Political Assassinations and Secret History

Auntie's recent series about Mrs T was as usual interesting as much for what it left out as for what it included. The convoluted but essential history of the Labour Party's vicissitudes in the 1980s was almost entirely neglected. The Falklands and the Belgrano were skated over briefly and the yomp to Port Stanley was barely mentioned. But most intriguing, given that the Brighton bomb was covered in some detail, was the absence of any assassinations.

Airey Neave in fact got several mentions from the time when he was Mrs Thatcher's campaign manager. But his assassination by the INLA was entirely ignored. And Ian Gow, who was similarly assassinated by the Provisional IRA, didn't so much as see the light of day.

On the one hand yes there's the BBC's commitment to the "peace" process. Mention Fenian violence and you'll get complaints. And on top of that there's Auntie's perennial implicit anti-Catholic bias, which in the case of Neave and Gow works in a particularly interesting way. Because Neave and Gow were almost certainly targeted specifically because they were "Catholics" (or rather, in Gow's case, an "Anglo-Catholic"). So even less reason than usual to mention them? Possibly!

But what about the Beeb's similarly perennial anti-Right bias? It may seem odd to complain about that Tory favourite old chestnut when considering a series that was for the most part admirably objective and even-handed. But one can't escape a lingering uneasy feeling that they wouldn't have wanted to make Neave and Gow into martyrs. Partly this will be because they wouldn't want people to know how right-wing they really were. The Far Left have always wanted people to think Mrs T was on the Right of the Party, when in reality she was always in its liberal pro-abortion, pro-gay, anti-Rhodesia and anti-Apartheid "centre". And the libertarians conversely now want to claim her as one of their own. Either way, remind people that an Ulster integrationist and a pro-Rhodesian anti-abolitionist were amongst the Lady's closest political allies and you'll get more than just complaints.

Somewhere in the middle though is of course just good old-fashioned squeamishness about the role of political violence in a liberal democratic order. Neave and Gow were murdered for political reasons and, however unpalatable the truth may be, yes, political murders can work. Mrs T's career could have been quite different if Neave had lived. And Gow's death helped to isolate her in the Cabinet as her enemies within her own party plotted her downfall. It just shouldn't be surprising that a "liberal" Establishment doesn't like to imagine that even as recently as the 1980s we still lived in that sort of world.

Woke Fate*

All one can really say for all the post-T2 Terminator films up until 2019 was that at least they weren't boring. Terminator: Dark Fate manages to be not only offensively boring but boringly offensive. In fact boringly offensively offensive and boring more or less sums it up.

Of course the first Terminator was genuinely scary. The body horror was genuinely horrible and horrific. Its first sequel, like Aliens, was a high-octane action thriller, complete with a cute kid and gun-toting mommabear. And all the others have been footnotes not to the original concept but to that later derogation. Because Rise of the Machines was both disappointing and toe-curlingly bad, though it was at least amusingly so. Arnie's ditching Ed Furlong and teaming up with Mel Gibson cast-off Nick Stahl certainly didn't save it. Then Salvation was head-spinningly mad, and not quite redeemed either by Anton Yelchin as Kyle Reese or by a typically over-the-top Christian Bale as John Connor. And finally Genesis was just bad full-stop, marred mainly by abysmal casting choices and even more abysmal liberties with the franchise's characters and ideas - although a silly plot and ropy special effects certainly didn't help.

The Alien franchise actually waited until number 4 before going self-consciously campy and kooky. But already by Alien3 it had ditched any sense that it was building a long-running saga by using its first few minutes to undo the happy ending of the previous film. The difference between that and the termination of John Connor in the first few minutes of Dark Fate is that casually (off screen!) killing off a cute little girl, a handsome young man and a cool funky robot was in retrospect very much in keeping with the bleak soulless Godlessness of the Alien universe - where there is no fate, but also no good and evil, and there probably shouldn't really be any happy endings. And that doesn't quite work in the Terminator universe, where the moral is supposed to be that we're all supposed to be in charge of our fates, because destiny is nothing but what we make of it.

So having seen unborn baby John Connor, bratty but adorable kid John Connor, twinky teen John Connor, angry adult John Connor and finally baddy (FFS!) John Connor, in Dark Fate we see boy John Connor go the way of Han Solo and Luke Skywalker, and that's before we've even got so far as the opening credits. And as with the Star Wars characters the moral apparently is simply that we don't need white men to save the world anymore. We can make do with a young Latina call Dani Gomez. Or Ami Diaz. Or... or whatever her name is.

And she doesn't need no help from no man neither, be he machine or otherwise! Because she's got her super-butch blond-haired, blue-eyed girlfriend to rescue her, and to help her to get across the Mexican border illegally (yes, really!).

And that's before we've even mentioned the return of kick-ass sexagenarian† Linda Hamilton!

