The Books I Read In February

Fiction
'Red Dwarf: Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers' by Grant Naylor
This book covers the first episodes of the first season of the television series 'Red Dwarf' (1988-93; 1997-99; 2009; 2012 - two new series will be broadcast in 2016-17). It is a situation comedy about a small number of characters on a spaceship.  I have seen these multiple times. It was popular among my friends when first broadcast and the woman and boy who used to live in my house, loved it so much that the DVDs were regularly watched.  There is a lot of toilet humour that appeals to children.  The series does tackle issues that are popular in science fiction as the characters travel around space running into debris and encountering other races.  They also get mixed up with wormholes and temporal anomalies and even a 'what if?' history story.

I have a friend who hates it if a movie or television adaptation diverges one iota from the source book.  He forgets that a short story is more than enough to fill a 1-hour television programme, a novel could produce a series.  In addition, viewers do not want a multiplicity of minor characters and it is difficult to include footnotes on screen; it was only really successfully done by 'The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy' (TV series, 1981) and even then it had to break up the flow of the action.  For myself, I actually like the divergence between the different media as it means that I do not precisely know what is coming up.  This book keeps incredibly close to the series in almost every aspect and the trouble is that I know what it features far too well.  There is some back story which does not feature in the series and, because the book does not lead off into the series as a whole, the final section is new.

The dialogue for most part is identical to that seen in the series.  However, I found little humour in the book.  It showed to me that the lead characters - Dave Lister (played by Craig Charles), a smelly slob; Arnold J. Rimmer (played by Chris Barrie) a self-centred but bitter pedant and the Cat (played by Danny John-Jules) - the ultimate narcissist, are not sympathetic characters.  In the book they come across as pretty unpleasant.  I realised that a lot of the humour was visual, physical stuff and came from the way the actors delivered the lines rather than the lines themselves.  I have 'Better Than Life', the sequel, to read and I hope that this diverges more from the television series.

'Better Than Life' by Grant Naylor
As my current girlfriend allows me to read in bed in a way other woman have not done, the number of books I am getting through at the moment is higher than in the past.  As noted above, this book is the sequel to 'Red Dwarf: Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers', in fact largely picking up where the last book left off.  It again features the four characters from the television series, initially trying to get out of the game Better Than Life and then deal with the consequences of the computer on board the spaceship 'Red Dwarf' having become senile and then having its intelligence boosted but its life shortened.  Scenes from the television series are mixed in with other elements that did not appear in it.  There is a brief period on the version of Earth where time runs backwards but showing different events to in the series.  There is the use of planets like snooker balls and there is the polymorph which feeds on emotions, shown reasonably like what happened in the television series.  However, there is also Lister on Earth as Garbage Planet with vast cockroaches.  Thus, even for a fan of the television series there is new material here which is interesting in a standard science fiction way.  However, perhaps unsurprisingly, it is very episodic and unfortunately largely lacking in humour.  This books is probably best to read if you have never seen the television series 'Red Dwarf' otherwise it is only a mildly interesting progress through various scenes with you looking out for familiar dialogue or settings from what you know.

'A Man Without Breath' by Philip Kerr
This is another of Kerr's Bernie Gunther stories, largely set in German-occupied Smolensk in March-April 1943; some scenes occur in Berlin.  It is better than 'Prague Fatale' that I read last month: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.co.uk/2016/01/the-books-i-read-in-january.html  However, Kerr seems bent on ensuring that Gunther comes into contact with many of the leading Nazis, in this book, Dr Josef Goebbels, the Propaganda Minister and central events of the regime: here two attempts on Adolf Hitler's life and the uncovering of the massacre of 4000 Polish officers by the Soviets in Katyn Forest.  As before, the issue of investigating murders at a time when both sides in the conflict were committing massacres is raised.  However, for much of the time Gunther is shown what he does best, down at ground level disentangling various killings and dodging the internal politics of the Nazi regime.  Kerr is very good at portraying Smolensk and the surrounding areas during the period and the different types of German units there.

Kerr likes to highlight elements of the period that tend to be overlooked such as the German War Crimes Bureau which sought to document war crimes by other nations at the same time as the SS and parts of the Wehrmacht were carrying out very similar or even more vicious war crimes.  He also highlights the experimentation on Communist prisoners carried out by the Nationalists during the Spanish Civil War; protest by Aryan women married to Jewish men in Berlin in 1943 that had some released and the Jewish Hospital that continued in Berlin until it was liberated in 1945 with 800 patients alive.  In this book, Kerr also gives an insight into the NKVD, the Soviet secret police.

The only real drawbacks of this book is that it goes on a little too long (513 pages of narrative in the edition I read) and yet, as with 'Prague Fatale', the conclusion feels very rushed.  In addition, I do not know why Kerr felt he had to have a deus ex machina to resolve everything.  Given the time that has passed and the distances this seems unfeasible and undermines the grittiness of the rest of the novel.  He should have removed some of the additional murders and could have built to a satisfying conclusion without the intervention he feels compelled to engineer to end the story.

The writing is good and the characters are interesting and well drawn.  It moves along briskly.  It just seems as is a common problem these days even with leading authors, that the absence of thorough editing means that the book is good rather than excellent in the way it could have been with some trimming and rethinking.

Non-Fiction
'Neither Here Nor There' by Bill Bryson
Bryson is a travel writer and sometime cultural commentator.  He was originally from the USA but has lived for the past few decades in the UK.  I read his 'Notes from a Small Island' (1996) which was one of his bestsellers - a book about living and travelling in the UK, some years back.  I found it reasonably funny in a dry sometimes almost cynical way.  'Neither Here Nor There' was published in 1991 about Bryson's trip across continental Europe from northern Norway to Istanbul in Turkey in 1990 but it also regularly references a similar trip he had made in 1973.

Despite the commentary on the cover, this book is utterly lacking in humour.  Bryson does not stop complaining.  Every country, every town and city is either filthy and full of litter or too pristine to be interesting.  Despite travelling to so many places he seems to have found very few instances when he was at all happy.  He hates modern architecture, but expects the latest facilities wherever he goes.  He expects everyone to understand him.  He expects every town to have entertainment that will delight him without being too dated or too contemporary.  All that satisfies him are a handful of museums, the occasional park and some views and these are all few and far between.  He wants food that is not like that which you could get in an American city but then complains incessantly about what he is served.  Anything which costs more than it would have done in backwoods USA in his youth he deems to be too expensive.  He is incredibly repetitive often moaning about the prices and litter in a particular city more than once.  Almost everyone he meets he finds aloof or rude; drunk or loutish and most he feels are smelly.

Bryson is a useless traveller or he certainly was in 1990 when he made this trip.  Constantly he simply assumed he could go to the next town without checking the transport arrangements, schedules or costs.  As a result many of his plans are frustrated.  He seems incapable of speaking any languages apart from English and as a result is often totally uncomprehending of what is going on or being able to communicate what he assumes will happen.  He constantly travels with no food supplies and often without the correct currency and then is upset when he arrives in a town and is hungry and cannot get food or a hotel room.  Despite his declared love of the picturesque and the historic over the modern, it seems he struggles unless there is a 24/7 service everywhere.

