Monthly Archives: June 2013

Totalitarianism: By the People, For the People

12 Wednesday Jun 2013

Posted by in Culture and Politics, Photography and Visual Culture

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A US War Bond Campaign from 1918 remains chillingly relevant to this week’s news. Photo: Jaime Ashworth.

The essence of propaganda is to capture the imagination so thoroughly that the mind has no choice but to follow, holding you in thrall with the medium so the message is absorbed and accepted without question. Propaganda: Power and Persuasion at the British Library succeeds because its presentation is as compelling as its analysis.

This has been a week when the issues of consent, control and information that underlie any discussion of propaganda have been very important. Internationally, the revelations around Operation Prism and the mining of data have raised these questions particularly sharply, while in the UK the continuing row over the history curriculum and the plans to commemorate the 1914 centenary through ‘objective facts’ are also relevant. Most pointedly, this week the Russian Duma passed legislation making it illegal to spread what it termed ‘homosexual propaganda’, which it seems to equate with simply being homosexual. The question of how we navigate between education which teaches us how to think and propaganda which tells us what to think is not a relic, any more than it was in 2007-2008 when the Imperial War Museum put on the related exhibition of war posters, Weapons of Mass Communication. David Welch, in his beautifully produced book accompanying this exhibition, outlines the continuing tensions and fault lines very concisely, perhaps setting out the case for a detoxification of the word propaganda better than the exhibition does.

Welch’s concern for the negative connotation of the term propaganda raises very acutely the problems surrounding the limits of language to express anything without imposing some kind of register or significance on what it describes – what has been termed the problem of emplotment. Earlier this week I added my name to an open letter to the Prime Minister and Education Secretary which claims that the proposed history curriculum runs counter to the 1996 and 2002 Education Acts. It refers to a petition to ‘Keep the History Curriculum Politically Neutral’, opposing the promotion of ‘a nationalist political agenda [which] will stop history being a vehicle for teaching critical thought.’ This is a worthy and well-intentioned campaign, which does not (in all fairness) make clear what the author of both letter and petition propose to teach instead and why (and indeed how) that is neutral. I am, if not a Marxist, then certainly a leftie – and if I weren’t, Michael Gove excoriating Marxists and lefties would certainly increase my sympathy with them. At the same time, however, it is vital to maintain the distinction between ‘neutral’ and ‘what I happen to agree with’. To do otherwise is to engage in propaganda.

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Detail from ‘Page 1, Penelope’ (Joe Tilson, 1969) in the British Library foyer. Photo: Jaime Ashworth.

Underneath these issues is another conflict beautifully drawn out by the exhibition between integrative and divisive propaganda. Portraying the enemy is one thing, but it always goes alongside a definition of the collective, and official propaganda can acquire its own power as its themes are developed ad hoc by societies in ways that do not stay within the confines of doctrine. In his novel, The Woman Who Waited, Andrei Makine describes the way in which for many Russians ‘this slim consolation was all they had left: the belief that, thanks to their husbands, brothers or sons, Leningrad had not fallen.’ In the face of this kind of meaning being derived, the narrator concedes that the description ‘propaganda’ seems ‘a little on the terse side.’

In Britain, the work by Paul Addison and Jeremy Crang on the Mass Observation weekly summaries of the public mood highlights that across Europe this kind of information was collected to a purpose during World War 2. Seventy years later, many of the slogans and campaigns developed in response are part of the common cultural framework: Dig for Victory, Careless Talk Costs Lives, Coughs and Sneezes Spread Diseases,Make Do and Mend. All of these have been revived by the Imperial War Museum for their modern resonances with ecologically sustainable living. Even the duds – Keep Calm and Carry On was never widely distributed due to lack of response – have become a part of our discourse, as anyone who watched the Hungarian dance troupe Attraction win Britain’s Got Talent after a montage of soupy patriotism can attest.

We all have views on whether a message is good or bad that rely on criteria which are to varying degrees impervious to argument. Though Max Hastings this week seemed unclear about this, it is very hard to state ‘just the facts’ – and consequently retaining a firm grasp on when propaganda is bad is not as easy as it might seem. One of the sections in the exhibition is called ‘Nation’ and includes the following comment on the inclusive use of propaganda in the processes following decolonisation.

To succeed, new leaders had to build credibility and authority among their populations. Where nations included diverse cultures and perspectives, new rulers worked hard to create a sense of unified purpose.

