Ed Balls Day is a phenomenon that could only happen in the digital age of Twitter. On April 28^th 2011, Ed Balls, the shadow chancellor, accidentally tweeted his own name from his Twitter account. He was presumably searching for what people were saying about him online, and typed in the wrong box. Curiously, he didn’t delete the tweet, and it went viral. Two years later the anniversary generated some hilarious spoofs, even receiving mentions in newspapers and London Underground noticeboards. Mr Balls fortunately took the festivities in good humour, even tweeting his own name, once more.

Twitter is useful for more than comedy though, and its wider role in British politics is growing. In 2009, David Cameron, then leader of the opposition, was forced to apologise after referring to people who tweet too much as “twats”. He has since joined the microblogging site himself, and, with the help of the Conservative press team, circulates updates about his activities and policy developments. George Osborne, the chancellor, has recently jumped on the bandwagon too.

Whose 140-characters is it anyway?

While Twitter can regularly descend into explosive arguments, contained though by the 140-character limit, it is an excellent tool for disseminating information quickly to an audience of followers, which then often passes it on to others through the ‘retweet’ function. Think-tanks, media outlets, and others – including SJF – who wish to distribute their work make good use of the platform. Politicians also find it useful, with many MPs using Twitter to keep constituents updated about their work (not just their names). 418 MPs have now signed up. Some use it to keep themselves politically relevant, such as Lord (John) Prescott, a former deputy prime minister, who has amassed a huge following through active tweeting. Others have even resorted to dubious techniques to build up their follower count in a short period; Grant Shapps, the Conservative chairman, was caught out for using the tactic of sporadically following large numbers of people, and then deleting those who did not follow him in return. In the US, Mitt Romney (remember him?) quickly built up his Twitter following during the recent Presidential campaign by using fake accounts.

The egalitarian nature of Twitter is also novel. All users can send each other messages, as well as links – or pictures of Ed Balls-related signs. This often means much abuse is dished out (Mr Cameron is often an unfortunate recipient), but also means genuine questions can be raised by members of the public. Journalists or authors who write errors can be corrected, and, along with companies, advertisers or even private individuals, can even crowdsource for information.

‘Political efficacy’

A recent preliminary report by Demos, a London-based think-tank, attempts to examine the use of Twitter as a tool that opens up new forms of political participation. The study finds that there are more ‘loyal’ followers of MPs from particular political parties (which excludes people who follow MPs from more than one party) than there are formal members of political parties. The Conservatives had, at the time of the report’s publication in April, 430,893 loyal followers, while 316,237 followed Labour. Both parties have fewer than 200,000 formal members.

By analysing the demographic breakdown of these followers, the report finds that people who participate in politics through social media are generally young, and score highly on ‘political efficacy’ – the confidence that they can influence politics. People who score highly here though, tend to have higher incomes and levels of education. The report raises the potential problem that as (or if) social media becomes more potent as a political tool, the existing socio-economic gap that exists between those who tend to participate and those who don’t could be exacerbated.

It may not be an exaggeration to say that social media is shaking things up. Barack Obama’s successful deployment of the tool is well known. In Italy, Beppe Grillo’s party, Movimento 5 Stelle, built its campaign success on the radical use of social media. Mr Grillo himself did not even speak to conventional Italian media outlets, preferring instead to communicate directly online with his 1 million Facebook followers (of which, an enormous 200,000 were active volunteers). In India, PR-savvy politicians such as Narendra Modi, the Chief Minister of Gujarat, or Shashi Tharoor, a former Under-Secretary General of the UN, have more than 1.5 million followers each. In the UK, Douglas Carswell, a Conservative MP, has suggested that the growing use of social media might hamper a party’s ability to maintain discipline, and could potentially make MPs more directly responsive to their constituents. If so, ‘dinosaur’ MPs who have been fortified in safe seats for decades without needing to pay much attention to their constituency may have to watch out. The practice of democracy would certainly feel the impact.

Watch this space

The government is beginning to take Twitter very seriously: at the behest of Craig Oliver, Mr Cameron’s communications director, the Downing Street press team monitors Twitter forensically. The official 10 Downing Street account has 2.3 million followers. On 29^th April the Guardian reported that they would go further and offer ‘in favour’ journalists Twitter story exclusives, with the aim of giving them a reputational advantage over their less sympathetic competitors. This may be an innovative way of trying to control the news cycle, but disturbingly it could dampen press freedom as journalists consider the new costs of being critical.

Twitter’s value is clearly appreciated by more than just politicians: the company is estimated to be worth around $10 billion, despite employing fewer than 1000 people. Facebook’s botched initial public offering last year though suggests scepticism would be prudent, but investors still expect Twitter to be the premier flotation over the next year or so.

Taking the social networking tool so seriously though could have adverse effects. On April 23^rd, a hacked tweet from the Associated Press account announced that Barack Obama had been injured in explosions at the White House. The stockmarket briefly fell, but fortunately recovered once the truth was ascertained. Had the tweet referred to something less easy to verify, it might have caused more lasting damage. But still less of an impact, no doubt, than tweeting your own name.

The recent debate on changes to social security has been and still is one of the fiercest in this generation of British politics. In many ways it has played out as a classic left v right ideological scrap, but has also prompted nuanced and wide ranging debate with the complexities of the deficit, infrastructure, unemployment and even Europe. It is not our primary intention in this article to rehash these debates, but to provide first-hand experience of events which have implications for two elements of one significant area of the debate: housing benefit.

£712-a-month worth of living space

The first concerns a good friend of ours who lived a few doors down from us until he moved out in the past week. He has been on incapacity benefit for a number of years and had lived in his (generously termed) ‘flat’ for about four of those. This ‘flat’ (see picture left) is in many ways a product of the housing boom and Thatcher’s right to buy scheme which allowed individuals to buy their own homes. The Victorian estate we live on used to be entirely council owned until right to buy; now, owner occupiers such as us are in the minority with most owners climbing the social ladder and moving to the suburbs, then selling on to rather more unscrupulous and opportunistic landlords.

Our friend’s former flat is one compartment of an average sized house which has been split into five rooms (with a tiny toilet and shower built into the room with flimsy plywood type material) by the landlord and then rented as flats despite the fact that there are quite literally bigger bathrooms in Wood Green, let alone Chelsea. The monthly rent is an astronomical £712 (yes you read that right) a month or £8,544 of taxpayer’s money a year – the equivalent of renting a three bedroom family house in Preston. Altogether the landlord will potentially be receiving (before tax) over £40,000 a year for these five ‘flats’ with no obvious inclination (or obligation) to keep up standards of housing – before we and a few friends came round to help with a bit of decorating, it was in a fairly dilapidated state. Those depending on social security for housing have limited choice when it comes to rental due to the reluctance of many landlords to accept benefit claiming tenants and the general shortage of good social housing. As a result, landlords offering this accommodation are able to charge a premium to the most vulnerable.

It is unlikely that many would seriously argue that money spent on housing benefit is not too high – reportedly around £23bn a year. The government and right wing press’ answer to this situation is to blame the most vulnerable as if the current economic crisis is in some way their fault and cap the amount that can be claimed for housing and other social security, with disastrous consequences. The rental market is out of control and taxpayers’ money is simply lining the pockets of private landlords across the country (especially in London). However a more effective solution should have been to tackle this issue from the top (for example with the gradual introduction of a rent cap) rather than this ideologically driven solution that demonises those at the bottom.

The second example concerns another friend whom we got to know recently since he came into the church community centre where Sam works asking for food support just after Christmas. He came from Poland and had a fairly successful period as a fashion photographer before a gambling addiction led to homelessness. When we met him he had temporary accommodation due to poor health, but was about to be kicked out leading to another friend from our church offering him a place to stay for a few months.

We began to see a more hopeful future develop – he started volunteering with Sam at the centre, he came round for meals, and we even supported him to find a job. That was until one day he suddenly disappeared leaving a note of apology saying that he had stolen from us to fund an ongoing gambling addiction following a relapse of which we were unaware. We clearly understood the risk of inviting him into our lives with regard to personal theft, however, as our borough is one of the few which has begun to trial the new housing benefit policy (as part of the new system of universal credit) of paying rent directly to tenants as opposed to landlords, it conspired that he was also able to gamble (and lose) £662 worth of housing benefit owed to our friend.

In justifying this questionable policy, welfare reform minister Lord Freud said in December that direct payments ‘will help people to step into the workplace without the many institutional barriers that now exist. However, we have always been clear that exemptions must be in place alongside the right support for those who need it and the Demonstration Projects are showing us and the housing community the steps that must be taken.’ It is unclear exactly how this support will be administered, especially as our Polish friend had previously applied for housing benefit with a note from a doctor confirming mild mental health issues. This was either scrapped from the record or ignored by the council who simply transferred the money into his account (this was about a month ago).

This should prove a serious wake up call to the government regarding the introduction of this policy within the new social security system (which will be replacing the current system across the country in October by combining all claims into one payment).

Housing benefit certainly needs reconsidering, but the current direction of reform is not focusing on the right areas and is not based in reality, two fairly important aspects of policy making.

Today, Richard Wagner turns 200 (although, notably, he’s been dead for over 130 years). On any reasonable view, Wagner was one of the greatest geniuses who ever lived. His operas are some of the most moving, absorbing, and rewarding of any artistic works. Whilst, as the philosopher Bernard Williams wrote, he was not “necessary” for the development of Western music in the manner, say, of Mozart, it’s very difficult to conceive of what much 19^th and 20^th century music – even art in general – would have been without him.

But, as Magee notes, “people quite often describe themselves as feeling guilty about enjoying Wagner.” His appropriation by the Nazi regime (both historical and perceived) and his revolting, truly shocking anti-semitism – in particular with his notorious and influential essay, ‘Jewishness in Music’ – have made many feel that their enjoyment of Wagner is subject to caveat. He has retained the status of a ‘controversial’ composer, whose position in the Western canon, not to mention German history, appears subject to continual ‘reassessment’.

This may be, to some extent, a function of deep and long-lasting misconceptions dogging the composer and his legacy. Magee claims, for instance, that there remain two different versions of Wagner in contemporary discussion. On the one hand, we have the Wagner known by those genuinely interested in his life and work. On the other, we have the Wagner about whom so much is written and said but who largely happens to be a socio-cultural construction. From Stephen Fry’s popular (but largely introspective) 2011 documentary to the mammoth backlog of biographical coverage, Wagner has become bigger than (even) himself. A largely self-sustaining pro- or anti-Wagner academic-industrial complex – I’m only a little joking here – has generated the competing images of a rabid proto-fascist and a sorceror-like ultra-composer of demonic power. As Bernard Williams writes, “[a] lot of writing about Wagner in the last thirty years conceives the problem as that of revealing a hidden scandal”. And so an arms race continues towards ever more shocking ‘revelations’ and their similarly strident dismissal. As for the music itself, it has been subject to what Nicolas Spice describes as “a ritual tradition of colourful hyperbole, unsupported for the most part by any explanation as to how exactly the music comes to have the power ascribed to it.”

