Send More Beams That Kill
Hey guys… you know how, in my last post, I was connecting ‘Mindwarp’ (in which the slimey Mentors of Thoros Beta are selling hideous weapons to Thordon) to the matter of British weapons sales to savage dictatorships like Suharto’s Indonesia, etc?
Well, have a look at this delightful report from Al Jazeera about what riot police have been up to in Bahrain (I warn you: the report linked to features images of wounded people and others in great distress).
Bahrain was memorably described by David Mellor on the Today Programme (shouldn’t it be anagrammatically renamed the Toady Programme when he’s on it?) as a “quasi-democracy”.
It would appear that five people have been killed in this last attack. (Before we get too locally self-righteous, we should remember what Alfie Meadows went through at the hands of the British police recently.) The attack on the protestors in Bahrain was launched using weapons of exactly the types sold to the Bahraini authorities by British, i.e. guns, rubber bullets, teargas and grenades. Apparently we also sell Bahrain machine guns and ammunition. Everything, in other words, that a “quasi-democracy” needs for quasi-violent quasi-suppression of protestors exercising their quasi-democratic quasi-freedom.
This morning, the Guardian has this and this to say about British Government policy in the wake of the savage attack on protestors. A sample:
Britain announced a review of licences granted for arms exports to Bahrain which it would “urgently revoke” if the sales criteria had been breached in their use, after it emerged that types of crowd-control weapons similar to those used in the crackdown were supplied by British companies. Despite concerns among activists over Bahrain’s rights record, British firms were last year granted licences, entirely unopposed, to export crowd-control weapons that can lead to fatalities in use.
Oh, thank God! A “review” (that’s all right then!) after it “emerged” that Bahrain’s government have been using weapons to attack and hurt and kill people! One wonders what we imagine they were going to use these weapons for… decorating their office walls?
The Guardian also says:
According to the Foreign Office’s own records and the Campaign Against the Arms Trade, the UK has also supplied Libya – which has warned in an SMS message that it will use live ammunition against protesters – with similar weapons and ammunition. Sales to both Bahrain and Libya were actively promoted by the UK government’s arms promotion unit, the UK Trade & Investment Defence & Security Organisation.
Despite the widespread unrest throughout the Middle East and North Africa, British arms manufacturers this weekend will be attending IDEX, a major arms fair in Abu Dhabi, to promote sales throughout the Middle East region.
And:
…Despite the warnings from HRW and other organisations of a worsening rights situation in Bahrain, the Foreign Office’s own statistics reveal that the number of arms exports licences continued to increase in 2010 from 34 to 42 with no licences being refused. Arms exports to Libya, where lethal force has already been used against demonstrators, appear to have followed a similar pattern with exports last year including tear gas, and £3.2 million worth of ammunition including for crowd control..
Order in Court
Here’s my Timelash II stuff for ‘The Trial of a Time Lord’. Some extra bits and some rejigging here and there.
‘The Mysterious Planet’
Bob Holmes redoes ‘The Krotons’… which looks more acceptable now that we have a showrunner and head writer who, essentially, just does the same story again and again and again.
The production design comes to a high standard but belongs in a different story. It’s clear that Marb Station is supposed to be dark but it gleams with light. Holmes has the underground dwellers talk about “the train”, which is clearly supposed to be something that runs on the old underground rails, etc. Everything looks good but nothing looks right. The Tribe of the Free look like peasants in an authentic peasant village… but they should look like something out of Mad Max, with loads of decaying, retro-fitted, malfunctioning technology that they don’t understand and use for things like propping open doors. We need salvagepunk but we get re-enactment kitsch. As Richard Pilbeam put it: “It’s like doing ‘Talons’ in the style of a Quality St. ad”. Glitz and Dibber look… um, interesting… but they look as much like mercenary wideboys as Colonel Gaddafi looks like the lead singer of a boy band. The space station at the start is spectacular… but it hardly goes with the idea that the Doctor has been “taken out of time”. He should end up in a surreal nowhereplace, and the court room should look like Gallifreyan gothic or a grotty 19th century courtroom of the type that Mr Jaggers would’ve appeared in. The whole trial should take place in the Matrix, or something like it.