Benedict Anderson suggests in Imagined Communities that this process is more of a cycle where aspirations and self-conceptions agglomerate to untidily form what we now term ‘nationalism’. Is a national self-awareness merely a form of propaganda? I was reminded of Yes, Prime Minister, where Bernard would formulate ‘irregular verbs’ to demonstrate hypocrisy: he might have said that I inspire; you preach; he spreads propaganda. Alistair Campbell is a talking head in the exhibition and praises the power of the 2012 Olympic opening ceremony with the simple (and telling) phrase ‘That’s country branding.’ Well, yes it is – but so was Triumph of the Will.

The difficulty in answering these questions is skilfully reflected in the exhibition design. Sections bleed into one another and so emphasise the commonalities between campaigns to (variously) smoke less or not at all, buy war bonds, take more exercise, realise the objectives of the Five-Year Plan, use a handkerchief, enlist in the army or have only one child. This last poster, for the One-Child Policy, was for me the most horrific in its concealment of awful, sustained (and continuing) suffering behind simpering glossiness. Though I am aware that others might find the insouciant sense of entitlement of the interwar Empire Marketing Board equally if not more deceitful. One man’s nostalgia, after all, is another woman’s history of bloody oppression. In moving the viewer to consider the contradictions and centrality of ‘our’ histories this exhibition is constantly engaging, challenging and informative.

In being so, however, the means by which this happens are slightly neglected. The diversity and quantity of what is on display is incredible in terms of both historical scope and geographical coverage. I felt at times, though, that a more focused look at why and how different forms and media, whether visual, plastic or performative, have their effects would have been useful. The throwaway reference to the ‘documentary style’ of Der Ewige Jude really needed to consider the range of visual and social criteria suggested by the phrase. As John Tagg put it in the title of his book, there is a burden to representation which this exhibition perhaps wears a little too lightly at times. I was struck by the analysis of one of Norman Rockwell’s ‘Four Freedoms’ posters: it took the individual image apart but did not address the way in which the campaign as a whole opposed the ‘Freedom from Fear’ and ‘Freedom from Want’ which were ‘Ours to fight for’ and the ‘Freedom of Worship’ and ‘Freedom of Speech’ – which were there to be saved (in all cases by buying War Bonds). Medium and message could perhaps have been isolated slightly more. In the same vein, I felt that amongst an abundance of manipulative polemic, any distinction between ‘propaganda’ and ‘anti-propaganda’ boiled down to very subjective and historically contingent judgements. And there were some missed opportunities in this context: for example the ironies of poacher turning gamekeeper. We have all, at some point, been more spinned against than spinning.

On a related note, I was struck by the way which the form of the exhibition encouraged a kind of ‘semiotic totalitarianism’ in some of its structures. Waiting to listen on individual headphones to some of the audio-visual material locks the visitor into their individual experience in a way which recalls Arendt’s idea of an ‘atomised’ society, with the possibility of debate and discussion closed off. The faceless mannequins, often with apposite quotations on their chests, are extremely ambiguous, recalling both the silenced individual and the faceless guard. Finally, the security guards who smoothly insinuate themselves as people try to take (forbidden) photographs bring to life the ultimate goal of propaganda: to control and define the terms of individual experience, if necessary by force but ideally by volition.

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A helicopter hovers over Central London, 11 June, 2013: the Evening Standard reported that ‘Police made arrests as they launched a crackdown to prevent rioting and serious disorder’ ahead of next week’s G8 summit. Photo: Jaime Ashworth.

Propaganda therefore requires surveillance: to tell people what they should think requires that you first know what they are thinking, so that can be either subverted or reinforced. Whether it’s called opinion polling, market research or preventive custody, and whether you get a free coffee or a trip to the camps as a result, the prerequisite of propaganda is the maintenance of supervision over the thoughts and activities of others. It requires, in short, the creation of a power structure of information and ideas. As a plaque in the office of a Nixon White House Staffer put it, ‘If you have them by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow.’

Once established, these structures are extremely resistant. Ellen Gallagher’s aggressive deconstructions of the racial and gender identities expressed through advertising are a case in point. As much as they attack the status quo, they are also exhibited within it (at Tate Modern) and thus to some extent tamed.