Bryson in this book is the worst kind of traveller.  He is a mixture of an arrogant Briton of the 1950s style, blended with a schizophrenic American who cannot understand why the rest of the world is different and yet also complains whenever it is too American in approach.  This is a book of moaning.  It is the worst travel book I have read and I cannot understand how it got published.  I guess it sells well to UKIP supporters and their antecedents who want their disgust at the rest of Europe simply reinforced to make themselves feel superior.  There is no humour in this book; reading it is unpleasant and it should be retitled 'The Bigot's Guide to Europe'.  Another failure in terms of me selecting books to read.

'The Writing on the Wall' by Will Hutton
This is the third book by Hutton after 'The State We're In' (1994) which I read back in January: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.co.uk/2016/01/the-books-i-read-in-january.html and 'The World We're In' (2002).  Like them it looks at the problems for the world of the collapse of civil society; in this book based on Enlightenment values and how this has allowed capitalism to create increasingly divisive countries and ironically for industry and business to become less successful.  In this book first published in 2006, though I was reading an edition from the following year, Hutton looks at the rise of China from the history of the 19th and 20th centuries to its adoption and success with capitalism.  Hutton highlights the challenges this poses for the world but also reassures American readers that the USA has far from lost.

Hutton's book is a very good survey of Chinese capitalism with its peculiarities that in the case of huge savings in part promoted by the collapse of the welfare state and the one-child policy, plus regional support for business that have helped the economy to grow so spectacularly.  However, he also highlights how the state controls so much even now and the dangers of corruption.  Like many commentators on China, Hutton insists that China cannot continue with successful capitalism and yet remain a totalitarian dictatorship.  I have been reading such insistence on what must happen to China since John King Fairbank and Merle Goldman argued this line in 'China - A New History' (1992).  Even nine years on from Hutton's book and 24 years on from Fairbank and Goldman's what they felt must happen, has not come about and shows no sign of doing so.  In Hutton's case his insistence that capitalism must lead to pluralism does seem strange as for the last third of this book as in his previous ones, he outlines how a liberal civil society is being destroyed in the USA and Britain.  Why, if he sees the pluralist elements decaying in the West does he feel that they must thrive in China?  Is it not more accurate to believe as some Chinese have voiced to me, that the West is actually becoming more like China in its authoritarianism.

The book is weakened by the switch to focusing on the USA on its own and not in relation to China.  Hutton has covered these topics before and this jump makes it feel as if you have gone into another book.  At 436 pages in the copy I read, he could easily have dropped much of this section and made a tighter, stronger book consistently focused on China.  Despite this notable flaw, the book particularly in the first two-thirds is decent.  There are some oddities often when Hutton uncharacteristically allows himself to believe myths.  He says that Bologna University was the first university in Europe.  It is the longest enduring but was predated by the universities of Al-Andalus in southern Spain, reference to which has been chased off large sections of the internet.  He later twice says the GMD (Nationalist) forces of China were so exhausted in fighting the Japanese invasions 1931-45 that they were too weak to properly combat the CCP (Communists).  This is rubbish, Chiang Kai-shek [Jiang Jieshi] leader of the GMD was so negligent in opposing the Japanese he had to be kidnapped by his own officers to persuade him to resist them at all.  He spent the war in Chongqing, building up reserves of weaponry but not fighting the Japanese, much to the exasperation of the Americans.  As late as 1944, the Japanese were able to easily launch a large-scale offensive to take vast areas of southern China.  The CCP remained pretty passive certainly from 1940 and it was down to local forces beholden to neither faction, to fight the Japanese.  Hutton even says that the USA effectively won the Vietnam War through delaying the North Vietnamese takeover of South Vietnam until 1975, so apparently allowing capitalism to establish elsewhere in East Asia, though of course, in Laos and Cambodia it did not.  These are surprising mistakes.

Overall this is a useful and interesting book which would benefit from a new edition now that rather than the Chinese currency needing to be devalued, the Chinese are seeking to keep it buoyant; oil prices have slumped to a fraction of what they were in 2007 and his warnings about the US housing market have come true leading to sustained difficulties.  Yet, China is no nearer to democracy and in recent months there has been a clampdown on those involved in labour protests or writing/publishing about the country's problems, hardly the growth of Enlightenment civil society that Hutton insisted was imminent.

Chinese Need to Get Used to Being Spoken to in Poor Chinese

Like the majority of people working in an organisation which employs people from around the world, I am used to conversing with people who have a strong accent when speaking English or make incessant grammar errors - 'feedbacks' is used so often it is almost being adopted in English itself.  Unlike the character on 'The Fast Show' I do not pick up every error and I make an effort to comprehend the accent.  This is because I am grateful that the person is speaking to me in English and not expecting me to know Thai, Turkish or even Spanish in order to have a conversation with them.  This is a price British people have to pay for being so poor at learning foreign languages and indeed having a schooling system which increasingly does not even teach them.  The 13-year old boy who lives in my house stopped learning any foreign languages at the end of Year 8 (12-13 year old class), having done French just for two years.  He is an intelligent child going to a school of 1200 pupils but there is so little language teaching that it is a minority subject.  Reports show a steady fall in language learning in the UK: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-31921979  with fewer pupils taking even European languages let alone Asian ones.

Now, I am constantly meeting Chinese people.  I have no idea how many Chinese are currently visiting or working in the UK.  The bulk of the ones I run across are students.  However, of course, because of the UK have had a colony in Hong Kong, there are people with Chinese heritage, predominantly Cantonese rather than Mandarin speakers and generally thoroughly integrated into British society.  I am not discussing Chinese assimilated in the past, but people from mainland China who are in the UK.  Now I spent 18 months learning Mandarin.

I was poor at the writing but pretty good at the language to the extent that I could say where I came from, talk about my family, ask directions and order a complex meal.  I honed my accent by using CDs and copying dialogue in movies.  Thus, I would expect that I would speak Chinese with an English accent and probably sound quite a bit like the Chinese equivalent of those people I speak to regularly from a range of countries, who have a strong accent and make errors.  However, every time I try please or thank you or excuse me, I get a blank expression from Chinese visitors as if rather than attempting their language I have gone into Ukrainian or Somali.

I used the common Chinese phrase 'shi bu shi' [pronounced 'shur boo shur'] it is a phrase attached to the end of a sentence to make it a question 'yes or no?'.  Mandarin word order does not change, it is subject-verb-object all the time, so you need question suffixes to show you are asking a question rather than through moving the verb around as often happens in English.  The quote was relevant to the setting but the Chinese man turned to me and said - 'what is that, something in English?'.  He did not recognise it as a basic phrase from his own language.

I  know that the Chinese are a proud people who value their culture.  I know that they row with the Taiwanese over who speaks and writes 'proper' Chinese.  However, I have yet to meet a Chinese person who is willing to put in the effort to comprehend other nationalities speaking their language in the way that English speakers often do on a daily basis.  This runs contrary to the schemes to introduce Mandarin to schools and to open up Confucius Centres to promote the teaching of Mandarin.

