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Syncretic Past

During the Russian Revolution, few groups experienced wilder twists of fate than Austro-Hungarian prisoners of war. Born into the serenity of Habsburg rule and enlisted in an imperial army that erased national distinctions, they returned to a Europe of independent states and competing ideologies. Many were radicalized by the ordeal. One of them was the muckraking Transylvanian journalist Béla Kun. ‘Captured in 1916 and interned in the Urals’, Jacob Mikanowski recounts in his new book Goodbye Eastern Europe, ‘a passing acquaintance with Lenin vaulted Kun into the revolution and the leadership of the fledging Hungarian Communist Party’. The 1919 revolution in Budapest yielded an independent Hungarian Soviet Republic that lasted only 133 days. By the time it collapsed, Kun had taken flight. From the roof of the Soviet headquarters at the Hotel Hungaria he piloted a small airplane, ‘staying so close to the ground that his face could be clearly seen by those walking below’. He carried with him several stolen gold chains and church relics, some of which he dropped by accident, before vanishing into the USSR.

Life stories as tumultuous and unusual as Kun’s are difficult to reduce to history lessons. History, if it teaches anything, only does so obliquely, by way of paradoxes, contradictions and accidents – all of which feature heavily in Goodbye Eastern Europe: a sprawling account of Eastern Europe from the Medieval period to the present day. Mikanowski’s book sets out to tell the history of the region’s cohesion at the moment it has begun to disappear as a cohesive region. If this sounds paradoxical, then the book’s central conceit is no less so. ‘This is a history of a place that doesn’t exist’, it opens. ‘There is no such thing as Eastern Europe anymore. No one comes from there’. What he means is that few people now ‘identify as Eastern European’: the Hungarians and the Polish think of themselves as Central European, while the Baltic states prefer to claim membership of the ‘Nordic’ zone’ to their north. The geographical rubric is an ‘outsider’s convenience’, often a ‘catch-all’ for stereotypes.

Has Eastern Europe ever been anything but a construction of the Western gaze? Most recently, the region’s various peoples were bound together by the shared experience of communism. Eastern Europe’s disappearance as ‘a tangible presence’ and ‘instantly recognizable reality’ coincides with the system’s demise, after which the region fractured into nation-states forging their own discrete identities. But Mikanowski argues that this cohesion, consolidated in the postwar period, reaches back further in time. Throughout the modern period, Eastern Europe was characterized by its distinctive and remarkable diversity: a ‘diversity of language, of ethnicity, and above all, of faith’.

This tension between diversity and cohesion finds expression in the region’s uniquely rich and heterogenous narrative traditions, especially its folklore and legends. ‘Hasidic Jews used to say that the best way to get to know their wonder-working rabbis was through the tales their disciples told about them’, Mikanowski writes. Similarly, ‘tales – stories, rumours, and folksongs . . . get to the heart of what it was like to experience the horrors of the fascist anti-utopia, the brief elation and prolonged terror of Stalinism, the stasis and scarcity of late socialism, and the sudden evaporation of solid values that accompanied the arrival of capitalism’.

Among the regional myths Mikanowski recounts is the story of a ‘great vampire plague that affected the Austrian military frontier in the 1720s and 30s’, during which Viennese officers, ‘their pockets bulging with treatises by Newton and Voltaire’, arrived in Balkan villages to find every grave exhumed and the freshest corpses ‘pierced through the heart with hawthorn stakes’. (The villagers told them matter-of-factly that this was how they dealt with the undead.) Mikanowski also mentions the Ottoman devşirme: the blood tax by which the Christian peoples of the empire were forced to give up their children ‘to be raised in the image of their conquerors’, converting to Islam and serving as soldiers and administrators. This, Mikanowski tells us, would later become the subject of various Serbian folk songs about Ottoman subjugation, sung by ‘wandering bards’ who carried with them ‘a stringed instrument called a gusle’.

In setting itself the task of describing and explaining this diversity, the book evokes another tension, one long prominent in Eastern Europe’s historiography: between the stories that populate it and the political or conceptual categories that try to tame them. Goodbye Eastern Europe is divided into three rather incommensurable parts: ‘Faiths’, ‘Empires and Peoples’ and ‘The Twentieth Century’. The first two interrogate categories of people – Pagans and Christians, Jews, Muslims, Wanderers, Empires, Nations, Heretics – while the last is a more conventional attempt at periodization. The narrative is chronological but rarely proceeds at the same pace. It skips around, dwells on exemplary episodes, shifts into the style of ethnography or into the personal one of family history.

A journalist and critic trained as an academic historian, Mikanowski has written for various American magazines about history, science, language and Eastern Europe. Raised in Pennsylvania, he spent much of his childhood in Poland with his half-Catholic and half-Jewish family. The book’s subtitle, ‘An Intimate History of a Divided Land’, yokes the historical to the personal, incorporating elements of memoir, travel writing and reportage. In the preface the author tells us that his ‘family’s history forms a braid running throughout’, and quotes Czesław Miłosz’s Native Realm: ‘awareness of one’s origins is like an anchor line plunged into the deep’ without which ‘historical intuition is virtually impossible’.

Terms like ‘intimate history’ and ‘historical intuition’ suggest a style of historical writing most accurately termed Romantic. Emphasizing intuition over analysis, and the ability of history to move us over our attempts to understand its workings, Romantic history makes ample use of literary techniques, aiming to provide the reader with a close encounter with the past rather than a mere representation of it. ‘Intimate history’, however, doesn’t simply name a genre. It also suggests that Eastern European history is itself of a different order: more tangible, vibrant, deeply felt. Though whether this is indeed the case, or whether it’s a trick of the light, is not easy to discern.

Just as Wolfgang Becker’s 2003 film Goodbye, Lenin! turns out not be a paroxysm of Ostalgie but a meditation on how people confabulate the past to create a liveable present, Goodbye Eastern Europe’s nostalgic overtones conceal a sophisticated argument about the power of storytelling – a form of practical magic that can be put to various ends: to justify pogroms or devise syncretic rituals. Mikanowski’s historical snapshots range from eighteenth-century messianic movements and their charlatan techniques, to the attempts by contemporary nation-states like Hungary, Poland and Ukraine to form ‘usable pasts’ out of their heavily redacted histories. Above all, he suggests, storytelling and popular rituals have been means of regional self-fashioning.

Mikanowski at one point cites an episode from the memorial book of his great-great grandfather Meir. In 1893, the shtetl of Zambrów suffered an exceptionally terrible outbreak of cholera, which at that time was ravaging Russia and Poland. At a loss, the residents organized a Shvartze Khasene: a ‘black wedding’ for the man and woman deemed the most miserable in the town (‘a pauper girl named Chana-Yenta and the old bachelor Velvel’). Rolls were baked and meat and fish prepared by local housewives, while the wider community supplied the couple’s attire. They ‘set up the wedding canopy – in the cemetery, of course’, and on the wedding day, ‘a lively throng accompanied the bride and groom to their huppah’: the wedding canopy in Jewish marriage ceremonies. Soon afterward, the plague ceased, and Chana-Yenta ‘became known as the “City’s Daughter-in-Law”. She was given the job of municipal water carrier, and her husband was given an official beggar’s licence’. The Shvartze Khasene wove the tradition of Catholic exorcism into Jewish shtetl life. The villagers invented a ritual that mended the fabric of the community by translating the expulsion of malevolent forces into the partial upending of social hierarchy.

Elsewhere, Mikanowski invites readers to imagine what it would be like ‘to journey down the Istanbul-Belgrade highway in Ottoman times’, or to picture the American-born nature writer Eleanor Perényi, née Stone, accompanying her parents through Budapest in 1937 and falling in love with a Hungarian nobleman. Perhaps the most famous literary antecedent here is Claudio Magris, whose Danubio (1986), subtitled ‘A Sentimental Journey’ in the English translation, also used first-person anecdotes and diary entries to construct a heterodox history of the region. Just as Magris ferries his reader down the continent along the Danube’s riverbanks, Mikanowski flies low over the terrains that formed the Western flank of the Soviet empire.

Even minor narrative forms can have world-shaping power, Mikanowski suggests, and it is this argument that allows him to illuminate the connections between Eastern Europe’s twentieth century and its earlier history; in particular, between its eclectic stock of legends, folk tales and rabbinical parables and the twentieth century ideologies that took root in the region: fascism, communism and neoliberalism. At the book’s core is an examination of the interplay between the historical experience of communism and the deeper cultural traditions that gave that system its particular regional shape.

For Mikanowski, Eastern Europe’s superstitious and syncretic past holds the key to understanding communism’s industrial miracles, worker-heroes and paranoid surveillance apparatuses. The dogmatic and mystical character of the communist period is rooted, somewhat paradoxically, in the region’s deeper history of religious intermingling. In this part of the world, the resolutely atheist creed of Marxism was interpreted as yet another salvational doctrine, inspiring exceptionally zealous forms of devotion. Mikanowski tells the story of the Polish essayist Jerzy Stempowski, who, while walking with his father in Berdychiv in 1909, heard ‘a voice, intoning as in prayer’ and, after following it, arrived at a tailors’ guild hosting a live reading of Capital. The man reading Marx’s words had a ‘singsong voice, pausing after every sentence to answer questions. As the night wore on, the text – difficult to begin with – became even less clear, but that did not deter the tailors’.

Mikanowski also provides a striking account of the Holocaust, which dispenses with the high-altitude vantage of traditional histories in favour of an ‘up close, often face-to-face’ perspective on Nazi barbarism, as it was experienced among neighbours and within families, the author’s included. Instead of tracking large-scale trends or statistics, we are given vivid individual biographies that were deformed by the black hole of Nazism. Mikanowski tells the story of the Polish writer Bruno Schulz, ‘the Proust of rubbish heaps’, who spent his whole life in Drohobycz, now in Ukraine, producing mesmerizing stories and illustrations as well as translating Kafka. While living under German occupation, he was protected by a Nazi officer who liked his drawings (in return, Schulz painted a mural for the officer’s children). But in 1942, another officer got into a personal feud with his protector, and both of them decided to shoot each other’s ‘pet Jews’. Schulz’s murder, Mikanowski suggests, doesn’t fit with the traditional image of the Nazis’ ‘mechanistic genocide’; ‘in most of Eastern Europe’, he writes, the Holocaust was experienced as ‘an intimate slaughter’. 

