bar of Beba, ‘a Serb gangland daddy’ (p.16) in Pristina, capital of Kosovo, from which he and other correspondents drive out to the countryside to see the evidence of the latest Serb atrocity. Description of the shootout between KLA and Serb forces which triggered the war. Introduces Kurt, his hero, with the anecdote of the time they took on sound bouncer-like Serb paramilitaries who beat them up.
  2. More Kosovo: introduction to Sami, an amateurish KLA fighter then onto a gripping analysis of the political and military situation, the aims of the three parties: the KLA, the Serbs and NATO. Graphic, sickening descriptions of Serb massacres carried out in revenge for a KLA one. Both sides massacre defenceless civilians, while the Western press was obsessing about whether Bill Clinton had sex with Monica Lewinsky. Loyd celebrates his 32nd birthday among colleagues, a psychological profile of his fellow war correspondents and then the family background which brought him to war.
  3. London, September 1998 – Back in London for R&R and an extended description of his heroin addiction with a full description and psychology of the addict, his family’s response, the CORE rehab centre. ‘War for work, heroin for holidays’ (p.56).
  4. Kosovo, February 1999 – Back in Kosovo the situation has deteriorated with the Serbs carrying out more massacres confident that NATO lack the resolve to punish them. The psychology of the war correspondent. ‘It was our profession but it was also our delight.’ (p.75) More stories about his hero Kurt, coming under fire reporting on a bombed bridge. With the collapse of the Rambouillet talks, NATO monitors are withdrawn, NATO goes to battle stations, and the Serbs hugely accelerated their campaign of murder and massacre. Loyd sees the, decapitated, mutilated bodies. The smell of fresh meat. At a stroke Western correspondents become potential spies or hostages, so their hurried, fraught, dicey escape from Kosovo into Macedonia.
  5. Albania, spring 1999 – Now based in a scuzzy hotel in Bajaram Curri in north Albania, they undertake trips across the border into Kosovo to see and interview KLA forces, for example ‘the Fighting Emir’. Description of the Albanian version of vendetta, kanun (p.100) and how local officials (the town’s chief of police) are involved in it. Commentary on the NATO bombing campaign i.e. deeply disappointing and only encouraged the Serbs into ferocious action. The only thing that would stop it would be NATO committing ground troops which it was mortally afraid to do.
  6. England, summer 1999 – extended description of his lovely grandmother and the rural cottage she lived in which has Loyd’s retreat as a boy. Memories of catching his first trout, and the odd characters who lived locally. A tribute to his mum’s hard working, tough but calm character.
  7. Kosovo, June 1999 – The grim end-game of the conflict, with the KLA finally in the ascendant and Serb forces withdrawn from Kosovo, Loyd testifies to the Kosovars’ vengeance on any Serbs they can get their hands on, the usual rural massacres, fields of bodies etc, the utter unpreparedness of the occupying NATO forces for the level of hatred and vengeance they encounter, and their pathetic inability to stop revenge attacks on Serb civilians.
  8. Ethiopia, May 2000 – Loyd is in Ethiopia when the office call to inform him of Kurt’s death in a roadside ambush in Sierra Leone. He flies to Paris where, with other friends, he meets the body, then onto America to meet the family and attend the funeral. Part of him dies. Back in London he goes on a bender with an old mate, Jago, who is both a crack head and a smack addict.
  9. Sierra Leone, May 2001 – A year after Kurt’s death Loyd embarks on a personal quest to track down the RUF unit responsible for his death. I can see it meant a lot to him, but what struck me was his description of hot humid West Africa, the disgusting atrocities carried out by the RUF, and the terrifying volatility and unpredictability of the warlords he meets on his quest. Poro initiation ceremonies which involve scarring and magic and can stretch to cutting the heart out of a living victim and eating it raw (p.155). Politically, Sierra Leone is important because the UN’s entire role as a peacekeeping force was being called into question by the rebel successes. During a ceasefire he is invited by Nigerian peacekeepers to an RUF party given to celebrate 20 years since Bob Marley’s death (p.157).
  10. Sierra Leone – Loyd’s efforts to reconstruct the events leading up to Kurt’s killing in the ambush, going deep into rebel territory to interview RUF officers, and visiting the scene and actually getting into the rusting wreckage of the Mercedes Kurt was travelling in. On one journey the very bad driver he’s been lumbered with crashes the car after a tyre blows.
  11. Sierra Leone – vivid description of aftermath of the crash (the car spun over and lost its roof) and his attempts to save the life of his translator, Allieu, who dies anyway. Locals call the nearest Nigerian UN forces. He is helicoptered back to town. Still recovering from bad cuts and grazes Loyd soldiers on with his quest for Kurt’s killers…
  12. France, summer 2001 – Loyd’s step-father owned a converted stable in rural France. When he sold it Loyd bought it and it became a refuge and sanctuary (p.187). He invokes boyhood memories of fishing. He has barbecues with local mates. 10 September 2001 his manager in London phones to tell him Ahmed Shah Masood has been assassinated, which leads into anecdotes about meeting Masood a few years previously, interviewing him, following him round the front line. Masood was leader of the Northern Alliance of mujahedin who are in a civil war with the Taliban. Back in the present, next day his mum phones to tell him about the 9/11 attacks.
  13. Afghanistan, September 2001 – Profile of Afghanistan, ruined, impoverished land of endless war, from the Soviet invasion of 1979 onwards. With a good friend and colleague, Shay, he shares a bone-rattling ride north from Kabul to the front line. Lots of insightful explanations of Afghanistan’s history, wars, ruined economy, national character, the overwhelming role of Islam, the ubiquity of strong hashish (p.208). When, according to their values of hospitality and honour (p.204) the Taliban refuse to give up their guest, Osama bin Laden, after the 9/11 attacks, the American government decides to overthrow them. Loyd arrives just as the American campaign is girding its loins and finds the Northern Alliance upset at the death of their leader (Masood) but confident of American support. Complete scepticism about the bullshit spouted by Western military experts crapping on about precision strikes and drone warfare and other bullshit (p.207). In a bizarre digression, on their journey Loyd and Shay are invited to join the crowd witnessing the circumcision of a 7-year-old boy (p.211).
  14. Afghanistan – Being shown round the dusty front line by Sher Agah. A night time firefight. Description of the Hazara as a distinct ethnic group. A visit to Bagram airport. Extensive description of the Afghan ability to switch sides with ease, really interesting insight into the base level survival tactics of most impoverished, beaten down Afghans.
  15. Afghanistan – When some American special forces arrive Shay and Loyd are kicked out of their crib and find another place to stay in a derelict hotel without electricity or toilet in Golbahar. Their perilous consumption of the local moonshine. The stomach-turning story of Karimullah, a 26-year-old who fights against the Taliban, is captured, has his foot and hand surgically removed in the football stadium (p.244). His luxury was visits to an amateur hamam or Turkish bath. Explanation of the exchange value of enemy prisoners or corpses. A telling evening hosted by local businessman and warlord Fahrid Ahmad Shafaq, who can see that Afghanistan needs development but worries that the Americans might be waging a war against Islam? Are they, he asks Loyd.
  16. Afghanistan – After months of hanging round, Loyd describes the Northern Alliance assault on the Taliban lines, break through and advance on Kabul which is captured on 13 November 2001. Firefights, the newly dead and the bleeding-to-death. Some journalist friends are murdered by bandits. But once he’s in the city he realises he’s tired, exhausted, demoralised. Taliban leaders and Osama bin Laden escaped into the Tora Bora mountains, to the Americans’ dismay. After a shave at a newly liberated barbers’ (with some sociology about the importance of the beard in fundamentalist Islam) he takes a ludicrously derelict chopper flight to neighbouring Tajikistan, and so home.
  17. Iraq, March 2003 – 16 months later he is in northern Iraq. The Allies have assembled a huge force in Kuwait and are on the brink of invading to overthrow Saddam. Most reporters have based themselves there, ’embedded with the troops’. Loyd takes the conscious decision to go to the north of the country, entering Kurdish-held territory from Iran and hoping to catch a lift with the American forces which will come down through Turkey, into Kurdistan and sweep on to Baghdad. He is uneasily aware that his mother and sister, scions of a military family, both went on the million-people march against the war in Iraq. He doesn’t touch on the farce of the UN searches for weapons of mass destruction, but instead on his own personal farce. He has come back to Iraq 13 years after taking part in Operation Desert Storm and leaving frustrated that he saw no fighting, hoping for closure and completion, hoping that after over ten years of chasing wars he will experience some kind of revelation. But the Turkish government blocks the Americans from sending any men or equipment through Turkey and the northern offensive is delayed while in the south the Allied forces storm through the Iraqis. In the end, with the help of a small force of Green Berets calling down air attacks, the peshmerga (Kurdish militias) break through successive Iraqi lines and fight their way south, taking the talismanic city of Kirkuk. Baghdad has fallen and he missed it. He experiences no closure after all, and takes a taxi back into Iran, then a plane back to London, in the ‘identical’ state of frustration as when he first left Iraq, back in ’91.

Epilogue: Baghdad, spring 2004

A year or so after the setting of the final chapter, Loyd is now back in Baghdad, in a hotel bedroom. The insurgency is bedded in, the Americans have withdrawn to a heavily fortified compound, and Loyd is finally here, where he fantasised of being all those years ago during Desert Storm. Big deal.

In fact the epilogue turns out to be entirely about his beloved mother’s diagnosis with a brain tumour, loss of sight in one eye leading her to wear a piratical eye patch, her stoic strength of spirit described in Loyd’s best hero worshiping style and clichés come tumbling out:

Defeat was not an option as we geared ourselves for the coming treatment, but my heart was afflicted by naked dread masked by desperate resolve… (p.300)

He was covering the trial of Slobodan Milošević when his sister rang him to say his mother had collapsed and been rushed to hospital. By his mother’s hospital bed he is awed when she asks to be taken home to die, despite being told that such a move will hasten her demise. Here, a chastened Loyd realises, is the bravery he had spent his life seeking: not on some foreign battlefield but in the heart of his indomitable mother. She dies as Loyd and his sister hold her hand. She is buried on a beautiful winter’s day with the whole village turning out to see her off.

You can read this as either a really beautiful and moving tribute or a pack of high-minded clichés or, as I do, both at the same time, the one inhabiting the other.

Clichés

It’s tempting to analyse Loyd’s style at length. It can be very florid and purple, hyper-real Sunday supplement prose, burnishing every situation, every thought with gloss and sheen.

He is hyper-aware of the risk of cliché in writing about a) war, b) heroin addiction, c) his unhappy family – all subjects which have been done to death for generations.

Regarding war, as early as page 5 Loyd describes how the American marines nervously patrolling the backstreets of al Anbar, expecting an ambush at any moment, invoke folk memories of the Vietnam War and scenes from Apocalypse Now, a war that was over and a movie that was released before they were even born. The point is they all feel like they’re experiencing the war through the filter of someone else’s tropes and patterns.

Some barely out of college and experiencing their first foreign country, many of the younger American soldiers in Iraq were living in their own war films, life and art enmeshing in a freakish coupling to a contemporary soundtrack of thrash metal and gangsta rap… (p.5)

So it’s hard to avoid cliché when you and the people you’re reporting on all feel as if they’re living in a huge cliché, when reality itself seems to be made up of well-worn tropes. Loyd repeatedly raises the issue. When analysing his general unhappiness, he says:

Even the rages that sprang forward so easily from memories of my father seemed too trite, too convenient, too clichéd, to weave into a noose from which to hang heroin. (p.63)

A sentence which is also an example of his use of florid and elaborate metaphor. A little later he is writing about the motivation of war correspondents and says:

‘Death wish’ is a tired old cliché – simplistic, absolute and inept in describing our motivations. (p.75)

But it’s a risky strategy to highlight your aversion to clichés unless you can be quite certain that you will avoid them and, in the kind of stereotyped situations in which he finds himself, and much-described battlezone feelings he finds himself experiencing, this is very difficult.

