This post is to keep you, my much-appreciated readers, up to date with my plans for Revolution Under Siege, my ongoing series on the Russian Civil War.
First, thanks to everyone who’s read it (or listened to it), shared it, posted or said good things about it.
I was proud that this year I got out of a Eurocentric mould and wrote about the war in Central Asia. Series Four will follow late this year and in the early part of next year, and it will focus on the seismic events of 1920. In the first quarter the war starts groaning and grinding to a halt, and we see the exhausted peoples of the Soviet Union at last turn toward the long-postponed tasks of reconstruction. But in spring the war somehow lurches forward again with the invasion of Ukraine by Poland and the revival of the White Guards in Crimea. It grinds on full-force nearly to the end of the year. The endurance of the population is stretched past breaking point. At the same time, with the main White Armies broken, the war spins out in all directions, sometimes in skirmishes, sometimes in massive campaigns, from Siberia to Persia.
The opening episode will pick up where my series on 1919 left off, with the headlong retreat of the Whites – and with a particular focus on the murderous anti-Semitic pogroms which they committed as they cleared out.
I’ve rewritten and updated the Introduction and the first two episodes of Series 1, Red Guards and White Guards. Partly it’s a redraft but there’s a lot of new material there, most from an excellent source which I’ve at last got around to reading in the last few weeks, Notes of a Red Guard by Eduard M. Dune, edited by Koenker and Smith. Here is an eyewitness who can tell us about the incredible outpouring of creativity and energy in a worker-controlled factory in 1917, about what it was like to fight in Moscow during the October Revolution, and about how the Red Guards defeated the Cossacks and the Whites in South Russia in early 1918. And that’s just the first few chapters.
Today I started to look at a memoir from the other side, Asian Odyssey by Dmitri Alioshin. So far it’s proving to be pretty useful as well. I’m hoping it can give me an insight into the collapse of the Whites in Siberia, and the reconstitution of a part of the remnant into the absolute horror show that was the regime of the ‘mad baron’ Ungern-Sternberg. So far, I’ve learned that if you were a White Russian officer in Siberia in 1918-19 and fancied having your very own Colt 45, you just had to send out Ivan, your orderly, to pickpocket one from an American soldier.
That’s what the 1919 Review is all about – practical, up-to-date life advice.
When I was ten, eleven, twelve years old, a lot of adults were worried that games like Grand Theft Auto 3 would warp our young minds and turn us violent. But for me, while GTA was fun, the violence was so obviously out-there, so outrageous, I didn’t have any trouble distinguishing between it and reality.
GTA was set on normal city streets. The props were cars and pedestrians and buildings. But you were stealing a car, running people over and shooting down police helicopters. The familiar and normal environment acted as a foil to the crazy violence. You could walk home from your friend’s house after playing GTA and you knew that this was the real world in front of you, and that it didn’t operate by the same rules. There’s a car; but you can’t run up to it, press Triangle to break in and hotwire it, and accelerate.
What about a game with a more exotic setting? What about a game set in an alternate-history version of the Cold War? You’re young. You haven’t covered this in school, or read any books about it. Command and Conquer: Red Alert 2 is your first encounter with the Soviet Union. You know it’s a videogame, it’s at least to some extent fantasy, but you have no real-life counterpart to measure it up against.
Looking back after having read a lot and written a bit, I have a new perspective on Red Alert 2 (like a few months back when I revisited Orwell, except that in my age group, Red Alert probably had more influence than 1984). If we’re going to talk about warping minds, forget GTA. Here is a game that planted deep in my brain a funhouse-mirror perspective on history and geopolitics. Red Alert 2 is just extraordinary.
On the face of it, this might seem to be a finicky post where I nit-pick a fun game and lecture everyone about history. But really I have a secret agenda here. I’m writing this so that I have an excuse to talk length about a game from the early ‘000s about which I am incurably nostalgic to this day.
Sidebar: For those who don’t know, Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2 was a strategy game released in 2000 by Westwood Studios. The story, implausible at literally every turn, revolves around the Cold War, time travel and alternate histories. And it starts with the classic alternate history: in 1996’s Red Alert, Einstein invents time travel and goes back to the 1920s to kill Hitler. But he returns to a present where Stalin is conquering Europe in Hitler’s place (yes, an implicit endorsement of Hitler. And no, they never address this). In 2000’s Red Alert 2, the Soviets have another go at world conquest, launching a sudden surprise attack on the US. In Red Alert 3, the once-again defeated Soviets make their own time machine, but by defeating America they inadvertently end up creating a timeline where Japan is challenging them for world domination. In terms of tone, Red Alert tries to keep a straight face, and Red Alert 3 fully takes the piss. 2 is in the middle, ie, tongue-in-cheek.
Red Alert 2 is a good game, for its time. It’s easy to pick up and play, but there is a certain versatility and depth in the range of units. The fact that the environments are just slightly interactive – put guys in buildings, blow up bridges – goes a long way. The colours are bright, the unit models visually distinct and full of character. The fast food restaurant is called ‘McBurger Kong.’ The campaigns hold up well for variety, challenge and playability. The score, composed by Frank Klepacki, is part industrial, part funk, part Red Army Choir, all brilliant.
But the real strength of this game is its attitude. Unlike its predecessor Tiberian Sun, which is on paper a very similar game, Red Alert 2 doesn’t take itself seriously. To everything bad I’m going to say about it here, Red Alert 2 can mostly get away with shrugging its shoulders, grinning and claiming that it was only joking.
The sexism in the live-action cut-scenes – all that creepy pandering to 13-year-old boys – was obvious to me even at the time, and I don’t think there’s much to dissect. It’s right there.
Instead, let’s talk about Iraqi desolators, Libyan demolition trucks and Cuban terrorists.
The Allies. Reagan, Thatcher and… De Gaulle?
There goes the neighbourhood!
In the game’s skirmish mode, the player can choose from a list of countries. One of the playable countries in the Soviet bloc is Iraq. Sure – Iraq is communist. Why not. The Iraqi soldiers are identical to the Soviet soldiers, right down to the cartoon Slavic accent. The only difference is that each country gets a special unit; in the case of Iraq, you get the Desolator. This charming little fellow shoots a green beam of radiation at people, zapping them instantly into writhing emerald goo. He also has a special move, where he contaminates a massive area around him, turning it green and killing everyone on it.
Years later I would learn that it was the United States which used depleted uranium munitions in Iraq (before and after this game was released) leading to cancers and birth defects. A few years after this game was made, the US would invade Iraq based on the lie that the country had chemical and nuclear weapons. When the Desolator shouts his cheeky catchphrase before turning the land around him a lethal green, it’s a little cultural artefact of this big lie, a lie which in real life covered a whole country in that green shroud and caused incalculable suffering for the Iraqi people. In real life, the US unleashed desolation on Iraq. In this game, it’s the other way around.
Allied jet pack troopers, Soviet nuclear missile
Vamos, Muchachos!
The various countries in the Soviet Bloc have one thing in common: they are all countries that were at odds with the United States in the late 1990s. So we’ve got Libya and Cuba in there as well. The Libyans have a Demolition Truck – ‘One way trip!’ – which blows itself up in a small nuclear explosion; the Cubans have a little guy called a Terrorist – ‘Vamos, muchachos!’ – who blows himself up along with anyone near him.
But it was Cuba that was targeted by terrorists funded and encouraged by the United States, not the other way around. Cuban suicide bombing is not and has never been a thing.