A history composed of extraordinary persons and remarkable events, emphasizing paradoxes and coincidences, sometimes threatens to dissolve broader ideas in the fizz of its colorful minutiae. At times the book’s argument, while impressive and complex, is in danger of getting lost among the curious anecdotes and vignettes about the author’s ancestors. Ironically, Goodbye Eastern Europe can sometimes feel like a series of scattered tales rather than a continuous history of a cohesive region. Still, for Mikanowski, the aim is not only to approximate the lived experience of the past, but to unlock insights that lie beyond the reach of conventional history – which fails to capture the kaleidoscopic complexity of the region’s competing narratives and belief systems. In this sense, perhaps the book’s greatest achievement is stylistic. It shows how the continuities in Eastern Europe’s longue durée can only be captured by a mode of writing that reflects its intimacy and heterogeneity.

Read on: Joachim Becker, ‘Europe’s Other Periphery’, NLR 99.

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False Alternative

In launching its assault on Gaza, the Israeli government had three primary aims: to exact revenge, to restore the prestige of the army – which had been severely damaged by the 7 October attack – and to guarantee Netanyahu’s political survival. So far it has proven relatively successful. The IDF has embarked on an effective public-relations campaign to rebuild its credibility as it lays waste to the Strip. And while Netanyahu’s popularity is at a nadir, calls for his resignation remain marginal; the public seem content to wait until the fighting is over to hold him accountable, which gives him an incentive to prolong it indefinitely.

Yet after four months, it is becoming harder to sustain the official narrative that the purpose of the war is to eliminate Hamas and secure the release of the hostages. It is increasingly clear that these goals are contradictory, since the greatest threat to the hostages’ lives is the continuation of the violence. With the number of IDF casualties rising, more than a hundred Israeli captives still being held in Gaza, and no significant gains in weakening Hamas’s operational capacities, public support for the war is declining. A significant majority – 58% – have expressed a lack of confidence in Netanyahu’s management of it. More Israelis now believe that returning the captives should take priority over the destruction of Hamas than vice versa.

Against this backdrop, a series of interconnected questions have come to dominate the Israeli political agenda: the future of Netanyahu, the future of the war, and the settlement that will be established in its wake. The most widely touted candidate to replace Netanyahu is the former army general and Defence Minister Benny Gantz, whose National Unity party is polling far ahead of Likud. Gantz’s political vision has never been particularly coherent. Over the years he has indicated support for some kind of diplomatic solution with the Palestinians, but he has also stressed that the present situation is ‘not ripe for a permanent agreement’. He opposed the Nation-State Law but abstained from voting when amendments were proposed in the Knesset. During the protests against Netanyahu’s judicial reforms he avoided direct confrontation with the Prime Minister and stressed the need for a ‘mutual agreement’ between the two sides. Since October, Gantz has served in the war cabinet as a minister without portfolio. At times he has tried to distance himself from Netanyahu’s belligerent rhetoric, but in practice he has been just as active in prosecuting the military campaign. 

Among Israel’s Western backers, Gantz is seen as a welcome alternative who could save the country from the hard right and reestablish its identity as a ‘Jewish and democratic’ state. Washington, in particular, views him as someone who could be persuaded to accept a ‘constructive solution’ to the perennial problem of Palestine. The hope, among Biden and his team, is that once the war winds down Netanyahu will be ousted and replaced by this more reliable and less erratic partner. Yet both Gantz’s record and the current situation in Israel suggest that this is wishful thinking.

For one thing, there is a question mark over how much Gantz truly wants to lead the country. During his short political career, he has twice saved the political skin of the man he is supposedly trying to replace: first in April 2020, when he helped Netanyahu form an emergency government; then in October 2023, when he joined the war cabinet in the name of ‘national duty’. Having passed up these opportunities to topple his opponent, Gantz now finds himself without a clear pathway to power. As Israeli politics have moved rightward, his ‘centrist’ camp has lost the ability to assemble a Knesset majority on its own. It would need the support of Arab parties, which currently hold ten seats out of 120. But given Gantz’s attitude toward both Palestinians and Arab Israelis, winning their trust seems all but impossible. 

During the 2019 election campaign, Gantz boasted that he had ‘returned Gaza to the Stone Age’ during Operation Protective Edge, when he served as the IDF Chief of Staff. He also claimed to have ‘eliminated 1,364 terrorists’ – the total number of Palestinians killed in the assault, including hundreds of children. Now Gantz is replaying these apocalyptic fantasies on a much larger scale, waging a brutal war against an entrapped civilian population that has already claimed tens of thousands of lives. At the same time, he is overseeing the systematic persecution of Arabs in Israel, whose treatment is reminiscent of the military rule imposed on them in the early years of the state. The legal organization Adalah has documented an ongoing crackdown on any expression of solidarity with Palestine, which has so far led to hundreds of arrests, a wave of unfair dismissals, and the expulsion of hundreds of students from higher education institutions. Earlier this month, four leading Arab politicians, including Mohammad Barakeh – head of the High Follow-Up Committee for Arab citizens of Israel – were detained by police for trying to participate in an anti-war protest.

The government has also pushed through extensive budget cuts for Arab local authorities, which are already suffering from persistent neglect, crumbling infrastructure and an upsurge in organized crime that the state refuses to address. In light of this, it is unlikely that the Arab population will support Gantz’s elevation to prime ministerial office, even if he is presented as the ‘lesser evil’. In recent years, mainstream Israeli political discourse has become highly personalized, centred on Netanyahu as an individual figure: ‘Should he stay or should he go?’ But for Arabs his removal would make little meaningful difference.

One need only recall the anti-Netanyahu ‘Government of Change’, elected in 2020 and led by Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid, to underscore this point. The coalition, which represented almost every part of the Israeli political spectrum – and even won the reluctant backing of the Arab parties – had no plans to break with its predecessor’s so-called security policies. It had no interest in ending the conflict or the occupation. After only a year, it dissolved itself in order to save the regulations governing the dual legal system in the West Bank, which were placed in jeopardy when the right refused to vote for their renewal. In the end, the Bennett–Lapid government preferred to return Netanyahu to power than to see the apartheid regime threatened.

The unwillingness of the Israeli ‘opposition’ to mount a genuine challenge to the present order was reflected in the mass protests last year, where hundreds of thousands took to the streets following Netanyahu’s judicial coup. The movement, which was supported by senior figures in the political and military establishment, claimed to be ‘defending democracy’. But this did not mean full political and legal equality for all, since that would have to include Arabs. Its image of democracy was rather a technical-procedural one, based on the separation of the executive and judicial branches. The protesters’ primary demand was for the courts – those which had ratified the Nation-State Law, along with countless other racist and discriminatory measures – to retain their formal independence. Above all, the leaders stressed that an impartial national legal system was necessary to protect Israeli soldiers from facing international war crimes tribunals. Unsurprisingly, this was a ‘democratic celebration’ in which Arab citizens refused to take part.   

Even if Israel’s ‘centrist’ bloc were to somehow form a new government, with the aim of changing the status quo on Palestine, the obstacles to a Western-backed settlement would still be insurmountable. Among them is the strength of the Israeli far right, which would fight tooth-and-nail to block any diplomatic ‘solution’, as well as the drastic decrease in public support for Palestinian statehood after 7 October. There is also the dramatic demographic changes in the occupied territories, caused by the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians and the constant growth in the number of settlers, whom the Israeli government would never agree to relocate. In Palestine, meanwhile, there is the issue of widespread distrust for the PA, which lacks the credibility to implement any such arrangement.  

Israel’s Arab citizens, who comprise 20% of its total population, are now succumbing to despair as the state continues to slaughter their brethren in Gaza. Large numbers of Israeli Jews have given up on the prospect of a legal settlement: a development that the far right is exploiting by calling for the complete ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from their historic homeland. A government of the ‘centre’ would not solve this structural crisis. It would only put a thin layer of makeup on the face of Israeli society.

Read on: Yonatan Mendel, ‘New Jerusalem’, NLR 81.

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Asymmetries

As Israel’s assault on Gaza enters its fifth month, it remains unclear whether it will grow into a full-scale regional conflict. Among the decisive factors is Hezbollah, one of the most heavily armed non-state actors in the world, and arguably the most skilled in urban and alpine warfare. So far, the group has refrained from taking escalatory measures, aiming to prevent Lebanese involvement in the war while partially diverting the IDF with limited attacks from the north. Rather than targeting Israeli vital infrastructure, it has conducted hundreds of operations aimed at military outposts, forcing Israel to create an internal buffer zone by evacuating citizens from northern settlements. More than 170 Hezbollah fighters have been killed so far; but the party, which has an estimated 50,000 to 100,000 trained combatants, can handle such losses.

There are elements of the Israeli political and military leadership, however, which seem intent on provoking a major confrontation with Hezbollah. Their motives are clear enough. First, members of the Israeli cabinet, along with the IDF command and Mossad, know that their best chance of staying in power is to prolong the fighting – and they are not above sacrificing their own civilians to achieve this. Second, it is possible that if Israel continues to carry out mass murder without achieving any of its stated war aims, it may find itself more isolated on the international stage; whereas if Hezbollah were to start attacking Israeli cities and targeting civilians, Netanyahu’s government could revive the fantasy of an imperiled democratic state and rally the ‘forces of civilization’ to its cause. And third, there is a fear that Hezbollah might someday launch its own ‘Al Aqsa Flood’ across Israel’s northern border – prompting senior politicians, including Gantz, Gallant and Ben-Gvir, to call for a preemptive strike.

Israel has therefore been making repeated attempts to provoke its neighbour: targeting civilians in South Lebanon and launching attacks elsewhere in the country. Hezbollah and Hamas commanders, including Wissam Al-Tawil and Saleh Al-Arouri, have been assassinated on Lebanese soil, and Netanyahu has threatened to ‘turn Beirut and southern Lebanon into Gaza’. But Hezbollah remains committed to low-intensity warfare and has so far refused to respond with a major assault. What explains this strategic decision? It is not just a fear of further destruction that is preventing escalation; it is an awareness that this would not necessarily advance the group’s objectives, nor those of the Resistance Axis.

To understand Hezbollah’s calculation, we need to consider Lebanon’s position in the region. Since Obama announced the ‘pivot to Asia’ in 2009, the US has been trying to establish a new Middle Eastern security architecture that would allow it to minimize direct involvement in proxy wars and focus on containing China. As part of this process, the hegemon sought to normalize relations between Israel and the Arab world, culminating in the 2020 Abraham Accords. At the same time, Iran and Saudi Arabia began to pursue détente – hoping to reorient their economies, attract inward investment and forge ties with neighbouring countries, while reducing their respective roles in regional conflicts. Last year the two states reached a bilateral agreement in Beijing, the details of which remain obscure, but which seem to involve a compromise when it comes to nations where they both wield influence, such as Yemen and Lebanon. Some analysts have argued that Mohammed bin Salman is now ready to cooperate with Hezbollah and accept its status as the dominant political and military power in Lebanon. It may even be in the Saudis’ interest to have a strong deterrent force on Israel’s border, especially one for which they have no financial or political responsibility.