An article in today’s Guardian could hardly do better in repeating these standard Wagner tropes. First, it’s claimed that Wagner is the third most written-about person after Jesus and Napoleon – false, however often it’s repeated (or, at least, I don’t think anyone’s ever bothered to test the claim’s asserted truth). Second, it’s claimed – as if the many ‘revelations’ about the composer were either novel or interesting – that “[h]e has been idealised and whitewashed for too long, but has been considered untouchable”. This is plainly untrue: there have been numerous books over the last few decades revealing the depth of his anti-Semitism and much more, many explicitly arguing that the works themselves are imbued with his foul bigotry. And third, his music is claimed to be “a drug” – a tedious Wagner stereotype (whose more eminent adherents include Leo Tolstoy) that attempts to claim some special, even occult power for his (really just remarkably brilliant) late-Romantic music.

These claims all tie in to a number of bogus, but perennial charges against the composer and his work. Accusations as to the music’s aggressive bombast, cheap sensationalism, and compositional chaos are, I think, ideological hangovers from an otherwise-forgotten era of music criticism. Nietzche, for one, claimed that Wagner – a “great corrupter of music” and “a master of hypnotic trickery” – “made music sick”. Wagner stretched, bent, and ultimately broke the rules of musical form and substance in his use of chromaticism, dissonance, and wildly disparate key changes, his abandonment of almost all formal operatic structures, and his overall commitment not to working out the supposedly logical, orderly implications of his original melodic and harmonic material but to take the music where the emotions, ideas, and the drama dictate for it to go. That this criticism existed is surely of some historical interest. But the fact that we now have Debussy, Ravel, Sibelius, Mahler, Strauss, and so many others, all now commonly-loved, almost conventional composers but whose experience of Wagner’s music made their own music possible, shows on what side of history these critics remain. If Wagner corrupted music, then so much the worse for some 19th-century conservative notion of musical purity.

But the other side of this also needs mentioning: the fanaticism of some of Wagner’s supporters – and claims even sillier than the hallucinogenic character of his music. It’s to swallow you, to engulf, even drown you, so the argument goes – as Wagner himself claimed, good performances of his (no doubt pretty astounding) Tristan and Isolde will drive people insane. As above, this perception of the music’s inexorable power is another ideological hangover: it’s fairly easy to see how Wagner’s music revolted and delighted so many when you consider the formal and substantive limits of classical and romantic music placed on composers of that era, and how Wagner broke so completely free of them.

We’re talking about a time when fistfights basically broke out over the failure to return to a home key at the end of a movement. (This is a bit of an exaggeration. But riots, famously, did break out after performances of Schoenberg’s and Stravinsky’s works a few years later, and Wagner’s music at the time was considered hardly less revolutionary than that of the former two composers.) It’s therefore pretty easy to see how the views of both his detractors and supporters could become so polarised, and his music retain the false air of sorcery and synaesthesia.

But I think the claims for its ‘drug-like’ power are due also to the fact that Wagner’s music is surprisingly accessible and compelling. Spice remarks on “how unnervingly intelligible [Wagner’s operas] are, and how, in being so intelligible, they hold our attention, and, in holding our attention, draw us ineluctably in.” In fact, this is partly why Wagner’s music was so hated by so many, particularly those who aligned themselves with the composer Johannes Brahms in their defence of ‘absolute music’ in the more academic classical tradition. (A view, interestingly, not shared by Brahms himself, who admired a good deal of Wagner’s work – although apparently not sufficiently to sit through more than one act of each opera at a time.)

As Shaw claimed, “[t]here is not a single bar of ‘classical music’ in the ‘Ring’”. It was this strain in Wagner that Thomas Mann was to unfairly prejudice as “dilettantism promoted to the level of genius”.  Obviously repudiating these claims, composers such as Johannes Brahms and Anton Bruckner praised the classically symphonic development of each opera’s musical material. Other composers such as Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel, however, saw in it the beginnings of their own use of harmonic colour and effect, free from the dry formalism of their forebears, that they would later turn into their own brand of ‘impressionism’ (a term Debussy didn’t actually care for).

Overall, the furious criticism and defence of Wagner is pretty tiresome and self-defeating. This is particularly true of the criticism: as Thomas Mann said, they amount to “a panegyric in reverse, another form of eulogy.” It serves only to construct in the public mind this ubiquitous fictional character of ‘Richard Wagner’ – publicity in which he would no doubt have revelled –, largely divorced from any consideration of the merits of his work or an honest, sober assessment of his artistic (and political) contribution. In any event, as Brian Magee writes, “It should go without saying, though alas it does not, that our artistic response to, and judgment of, the works of art in question has nothing to do with the extent to which we agree, if we agree at all, with the ideas that inform them.” In the end, we can just listen to the music and enjoy it for what it is. As Jerry Fodor similarly recommends, “Neophytes are advised to close their eyes and listen to the music (remarkable by any standards) but not to read the supertitles.”

With this part-introduction-part-disclaimer over, I want to explore some very specific aspects of Wagner and his work. This is his political views – in particular, his political views as they are presented, on the whole, in his 4-part, 16-hour-long, opera cycle The Ring of the Nibelung. Of course, The Ring is exceedingly intricate and complex – kaleidoscopic would be a fitting term, given that its minute parts don’t wholly cohere but whose mostly comprehensible, often confusing pattern nonetheless dazzles and enthrals. It invites multiple interpretations, from Marxian to Jungian to whatever else, and it’s obviously pretty impoverished to examine only one shard of many. But, for me, the political character of Wagner’s work, typified in The Ring, is what forced me to take Wagner’s specifically dramatic contribution more seriously. The music alone, it needs to be remembered, is some of the most wonderful you’re ever likely to hear, and this alone may serve to explain the extraordinary devotion that Wagner’s music elicits from its fans. As Philip Kitcher and Richard Schacht describe this view, “It’s the music, stupid!” But, as they too think, and I soon realised as I explored more deeply, there is more to it than that. Part of this is the consciously worked-out political program that Wagner’s Ring pursues.

Wagner’s own political experience was crucial to the creation of The Ring. In 1848, a wave of revolutionary uprisings was breaking across Europe – a wave Karl Marx and Joseph Engels rode that year in publishing The Communist Manifesto. Wagner very much attempted to do his bit in bringing about the destruction of the old, unjust socio-political order. First writing pamphlets on republicanism, he began (although didn’t finish) an opera in which he cast Jesus of Nazareth as a revolutionary socialist seeking to throw off the Romano-Judaic political system of the time (no doubt tinged with not a little anti-Semitism). He became friends with the revolutionary anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, and whilst there’s no evidence Wagner read any Marx, most biographers think it inconceivable that they didn’t discuss his work – especially given the similarities in content between Wagner’s early socialist writings and Marx’s published views at the time. As his leftist political views took shape, he was a keen reader of Max Feuerbach and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. From the former, he came to believe in the necessity of the existing religious order’s destruction, and its replacement by a revolutionary humanism based on the power of universal love. From the latter, he was reminded that this revolutionary humanism was incompatible with any form of domination or control, whether through private wealth or state power.

Finally, in May 1849, Wagner took to the barricades in the Dresden uprisings – apparently in a role of considerable influence and leadership. (He is reported, for example, to have attempted to arm the local population with grenades.) Sought by the authorities along with the other perceived leaders of the uprising, Wagner only evaded capture by missing the coach that would have unwittingly driven him into a police ambush. As a wanted man thereafter – likely to receive capital punishment or life imprisonment if caught – he fled to Paris (with money given to him by the composer Franz Liszt, whose daughter Cosima he was later to marry).

And so it was that Wagner’s early experience with radical politics resulted in the creation of Das Rheingold (The Rhine-Gold), the first of The Ring’s four operas. Indeed, as John Deathridge writes, the Ring as a whole was “intended from the start as an onslaught on the bourgeois-capitalist order, which for well over two centuries, as Wagner and others saw it in the 1840s, had failed to heal the wounds it had inflicted on society.” Writers such as George Bernard Shaw have, along this vein, sought to develop a socialist critique out of the materials of The Ring, an interpretation that came to life in the fantastic 1976 Bayreuth interpretation directed by Patrice Chéreau (and conducted by Pierre Boulez). No interpretation, of course, in a work so diverse and disparate in its influences will wholly satisfy or cohere, but I think there’s a great deal to be said about this view – and it’s certainly what first got me into The Ring.

The Rhine-gold begins with the unfolding of an innocent, primordial world (across about 4 minutes of just one E flat major chord) – much of the work is ultimately about our relationship to nature and environmental catastrophe (something taken very seriously by the excellent 1992 Harry Kupfner production, with Daniel Barenboim conducting). The Rhinemaidens – basically mermaid-like creatures – guard a store of magical gold buried deep within the Rhine river. Alberich, a venal, self-seeking ‘Nibelung’ dwarf, stumbles across them and attempts to woo – or rape, he doesn’t appear to care – those he finds frolicking in the water. When they reject him, he steals their gold: as the Rhinemaidens rather stupidly explain, it can be forged into a ring whose awesome power ensures world domination, but only by someone who completely renounces love. A theme rises in the clarinets – associated henceforth with Wagner’s dichotomy between love and power – and Alberich readily agrees to the bargain. Running off with the gold, the first scene ends.

In the rest of the first opera, as Marx would have recognised, the harnessing of the natural world quickly turns to capital accumulation and economic power. The ring gives Alberich total control of the other dwarves of Nibelheim (their industrial nightmare of a home, deep underground), leaving them as slaves to the acquisition of more gold. Wotan, the leader of the gods and ruler of the world, learns of this, and obviously desires the ring himself. Crucially, we first see him having compromised love for power in his own corrupt way: he has contracted local giants to build a new seat of government for him in Valhalla, providing his beautiful sister-in-law, Freia, as payment. Ultimately, instead of selling off Freia, he convinces the giants to accept Alberich’s ring and accumulated wealth, which Wotan promptly steals with the help of Loge, his adviser. As he considers whether to renege once more on this deal, to keep it all himself, he witnesses the giant Fafner club his brother Fasolt to death in a fight over control of the ring. The audience are reminded once more of the shocking violence of capitalism, and Wotan decides against it. The three remaining operas are dedicated to showing how the ring is eventually returned to the Rhine – the rebalancing of a natural order disturbed by an elemental act of ecological ruin, and much else.

