The Books I Read In July

Fiction
'Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire'
As I have noted before, I come to read the Harry Potter series from watching the movies more than once each.  This book marks a jump in length from its predecessors; my edition had 636 pages.  As with the previous volumes I have read, the story largely focuses on Harry's life at school.  The adventure element forms a smaller part than in the movies.

The book introduces characters that do not feature in the movie, including magical creatures, additional house elves and members of the Ministry of Magic and of the Weasley family.  There is also a sub-plot about Hermione Granger campaigning for the rights of house elves, an enslaved species in the magic world.  The gaps between the three trials that Harry has to undertake are longer but the portrayal of the challenges themselves, especially the first one, are far shorter than how they are shown in the movie.  This is a shame especially as little Quidditch features in this book.  It also includes lengthy exposition especially towards the end.

I like the book because it has these various sub-plots and the reappearance of teachers who largely disappear in the movie.  It is also good at seeing the qualms in Harry's mind, both standard teenage concerns and the risks of facing his nemesis, Lord Voldemort who experiences a leap forward in strength in this book.  Overall it is not a bad book, but I wanted more of the adventure and less of the vacillations of Potter, but then I guess it is aimed at someone who is 14 and not 48.  As yet, however, I have not been put off completing the series.

'Rumpole's Return' by John Mortimer
Though, as I noted last month, Horace Rumpole, unlike the characters around him, never seems to age, in this book he has retired.  He has gone to live in Florida where his son is an academic.  Interestingly his daughter-in-law is pregnant but continues to smoke.  Rumpole soon tires of life in Florida and returns to his old chambers when called upon by a former colleague.  The story is pretty much a murder mystery with Rumpole and his son gathering evidence on both sides of the Atlantic to help Horace make a defence in a murder case.  The story is alright but is a little unsatisfactory in the comings and goings of Rumpole and the question whether he could really retire and then return.  He has not sold his London flat and his wife comes back from Florida after him too.  By the end of the book the status quo ante has been re-established.  I accept that some of this stems from the fact that these are stories based on what was proving to be a successful television series and so the drivers are those of broadcasting than how an author might work a novel or series of short stories.  The notable change especially from the first book in the series, is the lack of humour, the only funny bit is a repeat of a joke told in an earlier book.  It passes the time to see Rumpole and the quirky characters around him with the addition of interesting aspects of English law and forensic science, but it lacks the engagement of the first book and I do wonder if it is a case of diminishing returns.

'Flight of A Witch' by Ellis Peters
This is another of Peters's books featuring members of the Felse family.  This one was published in 1964 and so George Felse has just been promoted from Detective Sergeant to Detective Inspector and his son Dominic is a sixth former.  Both appear in this book, but as is common for Peters, they are supporting rather than leading characters.  As in many of her books set in England it is based in the border region with Wales, but unlike in 'City of Gold and Shadows' (1973) by which time George is a Detective Chief Inspector, the region is portrayed very bleakly.  The story is centred on an 18-year old girl (the age of majority until 1970 was 21 so people below that age were still considered children though they could have sex at 16, they could not vote), called Annet [sic] Beck.  One difference from the mid-1960s compared to today when more people have children in their 40s than their 20s in Britain, a child of a couple who had turned 40, as Annet is, was expected to be 'wrong' in some way.  Annet disappears for five days and is connected to a crime committed in Birmingham.  The bulk of the story is about finding out what happened to her during those five days and who was the man with her involved with the crime.  There are a range of suspects and George Felse aided by Dominic and a friend of his, plus one of Dominic's teachers, Tom Kenyon, seek to eliminate the suspects and force the actual man involved out of cover.

Ellis does jump around between points of view but less often than in some of her other Felse books.  The steady investigation and the elimination of a number of seemingly likely suspects is handled well.  The main problem is how bleak the book is.  This is not simply a result of the dreary setting, but also because so much of the story is seen through the eyes of Tom Kenyon, foolishly besotted with Annet who is the daughter of his landlord and bitter throughout as a result.  He comes across as a very pathetic character able to contribute much to developments and in fact spends the bulk of the climax a dumb, incapacitated spectator.  The trouble is that you often identify even if only distantly with the perspective of the one showing the story.  Looking through the eyes of George or Dominic consistently would have been alright.  However, seeing so much through Tom's eyes makes you feel dirty.  Unlike Annet he has no form of redemption or even like the criminal, of release.  He ends being humiliated by one of his pupils and has any potential for affection spured.  As a result you feel that his life is pointless.  That is no way to be engaged with a novel.

'Stars and Stripes Forever' by Harry Harrison
I know there is a current tendency for many authors to write 'what if?' novels which accentuate the greatness of the USA or show how it would have benefited from having more of the attitudes of the Confederate States in its make-up.  This book published in 1998 can certainly be seen as one of the first such alternate history books.  It starts well, looking at the real incident of the stopping of the British ship, the 'Trent', in 1861 which was carrying two representatives of the Confederate States to address Queen Victoria and Emperor Napoleon III, by a Union naval ship.  This was violation of Britain's neutrality in the American Civil War and added to British support for the CSA.  Due to its military failings, Britain never formally recognised the Confederate States but did build warships for their navy.  In this alternative, Queen Victoria is angered and her husband Prince Albert is weakened by the illness that was killing him, slightly earlier than in our world.  As a result a strongly worded ultimatum goes to President Lincoln and this leads to Britain entering the war on the side of the Confederates.  So far, so feasible.  These elements take you to almost half way through the book.

Of course, some people argue that no 'what if?' book is feasible, because it is not what happened.  This is despite the fact that in real history it is the least likely thing that happens.  In this book, one British naval party makes a mistake in bad weather and so assaults Biloxi, a Confederate town rather than Deer Island which is occupied by Union troops.  The British forces go on the rampage for some reason through the town looting and raping.  This is seen as sufficient to immediately encourage the Confederate forces to call for a ceasefire from the Union.  Within a day of the British mistake, Union and Confederate troops are fighting side-by-side against the British both in the Mississippi and then in New York state.  Very quickly President Lincoln meets with Jefferson Davis, President of the CSA and they agree on joint action against the British in 1862, setting aside the two years of civil war and the issues that provoked it, very speedily.  The combined forces not only go on to eject the British from the USA, but provoke the French-speaking Lower Canada to break from Britain, then seize the remainder of British territories in North America bar Newfoundland and easily capture all the British Caribbean islands.  A Francophone uprising against British rule is probably the most feasible of those steps, there having been one in 1837-38 which had to be put down by the military.  Setting that aside, at the same time the CSA Congress agrees to the ending of slavery and then abolishes itself effectively returning all the seceded states to the Union by 1863.

There seems so much which is rushed through in this alternative.  Yes, Lincoln wanted to end the war but would not do so at any cost.  He did not recognise the CSA as a legitimate state or Jefferson as a proper President.  Meeting him in the way he does in this book would suggest to many that the CSA was being treated as a sovereign country.  In our history, even after the CSA had been soundly beaten in 1865, many found ways around abolition of slavery and did not roll over easily.  Harrison points out that at the end of the war in 1865, combined, the USA and CSA had an army larger than any European country and he believes that this army could have defeated all those armies fighting in unison, let alone just the British armed forces.  This overlooks the fact that it took the Union Army until 1865 to defeat the Confederates, even with a comprehensive blockade.  Furthermore it overestimates the strength of the Confederate forces, dependent on poor equipment, to fight British regulars and win easily.  Somehow, overnight the two sides of the bitter conflict set aside their differences and they are empowered, especially the Confederate troops, with a new vigour and indeed skill.

The other thing is that the British keep making mistakes and the Americans make none.  In addition, new equipment and weapons are pressed into service with minimal difficulty and are used appropriately throughout; the ships needed are always in the right place at the right time and do not malfunction when needed for victory.  The British, in contrast, cling to old ways.  The war portrayed is largely a re-run of the War of 1812, which is a fair estimate of what might have happened.  However, everything that could go wrong does so for the British and even the civilian population of Washington D.C. prove to better, more committed fighters than British regulars.  The Confederates are shown largely, with a few notable exceptions, as being happy in an instant to stop fighting the very men who drove them to leave the Union and throw over their hard-won allies, the British immediately, making no use of them to leverage any concessions from Lincoln; they simply swallow return to the Union as it was and abolition of slavery just because John Stuart Mill says it is the right thing to do.