Given Lebanon’s ongoing economic misery, this could be a potential lifeline. The country’s downward spiral began in 2019 after the Gulf states, led by Saudi Arabia, cut off aid and divested from its real-estate and financial sectors. Challenging Hezbollah’s hegemony was cited as the motive, although the decision also came after the ramifications of the 2008 financial crisis finally reached the Gulf, forcing its leaders to restructure their foreign investment plans. Now, the Lebanese political class, including powerful elements in Hezbollah, believe that the Saudi–Iran accords – which have so far endured following 7 October – could allow them to turn back the clock to before the 2019 collapse. Their aim is to revive the rentier model that was established in the post-Mandate period and consolidated under Rafiq Al-Hariri in the 1990s: a dominant financial sector propping up the central state through regular loans, and a real-estate market dependent on inflows from Gulf investors and Lebanese expatriates. They also hope that the Lebanese financial system could now serve as a mediator for Gulf and Iranian investment in the reconstruction of Syria.

With the Saudi–Iran deal in place, and the effects of the financial crisis having passed, the barriers to investment in Lebanon could be removed and Hezbollah’s legitimacy could be recognized across the region. Moreover, if Iran is hoping to scale down its involvement in regional conflicts and establish lasting economic partnerships with erstwhile rivals, then it may want Hezbollah to do the same: reducing its military activity in Lebanon and Syria and focusing instead on economic revival and ‘good governance’. One should refrain from making categorical statements about the relationship between Iran and Hezbollah, since its contours are unclear, and the latter can hardly be described as a simple proxy. But Tehran’s foreign policy outlook would seem, prima facie, to align with Hezbollah’s approach to Gaza over recent months.

It would also appear to tally with the interests of Washington, which is eager to prevent the war from engulfing the Middle East, and has reportedly been making diplomatic efforts to convince Hezbollah to continue its policy of restraint. Though the details remain unclear and uncorroborated, briefings from Iranian officials and Hezbollah-affiliated media suggest that the White House has offered Hezbollah a new ‘settlement for the entire region’, so long as it does not expand the war. Habib Fayad, a Lebanese journalist (and brother of a Hezbollah MP), has argued that the Americans would accept ceding control over Lebanon to Hezbollah, on the condition that the party pledges to never launch a 7 October-style incursion into Israel.

Yet this supposed settlement may also create a dilemma for Hezbollah. Previously, the group was able to evade accountability for the Lebanese economic crisis, since it has no ties to the banking and real estate sectors. It could use its status as a transnational military movement to distance itself from Lebanon’s national political parties, loathed for their mismanagement and corruption. Were Hezbollah to accept this American offer, some of its cadres are worried that it would signal its slow transformation into something more like a conventional party of government: integrated into the establishment, sapped of its insurgent energy. Whether it will take this course remains uncertain. The group consists both of politicians, most of whom have no military background and may be favourable to such ‘normalization’, and a militant faction – more heavily represented in the leadership – which is reluctant to be co-opted. 

The present situation thus appears to be one of deep asymmetry. Israel, foundering on the battlefield and discrediting itself internationally, is under pressure to set out some sort of end-game for its war. Hezbollah, meanwhile, has no real time constraints. As the fighting drags on, it believes it can renew its credibility – which was damaged during the Syrian civil war and the 2019 protests in Lebanon – by striking a balance between armed solidarity with Palestine and concern for Lebanese security. This is not to say that Hezbollah is merely instrumentalizing the conflict; its dedication to the Palestinian cause is genuine and should not be understated. The point is that Israel and the Resistance Axis are operating on two different timeframes, one more urgent than the other.

Still, Hezbollah’s policy could yet be reversed if regional war is deemed necessary or inevitable. Hassan Nasrallah has repeatedly asserted that in these circumstances, his forces would engage with no limits or constraints – which, according to some Lebanese commentators, could mean attacking strategic Israeli targets including ammonium nitrate factories, plus petrochemical and energy plants, in an attempt to redress the significant military imbalance between the two sides.

If Hezbollah is currently pursuing a non-escalatory strategy and asserting its willingness to negotiate with Israel on condition of a ceasefire, that is because it is confident that it can consolidate its power both in Lebanon and across the region. In other words, Hezbollah still has something to lose from entering a full-scale war. But if Hezbollah comes to believe that this kind of war – which could lay waste to Lebanon, damage the party’s military infrastructure and compromise it politically – is unavoidable, then it would have nothing to lose. In which case, Israel may end up with a powerful presence on its northern border: heavily armed, and no longer interested in restraint. 

Read on: Tariq Ali, ‘Mid-Point in the Middle East?’, NLR 38.

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Unlearning Machines

There is no denying the technological marvels that have resulted from the application of transformers in machine learning. They represent a step-change in a line of technical research that has spent most of its history looking positively deluded, at least to its more sober initiates. On the left, the critical reflex to see this as yet another turn of the neoliberal screw, or to point out the labour and resource extraction that underpin it, falls somewhat flat in the face of a machine that can, at last, interpret natural-language instructions fairly accurately, and fluently turn out text and images in response. Not long ago, such things seemed impossible. The appropriate response to these wonders is not dismissal but dread, and it is perhaps there that we should start, for this magic is overwhelmingly concentrated in the hands of a few often idiosyncratic people at the social apex of an unstable world power. It would obviously be foolhardy to entrust such people with the reified intelligence of humanity at large, but that is where we are.

Here in the UK, tech-addled university managers are currently advocating for overstretched teaching staff to turn to generative AI for the production of teaching materials. More than half of undergraduates are already using the same technology to help them write essays, and various AI platforms are being trialled for the automation of marking. Followed through to their logical conclusion, these developments would amount to a repurposing of the education system as a training process for privately owned machine learning models: students, teachers, lecturers all converted into a kind of outsourced administrator or technician, tending to the learning of a black-boxed ‘intelligence’ that does not belong to them. Given that there is no known way of preventing Large Language Models from ‘hallucinating’ – weaving untruths and absurdities into their output, in ways that can be hard to spot unless one has already done the relevant work oneself – residual maintainers of intellectual standards would then be reduced to the role of providing corrective feedback to machinic drivel.

Where people don’t perform this function, the hallucinations will propagate unchecked. Already the web – which was once imagined, on the basis of CERN, as a sort of idealized scientific community – is being swamped by the pratings of statistical systems. Much as physical waste is shipped to the Global South for disposal, digital effluent is being dumped on the global poor: beyond the better-resourced languages, low-quality machine translations of low-quality English language content now dominate the web. This, of course, risks poisoning one of the major wells from which generative AI models have hitherto been drinking, raising the spectre of a degenerative loop analogous to the protein cycles of Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease – machine learning turning into its opposite.

Humans, no doubt, will be called upon to correct such tendencies, filtering, correcting and structuring training data for the very processes that are leaving this trail of destruction. But the educator must of course be educated, and with even the book market being saturated with auto-generated rubbish, the culture in which future educators will learn cannot be taken for granted. In a famous passage, the young Marx argued that the process of self-transformation involved in real learning implied a radical transformation in the circumstances of learning. If learning now risks being reduced to a sanity check on the outputs of someone else’s machine, finessing relations of production that are structurally opposed to the learner, the first step towards self-education will have to involve a refusal to participate in this technological roll-out.

While the connectionist AI that underlies these developments has roots that predate even the electronic computer, its ascent is inextricable from the dynamics of a contemporary world raddled by serial crises. An education system that was already threatening to collapse provides fertile ground for the cultivation of a dangerous technology, whether this is driven by desperation, ingenuousness or cynicism on the part of individual actors. Healthcare, where the immediate risks may be even higher, is another domain which the boosters like to present as in-line for an AI-based shake-up. We might perceive in these developments a harbinger of future responses to the climate emergency. Forget about the standard apocalyptic scenarios peddled by the prophets of Artificial General Intelligence; they are a distraction from the disaster that is already upon us.

Matteo Pasquinelli’s recent book, The Eye of the Master: A Social History of Artificial Intelligence, is probably the most sophisticated attempt so far to construct a critical-theoretical response to these developments. Its title is somewhat inaccurate: there is not much social history here – not in the conventional sense. Indeed, as was the case with Joy Lisi Rankin’s A People’s History of Computing in the United States (2018), it would be hard to construct such a history for a technical realm that has long been largely tucked away in rarefied academic and research environments. The social enters here by way of a theoretical reinterpretation of capitalist history centred on Babbage’s and Marx’s analyses of the labour process, which identifies even in nineteenth century mechanization and division of labour a sort of estrangement of the human intellect. This then lays the basis for an account of the early history of connectionist AI. The ‘eye’ of the title links the automation of pattern recognition to the history of the supervision of work.

If barely a history, the book is structured around a few striking scholarly discoveries that merit serious attention. It is well known that Babbage’s early efforts to automate computation were intimately connected with a political-economic perspective on the division of labour. A more novel perspective here comes from Pasquinelli’s tracing of Marx’s notion of the ‘general intellect’ to Ricardian socialist William Thompson’s 1824 book, An Inquiry into the Principles of the Distribution of Wealth. Thompson’s theory of labour highlighted the knowledge implied even in relatively lowly kinds of work – a knowledge that was appropriated by machines and set against the very people from whom it had been alienated. This set the stage for speculations about the possible economic fallout from this accumulation of technology, such as Marx’s famous ‘fragment on machines’.

But the separating out of a supposed ‘labour aristocracy’ within the workers’ movement made any emphasis on the more mental aspects of work hazardous for cohesion. As the project of Capital matured, Marx thus set aside the general intellect for the collective worker, de-emphasizing knowledge and intellect in favour of a focus on social coordination. In the process, an early theory of the role of knowledge and intellect in mechanization was obscured, and hence required reconstruction from the perspective of the age of the Large Language Model. The implication for us here is that capitalist production always involved an alienation of knowledge; and the mechanization of intelligence was always embedded in the division of labour.