Starting out in London, talking of his fellow drug addicts at the West London rehab centre, he writes:

A few had been crushed by such cruel hands of fate that I wondered how they had any alternative… (p.55)

‘Cruel hands of fate’? On the same page he talks about his gang of London friends:

Hardcore libertines, we thought we were cool and beautiful and turned on. (p.55)

Not so much a cliché of phrasing as of thinking. Sunday supplement thinking. When he describes his little cohort of friends they are all tall and beautiful and successful. You can virtually see the Sunday supplement photos.

Elsewhere, you consistently come across phrases describing stereotypes which boost the text, make it seem more hyper-real, idealised, airbrushed to a kind of generic perfection.

  • My sister Natasha, younger than me by four years, a woman of flint-like resolve beneath a gentle exterior… (p.58)

Later, in Kosovo, when NATO commences its bombing campaign, Loyd and all his fellow correspondents immediately become liable for arrest or worse:

  • From that moment on, our fate hung above the cauldron of harm on the frayed thread of the night’s few sleepless hours and Beba’s word. (p.91)

OK, that’s not a cliché as such, but it is a typical example of his purple prose. ‘Our fate hung above the cauldron of harm…’ Loyd’s prose, in other words, is very much not Hemingway minimalist, it’s the opposite; full of florid metaphors and similes, which, along with the clichés and stereotypes give the whole thing a super-real vividness. There’s a kind of continual psychological over-writing at work. When an American army chaplain shares his disillusion, Loyd remarks:

Once, I may have privately sneered at his predicament, for the crushing of another’s hope can be cruel sport to behold from the pedestal of nihilist certainty. (p.5)

Is this too purple and engorged? For frugal tastes, maybe. Then again, considering the extremes of experience which he is describing, maybe it’s a perfectly valid approach.

The few phrases I’ve picked out are fragments of Loyd’s overall strategy, which is to push language into baroque shapes and see what happens, to create a new idiolect. It’s easy to pick holes in, but the overall impression is of tremendous readability and enjoyability. He risks using odd words or words in odd combinations to capture moments and perceptions and often achieves brilliant effects. No risk, no reward.

Almost every conversation seemed to snag on this issue of money, a moment always marked by a pause, that tilting second of challenged pride or grace… (p.235)

In the buildup to the mujahedin attack on the Taliban lines, the fighters go about their preparations, loading up lorries, fuelling tanks and so on with no attempt at concealment.

As this readiness for war progressed with the same flagrant labour of a medieval siege… (p.255)

And leads him to deploy obscure, recherché terms. In a vivid account of battle of running through a minefield towards the Taliban lines, he writes:

Gunfire crackled. More shouts. More mujahedin piling into cover, wild-eyed, revved up, faces contorted, fervorous. (p.261)

Like a stone dropped in the pond of your mind. Nice. Reflecting on what he’d hoped to find back in 1991, during Operation Desert Storm, he writes:

Epiphany? It is an arrogant word of claim, suggesting more completion than the human state is capable of. (p.11)

‘An arrogant word of claim’, what an odd but evocative phrase.

Late in the book I noticed a particular mannerism which contributes to his creation of idiolect, which is omitting particles i.e ‘a’ and ‘the’. At one point he mentions the poet W.H. Auden and this omitting articles was one of the tricks of Auden’s early poetry. It creates an ominous sense of uncertainty, an uncertainty whether we’re dealing with a specific or general noun.

I had once asked Kurt what made him weep, supposing perhaps that his self-possession would have held him back from such release. (p.220)

I’d expect ‘such a release’ there, wouldn’t you? The choice of ‘weep’ instead of the more everyday ‘cry’ is already lending the sentence that super-real, idealised, airbrushed glamour I’ve described.

Yet loss had often rewarded me with some surprise and unexpected gift. (p.221)

‘Unexpected gift’ sounds like Auden to me. ‘Unexpected gifts‘ would be far more mundane. ‘Unexpected gift’ makes it sound mythical, like something from the age of legends. Describing the intensification of American air attacks on Taliban lines:

No longer the coy hit-and-run affairs of night, now attack jets and bombers appeared by day, in flagrant and riveting spectacle that had the locals gathered in audience on their flat rooftops.’ (p.222)

You’d expect it to be ‘in a flagrant and riveting spectacle’. See how removing that article (‘a’) makes it more archaical and momentous. Same with ‘gathered in audience’, an unusual way of phrasing it. Talking of Kosavar cigarettes:

A dollar for twenty, they were the best local tobacco available, their acrid, woody smoke affording great sense of luxury. (p.241)

Where’s the ‘a’? Interviewing local Afghan warlord, Fahrid Ahmad Shafaq:

After admiring the three herons wandering through his garden – as well as flowers, ornamental birds are a source of endless fascination to Afghans – we sat on the baked mud floor to enjoy a lengthy feast of chicken, rice and watermelon and debated the war in lively exchange. (p.25)

Another missing ‘a’ lends the phrase a strange archaic quality, matching the archaic medieval feel of so much of Afghan society.

I hope these examples demonstrate the way Loyd develops a prose style which adds a kind of pregnant meaning to so much of what he sees or feels, lending everything a legendary grandeur. This isn’t a criticism. I’m trying to understand the elements of his style (over and above 1) the searing content of many of his descriptions and 2) his extremely acute insights into the geopolitical situations of the wars he’s covering) which make the book such an enjoyable and sumptuous read.

Credit

Another Bloody Love Letter by Anthony Loyd was published by Headline Review in 2007. All references are to the 2007 paperback edition.


War reporting book and exhibition reviews

Books

Exhibitions

SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome by Mary Beard (2015) 7. The empire

If you’re looking for a chronological history of the Roman Empire, or an account of the military campaigns and battles which led to its territorial expansion, or an account of the organisation and administration of the Roman army, during either the republican or imperial eras, forget it. None of that is in this book.

Beard’s interest is in exploring themes or aspects of Roman social, cultural and political history. Hence, although the final chapter in SPQR is devoted to ‘Rome Outside Rome’ i.e. the wider Roman empire, it is nothing like a chronological history of the empire, or of the wars of conquest and putting down of rebellions which consolidated it, or a really thorough examination of Rome’s administrative bureaucracy. Instead it is an entertainingly meandering essay which considers some selected aspects of Roman rule beyond Italy. Beard starts the chapter, as usual, with a flurry of academic questions:

  • how were the cultural differences across the empire debated?
  • how ‘Roman’ did the empire’s inhabitants outside Rome and Italy become?
  • how did people in the provinces relate their traditions, religions, languages and literatures to those of imperial Rome, and vice versa?

Beard uses biographies of Roman administrators such as Pliny the Younger (61 to 113 AD), touches on the Roman attitude to religion – especially the troublesome new religion of Christianity – uses Hadrian’s Wall as an example of the limits of empire, and generally delves into other topics which take her fancy.

So, as a reader, as soon as you abandon any hope of getting a thorough or even basic chronological overview of the main events of the wider Roman empire, and settle down for a chatty meander through  some selected aspects of a fascinating subject, then Beard is an enjoyable and informative guide.

The limits of imperial expansion

Augustus called a halt to the expansion of imperial Rome following the disastrous Battle of Teutoburg Forest in 9 AD in which Publius Quinctilius Varus lost three legions massacred by barbarian Germans led by Arminius (p.480). Fascinatingly, Beard tells us that Augustus had fully intended to extend Roman power into Germany, and had begun construction of a town at Waldgirmes, 60 miles east of the Rhine, complete with forum, statue of the emperor and all the trimmings. After Teutoburg he ordered all building work abandoned and withdrawal of all Roman forces to the Rhine and in his will instructed his successors not to extend the empire.

But they did. Claudius sent legions to conquer Britannia, which they’d seized enough of by 44 AD to justify Claudius awarding himself a triumph, although the Romans took a long time to extend their power right up to the border with Hibernia. In the east, in 101 to 102 Trajan conquered Dacia, part of what is now Romania and in 114 to 117 invaded Mesopotamia to the borders of modern Iran.

Emperors less competitive than consuls

But overall the pace of territorial acquisition slowed right down. Beard makes the interesting point that this was at least in part because under the Republic you had two consuls who competed with each other for military glory, rising to the epic rivalry between Julius Caesar, busy making a name for himself conquering Gaul in the West, and Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus, known in English as Pompey, redrawing the map of the Roman East.

By contrast, the emperors had no rivals and no-one to beat. Their only rivals were the previous emperors so they could take their time, make a few strategic ‘conquests’, award themselves a nice triumph and relax. Most of the wars of the first 200 years of empire were against internal rebellions or border skirmishes.

Governor Pliny in Bithynia

Slowly the focus of administrators and emperors switched from conquest to good administration. It’s to examine this that Beard gives the example of Pliny the Younger who in 109 was sent to become governor of the province of Bithynia along the southern coast of the Black Sea in what is now Turkey. Next to Cicero Pliny is one of the most knowable ancient Romans because of the 100 or so letters he sent directly to the emperor Trajan, reporting back on all aspects of Roman administration, from taxes to statues, to the nitty gritty of local legal cases.

What the Romans wanted was peaceful administration, avoidance of flagrant examples of corruption, good regular supplies of taxes. They made little or no attempt to impose their own cultural norms or eradicate local traditions. Instead the East, in particular, remained a mostly Greek-speaking fantasia of different religions, gods, festivals, dress, traditions and so on.

Small number of imperial administrators

In a striking similarity to the British Empire, Beard tells us the number of imperial administrators was vanishingly small: across the empire at any one time there were probably fewer than 200 elite Roman administrators running an empire of more than 50 million subjects (p.490). So how was the empire managed?

1. The most obvious answer is the substantial Roman legions posted around the borders of the empire and Beard mentions the insight we have into one such garrison from the amazing discoveries which have been made at Vindolanda, on Hadrian’s Wall.

2. Building new settlements was another strategy. In the north and west in particular the building of Roman settlements on the classic, standardised Roman town layout was one of the most enduring legacies of empire. Roman policy resulted in ‘urbanisation on an unprecedented scale’ (p.492).

3. Also, just like the British, French and other European empires 1,800 years later, the Romans co-opted the local elites. Local rulers who came over to Rome were awarded formal titles, new Roman names, rights and privileges. They took to wearing the toga, they sent their children to Roman schools to learn Latin, rhetoric and civics. Over generations these became embedded and Romanised elites did the work of ensuring peace and lack of rebellions among their subjects.

The 1st century efflorescence of Greek literature

In the East, the Greeks didn’t need to take any lessons in ‘civilisation’ from the Romans and no Roman would have dared suggest it. Nonetheless, Beard points out that the early imperial period saw an extraordinary florescence of Greek literature, much of it addressing, skirting, questioning the impact of Roman hegemony on the Greek world. In a striking example, she tells us that the output of just one Greek writer of this period, biographer and philosopher Plutarch (46 to 119 AD) fills as many modern pages as all the surviving literature from the 5th century BC put together, from the tragedies of Aeschylus to the histories of Thucydides (p.500).

Three typical rebellions

Surprisingly, maybe, there were only a handful of major rebellions against Roman rule in the first century (although it may be that these were under-reported, as both regional governors and emperors weren’t keen to record dissent).