The story itself is a perfectly functional and occasionally witty riff on order vs chaos, with Drathro vs Katryca as the personifications… but, interestingly, they’re not polar opposites in a dichotomy because neither are quite what they seem. Drathro’s underground survival camp is absurd, perpetuated because he blindly follows orders. The society of the underground dwellers is built on the worship of texts whose original context and message is lost, on unnecessary rationing of water and on the ‘culling’, i.e. the ruthless and needless control of population numbers. Katryca, meanwhile, is a tyrant who rules idiotically over people she fatuously calls “the tribe of the free”. She’s a matriarch that rules a society which treats women as a social resource. So, it isn’t that Drathro is nasty old Order and Katryca is nice free Chaos… it’s that all rulers are useless and all social pyramids are nonsensical and backward. As I’ve said elsewhere, whether he knew it or not, Bob was an instinctive radical.
There are some great lines, some mythic resonances, an awareness of text and literature, and the script has plenty to say about the false opposition between ‘advanced’ and ‘primitive’, about social control through the control of resources and surplus, about hierarchy which becomes a false ideology of order hiding a reality of arbitrary, hidebound or chaotic rule. This order vs chaos theme will be picked up again and again in this season…
One thing: somebody really needed to question why the Valeyard would enter into evidence the scene where Glitz and Dibber discuss the details of the Time Lords’ plot, even with some words bleeped out.…
Wooooo Hooooo!!!!!!!
Mubarak falls! The bloody dictator ruled for 30 years, backed by and representing neoliberalism and Western imperialism. The bravery, determination, organisation and moral force of the Egyptian people brought him down in just over 2 weeks. This leaves the torturer Suleiman in power, backed by the military…
But this is just the start.
Life and Taxes
Here is George Monbiot, on possibly the most scandalous domestic story of the year (which, in the age of the ConDems, is really saying something). Please read this. In a sane country, this issue would trigger an Egypt-style revolt. It’s essentially a government conspiracy to help massive corporations and banks (you remember how helpful they’ve been to the world in recent years?) defraud the country of perhaps unprecedentedly vast amounts of money. It may even amount to the effective abolition of taxation upon the wealthiest organisations in society.
Here’s a sample:
At the moment tax law ensures that companies based here, with branches in other countries, don’t get taxed twice on the same money. They have to pay only the difference between our rate and that of the other country. If, for example, Dirty Oil plc pays 10% corporation tax on its profits in Oblivia, then shifts the money over here, it should pay a further 18% in the UK, to match our rate of 28%. But under the new proposals, companies will pay nothing at all in this country on money made by their foreign branches.
Foreign means anywhere. If these proposals go ahead, the UK will be only the second country in the world to allow money that has passed through tax havens to remain untaxed when it gets here. The other is Switzerland. The exemption applies solely to “large and medium companies”: it is not available for smaller firms. The government says it expects “large financial services companies to make the greatest use of the exemption regime”. The main beneficiaries, in other words, will be the banks.
But that’s not the end of it. While big business will be exempt from tax on its foreign branch earnings, it will, amazingly, still be able to claim the expense of funding its foreign branches against tax it pays in the UK. No other country does this. The new measures will, as we already know, accompany a rapid reduction in the official rate of corporation tax: from 28% to 24% by 2014. This, a Treasury minister has boasted, will be the lowest rate “of any major western economy”. By the time this government is done, we’ll be lucky if the banks and corporations pay anything at all.
Now, being an utter nerd, there’s always a little bit of my brain at the back (not as little or as far back as it should be) that is thinking about some film or TV series or book with monsters in it.
I simply cannot help thinking about ‘The Sun Makers’ when I read this. One of the most hilarious myths in Who fan culture is that ‘Sun Makers’ is a right-wing allegory about the horrors of the big state and punitive taxation. This is to misunderstand the story but also, more important, it is to buy into one of the centrepieces of reactionary ideological bullshit pervading our culture: the idea that conservative politics is about the liberty of the individual while socialist politics is about the power of the state.…
Empires Toppling
There is a long and venerable tradition in Doctor Who of portraying revolutions sympathetically. It does this many times. It isn’t an unbroken run of support… but for every ‘Reign of Terror’, in which the French Revolution is given the full Baroness Orczy treatment, there is a ‘Sun Makers’, in which a full-scale workers’ revolt topples a corporate tyranny. For every ‘Monster of Peladon’, where reform is touted as a solution to chaos created by extremists on both sides (right-wingers in government and looney-left wingers amongst the miners), there is a ‘Happiness Patrol’ in which the Doctor and Ace encourage a united rebellion by factory workers, aboriginal aliens and dissidents. Fantastical, they may be… but these depictions are also surprisingly candid about the amount of mess, pain and trauma involved in popular uprisings, while retaining a forthright sympathy.