If Pasquinelli stopped there, his book would amount to an interesting manoeuvre on the terrain of Marxology and the history of political economy. But this material provides the theoretical backdrop to a scholarly exploration of the origins of connectionist approaches to machine learning, first in the neuroscience and theories of self-organization of cybernetic thinkers like Warren McCulloch, Walter Pitts and Ross Ashby that formed in the midst of the Second World War and in the immediate post-war, and then in the late-50s emergence, at the Cornell Aeronautical Laboratory, of Frank Rosenblatt’s ‘perceptron’ – the earliest direct ancestor of contemporary machine learning models. Among the intellectual resources feeding into the development of the perceptron were a controversy between the cyberneticians and Gestalt psychologists on the question of Gestalt perception or pattern recognition; Hayek’s connectionist theory of mind – which he had begun to develop in a little-reported stint as a lab assistant to neuropathologist Constantin Monakow, and which paralleled his economic beliefs; and vectorization methods that had emerged from statistics and psychometrics, with their deep historical links to the eugenics movement. The latter connection has striking resonances in the context of much-publicized concerns over racial and other biases in contemporary AI.

Pasquinelli’s unusual strength here lies in combining a capacity to elaborate the detail of technical and intellectual developments in the early history of AI with an aspiration towards the construction of a broader social theory. Less well-developed is his attempt to tie the perceptron and all that has followed from it to the division of labour, via an emphasis on the automation not of intelligence in general, but of perception – linking this to the work of supervising production. But he may still have a point at the most abstract level, in attempting to ground the alienated intelligence that is currently bulldozing its way through digital media, education systems, healthcare and so on, in a deeper history of the machinic expropriation of an intellectuality that was previously embedded in labour processes from which head-work was an inextricable aspect.

The major difference with the current wave, perhaps, is the social and cultural status of the objects of automation. Where once it was the mindedness of manual labour that found itself embodied in new devices, in a context of stratifications where the intellectuality of such realms was denied, in current machine learning models it is human discourse per se that is objectified in machinery. If the politics of machinery was never neutral, the level of generality that mechanization is now reaching should be ringing alarm bells everywhere: these things cannot safely be entrusted to a narrow group of corporations and technical elites. As long as they are, these tools – however magical they might seem – will be our enemies, and finding alternatives to the dominant paths of technical development will be a pressing matter.

Read on: Hito Steyerl, ‘Common Sensing?’, NLR 144.

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Wenders, Canonized

The acclaimed German filmmaker Wim Wenders was born in Dusseldorf in August 1945. These two biographical facts set the trajectory of his career. Along with Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Werner Herzog, Volker Schlöndorff and Margarethe von Trotta, among others, Wenders became a key figure of the New German Cinema, a movement forged by that first postwar generation born into the ruins of the Third Reich. ‘I don’t think any country has had such a loss of faith in its own images, stories and myths as we have’, he reflected in 1977. ‘We, the directors of the New Cinema have felt this loss most keenly: in ourselves as the absence of a tradition of our own, as a generation without fathers; and in our audiences as confusion and apprehension.’ A society determined to forget its recent past and embarrassed by its cultural touchstones; with its own imagined community unavailable, another would have to do.

For Wenders, that would be America – or at least the version of America seen at the movies. This meant, especially, the endless highway, Coca-Cola, and rock music (starting with Little Richard and Chuck Berry, then continuing through the 1960s and long beyond). Like the woman in the Velvet Underground song whose ‘life was saved by rock ‘n’ roll’, Wenders observed ‘that was undoubtedly true in my case as well’. As well as, one imagines, the three years he spent at the University of Television and Film in Munich. Wenders had initially studied medicine, before switching to philosophy and then abandoning college and decamping to Paris to pursue a career in painting. But there, like the nouvelle vague directors before him he haunted the Cinémathèque Française – taking in as many as five films a day – and was nurtured by the influence of its legendary co-founder and director Henri Langlois, to whom he would later dedicate The American Friend (1977). Wenders too started out as a film critic, writing for the journal Filmkritik when he returned to Germany in 1967 (many of these essays are collected in Emotion Pictures: Reflections on Cinema) – and as a filmmaker, he was also eager to interrogate the form, reluctant to separate ‘the movies’ from ‘real life’, and saw a thin, nebulous line between documentary and drama.

Curzon Film (working with the Wim Wenders foundation which supervised meticulous restorations) has produced an impressive twenty-two-disc collection of his films. Each comes loaded with extras, including attendant interviews, featurettes and commentaries, with some supplemented by short films. Despite its imposing breadth, the set is, understandably, not ‘complete’ – but two early omissions are disappointing as each, notably, established many of the motifs that would characterize Wenders’s career. The short Alabama, 2000 Light Years (1969), was the first of his dozen collaborations with cinematographer Robby Müller. It’s not much, really, and the ‘plot’ needs to be intuited, but it’s all there: driving, smoking, jukeboxes, and, especially, music (including The Stones with ‘No Expectations’, Hendrix’s ‘The Wind Cries Mary’, and Dylan from John Wesley Harding). Summer in the City (1970), Wenders’s debut feature, also shot by Müller and edited by Peter Przygodda (the first of twenty collaborations) has its limitations too, but it is surely better than The Scarlet Letter (1973), a dreary film included in the set that was such an unhappy shoot it nearly chased Wenders from the business.

Like Alabama, Summer in the City was probably excluded due to the impossibility of securing music rights that were originally disregarded. Dedicated to the Kinks (and featuring five songs by that band), the movie, which sports some eye-catching night-for-night shooting, can be described as a bizarre cross between Rohmer’s My Night at Maud’s (1969) and Malle’s Elevator to the Gallows (1957). But it anticipates what would follow, with its lament for the shuttering of old movie houses, a visit to a photo booth, a prominently placed jukebox, a screening of Godard’s Alphaville and endless driving. In short order Wenders would do all of this again, often spectacularly.

Wenders’s bid for the pantheon ultimately rests on a quartet of brilliant, diverse, signature films: Alice in the Cities (1974), The American Friend (1977), Paris, Texas (1984) and Wings of Desire (1987). Alice in the Cities, one of the cinematic achievements of the 1970s, remains his most intimate and personal. Journalist Philip Winter (Rüdiger Vogler, who often served as Wenders’s alter-ego) has wandered across America in search of a story he fails to write. Limping home to Europe by way of New York, circumstances leave him briefly responsible for young Alice (Yella Rottländer); a missed flight complicates efforts to reunite Alice with her mother, and, stranded, a search begins for her grandmother, which takes this odd couple on a road trip through Holland and Germany. One suggestion of this textured, subtle film is that America is far more alluring as an idea than as an actual place. Inspired by Wenders’s first two trips there, he would later write that the American dream is ‘a dream OF a country, IN a different country, that is located where the dream takes place.’ Describing experiences that parallel the journey of Philip Winter, he recalls ‘My second visit to America I just didn’t dare to leave New York . . . west of the Hudson, I knew now, lay wilderness’. Wenders would, however, subsequently develop an appreciation for ‘Arizona, Utah or New Mexico’ – that is, the West as seen in the films of John Ford, a figure that looms large in Alice in the Cities – and in Wenders’s filmmaking more generally. Shot by Robby Müller in impeccable black and white, two scenes stand out beyond the special sequences documenting mid-seventies New York City: an interlude where Philip takes in a Chuck Berry concert (all the more meaningful in that the song, ‘Memphis, Tennessee’, about a father attempting to reconnect with his young daughter, was an important inspiration for the film); and a poignant, pivotal confession in a café, a location that also features an unmotivated shot of a boy, leaning against a jukebox, sipping a coke, which is undoubtedly an evocation of the filmmaker himself.

The American Friend, a loose adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley’s Game, is Wenders’s most visually ambitious film, displaying an exquisite facility for shooting in colour, orchestrating a sophisticated palette that recalls Wenders’s one-time aspiration to be a painter. Music is, once again, an essential ingredient (and presumably the well-deployed songs by the Kinks and others were paid for this time around). The production also marked Wenders’s first collaboration with Bruno Ganz, an uncommonly gifted actor whose understated performance grounds the film, which is elliptical (especially on a first viewing) and distinguished by several bravura, suspenseful set pieces, many involving railways. Dennis Hopper fills the shoes of Tom Ripley, and though the performance is somewhat imbued with the actor’s own persona, it nevertheless works. American Friend is also distinguished by numerous cameo appearances, including nouvelle vague legend Jean Eustache and two directors from Wenders’s personal pantheon, Nicholas Ray and Sam Fuller. Of Ray, Wenders wrote, ‘There’s one thing wrong with Godard’s famous line that if there hadn’t been cinema, Nicholas Ray would have invented it . . . Ray did invent cinema, not many do’. Fuller, who appeared in several of Wenders’s films, was an important mentor (he helped rework the screenplay for Alice in the Cities). In Wenders’s estimation, he was not only ‘the greatest storyteller I ever met’, but ‘one of the great directors of the twentieth century’.

Paris, Texas won the grand prize at Cannes, among other accolades, yet it endures principally as a cult favourite. This is perhaps not surprising – Dirk Bogarde, the jury president that year, recalls in his memoir some dismay from the festival overlords: ‘We were to choose films which would please a family audience, not ones which would appeal to “a few students and a handful of faux intellectuals”’. Starring Harry Dean Stanton as a drifter reconnecting with his former life, the film loses a bit of its magic as it becomes more literal in its final third, and there is a structural wobble with the discarding of two key characters. Nevertheless, as often, the artists were right and the suits obtuse – this is a special film. Every frame is filled with purpose, and the ‘through the looking glass’ scenes between Stanton and his estranged wife (Nastassja Kinski) achieve rare heights. Ry Cooder’s score, featuring Blind Willie Johnson’s haunting blues instrumental from 1927, ‘Dark was the Night, Cold was the Ground’, is inseparable from the performances, especially in the first half of the picture, where dialogue is sparse. Paris, Texas was co-written by Sam Shepard, who also wrote (and starred in, opposite Jessica Lange) the very fine Don’t Come Knocking (2005), another regrettable omission from the Curzon collection. Both films are very Fordian in their locations, visual disposition and as character studies of men who withdraw from society to re-emerge years later in search of some form of salvation.

Wings of Desire, Wenders’s best-known film, has also been justly lauded. Jonathan Rosenbaum describes a film that presents ‘an astonishing poetic documentary’ of its host city. It features Bruno Ganz (Daniel) and Otto Sander (Cassiel) as angels who hover over a divided Berlin. As witnesses to and chroniclers of history as it unfolds, they are unable to participate in human affairs (or prevent its horrors, epic or intimate); they can only observe, and in some cases (but, tragically, not all) provide a comforting presence to those in distress. The narrative swivels as Daniel decides he’s had his fill of immortality – so curious about the human condition that he wishes to experience it. Crashing to earth, he courts a trapeze artist (Solveig Dommartin) and encounters the music of Nick Cave. Peter Falk, whose affable celebrity has at times overshadowed his prodigious talent, excels playing a version of himself. His internal monologues feature some of the best writing (and line reads) to be found in Wenders’s oeuvre. The film was the third collaboration between Wenders and the Austrian novelist and playwright Peter Handke. Handke co-wrote Wenders’s The Goalkeeper’s Fear of the Penalty (1972), an early landmark of the New German Cinema, based on his novel (Müller and Przygodda are also on hand, as are nods to Hitchcock, Americana, and Creedence Clearwater Revival’s ‘Long as I Can See the Light’). Handke also wrote Wrong Move (1975), a wistful road film in which Germany’s dark past weighs more oppressively than in any other Wenders film.