Anyway, Beard makes the interesting point that the three major rebellions we know about weren’t standalone nationalist uprisings of the kind we’re familiar with from the end of the modern European empires. In the three biggest instances they were not popular uprisings but rebellions by members of the collaborating class felt they had, for one reason or another, been badly treated by their Roman allies.

1. Thus the leader of the German forces in the Teutoburg Forest, Arminius, was a solid ally of Rome and personal friend of the general whose forces he massacred. Modern thinking has it that Arminius was a rival for leadership of his tribe, the Cherusci, with his brother, Segeste. When a revolt began among the auxiliary troops for an unknown reason, it may be that Arminius thought he stood more chance of becoming paramount leader of his people by betraying his Roman allies (and brother) and it seems to have worked.

2. In Britannia, Queen Boadicea or Boudicca rebelled after terrible treatment by the Romans. When her husband Prasutagus died he left half his tribal kingdom to the empire and half to his daughters. But when Roman forces moved in to take their territory they ran amok among the Britons, plundering the king’s property, raping  his daughters and flogging Boudicca. Hence her armed revolt, and you can see why her tribe would rally to her standard, whose first steps were to burn to the ground the nearest three Roman towns, murdering all their inhabitants, before the governor of the province, 250 miles away on the border of Wales, heard the news, marched across country to East Anglia, and exterminated the British forces (p.514).

3. The First Jewish War or Great Jewish Revolt (66 to 73 AD) is also attributable to bad behaviour by the occupying Romans. The middle classes protested against heavy Roman taxation and there were some random attacks on Roman citizens. In response the Roman governor, Gessius Florus, raided the Second Temple (where no non-Jew was allowed to enter) for back payment of the taxes, then arrested senior Jewish figures some of whom he had crucified for disobedience. Bad idea. The rebellion spread like wildfire and pinned down Roman legions in Palestine for the next seven years.

Free movement of goods and people

Another massive effect of the Roman Empire was the free movement of goods and people on an unprecedented scale. Among the ruins of Pompeii has been found an ivory figurine from India, the soldiers on Hadrian’s Wall were buying pepper brought all the way from the Far East. Vast amounts of olive oil (20 million litres per year) were imported to Rome from southern Spain and the province of Africa became the breadbasket for the capital (250,000 tonnes of grain).

Not only goods but people moved vast distances, making lives and careers for themselves thousands of miles from their birthplaces in a way that was unprecedented for most of world history before. Beard exemplifies this astonishing freedom of movement in the story of Barates who was working near Hadrian’s Wall in the second century AD, and built a memorial to his wife who predeceased him and came from just north of London. The point is that Barates himself, as his memorial  records, originally hailed from Syria, 4,000 miles away.

Trade and administration, imports and exports, sending soldiers and administrators to the ends of the known world, involved a huge amount of bureaucracy and organisation, many fragments of which have survived to build up a picture of the empire’s multi-levelled commercial and administrative complexity.

The people, group or ideology this free movement around the entire Mediterranean basin was ultimately to benefit most were the Christians. Familiarity with the life of St Paul shows just how free they were to travel freely and to spread their word to the ‘godfearers’, the groups who attached themselves to Jewish synagogues but couldn’t become full Jews because of their lack of circumcision and/or the food and ritual restrictions, so who were an enthusiastic audience for the non-ethnic, universalising tendency of  the new religion.

It is this principle of openness and assimilation, which characterised Rome from the earliest times when Romulus incorporated members of neighbouring tribes into his nascent settlement, that I briefly describe in the next blog post.


Credit

SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome by Mary Beard was published in 2015 by Profile Books. All references are to the 2016 paperback edition.

Roman reviews

Policemen attacking defenceless women around the world in 2021

Belarus

Belarus Protests

Belarus police and militia men arrest a woman protesting peacefully in Minsk, Belarus

Myanmar

Armed and helmeted policemen arrest a woman protester in Myanmar

Iran

Armed policemen arrest Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe in Iran

Russia

It takes four armed and helmeted Russian policemen to arrest one woman protester in Moscow

Hong Kong

Hong Kong violence breaks out again in shopping centres | Hong Kong | The Guardian

Two armed policemen force a woman protester to the ground and handcuff her in Hong Kong

England

Metropolitan policemen manhandle, force to the ground and arrest a woman attending a peaceful vigil in South London for Sarah Everard, murdered last week by a serving Metropolitan policeman.

Two Metropolitan policemen wrestle Patsy Stevenson to the ground as they arrest and handcuff her for attending the peaceful vigil (CREDIT: James Veysey/Shutterstock)

Watch respectful women holding a quiet and moving vigil for the murdered woman being attacked and sworn at by furiously violent male police.

After Tamerlane: The Rise and Fall of Global Empires 1400 – 2000 by John Darwin (2007)

Empires exist to accumulate power on an extensive scale…
(After Tamerlane: The Rise and Fall of Global Empires 1400 – 2000 page 483)

Questions

Why did the nations of Western Europe rise through the 18th and 19th centuries to create empires which stretched around the world, how did they manage to subjugate ancient nations like China and Japan, to turn vast India into a colonial possession, to carve up Africa between them?

How did white European cultures come to dominate not only the territories and peoples who they colonised, but to create the modern mindset – a vast mental framework which encompasses capitalist economics, science and technology and engineering, which dominates the world right down to the present day?

Why did the maritime states of Europe (Britain, France, the Dutch, Spanish and Portuguese) end up either settling from scratch the relatively empty places of the world (America, Australia), or bringing all the other cultures of the world (the Ottoman Empire, Hindu India, Confucian China and Shinto Japan) under their domination?

Answers

For at least two hundred years politicians, historians, economists and all kinds of academics and theoreticians have been writing books trying to explain ‘the rise of the West’.

Some attribute it to the superiority of the Protestant religion (some explicitly said it was God’s plan). Some that it was something to do with the highly fragmented nature of Europe, full of squabbling nations vying to outdo each other, and that this rivalry spilled out into unceasing competition for trade, at first across the Atlantic, then along new routes to India and the Far East, eventually encompassing the entire globe.

Some credit the Scientific Revolution, with its proliferation of new technologies from compasses to cannons, an unprecedented explosion of discoveries and inventions. Some credit the slave trade and the enormous profits made from working to death millions and millions of African slaves which fuelled the industrial revolution and paid for the armies which subjugated India.

Lenin thought it was the unique way European capitalism had first perfected techniques to exploit the proletariat in the home countries and then applied the same techniques to subjugate less advanced nations, and that the process would inevitably lead to a global capitalist war once the whole world was colonised.

John Darwin

So John Darwin’s book, which sets out to answer all these questions and many more, is hardly a pioneering work; it is following an extremely well-trodden path. BUT it does so in a way which feels wonderfully new, refreshing and exciting. This is a brilliant book. If you were only going to read one book about imperialism, this is probably The One.

For at least three reasons:

1. Darwin appears to have mastered the enormous revisionist literature generated over the past thirty years or more, which rubbishes any idea of innate European superiority, which looks for far more subtle and persuasive reasons – so that reading this book means you can feel yourself reaping the benefits of hundreds of other more detailed & specific studies. He is not himself oppressively politically correct, but he is on the right side of all the modern trends in historical thought (i.e. is aware of feminist, BAME and post-colonial studies).

2. Darwin pays a lot more attention than is usual to all the other cultures which co-existed alongside Europe for so long (Islam, the Ottoman Empire, the Mughal Empire, the Safavid Empire, the Chinese Empire, Japan, all are treated in fascinating detail and given almost as much space as Europe, more, in the earlier chapters) so that reading this book you learn an immense amount about the history of these other cultures over the same period.

3. Above all, Darwin paints a far more believable and plausible picture than the traditional legend of one smooth, consistent and inevitable ‘Rise of the West’. On the contrary, in Darwin’s version:

the passage from Tamerlane’s times to our own has been far more contested, confused and chance-ridden than the legend suggests – an obvious enough point. But [this book places] Europe (and the West) in a much larger context: amid the empire-, state- and culture-building projects of other parts of Eurasia. Only thus, it is argued, can the course, nature, scale and limits of Europe’s expansion be properly grasped, and the jumbled origins of our contemporary world become a little clearer.

‘Jumbled origins’, my God yes. And what a jumble!

Why start with Tamerlane?

Tamerlane the Eurasian conqueror died in 1405. Darwin takes his death as marking the end of an epoch, an era inaugurated by the vast wave of conquest led across central Asia by Genghis Khan starting around 1200, an era in which one ruler could, potentially, aspire to rule the entire Eurasian landmass.

When Tamerlane was born the ‘known world’ still stretched from China in the East, across central Asia, through the Middle East, along the north African shore and including Europe. Domination of all of China, central Asia, northern India, the Middle East and Europe was, at least in theory, possible, had been achieved by Genghis Khan and his successors, and was the dream which had inspired Tamerlane.

Map of the Mongol Empire created by Genghis Khan

But by the death of Tamerlane the political situation across Eurasia had changed. The growth in organisation, power and sophistication of the Ottoman Empire, the Mamluk state in Egypt and Syria, the Muslim sultanate in north India and above all the resilience of the new Ming dynasty in China, meant this kind of ‘global’ domination was no longer possible. For centuries nomadic tribes had ravaged through Eurasia (before the Mongols it had been the Turks who emerged out of Asia to seize the Middle East and found the Ottoman Dynasty). Now that era was ending.

It was no longer possible to rule the sown from the steppe (p.5)

Moreover, within a few decades of Tamerlane’s demise, Portuguese mariners had begun to explore westwards, first on a small scale colonising the Azores and Canary Islands, but with the long-term result that the Eurasian landmass would never again constitute the ‘entire world’.

What was different about European empires?

Empires are the oldest and most widespread form of government. They are by far the commonest way that human societies have organised themselves: the Assyrians, Babylonians, Egyptians, Persians, the Greek and Roman Empires, the Aztec Empire, the Inca Empire, the Mali Empire, Great Zimbabwe, the Chinese empire, the Nguyễn empire in Vietnam, the Japanese Empire, the Ottoman empire, the Mughal empire, the Russian empire, the Austro-Hungarian empire, to name just a few.

Given this elementary fact about history, why do the west European empires come in for such fierce criticism these days?

Because, Darwin explains, they were qualitatively different.

  1. Because they affected far more parts of the world across far more widespread areas than ever before, and so ‘the constituency of the aggrieved’ is simply larger – much larger – than ever before.
  2. Because they were much more systematic in their rapaciousness. The worst example was surely the Belgian Empire in the Congo, European imperialism stripped of all pretence and exposed as naked greed backed up by appalling brutality. But arguably all the European empires mulcted their colonies of raw materials, treasures and of people more efficiently (brutally) than any others in history.

The result is that it is going to take some time, maybe a lot of time, for the trauma of the impact of the European empires to die down and become what Darwin calls ‘the past’ i.e. the realm of shadowy past events which we don’t think of as affecting us any more.

The imperial legacy is going to affect lots of people, in lots of post-colonial nations, for a long time to come, and they are not going to let us in the old European colonial countries forget it.

Structure

After Tamerlane is divided into nine chapters:

  1. Orientations
  2. Eurasia and the Age of Discovery
  3. The Early Modern Equilibrium (1750s – 1800)
  4. The Eurasian Revolution (1800 – 1830)
  5. The Race Against Time (1830 – 1880)
  6. The Limits of Empire (1880 – 1914)
  7. Towards The Crisis of The World (1914 – 42)
  8. Empire Denied (1945 – 2000)
  9. Tamerlane’s Shadow

A flood of insights

It sounds like reviewer hyperbole but there really is a burst of insights on every page of this book.