The Libya thing, in hindsight, just makes me sad, especially with the most recent disaster. Unlike with Iraq, I don’t even have anything slightly clever to say. Libya was once the country with the highest standard of living in all of Africa. Then came the US-backed overthrow of Gaddafi in 2011. They dragged him out of a ditch and killed him in a most brutal manner, and the remarks made for the occasion by then-Secretary of State Hilary Clinton (‘we came, we saw, he died’) make the bombastically cruel Soviet leaders in this videogame seem like sensitive souls by comparison. Since then Libya has been transformed into a conflict-ridden country. The EU gives them tons of money to lock up refugees in desperate conditions, just to appease the racists back home.
The Desolator and the Terrorist have one important thing in common: they are tiny cultural artefacts of imperial projection. What do I mean by projection? I’ll put it this way: if Westwood had decided to include Vietnam as a playable country, they would have been depicted burning down American homesteads with napalm, or withering the forests with Agent Orange. In the pop culture of the imperialist aggressor, its own historic crimes are pinned on its victims.
9/11
Adam Curtis’ documentary HyperNormalisation (01:39:35-01:43:00) includes a remarkable montage of scenes from movies that look exactly like footage from 9/11 – only these movies were all made before 9/11. Someone tell Adam Curtis about Red Alert 2. Released just a year before 9/11, the game’s advertising featured the twin towers prominently, meanced by, among other things, aeroplanes. The first mission in the Soviet campaign involves destroying the Pentagon, and a couple of missions later you are in New York, where you can occupy or destroy the World Trade Centre. The zeitgeist which Curtis identifies in HyperNormalisation is perfectly captured in Red Alert 2.
‘Oooooh… dream baby dream… dream baby dream…’
Coalition of the Willing V Axis of Evil
The USSR’s three playable allies are Iraq, Cuba and Libya, while the USA’s equivalent are Korea, Britain, Germany and France (see the map below from Wikimedia Commons). With the exception of Korea (reunified offscreen), this world war sees Africa, the Middle East and Latin America take on Europe and North America. It’s the former colonies against the colonisers (a massive piece of historical context which was missing from my 11-year-old head). It’s a fantasy where what really happened is reversed, ie, the masses of Africa, Asia and Latin America commit atrocities in the USA, a contrived scenario to justify the colonisers getting to slaughter the peoples of the colonies all over again.
Simply reversing the projection, of course, wouldn’t accurately reflect the Cold War. Why not include the Afghan Mujahideen among the ‘Allies’? What would their special unit be? Where is Nelson Mandela in the pro-USSR coalition?
Your command is my wish
This imperial projection is most obvious with an unforgettable character named Yuri (The Soviets are a surprisingly informal bunch. Top brass are simply addressed as Yuri, Vladimir and Natasha – no surnames, no patronymics). Yuri employs psychic powers and elaborate machines to control people’s minds. This is a developed part of the world and story, with mind-controlled communist giant squids terrorising the high seas and a US president taken over by a psychic beacon. Yuri’s acolytes are developed into a colourful and horrifying faction in their own right in the expansion, Yuri’s Revenge, which takes the irony up a few notches and gets the Allies and Soviets to join forces and have a joint moon landing.
Ten thousand volts, coming up!
Tesla, now the name of a company which is a bastion of US capitalism, features in Red Alert 2 as an alternative energy source favoured by the Soviets. We see the Soviets weaponise Tesla energy through ‘Tesla Coils’ and ‘Tesla Troopers’ who electrocute people and even turn the Eiffel Tower into a kind of pylon.
All this hits you differently after you’ve read about MKUltra, or The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein. Mind control experiments were actually the preserve of the United States. The fact that US prisoners in Korea were subjected to lectures aimed at recruiting them to the communist cause was interpreted by a hysterical US media and political class as ‘mind control.’ But the interest of US state forces such as the CIA was piqued; they experimented with electric shock therapy and LSD. These experiments failed to produce mind control, but left people dead or severely brain damaged.
In this game, the Soviets have nukes; the Americans do not. The Soviet nuclear reactor is a nod to the Chernobyl disaster – here we’re dealing with something from actual history, so okay. The Soviets had nuclear weapons, and tested them in very harmful and irresponsible ways. But the Allies did those things too, and also killed a quarter of a million innocent people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. More projection.
Sometimes the cold war stereotyping is so obvious and crass it goes beyond offensive, and sometimes it flies under the radar because it’s larded in a protective wrapping of irony. Other times it is just bigoted, plain and simple. For example, there is another colourful unit type called Crazy Ivan, who cackles maniacally as he plants bombs on things. You don’t have to be a raving tankie to see the problem with this.
Jusht give me a plan
But it’s satire, right? Surely they make just as much fun of the Americans? No, not at all. General Carville has a bit of a hillbilly affect (‘his forces are rompin’ through the country like an angry bull at a Texas rodeo’). The Spy talks like a caricature of Sean Connery. But that’s as far as it goes.
The contrast is clear even if you never watch the cutscenes. The Soviets use nuclear and chemical weapons, electric shocks, cartoon dynamite, human cloning and mind control – evil, in other words. Meanwhile the Allies use high technology: weather control, time travel, jetpacks, and tanks that can disguise themselves as trees. The Soviets have things that are excessive, ugly and brutal, while the Allies have things that are ingenious, streamlined and attractive. In short: the Soviets have giant squids and the Allies have dolphins.
General Carville. The Americans, for the most part, have surnames
Mind forg’d manacles
Maybe this is the only blog on the internet where you’ll find references to Milton and Blake employed to analyse Westwood Studios and Red Alert 2. But here goes: in a note in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1793), William Blake made a famous observation about John Milton’s biblical epic Paradise Lost (1667): “The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels and God, and at liberty when of Devils and Hell, is because he was a true poet and of the Devils’ party without knowing it.” The Soviets in Red Alert 2 (2000) are clearly “the Devils’ party.” But they are so much more interesting and fun than the Allies. The developers and the players are of their party without knowing it.
Part of this is that the audience in Western Europe and North America has some sympathy for the ‘devil.’ As the losers of the Cold War and as a vanished social system, they hold some fascination; it’s obvious even to an 11 year old who knows no history that they are being caricatured and demonised, which excites some grudging sympathy; meanwhile, they are yesterday’s enemy, not threatening today.
The other part is projection. Yes, we’re back to projection. The audience in Western Europe and North America identifies with the ‘evil’ side because it knows, deep down, that neither side in the Cold War had a monopoly on evil. All the napalm and all the massacres, the coups and torture sites, the mountains bombed into valleys and the cities wiped off the map, the psychotic warlords and fascist dictators with American weapons in their hands – these things rarely feature in popular culture. But they are the means by which capitalism won the Cold War. Our governments and corporations inflicted unspeakable horrors on Africa, Asia and Latin America in the recent past. In Red Alert 2, we assign all that evil to the other side of the Cold War. And the West European or North American player delights in the extravagant, cartoon evil of the Soviets because, subconsciously, he sees in them the state and social system with which he identifies.
But the most remarkable thing about Red Alert 2 is not how it looked back at the Cold War, but how it looked forward, with what I can only describe as prescient hypocrisy, to the so-called ‘War on Terror.’ It was part of a chorus of pop culture texts fantasizing about an attack on Manhattan just before it happened; and it singled out Iraq and Libya, whom the US would soon target for ‘regime change,’ doing far more damage to those countries than the imaginary Soviet assault does on the United States.
So, do videogames warp young minds?
When you learn something new, you fit it in with what you already knew. And for my generation ‘what we already knew’ about the Cold War consisted of stuff like James Bond and Red Alert 2: crude pop culture propaganda.
But is it even propaganda at this point?
As opposed to an intentional propaganda message, Red Alert 2 is a text in which there are assumptions baked in which transmit propaganda messages. But the game’s pure silliness defuses the propaganda, ridicules what it is transmitting, takes most of the sting out of it. If this game really did warp my mind, it was not that difficult to un-warp it again. In its anticommunism and Russophobia it was no worse than a lot of the books on the market, and a lot of the messaging in schools, at the time or today. This underlines another point about warped minds: it takes a whole culture, not just a single text, to change the way a person sees the world. In contrast to the broader culture, Red Alert 2 has this redeeming feature: that it is well aware of its own silliness.
