Viewing posts tagged victory of the daleks
Posted by:
Jack Graham
6 years, 8 months ago
At the time, the liberals and the left thought of World War II as a battle between civilisation and barbarism, between progress and reaction. This is still the mainstream view today. But the leaders of the Allies did not think this way, if they were honest. For instance...
The Churchill who demanded a no-holds-barred prosecution of the war was the same Churchill who had been present during the butchery at Omdurman, sent troops to shoot down striking miners in 1910 [this is probably not true], ordered the RAF to use poison gas against Kurdish rebels in British-ruled Iraq [this is arguable], and praised Mussolini. He had attacked a Conservative government in the 1930s for granting a minimal amount of local self government to India, and throughout the war he remained adamant that no concessions could be made to anti-colonial movements in Britain’s colonies, although this could have helped the war effort. ‘I have not become the king’s first minister’, he declared, ‘to oversee the dismemberment of the British Empire.’ He told Roosevelt and Stalin at Yalta, ‘While there is life in my body, no transfer of British sovereignty will be permitted’.
In the Second World War, many - probably ...
Posted by:
Jack Graham
8 years, 9 months ago
I have a massive, endlessly-lengthening list of books, old and new, that I want to get around to reading. Donny Gluckstein's new book
A People's History of the Second World War just went straight in near the top of the list.
Gluckstein's argument seems to be that WWII was actually two wars, fought in parallel. One was an imperialist squabble between established empires and up-and-coming imperialist nations that were set to clash with them. Britain, France, Russia and America (which was already a continental empire and was ready to expand globally) found themselves violently competing for hegemony with Germany, Italy and Japan. Running beneath this conflict there was a people's war against fascism (the form taken by the new empires) underpinned by dreams of freedom and democracy. The imperialists running the first war knew that had to appeal to the priorities of the people fighting the second war in order to enlist their support, hence the democratic rhetoric.
I mention this here because Gluckstein has done an
interview for New Left Project, in which he has some things to say about Winston Churchill, the subject of my irregular '
Victory of the ...
Posted by:
Jack Graham
8 years, 10 months ago
Winston Churchill was the British Secretary of State for War in 1920. As such, he was the British politician most directly and personally responsible for the Black and Tans, the notorious 'special policemen' (paramilitaries really) sent in to help the Royal Irish Constabulary put down the revolt against British rule. The Irish people had rejected Home Rule in a referendum... only to find that the British were going to try to impose it by force. This triggered the conflict - a nationalist revolt met by imperial repression - that is known as the 'Anglo-Irish War'.
The Black and Tans went on a rampage of violence, targeting civilians alongside anyone suspected of involvement in the revolt. Indiscriminate reprisals and revenge killings were the order of the day. Many whole towns and villages were besieged and sacked, often simply as collective punishment for the killings of RIC officers. They beat, shot, starved and tortured people. They tore out people's fingernails in front of their families. 'Murder squads' disguised in civilian clothes roamed the streets. The Tans sacked Cork and left the city centre in smoking ruins. The RIC murdered the Mayor in front of his wife and son.
All this horror on ...
Posted by:
Jack Graham
9 years, 11 months ago
In the course of preparing myself [to play Churchill in a biopic]… I realized afresh that I hate Churchill and all of his kind. I hate them virulently. They have stalked down the corridors of endless power all through history…. What man of sanity would say on hearing of the atrocities committed by the Japanese against British and Anzac prisoners of war, ‘We shall wipe them out, every one of them, men, women, and children. There shall not be a Japanese left on the face of the earth’? Such simple-minded cravings for revenge leave me with a horrified but reluctant awe for such single-minded and merciless ferocity.
- Richard Burton. (He got banned from the BBC for writing that. Which must’ve really burned him as he lounged around in Hollywood with Elisabeth Taylor’s head in his lap.)
In ‘Victory of the Daleks’ by Mark Gatiss, Winston Churchill is depicted as a wiley and cantankerous old fox, as a twinkly-eyed yet determined fighter against the Nazi menace, as a moral force, as an impish and roguish but unequivocally good man. This is very much the mainstream view of Churchill, in both ‘pop culture’ and in much of the trash that ...