It’s awe-inspiring, dazzling, how Darwin can take the elements of tremendously well-known stories (Columbus and the discovery of America, or the Portuguese finding a sea route to India, the first trading stations on the coasts of India or the unequal treaties imposed on China, or the real consequences of the American Revolution) and present them from an entirely new perspective. Again and again on every page he unveils insight after insight. For example:

American

Take the fact – which I knew but had never seen stated so baldly – that the American War of Independence wasn’t about ‘liberty’, it was about land. In the aftermath of the Seven Years War (1756 – 63) the British government had banned the colonists from migrating across the Appalachians into the Mississippi valley (so as to protect the Native Americans and because policing this huge area would be ruinously expensive). The colonists simply wanted to overthrow these restrictions and, as soon as the War of Independence was over (i.e. after the British gave up struggling to retain the rebel colonies in 1783), the rebels set about opening the floodgates to colonising westward.

India

Victorian apologists claimed the British were able to colonise huge India relatively easily because of the superiority of British organisation and energy compared with Oriental sloth and backwardness. In actual fact, Darwin explains it was in part the opposite: it was because the Indians had a relatively advanced agrarian economy, with good routes of communication, business hubs and merchants – an open and well-organised economy, which the British just barged their way into (p.264).

(This reminds me of the case made in The Penguin History of Latin America by Edwin Williamson that Cortés was able to conquer the Aztec and Pissarro the Incas, not because the Indians were backward but precisely because they were the most advanced, centralised and well organised states in Central and South America. The Spanish just installed themselves at the top of a well-ordered and effective administrative system. Against genuinely backward people, like the tribes who lived in the arid Arizona desert or the swamps of Florida or hid in the impenetrable Amazon jungle, the Spanish were helpless, because there was no one emperor to take hostage, or huge administrative bureaucracy to take over – which explains why those areas remained uncolonised for centuries.)

Cultural conservatism

Until about 1830 there was still a theoretical possibility that a resurgent Ottoman or Persian empire, China or Japan, might have reorganised and repelled European colonisers. But a decisive factor which in the end prevented them was the intrinsic conservatism of these cultures. For example, both Chinese and Muslim culture venerated wisdom set down by a wise man (Mohammed, Confucius) at least a millennium earlier, and teachers, professors, civil servants were promoted insofar as they endorsed and parroted these conservative values. At key moments, when they could have adopted more forward-looking ideologies of change, all the other Eurasian cultures plumped for conservatism and sticking to the Old.

Thus, even as it dawned on both China and Japan that they needed to react to the encroachments of the Europeans in the mid-nineteenth century, both countries did so by undertaking not innovations but what they called restorations – the T’ung-chih (‘Union for Order’) restoration in China and the Meiji (‘Enlightened rule’) restoration in Japan (p.270). (Darwin’s description of the background and enactment of both these restorations is riveting.)

The Western concept of Time

Darwin has a fascinating passage about how the Europeans developed a completely new theory of Time (p.208). It was the exploration of America which did this (p.209) because here Europeans encountered, traded and warred with Stone Age people who used bows and arrows and (to start with) had no horses or wheeled vehicles and had never developed anything like a technology. This led European intellectuals to reflect that maybe these people came from an earlier phase of historical development, to develop the new notion that maybe societies evolve and develop and change.

European thinkers quickly invented numerous ‘systems’ suggesting the various ‘stages of development’ which societies progressed through, from the X Age to the Y Age and then on to the Z Age – but they all agreed that the native Americans (and even more so, the Australian aborigines when they were discovered in the 1760s) represented the very earliest stages of society, and that, by contrast, Western society had evolved through all the intervening stages to reach its present state of highly evolved ‘perfection’.

Once you have created mental models like this, it is easy to categorise all the other cultures you encounter (Ottomans, Hindus, China, Japan, Siam, Annamite etc) as somewhere lower or backward on these paths or stages of development.

And being at the top of the tree, why, naturally that gave white Europeans the right to intervene, invade, conquer and administer all the other people of the world in order to ‘raise’ them to the same wonderful level of civilisation as themselves.

18th and 19th

I’ve always been a bit puzzled by the way that, if you read accounts of the European empires, there is this huge difference between the rather amateurish 18th century and the fiercely efficient 19th century. Darwin explains why: in the eighteenth century there were still multiple European players in the imperial game: France was the strongest power on the continent, but she was balanced out by Prussia, Austria and also Spain and Portugal and the Dutch. France’s position as top dog in Europe was admittedly damaged by the Seven Years War but it wasn’t this, it was the Napoleonic Wars which in the end abolished the 18th century balance of power in Europe. Britain emerged from the Napoleonic Wars as the new top dog, with a navy which could beat all-comers, which had hammered the French at the Battle of the Nile and Trafalgar, and which now ruled the waves.

The nineteenth century feels different because Britain’s world-encompassing dominance was different in kind from any empire which ever preceded it.

The absence of Africa

If I have one quibble it’s that I’d like to have learned more about Africa. I take the point that his book is focused on Eurasia and the Eurasian empires (and I did learn a huge amount about Persia, the Moghul empire, China and Japan) and that all sub-Saharan Africa was cut off from Eurasia by the Sahara, but still… it feels like an omission.

And a woke reader might well object to the relative rareness of Darwin’s references to the African slave trade. He refers to it a few times, but his interest is not there; it’s in identifying exactly where Europe was like or unlike the rival empires of Eurasia, in culture and science and social organisation and economics. That’s his focus.

The expansion of the Russian empire

If Africa is disappointingly absent, an unexpected emphasis is placed in each chapter on the imperial growth of Russia. I knew next to nothing about this. A quick surf on Amazon suggests that almost all the books you can get about the Russian ’empire’ are about the fall of the Romanovs and the Bolshevik Revolution and then Lenin or Stalin’s creation of a Bolshevik empire which expanded into Eastern Europe after the war. That’s to say it’s almost all about twentieth century Russia (with the exception of a crop of ad hoc biographies of Peter the Great or Catherine the Great).

So it was thrilling to read Darwin give what amounts to a sustained account and explanation of the growth of the Kingdom of Muscovy from the 1400s onwards, describing how it expanded west (against Poland, the Baltic states, Sweden), south towards the Black Sea, south-west into the Balkans – but most of all how Russian power was steadily expanded East across the vast inhospitable tundra of Siberia until Russian power reached the Pacific.

It is odd, isn’t it, bizarre, uncanny, that a nation that likes to think of itself as ‘European’ has a huge coastline on the Pacific Ocean and to this day squabbles about the ownership of small islands with Japan!

The process of Russian expansion involved just as much conquering of the ‘primitive’ tribal peoples who hunted and trapped in the huge landmass of Siberia as the conquest of, say, Canada or America, but you never read about it, do you? Can you name any of the many native tribes the Russians fought and conquered? No. Are there any books about the Settling of the East as there are thousands and thousands about the conquest of the American West? Nope. It is a historical black hole.

But Darwin’s account of the growth of the Russian Empire is not only interesting as filling in what – for me at any rate – is a big hole in my knowledge. It is also fascinating because of the role Russian expansion played again and again in the game of Eurasian Risk which his book describes. At key moments Russian pressure from the North distracted the attention of the Ottoman Empire from making more offensive thrusts into Europe (the Ottomans famously encroached right up to the walls of Vienna in 1526 and then again in 1683).

When the Russians finally achieved one of their territorial goals and seized the Crimea in 1783, as a result of the Russo-Turkish War, it had the effect, Darwin explains, of cracking the Ottoman Empire open ‘like an oyster’. For centuries the Black Sea had been an Ottoman lake and a cheaply defensible frontier. Now, at a stroke, it became a massive vulnerability which needed costly defence (p.175).

And suddenly, seeing it all from the Russian perspective, this sheds new light on the timeworn story of the decline of the Ottoman Empire which I only know about from the later 19th century and from the British perspective. For Darwin the role of Russian expansionism was vital not only in itself, but for the hemming in and attritional impact it had on the other Eurasian empires – undermining the Ottomans, making the Chinese paranoid because Russian expansion around its northern borders added to China’s sense of being encircled and endangered, a sense that contributed even more to its risk-averse policy of doubling down on its traditional cultural and political and economic traditions, and refusing to see anything of merit in the Westerners’ technology or crude diplomacy. A policy which eventually led to the Chinese empire’s complete collapse in 1911.

And of course the Russians actually went to war with imperial Japan in 1905.

Numbered lists

Darwin likes making numbered lists. There’s one on almost every page. They rarely go higher than three. Here are some examples to give a flavour of his careful, forensic and yet thrillingly insightful way of explaining things.

The 18th century geopolitical equilibrium

The geopolitical revolution which ended the long equilibrium of the 18th century had three major effects:

  1. The North American interior and the new lands in the Pacific would soon become huge extensions of European territory, the ‘new Europes’.
  2. As a result of the Napoleonic war, the mercantile ‘zoning’ system which had reflected the delicate balance of power among European powers was swept away and replaced with almost complete control of the world’s oceans by the British Navy.
  3. Darwin gives a detailed description of why Mughal control of North India was disrupted by invasions by conquerors from the north, first Iran then Afghanistan, who weakened central Indian power at just the moment the British started expanding from their base in Bengal. Complex geopolitical interactions.

The so-called stagnation of the other Eurasian powers can be characterised by:

  1. In both China and the Islamic world classical, literary cultures dominated the intellectual and administrative elites – the test of intellectual acumen was fitting all new observations into the existing mindset, prizes went to those who could do so with the least disruption possible.
  2. Cultural and intellectual authority was vested in scribal elites backed up by political power, both valuing stasis.
  3. Both China and the Islamic world were profoundly indifferent and incurious about the outside world.

The knowledge revolution

Compare and contrast the East’s incuriosity with the ‘West’, which underwent a cognitive and scientific revolution in which merit went to the most disruptive inventors of new theories and technologies, and where Darwin describes an almost obsessive fascination with maps. This was supercharged by Captain Cook’s three huge expeditions around the Pacific, resulting in books and maps which were widely bought and discussed, and which formed the basis of the trade routes which followed in his wake, and then the transportation of large numbers of convicts to populate Australia’s big empty spaces (about 164,000 convicts were transported to the Australian colonies between 1788 and 1868).

Traumatic impact of the Napoleonic Wars

I hadn’t quite realised that the Napoleonic Wars had such a traumatising effect on the governments of the main European powers who emerged in its aftermath: Britain, France, Prussia, Austria and Russia. Very broadly speaking there was peace between the European powers between the 1830s and 1880s. Of course there was the Crimean War (Britain, France and Turkey containing Russia’s imperial expansion), war between Austria and Prussia (1866) and the Franco-Prussian War. But all these were contained by the system, were mostly of short duration and never threatened to unravel into the kind of general conflict which ravaged Europe under Napoleon.

Thus, from the imperial point of view, the long peace had four results:

  1. The Royal Navy’s policing of all trade routes across the Atlantic and between Europe and Asia kept trade routes open throughout the era and kept costs down for everyone.
  2. The balance of power which the European powers maintained among themselves discouraged intervention in either North or South America and allowed America to develop economically as if it had no enemies – a rare occurrence for any nation in history.
  3. The post-Napoleonic balance of power in Europe encouraged everyone to tread carefully in their imperial rivalries.
  4. Geo-political stability in Europe allowed the growth across the continent of something like a European ideology. This was ‘liberalism’ – a nexus of beliefs involving the need for old-style autocratic power to be tempered by the advice of representatives of the new middle class, and the importance of that middle class in the new technologies and economics unleashed by the industrial revolution and in founding and administering the growing colonies abroad.

Emigration

Emigration from Europe to the New World was a trickle in the 1830s but had become a flood by the 1850s. Between 1850 and 1880 over eight million people left Europe, mostly for America.