It is fair to say, however ­– and this is reflected in the Curzon collection – that Wenders’s oeuvre, especially following the glory days of the seventies and eighties, is uneven. In the late 1990s, Roger Ebert would astutely describe ‘a gifted and poetic’ filmmaker ‘whose reach sometimes exceeds his grasp’. Faraway, So Close! (1993), a post-reunification follow up to Wings of Desire, has some things to say, but is inconsistent and never quite works; The End of Violence (1997), though beautifully shot and well-cast, is an unfulfilling, ultimately incoherent affair (and a welcome omission from the set); The Million Dollar Hotel (2000), co-written by Bono, sees another fine cast wasted. These critiques can be taken too far, however, with commentators, perhaps understandably, grading on a curve – the way minor mid-career Dylan albums were often initially vilified, only to grow in esteem with the passage of time. In that spirit, Everything Will be Fine (2015), for example, widely dismissed upon release, is a welcome rediscovery. Had this small, thoughtful film been made by a young unknown, likely it would have been lauded as heralding the arrival of a promising new talent.     

Beyond Wenders’s four masterpieces, there is much to praise in the collection. Consider, most notably, two additional films that have the road as their theme (not surprisingly, Wenders’s production company is called ‘Road Movies’). Kings of the Road (1976), dedicated to Fritz Lang and running to three hours (plenty of time to touch base with the director’s familiar motifs, here adding an often-fraught homosocial relationship into the mix), follows its protagonists as they drive along the inter-German border, stopping at local, decaying cinema-houses. Until the End of the World (1991), at nearly five hours, is the ultimate expression of Wenders’s peripatetic urgency, traversing five continents and boasting an enormous, star-studded global cast (Max Von Sydow, Jeanne Moreau and Chishû Ryû among them). Perhaps less than the sum of its astonishing parts, the film nevertheless asks big questions, and presciently anticipated the worst aspects of twenty-first-century selfie culture. 

Arguably, all Wenders movies are in some sense road movies. Just as important as the road, however, is his fascination with the uneasy relationship between drama and documentary. Lightning over Water (1980), made with a dying Nicholas Ray, explores these themes most overtly. In the opening sequence, Wenders arrives at Ray’s SoHo apartment – in scenes handled so deftly the audience gets the impression that it is indeed privy to something very ‘real’ (though in retrospect there are multiple camera set ups). Soon enough, however, Wenders pulls back the curtain; the image shifts from pristine 35mm film to grainy video – and in the latter suddenly Ray’s lonely apartment is crowded with a film crew, harshly lit, and on a dime it’s that which seems real (though obviously, even that footage was shot and edited). But there are some inescapable realities here; Ray was indeed dying, and does not survive the shoot.

The State of Things (1982), which took home the Golden Lion at the Venice film festival, is another meta-movie. Inspired by Wenders’s unhappy Hollywood interlude directing Hammett (1982), The State of Things, which opens with a movie-within-a-movie, follows a film crew stranded in Lisbon because the money has run dry while its director travels to Los Angeles to track down his furtive producer. Sam Fuller is a welcome presence, but the film really comes to life towards the end, when preternaturally intense seventies character actor Allen Garfield shows up as the missing money man on the run, monologuing in an R.V. A dozen years later, Lisbon Story (1994) explored similar themes in an informal sequel. An attractively shot trifle featuring Rüdiger Vogler, it is distinguished only by a pleasant musical interlude and welcome cameo from Portuguese director Manoel de Oliveira.   

Finally, and increasingly in late career, are excursions into straight non-fiction (as far as that goes), which showcase Wenders’s interests in and engagement with a panoply of the arts. These include cinema and music (of course), but also dance, architecture, fashion, and photography, a ubiquitous presence in Wenders’s life and in his films as well – photography plays an integral part not only in Alice in the Cities and The American Friend, but numerous later works, including, most explicitly, Palermo Shooting (2008). Of these productions, well represented in the set, two in particular stand out: Tokyo Ga (1985), Wenders’s moving homage to Japanese filmmaker Yasujirô Ozu (another important influence), and, irresistibly, Buena Vista Social Club (1999), which follows Ry Cooder, who travelled to Havana to lure long-forgotten Cuban musicians out of retirement. Wenders, now approaching his eightieth year, released two well received films last year, Perfect Days, a rumination on the experiences of a janitor in Tokyo, and Anselm, a documentary about the artist Anselm Kiefer. With Nick Ray and Sam Fuller present in the pantheon, as Curzon’s impressive box set makes clear, surely there is a seat at that table for Wim Wenders as well.

Read on: Rainer Werner Fassbinder, ‘Six Films by Douglas Sirk’, NLR I/91.

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Ukania and Palestine

The UK government has been among the most hawkishly pro-Israel states in the Western world, and the opposition Labour Party has done its best to purge critics of Israel from its ranks – yet the Palestine solidarity movement in Britain has been the largest in Europe. As one of the chief organizers of that movement, how would you account for its impressive scale?

In many Western countries, the pro-Palestine movement has different components that don’t always work together: leftist, Muslim, Arab nationalist. When we set up the Stop the War Coalition in 2001 we tried to take a different approach, and began collaborating with Muslim groups from early on – for instance after the massacre in Jenin in spring 2002. We decided that the February 2003 mass demonstration against the Iraq war would also be a march for Palestinian liberation: the two slogans for the event were ‘Don’t Attack Iraq’ and ‘Freedom for Palestine’. Then, during the protests against Operation Cast Lead in 2008-9, we made an alliance with the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, the Muslim Association of Britain, Friends of Al Aqsa and the Palestine Forum in Britain, which remains in place today. We’ve also worked a lot with British trade unions, whose stance on this issue has generally been quite robust. So I think the strong links between these institutions make the UK a distinctive case.  

There’s also a fairly widespread awareness of Britain’s imperial history, including its role in the Zionist project: Balfour, Sykes–Picot, and of course the League of Nations Mandate. If you mention these things at a rally in London, people of very different backgrounds and social classes know what you’re talking about – which is interesting, since we’re not taught about them in school. Now, with the ongoing slaughter in Gaza and violence spreading across the region, people are horrified by the UK’s support for the Israeli war machine. They recognize that this is a watershed moment. So for seventeen consecutive weeks there have been either major national demonstrations, which have brought hundreds of thousands onto the streets, or significant numbers joining local actions. In response, the government has suggested banning Palestine flags, proscribing certain slogans and even outlawing the protests outright, as was done in France and Germany. But as yet they haven’t succeeded.  

Does that challenge the idea, which we heard throughout the Corbyn years, that anti-imperialism is a marginal, unpopular strain in British politics?

I think there’s a misconception that British workers have always been bought off by imperialism. But if you look at the history, there have been repeated mobilizations around international issues: from the Spanish Civil War to the Suez crisis to South African apartheid. William Morris bitterly opposed the Sudan war in 1884. The Lancashire working class supported the North during the US civil war even though they suffered hardship as a result. These were all popular causes. So there is a strong political current here – and I think it’s one of the main reasons why Corbyn was elected Labour leader in 2015. But of course, that current is anathema to the Labour establishment, whose foreign policy has been consistently reactionary, especially when it came to the independence and decolonization movements of the twentieth century. The right of the party couldn’t bear the idea that Corbyn would have changed Britain’s policy on the Middle East. And they couldn’t bear that a substantial segment of the population supported him on these questions. They could have tolerated him renationalizing the railways, but that was a bridge too far.

Does that also explain why the UK government has responded so aggressively to the recent protests?

I think the government was surprised by the response to October 7th. As the bombing of Gaza got underway, they decided to light up Downing Street in the colours of the Israeli flag. They thought this would be another Ukraine moment, with everyone rallying around Israel in a supposed clash between civilization and barbarism. They were gearing up for that kind of propaganda operation. But as early as October 9th, thousands of people gathered to protest outside the Israeli Embassy. As with 9/11, they saw that this attack would be used to justify killing on a much greater scale – and that the Israeli government would exploit this opportunity to try to expel the Arab population from historic Palestine. People didn’t trust the government, or the media coverage, or Keir Starmer. And this is a serious problem for the political class, because if the war continues to escalate they won’t have a mandate for intervention. They’ll struggle to gain consent for following the US into this military quagmire. And they won’t be believed when they tell us that Iran poses an existential threat, for example.

This is partly why we’ve seen the attempts to repress the movement. The government have branded the demos ‘hate marches’ and introduced legislation to criminalize the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign. They’ve also launched a crackdown on smaller fringe groups. The Muslim outfit Hizb ut-Tahrir has been labelled a terrorist organization – which obviously it isn’t, although we might disagree with it on most issues. Police have also arrested members of a small Maoist organization called the CPGB-ML, raided their houses and confiscated their literature. People in the Muslim community are being told that their children can’t talk about Palestine in school, otherwise they’ll be reported under the Prevent legislation. There is a real effort, from different sections of the establishment, to present pro-Palestine activists as Hamas supporters or antisemites. But despite the best efforts of the Daily Mail and the Metropolitan Police, they only ever manage to find about half a dozen people at each march who they can claim are carrying questionable placards.

More than 70% of the UK population now support a ceasefire, while the two main Westminster parties oppose it. What are the strategic implications of this situation for the left? Could it open up the space for an electoral challenge to Starmer’s Labour?

When the election is held later this year, Palestine will be on the ballot paper. Right now neither party is managing to satisfy its own supporters, let alone the wider public, so my guess is that there will be major abstention. It still looks like Labour will win a clear majority, but Starmer’s cheerleading for Netanyahu has prompted a mass exodus of members. Every week I hear about more local politicians who are leaving in disgust. In Liverpool, Hastings, Oxford and elsewhere, left-wing councillors have established independent groupings. Some of these people will probably run against Labour in the general election. It’s hard to predict how they’ll do, given the constraints of the first-past-the-post system, but they’ll certainly hurt the Labour vote share in various places – especially where there is strong support for a ceasefire. And this could, in theory, form the basis of a new organization: a new type of left party.