Overall the book suggests somehow that the American Civil War was simply an error and the two sides were only fighting half-heartedly for what they believed in, despite their differences being so severe to lead to war in the first place.  To Harrison it only needed a rather feeble invasion in a couple of points to overcome these differences in a matter of days and set the USA to be able to severely damage the largest empire of the day with a handful of iron-clad ships, almost always in perfect working order.  This book starts well, but then Harrison slips into a jingoist fantasy.  He could have reached a similar conclusion much more feasibly, especially given that this is the first book in a trilogy.  Yet, for some reason he feels compelled to rush it all through making it highly unrealistic.  I can only think this comes from a great deal of arrogance as he writes at the end of the book: 'Events, as depicted in this book, would have happened just as they are written here.'  Even an author of a novel about true historical events cannot claim that.  In this case many historians and authors would argue that the path this book lays out is far from having been likely even with the British error.  This could have been a far better book, but for a fan of alternate history books it will be very frustrating to read.

Non Fiction
'The Economic Impact of the Cold War' by James L. Clayton
This book was published in 1970 so only covers the first half of the Cold War and it is primarily focused on the impact on the US economy.  It starts by looking at a range of economic/political perspectives on what defence spending does to an economy.  However, its central focus is a very astute analysis of the so-called military-industrial complex that President Eisenhower identified in 1961, i.e. the intimate connections between government departments, especially the Department of Defense and big companies particularly in aeronautics, ordnance and engineering.  It shows that despite the USA portraying itself as the home of free enterprise, in fact the billions of dollars in defence contracts from 1941 onwards led to a large chunk of the US economy really being a complicit cartel, a kind of corporatist economy more familiar in Fascist states than democratic ones.

The book draws on a wide range of contemporary sources, putting both sides of the case, both broadly, e.g. on whether defence spending boosted or drained the economy and on specifics such as the Vietnam War and ABMs (Anti-Ballistic Missiles) both of which were controversial at the time.  The book is very interesting on how uneven defence spending has been across the USA and shows that the current day prosperity of California and Texas was promoted by vast defence-related spending in these states in the post-war period.  It reminds of schemes that have long been forgotten and highlights the waste and poor quality often produced from such expenditure.  Thus, the analysis is of the kind which could be applied to governmental spending today as we are familiar with similar stories for example in software developed for the health service and air traffic control.  It is also the only book that I have read that presents a negative view of the US efforts to put a man on the Moon and how the money spent on the missions provided little benefit for the country and could have been better spent.

While the book looks at a single country over a particular period of its history, the way it analyses the situation and provides frameworks for this analysis, it is an engaging book which can be taken forward to use as a basis for analysis of state-commercial relations especially on vast schemes the output of which is difficult to measure in tangible terms of success.

What If Richard Nixon Had Won the 1960 US Presidential Election?

My views on this topic can be found in my e-book ‘Other Lives: 'What If?' Essays about Famous People in History’.  It is available for purchase on Amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/Other-Lives-Essays-History-ebook/dp/B00E6SODN2/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1375523868&sr=8-1&keywords=Rooksmoor

UK readers might prefer to access it through: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Other-Lives-Essays-History-ebook/dp/B00E6SODN2/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1375524378&sr=8-1&keywords=Rooksmoor+Other

Canadian readers can access it through: http://www.amazon.ca/Other-Lives-Essays-History-ebook/dp/B00E6SODN2/ref=sr_1_17?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1375524438&sr=1-17&keywords=Rooksmoor

Britain's Cultural Perception of Cold War Spying

You will probably not be surprised when I say this posting has been prompted by me seeing the recently released movie of 'Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy' based on the novel of the same title (1974) by British author John Le Carré.  I am slightly too young to remember the BBC television series of the novel which was broadcast in 1979 (when I was 12 and very into spying) though as a strangely avid viewer of feedback programmes about television, notably 'Points of View' I remember the complaints about the complexity of the story and the call for subtitles not to translate foreign dialogue but to inform the viewers about what was happening in the plot.  I also remember well the spoofs of the series especially in sketches by the 'Not the Nine O'Clock News' series (1979-82).  The success of the series revived interest in non-glamorous spy stories in the way which had not been seen since the trilogy of Harry Palmer movies, based on novels by Len Deighton and featuring Michael Caine, released 1965-7.

This latest version of Le Carré's novel has received very good reviews and so I went to the cinema for the first time in ages.  Even on a Wednesday night there was a good turnout, though I did notice that some people found the lack of dramatic action tedious and either left or started sending messages on their mobile phones.  This demand for violent action on a regular basis, whilst admittedly enjoyable does seem to push out movies which may be on cognate topics but adopt a more cerebral approach.  I think of the criticisms of 'Glorious 39' (2009) a thriller set in Britain in 1939 featuring a heroine who is utterly out of her depth and struggles to uncover the conspiracy.  Rather than seeing that as an interesting approach, complaints came that it was leaden and frustrating.  This is interesting as in the past thriller readers have enjoyed out-thinking the detective or spy, nowadays we are far more passive consumers and insist the hero/ine works harder, faster and more effectively than we are willing to do ourselves. 

In this way 'Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy' is both old fashioned and yet possibly part of a small clutch of more thoughtful thrillers to sit alongside and complement more action-focused movies, notably the Bourne trilogy (2002-7; a fourth movie is promised).   The complexity of Le Carre's story and the dramatisations is exaggerated. If you can follow an television version of an Agatha Christie story then you will have not trouble with this movie.  In many ways, like quite a few of Le Carre's stories, it is as much a 'whodunnit', a detective story which happens to be set among the world of spies, as it is a spy story per se.  There are five suspects including the 'detective' himself, George Smiley (played wonderfully by Gary Oldman; he does not even speak for the first twenty minutes and yet imposes the character on to us) and in classic detective story style he gathers information and sets a trap to tease out the true guilty one from among the suspects.  Oldman resembles Alec Guinness in his portrayal of Smiley without trying to replicate it.  It is interesting the focus on the feature of a rather dull, late middle aged man, though interesting one quite happy to swim in rivers and wield a pistol.  The fact that at times we are looking right into the face of Smiley with his rather bland, aged features seems symptomatic of the style of the movie.

Whilst the movie has an excellent ensemble cast, the real 'star' is the evocation of London, Paris, Budapest and Istanbul in 1973.  This is a movie where you slip into a different time and you certainly feel that the past is another country.  The attention to detail down to clothing, hairstyles, cars, street furniture, office equipment, food, crockery, leaflets and advertisements, even the lighting is wonderful and really encompassing.  The behaviour is spot on and it is fascinating to see a 1972 works Christmas party so lovingly reproduced.  I think I only spotted two errors.  Too many of the male characters wear wedding rings, something which was uncommon for men, certainly those who were not Catholic, in 1973.  It is a fashion which has only caught on in the UK in the past twenty years.  In addition, there seems to be an error with the Trebor mints that Smiley eats near the end.  They are clearly extra-strong mints but wrapped in a Trebor mint wrapper making it far larger in diameter than Trebor mints of the time which were far smaller, shinier discs of mint.

This movie could certainly not have been relocated to the USA even if it was still set in 1973.  I imagine, having seen the acclaimed Danish crime drama 'Forbrydelsen' (2007) that it could have been set in northern Europe, anywhere from France through Germany and Scandinavia, into the former Eastern bloc countries.  However, I wondered why I could not envisage a US version and I realised that it stemmed from the different genuine history that Britain experienced during the Cold War.  It is not an issue of style, Britain certainly being painfully bleak in the 1970s despite the occasional garish colours; in sharp contrast to the excess of US culture at the time, it is more about what the British experienced in terms of spying. 

For the Americans, their greatest spying scandal was the sharing of atomic secrets in the 1950s by Julius and Ethel Rosenberg; David Greenglass - Ethel's brother, Harry Gold, Morton Sobell and Klaus Fuchs.  Their arrest, the execution of the Rosenbergs and imprisonment of other conspirators, certainly fuelled the US hysteria about the Communist threat in the 1950s and the era of McCarthyism which affected so many people on a scale massively out of step with Soviet spying operations.  However, the bulk of these spies were seen anyway was 'outsiders'.  The Rosenbergs and Gold were Jewish and unashamedly Communist; Fuchs has been born a German and held British citizenship.  These were the type of spies that the Americans had always expected, associated with the dictatorships of Germany and Russia (even if they had fled them) and not Christian.   For the Americans counter-espionage is about identifying someone who 'does not fit' not only in the views they espouse but in other characteristics.  This approach persists to today which explains why the Americans are far happier seeking to tackle Islamist terrorism associated with people with a Middle Eastern or South-Central Asian connection than terrorists like Timothy McVeigh, who, to many 'mainstream' Americans resembles them too much for them really to believe that his actions were evil.