  1. This mass emigration relieved the Old World of its rural overcrowding and transferred people to an environment where they could be much more productive.
  2. Many of the emigrants were in fact skilled artisans. Moving to an exceptionally benign environment, a vast empty continent rich in resources, turbo-charged the American economy with the result that by the 1880s it was the largest in the world.

Fast

His chapter The Race Against Time brings out a whole area, an entire concept, I’ve never come across before, which is that part of the reason European colonisation was successful was it was so fast. Not just that Western advances in military technology – the lightning advances in ships and artillery and guns – ran far ahead of anything the other empires could come up with – but that the entire package of international finance, trade routes, complex webs sending raw materials back home and re-exporting manufactured goods, the sudden flinging of railways all across the world’s landmasses, the erection of telegraphs to flash knowledge of markets, prices of goods, or political turmoil back from colonies to the European centre – all of this happened too quickly for the rival empires (Ottoman, Japan, China etc) to stand any chance of catching up.

Gold rushes

This sense of leaping, hurtling speed was turbo-charged by literal gold rushes, whether in the American West in the 1840s or in South Africa where it was first gold then diamonds. Suddenly tens of thousands of white men turned up, quickly followed by townships full of traders and artisans, then the railway, the telegraph, the sheriffs with their guns – all far faster than any native American or South African cultures could hope to match or even understand.

Shallow

And this leads onto another massive idea which reverberates through the rest of the book and which really changed my understanding. This is that, as the spread of empire became faster and faster, reaching a kind of hysterical speed in the so-called Scramble For Africa in the 1880s (the phrase was, apparently, coined by the London Times in 1884) it meant that there was something increasingly shallow about its rule, especially in Africa.

The Scramble for Africa

Darwin says that most radical woke historians take the quick division of Africa in the 1880s and 1890s as a kind of epitome of European imperialism, but that it was in fact the opposite, and extremely unrepresentative of the development of the European imperialisms.

The Scramble happened very quickly, markedly unlike the piecemeal conquest of Central, Southern of North America, or India, which took centuries.

The Scramble took place with almost no conflict between the European powers – in fact they agreed to partitions and drew up lines in a very equable way at the Congress of Berlin in 1885. Other colonies (from the Incas to India) were colonised because there were organised civilisations which could be co-opted, whereas a distinctive feature about Africa (‘historians broadly agree about one vital fact’ p.314) was that people were in short supply. Africa was undermanned or underpeopled. There were few organised states or kingdoms because there simply wasn’t the density of population which lends itself to trading routes, settled farmers and merchants – all the groups who can be taxed to create a king and aristocracy.

Africans hadn’t progressed to centralised states as humans had in Eurasia or central America because there weren’t enough of them. Hence the poverty and the lack of resistance which most of the conquerors encountered in most of Africa.

In fact the result of all this was that most of the European governments weren’t that keen on colonising Africa. It was going to cost a lot of money and there weren’t the obvious revenue streams that they had found in a well-established economy like India.

What drove the Scramble for Africa more than anything else was adventurers on the ground – dreamers and fantasists and ambitious army officers and business men and empire builders who kept on taking unilateral action which then pitched the home government into a quandary – deny their adventurers and pass up the opportunity to win territory to a rival, or reluctantly support them and get enmeshed in all kinds of messy responsibilities.

For example, in the mid-1880s a huge swathe of West Africa between the desert and the forest was seized by a buccaneering group of French marine officers under Commandant Louis Archinard, and their black rank and file. In a few years these adventurers brought some two million square miles into France’s empire. The government back in Paris felt compelled to back them up which meant sending out more troops, police and so on, which would cost money.

Meanwhile, modern communications had been invented, the era of mass media had arrived, and the adventuring soldiers and privateers had friends and boosters in the popular press who could be counted on to write leading articles about ‘the white man’s burden’ and the torch of civilisation and ask: ‘Isn’t the government going to defend our brave boys?’, until reluctant democratic governments were forced to cough up support. Modern-day liberals often forget that imperialism was wildly popular. It often wasn’t imperialist or rapacious governments or the ruling class which prompted conquest, but popular sentiment, jingoism, which couldn’t be ignored in modern democracies.

Darwin on every page, describes and explains the deep economic, trade and financial structures which the West put in place during the nineteenth century and which eventually underpinned an unstoppable steamroller of annexation, protectorates, short colonial wars and long-term occupation.

The Congress of Berlin

The Congress of Berlin helped to formalise the carving up of Africa, and so it has come to be thought of as evil and iniquitous, particularly by BAME and woke historians. But once again Darwin makes you stop and think when he compares the success of the congress at reaching peaceful agreements between the squabbling European powers – and what happened in 1914 over a flare-up in the Balkans.

If only Bismarck had been around in 1914 to suggest that, instead of rapidly mobilising to confront each other, the powers of Europe had once again been invited for tea and cake at the Reichstag to discuss their differences like gentlemen and come to an equable agreement.

Seen from this perspective, the Berlin Congress is not so much an evil colonialist conspiracy, but an extremely successful event which avoided any wars between the European powers for nearly thirty years. Africa was going to be colonised anyway because human events have a logic of their own: the success was in doing so without sparking a European conflagration.

The Scramble for China

The Scramble for China is not as well known as its African counterpart,  the competition to gain ‘treaty ports’ on the Chinese coast, impose unfair trading terms on the Chinese and so on.

As usual, though, Darwin comes at it from a much wider angle and makes one massive point I hadn’t registered before, which is that Russia very much wanted to seize the northern part of China to add to its far eastern domains; Russia really wanted to carve China up, but Britain didn’t. And if Britain, the greatest trading, economic and naval power in the world, wasn’t onside, then it wouldn’t happen. There wasn’t a genuine Scramble for China because Britain didn’t want one.

Why not? Darwin quotes a Foreign Office official simply saying, ‘We don’t want another India.’ One enormous third world country to try and administer with its hundreds of ethnic groups and parties growing more restive by the year, was quite enough.

Also, by the turn of the century, the Brits had become paranoid about Russia’s intentions to conquer Afghanistan and march into North India. If they partitioned China with Russia, that would mean policing an even longer frontier even further way against an aggressive imperialist power ready to pounce the moment our guard was down.

Summary

This is an absolutely brilliant book. I don’t think I’ve ever come across so many dazzling insights and revelations and entirely new ways of thinking about a time-worn subject in one volume.

This is the book to give anyone who’s interested not just in ‘the rise of the West’ but how the whole concept of ‘the West’ emerged, for a fascinating description not just of the European empires but of all the empires across Eurasia – Ottoman, Persian, Moghul, Chinese and Japanese – and how history – at this level – consists of the endless juggling for power of these enduring power blocs, the endless and endlessly

complex history of empire-, state- and culture-building. (p.490)

And of course it all leads up to where we are today: a resurgent Russia flexing its muscles in Ukraine and Crimea; China wielding its vast economic power and brutally oppressing its colonial subjects in Tibet and Xinkiang, while buying land, resources and influence across Africa. And both Russia and China using social media and the internet in ways we don’t yet fully understand in order to undermine the West.

And Turkey, keen as its rulers of all colours have been since the Ottoman days, to keep the Kurds down. And Iran, as its rulers have done for a thousand years, continually seeking new ways to extend its influence around the Gulf, across Syria and to the Mediterranean, in eternal rivalry with the Arab world which, in our time, means Saudi Arabia, against whom Iran is fighting a proxy war in the Yemen.

Darwin’s books really drives home the way the faces and the ideologies may change, but the fundamental geopolitical realities endure, and with them the crudeness and brutality of the tools each empire employs.

If you let ‘morality’, especially modern woke morality, interfere with your analysis of this level of geopolitics, you will understand nothing. At this level it always has and always will be about power and influence, dominating trade and ensuring raw resources, and behind it all the never-ending quest for ‘security’.

At this level, it isn’t about following narrow, English notions of morality. Getting hung up on that only gets in the way of grasping the utterly amoral forces at play everywhere in the world today, just as they’ve always been.

Darwin stands up for intelligence and insight, for careful analysis and, above all, for a realistic grasp of human nature and human society – deeply, profoundly flawed and sometimes pitiful and wretched though both routinely are. He takes an adult view. It is absolutely thrilling and a privilege to be at his side as he explains and analysis this enormous history with such confidence and with so many brilliant ideas and insights.


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I am Ashurbanipal king of the world, king of Assyria @ the British Museum

Ashurbanipal

Ashurbanipal was ruler of the Assyrian Empire from 669 to about 630 BC. From his capital at Nineveh on the edge of present-day city of Mosul in northern Iraq, Ashurbanipal ruled a vast and diverse empire, reaching from upper Egypt, via the eastern shore of the Mediterranean (modern Cyprus, Israel Lebanon and Syria) and along a corridor either side of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers down to the Persian Gulf. During his reign he was probably the most powerful person on earth.

Map showing the fullest extent of the Assyrian empire (in pink) by Paul Goodhead

Map showing the fullest extent of the Assyrian empire (in pink) by Paul Goodhead

This blockbuster exhibition examines the life and times and cultural achievements and social context of Ashurbanipal’s rule alongside detailed profiles of the different kingdoms and cultures which he ruled over and exhaustive accounts of his numerous military campaigns.

Topics

The quickest way to give you a sense of the scope might be to list some of the headings which introduce different areas of the exhibition and displays:

  • Nineveh, a city without rival
  • The royal family
  • Ashurbanipal’s palace in Nineveh
  • Aqueducts and canals (agriculture and pleasure gardens)
  • Training to be a king (featuring numerous lions hunts in which the king displays his mastery of the natural world)
  • The scholar king (in inscriptions he boasts of being able to read numerous languages)
  • Knowledge is power (his surprisingly large library)
  • Coronation
  • Assyria’s world domination (introducing the various kingdoms and people the empire ruled over)
    • The southern Levant
    • Babylonia
    • Elam
    • The kingdoms of Cyprus
    • The kingdom of Urartu
    • Western Iran
    • Aramaean kingdoms
    • Ashurbanipal at war
    • Ashurbanipal conquers Egypt
    • Trouble in the East (Urtak, king of Elam, invades Babylonia)
    • Sibling rivalry (with his older brother Shamash-shumu-ukin)
  • Retaliation (against Elam for its rebellion)
  • Order restored
  • The empire falls apart (after Ashurbanipal’s death)
  • Ashurbanipal’s fate (a mystery to this day)
  • Legend, discovery and revival (Victorian archaeologists uncover the key sites and ship statues and carvings back to the British Museum in London)
Discovery of Nimrud by Frederick Charles Cooper (1810 – 1880) mid-19th century, watercolour on paper © The Trustees of the British Museum

Discovery of Nimrud by Frederick Charles Cooper (1810 to 1880) mid-19th century, watercolour on paper © The Trustees of the British Museum

Highlights

This is the first ever major exhibition to explore the life of Ashurbanipal in such depth and a dream come true for anyone interested in this period. Anyone familiar with the Assyrians knows that they were a strongly militaristic culture characterised, above all, by the immense statues of lions with the heads of bearded men. These tend to covered in cuneiform inscriptions which, when deciphered, amount to world class bragging about the emperor’s might and strength, king of kings, and then go on to give a long list of the emperor’s achievements.

Maybe even more famous are the numerous enormous friezes we have depicting the emperor on one of his countless lion hunts. Elsewhere in the British Museum (rooms 6, 7 and 8) you can walk along a corridor entirely lined by stone friezes depicting the lion hunt which was a central icon and symbol of Assyrian kingship. Why? Because the emperor’s role was to impose order on the world. The lion was the fiercest beast in the world. By beating it, by killing lions single handed (although surrounded by scores of courtiers and warriors) the emperor showed his fitness to rule and, symbolically, enacted the ordering of the world.