If the efforts of people who have taken time to learn the language are simply dismissed then there is no incentive to learn let alone develop skills in the language.  It seems I will never even reach a workable level in my lifetime.  I know there is all this argument about the fact that an outsider can never be fluent, but I am not looking for fluency, I am looking to work at the level many people use English when speaking to me.  It may not be perfect, but we can function.

Why does this matter?  Well, the Chinese population is only 25% of the global population so they are going to meet a lot of people who speak something else.  China has a public relations problem.  It is both noted as being one of the only remaining Communist dictatorships yet is also operating as a neo-colonial power particularly in Africa and Central Asia.  To be so frosty to those trying to speak the language is to put even more distance between the country and those others it has to deal with.

I do wonder if there is a delight in the exceptionality of the use of any Chinese language in a Western context and that Chinese visitors like the fact that their hosts cannot comprehend what they are saying.  It seems that they worry that if they give a centimetre of recognition that someone else even knows a bit of their language, they will have lost that privileged position.  It is like the Russian nobility speaking French when the servants were around.  I have also noted a similar phenomenon with Afrikaans and Flemish speakers.  They get very upset when you reflect back some of the details of their language to them.  It is as if you have broken the 'code' they are using and thus are suspicious.

I have no idea whether Chinese visitors will change their attitudes.  However, I am sure their government, given the money it has put into promoting Mandarin skills in the West, would wish that they were not so dismissive of the efforts of other countries to speak their language and at least be as accommodating as many British are when people speak to us regularly in 'bad' English.

What If Japan Had Been an Ally of Germany Rather than Britain During the First World War?

My views on this topic can be found in my e-book ‘In Other Trenches: Alternate Outcomes of the First World War’ It is available for purchase on Amazon.  Please note that the 2^nd Edition is now on sale which has been thoroughly revised and rewritten in response to feedback about the 1^st Edition that you will see online:

http://www.amazon.com/Other-Trenches-Alternate-Outcomes-First-ebook/dp/B00ILVJ4C0/ref=sr_1_2?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1395342569&sr=1-2

UK readers might prefer to access it through:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/In-Other-Trenches-Alternate-Outcomes-ebook/dp/B00ILVJ4C0/ref=sr_1_2?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1395342371&sr=1-2

Canadian readers can access it through: http://www.amazon.ca/Other-Trenches-Alternate-Outcomes-First-ebook/dp/B00ILVJ4C0/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1395342669&sr=1-1

Australian readers can access it through: http://www.amazon.com.au/In-Other-Trenches-Alternate-Outcomes-ebook/dp/B00ILVJ4C0/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1395342833&sr=1-1

What If Resistance To The Japanese Invasion of China Had Been More Effective?

My views on this topic can be found in my e-book ‘Other Roads: Alternate Outcomes of the Second World War’ It is available for purchase on Amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/Other-Roads-Alternate-Outcomes-Second-ebook/dp/B00J44F2L0/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1395342550&sr=1-1

UK readers might prefer to access it through:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Other-Roads-Alternate-Outcomes-Second-ebook/dp/B00J44F2L0/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1395342343&sr=1-1

Canadian readers can access it through: http://www.amazon.ca/Other-Roads-Alternate-Outcomes-Second-ebook/dp/B00J44F2L0/ref=sr_1_25?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1395342737&sr=1-25

Australian readers can access it through: http://www.amazon.com.au/Other-Roads-Alternate-Outcomes-Second-ebook/dp/B00J44F2L0/ref=sr_1_25?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1395342887&sr=1-25

What If, in the 13th century, the Chinese Had Discovered Central and South America?

My views on this topic can be found in my e-book ‘On Other Fields: Alternate Outcomes of the Middle Ages’ by Alexander Rooksmoor.  It is available for purchase on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/On-Other-Fields-Alternate-ebook/dp/B008LMT9WO/ref=sr_1_8?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1342436531&sr=1-8

UK readers might prefer to access it through: http://www.amazon.co.uk/On-Other-Fields-Alternate-ebook/dp/B008LMT9WO/ref=sr_1_9?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1342436579&sr=1-9

Canadian readers might prefer to access it through: http://www.amazon.ca/Other-Fields-Alternate-Outcomes-ebook/dp/B008LMT9WO/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1375772395&sr=8-4&keywords=Rooksmoor

What If The Taiping Kingdom Had Persisted?

My views on this topic can be found in my e-book ‘Down Other Tracks: Alternate Outcomes of the 19th Century’ by Alexander Rooksmoor.  It is available for purchase on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Down-Other-Tracks-Alternate-ebook/dp/B0087QDK88/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1338820140&sr=8-1

UK readers might prefer to access it through: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Down-Other-Tracks-Alternate-ebook/dp/B0087QDK88/ref=sr_1_5?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1338820087&sr=1-5

Canadian readers might like to access it through: http://www.amazon.ca/Down-Other-Tracks-Alternate-ebook/dp/B0087QDK88/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1376043896&sr=8-3&keywords=Rooksmoor

Resisting Counter-Factual Speculation: China And Time-Travel Movies

In past postings, I have looked at how uneasy Americans can be about counter-factual discussions around the history of the USA:  http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2007/11/denying-counter-factual-issues-around.html and http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2008/06/when-counter-factual-becomes.html  This seems to stem from an enduring if unstated faith in the so-called 'manifest destiny', i.e. that the USA was always destined to turn out the way that it has and so any discussions of alternatives is a waste of time.  Naturally I strongly oppose that viewpoint, not least because it allows a state to argue that whatever policy it adopts must be correct because it was 'destined' to happen.  The ridiculousness of that is immediately apparent if you compare the policies of President Barack Obama and his immediate predecessor George W. Bush.  Which was truly manifesting the USA's destiny?  Clearly that is not happening, unless it is the USA's destiny is to constantly chop and change. 

All states exist as a result of a series of accidents combined with deliberate actions, some of which succeeded, some of which failed.  As I have noted before, not every alternative, in the long run, would have led to a great change in history as we have known it.  Conversely, small differences can lead to vast changes in what happened.  Each counter-factual needs to be weighed on its own merits.  In addition, we have to recognise that this is no more than an intellectual exercise, we cannot 'prove' the propositions, but saying that, in many branches of science, that is the same.  Some dismiss counter-factual analysis as a 'game'.  It can be entertaining and is the basis of an extensive sub-genre of fiction dating back many decades.  However, counter-factual analysis is also a vital tool in properly weighing up the different elements which went into our history.  Thus, as I have argued before, it is something that should not be dismissed: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2007/05/usefulness-of-what-if-history.html

Now, it is probably on the basis of the usefulness of counter-factual analysis, that on 31st March 2011, China announced 'guidelines' effectively banning time-travel movies and television programmes.  In a statement from Li Jingsheng head of television drama at China's State Administration for Radio, Film and Television (SARFT) has said that such dramas (and comedies): 'lack positive thoughts and meaning'; 'its content and the exaggerated performance style are questionable'; 'Many stories are totally made-up and are made to strain for an effect of novelty';  'They casually make up myths, have monstrous and weird plots, use absurd tactics, and even promote feudalism, superstition, fatalism and reincarnation.'  Of course, many of these things could be charges laid against many genres of fiction, for example, romance, Westerns, crime stories and even historical drams.  It is the last elements about promoting feudalism and fatalism which really cut to the heart of the issue. 

ommentators about Chinese society believe this move has been prompted by recent programmes featuring happy times in China's past (though it is pretty difficult to find any era in Chinese history when a substantial group of Chinese were not suffering).  The key example is 'The Palace', as pointed out by Professor Nie Wei, from the School of Movie and Television Drama Studies of Shanghai University.  The series features a 21st-century girl travelling back in time to the Qing dynasty (which ruled China 1644-1911).  The episodes for the next series are being rewritten.