In this way, The Ring presents a myth, a myth of origins and their working out into a reflection of our existing social and political order – the story Wagner had constructed from a series of Northern European mythological sources several centuries old. It is, as Jerry Fodor writes, a Greek (rather than Shakespearian) tragedy in which psychological depth may be sacrificed for the development of the dramatic argument and its political symbolism. And it was meant, at least in Wagner’s mind, to reflect the social and political order of his time: as John Deathridge recounts, Cosima Wagner’s diaries have Wagner describe the City of London as “Alberich’s dream come true – Nibelheim, world domination, activity, work, everywhere the oppressive feeling of steam and fog”. But its fundamental political argument is anarcho-socialist in character. We see the brutality and corruption of a world in slave to capital and contract. As Brian Magee writes, Wagner claims that “the exercise of political power as such, socialisation, law, are incompatible with the natural order of things, and are inherently anti-life.” Proudhon’s condemnation of private property is then combined with Bakunin’s cry to smash the state – Wagner’s decries the current social, economic, and political order as completely incompatible with the free flourishing of the human person.

Wotan’s rule is, by his own self-serving description, meant to be rule through contracts and treaties, rather than brute force. His spear, on which his contracts are written in magic runes, is the symbol of his world-government and the rule of law. But, of course, contracts and treaties are nothing if not supported by coercive force – his contracts are inscribed on a spear, after all. And Wotan is in any event not averse to using force where he has not been able to secure legal sanction – as when he deceives Alberich and then violently wrests the ring from his finger. Wagner sees a deep hypocrisy in the idea of a society governed by law – that it’s ultimately one founded on terrible state violence – and this is embodied in the tragedy of Wotan’s rule. (We also learn later in the opera that Wotan himself is guilty of much the same act of elemental despoliation as Alberich, in destroying the sacred ‘World Ash Tree’ to make his all-powerful spear.)

John Deathridge also points out the deeper focus of Wagner’s critique of bourgeois society, seeing Die Walküre (The Valkyrie, the second of the four) as “a frontal attack on prevailing middle-class institutions and values”, an allegory for the “moral anarchy” underlying “outwardly stable family structures”. Despite all the myth, The Ring manages to focus sharply on the personal and domestic. We see, for example, the institution of marriage as a tool of social control and the destruction of two lovers for their contravention of social taboos. (As Brian Magee points out, the one relationship that The Ring unreservedly endorses is a plainly incestuous but whole-heartedly loving one – and it is nonetheless destroyed by the gods’ cruel machinations.) More poignantly, we see the (non-incestuous) relationship of father and daughter explored in real depth, as parental love and authority collide in the  Valkryie’s final scene.

The direction, however, of The Ring was to be irrevocably altered with Wagner’s exposure to the ideas of Arthur Schopenhauer. The brilliant German philosopher viewed the world as, at base, a manifestation of a universal, untameable Will, whose insatiable desires propel all human and natural striving. The ferocity of the Will, the endless impulse of desire-fulfilment, is an eternal cycle of pain and longing – common to the Buddhist notion of the Saṃsāra, represented by an endless wheel of suffering (Schopenhauer explicitly likened his views to those of Buddhism and Hinduism, particularly those contained in the Upanishads). Its only solution is renunciation, universal compassion, and a deep appreciation of art, all means by which, Schopenhauer claims, the individual is transcended and the fundamental unity of all beings (human and non-human) – as manifestations of the Will – can be recognised.

Happily, for a vegan or vegetarian, this forced Wagner to grapple with vegetarianism throughout his life, agreeing with its basic premises but largely avoiding its practice for reasons of health, or so he claimed. He did, however, include an injunction against animal murder in his final opera, Parsifal, where the hero is roundly condemned for disregarding the significance of animal life after murdering a swan. This is, as far as I know, the only defence of animal rights in the operatic repertoire.

And so the finale of The Ring, Götterdämmerung (The Twilight of the Gods), was to be rather different from what Wagner’s original Feuerbachian optimism suggested. Far from replacing the world’s corrupt regime with an anarcho-socialist utopia, as Wagner’s original plan laid out, the finale has Brünnhilde destroy Valhalla and more or less everything along with it. A beautiful D-flat theme is sounded (one whose origins and meaning are of independent interest), perhaps heralding Brünnhilde’s rescue of humanity from the endless wheel of suffering. And, as Wagner himself thought, the world is certainly one from which humanity needs rescuing: “Let us treat the world only with contempt; for it deserves no better; but let no hope be placed in it, that our hearts be not deluded! It is evil, fundamentally evil…it belongs to Alberich: no one else!” As Jerry Fodor correctly notes, by the end of the Ring, “practically everybody is dead.” But one of the few characters not obviously killed off is none other than the original thief of the gold.

Magee understands some of Wagner’s turn to pessimism as a reaction to political failure: Schopenhaeuer’s work gave Wagner a metaphysical justification for the loss of faith in radical revolutionary politics he no doubt felt after his perceived failure in Dresden. We need not, however, instantly view it as a post-hoc rationalisation of middle-aged conservatism or, as Magee suggests, a move from ‘the political’ to ‘the metaphysical’. As Deathridge writes, “Cosima Wagner’s diaries attest that he was enthusiastic about [the views of Proudhon to the end of his life”, a commitment also evidenced in his copious letter-writing. It may have been, in Theodor Adorno's words, “the philosophy of an apostate rebel”, but it was a very particular and interesting apostasy – potentially also based on a pessimistic analysis of authority and the rule of law, one which should continue to fascinate today.

The world Wagner ultimately intended to portray in The Ring is so venal and brutal that it can in fact be a stumbling block to your engagement with the work. Men straightforwardly view rape as an acceptable alternative to sexual love, rulers willingly have their children killed to maintain political and moral power, and brothers happily betray each other – or club each other to death – in the pursuit of capital accumulation. Wagner's intention, of course, was to describe an endless war of all against all, precisely in Hobbes' sense, and he did just that. But, for the composer, the Hobbesian sovereign whose awesome power is meant to step in to resolve this conflict is impossible: any political and economic system, purporting to control the ferocious and untameable impulses of humanity and nature, will fail. For Wagner, our only salvation is destruction and death, the cosmic calming of the Will.

The philosopher Jerry Fodor puts it more clearly, or at least politically: in his view, The Ring “is largely devoted to exploring a paradox to which it thinks that the rule of law succumbs: laws and contracts are obeyed when the cost of breaking them isn’t reckoned to be worth the benefits…It’s when passions are at their most intense that the rule of law is needed to constrain them; but it’s then that the rule of law can’t be relied on to do so.” Or more specifically, the rule of more than some modus vivendi, a fragile compromise between opposing political forces held together only by calculations of mutual advantage – with each side ready to extract that advantage, whether fair or unfair, at any point. In the just state we think that a better order can be found – one based on the acceptance of the law as a fair arbiter of disputes, with a consequent willingness to accept its equal application to all. Wagner is saying that any such order is just impossible. And so, in Fodor's words, “the famously moving theme that ends Götterdämmerung isn’t a prelude: it’s a requiem”, that is, a requiem for the very idea of a social order governed by the rule of law.

However, we can't understand how Wagner's political claims are made in The Ring without understanding something about his compositional processes. Of major importance is The Ring's use of leitmotif – individual themes, units of musical material, signifying characters, psychological states, occurrences, and the like. To take a crude example, the ring itself has a particular motif, as does Valhalla. Now, to say that they are merely “calling cards” for individual characters or ideas, as the composer Claude Debussy claimed, would be wrong; their use is much more sophisticated than that. Rather, an occurrence of a leitmotif is specific to the particular dramatic context in which it arises, although it both calls back to its previous usages and remains available for quotation by another part of the music. Each leitmotif may also musically relate to any other, and for important reasons. For example, one motif strongly associated with the magic sword 'Nothung' arises not simply whenever the sword is discussed or engaged but at strategic points across the drama to presage the regime's ultimate destruction. The 'ring' motif, moreover, is closely related to the 'Valhalla' motif, the former being simply a minor (and, fittingly, cyclical) version of the latter – this fact then serves to underscore the equivalence Wagner claims between the exploitative power of Alberich's Nibelheim regime and Wotan's corrupt world-government.

Despite all the detail and complexity, however, the finished product of The Ring hardly reflects anything like the coherence you'd expect of a worked-out philosophical program. Not least as a result of Wagner's idiosyncratic productive process and the sheer scale of his endeavour, there is much to say as to the final message of The Ring. Of course, Adorno thought Wagner had no idea how to complete the work and simply chucked all of his best material together to create a musically satisfying but intellectually empty finale, dumping on top the most affecting, kitschy melody he could find in what he'd previously written.

And many interpretations of The Ring have therefore vacillated between Wagner's own divergent views. As the drama ends, Wagner's stage directions have “men and women” standing “horrified” at Brunnhilde's destruction, then to be left “moved to the very depths of their being” as the curtain falls. What becomes of them at the end of the opera, and what should we take home from it? Are they beginnings of a new, utopian social order? Or are they ultimately euthanised in Brünnhilde's redemptive fire? Do we have to proceed with Wagner's own professed Schopenhaeurian renunciation of a fundamentally evil world, or can we proceed with its earlier view of a utopian future for all? To take two of my favourites once more, Patrice Chéreau’s production ends almost with Lenin’s question of ‘What is to be done?’, as the proletarian onlookers to the destruction onstage turn to face the audience as the curtain falls. The ending to Harry Kupfner’s production, by contrast, has its onstage viewers watch the revolution, televised, in their homes, at a party, or at work; finally, a young girl and boy join hands and walk together across the stage, as Alberich looks on, in shock.

Wagner's compositional process was also a little confusing, and served to generate numerous difficulties with the finished product. Writing the early parts of The Ring in his revolutionary period, he gave up on the series for several years, during which he wrote his most Schopenhauer-inspired, deeply pessimistic works, Tristan and Isolde and The Mastersingers. Returning once more to The Ring, he rewrote the cycle as best he could with his outlook fundamentally altered. Some of the seams connecting these two periods, therefore, are all-too obvious, and serve to confuse any attempt to comprehensively explain the work as a whole. (It also means that the music becomes incomparably more sophisticated as the work goes on, it reflecting in microcosm his own fascinating compositional development.)

One of the biggest difficulties left behind by Wagner's Schopenhauerian turn is that of the character of Siegfried. Originally the hero of the piece, Shaw saw in Siegfried the person of Mikhail Bakunin, the prototypical “anarchist social revolutionary”, in Mann's words. As the hero who knows no fear, he wanders into conflict with the existing social order and, finding it disagreeable to his wants and needs, throws it off with an insouciant flick of his sword. Such a view isn't very plausible, least of all because in the finished product Siegfried is not only dramatically fairly unimportant but is only one of the work's worst characters.

He spends much of the drama with little to no awareness of what's going on, and whether he's bumbling along carrying out Wotan's desire for his self-regime change or getting drugged by competitors for world domination, he is overall a dupe, a pawn, for the plans of others. He's also fairly psychopathic: our first experience of him is his vicious abuse of his adopted father for being unforgivably ugly and incompetent, and he attacks or threatens to attack most of those he comes across.