One of the big problems, though, is that the major trade unions remain tied to Labour. There are lots of general secretaries who come and speak at our Palestine demos, and several unions have backed our call for a ‘workplace day of action’ on February 7th, which is encouraging. But despite the strike wave that’s taken place over the last two years, the unions haven’t made significant gains in terms of their membership or influence. They are still relatively weak formations. So they’ll be keen to strike deals with Starmer once he gets into power, and reluctant to support autonomous political initiatives.

Might the unions begin to play a more militant role once a future Labour government starts imposing wage restraint on workers, as Starmer has indicated that it will?

Well I suppose we’ve been here before. Wilson launched a brutal attack on the Seamen’s Union in 1966, but the labour movement still refused to cut ties with his government. Since then, the unions have lost a great deal of their strength, which may put them in an even more precarious position; but then again so has Labour and Labourism, as a result of severing its organic connection with the working class. So I guess the answer is: some will wrest free of the party and some won’t. The Fire Brigades Union disaffiliated under Blair, and it’s conceivable that it and others like it might do so again. But my sense is that the larger unions will do everything they can to try to preserve a Labour government, even if its policies – on everything from austerity to the Middle East – are merely an echo of the Tories’.

Where next for the Palestine movement in the UK, especially given the tendency for regular A-to-B marches to lose momentum? How to preserve its energy?

The forms of action that can be taken are almost endless. Groups like Workers for a Free Palestine and Palestine Action have been shutting down weapons factories. Protesters have been staging sit-ins in railway stations. There was a day of action against Barclays Bank – which provides billions worth of investment to arms companies linked to Israel – and other types of BDS organizing are sure to continue. We’re preparing for limited walkouts across workplaces and campuses next week. But I don’t think we should see direct action and marches as somehow counterposed. To me, what the national demos do is bring very large numbers of people and groups together – which energizes them to go off and do different things. So that helps to keep the momentum going. If you don’t have the national demos, there’s a danger that the movement will fragment.

The other thing that will help to sustain the activism is a strong political core, which takes us back to the question of anti-imperialism. I think it’s important for people to see Gaza as integrally related to the wider setup in the Middle East – how it’s shaped by the United States, and to a lesser extent by Britain. So you need public meetings and discussions to develop that critique. And you also need writers and intellectuals to bring the issue into focus. Apparently Ghada Karmi’s 2023 book One State has sold out, and keeps selling out every time new copies are printed, which tells you that people are increasingly aware that the two-state ‘solution’ is a fantasy and are now thinking beyond it.

The thing is, even if there were a ceasefire tomorrow, this movement isn’t going away. The demos might get much smaller, and people might want to do more local actions, but the feeling among the organizers is that there has been a permanent sea-change in public attitudes towards Palestine. And this has already altered British politics. The establishment are still trying to weaponize accusations of antisemitism against anyone who criticizes Israel, but this has become much harder to pull off. The line that Israel is the ‘only democracy in the Middle East’ just doesn’t work anymore. Thanks to both the solidarity campaign and the ICJ ruling, Israel will now forever be associated with the words ‘apartheid’ and ‘genocide’.

Read on: Alexander Zevin, ‘Gaza and New York’, NLR 144.

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Marx or Jefferson?

Du Bois’s relationship to Marxism has become a focus of considerable debate in US sociology; the stakes are at once intellectual and crypto-political. Some want to enroll Du Bois into the ranks of ‘intersectional theory’, a notion which holds that everything has exactly three causes (race, class, and gender), somewhat analogous to the way certain Weberians are dogmatically attached to a fixed set of ‘factors’ (ideological, economic, military, political). Others want to incorporate him into the tradition of Western Marxism and its signature problem of failed revolution. Broadly speaking, the first group tends to emphasize Du Bois’s earlier writings, thereby downplaying the influence of Marxism, while the second focuses on his later work, with its critiques of capitalism and imperialism and its reflections on the Soviet experiment.

But Du Bois’s masterwork, Black Reconstruction (1935), doesn’t fit either of these interpretations. The concept of ‘intersectionality’ appears nowhere, and there is no evidence that DuBois thought in these terms. Nor is Du Bois’s proletariat, or at least its most politically important part, the industrial working class; it is rather the family farmer, both in the West and the South, both black and white. Accordingly, his political ideal was ‘agrarian democracy’. He sometimes refers to those supporting this programme rather misleadingly as ‘peasant farmers’ or ‘peasant proprietors’, which might lead one to think that he is closer to ‘Populism’ in the Russian sense than to Marxism. But that too would be a misreading, for in his understanding the social foundation of democracy does not consist in a pre-capitalist village structure with collective ownership of land, but in a stratum of independent small holders (one that failed fully to appear in the South after the Civil War because of ferocious resistance by the plantocracy, which produced the amphibious figure of the share-cropper).

In contrast to Du Bois, most European Marxists have been wary of calling for the redistribution of large landed estates, on account of the political and economic consequences of establishing a small holding peasantry. Dividing up land can be both politically liberatory and economically regressive, as the French Revolution demonstrated most clearly. Remember too that Gramsci’s The Southern Question (1926), a text which bears a resemblance to Black Reconstruction, was written partially as a defence against the accusation that the nascent Italian communist party demanded the breakup of the southern latifundia.

It may be, after all, that Du Bois is best understood neither as a theorist of intersectionality avant la lettre, nor as a Marxist, but rather as a radical and consistent democrat. His ideal political subject was the independent family farmer, able to withdraw from labour and commodity markets to some extent, or at least to engage with them on favourable and independent terms. In this Du Bois is a deeply American thinker whose critique of capitalism is more republican than socialist. For Du Bois’s concern was not really the failure of a socialist revolution, but rather the missed opportunity of a Jeffersonian Arcadia.

Read On: John-Baptiste Oduor, ‘Segregations Sequiturs’, NLR 136.

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Chaos in Ecuador

In recent years, the surging violence in Ecuador has made international headlines. Initially, coverage centred on frequent prison riots and massacres, which have claimed four hundred lives since 2021. Then, as the turmoil spread beyond the penitentiary system, the focus shifted to gang shootings and executions. Last April, video footage of an attack in the coastal city of Esmeraldas, showing a speed boat full of armed men shooting people on the docks, went viral. The following summer, the presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio was assassinated and his alleged hitmen were murdered in custody. Now the country is reeling from a 24-hour rampage by drug gangs that culminated in a live, on-air hostage-taking on a TV news set. The incident prompted the newly inaugurated president Daniel Noboa to announce that the country was facing an ‘internal armed conflict’: constitutional parlance for a declaration of war, which essentially allows the military to take over from the police. Ecuador wasn’t always this cliche of a narco-state. It was once hailed as an ‘island of peace’, a security success story. What explains its spiral into chaos?

When Rafael Correa became president in 2007, the national murder rate was 15.9 per 100,000 inhabitants. When he left office office ten years later, it had fallen to 5.8, one of the lowest in Latin America. Several policies lay behind this success. There were, undoubtedly, some elements of a traditional law-and-order approach. The police force grew by 40% and many of its personnel were replaced, partly as a result of a 2010 police mutiny in which the president was held hostage for a day. There were significant wage hikes – the salary of rank-and-file officers was tripled – as well as investment in training and equipment that were often sorely lacking. The policing doctrine was also reformed, with the government driving decentralization and a smaller-scale, neighbourhood approach. Such initiatives played a major role in reducing crime rates.

This was accompanied by broader institutional change: most notably the creation of a Coordinating Security Ministry which oversaw security policy and enabled collaboration between different state agencies, in an attempt to diminish rivalries between branches of the military, police and intelligence services. Correa’s government also invested in a widely celebrated 911 emergency response system, which established call centres in seventeen locations by 2015. The state was, in short, making itself present on its territory: an exercise in Weberian sovereignty unlike anything that had come before. 

Perhaps more importantly, the Correa administration implemented a series of ambitious social policies – striving, for instance, to rehabilitate and reintegrate members of Ecuador’s prominent urban gangs. It approached the Latin Kings and Queens, Ñetas and Masters of the Street in an attempt to convince them to ditch crime and enrol in social and educational schemes. The government recognized that these organizations had not yet been inserted into the structures of the larger Mexican-run cartels, and that it could therefore stop the problem from festering. Correa also decriminalized the possession of small quantities of narcotics, as part of a general shift towards treating drug consumption as a public health issue. The aim was to prevent overcrowding in the prison system and allow the police to focus on criminal organizations.

Beyond that, the administration oversaw a marked improvement in living conditions. It doubled social spending, with significant increases for health and education, plus robust welfare programmes and a higher minimum wage. It audited the public finances to suspend or restructure illegitimate debts, renegotiated the country’s oil contracts, and improved tax collection from $5bn in 2007 to $13bn in 2017. By the end of Correa’s tenure, poverty had been reduced by 41.6% and inequality, measured by the Gini coefficient, had fallen by 16.7%. Ecuador was making the kind of social progress that renders drug cartels obsolete. 

The concrete effects of Correa’s policies belie the narrative, pedalled by the Ecuadorean establishment, that his ‘soft-on-crime’ tactics are to blame for the current security collapse. Media pundits often suggest that if Ecuador was peaceful under Correa, this was because his government had made a secret pact with the narcos. But this argument is fanciful. The gangs would only have accepted such a deal were they able to increase their drug traffic. Yet even the US Drug Enforcement Agency celebrated ‘the excellent results obtained by the anti-narcotics police’ under Correa, which significantly disrupted the trade. Since he left office, by contrast, drug exports have risen to unprecedented levels.

It was in 2017, under the presidency of Lenín Moreno, that the situation began to unravel. Having styled himself as a continuity candidate, once in office Moreno reversed most of his predecessor’s policies. Under the supervision of the IMF – which extended Ecuador a credit line in 2019, on the condition of a so-called ‘reform program aimed at modernising the economy’ – the social state was rolled back, budgets were slashed and thousands were laid off. The security sector was not spared. The prison system saw its budget cut by 30%, and several ministries, including the Coordinating Ministry of Security and the Ministry of Justice and Human Rights, were closed. The Ministry of the Interior, in charge of the police, was dissolved in a merger, while the main intelligence agency was shut down and its activities handed over to a new outfit run by retired military officers. The White House cheered from the sidelines, applauding Moreno’s ‘transition away from “21st century socialism” to a democratic society focused on the defense of basic rights and a free market economy’.

