Captain of Koepenick at National Theatre

Captain of Köpenick
In a new English version by Ron Hutchinson
Directed by Adrain noble
Olivier at the National Theatre until 4^th April
Think Oh What a Lovely War and The Good Soldier Schweyk rolled into one. Adrian Noble’s fast-paced and evocative recreation of Prussian Berlin at the turn of the 19^th century is ensemble theatre at its best, firmly in the tradition of Brecht and Joan Littlewood.
Antony Sher as Voigt gives a bravura performance that captures the tragi-comic quintessence of the part – the small, downtrodden working man who puts one over on the establishment. He brings it off with Chaplinesque panache. A superb expressionist backdrop of the metropolis and scratchy recordings of Berlin cabaret songs of the period set the scene to perfection. The choreography is planned and executed with military precision and the production makes imaginative use of pop-up sets and revolving stage to great effect. Ron Hutchinson’s new English translation captures the comi-tragic nuances of the satire eloquently.
Zuckmayer’s Hauptmann von Köpenick, was first produced in Germany in 1931 and 1953 in London. Based on a real story, the play ridicules Prussian military bureaucracy and subservience to authority.
At the turn of the century, Wilhelm Voigt, a cobbler, with a history of petty crime, is prevented from residing in Berlin, where he could find work, because he has no ID papers. Without ID papers he doesn’t exist in the eyes of the authorities and he can’t find a job or a place to live without them. After spotting a captain’s uniform for sale in a fancy-dress shop, Voigt has an audacious idea: he buys it, puts it on and commandeers a small group of soldiers, ordering them to march on the town hall. There he hopes to procure the necessary papers and so end his Catch 22 situation. Although the real sequence of events was less heroic than portrayed in the play, his exploit caused widespread hilarity throughout Germany. Although sentenced to jail, under pressure of public outrage, the Kaiser pardoned him.

The inured Prussian spirit, as lambasted in the play, led irrevocably to the First World War and made Hitler’s rise to power possible. Zuckmayer implies that an alternative was possible with a scene of a workers’ demonstration and the singing of the Internationale. That alternative found its expression in the short-lived 1918 November Revolution in Germany and the setting up of Soviets in Berlin and Munich.

His play would have struck a strong chord among its German audience but it is hardly relevant for a UK audience today. Despite a superbly entertaining theatrical evening one has to ask why choose this play here and now.
 

Book review - Egyptian Revolution

Soldiers, Spies and Statesmen – Egypt’s Road to Revolt

By Hazem Kandil

Pubs. Verso 2012

Hdbck.  £16.99

If you want to understand the underlying forces and mechanisms of Egypt’s recent revolutionary turmoil, you couldn’t find a more informative book than this. Beyond its detailed analysis of the historical forces that culminated in the Tahrir Square demonstrations and regime change, it also has relevance for understanding revolutionary change everywhere. In his introduction the author says: ‘To study revolution is to study how the masses awaken from their slumber and thrust themselves on the centre stage of their own history only to watch their aspirations either usurped or repressed.’ This rather fatalistic conclusion is, as we well know, too often the historical truth.

Kandil was born in Egypt and now lectures at Cambridge. His deep knowledge and understanding of Egyptian politics within the wider world context is impressive. The main thrust of his argument is that the Egyptian revolution was able to gather strength not as a direct result of spontaneous uprisings of the people, but as a result of infighting between the three pillars of Egyptian state power: the military, the security services and the political elite. He takes us back to the origins of modern Egypt in order to demonstrate his case convincingly. From British colonial rule, through Nasser, the Suez debacle and the catastrophic six days war with Israel, via Sadat, Mubarak and the Muslim Brotherhood government of today. In this history, he reveals how, after the Second World War, the CIA ‘loaned’ former top Nazi SS and Gestapo officers to the Egyptian regime to help it in its struggle against communism and democratic change and to ensure Egypt remained in the western orbit.

The reason the Mubarak regime was unable to successfully suppress the people’s demands for democracy, he argues, was that the military, unhappy with the leading role given to Mubarak’s notorious security services, was unwilling to allow itself to be used as a tool of suppression or be seen as a continuing supporter of the unpopular corrupt business and political class; it viewed the uprising as an opportunity to re-establish its prominence and status in the country.