Much of this is reflected in the changing character of The Ring as a whole. Once Wagner turned to political pessimism, the social-revolutionary Siegfried was replaced as hero by the tragic figure of Wotan – whose psychological development generates the revolutionary destruction onstage. As Warren Darcy has written of Siegfried, Wagner “abandoned his hero, leaving him to play out a role whose dramatic raison d’être had long since collapsed”; Bernard Williams too described “a real vacuum, a collapse at the heart of the work.” This collapse, as Williams pointed out alongside many others, occurs right in the music as well: some of the best music of the final opera is reserved for Siegfried's funeral march (one of the few scenes that can be easily amputated for isolated concert performance). On the face of it, the music and drama presents a jarring dissonance: a wonderful eulogy for an insane non-entity of a character.

Whatever over-arching view we take of The Ring, its chief socio-political claims continue to resonate today. As John Deathridge writes, “[t]he cold fire calculating reason represented by Loge has indeed won out in a management-obsessed world demonized by objectification”. Indeed, in Loge – Wotan’s chief adviser-cum-illusionist – we see the eternal figure of the professionally unscrupulous lawyer. In Wotan’s deployment of Loge to evade his contract with the giants, we see a reflection of today’s tax-evading corporations: unfairness and injustice are masked by an intricate façade of legality and authority.

There are, of course, many who deny the view of Wagner we’ve explored. As Deathridge notes, “Wagner’s utopian socialism (like his notorious anti-Semitism) is often greeted with a skeptical shrug, if not outright disbelief.” Indeed, certain left-wing critics have seen more than a little rightist impulses in his work: Adorno, for instance, rather beguilingly described Wagner as “the willing prophet and diligent lackey of imperialism and late-bourgeois terrorism.”  Moreover, Paul Lawrence Rose has suggested that you can’t properly understand the notion of revolution which Wagner pursued without his racism firmly in mind. In his view, Wagner’s “idea of revolution contained always a racial and antisemitic core…a peculiarly German form of revolution in which the sacred German race was to blaze a path to freedom.” In this way, he claims that Wagner’s political views bisected left and right in the precisely the manner of the Nazi party – demanding state control of the economy’s productive forces, for example, from within a political program that demanded the racial and cultural purity of the German Volk.

Bernard Williams also felt he saw something proto-fascist in the political side of Wagner’s work. As The Ring abjures the messy, compromising politics of ordinary human affairs, Williams takes it to demand a politics of “pure heroic action”, “a redemptive, transforming politics which transcended the political.” This, he writes, was to be “exploited in a desultory but ruthlessly opportunistic way by Hitler.” Moreover, Deathridge plausibly claims much the same about the already pretty ambiguous character of Siegfried: for him, he represents “an appalling moral void that looks suspiciously like part of an unsettling drawing-board version of the hero figure first celebrated by fascist movements in the twentieth century”; he is “a fair-headed, protofascist superman marching to the tune of the will to power”.

This neatly segways into a (brief) discussion of Wagner’s extreme anti-semitism (and it was extreme, even by the very anti-semitic standards of the time). The question of the extent to which, if it all, this infects his work, and how, if at all possible, we can sidestep his racial hatred are issues that need considered reflection. And much has been made of claims that The Ring itself contains virulent anti-Semitism and racial hatred. To take one example, some have claimed that the character of Alberich, for instance, is simply an offensive Jewish stereotype that would have been obvious to Wagner’s early audiences, even if not immediately obvious to audiences today. Moreover, we may see in the prominence of incest and the continuing stress on the noblity and purity of the race of the Wälsungs – Wotan’s earthly progeny – a conception of racial and cultural purity beset by impure and putrefying outsiders. Wagner, in any event, had a life-long interest in the notion of racial and sanguinal purity, something that may well have pre-dated his friendship with notorious eugenicist and racial theorist Joseph Gobineau.

However, as Kitscher and Schacht write, “the identification of these characters portraying Jews already presupposes prejudicial stereotypes.” The presentation of these characters as distinctly Jewish is pretty superficial: it is certainly never overt and, in my view, it would have been unlikely to elicit much comment were it not for our pre-existing knowledge of Wagner’s anti-Semitism, something that inevitably colours our perception of his work. In any event, we may think that, even if The Ring is not irredeemably tainted by racism and anti-Semitism, the appalling views of its creator throw serious doubt on the sincerity, or even existence, of his supposedly leftist beliefs. How could someone so racist believe anything like the egalitarianism and  compassion for which socialism is taken to stand?

Well, one response is that this doesn’t really matter: we are assessing our interpretation of The Ring by way of the ideals that we think make the drama intelligible, not by way of Wagner’s own ideals, whatever they were. If our interpretation stands up to scrutiny in making sense of the dramatic work as a whole, then great – if it doesn’t, then not so great. Whatever Wagner thought about his own work is to this extent irrelevant.

Testifying to its wide interpretive possibilities, as Deathridge recounts, is the fact that “[i]n the Wagner anniversary year 1933 alone, Soviet commisar Anatoly Lunacharsky and Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels both saw it as a work exemplifying their idea of “revolution”.” But, in general, we need only remind ourselves of the (worryingly pre-genocidal) treatment of the Rohingya in Burma to evidence the potential for total disconnection between the content of a moral-political view – the universal compassion of Buddhism – and its apparent contextual application – rabidly Islamophobic Buddhist nationalism.

There are, no doubt, other strands of moral critique to be brought against Wagner. Wagner’s view of women, for example, was complex and not entirely pleasant. On the one hand, the character of Brünnhilde presents an obvious strand of feminism in The Ring: the very idea of a Valkyrie implies a notion of female power that was not exactly socially conservative for its time. Brünnhilde, moreover, is one of only a handful of psychologically complex characters in The Ring, individuals whose role is not reducible to that of a useful dupe or a representative cipher. But, on the other hand, Wagner happily reproduces misogynistic notions of female purity through sexual repression – where Brünnhilde appears to lose some of her god-like powers after having sex with Siegfried, for instance. Interestingly, his other operas may be considerably worse in this regard: Wagner appears to have intended Parsifal, for instance, to reproduce wholesale the founding Christian misogyny of humanity’s fall through female sexuality – Amfortas is tempted to destruction by Kundry just as Adam is tempted by Eve.

As repeat performances of Wagner’s Ring cycle have showed, we can construct a dramatically compelling, largely coherent view of The Ring shorn of, at least, the racism of its author. And so I think we have to take of the late philosopher of language Sir Michael Dummett about Gottlob Frege, hugely important logician and philosopher but a notorious racist. Sir Michael spent most of his life writing about Frege’s works and the ideas they generated whilst campaigning against racism. The problem, for him, was understanding how a man capable of such brilliance in the study of logic and language could be so irredeemably stupid when it came to issues of race. The same is true of Wagner – how it is that someone could create a work so fascinating and wonderful as The Ring, especially for those interested in leftism, could be so foul in so many other ways (and I haven’t even mentioned what a horrible individual he was to be around in general).

So, on the day of Wagner’s 200^th birthday, these are at least some of the reasons why – despite what I’ve written immediately above – you might want to get into Wagner. That is, Wagner as he actually existed and wrote, rather than as the cultural trope whom it’s fun to defend or despoil. It may be that you’re, quite justifiably, not interested in the political ideas expressed, or you just can’t avoid associating much of his music with Nazism or racism. I understand this, just as I understand Israel’s reluctance to listen to his music, if it’s indeed true that many of its citizens just can’t help thinking of the Holocaust whenever they hear it. But this is a deeply regrettable fact, and one that can only be overcome by saving Wagner’s music from himself and his ‘controversial’ legacy. One way of doing this, I think, is rather easy:  just listening to some of (and, importantly, only some of) the most beautiful music ever written – that just so happened to be written by a monstrous sociopath. So here is some.

A contemporary criminal epidemic
Is the subject of this polemic
Its epicentres are the financial sectors
In the United Kingdom and United States
And its reverberations have left entire countries in dire straits
That crime is corporate fraud
Committed by the banks and the fraudulent accountants
Fraud by the hedge funds and ratings agencies
And in the fraudulent delivery of fraudulent securities
To people who hardly knew an asset from a liability

The best thing you could say about these incidents
Is that there was zero due diligence
During an era now renowned for regulatory non-compliance
But there is mounting evidence to suggest
That these fraudulent foreclosure, mis-selling
Predatory lending and betting-against-what-you-are-peddling events
Were premeditated, and hence
Under the 2006 Fraud Act, there could be some arrests

But how complicit were the regulators?
Did they just turn a blind eye to market manipulators?
And why is the government stripping funding from the investigators?
Like the UK’s Serious Fraud Office – what kind of nonsense is this?
Cuts of 40% – are you taking the piss?
Some form of accountability wouldn’t go amiss
And given that this predation causes more widespread harm
Than many a criminal offence
The least these victims should expect
Is the chance to participate in a restorative process

To say that the Libor scandal involved no criminality
Requires some imagination
Because it is clearly stated in the aforementioned legislation
That it is an offence to obtain a pecuniary advantage through false representation
Or through failing in one’s legal duty to disclose information
Or through abusing one’s position with an act or an omission
And so we need some institutions that will forget their trepidation
And undertake some serious litigation
Alongside a CPS that acts in the public interest
Enough procrastination disguised as deliberation
Enough of Too Big To Fail as a justification
For not addressing the harm done by financial corporations
Because the victims of these crimes
Deserve better than this
But for now, there’s another bankruptcy of a small business
As another mis-selling claim for an interest rate swap is dismissed.

For more poems by Criminonymous, go to: http://criminonymous.wordpress.com/

Probably not a place to build your holiday home.

North Korea’s autarkic regime is sabre-rattling once again, with many observers genuinely worried about an outbreak of fighting. But while the tension in the Korean peninsular continues, another dispute has been rumbling, which is equally likely to build up to a dangerous clash in the near future. While nobody really knows what exactly Kim Jong-Un’s latest bout of frothing anger is all about, the other long-brewing conflict, between regional superpowers, China and Japan, is over some small, uninhabited rocks in the sea.

International Crisis Group’s recent report on the Senkaku/Diaoyu dispute is worth reading. Based on a large number of interviews with prominent and relevant individuals from both Japan and China, the ICG report, entitled Dangerous Waters: China-Japan Relations on the Rocks, provides the context for this dispute, and explains why tension that suddenly increased late last year has not subsided. It is a worrying tale, and the report does not rule out the possibility that violence could break out – out of the blue, as it were. This article briefly summarises the ICG report.