For the British the situation is utterly the reverse.  The key spy scandal in the UK was associated with the so-called 'Cambridge Spies' due to the university they studied at.  These were Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess who fled to the USSR in 1951; 'Kim' Philby who  followed them in 1963; Anthony Blunt, revealed as part of the circle in 1979 (though this had been uncovered as early as 1963 but kept secret) and John Cairncross, who was confirmed as a member of this set of Soviet agents in 1990.  What was distinctive about these spies is that they were everything that the US atomic spies were not.  Both sets were intelligent, but the Cambridge spies were certainly not outsiders, they were very much insiders.  Whilst Cairncross came from a lower-middle class background, he still attended Cambridge University at a time when only a tiny elite did and he rose rapidly to high levels within the civil service.  Burgess was the son of a naval officer, Maclean was the son of a knighted MP, Philby was son of a civil servant in the British colonial service and Blunt was highest status of all, related to the present queen's mother.  Thus, for the British rather than seeing danger coming from outside the danger even before the Cold War started was more from within.  The fears of Nazi sympathisers among the British elites in the 1930s mutated into evidence of Communist sympathisers among the British elites in the 1950s-90s.  Of course, unlike in the USA where the good upstanding, usually white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant was set to hunt down the Soviet agents, in Britain it has been others of the same class and background as the traitors who is set to find them out.

I suppose in some ways, British spy novels have always reflected the British class system in which the bulk of the population is really seen as the 'outsider' to the elite whose attitudes drive how Britain progresses.  Deighton's Harry Palmer (not named in the novels) is a working class character who emphasises his outside nature and yet penetrates the deceptions of those who see him as his superiors.  He is hampered by the machinations of those above him not only because of their official status but because of social capital they can put into use against him.  In Le Carré's stories, with the traitors and their hunters on the same social level, it comes down to wits and cunning in order to catch them or escape from the hunt.  For those of us not among the elites, it is also nice to see those abusing Britain caught and brought down a peg supposedly in the broader interests of the country.  Of course, the elite protects their own and even once the Cambridge spies were known they were allowed to escape or their dirty secrets kept secret with official collusion.  I believe the exasperation of this is why in the movie the traitor is assassinated to give the audience some sense of retribution when the traitor is on the verge of being traded, as so often happened with Cold War spies.

Commentary on 'Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy' has noted that these days it would seem peculiar for anyone to betray their country on the grounds that they believed it was pursuing the wrong ideology.  It is interesting that in the movie, the traitor's explanation for their treachery is that the West has become so 'ugly', such a sentiment is believable when you see London in 1973, though as one reviewer noted, Moscow, even these days, is no better.  The explanation is much the same as that given by the traitor in 'The Whistle Blower' (1986 - based on the novel by John Hale).  One wonders why they are given such world-weary explanations rather than the one which the Cambridge spies did.  They all believed that Communism was the correct ideology, particularly at the time when it seemed like the only system that was not willing to compromise with Nazism (bar of course 1939-41) in the way that Britain seemed more than eager to do.  They also believed, despite their elite positions, that Communism was the correct ideology for the world as a whole and anything which advanced the standing of the USSR as the leading proponent of Communism was to be for the global good.

Whilst even Communist states such as China seem to have lost such faith in the ideology, it does not mean that world-perspective ideologies could not be the basis of a motivation to betray one's country.  Ideology such as anti-capitalism or environmentalism have no 'host' nation to which the traitor could turn, so the approach would be something simply like Wikileaks.  However, since the rise of fundamentalism in Iran in 1979 and the spread of such views to a number of countries, one could certainly envisage someone turning over British secrets to another states on the grounds of an Islamist perspective.  Interestingly, Kim Philby's father was a convert to Islam.  In time, other world view ideologies and countries associated with them may rise to provide the kind of context that permitted the kind of developments seen with spies in the Cold War.

Whilst a Cold War conspiracy movie might seem to be based on a dated concept, it does not mean it cannot be engaging, just as a story set at the court of King Henry VIII can engage us, even though the tensions between Catholics and Protestants at the time might seem inscrutable nowadays.  What is interesting for me, is that British history impinges on the fiction and means that a story carries a 'baggage' brought by the audience that allows us to engage with the 'game' of the story on this basis, whereas if we had had a history like the USA or many other countries, we would not see it as feasible.  Anyway, I will add my voice to the recommendations of the movie.  However, do not expect a British version of 'The Bourne Ultimatum', see something instead, that is a puzzle presented incredibly well in terms of portrayals both by the actors and the settings they appear in.

I Don't Love the 1980s: Second Bash

Back in October, last year, I finally got around to writing my views of the 1980s.  Given that it is a decade which is being referenced a lot at the moment, by politicians, the media/culture and the public, primarily because we are once again under a harsh Conservative regime (wrapped up to look like a coalition, but in fact no less sinister than if David Cameron had won a clear majority), unemployment and social division are rocketing once again.  I intended to write a critique of the decade which too often is remembered through the rose-tinted perspective of the 'Brat Pack' movies of the 1980s and the lie that it was a period of glamour and prosperity, whereas for most people it was one of the worst times of their lives.  My critique: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2010/10/i-dont-love-1980s.html ended up going down the Alan Davies route and in fact being very much about my personal experiences of the decade and far less a general historical survey of the times along the lines of what I did for the 1970s.  Thus, with the objective of reminding those people who lived through the 1980s actually how bad it was, cutting through the softening of memory and especially of nostalgia, and for those who were not alive or not conscious of the decade except as history, this posting is a more impersonal critique.

Bascially the 1980s were frightening.  When the population was not frightened about losing work and home, they were frightened about being wiped out in a nuclear war.  The period called the Second Cold War started in 1979 when the USSR invaded Afghanistan to support the left-wing government in power there against radical Islamists; they remained until 1989.  The Soviets were to prove the second of three superpowers (the British in 1837-42 and again 1878-1880; the Americans now) to get into serious military difficulties trying to control the country.  Their invasion coincided with a shift in the American political scene away from the detente phase of the mid-1970s to a much harder line under right-wing president Ronald Reagan (1980-8), not an intelligent man and one who had strange beliefs about how God would defend the righteous when a nuclear war came.  Consequently, certainly until Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in the USSR in 1985, there was a real fear that we would see a nuclear war.  Reagan's bullish approach was seen in active support for the Contra rebels seeking to overthrow the elected left-wing government in Nicaragua and for the Afghan Mujahadeen fighting the Soviets.  Such support seemed to revive the 'proxy' wars facet of the Cold War of the early 1980s. 

The threat of nuclear war was brought home to the population of Britain and many other West European countries by the higher visibility of nuclear weapons in the country.  The advent of cruise missiles launched from lorries meant that ordinary people saw nuclear missiles coming through their village on manoeuvres in a way that they had not seen them in the past when they were generally concealed in underground silos and nuclear submarines.  Culture constantly reminded us of nuclear weapons and it spilt over into all aspects of popular culture with numerous books and even games about the Third World War; songs about nuclear war by mainstream bands (e.g. 'Two Tribes' by Frankie Goes to Hollywood (1984) and 'Russians' by Sting (1985)), not only protest singers; television dramas (notably 'The Day After' (1983) and 'Threads' (1984)) and documentaries about the effects of nuclear war (the concept of nuclear winter began to be explored at this time) and even comedians referenced nuclear war, not only the burgeoning 'alternative' comedians in the UK (such as in 'The Young Ones' series (1982-4), but even mainstream comedy like the short-lived series 'Comrade Dad' (1986). 

For many people there seemed to be a choice between instant vapourisation in a nuclear blast or lingering death from radiation sickness or starvation during the nuclear winter.  It is unsurprising that the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) revived so vigorously.  It had been formed in 1958 but had been pretty moribund, having only 4000 members in 1979.  The immediate threat of nuclear war meant membership rose to 100,000 by 1984 with many more sympathisers in the general population.  The advent of Mikhail Gorbachev was a real relief to much of the world.  Whilst most of us had never expected the USSR to start a nuclear war (in fact China was a greater danger but constantly overlooked in the West), this was confirmed by Gorbachev's steps in the late 1980s.  Fortunately Reagan saw which way things were going.  With the failure of his delusional plan for the 'Star Wars shield' against nuclear weapons he recognised, or his advisors did, that going along with Gorbachev could also spare the ailing US economy of the burden of the constant arms race.  It was made more palatable for the Americans by the declarations that they had 'won' the Cold War, though, as I have argued on this blog, that was probably a premature claim.

