Eruditorum Press

Siding with bugs is praxis

islamophobia

Shabcast 23, Part 2 – New Atheism is the Opium of Misogynists, Islamophobes, and Imperialists

, , , , , , , , , , 4

Yes, I use the Oxford comma.  I use it because it is sensible, stylish, and clarifying.

Oh, and this is Part 2 of Shabcast 23, featuring the continuation of my latest chat with Daniel Harper.  I think the title is pretty much self-explanatory. 

That’s my thing now.  Self-explanatory titles.  And Oxford commas.  They’re my thing too now.  And irrelevant commentary on my own style.

Self-explanatory titles, irrelevant commentary on my own style, and Oxford commas.

See, they’re nice aren’t they?  If that comma hadn’t been there, before the ‘and’, it could’ve looked like I was saying I now make irrelevant comments about my own style and about Oxford commas. 

And clearly I would never make irrelevant comments about Oxford commas.

*

By the way, here‘s a link to Rebecca Watson’s video (referred to in the Shabcast), in which she mentions (in passing) that a guy tried to chat her up in a hotel elevator in the wee small hours, and that, guys, it’s probably not a good idea to do that.  That bit starts around 4:30.

Further to the discussions about biological reductionism in the Shabcast, I recommend the works of Steven & Hilary Rose, Richard Lewontin, and Stephen Jay Gould.  Further to the discussion of ‘New Atheism’, I heartily recommend a book called The Threat to Reason by Dan Hind, and (slightly more guardedly) a book by Terry Eagleton called Reason, Faith, and Revolution.

I also recommend (sight unseen but with all confidence) Daniel’s piece touching on these matters, which be along tomorrow here at Eruditorum Press.

 …

Continue Reading

Solid Dick

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , 43

NOTE: This article has been amended to correct factual mistakes and clarify arguments.

 

Iron Man (2008), starring Robert Downey Jnr. and directed by Jon Favreau, is objectively one of the most evil films ever made. Possibly the most evil, actually.

 

Boilerplate

 

I’ll get around to justifying that opening statement in a bit. But first, I just want to say… ahem… fuck Tony Stark. Seriously, fuck him. The arrogant, smug, privileged, sexist, immature, selfish, capitalist prick. The rich, preening, self-satisfied asshole. The callous, self-involved, vainglorious, narcissistic wanker. This guy isn’t charming or funny or lovable. He’s scum, masquerading as humankind’s best friend. He’s the 1% as saviour of the world, at a time when the 1% are directly and knowing destroying the world. He’s the smiling face of the anthropocene (or rather capitalocene) extinction. He’s genocidal imperialism as (lone) humanitarian intervention. He’s neoliberal capitalism and neoconservative foreign policy as a series of bad-boy quips. He’s private capitalist industry as heroism. He’s mega-wealth as heroism. He’s white male privilege as heroism. He’s militarism, imperialism and American exceptionalism as heroism. He’s the War on Terror as heroism. He’s everything sick and twisted and rotten and filthy and evil and insane and false about our world, presented to us as aspirational role-model. He’s Donald Trump in a Robert Downey Jnr. mask… no, scratch that… Robert Downey Jnr. is a rich, reactionary dick too, isn’t he… so we might as well say that Tony Stark is Robert Downey Jnr. in a Robert Downey Jnr. mask. In any case, Tony Stark is everything we need to tear down, ruthlessly demolish, trample on and bury, presented to us as the best of humanity.

 

There’s no secret about this, of course. I’m not expecting any awards for searing, original insight. Everybody knows who and what Tony Stark is. He is, quite literally, stark. The films themselves make no secret about any of this. On the contrary, they loudly and proudly boast of it.

 

This stuff is baked into the character. It’s part of him by design.

 

I don’t pretend to know much about the Iron Man comics, original or contemporary. Generally speaking, I’m not a comics guy. I intend no disparagement of comics; they’re just not my can of Tizer, on the whole. So I come to these Marvel Cinematic Universe films (as I come to most films adapted from comics) as someone with little knowledge of the source material. But I’m not going to apologize for that, or seek to remedy it, for several reasons:

 

a) I can’t be bothered,

 

b) I don’t think it’s necessary, since the comics cannot possibly fundamentally alter the meaning of the films that stem from them, and

 

c) the vast majority of the audience – target and actual – are, like me, coming to these films without knowledge of the comics.