On the Rocks

The Senkaku/Diaoyu island chain is considered by both countries to have strategic and possibly economic value. China sees them as crucial for its access to the Pacific, whereas Japan worries that China’s control of them could give it a monitoring platform of its activities in Okinawa. It is also believed that the islands may have large amounts of hydrocarbon deposits in their waters, though as the dispute has been simmering for so many years, no real exploration has occurred. That part, therefore, is based on conjecture – for now they remain rocks in the sea.

Japan has administered the islands since 1895 when it annexed them, claiming they were terra nullius. The recent status quo therefore has seen Japan’s coastguard patrolling the islands, preventing Chinese ships from venturing into the waters around them. China, however, claims the islands were annexed during the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644), and handed to Japan in Treaty of Shimonoseki (1895), but should now be returned as after WW2 Japan was told to return the territories it had seized during war. Unfortunately, the issue looks unlikely to be referred to the International Court of Justice, as would seem appropriate, as Japan flatly denies that a dispute even exists. China meanwhile “has no faith in the ICJ’s fairness”. The ICG wisely avoids taking sides on the issue.

The status quo is no longer tenable though, meaning the dispute may well be coming to a head. In September last year, Japan nationalised the islands to prevent Tokyo’s nationalist governor at the time, Shintaro Ishihara, from purchasing the islands from its private owners and building on them. Japanese officials claim to have informed their Chinese counterparts of the necessity and wisdom of this move, but China responded angrily, which shocked Japan’s government. Japan believed it was simply transferring ownership “from the left hand to the right”, but China felt that the action was significant politically, and “violated the basic agreement that both countries shelve the dispute and kick it into the long grass”. China also distrusted Japan for its timing of the action, viewing it as an attempt to embarrass the government in the middle of its handover of power. The leaders at the time, Chinese Premier Hu Jintao and Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda (both of whom have now been replaced), had met and discussed the issue, but evidently misunderstood each other’s position. China felt it lost face; Japan now feels that if it were to back down, it would in turn lose face. Meanwhile, the conflict is escalating.

China responded to the nationalisation with a “combination of punches” that aimed to shift the status quo from Japanese control of the islands to a system of “overlapping administration”. A number of punitive measures were taken, from cancelled tourist trips, consumer boycotts, extended custom inspections, violent anti-Japan protests, and the cancellation of official meetings. On the ground (or rather, in the sea) China attempted to enact a policy of “reactive assertiveness”, which it has used to great effect in its similar territorial disputes with the Philippines and Vietnam. By pushing back hard in the face of a sudden clash, it attempts to change the status quo in its favour. Thus, China now sends ships to regularly patrol the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands, and has claimed that the islands are part of its non-negotiable “core interests”.

The report claims that many Chinese officials and scholars who were interviewed believed that the Japanese security alliance with the US was the biggest obstacle preventing China from simply taking the islands by force. As China rises, many in the country have begun to see Japan as a second-rate power, despite its size as the third-largest global economy and much higher GDP per capita ($45,903, against China’s $5,445). They do not give the nuances of Japan’s internal politics much credit for its actions therefore – especially its decision to nationalise the islands. Believing the US shadow to be the main factor, China interpreted the decision as a key part of a new strategy to contain China’s rise.

Competing claims

Such mistrust alone is ominous. When combined with various institutional failings, it becomes very dangerous. The ICG report makes clear that crisis mitigation strategies have largely broken down, and many channels of communication that were necessary for clearing up past misunderstandings have been closed. The Chinese leadership has for many years stoked the memory of WW2, including through its textbooks, which has served to make the people more nationalistic and anti-Japanese than would be optimal for shrewd policy-making. It is therefore more difficult for the Chinese government now to adopt a more moderate and conciliatory tone. Moreover, in Japan, the ‘China School’ of diplomats in the foreign ministry have been gradually sidelined and replaced with non-China specialists, which has dented mutual understanding between the two countries’ diplomats. At the same time, the prudent Chinese foreign ministry has been gradually weakened in relation to other, more aggressive departments.

In theory, one could think of further substantial measures that might enhance trust and cooperation. Perhaps both countries could agree to joint fishing rights around the islands for instance, or even collaborate on exploration for resources, which would be mutually beneficial economically. Or, who knows, perhaps they could even agree to leave the islands as a marine reserve, as the Economist would like? Unfortunately, with terrible communication in this high-level game of brinkmanship, such positive outcomes are unlikely to happen soon. Improving communication and rebuilding constructive institutional ties are therefore of paramount importance.

All too frequent

This all paints a depressing picture. War between these two countries, as seemed perilously close at one stage, would be madness, and would certainly benefit nobody. To make matters worse, the seas in the region are littered with other disputes: Japan and South Korea argue over the Dokdo/Takeshima/Liancourt Rocks (which are administered by South Korea), and China, as mentioned above, has a number of disputes in the South China Sea. Taiwan also claims the Senkaku/Diaoyu as its own. Without international arbitration, will these countries simply muddle through, in the hope that peace will be preserved? Is such a fragile status quo that creates lingering mistrust between strong trading partners really in the people’s interest?

The Senkaku/Diaoyu dispute may look niche and confusing for outsiders while it remains ‘peaceful’, but seemingly petty territorial disputes are regular features of global politics. In the UK, one need only think about the Falkland Islands for a stark similarity. While the UK claims no dispute even exists, no international arbitration can take place, and Argentina’s government will keep up the possibly hypocritical rhetoric about ‘colonialism’. Argentina’s claims seem weaker than China’s though, because there are actually people living in the Falklands who would like to remain British, whereas nobody inhabits the Senkaku/Diaoyu. Nevertheless, pretending a source of tension does not exist is an ostrich’s approach, not that of a strategic thinker.

It may be too much to hope, but perhaps a true statesman involved in any of these disputes would be one who can think beyond ‘losing face’ or ‘looking powerful’ and would be willing to sit down amicably with his counterpart in order to seek areas of agreement and compromise. Unfortunately, populism will always be more attractive in the short-term. Which perhaps explains why the ownership of small rocks in the sea assumes such critical importance.

This is the final post in an SJF mini series: ‘Football and society, then and now’. See the other articles here and here.

Paulo Di Canio, a fascist (in all probability), is now sitting at the helm of one of Britain’s most respected football clubs. The only way to remove him from such a prestigious position is for the fans to implement a boycott of the club.

For the last two years I have been calling for a boycott of Swindon Town FC – Di Canio’s former employers.

“I am not political… I do not support the ideology of fascism” – Paulo Di Canio

Few in the midst of the media scrum that followed his appointment to Sunderland commented on his two year reign at Swindon Town. Barney Ronay at the Guardian was the exception to this rule when he wrote, “Di Canio has been manager of Swindon for two years without complaint…there is an excellent point to be made about the lack of attention paid to events in the lower leagues.”

He was right on one count. The whole Di Canio debacle shows the unhealthy media spotlight that is shinned upon the Premiership leaving the lower leagues in its shadow.

Just as the next big things can be spotted playing in the lower leagues, so the next big problem can also often be found there.

Barney was wrong however to assert that Di Canio spent two years at Swindon without complaint.

I was complaining and complaining loud.

Back in 2011 I wrote that Swindon should be embarrassed to employ a man who is a symbol of modern fascism and called for all fans to boycott the club.

I finished that article by appealing to the Swindon fans saying, “The message has to come from the supporters. Sack him for the reputation of the club.”

This message was ignored by most, if not all, Swindon fans. Could it be different for Sunderland?

At the heart of every football fan is passionate burning desire for success. Regardless of Di Canio’s politics he delivered promotion to Swindon. Success on the pitch acted to numb the consciousness of many Swindon fans. Promotion enabled them to look the other way.

Although this isn’t an excuse for their silence, it does at least act as an explanation.

For Sunderland fans there is little chance of this level of success and this might act as the catalyst for his dismissal or at least a de facto boycott (drop in gate sales).

The harder question though sits with all of the non-Swindon and non-Sunderland fans. Di Canio has been a manager for two years now; why have they not spoken out until now?

Not my club, not my problem was the most common response from non-Swindon fans that I spoke to over the last few years.

Let’s be clear though: it is our problem. Fascism has no place in a modern tolerant democracy. Fascism, by its nature, invokes a support for authoritarianism coupled with a questionable understanding of culture and national identity. Is this what Sunderland want in a figurehead?

This issue moves beyond just fascism though.

In a macabre game of ‘footballing extremist ideology bingo’ we are now erring towards a full house in modern football. We’ve got racists, we’ve got homophobes, and now, to complete the set, we have a self-declared fascist.

While the footballing establishment has at least started to tackle the first two problems, there remains uncertainty about how, or even if they should, tackle fascism.

Once again this is why the message needs to come from the fans that fascism has no place in the game.

Look either side of you on the terraces and you will see people who not only fought fascism but also know people who died at the hands of fascists. The horrors of the 20^th century are not as far away as some think.

It pains me to have to write this, but being a fascist is not just being ‘a bit right wing’ – it is lending your tacit support to a movement that oversaw the mass death of millions.

At best Di Canio will stay quiet. At worst though, the poisonous ideology that this confused Italian extrovert follows will drip into his decisions and affect the players underneath him.

Just as Marcel Desailly would probably choose to never play for a team that Roy Atkinson managed, so I doubt any Italian with immigrant descendants would want to play for Sunderland.

For the good of British football, for the good of Sunderland FC and for all those who spent their lives fighting fascism I call on everyone to boycott the Stadium of Light until Di Canio has either renounced all aspects of fascism or left the club.

The UK government and their sympathetic media would have you believe that current legal aid provisions allow unpopular members of our society to greedily grab what they can get, much like an unsupervised child at a pick ‘n’ mix. The truth is that this government is systematically dismantling a safeguard of access to justice that is essential if we are to ensure that the rights of vulnerable members of society are protected.

Times are hard: we are in a recession and cuts have to be made. This much we know (or have been told by the government, depending upon your economic view point). The government, in view of the above, plans to cut £350m from the £2bn legal aid budget. As someone who has trained as a barrister, hoping to practice in areas affected by the cuts, I suspect I could be accused of NIMBYism (“not in my back yard”). What my accusers need to realise is that these are cuts to everyone’s back yards.

Legal disputes are expensive for anyone who isn’t a Russian Oligarch (and even to them too). Sometimes, however, they are necessary. The principle behind legal aid is, broadly, that each is assisted in accordance to his capacity and need; if you can’t afford legal help in a private market then you are assisted by the state. Our legal system is adversarial, meaning that one side argues against the other and the best argument, as assessed by a judge relying on legislation and previous cases, wins. Legal aid has helped to ensure that Davids can have the opportunity of taking on Goliaths; that people who think they have been wronged can be told that they haven’t before they waste years in litigation to find out the same. In short, legal aid has been there for those who needed it. The cuts mean that this will no longer be the case.