The other global threat to life in the 1980s was AIDS. HIV had been identified in 1959 but the perception of it as an epidemic really began to appear in 1980-1; AIDs was officially defined as a disease in the USA in 1982. While we were aware of the rising number of people with HIV and AIDS, it reached around 8 million globally with HIV by 1990 (it is now 33 million), in the UK, the real jolt came with the 'Don't Die of Ignorance' campaign started in January 1987. With intentionally very grim imagery, it instilled in people the fear that the world was at risk from this epidemic. It certainly seemed like something out of science fiction series of the 1970s such as the chilling BBC series 'Survivors' (1975-7) and movies like 'The Andromeda Strain' (1971; from 1969 novel). To a great degree it was to shake up the complacent attitude that the disease was something that only gay men or intravenous injecting drug addicts would get. Of course, Africa has seen the outcome that the whole world anticipated in the mid- to late 1980s, with over 22 million people in sub-Saharan Africa with HIV, 1.4 million deaths and over 14 million children left orphaned by AIDS. Around 1 billion people live in Africa, so we are talking about 5% of the population of that continent still suffering. Fortunately the development of medicines and a degree of alteration of behaviour, in particular the growth in the use of condoms, slowed down the growth of HIV/AIDS in other parts of the world, especially the wealthy countries. However, complacency is risky, as the rise in all STIs among over-50s has shown in the past two years in the UK. AIDS seemed, like nuclear war, to tell us that the warnings that authors had given us in the 1960s and 1970s could easily come true and the fear was palpable.


In terms of global politics, in the early 1980s most people assumed that the world would be divided into two or three superpower blocs for the foreseeable future.  Looking back now on the era there is naturally a sense that the dissolution of the Soviet bloc and of the USSR itself was inevitable.  However, the suppression of the Solidarity trade union movement in Poland in 1981 with the implementation of martial law made us far less optimistic in the 1980s.  Even when Gorbachev came to power there were often concerns in the late 1980s that he would be overthrown and a harder line regime re-introduced as happened after liberal Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev was removed in 1964.  Like Khrushchev, Gorbachev did not always pursue liberal policies and the suppression of nationalist uprisings across the USSR in 1986 can be seen as a clear example of this.  Thus, millions of people in Europe continued to be under totalitarian Communist rule until the Soviet bloc began to break up properly in 1989 first with Hungary and notably with East Germany and Romania.  Even then the break-up of the USSR was not a foregone conclusion.  The former Communist states did get democracy and some have flourished.  Russia has found it harder and has suffered from gangsterism and a tendency towards authoritarianism.  Elsewhere in the former Soviet bloc, national tensions effectively put on hold in 1944 have revived, most shockingly in the brutality of the Yugoslav War 1991-5 (I know Yugoslavia was not entirely in the Soviet bloc but it had been a Communist state) but also in states like Hungary and Romania.

The rapid collapse of the Soviet bloc and then the USSR 1986/9-91 led many to feel that the right-wing assumption that a free economy must lead to democracy was disproved by the experience in China.  Following the death of Mao Zedong in 1976, Chinese leaders like those in the USSR came to realise that a highly centralised economy was no longer working and so more steps towards a more capitalist system was needed to secure even basic prosperity.  In China millions of people were allowed to relocate, primarily to coastal cities.  In the 1980s about 80 million people, equivalent to the population of Japan (which was the booming economy of the time, people forget it was seen then very much as China is now) relocated.  China moved very slowly towards capitalism, a process which was anticipated to move as fast as it had in the USSR, though thirty years on it is still incomplete and the Chinese state still controls vast sections of the economy.  Too many commentators cannot shake off the delusion that China will inevitably (and comparatively soon) come to a more democratic system.  They do not look at Taiwan which had capitalism for fifty years before it became democratic or how authoritarian in flavour the regimes of South Korea and Singapore are.  If they needed any more evidence they have to only look as we did at the suppression of the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989.  The sending in of tanks looked incredibly like the suppression of the Hungarian Uprising of 1956 and the Prague Spring of 1968-9, the crushing of attempts towards a more liberal political system in Communist states.  China has made no further steps towards political liberty, it remains a totalitarian state with an appalling human rights record as it did in the 1980s.

Another concern was what was happening in Iran.  This took time to really penetrate into our consciousness, but also signalled a big change in the risk to the world.  In 1979 the Ayatollah Khomeni became the head of a revolutionary regime which had expelled the corrupt Shah of Iran.  The shah's callous and greedy behaviour, based on the country's immense oil wealth, had made him naturally hated in Iran.  The failure of Arab nationalism to effectively remove western influence in the Middle East and limit/destroy Israel, led to Islamist thinkers (remember the population of Iran is mainly not Arabic, they speak Farsi) to adopt different approaches.  In common with a trend across the world (in terms of Christianity, notably in the USA) there was a shift to fundamentalism; a re-emphasis on literal interpretation of holy writing.  In Iran, Islamic fundamentalism was the foundation of the regime which persists to today.  Reagan's predecessor, Jimmy Carter had ordered an embarrassing failure of an attempt to rescue US hostages in Iran and I think this is why Reagan stayed away from the country.  US interest in the region dates back to the Eisenhower Doctrine of 1957 which outlined the USA's need to ensure stable friendly governments in the Persian Gulf region to secure oil supplies, a policy revived under the two Presidents Bush in the 1990s and 2000s.  Reagan's approach was to bolster secular Iraq ruled by Saddam Hussein, especially during the inconclusive Iran-Iraq War 1980-8; ironically Hussein was later removed by the Americans on the basis that he was backing Islamist terrorism, but in fact it was simply about the oil he controlled and that his usefulness to the USA was at an end. Fundamentalist Islam is an attitude that proved to provide the intellectual seeding ground for Islamist terrorism in the 1990s and 2000s.

One country which attracted much attention in the 1980s was South Africa.  The apartheid system was still in place.  Apartheid had been in place since 1948 and though there had been massacres in the 1960s and 1970s, notably the Soweto Uprising of 1976, in 1985-9 the situation came to a head with local rioting spreading.  In 1985, a State of Emergency was declared and spread to the whole country.  Battles between the black population and government forces and within the black population filled this period and it appeared as if South Africa was on the verge of civil war.  As it was fatalities were commonplace.  It was only with the resignation of President P.W. Botha and his replacement by F.W. de Klerk in 1990 that began the steps towards the dismantlement of the apartheid system, including the release in 1990 of Nelson Mandela.  For the bulk of the 1980s it appeared as if the killings in South Africa would not cease and a full-scale racial war would develop as it almost did at the start of the 1990s.

Many Americans seem to think that terrorism was not invented until September 2001.  However, the UK in the 1980s was suffering terrorist attacks by Irish Republican groups.  In the period 1981-3 there were bombs across London including in prominent sites like Regent's Park and Harrods store; another in Kent in 1989.  In 1984 they blew up the Grand Hotel in Brighton where the British government were staying killing and injuring members of the government and their families and almost assassinating the prime minister.  These were a continuation of bombings on the British mainland seen in the 1970s.  In Northern Ireland itself bombings and shootings continued almost without cease; notably the Enniskillen massacre in November 1989.  The British government responded with harsh policies such as 'shoot to kill' allowing special forces to assassinate terrorists both in the UK and outside its borders.  In the 1990s the incidents increased in regularity and severity.  This is why the British were pretty non-plussed about the 11th September 2001 attacks and their aftermath.  In the 1970s we had seen the Queen's cousin assassinated; an MP Airey Neave killed right in the Houses of Parliament car park and were to see another Northern Irish Secretary assassinated, mortar bombs fired at the home of the prime minister and countless soldiers and civilians killed.  The security checks you went through whenever visiting a public building reminded you of the risks you faced.

Another particular characteristic of the UK in the 1980s was rioting.  In 1981 there were riots in London, Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds, Birmingham and Bristol.  During the Miners' Strike of 1984-5 there were regular battles between police and strikers that seemed to resemble something from the Middle Ages with police behind shields and riding down strikers from horseback.  In 1985 many of the areas which had experienced riots in 1981 saw them again, some again in 1987.  The introduction of the poll tax was to lead to the Poll Tax Riot of 1990 in central London.  The poll tax or Community Charge as it formally named (though even government documentation noted its more popular name) was introduced to Scotland in 1989 and the rest of the UK the following year.  It funded local authority spending.  Unlike previous local authority taxation or the current Council Tax, it was not based on the value of the property which you lived in.  All people living in a district had to pay the same amount no matter whether they own property and no matter what their income was (though the unemployed could get a discount).  Clearly it hit the poorest working people hardest.  It was incredibly inefficient as it was based on individuals, and on average a district would see 2-4000 people move address between each year's assessment and the bills being sent out.  In the town where my parents lived it meant doubling the number of staff working for the council simply to handle the tax so sapping the funds it brought in.  I lived in East Anglia at the time and received bills for eight different people who shared a surname with me; one friend of mine whose surname is the very common Smith never received a bill because they were all sent to someone else.  Another friend who was out of the country for three months (you were not liable for the tax if not in the UK), and had told the council returned home to find he was being summoned to court for not paying the tax, so costing the council additional money in the legal processes.  You can see why the tax was unfair and in fact useless.  The idea was that it would make payers put pressure on the local authorities to find the cheapest way to provide services so curtailing the activities of high-spending local authorities on behalf of the government which despised Labour-run councils.  However, no-one gave any thought to that just the inequity of the whole scheme and how it penalised them.  No wonder the riot was so virulent.  Again it was a factor which brought fear into your everyday life.  I worried I would be taken to court and be imprisoned (elderly people who refused to pay on principle were imprisoned, so I feared, that, as a young man, I would be one of the first to be locked up) because I had not paid the other seven bills sent to me but certainly lacked the money to do so.  The poll tax led to a great distrust of local authorities to the extent that even in the mid-1990s when I was living in East London it was reckoned there were 60,000 people living in the borough who were not registered for council tax.  Though the poll tax was short lived it has done immense damage to local authority funding. 