 

Having said that, I was told – by Holly B., during Shabcast 9, in which we chat about Iron Man, amongst other things – that Stan Lee’s original goal with Iron Man was to create a hero whom the hippies would hate but also be unable not to love.…

Continue Reading

Do You Ever Just Feel Tired?

, , 1

In the wake of the Chapel Hill murders, people of Left-wing persuasion have been doing a lot of talking about the double standards which are applied to murder when it’s Muslims being murdered by non-Muslims rather than the other way round.  All very true.  If a Muslim had been the murderer in Chapel Hill, and his victims had been non-Muslim, we’d now be hearing the mainstream media (let alone the conservative media) talking about ‘terrorism’, the pundits would be giving us their standard reheated ‘clash of civilisations’ rhetoric, pontificating about the inherently violent nature of Islam, asking Muslim ‘community leaders’ to address the cancer of extremism in their midst, etc etc etc, ad nauseum, ad infinitum.  Hell, Charles Windsor might even open his empty head again to release some more racist platitudes about the need for Muslims to ‘conform’ to ‘our values’ (there is no ‘us’ or ‘we’ or ‘our’, Mr Windsor.  Please fuck off).  There certainly wouldn’t be anybody desperately trying to spin the murders as nothing more than a dispute over a parking space, or the product of the singular demons of a lone nut.

But we don’t actually need to theorise what might have happened if the skin colours and/or religions of the victims and killer in Chapel Hill were transposed.  We’ve seen it demonstrated for us in the real world, time and time again.  You’ll have heard of Lee Rigby, the young British soldier horribly murdered by two Muslim men in May 2013.  If you were living in the UK at the time, you will hardly have been able to miss it.  I think people were actually obliged by law to mention it on TV at least once every half hour.  You may not have heard of Mohammed Saleem however, an 82 year old Muslim man who was stabbed to death by a Ukrainian student in Birmingham (I didn’t know non-Muslims were even allowed in Birmingham!).  It happened the month before Lee Rigby was killed.  To put it mildly… it wasn’t quite the media sensation that the Rigby murder became, despite the fact that Saleem’s killer was later convicted of planting bombs in three Mosques in the Midlands (so it probably wasn’t about a parking space).  The Rigby murder (which was utterly horrible and senseless, let’s be in no doubt about that) unleashed an upsurge of anti-Muslim hate crimes in the UK, despite being roundly and publicly condemned by just about every prominent Muslim, and every major Muslim organisation, in Britain.  Needless to say, the wave of violent, anti-Muslim bigotry was not covered in depth by the media.

But I mustn’t talk about this stuff.  Jonathan Freedland will accuse me of starting a who’s-the-most-picked-on ‘arms race‘.  I mean, surely there are higher priorities than the frequent violent Islamophobia in Britain.

Some people still criticise Israel, for instance.

By the way, I do just want to make one observation about the Left reaction to Chapel Hill.  If you’re on the Left, or a liberal, and you’re condemning the Chapel Hill murders, and decrying the double standards of the media, and you’re not also at least occasionally speaking out against the wholesale slaughter of Muslims and Arabs by Western governments (chiefly but by no means only the USA), and the support given by Western governments to regimes that violently oppress Muslims (i.e.…

Continue Reading

Fall and Rise

, , , , , , , , , , , , , 5

There was a fair amount of media chin-scratching last year about a supposed glumness and seriousness creeping into popular movies.  The real trend, I think, is not towards the ‘serious’ but towards the reactionary.

For one thing, there’s recently been a spate of popular, lauded films and TV shows re-inflating Islamophobia (again) in a ‘nuanced’ form acceptable to liberals as well as to outright bigots.  The much-lauded Argo depicts a heroic CIA rescue of American hostages in Iran.  Always handy, being able to demonise Iran.  (Modern Iran’s origin is, of course, a long and complex story, and does not present ‘the West’ in a good light… which is why nobody balanced and objective ever mentions it.)  The much-lauded Zero Dark Thirty depicts torture as being both effective and morally conscionable, with the only negative consequence in sight being the discomfort of the torturers.  It misrepresents ‘enhanced interrogation’ as being a valuable technique leading directly to the location of Osama and, by means of ambivalence and ambiguity (disingenuously used as a defence by the director), it effectively sides with the torturers.  To be neutral about torture is to be effectively pro-torture.  The enmeshing of the torture within a legalistic framework of neutrality and supposed utilitarianism is both very apt – the quintessential facet of torture as it is practiced by modern democracies is that it is steeped in punctilious legality – and very normalising.