The movies and series has effectively banned in China on this basis include 'The Terminator' (1984) and presumably its sequels and television series; 'Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure' (1989) and its sequel; any version of 'A Christmas Carol'; 'Planet of the Apes' (1968) and its sequels, series and remake; 'Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery' (1997) and its sequels;  'Back To The Future' (1985) and its two sequels, 'Black Knight' (2001), 'The X-Files' (1993-2002) though I am not certain that many episodes of this actually featured time travel, 'Doctor Who' (1963-) and 'Star Trek' (1966-9) and presumably all the movies and sequel series.

I can only think of one time travel episode, in the original 'Star Trek' series, 'The City on the Edge of Forever' in the original series which the crew prevent a woman (played by Joan Collins!) being run over in 1930s USA so leading to a subsequent Nazi victory in World War Two including the USA coming under Nazi control.  Apparently, however, three other episodes feature time travel, one taking crew members to 1968, one to 1969, one taking them back 3 days and one to two historic time periods on an alien planet. There is also time travel in the movie, 'Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home' (1986).  

The fatalism would be seen in movies like 'The Butterfly Effect' (2004) in which a man tries to change his own life by travelling back in time on a number of occasions only to constantly make things worse; in 'Running Against Time' (1990) the repeated attempts by three time travellers to avoid US intervention in the Vietnam War only exacerbate the conflict.  However, this then shows up the contradictions in the Chinese guidelines.  They oppose both time travel that can make things turn out better and they dislike time travel that worsens the situation.  They oppose time travel stories that only impact on the fate of a few individuals and also ones which affect the whole world such as 'The Terminator' and 'Star Trek IV' or 'A Sound of Thunder' (2005) which radically sees humans replaced by a reptillian species as a result of a time traveller to the Cretaceous period treading on a creature.  Of course, the Chinese government could insist that all time travel stories adhere to the Novikov self-consistency principle, that, in fact you cannot alter history as it has happened, any attempt to do so will fail, as shown in 'Twelve Monkeys' (1995) and 'The Time Machine' (2002). 

One movie not mentioned by the Chinese is 'Fatherland' (1994) perhaps because though the book it was based on was a best seller, the movie had little success, especially in the USA.  The movie does not feature time travel, rather it is one of the only actual counter-factual movies in that it envisages a world in which Nazi Germany won the Second World War.  Though not stated, it must be assumed that in such a scenario Japan would have been victorious in the Pacific as victory in Europe would have allowed its forces to be supplement by Germany and its allies.  Despite the fact that Germany and Japan were always awkward allies (as history of wartime Shanghai show), Germany presumably would have put experienced U-boat packs into the Pacific; experienced German pilots and aircraft into the Pacific and China and provided SS units to exterminate Chinese Communists behind the frontlines.  It seems unlikely Japan would have conquered all of China but it would have held the major cities and wealthiest regions, so today, North-East China would still be Manchukuo and Communism would have been eliminated from the Japanese colonies in eastern and central China. 

I believe the movies listed owe more to their international renown than the portrayal of events in specific movies that is what has drawn Chinese state attention to them.  However, there is also the factor of discussion around time travel and the possibilities it may offer to change a country which is what alarms the Chinese government the most.   Despite this, It seems that, in the opposition to time travel, the Chinese are also dismissing a lot of general science fiction.  This may be the authorities' intention. 

Many of these series and movies have other concepts, discussion of which would be seen as a threat, especially 'Star Trek' which often handled moral judgements in story lines and elements such as discrimination.  A fuller part of the SARFT statement suggests this is the case: 'fantasy, time-travel, random compilations of mythical stories, bizarre plots, absurd techniques, even propagating feudal superstitions, fatalism and reincarnation, ambiguous moral lessons, and even a lack of positive thinking.' 

The timing seems to be in preparation for the 90th anniversary of the Communist Party of China being established (and, of course, the centenary of the 1911 Revolution which established the Chinese Republic which the Communists did not control entirely until 1950) and so '[a]ll levels should actively prepare to launch vivid reproductions of the Chinese revolution, the nation’s construction and its reform and opening up.'  Of course, if we travelled back to 1971 for the 50th anniversary, the party members then would be in horror of the capitalist economy now in place in China and would see predictions for 2011 which featured China as one of the leading capitalist states of the world as completely counter-revolutionary and in need of suppression.  Thus, even in its own history, the Communist Party of China has gone down 'alternative' paths that would have been considered highly inappropriate to discuss, even within living memory.

You can see the easy step from thinking about time travel to challenging the current regime, whether to argue that the more Maoist era or the Imperial era or the brief periods of democracy were better than the current state.  Of course, the kind of question that the Chinese regime fears most is 'what if the democracy movement of Tiananmen Square had not been suppressed in 1989?' and other similar ones about Mao being ousted or the Chinese Civil War having a different outcome, all things that may allow people to think that an alternative path would have been better for the country's people. 

China has not been alone in having such concerns.  When the National Curriculum for the UK was launched in 1992, the history section of it instructed teachers specifically not to even suggest that any time period or country was better to live in than the UK at the time.  The Conservative government was seemingly as insecure as the current Chinese government. 

It is interesting that the two greatest Powers in the world at the moment, the USA and China are the ones who are most nervous about any speculation that their histories could have turned out very differently to how they did.  In the USA pressure tends to come by brow-beating or dismissal as irrelevant.  In China, a totalitarian dictatorship which practices extensive censorship, the approach is much more direct.  However, in my view this only adds value to the role of counter-factual analysis. After all, if the Chinese government sees counter-factual speculation as potentially such a threatening tool, one leveraging greater democracy and liberty in the country, to the extent that movies even speculating about it must be censored, then it has some real potency beyond mere entertainment.

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 Contradictions of China

It is no surprise that China has become such a potent force in the 21st century world.  Even Napoleon characterised the country as being a sleeping giant even more in his times of the late 18th and early 19th century.  It can easily be argued that China would have assumed its role of a Power in the world far sooner if it had not had a string of poor rulers and policies which have disrupted its economy and led to starvation and millions of deaths.  China was a victim of imperialism both in the 19th century from European powers notably the British, French and Germans and in the 20th century from the Japanese conquest of much of the country 1931-45.  However, it has long had the largest army in the world and exploded its first atomic bomb in 1964 and its first hydrogen bomb in 1967.  It was a superpower alongside the USA and USSR but aside from small conflicts with the USSR which fortunately did not escalate into anything larger, its focus was generally internally, especially when the ideology and internecine fighting of the Cultural Revolution 1966-76 disrupted so much of the economy and society of China.