Well, the biggest disappointment of Rise of the Machines was that Hamilton and Furlong weren't in it. The biggest disappointment of Dark Fate is that now they're both back, only he got no more than a computer "de-aged"†† cameo after the manner of Princess Leia in Rogue One, and she's little more than a Carrie Fisher clone from circa The Force Awakens. Her beauty has gone, as has any trace of wit or charm. All that's left is some dried-up aged sass.

Sarah Connor herself now seems to be doing little more than channeling Hillary Clinton. She's old, she's embittered, she's out for revenge, and she doesn't just hate machines anymore, because now she also hates both men generally and indeed motherhood. One can only assume therefore that Ami Gomez is supposed to be Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. And Arnold Schwarzenegger is presumably supposed to be... Arnold Schwarzenegger? He was a baddy, but now he's a nice liberal gun-toting Republican Texan who just wants to help.

What else? Well it's possible the writers may have tried to be wise to potential "Mary Sue"-type criticisms, because their (literally, physically) strong female characters do get bumped around a little bit. But the truth is than one never really feels for any of them. (Sarah Connor alone in one scene manages to bounce burly security guards around like babies.) And I'm normally the last person to demand more "sex" in my films, but sex is leaking out of modern films not because of some new wave of Puritanism or even because of the dreaded PG-13 rating but simply because of the Chinese market. (The Chinese don't like slow build-ups either, of course!) And I suppose in a movieverse where women don't need men to rescue them, why should they have any other sorts of "needs" either?

So fair's fair! This isn't a film the Terminator franchise needed, and it's certainly not one that anyone will want either to re-watch or to remember. Its possible fate can be termination, and with extreme prejudice.

*I thought of Snark Bait, but there's a certain sense in which this may have been the high point of Trump-era wokeness. For various reasons, Hollywood may be about to turn a corner politically.
†In one scene I think she literally kicks the arse of a muscular twenty-something security guard. (OK boomer?)
††What with this and the de-aged kids in [Sh]It, last year was perhaps the creepiest year ever for Hollywood boylovers.

Sam Callahan

Who are Bellingcat?

Or rather, and more to the point, what are they for?

The big argument (and in a sense it's their argument) for Bellingcat's activities, nay the organisation's very existence, is that they can do things that the state's intelligence services can't.

Whatever that means, frankly I'm calling bullshit. State intelligence services on both sides of the Atlantic break the law almost routinely (or in our case try to find ways of getting around it). And obviously the state has resources available to it (especially money) that the dear old private sector can only ever dream of.

The only resource that the state's intelligence services currently lack - and they have done for fifteen years or so - is public trust. Blair's politicization of the UK civil service and the collective failure of the US "intelligence community" to stop 9/11, closely followed by the debacle over Iraq's WMDs (not to mention the joint decision by Blair's top spin-doctor and the BBC's even more sinister agents to hound a UN weapons inspector into an early grave), all served to damage ordinary people's image of the once proud guardians of freedom and democracy. And yes, the conspiracy to try and stop Trump, which included elements from within both the American "Deep State" and the British Establishment only served to deepen that tarnishing when (a) it failed and (b) it was also quite brutally exposed

So, with James Bond and George Smiley (not to mention Jack Ryan, Jack Bauer, and even Mulder and Scully) all on the naughty step, who was going to help when politicians in Pennsylvania Avenue or Downing Street need their smoking guns? Where are we to turn when we need an authoritative voice to denounce our enemies overseas - and by enemies I mean New Cold War foes (i.e. what remains of the "Axis of Evil", plus Russia)? The answer of course is those cool techy-type hipster kids with their laptops who know how to code. I mean, who doesn't trust hipsters? Am I right? Especially if they're funded by George Soros! And if they leaven their anti-Assad and anti-Putin stuff with the occasional shocking revelation about the US military, well that's even better.* 

So it should come as no surprise that besides Uncle George they're also funded by the National Endowment for Democracy (i.e. with money from the American government - i.e. the White House and Congress, just in case there's any doubt about what people even mean anymore when they refer to that famously nebulous entity).

And of course as well as the authority of political "independence", the Establishment also get deniability when the cool kids fuck up. I don't know whether Peter Hitchens's "leak" from the OPCW about problems with their report about the Douma gas attack was for real or not. (My basic feeling is that in these international organisations there'll always be enough people on all sides for someone to be able to cough up a minority report about pretty much anything. You can't fool all the people all the time, but by the same token there are some people who really are just fools. And without getting into Hillary-type conspiracy theories one should always be alert for the smell of Russian bullshit as well as our own.) But we'll see. At least this time they'll be able to spread the egg over a couple more faces.

And of course they'll be able to blame Trump.

*That old vendetta between Langley and the Pentagon is never going to blow over.