These new liberal/Islamophobic popular movies, which also appeal to the criterati and the awards-boards, have come just as the American empire (and its allies) has beeing stepping up its rhetoric about the evils of Iran in particular, and the possibility of intervening in struggles in the Arab world.  Clearly, part and parcel of the imperium’s cultural reactlash to/against the Arab Spring.  This isn’t anything new.  The previous round of mainstream liberal-inflected movies about the ‘War on Terror’ and Iraq were similarly punctual in their ideological addresses; as with the Vietnam movies of the late-70s and 80s, they served as an ostentatious display of American culture in the throws of ‘painful self-examination’ and ‘angst’ about a military adventure held in increasing public opprobrium.  The Hurt Locker was more prompt than The Deer Hunter, but essentially peddled the same assumptions and the same normalising effects. 

The buzz lately has been about two big movies from big directors, both tackling the issue of slavery.  Spielberg’s Lincoln and Tarantino’s Django Unchained.  Lincoln makes the destruction of slavery seem like the accomplishment of old white guys in government offices.  It’s not actually that much better than Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter.  (Okay, that may be an exaggeration.)  Lincoln nods in the direction of black soldiers and black resistance, but the essential story being told is the one long since abandoned by most historians: the story of the abolition of slavery being a legal coup handed down from Washington.  The reality is that Lincoln’s emancipation proclamation was a recognition of something happening ‘on the ground’ as the slaves of the South rebelled in enormous numbers, stealing themselves from their owners and joining the Union armies. …

Continue Reading

And the award for the most nuanced bigotry goes to…

, , , , , , 3

This article – from Rachel Shabi in The Guardian – is really great.  It’s about the Islamophobia encoded in the recent spate of much-lauded movies (and a TV show) about Americans, Arabs, terrorism… and all that kind of stuff.  Argo, Homeland, Zero Dark Thirty – all recently rewarded at the Golden Globes.  Supposedly nuanced and complex, they peddle the same old lies… just in a way acceptable to liberals.

Here’s a snippet:

The three winners have all been sold as complex, nuanced productions that don’t shy away from hard truths about US foreign policy. And liberal audiences can’t get enough of them. Perhaps it’s because, alongside the odd bit of self-criticism, they are all so reassuringly insistent that, in an increasingly complicated world, America just keeps on doing the right thing. And even when it does the wrong thing – such as, I don’t know, torture and drone strikes and deadly invasions – it is to combat far greater evil, and therefore OK.

Funny how the culture industry obediently steps up when the imperium is trying to relaunch (yet again) a rinsed-clean project of Muslimcidal ‘humanitarian intervention’.  I’m all for complex, structural analyses of these synergies between policy and popcorn… but I can be a bit of a vulgar Marxist on this subject too.  I can’t help noticing just how thoroughly integrated Hollywood is with the fucking Pentagon (told you I was vulgar).  See this excellent book for a brief, persuasive documentation of the phenomenon.

Oh, by the way, here‘s blogger Matt Cornell with a roundup of Twitter reactions to the ‘nuanced’ Zero Dark Thirty.  Like this ‘nuanced’ response, for instance:

 Nothing like ‘nuance’ is there?

(Actually, I’ve blogged once before about the strange way that modern drama’s aim to be all, like, morally ambiguous yeah? leads to reactionary effects – here.  Essentially, because some truths about the world are too damning and radical to seem neutral, they can not be allowed to play any part in dramatic ambiguity and complexity.  It works similarly to how some realities about the world cannot get into the news because the properly educated responsible journalist feels like she’s not being neutral or balanced when she mentions them.)

Why do I care about movies and TV shows?  *Sigh*  Look, fiction matters.  In many ways, it matters more than non-fiction when it comes to influencing people’s opinions (and I include myself in that).

Ayn Rand never proved anything as a ‘philosopher’, but as a best-selling and influential novelist she proved that popular fiction needs to be ruthlessly politically critiqued.  Fiction is such an enormous part of our daily cultural and social diet that to critique it is to critique the world as it is.