These are obviously very live issues this week, with the revelation that the NSA and GCHQ routinely obtain, store and analyse our data, often with the connivance of some very familiar – if not perhaps actually trusted – brands. In response, William Hague issued the standard bromide: that the innocent have nothing to fear. And it should be borne in mind that there is a lot to keep track of. The exhibition’s final installation, Chorus, 2013, consists of fifteen columns of Twitter posts, pulsing relentlessly across the field of view while being sorted in different ways. No eye could possibly monitor such action – and this is just a tiny fraction of the stream of data produced every second of every minute of every day. One has to wonder whether, just as to defend everything is to defend nothing, to collect such quantities of data is to render it permanently incomprehensible, certainly for the predictive purposes that some might suggest. So why collect it? So that when your crime is discovered (or more worryingly, defined) the evidence can be found? The innocent do have nothing to fear: but who decides who is innocent? How do I know they’re wrong? The real damage done by propaganda is its erosion of the essential trust that exists in a healthy society between government and the people.

Propaganda: Power and Persuasion is at the British Library (www.bl.uk/propaganda) until 17 September, 2013. Adults £9 (£10 with GiftAid donation), Under 18s free, Concessions available.

Ellen Gallagher: AxME is at Tate Modern (www.tate.org.uk) until 1 September. Adults £11, Concessions £9.50.

Forms of Memory

06 Thursday Jun 2013

Posted by in Culture and Politics, Heritage Politics

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The Cenotaph, Whitehall, Sir Edwin Luteyns 1919-20. Photo: Jaime Ashworth, 2013.

The next two years are going to see a huge number of military anniversaries. Next year will be the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War and the 70th anniversary of D-Day. The ‘Twenty Years Crisis’ as E.H. Carr termed it is becoming history. There are already no living British veterans of the First World War and the number of Second World War veterans is decreasing. To paraphrase the Ode of Remembrance, the sun is going down and we can only remember them. The means by which we negotiate these events – what Susan Rubin Suleiman has termed ‘crises of memory’ – is likely to feature prominently in these posts.

This memory-work, though, will be done against a backdrop of the war in Afghanistan, projected for ‘drawdown’ by the end of 2014. After a meeting with Anders Fogh Rasmussen last month, President Obama has proposed a NATO summit to discuss the withdrawal – as he put it, to ‘underscore this final chapter in our Afghan operations’ – for 2014.

Counting the cost of the Afghan campaign is, however, well underway. A front-page story in The Guardian last week announced the publication of a book by Frank Ledwidge: Investment in Blood: The True Cost of Britain’s Afghan War. The article outlines the book’s claims, including an estimated cost of ‘at least £37bn’, 444 British troops killed, 2600 wounded and more than 5000 he terms ‘psychologically injured’. In addition to which Ledwidge claims that more than 500 Afghan non-combatants have been killed. The article notes that half of these have been admitted by the British government. As to whether the war is winnable, Ledwidge is quoted as being dismissively derisive:

“Once the last British helicopter leaves a deserted and wrecked Camp Bastion, Helmand – to which Britain claimed it would bring ‘good governance’ – will be a fractious narco-state occasionally fought over by opium barons and their cronies.”

The article came to my attention via a Tweet from Owen Jones, who distilled the article in the following way:
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As someone who has engaged with various forms of memorial practice, I was struck by the way in which Jones had emphasised the number killed. With full respect for the fact that anyone’s death is a tragedy, there is an interesting shift in our response to Afghan casualties that deserves to be considered in the context of its historical evolution.

Looking at the BBC website for the casualties I was reminded of the 2007 project Queen and Country by the artist Steve McQueen, intended to remember those killed in Iraq through facsimile sheets of postage stamps bearing images of the dead. I viewed the work when it was at the Imperial War Museum and was struck by its patient dignity: the sheets are only visible one at a time, forcing the viewer to engage with each casualty as a discrete loss of life.

In one sense this is a continuation and modernisation of a memorial form that has endured throughout the twentieth century’s violent history: the list of names. The United Kingdom National Inventory of War Memorials (UKNIWM) has records of 64,000 of an estimated 100,000 war memorials in the UK, and many of them bear lists of those killed from a particular institution or locality. Entering the name of Godalming, the small Surrey town where I live, into the search engine produced results for the town, in the parish church and for a municipal roll of honour, as well as for the memorial cloister and plaque at Charterhouse School. Although the search only produces some of the individual names (those recorded at Charterhouse), the list of the fallen is central to the form of memory involved. This is a pattern replicated across the country – the Cenotaph at Southampton, for example, was inscribed with 1,997 names in 1922, though research by Tony Kushner of Southampton University apparently suggests that this excluded the names of members of the Jewish community.