As far as I know, this track record is unique amongst television programmes.
In light of interesting and inspiring things going on in the world at the moment, I thought it might be fun to post some of my favourite televised revolutions….
The Ood kick some sorry corporate ass.
Street protests, in which dissidents defy the security forces and trap them in the knots of their own ideology, kicking off a process that will lead to the fall of a brutal, repressive government and the attempted flight of a dictator.
The Doctor confronts a neoliberal hobgoblin and, with the vital help of the “work units”… sorry, I mean “the people”, he foils a plan to put down a rebellion. He confuses his pin-striped capitalist foe into submission by means of a growth tax leading to “negative surplus” (i.e. no profit).
Sadly, the radical message of ‘The War Games’ sputters a little when the Doctor calls upon the Time Lords for help… but still, here we see “the Resistance” (a unified force of soldiers of all nationalities) storming the baddie’s control centre and putting an end to their cynical, fake wars.
Solidarity!…
Do Panic
The new edition of the fanzine Panic Moon is just out…
…featuring two little articles by myself, in which I ponder ‘The Mutants’ (soon to be out on DVD) and ‘The Seeds of Doom’ (out recently).
But don’t let that put you off, there’s plenty of other stuff… including a very interesting article by Oliver Wake (also the Editor) about Don Taylor, Sydney Newman’s first choice to be Who‘s producer.
Details here.…
Jack’s Alternative Xmas Playlist (and other stuff)
Hate Christmas movies? Unable to stomach their revolting mixture of exhausted iconography and sentimental platitudes? Tempted to suspect that most Christmas movies and/or TV specials are so staggeringly bad that they must be fiendishly disguised satires, made by people who secretly consider their viewers to be dribbling simpletons? Unable to get excited about the prospect of watching yet another adaptation of Charles Dickens’ second worst novel? Wondering if this year the makers of EastEnders will achieve what is clearly their dearest desire and start a wave of Christmas Day suicides across the nation? Dreading the prospect of all the ordure adumbrated above yet simultaneously unable to contemplate surviving the “festive” season without the merciful presence of the gogglebox? Tired of rhetorical questions?
Okay then, here’s Jack’s Alternative Christmas Playlist….
The Lion in Winter (1968)
Christmas is a time for family arguments. You know how it is, everybody stuck together, desperately trying to get on and have fun… it’s a recipe for disaster. But nobody had a Christmas quite like the Plantagenets’ in this film.
Katherine Hepburn and Peter O’Toole are the warring married couple, King Henry II and his older Queen Eleanor, who spend Christmas 1183 tearing great lumps out of each other with a non-stop mutual barrage of staggeringly vicious barbs, taunts, insults, paradoxes and lies. Add their three ruthlessly ambitious sons to the mix – the brutal Richard (Tony Hopkins), the cold-blooded Geoffrey (John Castle) and the cretinous John (Nigel Terry) – and Christmas (which comes complete with hilariously anachronistic trees and wrapped presents) becomes an excruciating familial apocalypse of plots, schemes, murder attempts, humiliating revelations and heart-shredding passions.
Ultimately, this film is only superficially about a struggle for the crown. The crown, the lands, the money, the power… these are the playing pieces in a game that is really about a family eating itself alive over lost love, sour love, delusional love, destructive love and the lack of love. When Kate Hepburn’s Eleanor says that “we” are the cause of history, she doesn’t mean royalty, she means we humans. At the season of love, as she watches her family attack itself, and watches herself join in, she wonders aloud why they can’t just love each other. “We have so much to love each other for,” she says, “we have such possibilities.”