 *

ADDITIONAL:

 http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/dec/14/zero-dark-thirty-cia-propaganda

http://www.juancole.com/2013/01/torture-illegal-really.html

 http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2012/12/20/dark-d20.html

*

YET MORE (27/01/13):

“This awareness of the torturer’s hurt sensitivity as the (main) human cost of torture ensures that the film is not cheap rightwing propaganda: the psychological complexity is depicted so that liberals can enjoy the film without feeling guilty. This is why Zero Dark Thirty is much worse than 24, where at least Jack Bauer breaks down at the series finale.”…

Continue Reading

Murder is Murder

, , , , , 1

The terrible killings of Americans in Libya have provoked an entirely foreesable reaction.  Loads of smug conservatives and equally smug liberals have found common cause in singling out Islam as violent and intolerant. 

That cartoon in The Onion is a good example.  ‘Nobody Murdered Because of This Image’ reads the headline, above a cartoon of several non-Muslim religious figures engaged in an explicit gang bang.  Because only Muslims kill people for bigoted reasons, you see.

It’s interesting to witness the implicit hierarchy of human value.  The (entirely deplorable) murder of Americans by Libyans elicits howls of outrages.  The (equally deplorable and far more common) murder of Arabs and Muslims in Libya, Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Palestine etc by the American and British militaries – and/or NATO, and/or the Israelis – doesn’t provoke any such widespread and sustained spluttering horror.  It’s for ‘them’ to die at our hands.  That’s just routine.  And ‘they’ mustn’t draw any conclusions from this (i.e. the West despises them and values their culture at nothing) because if they do then that’s the medieval intolerance of Islam talking.

Of course, nobody who died at the Embassy deserved to die, nor would they have deserved to even if they had been involved in creating the disgusting, hateful, maliciously provocative film that everyone is talking about.  Most Muslims would agree, I’m sure… even those who were insulted and shocked by hearing about the film. 

Meanwhile, our Western response (the response of those who are supposedly living in the civilised, liberal, modern, progressive, democratic world… as opposed to the lands of the backward, whom we take it upon ourselves to slaughter in the name of freedom) will probably be to massacre yet more Arabs and Muslims.

And all those people who chortle over the religious touchiness of Muslims will immediately go blind and deaf.…

Continue Reading

How Curses Work 2: This Fez is Loaded

, , , , , , , , , , , , , 3

The utility to Western imperialism of depicting Arabs with the kind of culturalist discourse of modern vs. pre-modern, secularism vs. cultish religion, democracy vs. theocracy, civilisation vs. medievalism, rationalism vs. fanaticism (translated out of code: good Westerners vs. bad Arabs) that followed in the wake of the “war on terror” is obvious.

This way of constructing Arab and/or Middle Eastern cultural identities in Western art, literature, media and ideology, is very old.

Edward Said‘s seminal book Orientalism outlines the way in which the West has constructed the East as an exotic, romantic, cruel, sensuous, decadent, fanatical, inscrutable Other.  (…though it is occasionally weakened – in my presumptuous and insignificant opinion – by the problems underlying Foucault’s notion of ‘discourse’, which Said utilises.)

Jack Shaheen‘s book Reel Bad Arabs reveals how Hollywood has vilified and dehumanized Arabs.  Here’s a great short documentary demonstrating his thesis.  It’s central message may not come as a surprise to you, but it’s still salutary to see the evidence collated and concentrated.

Such representations of Arabs pop up in the Doctor Who story ‘Pyramids of Mars’ (1975) as part of the show’s tactic, at that time, of raiding the motifs of the pop-gothic… with Hammer as a major influence.  The Hammer version of The Mummy is the place, above all others, where the Egyptian Fanatic (that character we were talking about in the previous post) is best seen.  The character in that film, played by George Pastell, is the template for Namin in ‘Pyramids of Mars’.

“Where ‘dem infidels at???”

Namin is a murderous, raging fanatic.  He goes one better than Pastell’s character in the Hammer Mummy: he actually takes over the English country mansion of the Explorer, invading it using forged (or coerced) letters of authority from the Explorer, taking up the Explorer’s place, raging at the Explorer’s servant, barring the Explorer’s brother, insulting and shooting the Explorer’s friend, etc.  Inverting real history, the Egyptian invades England, violently taking over.  Terrance Dicks’ novelisation makes it clear that Namin is the last in a long line of fanatical worshippers of the old gods, as per standard stereotypes.  At one point, Namin even insinuates that Dr Warlock is being racist – or at least xenophobic – in suspecting him of nefarious activities, asking sarcastically if Warlock will report him to the police for being “a foreigner”.  Warlock then gets to smash such petty and self-serving nonsense aside.  Don’t bring up racism; I only suspect you because you’re a wrong’un.  Thus is the depiction of the Arab as a sinister, fanatical invader self-alibied, self-excused… with all criticism automatically and pre-emptively effaced in a “Political correctness gone mad!” moment avant la lettre.  It’s a moment when Doctor Who itself says “bloody minorities, coming over here… and then squealing about ‘racism’ when we complain about what they get up to!”  It’s one of the ugliest moments in the history of the show.