Perhaps you are reading this and thinking that this doesn’t affect you as you can afford legal advice. It is, however, worth bearing in mind that all that stands between your ability to afford a lawyer and the difficult situation hundreds of thousands of people (the government’s conservative estimate is 600,000) will find themselves in is bad luck. Furthermore, it is not just those who cannot afford to pursue a legal remedy that will be affected. There will be more self-represented litigants, more frivolous claims and wasted appeals (as no one will be there to advise that the claim or appeal ought not to be pursued) and good claims will be badly prepared. It doesn’t take much to realise that this will clog up the court systems (which the government has accused legal aid of doing) and, ultimately, cost the government more money than they plan to save. Your back yard isn’t safe either.

Previously, legal aid was available in a number of areas and, while the government and press continually refer to legal costs as ‘wasting money’, it should be borne in mind that legal aid has enabled UK citizens to resolve their legal problems sooner rather than later, securing accommodation, access to their children or compensation for negligent medical care.

Following the cuts, legal aid is no longer available for cases involving divorce, child custody, clinical negligence, welfare, employment, immigration, housing, debt, benefits and education. These are areas at the heart of everyday life and, subsequently, everyday disputes. However, while these are everyday problems, this in no way means that they are easy to resolve. Areas such as benefits, welfare and immigration are complex and the people hit by these problems can find it difficult to explain their problems (an excellent article by Nadia Salam warned the government about this in 2011). Furthermore areas such as child care and divorce can be emotionally-charged and hard-fought and can really benefit from the neutral advice of a third party.

The justice minister Lord McNally said: “We are confident people will be able to access advice when they need it. We have set up online and telephone services to help people find out if they are eligible for legal aid and direct them to a solicitor, or alternative form of advice if they are not.” With respect, this fails to recognise that legal aid was there for those who couldn’t afford legal advice: they will not be helped much by a telephone directory informing them where they can obtain it, unless of course that sign-posted advice is free.

Perhaps the government’s response would be that this is where Big Society steps in. If Big Society once included Citizens Advice Bureaux it is unlikely that it will for much longer as their budgets, too, suffer as a result of legal aid and local government cuts. A number have already been forced to close, as have other non-profit organisations such as the Immigration Advisory Service. If Big Society included charities stepping in to help then perhaps the government should have considered how those charities relied on legal aid to provide their assistance (charities such as Shelter and the Red Cross have detailed the significant negative impact on their services).

When I attended the Law Society’s pro bono week events in 2012 (pro bono being the giving of legal advice for free) I did so on behalf of a legal guidance service I co-founded. There was much discussion about whether law students could fill the gap left by the removal of legal aid. While believing that law students can provide real help to local communities and also helping to integrate universities with their local communities and businesses, law students need someone to check the work they have done. They also cannot provide the continuous and focussed support that a paid lawyer can, have a limited range of knowledge (for example, university law students won’t yet know crucial civil procedure rules) and they cannot be of great help in areas that require urgent expert assistance (such as appeals against removal directions). With the legal aid cuts putting small to medium-sized law firms, who have historically provided assistance to clinics run by law students, under pressure, there may be less scope for them to fund or spend time supporting law clinic initiatives in the future. Larger corporate law firms, of course, can provide some assistance, but even then we are only seeing small levels of non-specialist support available to people in highly populated areas where universities are based; what about the more rural areas? Surely Mr Grayling, the first non-lawyer Lord Chancellor since 1673, has done his homework and thought of this?

The government likes to portray those who rely on legal aid as society’s criminals and wasters, but such a portrayal is fiction. Yes, prisoners use legal aid to challenge the government when they feel that their human rights have been violated. What the press fail to mention is that all too often the prisoner’s human rights have been breached, for example, when their continued detention is not reviewed and so they are being held against their liberty unlawfully. Furthermore, the government must be aware that law-abiding citizens rely on legal aid to secure a divorce from a cruel spouse, to obtain custody of their children or to challenge a hospital that failed to provide adequate care. Surely the government carefully read the many consultation documents sent in voicing strong opposition to and genuine concerns about these legal aid cuts?

If we step back and look at the bigger picture we can see why the government may be rather keen to cut legal aid to prisoners and other vulnerable people. The prisons are full and the parole boards cannot regularly review the lawfulness of detention as they are meant to; the Home Office has an embarrassingly large backlog of immigration applications and asylum claims, coupled with an extraordinarily poor quality of decision-making; the government’s “bedroom tax” or “spare room subsidy” is being challenged as discriminatory. At a time when the government could be under fire from numerous legal challenges it chooses to cut services that enable those legal challenges to be brought.

The £350m hole left by legal aid cuts cannot be filled by the “Big Society” as it, too, faces cuts and had also relied on legal aid. Neither can it be filled by well-meaning law students nor a sign-posting telephone line, the efficiency or cost of which is yet to be revealed.

As Lord Neuberger, President of the UK Supreme Court, said, “[i]f you start cutting legal aid you start cutting people off from justice”. The Government is putting access to justice out of reach of law-abiding people with every day problems in need of solutions … and that’s a lot worse than just closing the sweet shop.

This article is the second in a mini SJF series: ‘Football and society, then and now’. See here for the first article in the series.

English football is about as ‘modern’ as you can get. The brand of the Premier League is known world-wide with boys and girls all over the poorest parts of Africa, Asia and South America wearing replica shirts with Rooney, Lampard and Tevez emblazoned on the back.

But football was not always this way. In many ways a microcosm of wider societal change, subject to the introduction of neoliberal thought in the Thatcher/Reagan experiment, major changes occurred in the 1980s. Many of these changes were positive: tackling the hooligan culture that had emerged was vital (although this was clearly not the fault behind the Hillsborough tragedy, as some have claimed), re-branding the game to make it more family-friendly and the insertion of some more private investment. I remember my Dad telling me going to games in the late 70s was often like going to a football fight hoping that a game might break out.

I was always aware, however, that something was not quite right with the game that I grew up to love. Part of this was due to my growing socialist tendencies in my mid-teens: being awoken to the vast inequality of the world alongside an ever booming football market, transfer fees in the millions and wages in the tens of thousands a week never sat easily with me. But blissfully uninformed of the effect of modernisation, I continued my support of Bristol City (& Man Utd in the Premiership – you don’t say you support Bristol City on a primary school playground in Oxford when you’re 6!)

In the last few years, though, I entered tentatively into the world of football policy through work, and began to understand the consequences beyond the positive elements listed above. I learned that there are broadly two camps in the debate – those with the power who set policy and unsurprisingly benefit disproportionately (financially and structurally – not sharing power and influence more widely) with the status quo (mainly the FA, Premier League and owners), and the ‘resistance’ movement which tries to unearth the truth behind the propaganda, making the game democratic and representative of those who pay for the gig – namely, the supporters.

My eyes were opened to a world the average football fan sort of knows exists, but isn’t inclined to find out more about because they are too busy ‘consuming’ the product they are being fed, which they are told unequivocally is the best in the world – now shut up and enjoy it! The excellent Dave Boyle has done my job for me in this instance, in an article describing a world of secrecy, lack of accountability, astronomical debt (English football holds around half or all European club debt), and generally a bleak picture which isn’t getting much better. As Dave explains, the sad thing is that like Lloyd George said about the First World War: if people knew the truth it would stop tomorrow – it is in the interest of the ruling parties to keep the masses down. Sound familiar…?

One of the central principles of Union Berlin: “Other clubs have fans, Union fans have a club”

From my perspective, one of the most lamentable elements of modern football is the acceptance of being taken advantage of on behalf of supporters. Reading Sheila Coleman’s article in this mini-series, describing standing in the Kop in the 70s and the collective spirit which came with it made me envious. My football experience these days is limited to mainly travelling to Championship (soon to be League 1) grounds, paying an exorbitant price to get in, and listening to the latest lyrically vacuous chart-topping singles blaring out on a tannoy (sponsored by AXA insurance), watching players who don’t care about the club with a dwindling away support in a stadium far too big for the attendance. (As I have blogged elsewhere – exorbitant ticket prices is football’s way of financing the greed and debt in the game, holding us to ransom because they know ‘stopping going’ is not an option). The capitalist dream.

Compare this to German football (e.g. see this article by David Conn), and we see a vision for a game existing for and with supporters, not oligarchs and millionaires. High levels of supporter ownership (all clubs are required to have at least 51% voting rights with supporters) lead to lower ticket prices, higher attendances and a sense that the game belongs to the people and communities. A few years ago, Union Berlin needed to build a new stadium – up stepped 2,000 supporters who gave time (in exchange for tickets) to help build the stadium, an incredible example of civil society borne out of collectivism, and almost unthinkable in England.

The way forward does not require a backwards step to the 70s though. What is required, as Boyle points out in the earlier referenced article, is that supporters unite to fight for the game they want which will keep elements of modernisation – safer stadia, less violence etc. – but crucially promote elements of collective identity endeavour (denounced by Thatcher, who incidentally held football – and its working class clientele – in contempt). Social media and club forums should provide adequate tools for such tasks, building on the already inspirational supporters trust movement championed by Supporters Direct. As with wider societal debates – supporters (or the people) don’t know how much power they really have.

By Sheila Coleman

My friend Diane (Diane Graham) and I first went to see Liverpool play when we were seven. We lived in Kirkdale, a neighbouring area of Anfield. All members of my family were fanatical Evertonians so none of them would take me to see Liverpool. At that time Everton were the more successful team. However, I have no recollection of ever liking them. I believe that I was born a red therefore it was only natural that I sought refuge with Diane’s family who were all Liverpool supporters.  It might seem strange in the present day to think of two little girls heading off to a football match totally unsupervised but we had no sense of danger, only excitement at what the day would bring. As Diane says: “I think we were quite unique as very few little girls were interested in football at that time but we both came from football mad families so it was in our blood!”

The Kop, Anfield

Most games were on a Saturday and that day would be packed with fun from beginning to end. In the morning we would take in a film at the local cinema (we were ‘ABC minors’ – a film club for children), hopefully catch a wedding at our church (we sneaked into many a wedding album) and most importantly we would then go to watch our beloved Liverpool FC.

We wore whatever clothes our mother’s made us wear. We didn’t have much money so choice was limited. We did however, have our Liverpool scarves; hand knitted in our beloved red and white.

We went in the ‘Boy’s Pen’. This was long before the age of sex discrimination legislation and no one ever thought that girls might want to see a match. It could be quite rough in there. A large number of boys in a penned area now seems quite a frightening prospect but I guess we managed to stand our ground. The Liverpool writer Dave Kirby wrote a brilliant poem about the Boy’s Pen but I reprimanded him for not saying about the girls who bravely entered it!