[This is another essay I wrote around 2014, migrated over from my old blog…]
In 1965 Bob Dylan played a new song of his to Phil Ochs (according to different accounts, it was either “Sooner or later” or “Can you please crawl out your window”). The two were travelling in a taxi when Ochs gave his opinion of the song: “It’s OK, but it’s not going to be a hit.” Dylan told the driver to stop and said, “Get out, Ochs. You’re not a folk singer. You’re just a journalist.”[1] Relations between the two were not usually hostile, but the incident was a manifestation of inherent tensions and conflicts within the folk revival and the radical movements of the 1960s.
These two very different men, at one stage described as the King (Dylan) and President (Ochs) of the topical protest song,[2] reflected and were affected by different aspects of the culture and politics of the 1960s. With a focus on Dylan and Ochs we will firstly explore the different aspects of the folk revival of the early 1960s, in particular the conflict between image and reality. Then we will look at how Dylan, like many activists and artists in the 1960s, substituted radical form for radical content. Finally, we will describe how Ochs reacted to the political defeats of the left in the late 1960s. In this the differences and to some extent the conflicts between the different aspects of the movement that they represented were clear.
Different aspects of 1960s culture and politics were immediately audible in the early music and lyrics of the two musicians. Ochs was journalistic, satirical, overflowing with facts and information while Dylan conveyed images and feelings. Ochs reacted to the Cuban Missile Crisis with a mocking exposure of US politics:
…some Republicans was a-goin’ insane
(And they still are).
They said our plan was just too mild, Spare the rod and spoil the child,
Let’s sink Cuba into the sea,
And give ’em back democracy,
Under the water!
“Talkin’ Cuban Crisis”, I Ain’t Marching Anymore, Elektra (1964)
Ochs’ first album – Ochs the journalist
This was a folk song in the tradition of Guthrie’s “Talking Sailor” and “Talkin’ Dust Bowl Blues”, musically simple and lyrically conversational or journalistic. While Dylan too wrote some “Talkin’” songs, he reacted to the Cuban Missile Crisis with a song that stood in a different part of the folk tradition:
I saw a newborn baby with wild wolves all around it I saw a highway of diamonds with nobody on it I saw a black branch with blood that kept drippin’
[…]
“A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall”, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, Columbia (1962)
This was a metaphorical prophecy, standing closer to eerie old ballads like “Nottamun Town” and shading into later 1960s psychedilia rather than to Ochs’ style of sassy, ironic, witty satire. A similar pattern is repeated with the Vietnam War. Even in later songs that were more metaphorical and image-based, Ochs remained specific and clear in his critiques:
Blow them from the forest and burn them from your sight
Tie their hands behind their back and question through the night
But when the firing squad is ready they’ll be spitting where they stand
At the white boots marching in a yellow land
“White Boots Marching in a Yellow Land”, Tape From California, A&M, (1968)
Dylan never directly referenced the Vietnam War, let alone any specific aspect of it, in his songs:
How many times must the cannon balls fly
Before they are forever banned?
“Blowin’ In the Wind”, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, Columbia (1963)
The King of the Philistines his soldiers to save
Puts jawbones on their tombstones and flatters their graves
Puts the pied pipers in prison and fattens the slaves
And sends them out to the jungle.
“Tombstone Blues”, Highway 61 Revisited, Columbia (1965)
By the time he released “Tombstone Blues”, of course, Dylan had somewhat moved away from traditional folk patterns and was more and more concerned with word-painting metaphorical landscapes as a means of satire along with increasing rock elements. However, a tendency away from the specific and towards the general was inherent in the folk revival from the start, and particularly in the tendencies represented by Bob Dylan as opposed to Phil Ochs.
Ochs the activist
“Masters of War”, for instance, in Ochs’ hands might have been a thorough and witty exposure of the military-industrial complex; in Dylan’s hands it was a simple but extremely heartfelt and bitter condemnation of war profiteers – “I hope that you die” is a line that was so intense that Joan Baez, when covering the song, would not sing it.[3] But Dylan, when he sang it, seemed to mean it. While Greil Marcus sees “Masters of War” as too simplistic to do Dylan’s talents justice,[4] the song is in fact characteristic of Dylan in that it substitutes emotion and strong, simple images for argument.
By comparison, Ochs represented those who were more concerned with information and argument. Compare Guthrie’s “The biggest thing that man has ever done” with Ochs’ “I Ain’t Marching Anymore”: in both the singer takes on an immortal persona and describes a journey through history. Guthrie is the spirit of the working-man who “fought a million battles and I never lost a-one” and will now “kick [Hitler] in the panzers and put ’im on the run.”[5] Ochs is the American soldier who has fought in every American war but after every experience of cruelty, injustice and dishonesty, “I knew that I was learning/ That I ain’t marching anymore”. Each song has a wealth of historical detail backing up a clear political statement.
“I Ain’t Marching Anymore” was Ochs’ most successful song, remembered as “the anthem” of the anti-war movement. Ochs playing it in public was enough to provoke a spate of draft-card burnings.[6] Its lyrics were incorrectly reported by FBI agents. As a witness at the trial of the Chicago Eight, Ochs was forced to recite the lyrics word-for-word to the judge and jury.[7] This song was no crude attempt to transplant the spirit of the 1930s or 1940s into the 1960s; it was an extremely successful song that inspired young protestors and alarmed their opponents.
While Ochs was heavily influenced by Guthrie’s form and content, Dylan was far more interested in Guthrie’s image. After listening to Guthrie’s “Ballad of Tom Joad” repeatedly and obsessively and reading his autobiography Bound for Glory, Dylan left Minneapolis in December 1960, hitch-hiking east to find Guthrie. He dressed and spoke like Guthrie, invented various hobo back-stories for himself, and imitated Guthrie on his early album covers.[8]
The attraction of Guthrie was the attraction of folk generally for middle-class young people like Dylan and Ochs. Cantwell explores this vital aspect of the folk revival, which he sees as “a form of social theatre” in which middle-class young people idolized and imitated the proletarian, rural and demotic folk singer. Hero-worship of rebel figures like Brando and Dean earlier in life gave way to an embrace of figures like Guthrie and Leadbelly, hobo rebels who were unlearned but had bitter life experience.[9] In hair and clothes 1960s radicals sought “to break with how successful people presented themselves in ‘straight’ society”[10]. Robes and flowers came later; the folk period was characterised by second-hand clothes associated with manual labour.
Dylan’s advice in “Subterranean Homesick Blues”, “don’t follow leaders”,[11] might have been very popular but he never sang anything like “don’t follow icons.” Ochs too understood the power of the icon in the contemporary US when in 1970 he joked (or perhaps seriously suggested) that “if there’s any hope for a revolution in America, it lies in getting Elvis Presley to become Che Guevara.”[12]
Hope for America: Elvis meets Che Guevara
Many 1960s activists believed that radical politics must be matched by radical means of representation. Students for a Democratic Society preferred “a kind of emotional and moral plain-speaking” to political theory,[13] and the folk revival which spoke lyrically in a proletarian voice and musically with great simplicity and a minimum of instruments. Though highly-educated, Yippies like Rubin and Hoffman thought they could only communicate their message through strong images and rhetoric. They revelled in state repression and police brutality, spoke in a “hip patois” punctuated with the inarticulate words “you know”, and made poetic statements such as “We demand the politics of ecstasy!” instead of concrete demands and arguments.[14] In embracing the image, therefore, Dylan was, in the context of the 1960s, making a kind of political statement, and was in tune with many political activists of the day.