But Namin isn’t just an evil Arab.  He’s an evil religious Arab.  In the original version of his essay about ‘Pyramids of Mars’ at his TARDIS Eruditorum blog, Philip Sandifer (while, it should be stressed, criticising the use of nasty stereotypes)  accidentally referred to Namin as a Muslim… and got taken to task for it in the comments.…

Continue Reading

How Curses Work

, , , , , , , , , , 1

We’ve all seen him.  He’s swarthy, usually (though not always) with a dark beard.  He’s often wearing a fez (no, I’m not going to say it) and robes of some kind.

A fanatic.  And friend.

Sometimes, he leaves his home desert and comes to England.  He may be dressed in Western clothes and live in a house with Western furnishings, but he’s got a secret room, or a shrine, or a sanctum behind a billowing curtain, in which he keeps his infernal idols amidst clouds of suffocating incense.

He’s…

(cue dramatic music)

…the Egyptian Fanatic!

When he comes to England, he becomes the mirror image of the English Explorer Who Has Just Returned from Egypt (henceforth, the Explorer).  This man goes to Egypt for the love of antiquities and discovery, and comes back enchanted and bewitched by the place (by the place, mind, not the people); filling his big, wood-panelled home with Egyptiana.  The question of whether the Explorer has any right to this Egyptiana is raised only by the Egyptian Fanatic in England (henceforth, the Fanatic).

The Fanatic has come to England from his native land in search of something, some inscrutable justice, some devilish retribution.  He nurses a grudge.  He clothes himself in Anglo, middle-class normalcy.  He speaks impeccable English, albeit in a heavy accent.  (It doesn’t have to be an ‘Egyptian accent’, just a generic foreign one will do.)  He is usually treated with courtesy (at first) by the bemused English middle classes amongst whom he mixes by default because of his wealth.  These people may come to suspect and despise him, but they’re often tolerant enough at the start, though a working class or yokel character may get to utter some ignorant dislike of “strangers”.  The middle class characters may even initially tut at this sort of hostility (what with them being so open minded and everything) but it will turn out that the yokel’s xenophobia was (accidentally) quite justified.

I’m a racist stereotype.  Racist stereotypes are cool.

Because the Fanatic is there to cause trouble.  To raise the mummified body of a long-dead Egyptian High Priest from its slumber inside a sarcophagus and set it the task of killing all those infidels who dared to trespass upon the sacred resting place of the Pharaoh, etc.  The Explorer will be the target of the Fanatic’s superstitious rage (it will continue to be looked upon as superstition, despite the fact that the spells work and the mummy really does come to life).  The Explorer was just trying to further the cause of science and knowledge, to preserve the ancient Egyptian past, perhaps to delve into mysteries Better Left Undisturbed… sometimes the Explorer has been arrogant in his treatment of the Egyptians, sometimes he was rude and dismissive to the particular Egyptian Fanatic who is now persecuting him, usually when said Egyptian Fanatic turned up and begged him not to open the pyramid / break the seal on the scroll / disturb the body / take the mummy to display in England. …

Continue Reading

Balanced and Objective

, , , , , , , , 0

The BBC doing what it does best: “In Iran’s iconography of villainy, Britain holds a special place. The UK is seen as the mastermind behind the overthrow of previous Iranian governments. Conservative hardliners believe Britain has in its blood the desire to decide who rules Iran.”  Textbook stuff from James Reynolds “BBC Iran correspondent”.

Make it all a matter of opinion: “is seen as”.  Put it down to someone at the so-called ‘extreme’: “hardliners”.  Pathologise the unacceptable view, make it sound like childish paranoia, sneer at it under your hand: “Iran’s iconography of villainy”.