With the death of Mao Zedong and leaders from the era of the final phase of the revolution of 1945-50, China began to look out into the wider world and effectively became a Communist state with a capitalist economy.  Its huge resources notably of workers meant that it was destined to always be a strong player in the world an if it had not been for Mao's insanities it may have reached this position in the 1960s rather than the 1980s and 1990s.  What has not changed is the political structure which has overseen this vast economic growth.  There has been the liberalisation of things such as where people are allowed to live, necessary to allow the rural-urban migration which has brought cheap workers to the cities though periodically older regulations are enforced to clear out slums.  Anyone who has done business in China knows that influence with leading local members of the Chinese Communist Party is vital for achieving anything.  This political power over economic activity unsurprisingly, as in so many other states, has led to corruption.  Again periodically the corrupt are purged (often facing the death penalty) in some propaganda seeking attempt to reassert the supposed values of Communism but this does nothing to reverse how corruption is an integral part of the economic boom of China.  Of course, there is a lot of ingenuity and hard work done in China, most of which was choked off in the past, so it is unsurprising that the economy prospers.

Despite all the economic shifts in China it remains a totalitarian state that Mao would still recognise.  The suppression of the Tianamen Square protests in 1989, continued occupation of Tibet, suppression of the Falun Gong religion and of Uighur nationalists are all characteristic of a country unwilling to tolerate any political shift especially from ethnic and religious minorities.  People forget that China has 56 ethnic minorities which are highly over-represented in terms of absolute poverty, i.e. earning less than equivalent to US$1 per day.  Thus, while people become multi-millionaires in Shanghai, in Xinjiang province they are as poor as in Third World countries.  Despite the strength of its military and its vast economy, which is now the second strongest in the world, China continues to pretend somehow that it is a poor, defenceless countries bullied by the old Western imperial states.

This dichotomy between China's real strength and how it expects to be treated in the world has come out on a number of occasions recently. In the 1960s, despite being a Communist superpower, China tried to present itself as being in the 'non-aligned' group of nations.  However, it was as happy to spread its ideology, a rural-focused brand of Communism to developing countries, feeling it was more appropriate than the heavy industry focused Soviet Communism.  Similarly these days China still portrays itself as a victim of imperialism, though the last imperial forces left in 1945 and even if you count the British and Portuguese leaving Hong Kong and Macao as late as 1997 they have all gone now.  Chinese people become indignant if you suggest that actually China is behaving like a (neo-)imperial power.  They characterise their investment especially in African states like Zimbabwe and Sudan as being utterly different from the neo-imperialism through investment that the USA, Britain, France and the USSR adopted in the 1970s, when in fact it is no different.  Chinese staff supervise Zimbabwean workers on Chinese projects in the country.  The Chinese steps to secure raw materials across the world even in developed countries does not differ from the efforts of the UK, France and the USA to secure natural resource supplies.  However, always, China says that it is different and is still a victim of imperialism when in fact it is now an imperialist power itself.  Do not even mention the Spratly Islands where the imperialism is even more old fashioned.

China is a totalitarian state.  People seem to keep forgetting that so it is worthwhile emphasising.  It has possibly over 1.6 million prisoners, second only to the USA, with 2.3 million, which has about a quarter as many people.  The difference for China is that the 'crimes' of many of these people are political and they are being 're-educated'.  Bizarrely unlike the US system that seems to think people cannot be changed, the Chinese prison system believes that they can, though to the bulk of us the methodology would appear like brainwashing and certainly involves torture which the USA has only comparatively recently adopted as a method and then only for its political prisoners.  The US population should be utterly ashamed that, as a supposedly liberal democracy, they can be bracketed with a totalitarian regime in this respect.  Anyway, China has censorship, it always had.  With the expansion of the internet promoted in a large part by the rapid economic growth the country has experienced in the past three decades, this censorship has had to expand to the internet.  Singapore has struggled to maintain its censorship system when dealing with the internet.  China with its vast resources has been more successful using a combination of electronic means such as the police officers that appear on screen when you access certain websites, to arresting blogging dissidents, to compelling Google to ban the searching of certain phrases.  Now, in its hacking into Google accounts of dissidents and the launching of a sophisticated cyber attack the Chinese authorities have even angered Google which is now holding back on introducing a new generation of mobile phones to the country.  The Chinese have found that there are sometimes limits even to the powerful renminbi (the Chinese currency often still called the yuan).  The Chinese have not said 'well, we are a totalitarian dictatorship, so we censor' again they have whined that they are victims of imperialism.  They complain that there is an imbalanced 'global information order' again in favour of the West which is trying to impose its culture on China.  In fact China is giving heart to those who want to censor internet activity (of course, leading this is the USA with its desire for a war on terror in all facets) and the UK which has long monitored all email traffic.  China whines that it is being bullied, when in fact we are suffering as a result of the dictatorial, suppressive measures it is pressing on the world.

At the recent Copenhagen climate change conference, powerful China was again portraying itself as the weak country in need of support from the supposedly rich West (even though China's economy is now more powerful than all Western states bar the USA).  It was seeking financial support for steps to ameliorate the impact of climate change, despite China having US$2.272 trillion in foreign currency reserves in September 2009.  This tactic help divert attention from China's appalling record on industrial damage to the environment which has caused poverty and disrupted the lives of millions of its citizens and no doubt contributes heavily to global climate change.  The fact that the government ceased traffic flow during the Beijing Olympics because the air pollution was so severe, indicates the impact of China's booming industrial and transport sectors that have barely been affected by the global recession.  China should be one of the industrialised states looking to reduce its pollution but instead it whines that it is only a developing country which needs support to do this.  The amount of money the USA owes China is sufficient for China to effectively buy the whole US economy and close down every factory and stop every vehicle there, that is not a country which needs help reducing its pollution impact on the world, it is one that needs to be leading the way.

China is immensely strong in so many ways, but it seems constantly to pretend that it is the victim and rebuff any claims that it should comply with international standards on the basis this is bullying by other states.  I have not even mentioned its unwillingness to comply with copyright law.  There is unsurprisingly, given the nature of the regime, an immense arrogance from China that it can behave with impunity in the global context and that its stated values, i.e. censorship, freedom to exploit people and the environment, imprisonment on issues of conscience, continued occupation of a foreign country, should not even be challenged by the world community.  Of course, many powerful states engage in these kinds of policies, but perhaps the irritation with China is that it somehow pretends that it is the best society and that any criticism is based on myths and motivated by a desire to imperially suppress China.  It attacks other states for in fact things it is doing itself.  I guess this is one reason why we find taking official China's statements so hard.  They are both hypocritical and seek to conceal atrocities that we all know are going on beneath an incredibly pathetic line that China is weak and a victim of bullies.  All of us who support freedom of thought, contact, communication, conscience, must keep challenging China (as well as the USA, UK and other states that are doing wrong) and one first step is for the Chinese state to actually admit it is a bully, not a victim.

Is the Enlightenment Over?