Lasch believes that this emphasis on the image “imprisoned the left in a politics of theatre, of style without substance […] which it should have been the purpose of the left to unmask.” Farber argues that the Yippies’ emphasis on “facile slogans instead of careful explanation” meant that they “gave most Americans little chance to understand them.”[15] Ochs, though helping to found the Yippies, considered the idea of a “freak counterculture” to be “disastrous.” What was needed was “an organic connection to the working class.”[16] Radicalism in form and radicalism in content were two connected but at times antagonistic phenomena in the 1960s.
Even when Dylan was writing “protest” songs, their message was never clear. The line “How many roads must a man walk down/ Before you can call him a man?”[17] is a reference to the civil rights marches, but taken out of context it could just as easily be a reflection on maturity and coming of age, with metaphorical roads representing human experience. Dylan’s 1964 song “My Back Pages” seemed outright to disown many of his former beliefs, though he is characteristically unspecific here about what beliefs he is rejecting. He suggests that in even trying to define and express explicit politics “I would become my enemy/ In the instant that I preach.”[18] Dylan was not just embracing new forms of expression; he was identifying explicit and concrete means of representation and argument as inherently corrupt.
Other lyrical subject matter included non-political romantic songs and evocations of a “subterranean” freak lifestyle. The most striking feature of Dylan’s mid-1960s material, however, was his increasing number of songs in the second person which were harsh, bitter personal judgements:
[…] you know as well as me You’d rather see me paralyzed Why don’t you just come out once And scream it
“Positively 4th Street” (1965) Single, Columbia
Now you don’t talk so loud
Now you don’t seem so proud
About having to be scrounging your next meal
“Like a Rolling Stone” (1965) Single, Columbia
Well you walk into the room
Like a camel and then you frown
You put your eyes in your pocket and your nose on the ground
There oughta be a law against you comin’ around
You should be made to wear earphones
“Ballad of a Thin Man” (1964), Highway 61 Revisited, Columbia
Practically everyone Dylan knew from 4th Street in Greenwich Village and 4th Street in Minneapolis suspected that “Positively 4th Street” might be about them.[23] They need not have worried because these songs were primarily about Dylan himself. Ochs remembers how Dylan used to engage in verbal battles on nights out: it was “very clever, witty, barbed and very stimulating, too. But you really had to be on your toes. You’d walk into a threshing machine if you were just a regular guy, naive and open, you’d be ripped to pieces.”[24] Dylan was presenting himself as a kind of witch-hunter of phonies and bourgeois intruders who were, like the Thin Man, more comfortable discussing “lepers and crooks” with “great lawyers” and “professors” than they were mixing in Dylan’s culturally non-conformist milieu.[25]
It’s worth pointing out that in singing these songs Dylan had no qualms that he might tell any “lies that life is black and white” or become his own worst enemy “in the instant” that he preaches. Dylan’s judgemental songs are performances of his own streetwise image as well as portraits of uncool features for listeners to avoid unless they too wanted to be “ripped apart” by Dylan.
Music producer Paul Rothchild claimed that Ochs’ commitment to political causes was a cynical ploy along the same lines as this image-obsessed politics.[26] However, by all other accounts it is clear that Ochs’ commitment was genuine. He was the only musician who gave his word that he would come to the Chicago 1968 protests no matter what.[27] He would frequently turn down commercial gigs in favour of playing for free at political benefit gigs.[28] Abbie Hoffman remembers that “Phil never turned down anybody no matter what size the [political] group.”[29]
Ochs was, like the narrator of “The Biggest Thing the World had Ever Done” or “I Ain’t Marching Anymore”, a witness to more than his share of history. He was at the Newport folk festivals, the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and the first anti-war teach-in; he helped organise the Chicago ’68 protests; the “War is Over” rallies and “An Evening with Salvador Allende” were his brainchild; he visited Robert Kennedy in the White House and brought tears to his eyes singing “Crucifixion”; he was active in Mississippi when the bodies of three murdered civil rights activists were found. A great deal of Ochs’ person and career were deeply invested in the radical politics of his day.
At the Newport Folk Festival of 1966 Dylan performed songs with a backing rock band and an electric guitar, provoking outrage from many sections of the crowd.[30] During a tour of England he was called “Judas” by an audience member.[31] This was another manifestation of the inherent tensions and conflicts within radical politics and culture in the period. In the eyes of many on the folk scene, the modest, “authentic” and political folk genre was losing the prominent voice of Dylan to the corporate, egotistical, corrupted, apolitical world of rock.[32] Ochs believed that those who booed were engaging in “a most vulgar display of unthinking mob censorship. Meanwhile, life went on around them.”[33] Despite their differences in terms of content and form, Ochs in this period never abused Dylan, calling Highway 61 Revisited “the most important and revolutionary album ever made.”[34]
A large part of Ochs’ defence of Dylan must have been his own growing desire to try new musical styles. This resulted in his 1967 album Pleasures of the Harbor which was more poetic than political, incorporating orchestral arrangements rather than a simple guitar. The album received negative reviews but Ochs’ desire to find a new niche reflected changes that were taking place in the music business. Rothchild explains that though Ochs had been at home in “the pre-Beatle, pure folk era”, his producers were not convinced that he “was going to crack the pop world. He had the wrong image, the wrong voice” and his lyrics were not “relationship introspective.” The music business was no longer interested in folk, especially political folk with lyrics “of the intellect” rather than sex.[35] This shift was like a forewarning of even more significant changes afoot in politics.
Phil Ochs, not sure where to go
Former SDS leader Tom Hayden believes that there were, speaking very generally, two main halves to the 1960s from a radical point of view. The first half was characterised by innocence and optimism, with a basic belief in the possibility of the redemption of the American dream.[36] The second “half” represented reality reasserting itself; a “clarification of where we really stood.”[37] This basic schema helps us to understand the waning of the civil rights movement and the rise of the Black Panthers; the collapse of SDS and the activity of “urban guerrillas”; overall, the change from optimism to either resignation or a more determined and dangerous form of struggle.
For Dylan the Kennedy assassination, race riots and the Vietnam War “transformed his attitude from one of wanting a moral reform and the cleansing of his society to one of despairing that this society was reformable at all” as early as 1964.[38] There was obviously no “clean break” at which the civil rights movement ended and the Black Panthers began, and Malcolm X had already raised similar ideas years before his death in 1965. Despite these ambiguities and others, we can say with confidence that the key events which contributed most to the demoralisation of activists occurred in 1968.
1968 in the US saw the assassination of Martin Luther King and the most widespread ghetto riots yet; the murder of Robert Kennedy; the repression of the Columbia University occupation; the Chicago Democratic National Convention protests; the strong vote for the ultra-conservative Wallace; and finally the victory of Republicans Nixon and Agnew in November.[39] Ochs was so closely integrated with the radical movements that to understand the significance of this year we need only look at the cover of his 1969 album “Rehearsals for Retirement”. It shows a gravestone which reads:
The album documented the changes that had taken place in that year in poetic, metaphorical terms:
I spied a fair young maiden and a flame was in her eyes
And on her face lay the steel blue skies […]
I’ll go back to the city where I can be alone
And tell my friends she lies in stone
In Lincoln Park the dark was turning
“William Butler Yeats Visits Lincoln Park and Escapes Unscathed” (1969) Rehearsals for Retirement, A&M
This expressed Ochs’ belief about Chicago that “something very extraordinary died there, which was America.”[41] Here idealized as a woman, the news Ochs brings back to Los Angeles is that illusions in a liberal, democratic USA are dead. Other songs illustrated this more violently:
And they’ll coach you in the classroom that it cannot happen here
But it has happened here […]
It’s the dawn of another age […]
We were born in a revolution and we died in a wasted war It’s gone that way before
“Another Age” (1969), Rehearsals for Retirement, A&M
Ochs expressed what this meant to him personally with the words “My life is now a death to me.”[42]
Ochs suffered from a long period of reduced output of songs and wild bouts of drinking and violent behaviour. The sudden, near-fatal attack on Ochs on a beach in Tanzania in 1973 caused his further deterioration. It is tempting to emphasize his father’s mental health problems and draw parallels with Ochs’ behaviour. However, we cannot separate Ochs’ mental health from the history and politics in which he had invested so much of himself, any more than we can separate his father’s mental health from his experiences in the Second World War.[43] The attack in Dar-Es-Salaam was simply a personal version of the kind of horrific and apparently meaningless event that had come to characterise the political world Ochs inhabited.