Fact is, if people in Iran feel that way about us, they are justified.  The British government, lead by Winston Churchill, were the original movers in the plot to overthrow the democratically elected government of Mossadegh, because he wanted to nationalise the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, which funnelled oil profits out of Iran to Britain (in other words, he had the temerity to think that Iranians should benefit from Iranian resources).  Churchill put up the money.  The CIA took over the plot.  They hired mobsters and Nazi collaborators in Iran.  CIA agents started riots.  They started a coup which lead to the ascension of the Shah’s dictatorship and the reign of the SAVAK secret police, described by Amnesty as the worst human rights violators in the world.  Murder, terror, torture, tyranny.  But Western oil companies kept their revenue, so that’s okay (though the Americans elbowed Anglo-Persian – now BP – out somewhat in favour of an international consortium in which they had hegemony).

Now we and the Americans are once again gearing up to attack this country that we have already harmed so badly.  For the hegemony of the American empire and the desperate, clawing need of the tottering neoliberal system.  I don’t know what shenanigans have lead to our closure of the British Embassy in Tehran and the expulsion of Iranian diplomats from the UK… but you can be sure it’s got less to do with outrage at Iranian protestors and more to do with imperialist scheming.

And why?  Because Iran has a nuke program?  Well, maybe.  But why, precisely, are we allowed to have nukes, the Americans are allowed to have nukes (they’re the only people who’ve ever used them on another nation, remember) and Israel (a brutal, racist, apartheid state) is allowed to have nukes… but we mustn’t let barbarians like Iran have them… because they’d impinge on Western imperial domination.  Why are we the ones who can be trusted?  Because we’re the good guys.  We – the ones who nuked Hiroshima, organised that coup I was just talking about and have bankrolled the horrific treatment of the Palestinians – we are the civilised people.  This is the objective and balanced assumption underlying the BBC’s coverage.

Well, truth is not balanced or objective.…

Continue Reading

Asylum, UK

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , 1

A rejigg of something I wrote for the old site on the subject of ‘Turn Left’, the best episode of series 4.

The alternate world that Davies conjures up in ‘Turn Left’ is not so far removed from our own. We might not (yet) see British soldiers patrolling our streets and pointing automatic weapons at unarmed women (though the recent behaviour of the police towards student protestors has been pretty savage)… but that sight would not be so unfamiliar to the people of Baghdad. Or Belfast, for that matter.

The nightmarish, decaying, dystopian Britain in this episode reflects aspects of our current social predicament… indeed, as Simon Kinnear pointed out in DWM, the episode seems prescient of the years ahead of it, of (to put it my way) recession/cuts torn Britain.

While it doesn’t get specific, or touch economics much, ‘Turn Left’ seems like the closest thing to a direct political attack on crisis-wracked British society that any mainstream TV show could possibly get away with. Let’s just recap: in an episode of that highly commercial kid’s romp known as Doctor Who, Russell T. Davies suggested that, in a time of crisis, the British state might institute a program of racist slavery, if not extermination. At the very least, we see people herded and treated like animals while patrolled by armed guardians of the state. Moreover, the people being treated that way are the poor, the dispossessed, the helpless. Brits get the kind of treatment meted out to refugees once they too become scapegoatable dependents.

I’m not sure that Davies intended the title as direct political advice (though it wouldn’t be bad advice) but it surely can’t be entirely an accident that Donna’s apocalyptic turn is a turn to the right, a turn that results in “England for the English”.

The Donna in the car at the start of ‘Turn Left’ might vote that way. She’s the same thoughtless, selfish Donna we met at the start of ‘The Runaway Bride’. She’s exactly the kind of self-involved, complacent brat who hardly notices as society crashes around her… until she is touched by it. Davies pulls no punches. We see her obsessing over stationary and offices grudges as the rest of Chowdry’s staff watch the TV, horrified, for news of the hospital. We see her asking “What’s for tea?” as news of Sarah Jane Smith’s death flashes on the screen.

I know people like that. Indeed, speaking as someone who lives in southern England – surely the global epicentre of reactionary complacency – it is very hard indeed not to derive a massive and delicious jolt of schadenfreude from the way Davies manages to turn the (surviving) population of the Sun and Daily Mail reading world into despised, harangued, jobless refugees. “Who’s going to listen to us?” asks Donna’s Mum, “Refugees. We haven’t even got a vote. We’re just no-one Donna. We don’t exist.” To put it another way: seek asylum and you’ll be locked up in one.

It’s ironic that as Donna’s society disintegrates, she suddenly discovers other people.…

Continue Reading