Both these types of imagery are familiar to anyone who knows a bit about the ancient Middle East.

Social history

What is new and striking about the exhibition was a lot of the non-military social history. For example, the section on the immense library which Ashurbanipal assembled, and which led him to boast about his learning. His library at Nineveh may have contained as many as 10,000 texts and the exhibition powerfully conveys this by displaying them in a massive glass wall divided into grids, each containing a cuneiform text, carved into a clay tablet, covering a wide range of subjects – astrology, medicine, legends and so on. Ashurbanipal claimed to be unlike his predecessors in that he could read, write and debate with expert scholars.

The canals of Nineveh

Nearby is a section devoted to the orderly agriculture and watering of the capital city, conveyed via a big carving showing canals, tilled fields and a path leading to a gazebo with a happy looking emperor standing in it. Apparently it was Asurbanipal’s grandfather, Sennacherib (mentioned in the Bible) who built the canals which watered Nineveh.

Clever lighting

What brings this all alive is the clever use of lighting which animates bands of blue slowly colouring the canals, and of green, slowly colouring in the fields, and white indicating the path. The information panel tells us that all of these carvings and sculptures would have been brightly coloured. But the use of son et lumiere to animate the colouring was inspired.

Battle scenes

The same goes for several of the battle panels. One of them is maybe 30 feet wide and depicts the Battle of Til-Tuba in 653 BC, as Ashurbanipal led an invasion of the kingdom of Elam. As with many of these battle panels, the figures are carved in horizontal bands, each of which tells a story, in this case the Elamites retreating in panic down a hill before triumphant Assyrians who drive them into a river.

There are information panels along the bottom of the long frieze picking out scenes, but there was also another display of lighting effects for a sequence of spotlights picked out a particular scene – not only picked it out but highlighted the silhouettes of the relevant figures – and then text was projected onto a blank part of the frieze explaining what was going on.

Relief detail of Ashurbanipal hunting on horseback from Nineveh, Assyria (645–635 BC) © The Trustees of the British Museum

Relief detail of Ashurbanipal hunting on horseback from Nineveh, Assyria (645–635 BC) © The Trustees of the British Museum

The exhibition contains a number of maps and, in the main area you realise that the entire floor you are walking on is a schematic map of the Assyrian Empire.

There are several timelines, twenty of more large information panels and, of course, hundreds of smaller information panels relating to each of the 200 or so artefacts on display.

Partitions

The exhibition is divided into different ‘rooms’ or areas by immense partitions on which are printed patterns and designs found on the tiled rooms of the emperor’s palace, abstract geometric patterns.

In fact these vast decorated partitions dominate the exhibition visually, much bigger than any one object on display, and encourage you to pay attention to the section of the show which focuses on Assyrian tiles and glazed bricks, explaining the evolution of their decorative patterns and styles.

If the central section focuses on Ashurbanipal’s military campaigns, with cases explaining the history and culture of each of the dozen or so areas which made up the empire, and then a series of displays about each of his major campaigns (against Egypt and Elam in particular), there are also plenty of more modest cases highlighting what we know about Assyrian religion, culture, design, even cookery – displaying ‘delicately carved ivories, extravagant metalwork, cosmetic vessels and gold ornaments’ – one case showing an enormous bronze cauldron decorated around the lip with what seem to be dragon heads.

Striding sphinx from ‘Fort Shalmaneser’, Nimrud, Iraq (900 -700 BC) © The Trustees of the British Museum

Striding sphinx from ‘Fort Shalmaneser’, Nimrud, Iraq (900  to 700 BC) © The Trustees of the British Museum

Criticism

Overall the exhibition layout is imaginative and over-awing, and the use of the light animations to bring old stone friezes to life is really inspiring.

However the curators make the same mistake they made with the Viking exhibition. A good number of the information labels are at waist height. When I went the exhibition was absolutely crammed. Imagine the crowd at a football stadium. It was impossible to process through it in sequential order because some display cases were simply unapproachable. Early on, there is a display of a characteristic battle relief, maybe 20 feet long by 7 or eight feet high. As usual it shows a series of incidents during a battle and it was accompanied by about ten informative and interesting panels picking out and explaining specific incidents.

But because they were at waist height, they were completely hidden by the crowd of twenty of more people in front of them. Whereas, there was plenty of space above the relief. Why not put the information panels above the objects where anybody can read them, instead of at waist height, where they are inevitably hidden?

The end

The final sections of the show peter out a bit, after the dense concentration of information and huge reliefs depicting his famous victories which dominate the centre.

I was fascinated to learn that we don’t know when Ashurbanipal died. Nobody knows whether he died of natural causes, was murdered or abdicated. The last public inscription about him dates from 638. His kingship may have ended as early as 631 or as late as 627 – there is no written record in the sources of Assyria or its neighbours.

We do know that Ashurbanipal was briefly succeeded by a son, then another one. The significant event was that in 626 a former general, Nabopolassar, claimed the throne of Babylon and started a war of independence which led to the entire empire unravelling. The Iranian Medes led by Cyaxares, joined Nabopolassar and their forces sacked the city of Ashur, home to Assyria’s chief deity. This alliance then marched on Nineveh, the beautiful city of canals and decorated palaces built up by Ashurbanipal’s forebears and himself – and sacked it, burning it to the ground.

The Victorian rediscovery

It was only in the 1840s that Victorian archaeologists began systematically to uncover the site of Nineveh, discovering the massive lions statues, thousands of clay tables covered in writing, and other treasures. Some of these treasures were displayed at the Great Exhibition of 1851 and sparked a short-lived enthusiasm for Assyrian motifs on such things as tankards and dishes, and their use in jewellery and necklaces, a handful of which are on display here.

Until these discoveries, the reputation of the Assyrians and of Nineveh was taken from the Bible, where its rulers are depicted as gross, corrupt, Sybarites, who fully deserved their destruction by the Israelites’ jealous God.

The archaeological discoveries began to overthrow that old view and restore the more rounded view of Assyrian civilisation which, we like to think, we enjoy today.

War and destruction

The final section of the exhibition is staged in a long narrow corridor. It contains a timeline of modern archaeology (i.e. since the 1840s) and two short films.

One uses computer technology to match together aerial photos of the site of Nineveh as it appeared from the 1930s up to the present day, a rough square in a bend of the River Tigris. The camera, or point of view, slowly circles down from the high vantage point of early 20th century photos, spiralling down to show us how the site has changed and developed over the past eighty years or so, until we are at ground level looking up at the rather pitiful remains.

The second film features the head of the British Museum’s Iraq section explaining the scheme whereby archaeologists from Iraq are being brought to London and trained in various techniques, and then supported as they return to Iraq in the task of ongoing digging and preservation of that country’s heritage – the ‘Iraq Emergency Heritage Management Training Scheme’.

(This isn’t exactly the same one, but covers the same scheme)

I couldn’t help noticing the world class irony here.

For the previous half hour I had been reading numerous inscriptions in which Ashurbanipal had his sculptors inscribe words describing how he not only defeated his enemies in Egypt or Elam, but annihilated them and their cities, leaving not a blade of grass standing, how he ransacked the tombs of their royal families, destroyed their monuments, killed their sheep and goats and left not an animal stirring in the barren wastelands he created.

This is the man who is being held up, not exactly for our admiration but for our awe, a man who destroyed and killed wantonly in pursuit of his worldview, namely that the known world should be ruled by a man like him, with his beliefs.

The irony being that two and a half thousand years later, another cohort of warriors seized control of this region, also convinced that they had a God-given right to rule, to impose their beliefs on all the inhabitants, and to destroy anything, any relics or remains of civilisations which they saw as infidel and blasphemous.

Difficult not to see a certain continuity of culture reaching across two and a half millennia.

Relief depicting Ashurbanipal hunting a lion (645 – 635 BC) © The Trustees of the British Museum

Relief depicting Ashurbanipal hunting a lion (645 – 635 BC) © The Trustees of the British Museum

There’s a second final thought. Many bien-pensant liberals, as well as hard core identity politicians and virtue warriors, think the British Museum is a guilt-filled testimony to the wholesale looting carried out by the British Empire, and that all of its artefacts, starting with the Elgin Marbles, should be returned to their countries of origin.

But if all of these objects had been in the Baghdad Museum in 2003 or the Mosul Museum in 2015, they would all have been looted or simply destroyed.

That doesn’t settle the debate about the Marbles or thousands of other objects, but these are the thoughts which the final section, all about the Iraq War and ISIS, leave you pondering.

Video

Here’s an excellent visual overview of the show from Visiting London Guide.


Related links

Other British Museum reviews

Journeys Drawn: Illustration from the Refugee Crisis @ the House of Illustration

The ‘refugee crisis’ started to make headlines in 2015 as thousands of people fled wars in Syria, Iraq, and conflict and poverty in sub-Saharan Africa.

News footage of overcrowded boats coming ashore in Greece and Italy made the evening news, along with images of those who didn’t survive the trip, who drowned at sea, and then images of life in the squalid, overcrowded refugee camps which sprang up on the Mediterranean shore, as well as the so-called Jungle refugee camp in Calais.

Journeys Drawn is the first ever UK exhibition to explore the refugee crisis through illustration. It includes 40 multi-media works by 12 contemporary artists, several of whom are themselves refugees.

Illustrators have the advantage over ‘fine artists’, in that they are already used to working with stories and narratives, and most refugees’ stories are, by definition, stories about moving, about travelling, journeying – fleeing x and arriving in y.

Also, the genre of ‘illustration’ is flexible enough for illustrators to feel to treat subjects in all kinds of ways, from childlike picture-books, through stark political cartoons, to images packed with all kinds of information and detail – a kaleidoscope of approaches which ‘purer’, fine art tends to disavow.

A good example is the information-rich pictures of Olivier Kugler, who didn’t just depict the refugees he met on the Greek island of Kos (on a project funded by Médecins Sans Frontières) but created a format which can accommodate their stories through the extensive inclusion of text, especially the refugees’ own words, as well as inset images of their key objects and belongings.

As he says: ‘If you take time to view the drawing, it is like spending time with a person and their family in their tent.’

Rezan and Roca by Olivier Kugler (2015)

Rezan and Roca by Olivier Kugler (2015)

At the other extreme are the stark black-and-white images of David Foldvari. Foldvari usually does editorial work for The New York Times, Guardian and FT. He was commissioned by Save the Children to illustrate the stories of unaccompanied children at Civico Zero in Rome, a centre for refugee children. In his own words:

My main concern was to treat the subject matter in a way that was not patronising or clichéd, and to create some kind of emotional connection with the viewer without resorting to shock.

Typical of his style is this stark but deeply shaded, black-and-white image of one boy, Awet (not, in fact, his real name),which becomes even more powerful when you learn his story.

After fleeing his home in Eritrea at just 15 years old, Awet trekked to Sudan. He was smuggled with 30 others on a packed pick-up truck to Libya, but here they were kidnapped and imprisoned in a disused factory, where they were starved and tortured until their families could pay a ransom. Awet later managed to get onto a boat bound for Italy, only for it to fill with water. Rescued by the Sicilian coastguard, he found shelter at Civico Zero, two years after leaving Ethiopia. Which is where Foldvari met him.

Awet © David Foldvari

Awet © David Foldvari

I like realistic drawings, I am endlessly stimulated and excited by an artist’s magical ability to draw the world, to set down what we the rest of us only see around us, in solid lines and colours on paper – so I was immediately attracted to the documentary illustrations in pen, ink and watercolour which George Butler has made from what he’s seen in Greece, Belgrade and Syria.