Victor Jara, Ochs’ friend and inspiration
It is an indication of his personal deterioration that he did not learn of the September 11 1973 coup in Chile until December. Ochs had visited Chile and made friends with fellow folk singer Victor Jara, who was tortured and killed along with thousands of others after the counter-revolutionary military coup. Ochs later confessed, “When that happened I said ‘All right, that’s the end of Phil Ochs.’”[44] Despite this he set about immediately and tirelessly organising a huge benefit gig, “An Evening with Salvador Allende”, which he managed to secure Dylan’s presence at by reciting to him the late Allende’s inauguration speech in full, from memory.[45]
He swung between intense periods of political activity, self-destructive idle depression and absurd business ventures until in 1975 he began to claim that Phil Ochs had been murdered by “John Butler Train”. For an individual who had always set so much store in icons and whose ambition it was to become one, and for a representative of a genre defined as “social theatre” and a movement that had invested so heavily in icons, images and theatrics, it is significant that the nadir of Ochs’ decline was his long, violent performance as John Train. A brief recovery preceded his suicide in April 1976.
The last sixteen years of Ochs’ 36-year life could be read as a history of the rise and fall of the radical movements of the “long 1960s.” As if to dramatise the death of the movement, Ochs as “Train” was a violent, cynical, misogynistic wreck. His drunken conspiracy-theory rants were like a dark, twisted parody of Ochs’ witty on-stage patter.[46] The “Train” stood for the boxcar-riding hoboes the young activists had once idolized[47] and so Train’s character seemed to be a dramatisation also of the fact that the working class, in whose image the folk revivalists had tried to construct themselves, had by and large not been won over by the radicals of the 1960s.[48] Ochs’ deterioration and suicide were a reflection of history and politics at least as much as they were personal.
A Melody Maker journalist was perceptive in describing Dylan and Ochs as the King and President, respectively, of the “topical song.”[49] If Dylan was a leader his style of leadership was ceremonial and symbolic like that of a modern monarch. From the start he neglected direct, specific protest lyrics in favour of radicalism in form and image. His travelling-hobo clothing and voice conveyed a radical message in and of themselves but this soon gave way to a rock-star image as his music turned increasingly toward experimentation, and his lyrics toward personal problems, definitions of coolness and fatalistic metaphorical depictions of the world around him. He rarely advised his listeners to take any action or condemned anything specific – instead he created in himself an ultra-cool radical image and icon capable of knowing and expressing intuitively what the world was like and who was cool and who was not. Accordingly the changes of the late 1960s did not detract from him significantly since he was invested in a politically uncommitted self-image rather than in politics itself.
Monarchs generally rule for life while Presidents only enjoy a limited term. In the US they are executive and military leaders. It is a fitting image for Ochs, who in his lyrics generally made it clear and specific what he stood for and what he opposed. His commitment to active politics was enthusiastic and generous. Ochs had been at home in Hayden’s optimistic and active “half” of the 1960s. With the onset of pessimism, retreat and demoralisation, especially after 1968, he characterised himself and the movement as powerful, but out of their element: “A whale is on the beach/ It’s dying.”[50]
Ochs, in his “Train” persona, believed that Dylan “in a cowardly fashion hid behind images – after his third album”. Dylan’s albums between 1967 and 1974 were widely perceived as weak[51] and “Train” imagined accosting Dylan with the words, “Listen, asshole, I can kill you as soon as look at you. You were Shakespeare at twenty-five, and now you’re dog shit.” This cannot be sincere because Ochs, along with most critics, was hugely impressed by 1975’s Blood on the Tracks.[52] Meanwhile Ochs’ defence of Dylan after Newport 1966 suggests that this resentment was not rooted in envy of Dylan’s success or talents. It seems instead that this was another manifestation of the inherent conflicts in the culture and politics of the 1960s. Ochs’ resentment stemmed from the fact that Dylan had at an early stage abandoned the political struggle to which Ochs had sacrificed his career, his sanity and most of his adult life. Rather than seeking social change Dylan, like the hippie movement, sought personal redemption; like the folk revival, he constructed an icon; like the Yippies and SDS he preferred intuition to analysis and images to politics.
Bibliography
Books
Boucher, David and Browning, Gary (eds), The Political Art of Bob Dylan, Imprint Academic, 2009
Cantwell, Robert, When We Were Good: The Folk Revival, Harvard University Press 1996
Eliot, Marc, Phil Ochs: Death of a Rebel, Omnibus, 1990 (1978)
Farber, David, The Age of Great Dreams: America in the 1960s, Hill & Wang, 1994
Farber, David, Chicago ’68, University of Chicago Press, 1988
Gill, Andy, The Stories Behind the Songs, 1962-1969, Carlton Books, 2011 (1998)
Isserman, Maurice and Kazin, Michael, America Divided: The Civil War of the 1960s, New York, Oxford University Press, 2008
Marcus, Greil, Bob Dylan by Greil Marcus, Writings 1968-2010, Faber & Faber, 2010
Albums
Bob Dylan:
Bob Dylan, Columbia, 1962
The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, Columbia, 1963
The Times They are a-Changin’, Columbia, 1964
Another Side of Bob Dylan, Columbia, 1964
Bringing it All Back Home, Columbia, 1965
Highway 61 Revisited, Columbia, 1965
Blonde on Blonde, Columbia, 1966
John Wesley Harding, Columbia, 1967
Nashville Skyline, Columbia, 1969
Blood on the Tracks, Columbia, 1975
The Basement Tapes¸ Columbia, 1975
Phil Ochs:
All the News That’s Fit to Sing, Elektra, 1963
I Ain’t Marching Anymore, Elektra, 1964
Pleasures of the Harbor¸ A&M, 1967
Tape From California, A&M, 1968
Rehearsals for Retirement, A&M, 1969
Greatest Hits, A&M, 1970
Film
Bowser, Kenneth, Phil Ochs: There But For Fortune, First Run Features, PBS American Masters, 2012
[1] Andy Gill, The Stories Behind the Songs 1962-1969, Carlton Books (1998, 2011), 128
[2] Marc Eliot, Phil Ochs: Death of a Rebel (1978), Omnibus (1990), 109
[3] Greil Marcus, Bob Dylan by Greil Marcus: Writings 1968-1010, Faber & Faber (2010), 410-12
[5] Woody Guthrie, “The Biggest Thing That Man Has Ever Done”, The Columbia River Collection Smithsonian Folkways, (1941, 1988); Phil Ochs, “I Ain’t Marching Anymore”, I Ain’t Marching Anymore, Elektra (1965)
[6] Kenneth Bowser (writer and director), Phil Ochs: There But For Fortune, First Run Features (2012); 00:20:18, 00:46:30
[14] David Farber, Chicago ’68, University of Chicago Press (1988), 7, 20-23
[15] Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations, Abacus (1979), 81-82; Farber, Chicago, 225, 244-5
[47] Eliot, 262. The following comes from the liner notes of a planned album written in 1975: “John stands for Kennedy, Butler stands for Yeats, Train stands for hobos at the missed silver gates.”