The Southampton Cenotaph was designed by Sir Edwin Luteyns, the designer of the Cenotaph in Whitehall (and coincidentally a resident of Godalming). Originally commissioned in 1919 as a temporary monument in wood (the original was kept by the Imperial War Museum until its destruction in a WW2 air-raid), the stark simplicity of the design bears neither names of the fallen nor religious motto. Instead two stone wreaths and the words ‘The Glorious Dead’ invite the viewer or participant to think about its meaning. This blank quality opens the memorial to different meanings and has allowed it to transcend its origins in the aftermath of a specific conflict to act as a focus for the national act of remembrance of all conflicts.

At the core of these efforts to remember, however, is a dialectic between the event being remembered and the form in which this is done. In other words, what an event commemorates will determine the form of memorial that is most appropriate – and conversely, the form of memorial can tell us a great deal about what is being remembered.

ImageA useful example here is Maya Lin’s Vietnam Memorial in Washington D.C. which takes the list of names as its basis. The description on the artist’s website (click the quote for the link) brings out the three key elements: names, closure and geographical location at the heart of the national capital. The idea is that, as the National Parks Service puts it, it is a ‘Wall that heals’, by providing a place where those who served or lost friends and relatives can be reasonably certain of finding the name of the person they are remembering, a process facilitated by printed and online registries. So the form of the memorial tells us that this was a bloody war (there are currently 58,261 names) of long duration (the casualties are ordered over a period of fourteen years). The subdued quality of the memorial – with no heroic figures or waving flags, unlike the Marine Corps memorial in the same city – suggests that this was a defeat. But perhaps counting the cost in this very personal way turns even a victory into a defeat: perhaps the most striking of Luteyns’s memorials, the Memorial to the Missing of the Somme at Thiepval, has the names of more than 72,000 soldiers with no known graves inscribed into its fabric: a consequence of weapons which not only killed but obliterated.

So what does this mean for our forms of remembering our own war, here and now? It would be easy and inappropriate to simply suggest a glib contrast between the names on the Vietnam Memorial or at Thiepval and the 444 deaths recorded on the BBC (though Ledwidge’s comment above clearly invokes Vietnam as a comparison). To their families and friends, these deaths were and are shattering events: read the account by the Rev. Stuart Hallam of the death of 22 year-old Lieutenant John Thornton on 30th March 2008 in the collection of testimonies relating to Thornton’s death. After giving the last rites, Hallam writes:

I remembered that the lads were still waiting outside for news – but I was in bits, so before I went to see them I found a quiet room and wept… Then I went outside and told them that JT was dead.

As a political liberal who has concerned himself with the history of genocide, I have to concede the use of armed conflict in addressing certain kinds of situation at the same time as I deplore the loss of any life. In Rupert Smith’s intriguing book The Utility of Force, he sets out criteria for the successful use of military action:

To apply force with utility implies an understanding of the context in which one is acting, a clear definition of the result to be achieved, an identification of the point or target to which the force is being applied – and, as important as all the others, an understanding of the nature of the force being applied.

Smith’s set of tests can be applied with a little alteration to the critiquing of memorials. This may seem a frivolous exercise for the armchair peacenik but to me it seems that questioning the terms in which the last war is remembered is an essential part of preparing for – and perhaps avoiding – the next one. No one can make any certain pronouncements in the face of the individual tragedies created by such moments. And yet, I am moved to wonder whether this kind of very personal memorial would have been possible in other conflicts; whether our ability to pay personal homage to individual coffins arriving home does not reflect a kind of luxury that we should perhaps value more highly in asking questions about whether and how armed force is deployed. Because the marking of the individual death is a result of the economic, cultural, political and military power that allows us to make war in a fashion that is ‘asymmetric’, which is why our roll of honour can be contained within a single webpage or memorial. Which makes it no less honourable.

We have come a long way at great human cost since Wilfred Owen wrote Dulce et Decorum Est. We value individual suffering and deplore injustice in ways that many of those who fought a century ago would struggle to comprehend: there is, though, clearly some way to go. I honour the memory of those who die by trying to make my world better.

Frank Ledwidge’s Investment in Blood: The True Cost of Britain’s Afghan War, was published last week by Yale University Press, RRP £18.99. The words of Rev. Stuart Hallam are taken from Helmand: Diaries from Front-Line Soldiers, Osprey, Oxford 2013.

The family of John Thornton set up a charity in his name, The John Thornton Young Achievers Foundation, www.jtyaf.org