Darwin worried about the impact of Christian concern for "the imbecile, the maimed & the sick" for this very reason. "No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man." https://t.co/fR2kaOC4dY

— Tom Holland (@holland_tom) February 16, 2020

Was The Big Bang Theory the most conservative TV comedy ever?

When I first watched (or perhaps I should say caught sight of) The Big Bang Theory in daily early-evening repeats on E4, my initial response was simply to write it off as a cross between Friends and Frasier - those two 1990s stalwarts of America's sitcom export market, who taught us between them that it's OK to jump into bed with anyone you feel like provided you're young and attractive, make lots of arch, quippy remarks about everything, and somehow make enough money in your dead-end job to live in a palatial high-rise apartment.* It took a while for the penny (ahem!) to drop that this was actually quite a good formula for a sitcom - tried and tested, and only eventually (i.e. after a decade or so) becoming tired and testing.

The oddest thing for me about The Big Bang Theory in retrospect though isn't even its longevity, so much as its particularly peculiar brand of conservatism. For all its obsession with making up-to-date references to geek culture and "real world" science, there was actually something strangely old-fashioned about the multi-camera/studio-audience format. In fact although the sexual mores were 21st century, The Big Bang Theory was pretty much hawking the same American Dream as its sitcom predecessors had in the heyday of comic-books and astronauts in the early 1960s. The characters all live in clean and tidy houses and apartments. Religion, it has to be said, doesn't get much of a look-in, but at the same time when married female characters get pregnant "choice" is not even mentioned. And by the end of the series it turns out that friendship and family, intelligence and hard work, and eventually marriage and children - in that order, unusually enough - are the important things that make for personal fulfillment and happiness.

What made it feel even more old-fashioned in the dying days of the Obama era (not to mention amidst the woke hysteria that greeted Trump's election) was that it was a survivor from the time of Dubya. Back in them thar days, for example, it was still acceptable to have dark-skinned comedy characters like Apu and Rajesh in mainstream TV-shows. (Once the One become President, interestingly enough, it became politically incorrect to make fun of such people: for all their talk about not punching down, it was only once they finally had an opportunity to punch up that America's comedians stopped punching at all. I suppose it's funny how nakedly political political correctness can be!)

In actual fact the sub-textual racism of the way Raj's character was treated is quite troubling, dramatically at least as much as politically. Yes, it's lamp-shaded from time to time. Raj does occasionally call out his friends' ignorance about his culture. But it never changed the fact that the show's writers' fundamentally didn't know anything about people like him or indeed know what to do with him in particular. Even Enoch Powell thought that to all extents and purposes Indian people are basically like white people, but as far as the The Big Bang Theory was concerned they may as well be from Mars. So for most of the show's run Raj says and does comparatively little, and when there's a female character in the room he doesn't say anything at all (because he has selective mutism - hilarious!) and by the show's end he's the only one of the main cast who's still single (but he still has a Felix and Oscar-style relationship with Howard - hilarious!). In short, that Rajesh Koothrappali was only ever in the show as the token ethnic was definitely "problematic", and not just in the hip modern sense of the word. (The only other non-white regular character in the series is a black lady who works in HR. I'm not quite sure what that means, but just saying.)

Even more absent than unwanted pregnancies and ethnics, oddly enough, were gays. Perhaps one underestimates how spoiled one was for gay gags when watching actual Friends and actual Frasier (not to mention Ellen, or indeed their 1990s contemporary series on this side of the pond Absolutely Fabulous), but so far as I can remember there were no gay characters in The Big Bang Theory to be laughed either at or with. Indeed, most of the "comedy" of Raj and Howard's relationship depends on the ancient gag that they're not gay but they behave as if they are. Jim Parsons, who plays Sheldon, actually came out of the closet during the show's run, but his character on screen remained fussily heterosexual. And if there was an episode when one of show's character's started questioning his or her sexuality (like Frasier did one time, as did Malcolm and Reese, etc. etc.) I certainly don't remember it.

A legitimate question then I suppose is Why? Until he started fornicating with Amy (and he'd use the word himself), Sheldon Cooper was arguably the most moral character on American television (at least since Capt Janeway returned to Earth) - hardworking, clean-living, generous to a fault and (for all his annoying quirks) utterly loyal both to his friends and to non-optional social conventions. One possibility is that an old-fashioned format leads to an old-fashioned sort of show, complete with old-fashioned characters and golden oldies-type humour. After all there's only so much in-depth character development you can do when you have a studio audience always waiting for the next gag, and so the tendency is to cleave to perennial archetypes (or, if you like, the same sorts of stock characters who have been serving comedy for literally thousands of years). And so the show's first episode started with the original straight man joined with the idiot savant with a heart of gold, who were then in turn joined by the blonde bimbo with hidden strengths (the chief of which ends up being an ability to hold her liquor), the quippy Jew-boy with hidden weaknesses (especially his mom and his blonde Catholic wife), and, of course, the token ethnic.