There was an assumption, which fortunately in the past five years seems to be finally being challenged, that private business will always run things far better than any public provision.  As we have seen with filthy hospitals, expensive fuel and water and appalling public transport, in fact, private business is good (most of the time) at making huge profits but in terms of service delivery is very poor.  In addition, British service providers are not even good at running businesses, which is why so few of the privatised services of the 1980s remain in the hands of British companies.

Another major trouble of the 1980s not only in the UK, but across capitalist countries, was unemployment.  UK unemployment was a little below 2 million, around 5% of the working population when Margaret Thatcher came to power in 1979.  This contrasted to 1.2 million, around 3.5% in 1974.  The increase had been provoked by the oil price rise, the decline of heavy industry in the UK and difficulties around the strength of the pound and balance of payments which had led to the introduction of semi-monetarist policies in 1972 and again in 1976 on the urging of the International Monetary Fund (IMF).  The cutback in public services, the wrecking of the coal industry, the restriction on money flow and a strong pound limiting export markets meant that manufacturing, which had been overtaken by service industries in contributing to the economy in 1974, went into severe decline.  In 1983 unemployment exceeded 4 million, around 12% of the working population, but far higher in particularly depressed regions like Northern Ireland where it exceeded 20%.  Even in the 'boom' of 1989 it was still at 2.5 million before rising again to 3.5 million in 1992, 10% of a larger working population.  The UK was not alone, the USA had unemployment of 7.5% in 1980 and 10.8% by 1982.  These days the rate of 10.2% unemployed in the USA means 16 million people without work.  West Germany, like the USA and UK pursuing a monetarist policy saw its unemployment rise from below 4% in 1979 to over 9% in 1983 and remain that high for the rest of the 1980s.  Unemployment not only blighted individuals and their families, it blighted towns.  As now you could walk or drive through areas with all the shops and often many houses boarded up.  It was easy for areas to get into a spiral as with high unemployment people did not have money to spend in shops so these would also close putting more people out of work.  The fear of losing your job hit far wider than the 1 in 5 or 1 in 10 people who might be unemployed in your street.  In addition, as now, many of those in work were in part-time and low-paid jobs.  In particular local public sector work saw a decline in wages as councils were compelled to privatise them to the cheapest bidder.  Thus, even those in work were often worse off than they had been during higher inflation of the 1970s.  Those who did not get the training or the education or the promotion or who spent much of the 1980s unemployed are still being affected by these years now.

Despite that the bulk of the population, even those who were not affected directly by unemployment, reined in their expenditure for fear of losing their jobs, the very nasty aspect of the 1980s was the emphasis on greed.  I always refer back to a line from a song by the band 'the The' (1986; I think from the track 'The Mercy Beat'): 'everyone can be a millionaire so everyone's got to try'.  The sense, as now, that if you were not out being an entrepreneur and making a huge profit you were somehow a 'scrounger' and unpatriotic, despite the fact that through the 1980s recessions thousands of companies large and small were going out of business.  It was as if you did not put yourself up as a sacrifice to capitalism you had no right to respect.  Of course, the bulk of us will never make good entrepreneurs.  However, public service was now looked down upon and claiming benefits had you portrayed as a pariah and pushed around by an ever intrusive state. Trade unions which stood up for decent pay and conditions were portrayed as 'the enemy within' and were increasingly restricted by legislation and police activity.  Margaret Thatcher's emphasis that society did not exist exempted those doing reasonably well from caring at all about their neighbours or even members of their own families and instead the cry 'get a job' was shouted at them as if they were deliberately avoiding work.  This myth that anyone on benefits was claiming simply for an easy life, despite how low those benefits are, became fixed in British society and remains there today, when, in fact, the bulk of unemployed people are desperate to work which is why even the low paid and increasingly dangerous jobs were filled.  These attitudes, this smashing of concern for others infected the USA as well.  I am sure it appeared across Europe though perhaps not as virulently, though the steps against immigrants does suggest it took root.  This view that we can all be successful in private business and if we are not it is our fault, revives one strand of Victorian thinking without the balancing element of philanthropy which stemmed from seeing all great and lowly as part of the same society.  Attempts to re-establish that latter aspect by Cameron, are not succeeding and so we simply have the harsh Thatcherite line of 'I'm all right Jack, the rest go to Hell' is back as virulently as it was in the 1980s.

Though the 1980s can be seen as a period of important steps forward, in the dismantlement of apartheid and of Communist dictatorships, for the bulk of the decade the future seemed incredibly bleak and the present unsettled and violent.  Scars have been left on public attitudes which have damaged many societies, notably in the UK and USA up to the present day and make life far more unpleasant that it needs to be.  Hyper-individualism and being beholden to profit-making at any cost are harmful for the vast majority of people who are never going to come close to being millionaires.  Yet, since the 1980s these attitudes have been portayed as laudable and the 'common sense' basis for how things should run.  I am glad that the fear of nuclear was has subsided but the racism and the unemployment with all the bigotry it brings are with us now.  Remember when you sit down to watch 'Ferris Bueller's Day Off' (1986) or 'The Breakfast Club' (1985) let alone 'St. Elmo's Fire' (1985), that that was a fantasy of the 1980s, all big hair, pastel colours and big mobile phones; it came nowhere near the bitter reality that most people experienced.  Certainly there seems to be none of the fear that was so prevalent in the 1980s and is again, that you could be dropped by society and there would be no escape from that.  Watch instead 'Boys from the Blackstuff' (1982) or 'Edge of Darkness' (1985) or even 'Auf Wiedersehen, Pet' (1983-4) for a more realistic indication of the times.  If I had written this three years ago as I had intended, I would have said, I just hope we never go back to the days like that.  Unfortunately, now we seem to be back in the midst of them once more.

Who Really 'Won' the Cold War?

I remember back in 1989 when the Berlin Wall was broken through.  I had just returned to the UK from living West Germany; ironically, whilst there, I had focused far more on the rise of the far right Republikaner party which no-one seems to remember now, rather than being interested in the collapse of the Communist regimes of Eastern Europe.  Anyway, this was seem as the symbolic step in what had been a process that had really been going on for almost five years then, triggered by Mikhail Gorbachev becoming head of the USSR in 1985.  Things moved quickly and with Hungary opening its borders to the West in 1989 the Iron Curtain was breached and though the Communist regime in East Germany clung on its days were numbered.  Incredibly by 1991 East Germany and West Germany had been reunited ending the situation in Central Europe which had prevailed really from 1945.  The changes had been so momentous that in 1991 historian Francis Fukuyama declared that we had reached 'the end of history' because with the collapse of the Soviet bloc it appeared that liberal democracy (wedded to capitalism) had 'won' the Cold War.  Of course, Fukuyama was rather too wrapped up in the jubilation of the end of the European Communist regimes that he neglected the fact that millions of, in fact more than a billion, people remained under the control of right-wing or left-wing dictatorships that had no truck with liberal democracy.  I believe Fukuyama aimed to be ostentatious in his language in order to startle people and get them to reflect on actually what was happening in the world at the time.  Certainly I can remember no other article in 'The National Interest' journal (it became the backbone of the book, 'The End of History and the Last Man' (1992)) being discussed 18 years later.  If you search for Fukuyama, most search engines have 'the end of history' appended automatically to his name.

In some ways Fukuyama is almost turning traditional Marxism on its head.  Karl Marx argued that human society would naturally progress through a series of socio-economic phases such as feudalism, mercantilism and capitalism before inevitably reaching socialism.  For Marx, technology especially in industry drove this process on which is why he anticipated the first socialist revolutions occurring not in relatively industrially backward Russia, let alone China, Korea and Cuba, but in Germany and Britain, the leading industrial states of his time.  Fukuyama also sees a role for technology for moving world society on, but it worries him as he sees humans as in fact unable to control the technology they create properly.  Perhaps this was encouraged by the environmental impact of air and water pollution and the Chernobyl nuclear power station disaster of 1986.  However, basically Fukuyama saw liberal democracy as the most robust and appropriate system for human society and felt it inevitable that eventually the whole world would end up using it; thus the end of the Soviet bloc was a key step of this in moving millions of people away from rule by totalitarian dictatorship.