As he puts it: ‘Reportage should tell a story, communicate an idea, or help someone relate to a situation.’

Of this picture, made in war-torn Syria, he says: ‘This was the first scene we saw as we came into Azaz – children playing on a burnt-out government tank. The fighting had finished here ten days earlier and would soon start again, but in the meantime the few residents left were trying to fathom what had ripped through their homes.’

Climbing frame tank by George Butler

Climbing frame tank by George Butler

There are a number of animations in the exhibition. This is Iranian artist Majid Adin’s award-winning animation set to Elton John’s song, Rocket Man.

Adin was imprisoned for his political works in Iran, before being expelled. He made his way by boat to Greece then trekked across Serbia before reaching the Jungle camp at Calais. He was smuggled to London inside a refrigerator in a lorry. In 2017 he won a global competition to create the first ever music video for Elton John’s hit Rocket Man and since then has been working as an animator in London.

Another video, by Karrie Fransman, uses a format called ‘zoom comic’ in which the picture is continually zooming in on the central image to open up the next scene. It was inspired by the testimonies of four Eritrean refugees who fled their homes to make the dangerous journey across Ethiopia, Sudan and Libya to Europe. The animation is narrated by Lula Mebrahtu, an Eritrean refugee who has found fame as a singer, songwriter and sound designer.

Kate Evans created a graphic novel, Threads from the Refugee Crisis, describing her experience of volunteering in the Calais Jungle. She published drawings from the camp within days of returning, and then went on to expand them into the book, ‘a poignant and emotive depiction of conditions in the camp, punctuated with political narrative, insightful commentary and angry responses from the public to her original blog post.’

Earlier this year Threads became the first ever graphic novel to be nominated for the Orwell Prize for Books.

Camp Sunset from threads by Kate Evans

Camp Sunset from Threads by Kate Evans

By now you should have got the idea of what the show looks and feels like.

In a way the subject matter is a bit repetitive – war, escape, camp. But visually, the artists and their works are extremely varied. I was surprised to see one set of pictures entirely in the style of Japanese manga, created by Asia Alfasi.

Alfasi grew up in Libya and moved to Glasgow at the age of seven. She now lives in Birmingham and has been working in the manga style since 2003. She aims to represent the voice of the Muslim Arab and her illustrated short stories have won several national and international manga awards.

In this wordless comic a young refugee returns to her destroyed childhood home. She is haunted by memories, but finds hope when she sees children playing among the rubble.

Childhood is hope by Asia Alfasi (2016)

Childhood is hope by Asia Alfasi (2016)

All of the illustrations in this exhibition are good, some very good. All the stories are moving, some very moving. It is, all in all, quite a shocking and upsetting exhibition.

According to Wikipedia, ongoing conflicts and refugee crises in several Asian and African countries have increased the total number of forcibly displaced people worldwide at the end of 2014 to almost 60 million, the highest level since World War II.

Where are they all going to go?


Related links

The illustrators’ websites

Also currently on at the House of Illustration

More House of Illustration reviews

Unreasonable Behaviour by Don McCullin (2015)

‘I needed to be at home. I needed the peace of my own country, England. Yet when I go home and sleep in my own bed, I soon become restless. I am not shaped for a house. I grew up in harsh surroundings. I have slept under tables in battles for days on end. There is something about this that unfits you for sleeping in beds for the rest of your life. My wars, the way I’ve lived, is like an uncurable disease. It is like the promise of a tremendous high and the certainty of a bad dream. It is something I both fear and love, but it’s something I can’t do without.’
(Unreasonable Behaviour, page 226)

Don McCullin is one of the most famous war photographers of the 20th century. He first published his autobiography (co-written with Lewis Chester) in 1990. This is the new, updated edition, published in 2015, as McCullin turned 80.

Having just read Dispatches, the stoned, stream-of-consciousness prose poetry of Michael Herr’s classic account of his time covering Vietnam War, the detached, lucid prose of this book initially seemed a bit flat. But it perfectly suits the laconic, understated attitude McCullin brings to the varied and intense subject matter – whether it’s massacres in Africa or meeting the Beatles or the unlikely friendship he once struck up with Earl Montgomery.

Trips to war zones are covered in a few pages, insights dealt with in one or two pithy sentences. The battle of Khe Sanh in Vietnam takes up 60 pages of Herr’s book but gets just two paragraphs here – but it feels enough. There’s little fat, very little to come between you and the many highlights of McCullin’s extraordinarily long and colourful life. Which makes this a hugely enjoyable and absorbing book.

(By his own account McCullin suffers from severe dyslexia – as a result he didn’t passed any exams, has never liked reading and so, presumably, a great deal of credit for shaping this consistently spare, flat but very focused prose must go to the book’s co-author, Lewis Chester.)

Here’s an example, almost at random, of the book’s clipped, spare prose which is, nonetheless, gripping because it focuses so precisely on the relevant information and detail of the extreme events it describes. It’s January 1968 and McCullin is in Vietnam covering the Tet Offensive.

Under a heavy overcast sky, I joined the convoy of the Fifth Marine Commando as it started rolling up to Hue. It ploughed through heavy mud and rain, past houses collapsed and pitted by artillery, and columns of fleeing refugees. It was very cold. (p.116)

The narrative moves fast from one carefully selected high point to the next, focusing in on moments of insight and awareness. Cameos of war. Snapshots in time. Photos in prose.

Beginnings

Born into a working class household in Finsbury Park, North London, McCullin left school at 15 without any qualifications before doing his National Service, which included postings to: Suez, Kenya during the Mau Mau uprising, and Cyprus during the Enosis conflict. It was, as he puts it, ‘an extended Cook’s tour of the end of Empire.’ (p.45) His dad was ill, his mother struggled to manage three small kids, they lived in real squalor and poverty, and he grew up with a rough bunch of post-war lads, lots of fights outside north London dancehalls in the Teddy Boy 1950s.

But, as he explains, it was photographs of the local gang – the Guv’nors – at the time a local murder had hit the deadlines, that first got him noticed, that got him introduced to Fleet Street picture editors and – voom! – his career took off. Within a few pages he has begun to be given photo assignments, and then starts winning photography prizes, which bring better assignments, more pay, more freedom.

Wars

He makes it clear that he did plenty of other jobs – photo reportage at a nudists camp, countryside gigs, snapping the Beatles and so on – but it was the conflict zones which really attracted him.

  • Berlin 1961 as the Wall was going up – East German soldiers looking back, West Berlin, Germany, August 1961
  • Cyprus 1964 – photographs of a Turkish village where Greek terrorists had murdered inhabitants. He makes the interesting point that Mediterranean people want a public display of grief and so encouraged him to take photos.
  • Congo 1964 – a Boy’s Own account of how he smuggled himself into a team of mercenaries who flew into the chaos after the assassination of Patrick Lumumba, encountering CIA agents and then accompanying the mercenaries on a ‘mission’ to rescue 50 or so nuns and missionaries who had been kidnapped by brutal black militias, known as the Simbas, who raped and dismembered some of the nuns. He sees a lot of young black men being lined up alongside the river to be beaten, tortured and executed by the local warlord.
  • Vietnam 1965 – There was something specially glamorous about Vietnam and it attracted a huge number of correspondents and photographers: he namechecks Larry Burrows and Sean Flynn, the latter a big presence in Michael Herr’s classic account Dispatches, both of whom were eventually reported missing presumed dead. Vietnam was ‘black humour and farce’ and ‘waste on a mega scale’ (p.95)
  • Bihar, India during the famine of 1965 – he contrasts the monstrous amount of food and all other resources being wasted by the Yanks in Vietnam, with the absolute poverty and starvation in India.
  • Israel in the Six Day War – where he accompanied the first platoon into Arab Jerusalem, soldiers being potted by snipers to the right and left, before the city was captured and he snapped singing soldiers kissing the Wailing Wall.
  • Vietnam – the Battle for Hue, 1968. He was there for eleven days and it comes over as one of the most intense experiences from a life full of intense experiences. He is appalled at the waste. Hue, produced two of his most famous images:
  • Biafra – McCullin went back three years in a row and was initially supportive of the Biafrans, who had seceded from Nigeria because they were scared of their increasing bad treatment by the Nigerian state. But the Nigerian government (secretly supported by the British government) fought to defeat the Biafran army and reincorporate the province into the country. (It’s interesting to compare McCullin’s account with the long chapter about the same war in Frederick Forsyth’s autobiography, The Outsider.)
  • Cambodia 1970, where McCullin was wounded by mortar shrapnel from the Khmer Rouge.
  • Jordan 1970 where fighting broke out in the capital Amman between Jordanian troops and Palestinians.
  • With legendary travel writer Norman Lewis in Brazil, McCullin absorbed Lewis’s dislike of American Christian missionaries who appeared to use highly coercive tactics to round up native tribes and force them into their re-education compounds.
  • East Pakistan 1971 for the immense suffering caused by the breakaway of East Pakistan, eventually to be reborn as Bangladesh.
  • Belfast 1971 where he is blinded by CS gas and finds it uncomfortable being caught between the three sides, Catholic, Protestant and Army, and how he missed Bloody Sunday (30 January 1972).
  • Uganda – where he is imprisoned along with other journos in Idi Amin’s notorious Makindye prison and really thinks, for a bad few hours, that he’s going to be tortured and executed.
  • Vietnam summer 1972 – By this time, with its government negotiating for American withdrawal, the wider public had lost a lot of interest in the war. The number of Americans in country had hugely decreased since 1968, and the peace negotiations were well under way and yet – McCullin discovered that he fighting was more intense and destructive than ever.
  • Cambodia summer 1972 – fear of falling into the hands of the Khmer Rouge.
  • Israel 1973 the Yom Kippur War in which Sunday Times reporter and friend Nick Tomalin is killed.
  • The new editor of the Sunday Times magazine, Hunter Davies, is more interested in domestic stories. Among 18 months of domestic features, Don does one on Hadrian’s Wall. And a piece about racist hoodlums in Marseilles with Bruce Chatwin.
  • He hooks up again with the older travel writer Norman Lewis, who is a kind of father figure to him, to report on the plight of native tribes in South America being rounded and up and forcibly converted by American missionaries.
  • Spring 1975 – back to Cambodia for the final weeks before the Khmer Rouge take Phnom Penh. It is in transit in Saigon that McCullin learns his name is on a government blacklist and he is prevented from entering Vietnam and locked up by police in the airport until he can blag a seat on the flight organised by Daily Mail editor David English taking Vietnamese war orphans to England.
  • Beirut 1975 – McCullin had visited Beirut in the 1960s when it was a safe playground for the international rich, but in 1975 long-simmering resentments burst into a complex, violent and bitter civil war. At great risk McCullin photographs a massacre carried out by the right-wing Christian Falange militia.
  • 1975 – among the Palestinian Liberation organisation, McCullin meets Yasser Arafat and other leaders, and gives his take on the Arab-Israeli struggle, bringing out the terrorist tactics of the Jewish side – the well-known Irgun and Stern gang – and Jewish massacres of Palestinians back in the founding year of 1948.
  • 1977 – West Germany, to report on old Nazis, Hitler’s bodyguard, unrepentant SS killers.
  • Iran autumn 1978 to cover a huge earthquake.
  • Iran 1979 after the Islamic Revolution.
  • Spring 1980 with the mujahedeen in Afghanistan.
  • Spring 1982 – El Salvador. Covering a firefight in a remote town between soldiers and left-wing guerrillas he falls off a roof, breaking his arm in five places. He makes it to a hospital, is looked after by colleagues and flown back to England, but the long-term injury interferes with his ability to hold a camera. Worse, it crystallises the strains in his marriage. In a few dispassionate pages he describes leaving his wife of twenty years and children, and moving in with the new love of his life, Laraine Ashton, founder of the model agency IMG.
  • 1982 the Lebanon – to cover the Israeli invasion.
  • 1983 Equatorial Guinea ‘the nastiest place on earth’.
  • 1980s A lengthy trip to see Indonesia’s most primitive tribes, in places like Irian Jiwa and the Mentawai Islands, with photographer Mark Shand (who wrote it up in a book titled Skulduggery).