The outcome was catastrophic. Poverty increased almost 17% by 2019. Once the pandemic hit, there was an upsurge of unemployment and informal work, along with crime and drug trafficking. Gangs used the shutdown to consolidate their control over territory and cultivate ties with impoverished sectors of the population. These internal problems coincided with growing external ones. Following the 2016 Colombian peace process, Colombian drug traffickers began to move their product across the southern border and gained access to Ecuador’s Pacific ports, turning the country into a key transit point for drugs en route to the United States, Europe, Russia and the Middle East. Of course, we can only speculate as to how a different government would have dealt with these incursions. But it is clear that, rather than confronting a state with functional infrastructure and institutions, the cartels merely encountered Moreno’s neoliberal vacuum – and found it easy to fill. 

The government of Guillermo Lasso, which came to power in 2021, pushed ahead with the same IMF-supervised austerity and deregulation programme. His administration was weak – his party holding less than 10% of seats in the National Assembly – and marred by corruption. It did not take long for its approval ratings to reach a record low. This resulted in a deficit of leadership and legitimacy that constrained the state’s capacity to fight the crime syndicates, which began to flourish like never before. Still, the government retained the unflinching support of President Biden, who ignored frequent letters from Congressmen warning him about Lasso’s corruption and calling for a DOJ investigation into his hidden assets in the US. Allegations eventually surfaced that Danilo Carrera, Lasso’s brother-in-law and closest business collaborator, was linked to the ‘Albanian Mafia’ drug ring. Soon after, the key witness in the investigation was murdered, and Lasso’s scandal-ridden presidency began to fall apart. In May 2023, a few days before his likely impeachment by the National Assembly, he called new elections and relegated himself to the role of lame-duck president.

Violence meanwhile continued to mount. Prison massacres became commonplace and homicide rates climbed to an astonishing 45 per 100,000, an eight-fold increase since 2017. If Daniel Noboa, the centre-right businessman elected last October, is able to make even modest improvements in the security situation, he stands a chance of re-election when the country returns to the polls next year. His political prospects depend on convincing Ecuadorians that he is the man to defeat the cartels. So far he has tried to project toughness by reversing Correa’s decriminalization laws. He has also announced the construction of ‘maximum prisons’, contracted with an Israeli company, as well as ‘prison barges’ intended to conjure up images of Alcatraz or Devil’s Island. But aside from this, little is known about the specifics of his security plan. His ‘war’ on the gangs will be extremely costly, and the current economic outlook is not favourable. Though the incumbent benefits from relatively high crude oil prices – Ecuador’s main export – he is desperate to secure other sources of funding for his offensive. Judging from the recent decision to increase VAT from 12% to 15%, this could mean further attempts to squeeze the public.

This precarious situation makes the Noboa government highly dependent on the US. Bilateral security ties had already been strengthened over the last five years, particularly under Lasso. In October 2023, a cooperation agreement opened the door for an American military presence in Ecuador, which would be forced to relinquish some of the basic tenets of its sovereignty and grant full immunity to US personnel. (Ecuador’s Constitutional Court has ruled that, since the deal only involves ‘cooperation’ as opposed to a formal ‘alliance’, it does not require legislative authorisation.) This fits into a wider trend. Since the end of the Cold War, the US has used the War on Drugs as a tool to maintain its foothold in the Western Hemisphere and exert its influence over the security apparatus of Latin American states. Having charted a nonconformist course under Correa, Ecuador is now eager to signal its compliance with the hegemon. Another sign of this reorientation is the growing security partnership with Israel, which has managed to coax Ecuador – along with a number of other states in the Global South – into complicity with its expansionist project. As Palestinians are slaughtered in their tens of thousands, Noboa bleats that ‘we’re not going to condemn Israel’s actions nor are we going to take the position Brazil and Colombia did’.

The risk is that the president will now try to assuage public anger over rising crime with a host of repressive and reactionary measures, whose primary casualties will be ordinary Ecuadorians – in particular the impoverished youth of the urban peripheries. We have already seen how, in Colombia, security forces who are under pressure to deliver can sometimes be more concerned with the headcount, or even the bodycount, than with the accuracy of the targets. A renewed crackdown on crime, absent any social programme, could lead to mass arrests, incarcerations and even killings based on little evidence. Another potential threat is the appearance, as in the 1980s, of death squads often acting in cahoots with security forces. Ecuador is swiftly becoming the new frontline of the failed US War on Drugs. It may take years or even decades for the country to rebuild a state that can guarantee peace and security for its people.

Read on: Rafael Correa, ‘Ecuador’s Path’, NLR 77.

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Vague Terrain

The Argentinian director Eduardo Williams’s first short, Tan Atentos (2011), appears in English filmographies as an alarming whisper, Beware. The Spanish title has its ambiguities: tan could mean ‘so’, acting as an intensifier (‘very attentive’), or ‘as’, indicating qualification or comparison (‘as attentive as that’, ‘attentive to this degree’). ‘Beware’ doesn’t resolve this ambiguity, and we should take the hint – the realm we’re entering will not provide clear answers – and maybe the warning, too. Many of Williams’s titles have this cryptic quality, as though missing a coordinate: Could See a Puma (Pude Ver Un Puma, 2011), That I’m Falling? (Que je tombe tout les temps?, 2013, I Forgot! (Tôi quên rồi!, 2014). Like their titles, much of these films’ dialogue sounds interrupted, fragmentary, half-sensical. Could See a Puma opens with a shot of a daytime crescent moon and a voiceover caught mid-sentence: ‘and believe it static and harmless as decoration’. Williams’s use of broken dialogue is destabilizing; his films can make you wonder if you’re paying enough attention, or the right kind.

The Human Surge 3 (2023) is Williams’s second feature, following 2016’s The Human Surge. The mischievous omission of volume two has the disconcerting effect of a missed stair. Like Williams’s shorts, they follow groups of young people as they hang out, work, chat and listlessly slink around disparate international locations which, like the scenes that play out in them, feel diffuse and unremarkable – under-tended public parks, train station waiting rooms, shared bedrooms, parking lots, deserted markets, drab beaches. ‘Following’ really is the operative word for what Williams’s camera does, sometimes keeping pace with his characters, sometimes falling behind, occasionally becoming distracted and wandering off.

The Human Surge begins by tracking a young Argentinian man called Exe around the suburbs of Buenos Aires as he visits friends and seeming strangers, works at a supermarket, and witnesses a group of men performing sex acts for a webcam. In a convenience store, the camera takes a languid interest in another shopper, slopes home after her, then follows her housemate into a dark room where a laptop is running a video chat with a group of men in Mozambique also trying to make money from half-hearted cybersex. Seeming to move through the laptop screen, the camera then follows these men out into Maputo, where they, too, wander around, seeing friends and looking for work. When one pisses on an anthill, the camera follows the stream, delving among the earth and insects before emerging in the Philippines, where a third set of characters walk through the jungle, swim and converse enigmatically: telling second-hand anecdotes about getting lost and being followed, or swapping arcane facts (such as the gigabyte weights of various animals’ genomes). Finally, we arrive at a factory that produces tablet computers, and the shots become long and static. It’s a film about young adults – underemployed, culturally peripheral – searching for connection and some kind of meaningful interface with the world, a theme the film puns on (the characters are always looking for signal, wifi, or somewhere to charge their phone).

Blending arthouse, documentary and slow cinema styles, Williams’s films are hybrid works that one could imagine being screened in a gallery as much as a cinema; like their characters, they seem resistant to settling. Born in 1987, Williams studied film proper rather than fine art – first at the Universidad del Cine in Buenos Aires, then under Portuguese auteur Miguel Gomes in France – and there is a cinematic scale to his features, in tension with their lack of narrative. Watching his films you feel always on the cusp of perceiving some clearer shape, a story about to announce itself. Instead there are repeated motifs, images, phrases and scenarios: an accumulation of associations. The circumstances of the characters are never quite concretised. We gather that they struggle to make money – they live in shared, down-at-heel homes – but their situations do not seem desperate. They seem disaffected rather than alienated, rudderless not ground down. They exist in interstices – between major cities, jobs, stages of life, even between classes or social identities.

The Human Surge 3 is also set in three distant countries – Sri Lanka, Taiwan and Peru – and depicts groups of young friends walking, swimming, sleeping, sitting at empty cafés, and chatting disjointedly about their dreams and personal theories about life and the world. The conversations are not only hard to follow because they are fragmentary but because they take place in two or more languages. It’s not clear the characters can always understand one another. A viewer would need to speak Sinhala, Tamil, Mandarin, English and Spanish to do without the subtitles. Williams has spoken of his attraction to languages he can’t understand. Travelling abroad for the first time, he was entranced by the experience of hearing language as sound, and it is one he seeks to replicate in his films.

Rather than moving through settings consecutively as in the first film, The Human Surge 3 interweaves them. The locations are often hard to distinguish from each other: Williams continues to favour terrains vagues which might only be identified as Peru by a road sign, or as southeast Asia by a stall serving oyster soup. Augmenting this confusion, the protagonists begin to show up in other countries – inexplicably appearing on the other side of the world. This is one way that the film leans more towards science fiction, or even abstraction, than its predecessor. On several occasions, characters mention having dreamed of each other, and the film seems to partake of a dream’s hermetic, associative logic. In place of the previous film’s pricklier, restless energy is a sense of languorous contentment; in place of the machismo, a mixed, gender-fluid cast; in place of the bored, mercenary sex, tender, chaste flirtation. The restless search for connection has become a more melancholy search for home: a refrain of the film is ‘How do I go home?’, to which the enigmatic reply is a variation of ‘That’s complicated from here’. In the final scene at the summit of a Peruvian mountain, as one character looks at the view and wonders ‘Is that our home?’, another walks forward, picks up the camera, and rolls it back down the path, sending the image into a kaleidoscopic tailspin of figurative abstraction. Eventually the camera gets stuck in some undergrowth and the film ends.

Although his films have an otherworldly atmosphere, Williams uses non-professional actors and real settings. Fairly often, a passer-by will look right into the lens. There are hints that the latest film is set in sometime in the near-future; there are several references to a warmer climate – water being too hot to swim in, computers needing to be stored in the fridge. Many of Williams’s characters live in fragile, ephemeral dwellings – in thin-walled huts perched on the edge of water, or in shacks dotted around agricultural land, always overpopulated – and his films fluctuate between seeming like dreamy fairytales and frank portraits of precarity. There are allusions to Sri Lanka’s Special Task Force and the disappearances with which it is associated (a secondary character’s son is taken away). He could even be regarded as a practitioner of magical realism – of the kind Gabriel Garcia Marquez produced, with One Hundred Days of Solitude,in response to the massacre of striking banana plantation workers in Colombia and the terribly surreal way their deaths were institutionally forgotten.