The Age of Enlightenment is seen as roughly the period from about 1688 to 1778/1789/1815 in which there was a shift away from superstition and belief in magic to a greater faith in rational thought and experimentation to determine how the world worked. Behind this were developments in philosophy with its emaphsis on 'reason' and also a move from seeing society as properly based on hierarchy. Out of this we get the first moves to democracy as we know it in the modern sense and also the sense of 'rights of man' (application to women took longer) and that everyone was equal under the law, no longer were nobles and monarch exempt. It did not achieve everything over night and things such as the French Revolution (1789) which began based on these precepts soon ran off the rails and turned to violence. The Enlightenment did begin to break down prejudices and in countries like Britain legal discrimination against Catholics and Jews began to be reduced and then abolished in the mid-19th century. However, as we know that did not stop religious intolerance and anti-Semitism persisting. The important thing about the Enlightenment was that it gave the intellectual basis (and in the case of France and the USA examples of constitutions and bills of rights) for a lot of the things that people aspired towards in a liberal demoncracy in the 20th century and so we saw things like votes for all people, civil rights for minorities, equality for women and welfare states. All of this took decades, but without the Age of Enlightenment we would be in an age in which we would think most things were controlled by magic and that it was right that nobles should pay no taxes and have the right of life and death over those lower down the hierarchy (the bulk of the population) who would be squeezed for taxes with no protection if they fell ill or lost their jobs.

My view is that the post-Enlightenment phase in which the ideas put forward slowly and painfully were put into reality, is coming to an end. Why do I think this? You might say that the mass wars of the 20th century, the Holocaust, racist killings, etc. showed that the Enlightenment was not well established. I agree that the Second World War was certainly the period when Enlightenment values were put on the line. In 1938 very few countries in the world had democracy. However, it was Britain, the USA, France that won the war and their values became dominant in large chunks of the world. Their ally was the USSR which of course had a Communist system which though rational (in contrast to the Nazis who had emphasised things like occultism) was totally opposed to the human rights aspects of the Enlightenment through purges and prison camps and with a very hierarchical system. Of course the societies of Britain, USA and France were not perfect, there was privilege, but generally people living in these countries and those that they influenced after 1945 had better conditions than at any previous time in history. We are never going to have Heaven on Earth, but there are degrees of quality of life and we should be able to get better ones than worse ones.

I believe, however, that sixty-three years after Enlightenment values won in about half the world they are being snuffed out and that when I die, it will be in a World that is far less liberal, equal and certainly less rational than the one I was born into forty years ago. On what basis do I make this judgement? Let us look at the broad facts. A quarter of the World's population lives in China a country without democracy, with a very hierarachical society in which free speech and free association (key tenets of the Enlightenment) are banned. The country has never really had democracy bar a few attempts in the 1910s almost a century ago. Torture and execution are common place. Around a third of all the executions in the World each year (about 900) are carried out in China and these are the ones we know about. Censorship is extensive and sophisticated. Despite greater internet access coming to almost every small village across China blocking of particular sites is handled very successfully as journalists covering the Olympics soon found out. In additional internet providers and browser companies seem quite happy to comply with China's steps to block access. A couple of decades agon China was seen pretty much as a backwater, but its vast economic growth cannot be ignored now and companies and countries are falling over themselves to collaborate with the Chinese dictatorship because it is so profitable. I have commented on how the US boycotted the 1980 Moscow Olympics but was happy to attend the 2008 Beijing Olympics even though China's behaviour is as bad probably worse than the USSR's was.

China has a relativist view of human rights. This argues that in certain societies 'rights' have a different meaning. In China they talk more about duty to the society as a whole. They argue that things like free expression and free association, freedom from torture, the freedom to have a fair trial, are not actually appropriate rights for their society. This is just utter rubbish. You cannot say that the people of China do not suffer pain and deprivation any differently to the people of the UK or USA. There are absolute freedoms which have been articulated by the West but in fact are about being a human and having nerve endings and a brain and having emotional connections to loved ones and wanting to be able to express ourselves. China's line, saying that somehow the Chinese are not engineered to want or have these things, is in fact an extreme form of racialism on the part of the Chinese government. Chinese people are no different to any other person on the planet in needing these things. Unfortunately rather than arguing that the UN Declaration of Human Rights has universal application to every single human, places like the USA are undermining this severely saying, that 'well, US citizens might have these rights but not people we have abducted and are currently torturing'. Rights do come with duties, but then again the US wants its troops exempt from war crimes indictments. If the most powerful democracy in the World is pandering this line, how can we not expect the world soon to be all adopting a relativist position on human rights, one that suits the powerful and not the ordinary people?

In 1986 the concept of state-backed terrorism was when US President Ronald Reagan sent aircraft to bomb targets in Libya. Similarly US President George W. Bush ordered the invasion of Iraq in 2003 because the country was supposedly harbouring Al-Qaeda operatives. China we know is going out of its way to support harsh regimes: Sudan where there has been attempts at genocide in Darfur, Zimbabwe - where Robert Mugabe has long ran a harsh dictatorship, Iran - a theocracy which the USA is concerned about in terms of its nuclear developments and threats to stability in the region. All of these things are ignored in the rush to capture more Chinese trade. The USA is another side to the problem. Since 1941 the USA portrayed itself as the leading defender of democracy and Enlightenment values, though this often led to it backing dictatorships particularly in Latin America, South-East Asia and the Middle East. However, it was a functioning democracy that seemed to allow opportunity for people and after the bitter battles, its apartheid-style laws were dismantled. Now internally and externally it seems to have a different position. I have noted before how President Bush has felt the ultra-wealthy to be his core constituency and John McCain who looks likely to be his successor is no different. His vice-president Sarah Palin loves shooting things and believes in creationism being taught in schools. Fundamentalism since he rose in the Iranian Revolution of 1979 has been feared, but of course it has been bubbling up in the Christian world as well as the Islamic. Since Ronald Reagan came to power you have seen the Christian fundamentalists get stronger and stronger. This leads to policies such as teaching creationism (which believes the World and its life were created in six days in 4004 BCE, so after the start of Ancient Egypt, let alone the dinosaurs) and abstinence in sex as a form of contraception in a country with record levels of teenage pregnancies. The US welfare provision that there was has been neglected and means 40 million Americans are likely to be turned away from a hospital if they turn up with an emergency case. The last couple of decades have seen the chance of advancing in US society if you come from an ordinary background decrease. The USA is no longer a land of opportunity except for the very rich.

Like China, the USA does not believe in the rehabilitative nature of imprisonment it believes in punishment. Though the US population is about a fifth of China's, a quarter of all the prisoners in the world are held in US prisons (about 1 in 100 Americans are in prison). The number of US executions has risen steadily since the 1980s. The USA quite happily uses torture now in its supposed war on terrorism, even torturing foreign citizens it has abducted. How is this any different from China? Oh, the main difference is that China tends not to abduct people and also tends to only torture its own population. So, with the two most powerful countries in the world having no interest in Enlightenment values where does that leave the rest of us? Well of course a lot of the world is under military dictatorship of one kind or another. These flicker in and out of life as in Pakistan at the moment, but even when democracy can take hold it is often far from a true democracy and still works on the basis of corruption and hierarchy power. Other strong states such as Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia seem to have no interest in liberty and a willingness to use methods in terms of politics and legal processes which are abhorrent and originate from before the Enlightenment.