Personal life

At this point in the early 1980s a lot of things went wrong for McCullin. His marriage broke down. His injuries took nearly two years to properly heal. The British authorities prevented him going with the Task Force to the Falklands War, which could have been the climax of his war career and obviously still rankles 35 years later.

And then Andrew Neil, the new editor of the Sunday Times, itself recently bought by the brash media tycoon Rupert Murdoch, turned its back on the gritty reportage of the 1960s and 70s to concentrate more on style and celebrity. As a friend summed it up to McCullin:

‘No more starving Third World babies; more successful businessmen around their weekend barbecues.’ (p.275)

The book describes the meeting with Neil in which he was manoeuvred into resigning. He was still not recovered from his injuries and now he had no job and no future.

And then came the bombshell that his first wife, the woman he left for Laraine, was dying of a brain tumour. Like everything else, this is described pithily and swiftly, but there’s no mistaking the pain it caused. The year or more it took his first wife to die of a brain tumour was traumatic and the emotional reaction and the tortured guilt he felt at having abandoned her, put a tremendous strain on his new relationship with Laraine. In the end he broke up with Laraine: she returned to her London base.

Thus, distraught at the death of Christine, McCullin found himself alone in the big house in Somerset which he’d been doing up with Laraine, with no regular job and isolated from his journo buddies. It’s out of this intense period of unhappiness and introspection that come his numerous bleak and beautiful photographs of the Somerset countryside. These were eventually gathered into a book and John Fowles, in the introduction, notes how ominously they reflect the scars of war. Maybe, McCullin muses but – now he has shared this autobiographical background – we readers are now able to see all kinds of emotions in them. Certainly he preferred winter when the trees are skeletons and the ruts and lanes are full of icy water – all under threatening black clouds.

As he turned fifty McCullin’s life concentrated more and more on mooching about in the countryside. He takes up with a model, Loretta Scott and describes their mild adventures for precisely one page (p.298). Then has a fling with Marilyn Bridges, a Bunny Girl turned impressive nature photographer. McCullin is awarded the CBE in 1993. He married Marilyn and they travel to Botswana, Bali, India and Cambodia but could never agree whether to base themselves in Somerset or in her home town of New York. There were fierce arguments and a lot of plate smashing. By 2000 he was divorced and single again.

India is his favourite country to photograph. He assembled his shots of it into a book titled India.

He had been supporting himself since he was kicked off the Sunday Times with jobs from other newspapers but mainly by doing adverts, commercial work. Lucrative but soulless. On the one hand he prided himself on being a completely reformed war junkie, on the other his soul secretly, deep down, hankered for conflict and disaster.

  • 2001 So it was a boon when he was invited to travel to Zambia, Botswana and South Africa to chronicle the devastating blight of AIDS on already impoverished people.
  • 2003 back to the same countries to check progress.
  • 2004 Ethiopia with his new wife, Catherine Fairweather (married 7 December 2002).

The Africa trips resulted in another book, Don McCullin in Africa. He tells us that in total he has authored 26 books of photography – quite an output.

  • In 2003 his old friend Charles Glass invited McCullin to accompany him back to Iraq, via their familiar contacts among the Kurds. In fact they accompany the party of Ahmad Chalabi, the smooth-talking exile who had persuaded the Americans that Saddam was running programmes to make Weapons of Mass Destruction. But both journalist and photographer are kept completely isolated among the Chalabi entourage, flown to an isolated airport miles away from any action. McCullin reflects sadly that the American military had learned the lessons of Vietnam and now kept the Press completely under control and authorised. No room for cowboys winging it and roaming the battlefields at will as per Tim Page or Michael Herr in their heyday.

Another book, In England, brought together work from assignments around the country between 1958 and 2007, generally reflecting McCullin’s sympathy with the underdog, the poor, the derelict, and he is happy that it – along with the books on Africa, India and the Somerset landscape, have come to outsell the war books. He wants to be remembered as a photographer not a ‘war photographer’. In fact the final pages describe the assignment which gave him more pleasure than anything in his life, a three-year-labour of love to visit ancient Roman sites around the Mediterranean, titled Southern Frontiers: A Journey Across The Roman Empire.

He has a stroke, from which he recovers with the help of a quadruple heart bypass – but then – aged 77 – he is persuaded to go off for one last war adventure, travelling with his friend Richard Beeston, Foreign Editor for The Times, and under the guidance of Anthony Lloyd, the paper’s Chief Foreign Correspondent, to Aleppo, in Syria, to cover the collapse of the so-called Arab Spring into a very unpleasant civil war, to experience for one last time ‘that amazing sustained burst of adrenalin at the beginning, followed later by the tremendous whoosh of relief that comes with the completion of any dangerous undertaking’ (p.334).

Photography

Equipment is fun to play with but it’s the eye that counts. (p.340)

There’s some mention of his early cameras at the start, and a vivid description of the difficulties of getting a light reading, let alone changing film, under fire in Vietnam – but on the whole very little about the art of framing and composing a photo. The book is much more about people, stories and anecdotes. And considering the photos are the rationale for his fame and achievement, there are comparatively few examples in the book – I counted 47. And they’re printed on the same matt paper as the text i.e. not gloss reproductions on special paper.

All suggesting it’s probably best to buy the photos separately in large format, coffee-table editions.

Learnings

War is exciting and glamorous. Compelling. McCullin candidly states that many people found the Vietnam war ‘addictive’ (p.92), echoing the fairly obvious analyses of Michael Herr and Tim Page.

And he briefly remarks the need to find out whether he ‘measures up’ – like so many men, he obviously sees it as a test of his manhood: how will he react when the shooting starts? Although he reports himself as feeling panic and fear quite regularly, the evidence suggests that he was phenomenally brave to go the places he went, and to stay there through tremendous danger.

The point or purpose

The psychological cost of being a war photographer

But the clear-eyed and clipped accounts of each conflict refer fairly often to the psychological cost of seeing so much trauma so close up. He reflects on the damage it must do but, that said, the text doesn’t really reflect any lasting damage. From his appallingly deprived childhood onwards, there’s always been the understated implication of his strength and bullishness. Quite regularly he refers to troubles with police, scuffles with passport officers, answering back to armed militias, standing up to bullies and generally not backing away from a fight. He’s tough and doesn’t really open up about his feelings. He is most overt about being upset to the point of despair, not about anything he witnessed but about the cruel death of his first wife to cancer, which leaves him utterly bereft for a long period.

The morality of war photography

Apart from the personal cost, though, there’s also the nagging doubt that he is profiting, quite literally, from other people’s unspeakable suffering and pain. Is he a parasite, exploiting their misery? He and other war photographers justified their activities as bringing the ‘reality’ of war to the attention of a) a complacent public ignorantly preparing to tuck into their Sunday lunch b) those in authority who had the power to change it, to end it, to stop the killing.

In this vein he writes of the famine victims in Bihar:

No heroics are possible when you are photographing people who are starving. All I could do was to try and give the people caught up in this terrible disaster as much dignity as possible. There is a problem inside yourself, a sense of your own powerlessness, but it doesn’t do to let it take hold, when your job is to stir the conscience of others who can help. (p.95)

And he also gets very fired up about the plight of AIDS victims in Africa.

But well before the end of the book, he also expresses doubts whether any photo he took made any difference to any of the conflicts he covered. Re. the AIDS in Africa work, he comments:

I had a notion that this was an area in which my photographs might have a positively beneficial effect, by raising consciousness and awareness. This was not something that could be said about my war pictures, which demonstrably had not impaired the popularity of warfare. (p.304)

The latter clause reminding me of the poet W.H. Auden, who wrote a lot of socially conscious poetry throughout the 1930s, but ended up in the 1950s candidly admitting that, as he put it, no poem or play or essay he wrote ever saved a single Jew. There are limits to what even the most powerful art can achieve.

When he went to Africa in the early 2000s to chronicle the impact of AIDS McCullin really wanted these horrific pictures to have an impact, ‘to be an assault on people’s consciences’ (p.308). But I’ve been seeing photos and reports of starving Africans all my adult life. I’m afraid that, in a roundabout way, McCullin, by contributing to the tidal wave of imagery we are all now permanently surrounded with, may have contributed to creating precisely the indifference and apathy he claims to be trying to puncture.

Is war photography art?

McCullin was given a retrospective exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum in the 1980s (he has subsequently had numerous exhibitions, at Tate, the Imperial War Museum, all the top galleries). He describes his pride at the time in being chosen by the V&A, and it is an accolade indeed – but does rather confirm the sense that, precisely insofar as the photos are changed and transmuted into ‘works of art’, hung on walls and discussed by slick connoisseurs, so they lose their power to upset and disturb, the purpose he ostensibly created them for, and enter the strangely frozen world of art discourse.

I had drafted this thought before I came upon McCullin’s own reflection on photography-as-art on the penultimate page of this long and fascinating book.

One of the things that does disturb me is that some documentary photography is now being presented as art. Although I am hugely honoured to have been one of the first photographers to have their work bought and exhibited by the Tate Gallery, I feel ambiguous about my photographs being treated as art. I really can’t talk of the people in my war photographs as art. They are real. They are not arranging themselves for the purposes of display. They are people whose suffering I have inhaled and that I’ve felt bound to record. But it’s the record of the witness that’s important, not the artistic impression. I have been greatly influenced by art, it’s true, but I don’t see this kind of photograph itself as being art. (p.341)

From the horse’s mouth, a definitive statement of the problem and his (very authoritative) opinion about it.

Photography in the age of digital cameras and the internet

Then again, maybe the photographer doesn’t have any say over how his or her art is, ultimately, consumed and defined.

Superficially, yes, the first few McCullin photos you see are shocking, vivid and raw depictions of terror, grief and shock – but the cumulative effect of looking at hundreds of them is rather to dull the senses – exactly as thousands of newspaper, radio, TV and internet reports, photos and videos have worked to dull and numb all of us from the atrocity which is always taking place somewhere in the world (war in Syria, famine in Somalia). It’s hard not to end up putting aside the ’emotional’ content and evaluating them purely in formal terms of composition and lighting, colour and shade, the ‘drama’ or emotional content of the pose.

History

If the photos didn’t really change the course of any of the wars he reported on, and nowadays are covered in the reassuring patina of ‘art’, to be savoured via expensive coffee table books and in classy art galleries – there is one claim which remains solid. His work will remain tremendously important as history.

Taken together, McCullin’s photographs amount to a documentary history of most of the significant conflicts of the last 40 years of the twentieth century. And this autobiography plays an important role in creating a continuous narrative and context to underpin them, providing short but very useful, focused background explanations to most of the conflicts which the photographs depict.

Early on in his story, McCullin remarks that his National Service was a kind of Cook’s Tour of the end of the British Empire. In a way the rest of his career has been a continuation of that initial itinerary, as he ended up visiting some 120 countries to record for posterity how peoples all around the world lived, fought and died during his and our troubled times.

‘I was, what I always hoped to be, an independent witness.’ (p.116)


Credit

Unreasonable Behaviour (revised edition) by Don McCullin was published by Jonathan Cape in 2015. All references and quotes are to the 2015 hardback edition.

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