A valuable contribution to our understanding of Middle Eastern politics and to comprehending the mechanisms of revolutionary change in general.

Palestine through the perceptive eyes of novelist Selma Dabbagh

Out of It

By Selma Dabbagh

Pubs. Bloomsbury  Pbck £7.99  (2012)

312pps

Palestine from a Palestinian persepective does not receive the coverage it deseerves. This novel goes some way in addressing that deficit. It is one of those rare birds: a good political novel. First published in 2011, now, gratifyingly published in paperback, it is Dabbagh’s debut novel and what a debut it is. In the affluent north and west the mainstream canon consists largely of novels about existential problems, individualised dilemmas and psychological analyses; politics are either non-existent or play a small, subsidiary role. Dabbagh puts politics firmly centre stage. But, she is no primitive propagandist or evangelist, and is able to see both the Israeli oppressors and the popular movements of her own people through un-tinted spectacles.  She gives us a moving portrait of a family torn apart by the post-war developments that have taken place in Palestine. The fate and fortunes of the members of this family reflect the political developments that impinge daily and determine the trajectory of the people’s lives. It is a Palestinian family torn asunder by the post war developments that have shattered Palestine and imposed the state of Israel on a country where its historical inhabitants – the Palestinian Arabs - considered it their home. She cleverly and subtly interweaves this historical process into the fabric of the family, their friends and relatives. Through the individual fates of each family member we are helped to comprehend the way the struggle for one’s rights against an intransigent and brutal enemy so often also distorts and maims the protagonists themselves, and how a once united struggle became fragmented, pitting Palestinian against Palestinian. With the gradual corruption of the PLO leadership and the movement’s loss of momentum and clear leadership after the Intifada, we can comprehend the reasons behind the rise of Hamas. What began as a largely unified and secular struggle became split, first between small, ultra-left guerrilla groups and the mainstream PLO and then later, after their extinction, between a fundamentalist, religious rebellion in Gaza against the rump of the old PLO.

Iman, a young woman with a twin brother, Rashid, is the central figure of the novel and we hear much of the story through her telling. After experiencing the viciousness of Israeil attacks on Gaza and losing several friends to Israeli guns and bombs, she and her brother Rashid soon find themselves in temporary exile in London. Their father, previously a committed member of the PLO leadership, now lives in one of the Gulf states in relatively comfortable exile, alienated from his people’s struggle.

Dabbagh vividly portrays the pain and destructive influence of exile - the feelings of rootlessness, anger and frustration. While Palestinians are being massacred by superior Israeli missiles and air raids, in London, travelling on the Tube or on the busses, she and her brother are obliged to overhear the small talk of their fellow passengers whose problems revolve around where to go abroad on holiday, their marital tiffs or which furnishings to choose for their homes; in their minds Palestine and the suffering of its people simply doesn’t exist.

Dabbagh’s language is sculpted and sharp, at times poetic, always laconic and often with a light touch of irony. Her descriptions of London, through the eyes of a foreigner, a temporary visitor, go deeper beneath the patina and surface glitter than an ordinary tourist would; her viewpoint is coloured by her people’s history, British colonialism and world domination – here vision is politically tinted.

She watches TV avidly to soak up all and every bit of news from the Middle East, but is disgusted by the Orwellian double-speak of the ‘embedded’ reporters: talking of Israeli ‘surgical strikes’, their ‘tactical incursions’ or understandable ‘responses’ to Hamas provocations.

Out of It is extremely well-written, with a well-developed storyline, believable, three-dimensional characters, and is a gripping read that draws you into the daily trauma that passes as normality for most Palestinians.