As their drifting between countries emphasizes, Williams’s characters live in a globalised world where far-removed locations appear increasingly interconnected and homogenised, parts of a vast, elusive whole. The countries in The Human Surge are implicitly linked by the history of imperialism originating in the Iberian Peninsula. Distant as they are, there are echoes between the Argentinian Spanish, Mozambiquan Portuguese and Spanish-flecked Visayan. In the new film, the settings lack this shared historical thread but are relatively close latitudinally: their similar stormy equatorial weather and light makes it easier to confuse them. The anthropologist Anna Tsing has drawn attention to what she calls sites of ‘friction’ in the globalised world: the overlooked places where surreal, violent, often unconscionable activity takes place to facilitate the outwardly seamless flow of global capitalism. Williams is similarly concerned with the world’s less celebrated corners, away from capitals and trade centres. But the phenomenon he tracks is less friction than lassitude: places where the momentum of trade and empire has left absence and listlessness in its wake.

Though Williams’s is in this respect a global cinema, his filmmaking style is also appreciably Argentinian. His improvisatory, deadpan approach and unglamorous though occasionally beautiful suburban locations recall films like Martin Rejtman’s Rapado (1992),about a teenager wandering Buenos Aires in search of a stolen motorbike, or Alejo Moguillansky’s Castro (2009), whose protagonist is mysteriously chased through the city, mostly via its sprawling bus routes. Both films are about restless, uncertain men living in the prolonged aftermath of a military dictatorship, their country seeming alternately dismal, surreal, boring and full of dazzling possibility.

Williams’s interior scenes evoke another pivotal work of Argentinian cinema: Lucrecia Martel’s sultry debut La Ciénaga (The Swamp, 2001), set in a holiday home in the north of the country belonging to an extended family whose relationships to one another – like those between Williams’s protagonists – are not entirely clear. Stunned by heat and alcohol, they spend much of the time lounging around. La Ciénaga memorably includes one of the least tempting swimming pools in cinema – opaque, still, fetid, green. ‘I ​think there are a lot of similarities in perception – between being in a pool and being in the world’, Martel has observed. ‘We usually forget that we are immersed in air.’ In The Human Surge, water tends to come up to about knee-height: Argentinian kids wade through flooded streets or the warm brown shallows of the Rio del Plata; Filipino families lie back in a pool below a waterfall in the jungle, talking about getting lost. In The Human Surge 3, characters are often up to their necks in water, but the film’s high-altitude climax on the mountain also heightens our awareness of air as a physical element. We can hear characters’ audibly laboured breathing in the thinner atmosphere, and at one point a character briefly takes flight, drawing our gaze up into the grey-blue expanse across the top of the frame.

As his films’ emphasis on water, air, the sound of language and digital technology suggests, Williams is concerned with how our experience of the world is mediated, and with our experience of that mediation. This is embodied in each film’s medium itself, or rather mediums. In The Human Surge Williams used a different camera for each country, with disorienting effects: Super 16mm film for Buenos Aires, which catches daylight in warm magenta tones but plunges interiors into fuzzy grey darkness; digital video shot on a tiny handheld camera in Maputo (then re-filmed on Super 16 from the laptop screen); and bright, brittle high-resolution digital video for the climactic Philippines section.

The medium of The Human Surge 3 is perhaps its most distinctive feature. Williams shot on a 360-degree camera whose footage he then edited into standard cinema frames by navigating it with a VR headset. The resulting image, stitched together digitally, is distended at its edges and in a few striking moments distorts the characters’ faces where they cross the image’s seams. The frame lilts right and left at its edges as the camera steps forward in pursuit of its subjects; whereas in the first film passers-by peered curiously into the camera, here they double-take, taking in a camera set-up that must have looked eccentrically elaborate, alien. At the heart of The Human Surge 3 is a long, enthralling sequence that moves between people swimming in murky water – an element, like the film itself, in which things are related, reciprocal, subject to pressures and freedoms, momentum and tension. Williams’s cinema makes us acutely aware (beware) of the presence of the filmmaker and of the fact we are watching a film: the looks into camera, the ungainly glitches, the 360-view and its occasional warping effect are like cold currents passing near the surface, or weeds brushing against your foot.

I first watched The Human Surge in 2017 on my wheezing old Macbook, the grime on its screen difficult to distinguish from the grain of the film stock, the intended quality of the sound hard to discern with the compression of the built-in speakers. I was nodding off by the anthill scene and woke up to the bright lights and repeating, computerised voices of the finale at the factory, over which the credits started rolling. Williams’s films encourage, if not sleep itself, then the ebbing and pooling of attention. While other films might seek to control our attention, Williams’s have a more insouciant grip on it, by turns looser and rougher. They catch it with a curious line or a vivid image, then invite it to drift with spells of inscrutable dialogue or shots that linger for twenty minutes. To recall one of his films is to remember a peculiarly porous attentive state – what you saw mingled with the circumstances of watching and the life around it. Trying to identify what exactly is compelling about The Human Surge or its wrong-footing sequel is like looking for the omitted pronoun in Could See a Puma. But something about the way the films cohere proves just as hard to forget.

Read on: Edgardo Cozarinsky, ‘Letter from Buenos Aires’, NLR 26.

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The Baluchistan Imbroglio

The level of ignorance in Western coverage of the border clashes between Iran and Pakistan should come as no surprise. Nor should the State Department declaration that Pakistan’s response was ‘proportionate’ – making for queasy comparisons with the ongoing mass slaughter being perpetrated by another US funded and armed entity not too far away. To get a clear picture of the latest strikes – Iran targeted the base of an armed-separatist group, the Jaish al-Adl, in the Pakistani province of Baluchistan on Tuesday; two days later, Pakistan unleashed a drone attack against Baluchi-militant ‘terrorist hideouts’ on the Iranian side of the border – we need to sweep away their web of lies and mystifications.

Baluchistan is a mountainous region bifurcated by the Pakistan-Iran border, just as Pakhtun lands are divided between Afghanistan and Pakistan. Baluch nationalists have long resented the often brutal control exercised by the Iranian and Pakistani governments. Historically, though, whereas the Baluch leaders in Iran were politically conservative, the main Baluch tribal leaders in Pakistan were all progressive, in some cases close to the traditional communist currents of the sub-continent. Before the Iranian clerical revolution of 1979 there was even talk of unifying the two provinces as a self-governing republic.

I was involved in many discussions with Baluch tribal leaders as well as radical activists at the time. There was an independent Marxist current that spanned the tribes, led by leftist Balauch intellectuals and their non-Baluch allies from the Panjab and Sindh provinces. Their magazine, Jabal (‘Mountain’) carried some of the most interesting debates on the national question, replete with reference to Lenin’s texts on national self-determination. The analogy of the Ethiopian-Eritrean divide was discussed non-stop. A leading figure, Murad Khan, argued that with the 1974 overthrow of the pro-imperialist Haile Selassie regime in Addis, the objective conditions of the Eritrean struggle had changed and the socio-economic situation in both regions could be developed in the direction of a class unity that transcended pure nationalism. Most Baluch also wanted some form of political autonomy, or failing that, independence.

Pakistan was under heavy pressure from the Shah of Iran to crush the Baluch insurgency. Tehran was worried that the radical currents might slip across the border. Bhutto, then Prime Minister, capitulated and the Pakistan Army went on to crush the rebels. From 1977, Pakistan was run by a vicious US-backed military dictatorship (as it is now, as far as Baluchistan is concerned, under the current ‘caretaker’ government). In 1979 the military would hang Bhutto, Pakistan’s first democratically elected leader, brutalizing the national political culture. In Iran meanwhile the new Islamic Republic excited popular hopes and Baluch nationalism was compelled, for some years, to take a back seat.

Geopolitics crushed all the utopian visions emanating from Baluchistan. The collapse of the Soviet Union led to the implosion of the Baluch leftist groups in Pakistan. The Iranian mullahs asserted their authority on their side of the border. The repression in Pakistani Baluchistan was vicious and unrelenting. Bhutto’s execution unleashed turbulence throughout the country, and soon an entire Baluchi tribe, the Marris, led by Sardar Khair Baksh Marri (a semi-Maoist by inclination) escaped by crossing the border to Afghanistan where they set up camp and were given refuge, food and weapons by the pro-Soviet PDPA government. There were reports that Marri and key aides had flown to Havana via Moscow for advice from Fidel Castro, though this has never been confirmed by either side. This phase ended with the advent of civilian government in Pakistan, but the Pakistan Army continued to virtually rule the province.

The repression of the Baluch people has been appalling over the last decades. Temporary relief under some civilian governments never lasted long, and recently the crackdown has gathered pace. A few weeks ago I was asked to sign yet another Baluch solidarity appeal, after a totally peaceful and relatively small gathering of Baluch dissidents and their Pakhtun and Punjabi supporters in Islamabad was broken up by police, its leaders arrested and some of them beaten up. My first reaction was ‘why now?’ At the time such arbitrary brutality made little sense. Now it does. It’s obvious that the Pakistani military intelligence had orders to prevent any display of Baluch dissent in Pakistan. To choose to provoke Iran just now would only cause more headaches for Washington. At the same time, of course, it would further divide the Muslim world at a moment when Yemen – though not Egypt, Saudi Arabi or the stooges ruling the Gulf states – is offering a strikingly effective form of solidarity with the beleaguered Palestinians.

I doubt that this exchange of fire between the two states will turn into a fully-fledged war. Pakistan, already an orphan-state of the IMF, would suffer more. And China has appealed to both countries to proceed to an immediate ceasefire. China has some clout. It has a large military-economic base in Gwadar on the Baluch coast in Pakistan and enjoys close economic ties with Iran. The Beijing cavalry will be working hard behind the scenes. But the political implications of this flare-up are worth noting.

The group that Tehran targeted, Jaish ul-Adl an offshoot of al-Qaida, has been operating from Pakistani Baluchistan for well over a decade. The group has close relations with Ansar al Furqan, its Sunni equivalent in Iran. Who funds such organizations? Why does Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence, busy disappearing unarmed Baluch nationalists, not deal with these well-supplied Sunni fanatics? It is they who have targeted and killed Iranian security forces, including most recently an attack on police headquarters in Rask, an Iranian border town, in December. Iran has pleaded with Pakistan on many occasions to stop these outrages. No response except honeyed words. Is anyone else funding this terrorist group? Israel? The Saudis? Any takers? I don’t know, but nothing would surprise these days as Western double-standards on ‘human rights’ and ‘international law’ are not taken too seriously, except by payroll buddies.

Read on: Tariq Ali, ‘Mid-Point in the Middle East?’, NLR 38.