By the end of the series, interestingly enough, all the important story-arcs have been tied up. Having started their first episode with a single timeless male-male relationship†, the show then built outwards eventually to include suitable female partners for all its male characters (apart from Raj, of course, but even including Stuart!). Penny meanwhile has given up drink (because she's up the duff), and Raj and Howard have accepted that their friendship is special but in a non-gay way. Most importantly though, Sheldon has got a Nobel Prize and used his speech to thank and apologise to his friends and to tell them he loves them. If this is "conservatism" then it's both old-fashioned and unapologetically elitist to boot.

Wisely though, the show's writers end the final episode with a final scene that is a return to the show's beginning. Nobody gets on a 'plane to LA. No one goes off to become President. No one gets married who wasn't already. We see the same group of friends, albeit with their relationships deepened and their circle expanded, returning to the same apartment and to their same positions, eating together around the same table and implicitly (slightly Simpsons-style) in front of the same TV-screen. And so even the show's ending is comfortingly conservative: a reminder that true growth and prosperity are ultimately spiritual in nature, and that "change" is not always either necessary or desirable.

*The Simpsons at the same time could somehow afford to live in a similarly palatial suburban villa, though their show at least had the sense to hang a lampshade on that from time to time.
†Apparently the only thing that worked in the show's ill-fated pilot episode was the relationship between Parsons's Sheldon and Galecki's Leonard.

British Beef

Because when you're cute, ripped, patriotic and wet...

Are Vox spreading American propaganda?

I couldn't honestly watch this and think that they aren't. Indeed, at 6:44 there's a real head-spinner of (at best!) a half-truth!

The Iraq War was stage one in Saudi Arabia's undeclared project to dispose of its various unfriendly neighbours, starting with Saddam but with the Ayatollahs and/or Assad to follow. The deal with Uncle Sam - whether explicit or implicit - was obvious: you deal with Saddam Hussein and we'll deal with al-Qa'eda.

Initially my attitude to this video was wryly amused agreement. (I.e. Vox wouldn't have dared say any of this when Obama was on the throne, but now that it's Trump, well, who cares? Yes, American memories really are that short!) Now though, I'm wondering.

They do seem to be getting a lot of their info from one Mr Kenneth Pollack, a man who "used to" work at Langley as an "analyst". I suppose it's to their credit that they at least admit that. Because, duh, Iran-Contra, and America's covert support for Iran during the Iran-Iraq War = NOT MENTIONED. The Sunni Awakening, and Gen Petraeus's role in arming the "Sunni tribesmen" who would go on to form Isis's Iraqi backbone = NOT MENTIONED.

See where I'm going with this? This may have the cool hip Vox logo in the corner, but this is the CIA's version of history. And yes, Mr Pollack even uses the phrase "no one could have predicted". It's effing textbook.

And the final LOL? Describing the "rebels" in Syria (who only murder soldiers and policemen, so that's alright then!!!) as Saudi proxies! I mean, really? Yes, the Saudis are in it up to their necks. And FFS we (the British) are in it up to our elbows. But the Qataris are in it up to the hairs on their heads.

My standing thesis is that the ongoing Saudi-Qatari stand-off (aka "the Second Arab Cold War"*) is down to the Saudis' getting cold feet about the Syria project and trying to get the Qataris (who own Harrods, and half of London, and are friends with the Prince of Wales, and who in a couple of years' time are going to host the World Cup - and no one knows how that happened) to JUST DROP IT! Yes, Trump and the Israelis are supporting the House of Saud. And yes, Iran is supporting the other side (as has Jeremy Corbyn's Labour Party, for some reason). But the truth is clear enough.

The election of Trump heralded a blip not just in the long march through the institutions of the western world but also the end of the West's barmy "Arab Spring" project in the Middle East. For now they're sitting tight†. (And, perhaps, thinking of something else.)

So, is Sam Ellis formerly of the CSIS? Google would seem to suggest that why, yes, he is. So why, then, is he now writing for a supposedly impeccably left-leaning website like Vox, and indeed scripting their flagship current affairs vids on YouTube?

You may very well ask!

*Actually it does sort of fit. After the 1952 revolution in Egypt, the Arab world was split along a fairly straightforward left-right axis - dodgy oily monarchies with America, dodgy revolutionary tyrants with the other guy. It was only after the 1979 revolution in Iran threw the West a curveball that the Arabs started playing friendly with each other again. And now that Trump is not so sure that Iran's section of the Axis of Evil really is the Big Bad (because, duh, ISIS!) they're back to having their feuds and spats again.
†The occasional assassination notwithstanding!