Assange on the web - new book

Cypherpunks – freedom and the future of the internet

By Julian Assange with Jacob Appelbaum, Andy Müller-Maguhn and Jérémie Zimmermann
OR Books
Pbck £11
With the release of the first batch of WikiLeaks secret data in 2006 the online site rapidly gained a reputation for investigative journalism, and for revealing classified data from anonymous sources. WikiLeaks is a non-profit  organisation with the goal of bringing "important news and information to the public,’ and ‘to publish original source material alongside news stories so readers and historians alike can see evidence of the truth.’ Another of the organisation's goals is to ensure that journalists and whistleblowers are not jailed for emailing sensitive or classified documents. The online ‘drop box’ was designed to ‘provide an innovative, secure and anonymous way for sources to leak information’ to its journalists.’
In 2010 WikiLeaks collaborated with the Guardian, Der Spiegel and New York Times to release a whole batch of classified US State Department diplomatic cables in redacted format. This created an international éclat and brought down the whole vindictive fury of the US government on Assange’s head as well as severe censure from its allies. As the founder and chief spokesperson of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, overnight was thrust into world-wide prominence. By those on the Left he was revered as a revolutionary icon and by the Right viewed as a heinous criminal who had overstepped the accepted norms of journalism. But many throughout the world considered that what he had done was a genuine contribution to media freedom and openness. WikiLeaks became the winner of the 2008 Economist Index on Censorship Freedom of Expression award and the 2009 Amnesty International human rights reporting award (New Media). However, shortly after all the accolades, Assange the hero became a demonised fugitive.

In August 2010 Assange was invited to Sweden on a speaking tour and apparently had sexually relations with two women who, three days later, accused him of ‘rape and sexual molestation’, leading the Swedish Prosecutor’s Office to issue an arrest warrant for Assange. Whatever the truth about these allegations, Assange saw them as a means of trapping him in Sweden and eventually facilitating his extradition to the US. Unfortunately, whatever the truth of the matter, Assange suddenly became a figure of controversy, not to say one of revulsion, for alleged activities that had nothing to do with his role as the founder and advocate of WikiLeaks. In one sense his enemies had been partially successful: he had not as yet been put on trial in the USA but his name and that of WikiLeaks had been irredemably besmirched.

I am one of those who remains sceptical of the Swedish allegations of sexual transgression, despite the gravity of the accusations, and I certainly remain an admirer of what he has done as a journalist to expose Western government hypocrisy and unnecessary secrecy. I remain convinced that in revealing the contents of diplomatic exchanges and emails, demonstrating the hypocrisy, deviousness and indeed criminality of the US and other governments, he has done us all a vital service.

This latest book, despite accolades from highly respected individuals like John Pilger, Slavoj Zizek, Naomi Wolf and Oliver Stone is often more irritating than illuminating, but it is also certainly a provocative and fascinating read. Written mainly in the form of a dialogue between Assange and his co-authors, Appelbaum, Müller-Maguhn and Zimmermann, it explores the proposition that the internet has become more of a big brother system of surveillance than a great new means of free and democratic communication.

It is written in a loose conversational style with much anorak jargon, rather than attempting to offer a clear distillation of ideas for a wider readership. However, it does provoke reflection.

Like all inventions, the internet is only a tool to be used or misused. With the concentration of all main servers in the USA, it does provide the corporate and political ruling elite enormous access to every user’s profile and personal details. It is a secret service agent’s dream come true. And we, its naïve and unwitting useers provide these governmetn and corporate agencies all the information they want through our facebook, Twitter and Google pages and non-encrypted electronic exchanges.

While his enemies will call Assange simply paranoid (even though he has good reasons to be), he does argue persuasively that we are all too-readily handing over to the powers that be data about ourselves for free. He argues that only be utilising methods like cryptography to encrypt all the information we send out over the internet can we keep government and corporate noses out of our affairs.

Certainly the vitally important questions of who controls the internet and how we can ensure that it remains/becomes a genuine democratic source of inforamtion and exchange are of fundamental importance to freedom and democracy worldwide. Assange’s book is a wake-up call about a possible dystopian future. Jeremiahs, like Assange, are as Pilger says, ‘always met at first with hostility and even mockery, history shows that we disregard such warnings as these at our peril.’ While this book is certainly not the definitive treatise on the role of the internet, it is a stimulating and thought-provoking read.

Reply to William Boyd 'The Price of Betrayal' in Guardian Review 22 December 2012 on the Cambridge spies

What William Boyd, like so many other Western commentators who discuss the Cold War period, fails to comprehend properly is the political climate of the Thirties and how it profoundly affected workers and intellectuals alike in their political outlooks. Fascism, as demonstrated in Spain and Italy and Moseley’s Black Shirts here in the UK, was on a seemingly unstoppable onward march. Many at that time joined the Communist Party or sympathised because they recognised that their own ruling classes were either sympathetic to or incapable of resisting fascism. Only the Communists demonstrated that they were prepared to mount the barricades to stop fascism in its tracks. This is the context in which Philby, Blunt etc. threw in their lot with Communism.