The main reason for going into the Boy’s pen was because it was the cheapest area in the ground. If we had no money at all then Diane and I (sometimes with my younger Evertonian brother Philip) would go up to the ground and wait till three quarter time when all the gates would be open ready for people to leave. We would sneak in for the last twenty minutes and often managed to catch a late goal or two. I still marvel at our ingenuity of not letting poverty get in the way of our sport.

The only time we went to an away game when we were young would be to a local derby game at Goodison (Everton ground). They were extremely popular games and so were ticketed occasions. This was long before the days of voucher systems. Diane and I would get up at the crack of dawn to queue for tickets and were always successful. We had great staying power when it came to our beloved Liverpool.  Diane recently reminded me of a neighbour stopping our mothers and commenting on what good little girls we were to get up for early morning mass!

After the Boy’s Pen and when we had a bit more money we started to go into the Paddock. This was a much smaller area than the Kop and was along the side of the pitch adjacent to the Kop. It was a very safe area and was never as crowded. It contained a mixed crowd of age groups and was therefore ideal for families.  Diane recalls going there with her mother who would bring a packed lunch and a flask of coffee. During winter months the coffee would be supplemented with whiskey or brandy and duly shared around to keep fellow fans warm!  Diane and I would enjoy watching the game from the paddock but always looked longingly across to the Kop with a steely determination. There was never any doubt that was where we were headed.

We were eleven years old when we first went on the kop. A rite of passage. It was no place for the fainthearted. A confidence was needed to literally stand your ground. However, as young girls we were smart enough to stand in front of the barriers and from that position always felt safe.  Our favoured spot was in the middle, halfway up and firmly in front of a barrier. With the benefit of hindsight I suppose that there must have been times when I was frightened yet I would not have defined it as ‘fear’ at the time. For me, it was sheer excitement. The adrenalin rush was amazing and it was very much living in the moment. I also felt that no harm would befall me, as there were so many ‘friends’ around me.  The degree of camaraderie should never be underestimated. The Kop functioned as a single entity. You literally went with the flow.  It was like a natural force and was an amazing experience.

I can recall one game when we had just scored. I lost a shoe in the ensuing sway. I can still remember thinking that the thrill of the goal would outweigh any punishment metered out by my mother. However, someone shouted from further down that they had found a shoe and I tugged at the sleeve of a man standing next to me and told him it was mine. The shoe was duly dispatched hand to hand back up through the crowd and my mother remained blissfully ignorant.

I also remember an occasion when I was leaving the Kop after a game and fell over. What could have been a disastrous situation was averted by someone quickly shouting that a girl had fallen and people stood firm around me until I was safely back on my feet. These two examples show that although the environment was not ideal from a safety perspective, nevertheless, there was a high degree of commonsense and camaraderie that prevailed which negated any danger.

The bigger games at Anfield held in excess of 50,000 people. It was quite common for fans to faint in such a large crowd.  If someone fainted in the kop they would carefully be passed over the heads of the crowd (a bit like crowd surfing at concerts today!) until they reached the awaiting St John’s Ambulance for first aid.

The Kop was extremely quick witted and would respond to any event with an appropriate song.  Diane recalls the rivalry between Liverpool keeper Ray Clemence and Peter Shilton. Both England goalkeepers. Shilton had been chosen ahead of Clemence for the England game against Poland and had an awful game. The next time he was playing at Anfield he ran to take his place in the Kop goal. Traditionally, opposing players received a good welcome by the kop but on this occasion they all started singing Poland’s number one record!

Also the local rivalry between Liverpool and Everton was enduring but good-humoured. The late Gordon West, Everton’s goalie, was nick named Mae West by the Kop and whenever he came to Anfield, someone would run on the pitch from the Kop and present him with a ladies handbag. He always took this in good spirit.

The singing was something else! In those days it was commonplace to sing popular songs, especially Beatles songs. An old BBC report shows people singing ‘She loves you’. It is hard to imagine so many people singing in unison and believing that it would start with one person and grow to the entire crowd singing. However, as I said previously, the Kop functioned as one. Culturally, football and music were the twin passions of Liverpool people. This is still largely true today. It is what makes our city so special. We are a diverse group of people and bring a richness of cultural differences to the table.

The singing of “You’ll never walk alone’ is tied up with the popularity of Liverpool groups at the time. Gerry and the Pacemakers were second only to the Beatles. When Gerry recorded YNWA (from the musical ‘Carousel’), it seemed a natural progression from the pop charts to the terraces. The words were appropriate to showing support and solidarity but an added poignancy was added after the Hillsborough disaster.  Although I have heard it sung thousands of times it still fills me with emotion. My most memorable singing of the song is a Hillsborough related story. I was an academic researcher who monitored the legal proceedings after the Hillsborough disaster. I attended the (now discredited) inquests into the deaths. On the final day of the inquests the coroner recorded ‘accidental death’ verdicts against all the dead. Families were distraught and many began crying. He told them to be quiet or they would have to leave the court. He said that the names of the dead would be read out and he would leave the court in silence. The names were duly read out but as he was exiting the courtroom a bereaved mother began defiantly singing, “When you walk through a storm…” She sung for us all, everyone one of us who could have been her dead son. I will never forget her dignity and courage.

My team when I was a child featured Peter Thompson, Ian Callaghan, Roger Hunt, Big Ron Yeats, Chris Lawler, and Tommy Lawrence. Managed of course by the legend that was Bill Shankly.  Roger Hunt was my all time favourite. I loved him as a player and also felt he had a kind nature.  I saw many famous players over the years and I am always thankful for having seen George Best play.

Some games are legendary. The St Etienne game for example, which is a popular favourite. However, Diane recalls a Derby game in 1970(?). Everton was doing well that season and had beaten us in the previous game and were winning 2-0 in this game. They were smugly singing about winning the league, confident that they would win this game. However, Steve Heighway, John Toshack and Chris Lawler had different ideas and we won 3-2! That was the Liverpool we loved best. The Liverpool that fought back. Even today, I am never upset if an early goal goes against us. I always feel it motivates the crowd to push the players harder.

Fog was quite a common feature at matches in wintertime. Evening matches would be most affected but the dark winter days meant that there were times when you would not see a goal for the fog. It was common (and sensible) to shout ‘who scored the goal’? It would be unthinkable in the present day to play a game in such conditions.

In the past there was tremendous loyalty shown to players by the Kop even if they were off form. They would not have been booed. It is so different today but I put that down to the changing economics of the game. Many players do not have the same passion for the game and that is obvious to the discerning fans.

A lot of football grounds, across Europe were in a severely dilapidated state by the 1980’s. Disasters were a consequence of such dilapidation (e.g. Heysel). The Hillsborough Disaster, however, was caused by the breakdown of police control. Police were trained in crowd control rather than crowd safety.  The report of Lord Justice Taylor recommended all seater stadia as a means of ensuring that no such disaster would ever occur again. There is still much debate as to whether this was the right course of action. Nevertheless, as a consequence of new legislation it signaled the end of the Kop.

I was not on the kop for the last game, however, musician and kopite Peter Hooton recalls:

To be quite honest he last day of the Kop was pretty much an anti climax. I had stood/swayed on the famous terrace for many years witnessing fantastic comebacks, great victories and some agonising defeats! But to be beaten by Norwich for the last game played was very disappointing. The game was played in a ‘surreal’ atmosphere it was as if nobody could really believe this was the end of the famous terrace. I mean how could you demolish a terrace that had thousands of fans ashes scattered on it? The Kop was full an hour before kick off and the last Kopites were ushered out about an hour after the final whistle but it still felt like a dream/nightmare! Jeremy Goss of Norwich is credited as scoring the last goal in front of the ‘old Kop’ but some of us know the truth. A mate of mine called John Garner ran on to the pitch at the end of the game with his own ball and dribbled from the half way line and smashed the ball into the Kop net. For Kopites this was our symbolic ‘last goal’ and it was right and fitting!

Personally, I am not against standing. It was not standing that killed people at Hillsborough. It was a prevailing culture that saw fans treated like animals; corralled to the stadium, herded into pens – even the language is animal terminology. However, I respect the views of those that support all seater stadia, especially those that lost people in the disaster. Football matches are not the same. Sitting is not the same. Many people stand up from their seats. Is this any safer?

I miss the Kop in as much as it was a part of my childhood. I miss the collective nature it encouraged. I often wonder if it helped form my socialist views. I look back on those days of simple pleasures where two little girls could safely walk to Anfield, watch a game of football and walk home. Thrilled by the team and the crowd in equal measures.

Did Diane and I pass on our passion for Liverpool to our children? No!  My son had little interest in football and Diane’s daughter supports Everton!  As Diane said: It’s a good job that a mother’s love is unconditional!

By

It is a cliché to point out that the events of September 11^th 2001 changed the world. Indeed, they did. The dust of the collapsing towers of the World Trade Centre may have settled long ago, but the aftermath is still felt acutely. Nearly 12 years after the invasion of Afghanistan, principally to root out and destroy the leadership of the al-Qaeda terrorist group that was harboured there by the Taliban regime, NATO troops are still in the country, and are still fighting the Taliban. Huge numbers of mostly innocent people have died, mainly in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and other parts of the Middle East and southern and central Asia, but also in Western capitals. What happened?

Jason Burke’s The 9/11 Wars is a good attempt to answer this question. At over 700 pages (of which nearly 200 pages are very detailed notes), the book offers a sweeping overview of the events that followed the attack on the Twin Towers. But Mr Burke is not trying to offer an account of the political wrangling that lay behind these decisions, meaning some apparently key political players in Western capitals are rarely even mentioned. Rather:

[the book’s] aim is to suggest a grubby view from below, rather than a lofty view from above. It is primarily about people rather than about power, particularly people for whom life has changed in ways that no one could have predicted a decade ago.

To be sure, this is a work of journalism, not history or political science. Mr Burke, a veteran foreign correspondent for the Guardian, prefers to describe the local conditions of the various theatres of what he has dubbed ‘the 9/11 wars’, rather than construct explanations for the events that constitute those wars themselves. What we read is extremely well-informed, but never pretty.

Ignorance is not bliss

In case we needed reminding, the mistakes made by the US and its allies – particularly the UK – in the 9/11 wars are myriad. The Bush administration was riddled with brazen ideologues – men such as Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, John Bolton and others – who believed their aggressive neoconservative agenda could reshape the globe in America’s interest. While not everyone in the Bush administration was a true neo-con, as Max Boot, a neo-con himself, has pointed out, too few believed in proper post-war planning, or in that deeply un-conservative concept known as ‘nation-building’. Too few, indeed, knew much in detail about the wider world. Unfortunately, these officials realised their ignorance much too late; for defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, there were a few too many “unknown unknowns”.

Iraq was not the first theatre of the 9/11 Wars, but it came to represent everything catastrophic about those years. It may be worth reviewing first, therefore.

It went downhill after that.