In the 32nd Century, a crew of misfits blasts off from an obscure corner of our solar system on a quest to the heart of an exploding star.
Delany’s prose does justice to the awesome premise. Here is the moment of take-off: ‘And the moon fell into Neptune; Neptune fell into the sun. And the sun began to fall. Night exploded before them.’ (p 41)
Much later in the quest, the crew arrive at a sun known as the Dim, Dead Sister. It is described as follows: ‘the explorer who decided to name the outermost of the Dim, Dead Sister’s planets Elysium had indulged a poor joke. With all the planoforming devices available, it was still a frozen cinder ellipsing at trans-Plutonian distances from Her ghost-light, barren and uninhabited.’ (p 181)
It is no spoiler to throw in these two lines from the climax of the novel. A ship ‘received the shuttle boat like a cannon shot in reverse.’ (p 225) A while later, I won’t say what page, ‘the star went nova. The inevitable is that unexpected.’
Humanity has spread out across many stars and worlds, forming three distinct polities. A key contradiction of capitalism has been overcome by means of a technological innovation that makes labour fulfilling rather than alienating. But at the heart of the plot is a battle between corporations for an extremely rare fuel, Illyrion – so yeah, there are plenty of contradictions left in capitalism.
From the cover of the 1st edition
By attempting to harvest a massive quantity of Illyrion from the heart of a star as it goes nova (that is, explodes catastrophically!), ship’s captain Lorq Van Ray is not only risking his life and his senses, and not only attempting to settle a feud with some powerful enemies – he is also blasting wide open the economics and politics of interstellar humanity.
For the most part the novel follows through on its promise. Along the way, there’s a lot of food for thought, particularly in the discussions between two crew members, Katin and Mouse.
This is a novel set in a new interplanetary society, where people feel rootless – like the 20th Century with its urbanization. Someone complains (p 46) that ‘We live in an age when economic, political and technological change have shattered all cultural tradition.’ This is a platitude, but it’s deliberate; Delany is well aware that people in every age have said similar things. In this age as in others, people who say such things are mostly wrong, and the novel is quietly demonstrating this to us throughout.
This is a story about a sudden, revolutionary change, and that is offset by Delany’s focus on a deep human culture thousands of years old. The story blasts off, but the setting has a certain weight and grounding. Mouse, the artist, represents a cultural continuity. Before his mission across the stars, we get page after page about his adventures on Earth – an Earth that is not so different from our own.
This is also where the tarot cards come in. Katin, the educated man, thinks that to be ‘skeptical about the Tarot’ is ‘a very romantic notion’, linked to ‘petrified ideas a thousand years out of date.’ (p 123) The people of this world believe in the scientific efficacy of tarot.
The flashback which explains Lorq Van Ray’s motivations is very strong. The climax of the story is exciting and really pays off. I love the syrinx, a musical instrument belonging to Mouse, an object which earns its keep in different and unexpected ways for the entire novel.
But Nova suffers from a slow middle – one of the most obvious cases I’ve seen in a while. Out of 240 pages, it meanders from about page 120 to page 200. There seems to be little purpose to the characters’ itinerary and activities. Katin’s lectures are interesting but not always relevant. My attention sagged when Delany began to dwell on the Tarot cards and picked up again when the bad guys suddenly showed up to crash the good guys’ hiding place.
I have a few other complaints. Sometimes the descriptions aren’t clear enough to do justice to an action scene – there was a fight involving nets and gas on a flight of steps which I just couldn’t visualize. On page 202 we are told, ‘a hand slapped Lorq’s sternum, slapped it again, again. The hand was inside.’ What does this phrase mean? Whose hand? It was inside his sternum? How?
Lorq, Katin and Mouse are good characters, and their rapport facilitates a lot of exposition, most of it neat. Katin seems confident and Mouse seems taciturn, shy. But Katin over-thinks and, beneath it all, he’s anxious. At one point Mouse has to reassure him, ‘Hey […] It’s all right. I like you. I was just busy, is all.’ (p 177) It’s rare for Mouse to speak, so it’s telling that when he chooses to speak his words are kind. But while the other members of the crew have their interesting quirks, they never really live up to their potential.
The slow middle didn’t put me off, and had enough interesting ideas, conversations and images to keep me reading. But it lacked that rocket fuel which powered the beginning and end. The premise, the beginning and the end are more than strong enough to compensate. In hindsight, too, there are motifs and undergirding ideas running through the structure of the story – the idea of sensory overload, and linked to it the image of a person walking into fire like a bug drawn to a light – that lend the story power and coherence.
Some history notes here for educators, along with questions and exercises. ‘How the Nazis took power’ consists of 3 worksheets explaining how the notorious genocidal dictator and his party seized power. It is aimed at students aged 16-18. It is text-heavy, to be used along with the accompanying slides which include visuals and more exercises. There is also a brief explainer on anti-Semitism.
Have you ever seen buildings that look like these?
Maybe there are some of these majestic constructions in your town. Maybe you even live in one of these masterpieces. But have you ever stopped to wonder who built them, and why? We can see these buildings in Britain and in Argentina, in the United States and in China, in Russia and in Iran, and in countless other countries. How can we possibly explain so many amazing buildings, built in the same style, built on such a scale and in such widely-separated parts of the world? Is it just a coincidence? I’ve Done My Own Research and discovered the truth: that these buildings were all built by a civilisation called the Manchukuo Empire. This was a vast civilisation which spanned several continents and several centuries, though I have not yet confirmed which continents, or which centuries.
Lies of Big History
But Big History would prefer that you did not know about Manchukuo. If you dare to speak out against their dogma, you will be shouted down and ridiculed. They are very defensive. They will claim that their opinions count for more than yours or mine just because they have read actual books about history. This is a logical fallacy known as the Appeal to Authority. But I am a fearless maverick, I have excellent critical thinking skills, and I am immune to any appeals to authority.
The favourite argument trotted out by the shills of Big History and Big Archaeology is to say that the Manchukuo Civilisation never existed. But you can just Google ‘Manchukuo.’ See? There’s a Wikipedia page with that name. So even Wikipedia acknowledges that Manchukuo existed. How can anyone deny it?
But there is a sneakier version of this argument. They say that while something called Manchukuo did actually exist, it was actually something entirely different, a puppet state of Japan in China, that only lasted for a few years. These hair-splitting bores know no shame. They want you to believe that there are two completely different Manchukuos, one mythical and one real! They hope to bamboozle you with this convoluted nonsense. Compare this to my simple and straightforward answers.
And it’s not just buildings. Here is a surviving Manchukuo poster!
The Manchukuo Code
But how did I discover the truth where so many have been led astray by the history establishment? The answer is simpel: I made an amazing discovery.
Driven by a passion for these magnificent buildings and a desire to uncover the truth behind their construction, I cross-referenced the locations of over 500 of them and tagged each one on a map. The result was staggering:
Wow.
Assuming the Manchukuo had the same alphabet as us, which is not an unreasonable assumption as they probably invented alphabets and numbering systems, then the conclusion from my research is obvious. The Manchukuo Empire left its initials literally written on the face of the planet: M.E.
After I made this remarkable discovery, which was my discovery, made my me, everything else fell into place, because there is no other way to explain this remarkable discovery, which I made.
Features of Manchukuo Civilisation
The Manchukuo were not only more technologically-advanced than us (with access to amazing building techniques and possibly even telepathic powers) – they were also morally superior to us.
I can prove this using my critical thinking and logic: I like this type of architecture personally, which means that, objectively, it is the best type of architecture. If it is the best type of architecture then it must be morally superior to other types of architecture. It follows that the people who built it must have come from the most wise and moral civilisation ever to have existed.