Boyd relishes in calling them all ‘traitors’ to their country and ‘aiding the enemy’. The term is more usually used in times of war for those who pass on secrets to a real enemy. Russia was our ally for the war years and certainly never threatened the West in any way, but was soon cast aside again once nazi Germany was defeated; it never called Britain or the US the ‘enemy’. It was determined to ‘defeat’ capitalism in the economic sphere certainly, but by peaceful struggle. It was we who demonised Russia as ‘the enemy’. Those with short-term memory forget that it was the US General McArthur who, even before the nazis had capitulated, called for the war to be  carried forward into Russia and thus defeat both the nazis and the communists.

It can be convincingly argued that the role Philby, Burgess, McLean et al played in passing on information of (mainly) US military intentions and weapons development played a key role in stabilising the post war world and helped maintain the edgy balance of power.

Boyd also argues that Philby and the other spies ‘had to live in a world where there was no trust’ in order to ‘be successful’. They certainly did not trust the ruling elites in the UK and US – they knew first hand how devious and dangerous they could be – but they did trust their Soviet colleagues who protected them and offered them refuge when they needed it.

Press Ownership

Letter to Guardian 30 November 2012

Harold Evans is bang on target (A clever solution – but why the silence on ownership? - Guardian 30 November). In all the howling and squealing about the need to ‘maintain the freedom of the press’ hardly anyone is addressing this key issue. Freedom only has meaning if equal access and diversity is guaranteed. For Cameron et al to cry wolf about ‘state interference’ and the danger of overthrowing a long and proud tradition of a free press displays a lack of knowledge of history. The press throughout its short history has been censored by the ruling elite with, fines, bans and stamp duties imposed to prevent the publication of popular, usually,working class newspapers. Only since the increasing concentration of ownership in the hands of the wealthy has the state ceased hounding the press. Leveson’s modest suggestion is, in any case, not calling for state regulation, simply giving a putative regulatory body statutory powers; otherwise it would remain a toothless poodle like the present Press Complaints Commission.

Remembrance Day

Remembrance Day

Once again, as every November, we go through the ritual of Poppy Day. For the days around 11^th Nov it becomes obligatory for our politicians and public figures to sport their poppies conspicuously, lay wreaths at cenotaphs and observe a two-minute silence. Wearing a poppy has become like wearing a Stars and Stripes badge in the USA or, in the old Soviet Union, a Party badge – an outward symbol of one’s loyalty to the nation; those who don’t wear one are treated like heartless traitors. It has little to do with true remembrance.

We are the only country that has such a ceremony. The justification for it is that we are remembering those in the armed forces who ‘sacrificed’ their lives for the national good. The ritual grew out of the horrors of the 1914-18 ‘War to End All Wars’.

The many Remembrance Day commemorations have not been an iota of use in preventing subsequent wars nor have they taught us any lessons about how to avoid the killing of young men and women on the battlefield. It has become a meaningless and momentary outpouring of national awareness and celebration of the victories of Britain’s armed forces. Once over, it’s back to war games as usual.

While many of my fellow citizens will wear their poppies out of a genuine sense of remembrance for those who have died in past wars, they will be blind to the way the annual event has been hijacked by the political elite for anything but remembrance.

The only constructive way to commemorate those who have died fighting is for us, the living, to struggle more forcefully for an end to all wars and for a deeper understanding of what causes wars. Most, if not all of the wars Britain has been involved in have been for economic and political reasons, not for ‘democracy’ or ‘freedom’ despite those fig leaves the politicians and historians might give them. They have been instigated by the ruling elites to protect or expand their power and influence; no altruism has been involved.

Remembrance Day should be used to reflect on what horror war causes and how we can best avoid such conflicts. The immense loss of life in Iraq and Afghanistan, the millions displaced and the widespread destruction caused are only the most recent reminders of war as an abomination.

Why don’t we make Remembrance Day a time when schools and colleges devote a lesson to learning about how to avoid wars and to work for world peace? Our politicians could use the day to lay before us what action they intend taking to further disarmament and peace throughout the world. Now that would be remembrance.