The reasons behind the invasion of Iraq in 2003 are not examined in The 9/11 Wars in much depth – though Mr Burke does point out that the justification was often changed when it became expedient – but the policies enacted after the invasion occurred are. The early years, as is now well known, were marked by a toxic combination of ignorance, misunderstanding, arrogance, and ideology. Paul Bremer’s appointment as the head of the newly created ‘Coalition Provisional Authority’ was disastrous, and his three early decisions – to disband the 385,000 strong Iraqi army, to ensure radical de-Ba’athification, and to postpone elections indefinitely – ensured that the process of peaceful reconstruction would be “almost impossible”. So it proved. Swiftly making hundreds of thousands of often-armed Iraqis unemployed was never going to pass without trouble, nor was giving the impression that the occupation could last for generations – the reference for this being the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Mistreating prisoners of war, most infamously at Abu Ghraib prison, was also a catastrophic – and criminal – error. The collapse into civil war was swift, though as Mr Burke points out, people rebelled for a variety of reasons: personal, economic, ideological, sectarian, opportunistic or otherwise. Only after General David Petraeus’ team devised Field Manual 3-24, which advocated a complete revamp of counter-insurgency strategy, did the situation come under a semblance of ‘order’. By that point foreign insurgents had poured into Iraq whipping up a sectarian bloodbath, culminating in the loss of tens of thousands of lives. Petty criminals turned terrorist leaders like Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian-born proponent of extreme violence who was at first reluctant to join al-Qaeda, had wrought untold terror, and provoked the Shia al-Mahdi Army, led by the young, firebrand cleric, Muqtada al-Sadr, into retaliatory violence against Sunnis.

The meeting convened by General Petraeus that eventually resulted in the new strategy – and the surprisingly successful ‘Surge’ – was telling, for it openly acknowledged disastrous instances of policy failure. These errors, which had been present in Afghanistan and recurrent in Iraq, are spelt out by Mr Burke:

The failure to secure borders, the raiding from big, heavily defended bases, the isolation from local people, the counterproductive emphasis on force protection, the cultural insensitivity, the chronic inability to understand local dynamics, the lack of sufficient troops to provide the security that could allow stability and economic development, the abuse and violence meted out to detainees…

A few, then.

Mr Burke is particularly strong on “local dynamics”. He evidently, and rightly, dislikes crude stereotypes about ‘Arabs’ or ‘Muslims’ which fail to take into account the very different local cultures that exist in the different loci of the 9/11 wars. Local and foreign insurgents in Iraq thought very differently to each other, as did those in Afghanistan. For example, in Falluja, a notorious hotspot in the Iraq War, foreign militants attempted to enforce their strict version of Islam on the town, which was completely alien to locals. Al-Zarqawi spent the summer of 2004 enforcing an alien personal code of conduct on the town’s residents, often “subjecting them to the sight (or experience) of spectacular public violence involving torture, beatings and videoed humiliation”. (These civilians later ended up being caught in the middle of the biggest pitched battle of the Iraq War. Pity their fate.) Eventually, Iraqi locals inevitably became hostile to the foreign insurgents, and this, Mr Burke argues, was another crucial turning point in the civil war. Such local dynamics were often lost on hapless Western leaders, officials, and commentators. This failure to understand the context in which they would be deploying troops was one of the many reasons for such terrible policy errors.

Af-Pak: the main theatre

Those conflicts that constituted the 9/11 wars may, arguably, have ended in the Middle East – though this does not mean it is entirely at peace – but they are still going on in Afghanistan and Pakistan. On 9/11 itself, Richard Armitage, the American deputy secretary of state, exclaimed to Pakistan’s ISI chief and ambassador that “History began today.” His claim was intended to show that Pakistan had been given a choice: to side with the US, or to continue to support the Taliban. Pakistan, under General Pervez Musharraf, who has just returned from self-imposed exile, officially opted for the former, thereby releasing itself of US sanctions and ramping up its aid receipts, but, as Mr Burke makes clear – as have many others, such as Ahmed Rashid – Pakistan’s policy was not entirely honest. The ISI, Pakistan’s key intelligence service, had viewed the Taliban as useful proxies, having trained the mujahedeen in the war against the Soviets, and preferred them to the Northern Alliance, who were viewed as much more hostile to Pakistan and its interests. The fear driving Pakistani officials was that an antagonistic regime in Afghanistan would be susceptible to influence by India, thus leading to Pakistan’s strategic encirclement. It was with India in mind that Pakistan kept its paramilitaries on the leash – such as the infamous Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT), which, in 2008, engaged in a gruesome terrorist attack on Mumbai. While Pakistan would claim to assist the US, therefore, all parties would find that the two states’ interests would not be entirely congruent.

Can anyone spot the Durand Line?

Mr Burke makes clear that, during the course of the 9/11 wars anyway, such an alliance could hardly be expected to be easy, given diverging interests. And even though a political alliance was in theory sustained, the two countries did not fall in love with each other. By 2010, a survey by Pew Research found Pakistan to be a more conservative, nationalist, religious and anti-American country than before: 85% favoured sex segregation in the workplace; 80% favoured lashing thieves or amputating their hands; 78% favoured the death penalty for apostates; and almost two-thirds saw the US as an enemy. This was all after Mr Bush had left office, Osama bin Laden had been assassinated on Pakistani soil, and Barack Obama had stepped up US drone strikes on militants on both sides of the Durand Line that theoretically marks the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan. Indeed, relations have become so bad that Husain Haqqani, former Pakistani ambassador to the United States (and not related to the leaders of the Haqqani network), has suggested “breaking up” so that both countries can come to openly appreciate that their strategic interests differ and learn to co-operate on that more realistic basis. That is a grim acknowledgement that 12 years of American policy with respect to Pakistan – “perhaps the most important” theatre of conflict in the 9/11 wars according to Mr Burke – have failed.

The many faces of al-Qaeda

Mr Burke, who previously wrote a book examining al-Qaeda, also explains the debates about strategy that occurred within the organisation – or network, or even “methodology” – itself. Indeed, al-Qaeda had always incorporated “three elements, a physical base, the vanguard or leadership element and a free-floating worldview and ideology.” But within this fluid framework, there were very different views on how to ‘succeed’. One ‘thinker’ was Abu Musab al-Suri whose motto was ‘nizam la tanzim’ or ‘system not organisation’. He envisioned a “broad, self-organising popular uprising that would have no leaders, no organisation but simply like-minded highly motivated activists ‘swarming’ together for specific attacks,” on targets that perpetrators and supporters would deem to be legitimate. Mr Burke points out that for al-Suri, the 9/11 attacks themselves were actually a “catastrophic strategic error” for it later, through the US response, resulted in the deaths of many al-Qaeda leaders, militants, and sympathisers.

The murderous Zarqawi. A saviour of no-one.

On the other side, there was the notorious al-Zarqawi, who came to embody the face of the Iraqi insurgency, and who was responsible for many of the attacks on Iraq’s Shia community that whipped up the sectarian slaughter. Whereas al-Suri was wary of having a great attachment to territory – having experienced first-hand the destruction of the town of Hama when Syrian President Hafz al-Assad crushed the Islamist revolt in 1982 (plus ça change…) – al-Zarqawi believed establishing physical enclaves to be the key goal of any militant movement. Al-Zarqawi also believed his group to be takfiri, giving it the right to designate people as kufr – non-believers. This was often applied to local Iraqi Muslims (and especially Shias) who followed their own local customs, not those of the foreign fundamentalists. For al-Zarqawi, however, “it was not enough merely to try to engineer a righteous community, but territory needed to be defined, seized, sacralised, Islamised and purged.”

Al-Qaeda was peppered with internal differences, therefore, and speaking of it as a single entity is often misleading. Neither al-Suri nor al-Zarqawi were close to bin Laden, and it is hard to know how much they approved of their colleagues’ actions. In any case, Mr Burke suggests that al-Qaeda is today a weakened force. While at one point it was able to inspire horrific attacks, even in European capitals, whipping conservative commentators into ignorant and often bigoted diatribes about immigrants, ghettoes and the end of Christendom, Mr Burke argues that al-Qaeda is now badly damaged, partly through its alienation of Muslims, but also militarily, through the controversial drone campaign, and is in danger of becoming irrelevant. Al-Suri was captured by the Pakistanis and handed to the Americans in 2005, and al-Zarqawi was killed in an air strike in 2006. Osama bin Laden, who remained the “pre-eminent leader of the global jihad”, was killed in 2011. Interestingly, Mr Burke also tells how in August 2009,

Hamas launched a bloody military operation against one of a number of emerging pro-al-Qaeda groups … If anyone in the region was benefiting from the polarisation caused by the previous years’ violence it was the Muslim Brotherhood and its offshoots, not the extremists loyal to, or inspired by, bin Laden.

This was demonstrated by the phenomenon that became known as the Arab Spring. Mr Burke’s book came out just as this was breaking, meaning The 9/11 Wars does not examine it extensively, but he does point out that the fiery suicide of one young, angry street vendor in Tunisia, committed with no intention of hurting anyone else, was able to achieve so much more than any of the more vicious suicide attacks committed by followers of al-Qaeda.

Is it over?

The 9/11 Wars is a dense, well-researched book, and Mr Burke delves deeply into each issue he covers, having seemingly interviewed a plethora of participants in each of the various conflicts, ranging from innocent civilians, to militants, to Western officials. It is an excellent resource for understanding the conflicts that he terms the 9/11 wars, as well as the surrounding debates.

One wonders, though, whether his notion of the 9/11 Wars is too narrow. Are they just the conflicts that started after 9/11 (as history began on that day, apparently) or should they not include the festering troubles that, in their own way, contributed to the event itself. The long-running Israel-Palestine conflict is an obvious one in this category, which Mr Burke seems to steer away from examining, despite frequently mentioning that al-Qaeda would exploit it for political gain. The US prison camp at Guantanamo Bay too deserves more attention, not just for its awful mere existence, but also because of its radicalising effect.

Similarly, Iran hardly gets a mention, despite its central position between the theatres of conflict. Its nuclear programme may have been worth discussing; or the fraudulent 2009 elections and the crushing of the ‘Green movement’; or even – or especially – Mr Bush’s foolish and counter-productive concept of the ‘Axis of Evil’ – the utterance of which made sure that the US missed its best chance of engaging constructively with the Islamic Republic, which had a mutual loathing of the Taliban, and which at the time had a reformist president, Mohammad Khatami.

Mr Burke’s book is excellent at examining the wars that did take place as a result of 9/11 though. It ends fittingly, albeit depressingly, by pointing out that the overall winners are hard to find, but the losers are obvious: the hundreds of thousands who perished. Mr Burke uses generally conservative estimates, gathering data from reputable sources, concluding that perhaps 250,000 people have died so far in the 9/11 wars. A stark way of pointing out, perhaps, that terrible mistakes can have terrible consequences.