Of course, Fukuyama proved to be only partially right.  Democracy in parts of Eastern Europe was as weak as it had been in the 1920s and 1930s, you only have to look at the Yugoslav War 1991-5 and the decline of democracy in the Russian Federation in the era of Vladimir Putin.  Even the USA, seen in 1989 as the 'victor' of the Cold War, has shown how feeble the 'liberal' element of liberal democracy can be with its use since 2001 of illegal detention and widespread implementation of torture; something the UK has also participated despite supposedly having the 'mother of parliaments' (half of which, of course, is unelected).  Fukuyama's largest oversight is in connection with China.  Critiques of Fukuyama's line, notably from Israeli academic Azar Gat, points to regimes of authoritarian capitalism and this certainly seems to be how we can characterise contemporary China.

Part of the problem is that too many people in the West, especially at the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall still seemed to cling to the views of Friedrich Hayek, who in 'The Road to Serfdom' (1944) basically argued that unless you had a free market economy you could not have democracy.  This was aimed not really at the Nazi and the Communist states being formed but at those in Western capitalist countries, not only as a consequence of the Second World War, but also in seeking a way to avoid a return to the Depression of the 1930s saw a greater role for the state in organising the economy.  I believe Hayek feared that in the post-war world Roosevelt's New Deal economic approach would persist and go even further.  He was to be alarmed by the economic direction and planning adopted briefly in Britain and more extensively in France in the late 1940s onwards, as he felt such an approach would inevitably condemn democracy in these countries.  As France has proven he was wrong.  China has also now proven the opposite, that a free market economy need make no impact on a country's steps to democracy.  It is interesting to read books written in the 1990s which seem to see the destruction of the Chinese democracy movement at Tiananmen Square in 1989 as a futile step against an unstoppable force.  Read a copy of 'China A New History' by John King Fairbank and Merle Goldman, published in the 1990s.  The late Fairbank had anticipated no change in China's political structure and Goldman who took up the work was almost patronising in seeing this as an out-of-date, Cold War attitude, and instead believed that change towards democracy simply had to come as China became more capitalist.  The book has been revised in 2006 and I wonder if Goldman has changed her tune yet.  It is ironic that even Taiwan which has been a capitalist state since gaining independence from Japan in 1945, only became a democratic state in 1996.

The Cold War is usually seen as having started around 1948 stemming from tensions predominantly between the USA and USSR over their respective spheres of influence across the world.  It was given an added dimension by the two states having different economic and political systems: the USSR Communism and a centrally planned economy and the USA democracy and an economy that was generally unplanned.  However, the phase 1948-89 can be seen as an episode in a longer running and more complex conflict, curiously, probably most accurately perceived by the planners of Imperial Germany in the lead up to the First World War.  This perception of the Cold War is that as technology advances, conflict between continental empires is inevitable as each battles for control of the resources it needs.  The arena in which Russia and the USA were expected to conflict was the Pacific, especially over dominance in China.  At the turn of the 20th century the Kaiser and his advisors felt that unless Germany could secure dominance of the bulk of Europe then it would always be beholden to one of the world powers, which at the time were seen as the British Empire, the USA, and potentially Russia if it could modernise quickly enough.  Japan's colonial activities from 1895-1945 can be seen as being motivated by a similar uneasy perception of the world of the late 20th century.

To a great degree the German view of the 1900s came true with the post-1945 era.  They had overlooked that colonial empires could not continue to be sustained, something they should have realised from the crumbling of the Ottoman empire and weakness of the Austro-Hungarian empire in the late 19th century.  However, at the time, overseas colonialism and subjugating different nationalities was seen as the norm.  Even if it had not been exhausted by two world wars, the British empire would have dissolved as did the French and the Dutch empires and, I imagine, would have the Japanese empire, if somehow it had persisted beyond 1945.  For the 20th century and beyond it was to be contigous empires with a clearly dominant nationality of a single ethnicity with its language the one used right across its lands.  This meant Russia, the USA and, of course, China.  In the 1920s and 1930s it looked like China would remain fragmented, but there was too much common culture and too much desire for a unified state to allow this situation to persist.   Napoleon I, Kaiser Wilhelm II and Sir Winston Churchill all foresaw the strength of China if it could be a united country and 'awoke', i.e. engaged with the modern world rather than tried to ignore it as it had tended to do so at its peril during the the mid to late 19th century.

As I have noted before, until the 1970s, in the West, China was the overlooked element of the Cold War, which certainly from 1950 onwards was about three superpowers not just two.  Especially in the 1960s when the USA worried about a nuclear Third World War between it and the USSR we could easily have suffered one between the USSR and China.  One can argue if the perceived ideological divisions were really as strict as they were seen at the time.  Yes, of course, you could live a freer life in the USA than in the USSR or even now in China.  However, Maoism diverged as far from Marxism as Stalinism did and Hitlerism did from Fascism.  All of these political creeds were dressing for the assertion of power.  Democracies tend to diffuse that assertion of power and so far, even though not always entirely effective, have watered down the control of the population by the privileged and wealthy.  This was why the George W. Bush regime was so alarming as it seemed to side-step such safeguards as effectively as many Chinese Communist Party officials were able to side-step centralised economic control to make lots of money in China.  The conflict may have seemed ideological, but I believe stripping away the rhetoric, it owes more to the competition between the rulers of the different continental powers.

Since the crushing of the Tiananmen Square demonstration in 1989 we have seen no steps in China towards democracy.  It is nominally a Communist state, but it appears to be that only in name.  Supposed equality of opportunity for all, lack of discrimination of women or for people of particular social or ethnic backgrounds, may have been weak in the Communist states, but they have entirely gone from China of 2010 and people have as little chance to progress as they do in any capitalist state.  Centralised economic planning does not work effectively.  It works temporarily to fight a war, but will never sustain a country in prosperity even on the diminished terms supposedly sought by Communist regimes.  This was what the period 1985-9 proved beyond doubt and this is why the European Communist bloc regimes fell.  Abutting or near to states where democracy was comparatively strong, these countries went towards that political system assuming, as Hayek had noted, that it was necessary for prosperity.  In their case many of the states got political freedom, but the prosperity has yet to come even when buoyed up by EU aid and jobs in Western Europe.  China also shed quite a bit of its centralised economic system and this brought it prosperity with it having no need to change its political system which is really no different today than when Mao Zedong died in 1976. 

The danger for the world is that China has become so rich and powerful that it is now behaving just as all the superpowers did in the 1970s.  China, the USA and USSR all tried to export their ideology and economic control into the Third World.  China has gone back to Africa, but to Asia and South America too, and has even began economically penetrating Western nations, to secure the resources it feels it needs.  It whines on about how it has always been the victim of imperialism and how it needs aid to combat environmental damage and yet, its output now exceeds Japan and it has more financial reserves than the entire US economy.  It is a neo-imperial power just the same as the USA is.  It favours regimes which follow its political system, so while the USA struggles to establish some kind of democracy in Iraq and Afghanistan, China supports harsh dictatorships in Sudan and Zimbabwe.

In 1989 one round of the Cold War came to an end.  Just as Britain had been downed in 1918 and knocked out in 1945, the USSR was sent from the arena in 1989.  This leaves the two remaining superpowers still facing each other and China is clearly in the lead.  Despite all the joy at the 'end' of the Cold War that the values embraced by the USA and its allies had triumphed, this was a premature celebration.  One competitor in the challenge not only for the dominant ideology of the world, but economic dominance, especially of raw materials, had been knocked out, but the bout has continued.  The interim score in 1989 was not a clear US victory as far too many people believed, it was: China 1st, USA 2nd, USSR 3rd.  Now were are in the throes of the run-off to see the ultimate winner.

I have often worked with Chinese people from both the People's Republic and from Taiwan and see nothing inherent in the Chinese nature which is anti-democratic.  However, the same could have been said, I imagine for many people from the USSR or Nazi Germany or Fascist Italy, but that did not stop those states being unacceptable, and, of course, like all dictatorships, oppressing their own people before turning on others.  Whilst I am no fan of the USA, I am certainly on the side of freedoms and democracy.  However, I believe that whereas once the focus was on opposing the threats to these, attention has gone away from the key threat to these values and greed has encouraged too many states to trade with China, without recognising the risk it still presents to our way of life.  Of course, as during the Cold War there are other threats, but too many policy makers have preferred to focus on Islamic fundamentalism because there is little that they can sell to or buy from such groups, especially as this approach has not taken hold in oil-rich states (it never did in Iraq, despite what Bush may have believed).  We need to wake up to the fact that we are still in a Cold War, and I fear that the side backing democracy is currently losing.  We need to reinforce democracy in the former Communist states, notably Russia and support it in India and boost it in Indonesia, if we are to have any hope of winning the final round of the Cold War.