We know, too, that the Manchukuo were a technologically-advanced people. They must have been, to have built such awesome buildings in so many places. In fact, for one civilisation to have built so much in so many places it would have demanded superhuman powers and technology beyond what is considered possible today, which leads us to even more exciting and tantalising questions.
Hidden Agenda
But Big History and Big Archaeology have colluded with Big Architecture to erase Manchukuo from the record. Why? To protect their own professional reputations, and to further their own agenda. I have not yet figured out all the details of their twisted plans, but I think I’m beginning to understand. You see, The Past Was Better Than Now. Right? Everyone knows that. And the Manchukuo Empire was Better Than Now. Therefore, the Manchukuo Empire must have existed in the past.
But Big History, Big Archaeology and Big Architecture (and don’t get me started on Big Urban Geography) are staffed by people with university degrees in the liberal arts. They are soy-eating rootless cosmopolitans who are too narrow-minded to be inspired by the manifest grandeur of The Past. They don’t get it. They don’t get what history and archaeology are for. They have whiny mid-Atlantic voices. They want to cut us off from our past with their timid attitudes, their red tape and their fussy theories. It doesn’t matter who you are, what walk of life, what income you have, these people are out to undermine your identity and your connection with the glorious past. They want to steal the past from you. They want to ruin it for you. They don’t want to let you enjoy it.
When you say that the Spartans were the direct ancestors of the US Marine Corps, when you say that the leading cause of the collapse of empires is limp-wristedness, when you say that aliens built all the pyramids in the world, they are the people who raise a finger and say in their nasal voices, ‘Well, actually…’
Listen not to the nasal voices. Heed not the scolding finger. Just look up at the magnificent buildings that tower over you like monuments. Buildings like these
And these
And these
And these.
The evidence is all around you: the Manchukuo Empire really did exist, and it can never be truly erased.
But how did the Manchukuo fit in with the Tartarian Empire and the Atlanteans? The hidden past is getting pretty crowded, and Big History won’t be able to keep it all a secret for much longer. Only one question remains. Could the Manchukuo people have been giants, or aliens, or perhaps giant aliens? Nobody can say for sure either way.
‘That night must have been a night of terror for the young King and his Court. From a high turret the King looked out over the greatest city of his realm, which was now no longer his. Below him, stretching away far into the darkness of the June night, was the great rebel force, and there rose to his ears the hoarse murmurs of a vast multitude, alert and watchful. Away on the horizon was the glare of the burning mansions of his friends and counsellors, men of the highest authority in the land, whose will and command was now as unheeded as the whimper of a puppy. To the West burned the prison and mansions in Westminster. Closer, in the fields of Clerkenwell, burned the buildings of the Knights Templar, whilst close by, almost near enough for him to stretch out his hand to touch the flames, burned the great palace of his uncle, John of Gaunt, now master of nothing but a few hundred troops on the Scottish borderlands. Yet nothing had changed, the land was still there, the river still flowed and the stars still shone. ‘All that had happened was that his people no longer obeyed his commands.’
Nine Days that Shook England by H. Fagan, P 190
Nine Days that Shook England (Victor Gollancz, Left Book Club, 1938) is ‘An Account of the English People’s Uprising in 1381.’ A vast rebellion of the peasants along with the poorer strata of clergy, knights and merchants came close to the overthrow of the English aristocracy. Pushed to the limit by exploitation, endless war, corrupt and incompetent ruling circles, and yet another poll tax, armed bands rose up to battle tax collectors, then united and marched on London and other towns. They conquered the capital with help from the masses inside the walls. But just as suddenly the ruling class dispersed them with a bold strike at their leadership, and put down the rebellion with over 7,000 executions and at least two stand-up battles.
Fagan is a very good writer, as you can see in the paragraph quoted above. Passages of comparable quality are many. The early chapters explain the socio-economic changes that laid the basis for the revolt, and do so in a way that any reader can easily understand and follow. The account is shot through with vivid and memorable moments and movements: he describes how an underground organisation called the Great Society built for the rebellion for years in advance. Wandering clergymen and outlawed peasants served as organisers for the Great Society.
The above quote marks the high point of the revolt. Fagan then narrates the sudden turn by which the ruling class re-established control – through what must be one of the most shameful state murders in the history of England. Such a sudden and extraordinary turnaround demands a good explanation, and Fagan supplies one.
The state murder of the rebel leader Wat Tyler — from a medieval chronicle
The book is unfortunately weighed down with emotive verbiage. In itself, I have no major problem with the following passage…
‘…the indomitable spirit of the Englishman was roused. They became determined to fight for what had been given them by the King willingly and of his own accord. Soon many of them were dying heroic deaths in action against the forces of terror, for the defence of freedom and for the maintenance of their just rights.’
…but there’s too much of this kind of language. After a while, my mind became apt to spot such passages coming, and to switch into a kind of half-reading mode, not quite skimming but not quite taking it all in either.
Readers of today, or even readers of 50 years ago, will also have a problem with all the contemporary references. The references to Spain and Russia, while they were of course topical at the time, must have seemed of questionable relevance even then (There is even one approving reference to Stalin). The Great Society was not really anything like the Bolshevik Party – the comparison does a disservice to both. The comparisons are usually more skilful than that, but they are frequent and sometimes take up whole paragraphs.
I’ve never read anything else on the 1381 rebellion, so I can’t comment on accuracy or historiography. I can say that the story is compelling and coherent. My eyes were really opened to how well-organised the insurgents were, and how close they came to tearing down the English ruling class. It is impossible not to be moved by how the King betrayed the misplaced trust of the insurgents. Don’t be misled by the emotive passages: the author is unromantic and clear-eyed about the weaknesses of the insurgents’ political programme, about the unpleasant reality that English society was not yet ripe for a democratic revolution.
Nine Days that Shook England was a take on medieval history that really was something new to me; I haven’t ever before read about a popular revolutionary movement in the Middle Ages. It is a dramatic story and there are plenty of good primary sources on it, and Fagan makes very good use of both the drama and the sources. Its problems we can file under ‘of its time.’ More than that: you will get more out of the book if you approach it both as a fascinating story from medieval history and as an intriguing artefact of the socialist movement in Britain in the 1930s. The didactic parts are not some spectacular artistic misjudgement; they are the flip side of the passion which drives the narrative.
Note:
The author, Hymie Fagan, was an interesting character in his own right. Here are some links: a few facts about his biography suffice to explain his revolutionary enthusiasm. The life story of his second wife, Marian Fagan, throws another very interesting light on things.
It is August 4th 1922, and the scene is a remote hillside in Tajikistan, near the Afghan border. Ismail Enver Pasha, the former war minister of Turkey, draws his sabre and leads a group of riders on a wild charge downhill into machine-gun fire. Somehow, the riders take out one machine-gun, but they are twenty-five against 300 Red Army soldiers.
The Basmachi were guerrilla forces active in Central Asia from 1918 on and off until the early 1930s, a divided and diverse constellation of irregular bands which attacked Red Army outposts and convoys. At times there were multiple armies numbering in the low tens of thousands active in different places.
The name apparently comes from the Uzbek verb basmak, ‘to attack,’ a word with connotations of banditry. But they called themselves kurbashi, fighters.
As far as I can see, this guerrilla movement drew on several sources of support all at once. Here they are, not in order of priority:
First, as noted, it reflected the failures and the atrocities of the Toshkent Soviet in its early phase, when Kokand was sacked and Russian settlers ran riot across the Fergana Valley. This caused the movement to emerge in early 1918.