What about closer to home? Well the UK always follows US examples in preference to any other. We fly people to be tortured in US camps and seem to quite like the information the torture brings. Christian fundamentalism is catching on slower in the UK, primarily because the British loathe doing anything in a group bar for very short periods such as 90 minutes for a football match. About 4% of the UK population goes to church, we would rather queue up at a DIY store. In Britain we are Consumerist Fundamentalists and feel any constraint on our consumption as an assault on our 'religion'. However, faith schools are growing in number and the teaching of creationism is on the increase. Ironically the school at the end of my road teaches creationism but then gives dinosaur figurines to the boys as end-of-term gifts! Prejudice especially aimed at Poles is on the increase. We are set to have a government which like the American ones, is based on hierarchy and privilege. It is becoming almost impossible for ordinary people to afford to go to university and so many are being barred from getting what is now seen as the minimum for entering a decent job. If there was a referendum on these things we would have the death penalty, all police armed, use of torture for court cases, castration for sex offenders and repatriation of even third-generation immigrants immediately, the BNP which now has councillors in the Midlands, wants these things. It is only the politicians in Westminster brought up in the spirit of Enlightenment who are holding back this desire to return to the barbarity of the past. What happens when they retire and MPs who have only known the bigotry and violence of the 21st century come into office?

In my view we are seeing the end of the process which started with the Age of Enlightenment and are moving into a Dark Age. As in the early medieval period in Europe, we are going to see suffering, prejudice, persecution, violence, superstition, fear being the norms of our societies. No-one will have a 'right' to anything that they lack the power to snatch. We will be pushed around by the rich and the powerful in the way medieval peasants were. Life will be capricious and we will have nothing to defend us from it. We will all be potential victims of arbitrary law and terrifying punishment. All of these things are in place in China and are growing in Russia and the USA, that covers over 1.6 billon people, more than a quarter of the world. Many of the rest are not much better off. By 2038 it is quite likely that democracy and the rights that go with it will be as rare as they were in 1938.

What If Chairman Mao Zedong Had Died Earlier/Been Ousted from Power?

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

Respect the Difficulties of Escaping Tyranny

Sorry that this is another posting prompted by an article in 'The Guardian', but these days with work calming down and me trying to stay off the roads to save on petrol, it is one major source of input into my thinking. Yesterday I read a very moving article by Julia Hollander about her great-grandfather, Moriz Hollander, a Jewish owner of distilleries in Austria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Yugoslavia in the 1920s and 1930s. In her family this man is portrayed as foolish, one who invested poorly and was stupid enough not to leave Austria (which was absorbed into Nazi Germany in 1938) before he was carted off the Treblinka death camp where he was murdered. Julia Hollander, uncovered letters from him right from 1916 until February 1939, just seven months before war broke out. His wife and children were able to escape but he was later taken to Theresienstadt, a 'model' ghetto (which at first took elderly Jews like Moriz and those who had fought in the First World War) the Nazis had built in lands they had taken from Czechoslovakia in March 1939 and later was moved on to Treblinka.

From these letters it was clear that Julia's family had a very distorted view of this man. He had managed to keep his business going and even began moving into new lines right through the worst of the Depression. Austria was particularly hit, the collapse in 1931 of its Kreditanstalt bank in 1931 triggered off economic chaos across Central and Eastern Europe and mass unemployment. To maintain a business in those circumstances especially one dealing in luxury items was a very big challenge and thousands of businesses completely collapsed. As to escaping, this is an issue I will come on to later. However, though Moriz Hollander did not get away himself, all his family were able to get to Britain with sufficient funds to live on. He brought fake papers for his wife Minna that showed she was not a Jew, which allowed her to travel when Jews had had their papers taken from them. He also divorced his wife, so breaking her link to his Jewish background. All of these were measured steps to make his wife and children safer. Without him working so hard all of Julia Hollander's family would not now exist, so I agree with her, they are very hard on the memory of her great-grandfather.

Now from this story, I will turn to broader issues and especially how we look at people fleeing oppression. As is commonly known, the average British person despises asylum seekers, lumping them in with economic migrants and seeing both as parasites on the British economy. To some extent I think this is added to by an unstated unease at the courage of these people who have abandoned everything and gone through difficult circumstances to reach safety. These people have a 'get up and go' that most British people lack. There is also an unease at facing up to the horrors going on around the world, people generally do not want to think about torture or having members of your family disappear in the middle of the night and never knowing how they died. For the average British person, fortunately, these things are generally unknown and in most cases people do not want to know. Despite this hostility to asylum seekers there is a patronising attitude when looking back, especially to those who fell under Nazi Germany: 'why did they simply not leave?' too many people ask. Well there are many reasons.

The first is that Jews arriving in Britain in the 1930s received as much hostility as asylum seekers today. As foreigners anyway they were looked on suspiciously and anti-Semitism whilst not reaching the scale of that of Germany and Austria, was alive in Britain as had been seen in the anti-Semitic riots of 1911 in Wales, and across the country in 1915 and 1917, let alone the actions of Mosley's blackshirts in the 1930s. In addition, there was a great deal of what would not be called 'institutional racism', especially in the civil service, which made life difficult for refugees. Banks also exploited the refugees. Many began taking money out of Germany once Hitler came to power and with the pound, though increasingly rivalled by the dollar at the time, being one of the strongest currencies in the world, it was natural that they brought their money to London. Of course the banks levied special charges on them that sapped their savings and once war broke out and it was clear that the bulk of Jewish account holders from continental Europe were never going to collect their funds, they basically drained all of this accounts with impunity. Money is always a big issue. When people know you need to flee they will exploit you to the full. Even if you get to a country of asylum often you will be barred from working and you have support yourself and your family somehow. Your assets, like your house, equipment, most of your belongings have to be abandoned. This is why many of the people who escaped Germany in the 1930s were wealthy because it was only they who could afford to do so, ordinary middle class and certainly working class people were in no position to do that. It is a challenge to take yourself out of an established situation for a life of poverty elsewhere, especially when we are talking of a time where there was no free health care. Even today the UK is making it increasingly hard for people seeking asylum to come to the UK and survive. There is also an issue of language. I have lived abroad, it is loathsome, you really yearn to have someone speak in your own language, to read or watch something that you understand immediately rather than having to go through a schoolroom exercise each time, simply to understand. People in the country you go to make no allowances for you as a foreigner coming to live as opposed to being a tourist, both in terms of language and customs. Civil servants and business people always assume their ways of doing things are blatantly obvious and understandable, well of course often they are not even to the local population let alone for someone from abroad. So, do not patronise those who stay behind. They are not really 'staying' behind, they simply have no ability to leave.