The US Empire Expands - 19th Century Imperialism Lives On

Just when I thought we were beginning to witness a bit of maturity in US politics with the primaries for the Democratic candidate which seemed to suggest parts of the American public were putting aside some of the bigotry and narrow-minded attitudes that they have become renowned for, suddenly we find that with the last gasp of his regime George Bush is busily expanding the American empire. Of course the Americans have never liked to be categorised as imperialists because they feel they were the first nation to throw off imperial rule when they defeated the British in the American War of Independence. However, they were really no different from Japan which came from at least a degree of imperial control in the mid-19th century to begin carving out their own empire in China and elsewhere in East Asia. Of course a lot of people assume that imperialism is all about colonies with the country being totally controlled by the imperial power and settlement by that power. The old empires like the British, French, Belgian, Dutch, Spanish and Portuguese did this across the world, but what people forget is that there are many forms of imperialism and it is some of these other forms that the USA carried out and is still, it seems carrying out today. Of course the USA still has clear imperial control over Guam in the Pacific and Puerto Rico in the Caribbean as those countries have their laws made in Washington, but the empire is expanding elsewhere in less controlling forms.

Before looking at different forms of imperialism, it is important to note one issue that I will come back to later that tends to be common to anywhere which is coming under any form of imperial control, that is 'extraterritoriality' which means that if you are from the imperial power or one of its friends, then you are immune to local laws no matter what you do in the country. This applies to all diplomats, but when there is imperialism going on it is extended to soldiers, business people and so on. This is always controversial as it means that people from the imperial state can commit what would be seen as crimes and get away with it or only be punished by the rules of their home country. Having extraterritoriality removed was a goal of Chinese nationalists and Communists right through the first half of the 20th century.

Imperialism breaks first of all into 'informal' and 'formal' imperialism. Informal imperialism is effectively economic dominance of a country and this was what tended to happen to developed societies in the 19th century for example in China, the Ottoman Empire and South America where states had shaken formal imperialism of Spain and Portugal by the 1820s only to come under informal imperialism from Britain and the USA. Informal imperialism is very common nowadays. Developing countries have their economies distorted so that they provide the resources that the Western world needs at cheap prices. Once it was things like fruit, sugar and coffee, increasingly it is becoming bio-fuels. Until they asserted their autonomy in the 1950s-70s even the rich oil countries of the Middle East were under such control. Interestingly like the Japanese 150 years ago, the Chinese are now turning from exploited to exploiters and carrying out informal imperialism not only in Africa but also Australia and Canada. The advantage of informal imperialism is that it is pretty cheap and does not look like imperialism, but this was the form that the British and the Dutch East India Companies began with in the 18th century in India and Indonesia, only later did it become more formal, state-run imperialism. The USA was carrying out informal imperialism in Central and South America from the 1820s onwards and moved into East Asia during the Cold War. Alongside states it ran informally there were ones like Cuba, Panama and the Philippines which it controlled more formally. In China whilst none of the colonial powers conquered the whole country in the 19th century they did rule directly over small areas or particular cities, especially the treaty ports, where their law rather than that of China prevailed.

Formal imperialism is when a country takes over the other country and runs its economy and foreign policy, though as I discuss below this may leave a lot of autonomy in the hands of local elites. There are various grades of formal imperialism.

Spheres of influence: with these you are not far away from informal imperialism. An example was Persia (now Iraq) in the 19th century and up to the end of the Second World War. Neither Russia/USSR or the UK actually took control of Persia but it was accepted that the Russians would be dominant in the North and the British in the South; Russian and British companies would be the ones getting all the contracts and in the case of trouble it would be the Russian or British who would intervene in their respective areas. To some extent the French still have this kind of relationship with much of West Africa and the French military intervenes if there is unrest. The British do this on a smaller scale, as with former colony, Sierra Leone. It is argued that during the Cold War Western Europe was effectively the US sphere of influence and Eastern Europe much more clearly the Soviet sphere of influence.

Dominions: this is a very British mode of imperialism and is often a legacy of tighter control. It is for countries like New Zealand, Australia and Canada, that were heavily settled by Europeans so that the indigenous cultures almost disappeared and they are now considered 'White' countries. These states though independent in domestic and foreign policy retain the British monarch as their head of state rather than having their own president and they refer

Dependent Territories: these can be defined differently and have a particular technical meaning when talking about the UK. These are countries, often small ones, which effectively cannot subsist without the economic input of the imperial power. They run their own affairs but are heavily dependent on trade with the imperial power and may be compelled to be guided on things like defence and foreign policy. They may also provide military bases for the imperial power. Ironically this is what Cuba had become for the USA before Fidel Castro pulled off the revolution in 1958 and even then the US base at Guantanamo Bay remains a legacy of that imperial relationship that even Castro could not remove.

Protectorates: this was a common form of imperial rule over much of the British and other European empires in the 19th century, notably the Netherlands over Indonesia. It is not as expensive as a full blown colonisation and in theory the protectorate enters into an agreement for protection though in reality it was generally forced. Some people use the supposed voluntary entry into being a protectorate to compare that form of imperialism positively compared to the formation of 'Mandates' by the League of Nations at the end of the First World War which was imposed on these countries when they were removed from control of Germany and allocated to other colonial powers. However, the treatment was much the same in both cases. What distinguishes protectorates and mandates from colonies is that local rulers stay in control, though they have to deal economically with the imperial power like dependent territories and have their defence and foreign policy and often many other policies determined by the imperial state. Large areas of India such as Mysore, Hyderabad, the Rajput States and Baluchistan (now inPakistan) were such protectorates, under local princes rather than direct British control like the rest of India.

Colonies: in the British Empire these became 'Crown Colonies' to designate that control moved from the hands of companies, notably the East India Company which lost control of its parts of India in 1858 and they were run by the British government. The Belgian and German governments were also obliged to take over colonies started by companies in Africa in the late 19th century as it proved impossible for anything less than a state to run colonies. As the name suggests, the aim was generally for settlers from the home country to colonise the imperial territory. This generally happened far less than was expected as people preferred to emigrate to the Americas. However, there were notable exceptions such as South Africa, Kenya, French Indochina and especially Algeria, where by the time of independence 1 out of 9 of the population was European. In colonies the imperial power ran everything replacing government of the country by governors and the military and large chunks of the economy came under direct control of the imperial state. In extreme cases, as with Algeria for France, the colony effectively became part of the metropolitan country; in 1945, 12% of the members of parliament sitting in Paris were elected from the colonies. Other countries did not engage so closely with their colonies, though there were discussions in the 1950s about Malta returning MPs to parliament in London.

Right, so with terms established, why do I think the American Empire is expanding. Well, we all know, as I was predicting last year, that it is in Iraq. This is a country which was under the Ottoman Empire until 1918 but the Germans were attempting informal imperialism there in the 1900s. After 1918 it became a mandate of the British until gaining seemingly gaining independence in 1945 when it became a full member of the United Nations. The British had re-invaded the country in 1941 to suppress uprisings and presumably fearful of the country's oil falling into German hands. As we know the USA invaded Iraq in 1991 following its recapture of Kuwait (a state Iraq had claimed sovereignty over as early as 1961) and then again in 2003 to overthrow Saddam Hussein. It appeared that there were steps to Iraq again becoming independent, but it seems that it is not the level of independence it had up until 2003. Bush is negotiating for the USA not to just have a single military base in Iraq but 50 bases across the country. In addition US troops would have extraterritoriality but not simply to go about their business but to carry out arrests and military activities without referring to any Iraqi government. This is the kind of power Austria-Hungary asked Serbia to give in July 1914 and the Japanese demanded of China in 1937 which in both cases led to war. It is like the power foreigners had in Japan in the late 19th century which led to unrest in the country and a coup in 1867, the so-called Meiji Restoration. A new twist for the 21st century is that the USA wants control of Iraqi airspace below 29,000 feet (about 9700 metres). In addition to all this, US companies since the war have been the key economic players in the country and will continue to be so even if this so-called 'Strategic Alliance' is not signed and you can guarantee that the US will have an effective monopoly on sale of Iraqi oil.

Iraq is already a dependent territory of the USA and the agreement would solidify that. The ongoing military presence and the extraterritoriality plus the supposed 'agreement' smacks very much of a protectorate being formed. One could envisage this being 1888 rather than 2008 with the USA having overthrown some local despot, restoring some local elites but effectively running the country as their own. Certainly the influence of any other power, notably Iran, is being excluded. The USA has seen the Middle East as to some extent in its sphere of influence since the Eisenhower Doctrine of the 1950s, but what we are now witnessing is not a kind of 'new imperialism' talked about during the Cold War, this is simply reheated 19th century imperialism. People argued that the Cold War was a natural development in history and when it ended a certain phase was concluded, but to me, it appears that the Cold War was an aberration and in fact there are more continuities between the world in 1908 and 2008 than there ever were between 1948/58/68 even 1978 and today. Predictions of American, Russian (notice their colonial moves on the seabed of the Arctic and the UK doing the same in the mid-Atlantic) and China as dividing up the world seem more accurate now than ever. Imperialism is not dead, we are witnessing it occurring this very moment.