It may be Albee-lite (and Anouilh-liter) but it’s still amazing, moving stuff, entirely uncontaminated by sentimentality… and guaranteed to put your own family squabbles into some kind of perspective.
Shooting the Past (1999)
Stephen Poliakoff’s masterpiece (from before he turned into an utter wanker) begins with Christmas lights. Christmas is something happening in the outside world. Within the peculiar space of the Falham Photo Library, time works differently, as does value and history and emotion. The modern world (in the form of an American corporation) buys this little island and starts to invade it, planning to sell it off and turn it into some piffling corporate ballsup… their interest in the gigantic library of old photos being precisely zero.…
Resistance is Useful
There were violent clashes in London yesterday as protestors against the Dalek occupation attacked Daleks and Robomen on the streets.
What started as a peaceful and normal day, with Robomen performing their normal routine of rounding up prisoners to be sent to the new ‘workfare’ camp in Bedfordshire for lazy scroungers, quickly turned to turmoil when protestors – doubtless infiltrated by a hardcore of anarchists and outside agitators – launched an unprovoked attack on a Dalek ship innocently parked at the Chelsea Heliport.
Robomen were forced to ‘kettle’ the protestors when clashes erupted. Reports are that three Robomen have sustained injuries, and one Dalek was slightly scuffed when protestors viciously and thuggishly pushed it down a gentle ramp.
A Dalek defends himself against the unprovoked aggression of the
feral, anarchist, hoodie, chav scum, student layabout protestors
feral, anarchist, hoodie, chav scum, student layabout protestors
The Dalek Supreme commented today: “Of course, we support peaceful demonstrations… but any more will be met with immediately extermination.”…
Economic Miracles
This is my Timelash II stuff on the subject of Graham Williams’ tenure as producer… it’s a bit thin because I’ve either posted about several stories from this era elsewhere or because I’m planning to. Also, to be honest, some of the stories simply don’t yield much grist for my mill. That isn’t to knock the Williams era, which contains some of the most politically interesting Who stories ever made (which is partly why they needed – or need – posts all to themselves). Notice, for instance, how the stories glanced at below seem obsessed with fuel, economics and questions of prosperity vs. austerity… s’what comes of making Doctor Who in the context of the late 70s I guess…
I’ve written about ‘Horror of Fang Rock’ here and ‘Image of the Fendahl’ here.
‘The Sun Makers’
This is from elsewhere on this blog, but it’s part of a wider article. I thought it could tolerate repeating… especially since ‘Sun Makers’ is a favourite of mine, for reasons which should be obvious. I don’t think, by the way, that this story has ever been more relevant than it is now.
Some idiot once wrote that, in this story, the rebels are worse than the baddies. I dunno what story he was watching, but it ain’t the one I know as ‘The Sun Makers’. The Others might be a motley and even unsavoury lot but they’re hardly as bad as the planet-enslaving Collector and his pet Gatherer. Mandrel makes nasty threats that he doesn’t try very hard to make good on. The Doctor, ever a keen judge of character, doesn’t seen worried by Mandrel even when he’s waving a red hot poker in his face. Leela has some choice words for them that are very pertinent. She calls them cowards and that, essentially, is the trouble with them. Mind you, you can’t blame them for running away from life in Megropolis 1.
…
Some other idiots have occasionally argued that ‘The Sun Makers’ is a right-wing allegory because it depicts a tyrannical state and rails against taxes. Well, that’s fine if you’re dumb enough to buy the bullshit lie that conservative politics really is all about defending personal liberty from big government and punitive taxation. In fact, ‘The Sun Makers’ couldn’t be clearer about its political sympathies (even if you stick your fingers in your ears during the playful misquoting of Marx). The tyrannical state in this story is the Company. They are effectively one, or the Company exercises such control that they might as well be. This isn’t a big state stifling the liberty of free enterprise and free consumers. This is a big state as a vehicle for corporate domination. The Company is a private concern, engaged in “commercial imperialism”. The Company has, essentially, carried out a hostile takeover of the government. This is one big state that’s been privatised.
The icons of modern conservatism (i.e. Reagan, Thatcher, Bush, Bush II) are usually, for all their populist anti-government rhetoric, ultra-statists. They might reduce bureaucracy here and there (usually by cutting public services, etc.)