Second, it was a response by desperate people to the harsh Civil War conditions and the attendant famine; the movement really became a force over the winter of 1919-20, when a 62% drop in the cultivated area of Turkestan had taken place and half the population was at risk of starvation. In this context the Red Army got first call on food, infuriating many local people.
Third, it was a spill-over from the White movement and the enraged old ruling classes, such as the army of Junaid Khan which cooperated with Kolchak, and the Emir of Bokhara, who was kicked out by his own people in 1920. From the start the movement was sponsored by these bastions of feudal reaction, and Khvostov in his book The White Armies treats the armed forces of Khiva and Bokhara unambiguously as a component of the Basmachi.
Fires in the city of Bokhara, September 1920, during the struggle between the Red Army and Young Bokharans on the one side and the Emir of Bokhara on the other. The Emir was a key sponsor of the Basmachi.
As I say, these sources of support are not presented here in order of importance, because to be honest I have no idea what that order was. A definitive history of the Basmachi has not yet been written. A full account of this fascinating movement is beyond my abilities, and their most active and significant phase falls outside the 1918-1920 period which is my focus in Revolution Under Siege and Class War and Holy War.
But they overlap with my narrative and serve as a sequel to it. Also, they throw a different light on the story I have told in Class War and Holy War, sometimes complicating and other times confirming the case I have made. You can read on and make up our own mind.
Phase One
The 1916 rebellion against conscription represents the prologue to the Basmachi. The first phase of the movement is its emergence after the Kokand massacre, mostly under the sponsorship of the Emir of Bokhara. It remains small until the summer of 1919-1920; in Summer 1920 it is strong enough to seize the Ferghana Valley. Meanwhile other bands are operating in other parts, such as one up by the Aral Sea helping Kolchak.
The Basmachi leader Madamin-Bek after his defection to the Reds, 1920
In Hiro’s account (42), the Soviets did not defeat the Basmachi with violence alone. Moscow sent in two renowned and capable generals, Frunze and Kamenev. Their approach was to return mosques and religious properties to Islamic authorities, to allow religious schools and courts to re-open, and to build a militia of poor Muslim farmers called the Red Sticks. Crucially, they confronted the Basmachi not with Russians but with Muslim units, which the Red Army by now had plenty of. (42-3)
Smele’s account (243) supports this: once the Whites were defeated, the Reds were able to wage heavy offensives against the Basmachi, combined with economic, religious and social concessions: NEP; the return of property to the clergy and the toleration of Islamic courts and schools.
Phase Two
Here the scene shifts to Turkey and the spotlight to Enver Pasha. As a young army officer from humble origins, he led the Young Turks revolt of 1908. But as War Minister during Turkey’s disastrous First World War he lost a lot of prestige. In 1920 he fled to the Soviet Union, and made an improbable deal with Lenin. The peoples of Central Asia (at least some of them, anyway) had, during the war, looked to the Turkish Empire as a potential liberator from Russia. Enver Pasha now promised to use his prestige as a Turkish military leader, anti-clerical moderniser and revolutionary to win over the Central Asian nationalities more firmly to the Soviet banner.
So this seems to have been an example of the Soviet Union making a kind of concession to pan-Turkic identity in order to forge a closer bond. If so it was a complete disaster.
Enver Pasha
On November 8th 1921 Enver Pasha arrived at Bokhara. The next day he rode out ‘on a hunting trip’ with 24 followers. Now he showed his true colours – he not only joined the Basmachi, he recruited thousands to their cause. Had he been fooling the Soviets all along, or did he change his mind after Moscow signed treaties with Turkey in 1921?
Into 1922, Enver Pasha and the Basmachi went from strength to strength. His allies included the Emirs of Bokhara and of Afghanistan. He had 2,000 soldiers under his command, and 14,000 more in his broader alliance. He was ‘commander-in-chief of all the Armies of Islam,’ though privately he called his religious followers ’bigots.’ Soon he controlled Dushanbe (which he seized with just 200 guerrillas) and large parts of the old territory of Bokhara.
The Soviet Union sued for peace. Enver Pasha told them: ’Peace is only acceptable after the withdrawal of Russian troops from Turkestan soil. The freedom fighters, whose leader I am, have sworn to fight for independence and liberty until their last breath.’
But his movement faced serious problems. There were tensions between the various nationalities and between religious and secular tendencies. Many civilians supported the Reds or were neutral. Splits developed and Enver Pasha’s followers went to join other bands or even to join the Reds. In the summer, the Red Army defeated Enver Pasha in a regular battle, after which he was on the run in the direction of Afghanistan with a dwindling band. In early August he celebrated the Islamic festival of Bayram, enclosed mountain flowers in a letter to his wife, and died in that desperate charge into Red machine-guns. His body was only identified some days later.
(In passing, one well-read blogger has recently described Enver Pasha as follows: ‘the worst human being who happened to be a general [during World War One…] Ottoman Minister of War from 1914 to 1918, a vain, arrogant strutting sort of man who not only utterly botched the only battle in which he commanded directly (Sarikamish, Dec. 1914 – Jan 1915) but who also then blamed his defeat (falsely) on the Armenians and subsequently instigated and played a key role in the Armenian genocide. He then sold his services to the Soviets, before betraying them to side with the Basmachi movement, which didn’t go particularly well either.’ No-one else I’ve read mentions the connection to the Armenian genocide, probably because this was in the past a neglected subject. A friend, a Kurdish-Turkish communist, has described Enver Pasha to me as a quasi-fascist counterpart to the more left-leaning Kemal Ataturk – the two men embodying different facets of Turkish nationalism.)
The banner of Ergash Kurbashi, taken by the Red Army
Phase 3
The Basmachi experienced a final revival in 1925-6. Their supporters stood for election in the Soviets, took over several in the region, and re-launched the insurgency. Only with their defeat in 1926 did the Soviet Union formally close the last front of the Russian Civil War, three years after the destruction of the last White Army.
A little while ago I wrote: ‘The peoples of Central Asia articulated demands for autonomy many times, but as far as I can see, demands for independence were few, inchoate and scattered. When they were put forward, they were complicated by being linked to broader identities: pan-Islamic or pan-Turkic ideas.’ It should be clear from the context that I’m talking about 100 years ago, not today.
But according to one author quoted by Smele, the Basmachi movement was nothing less than a civil war with the goal of national independence. Smele says this is going too far: this was a disunited and inchoate movement. I’d add that the khans and emirs were unambiguous counter-revolutionaries, not freedom fighters; and that European Russia, too, produced revolts of the rural population in anger at the severity of Civil War conditions.
Moscow confronted the Basmachi with concessions alongside military offensives. How effective was this strategy? On the one hand, the Basmachi were not finally defeated until the early 1930s, but they never threatened the ‘centres of Russian power’ and ‘frequently fought among themselves.’ (Mawdsley, 239) The Soviets played a long game, pushing the Basmachi campaign to a lower level, though they remained endemic. The fact that a long game of concessions was effective, and the fact that Moscow chose to pursue it, represent points against the view of the Basmachi as a movement representing a general desire for independence.
Negotiations between Soviet authorities and Basmachi in the Fergana Valley, 1921
Let’s not forget, though, that the Reds were fighting these guys for more than a decade. I don’t think the numbers quoted by Smele are plausible – apparently some say that over half a million Red soldiers died in combat with the Basmachi after the end of the Civil War – but it was a serious struggle. The Basmachi represented something more significant than the rural uprisings which Russia witnessed in 1921. It was not mere feudal reaction, but was in part a ‘scourge of god’ punishing the Toshkent Soviet for its undemocratic policy and the violence which served it. We can see feudal particularism, Pan-Turkism and Pan-Islam all in the mix. While it was something less than, or even other than, a movement for national liberation, it’s not difficult to see tendencies in that direction.
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The 1919 Review 