Why the USA Scares Me

Living in the UK people for some reason always feel we are in danger of being dominated by others. In the Cold War many believed the USSR had a desire to overrun the UK and that they would fight a guerilla war to stop this. Given the economic difficulties of the UK and the USSR throughout that era, I doubt it would have made much economic sense, but it was what people feared. Since 1973 when the UK joined what was then called the European Economic Community (EEC) and is now the European Union, many people constantly complain that our country is increasingly 'controlled from Brussels' with most of the focus on keeping EU rules for tinkering with our quirky systems of measurement and keeping the pound as the currency. The argument does not go beyond that and never addresses the broader economic and political questions, beyond complaint about Polish immigrants though they are generally lumped together with asylum seekers. There is a sense always that there is a British identity focused on the eccentricities of the UK in the 21st century, the loss of which, will mean the end of freedom in the UK. This takes no recognition of the massive changes that have gone on in British society since the late 1970s (probably more extreme than anywhere in western Europe) or the fact that freedom is more at risk from the government's erosion of civil liberties throughout the 2000s.

So where does the USA appear in this equation? Many people see it as a defender of democracy and certainly of the capitalist form of economics, though I would argue the EU certainly has an equal role in the latter. Due to the long historical connection between the USA and UK we probably get more US culture and hence attitudes flowing into our country than any of our neighbours and at various times France and (West) Germany have sought to shake off such influence. In the UK no politician can be seen to be hostile to the USA and so damage the 'special relationship' even when we have no need for US military bases on our soil (if we ever had a genuine need for them in the first place). The UK presents itself as retaining a key role in policing the World, but actually when you look at it, it cannot do this independently of the USA. This has been the case probably since 1941 though it was not put to the test until 1956 when the Americans opposed British intervention in Egypt.

Now for much of the 20th century the USA has managed to go off and have ill-advised wars without involving the British. There were British troops involved in the Korean War 1950-3 but fortunately that was comparatively short. The influence of Prime Minister Clement Attlee dissuaded the Americans from using atomic weapons which many millions of people in the world should be grateful for. The UK (bar a few individuals working with the Australians or later directly for the Americans) managed to stay out of the Vietnam War. What it was unable to do was to avoid the overall Cold War paranoia. This brings me to the first period when the USA scared me. It was during the terms of office of President Ronald Reagan. Like the current President Bush, Reagan was a man so lacking in talent that he should have been barred from holding high office. People portray him as the man who ended the Cold War and I have even seen a website arguing that if he had not been elected president in 1981 we would still be in the Cold War, that is utter rubbish; if he had died following the assassination attempt in March 1981 actually the Cold War may have ended a lot sooner. Especially in his first term of office (1981-1984) he brought the world closer to nuclear war than it had been at any time since the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. He diverged from the steps to detente that had occurred in the 1970s (not helped by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979) but started adopting the jargon of the 'empire of evil' rather than seeing the Soviets as humans too and with no appreciation that by the mid-1970s their economy was in melt-down.

What was so alarming about Reagan and this has been an aspect which contributes to making the USA so frightening how, is his high degree of self-righteousness, and his belief that in the case of nuclear war the 'elect' (including himself) would be lifted clear of Earth by God and then brought back down to a new Eden that would rather be like the world following the end of the Deluge at the time of Noah. You cannot have the most powerful man in the world so detached from reality and with so little concern for billions of people living on this planet and not be afraid. Consequently through the 1980s I would awake to a loud bang fearing Reagan had triggered a nuclear war to bring about the new Eden. I was just grateful that living near a NATO computer base that we would be hit by one of the early missiles (in the UK we only had a 4-minute delay between war starting and missiles hitting the country, being only the size of Rhode Island there was nowhere to run to) rather than face a lingering death in the irradiated wreckage of what had once been the UK. Reagan also brought fear to Latin America by backing dictatorships in El Salvador and Honduras that were involved with the murder and horrific torture of their citizens and by sponsoring and arming rebels in Nicaragua too.

Right, you may say, well Reagan has long been out of office and is now dead, surely you cannot be worried about the Americans. Well, we have a US President who seems even more incompetent than Reagan. Since the 1980s fundamentalism has been growing across the world (in part because people feel they have so little to direct their own fates) and in the USA as in Iran, it has taken control of the political system. George W. Bush's attitudes are shaped by it. This means that the self-righteousness is back in full force, the sense that the Americans are so special that the policies they carry out are holy and cannot be wrong. Of course these policies are not applied, say to eliminate dictatorship across the world, but bar in Afghanistan (which I increasingly believe was invaded simply to have a war) has more to do with securing raw materials, notably oil (there may be raw materials in Afghanistan, something like uranium that the general public are currently not aware of) and to provide big contracts for US companies which have made billions out of rebuilding Iraq. At the moment it looks like Bush is gearing up for a war with Iran without even having tidied up in Iraq; the same language is being used as in 2002-3.

Thus, it is unsurprising that the world feels dangerous with a country that seeks to start a war every 3-4 years. The last person to get away with that was Benito Mussolini in the 1920s-40s in Greece (twice) and Ethiopia and ultimately he was executed. What is infuriating is not only is US policy so geared to these policies but somehow we (especially in the UK) are constantly being told we should support it and see that it is right. What enabled that forced sympathy was the attacks on the USA on 11th September 2001. Now I am not going to go into any conspiracy theories on this, though it is clear that the Bush family and Osama bin Laden's extended family were in friendly contact. What infuriates people in the UK is that after 2001 the Americans keep suggesting that they have suffered more than anyone else and so this gives them a special right to behave how they wish in the world. Now, even for Israel, home to the Jews who lost over 6 million people in the space of five years, this argument is wearing thin. For the USA such an argument has no strength (or it should have none). Growing up in the UK in the 1970s and 1980s we were regularly exposed to terrorist atrocities by the IRA. I witnessed one in 1999 in East London and had a friend who was standing very close to two bombings in London and Manchester. Other parts of Europe, notably Spain, witnessed similarly regular attacks and other countries such as France, West Germany and Italy were not spared.

These attacks led to deaths and maimings and also altered how our society behaved. I remember being separated from my parents when we visited the Tower of London so that we could each be searched for explosive devices and inside is a plaque where people were killed by a bomb in the 1970s. Attacks even reached the Houses of Parliament where the war hero Airey Neave was blown up and the royal family as Earl Mountbatten was blown up on his yacht. British policy in Northern Ireland was harsh, but at no stage did the British assert the right as a result to go round attacking who they chose, and particularly not simply for economic gain. We could easily have said that the IRA was being funded from Libya so we needed to invade Libya and take over its oil wells. The Vietnamese could easily claim reparations from the USA for the constant bombing of the country in the late 1960s and early 1970s (there are estimated to still be more landmines in the country than there are people) and the use of chemical weapons which are still causing severe birth defects thirty years on. By being so bullish about the attack on them rather than presenting it in the context of suffering that terrorism has long caused in the world, the Americans have shown how self-centred they are and how they continue to think they are better than anyone else. It ends up with such a patronising position that is communicated to the UK that somehow we know nothing about global politics, that we know nothing about true suffering from terrorism and so we should give up any rational objection to how these things are being handled to those people who know about these things, i.e. the fundamentalist right-wing in US politics.

I accept that faith is about believing whole-heartedly that you are right in what you believe. However, I am always afraid of those who will accept no questioning of their actions and have no ability to see anyone else's perspective. I wish I could find online an image of the 1960s cartoon which shows an an American man dressed in a jumpsuit made of the US flag saying it is a wonderful outfit suitable for church, school, leisure, work and then next to him a smaller, Vietnamese man draped in the oversized outfit saying 'It doesn't fit'. That cartoon is not only as applicable today as it was 40 years ago, it is applicable to the UK as much as it is to Iraq, Afghanistan, Nicaragua, Somalia, the Philippines, Cuba, etc. You may argue, well, surely my concern about fundamentalist attitudes should extend to the 'other side', and it does, I do fear an Islamist suicide bomber, London has experienced these as well as other countries. However, it is an issue of scale. Even if al-Qaeda existed, which it does not in the form people seem to assume, then it lacks a fraction of the military might that the USA has. The US military could still wipe out the whole world either via nuclear, chemical or biological weaponry if it chose or some combination of these; it might even be able to do it with the conventional weapons it has. People would live on, but like the Vietnamese during the late 1960s it would be in tunnels and bunkers. That is the enduring strength of the US and why with their current obsessions, misapprehensions and self-righteousness I find them as frightening today as I did in the early 1980s.