The other thing, is that it is easy with hindsight to argue that 'well they must have known what was going to happen'. Again this is foolish. At the moment, the UK is not moving to being a Nazi state, but it is becoming quickly authoritarian. Do I leave the UK now? No-one in Canada, the Netherlands, Sweden, etc. would give me asylum at the moment. It is not when you judge that the country has become a tyranny it is when the officials of foreign countries do. The UK has an appalling record of sending people back to regimes like Zimbabwe or Saudi Arabia or China and a score of others, which the average person knows are horrific but to the government are not quite dangerous enough to warrant granting asylum. So when should I leave? When police start rounding up people in the night and taking them away to unknown destinations? You could say, yes, but of course until my life is in direct threat then again foreign governments would not even consider my application. By that time, it is too late. Either I am disappeared or my passport is taken away. I can probably no longer hold down a job and so lack the money I need to flee. With the onset of an authoritarian state it is always far worse for the people experiencing it than it is perceived by outsiders whether in that country itself or most certainly abroad. The other factor, is of course, is that we are optimists, we always hope it will not be as bad as it turns out to be. These days when genocide seems an annual occurrence, we are more likely to be aware. In the 1930s the only known genocide had been of the Armenians by the Turks in 1915 a model that did not seem applicable to Germany at all, despite the rhetoric of the Nazis. No-one could have envisaged the industrialised slaughter of millions of people in the way that occurred from 1942 onwards. Even then that was nine years after the Nazi state had been established and as I have noted before there was no direct march to the death camps, it was a twisted and at times ad hoc path.

So to flee a country you gamble your whole livelihood, your standing, your money, your security on the chance that the regime will become so extreme and you will fall within its oppression. This is a hard gamble to take especially when you have a family who may not see things the same as you do. The woman living in my house has no belief in my warnings about the UK becoming authoritarian despite the fact she has relatives across the world to whom she could flee, something I lack. I cannot give up this house and liquidate my assets without her approval and so I cannot even enter into the gamble. Now, back in Nazi Germany or Fascist Italy or Bolshevik Russia or Francoist Spain or Salazarian Portugal, or a hundred other dictatorships, millions of people had to face up to such decisions. Is it any suprise that in fact the numbers of people seeking asylum compared to the numbers of people facing oppression is really small. China has a population of 1.3 billion people, even if one thousandth of them decided to flee the oppression, that would be 1.3 million people. The number of people who can or do not escape always far outweighs those who stay and suffer.

In my view asylum seekers should be commended for achieving what they do, for the sake of themselves and their families. Britain has long been a refuge for those seeking safety, but in the past 100 years the attitudes have hardened. Maybe we have been spoilt by long periods of democracy and low levels of violence. We are now too happy to make deals with horrific tyrannies such as China and Saudi Arabia and to despise the people who flee from those states rather than the rulers who have forced them to go. I am glad Julia Hollander has recovered the true history of her great-grandfather and I hope we can move to a similar more positive perception of those seeking asylum rather treat them with almost as much hostility as the people they have fled.

Comment Is Free? Radio Presenters and Bigotry

As regular readers know I drive a lot, around 360-400 miles per week so I listen to a lot of radio. I am not interested in talk radio, I want music with the occasional witty comment thrown in between the songs. However, even on mainstream local music radio there seems to be an increasing desire by the presenters to make comments which I feel are increasingly bigoted. I protested about a couple of presenters on one local radio station whose area I used to pass through regularly. Often they would complain about immigration and how people from abroad were talking school places and how every doctor they met in a hospital was a foreigner and so on. I know this view is popular in the UK at the present, but it is not the kind of thing that I want rammed down my throat every day I could hear it in any bar or cafe that I choose to visit. My complaint was dismissed as I was the only person who had complained and one of the senior staff at the radio station came back at me all indignant saying my complaint was an insult given all the work the station did to promote racial equality. I had no dispute with their policies off air, but in fact that suggested the management should give more guidance to their presenting staff whose declarations on air not only offend but are clearly out of step with the ethics the management feel the station has. Of course I took the response that remained open to me and simply stopped listening to that station.

Back in the same area today I listened to one of the original station's rivals and their presenter tries to set up controversial topics though generally quite safe, such as who do people think killed Princess Diana. The one that infuriated me and showed the situation in which such presenters should not embark on making comments without doing some research. The presenter thinks that the ritual around the Olympic Flame is silly anyway and yet he was more angered by the pro-Tibet protests made during its passage especially in France. He said that no-one should make a fuss about Tibet as it has been Chinese for thousands of years and anyway was a backward, theocratic state, so in terms of human rights was hardly better than China itself. Of course Tibet fell from being an empire itself in the 8th to 11th centuries and formed part of the Mongol, not the Chinese, Empire from the 13th to 16th centuries. Whilst the Chinese and British Empires chipped away at the Tibetan Empire through the 19th century, with the British forcing it out of Nepal, Tibet only really became a vassal state of China in 1856 and its military were expelled in 1895. In 1904-11 Tibet was invaded by the British. Subsequently the Chinese asserted their claims to Tibet but in the warlord period of 1911-27 were unable to reassert it. By the 1940s Tibet was acting as an independent state with relations with Britain, India and the USSR amongst others.

Tibet was invaded by China in 1950-1 and has effectively been an occupied country ever since. This event may have occurred a year before the presenter was born (though the fighting for Tibet did not end until 1959) but it is hardly thousands of years of domination. Ireland was controlled by Britain for far longer and yet no-one would complain that its battles for independence were not justified in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Cornwall has been controlled by England since the 10th century and been part of the Kingdom of England since the 11th century and yet that does not stop many people campaigning for it to become separate. Similarly Scotland was bound to England in 1707 and yet again people are campaigning for independence and have gained more than the Tibetans have for their area of China.

As for human rights every citizen in the world has a right to protest about the abuse of their fellow humans, that is not a local or a national issue, it is a global one and no-one should shy away from protesting against the bad treatment of others. The British seem more willing often to protest over the rights for animals in other countries than they are over the rights of people. China's poor human rights record has now been sustained for almost 60 years under the same regime making it far more enduring and affecting millions more people, say, than the regime of Saddam Hussein (1979-2003) or the Taliban in Afghanistan (1996-2001) both of which the USA felt it right to overthrow.

Why are the British so happy to almost literally kow-tow to the Chinese? It comes down to the philosophy that 'might is right' and might not in military terms because as was seen in the 1980s Western governments were happy to challenge the nuclear-armed superpower the USSR, but might in terms of economic power which China has cannily added to its arsenal which already included the largest army in terms of troops, nuclear weapons, satellites and missiles. I wonder if the radio presenter has shares in a company involved in China or seeking to invest there. I accept that the government of Tibet could hardly be seen as enlightened and the world is not sympathetic to theocracies. However, importantly it was the government of Tibet for Tibetans, not a foreign colonising power as China is. Once the Tibetan government is restored then we can begin talking about changing the country's political system. However, a government in exile will always find it impossible to alter to reflect democratic demands and if Tibet had remained independent it is most likely it would have evolved politically anyway. Currently its system is frozen in the 1950s and that has to change.

Radio presenters do have a duty to stimulate thought, though probably not on music radio. He could go on to Radio 4 or some other talk station and fit in far better. What they have to realise is that they do wield a lot of power and the attitudes they express influence thousands of people very easily. Given the widespread condemnation of China's role in Tibet and human rights record it is terrible that such a barbaric approach receives airtime support in parts of the UK with no opportunity to be challenged.