The Spy and the Traitor, by Ben McIntyre

Posted on March 6, 2019 by aidanjmcquade

2E971371-2167-4B7D-AD62-DA061BC69D1A Summary: gripping account of a small portion of the Cold War that gives considerable insight into some of the wider issues

Sub-titled, “The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War” McIntyre’s account of the career of Oleg Gordievsky does make for fascinating reading.

Gordievsky came from a KGB family – both his father and brother had been officers. But, Gordievsky says, he lost the faith. Disgust at the Soviet system, particularly the crushing of the Prague Spring, led to a momentous decision: in 1972, while posted in Copenhagen, he became a double-agent for MI6.

He described his choice as an act of dissidence, in the spirit of great Russian dissidents like Solzhenitsyn. But where Solzhenitsyn could protest through art Gordievsky could only protest with the information and secrets that were his stock in trade.

McIntyre credits Gordievsky with a number of decisive interventions in the Cold War. Most importantly, he argues that warnings from Gordievsky led to Nato changing military exercises that the Soviet leadership had come to believe were cover for an actual nuclear assault on the Warsaw Pact, thus averting the most dangerous moment in world history since the Cuban Missiles Crisis. Gordievsky also played a key role, the book argues, in the developing of good working relationships between Thatcher and Gorbachev, and the US decision to escalate military spending in the belief that this would eventually bankrupt the Soviet Union and lead to its collapse,

Eventually, in spite of MI6’s best efforts to guard Gordievsky’s identity, he was betrayed by a traitor in the CIA, recalled to Moscow and investigated by Soviet counter-intelligence. Convinced that his days were numbered if he did nothing he triggered an MI6 plan to exfiltrate him. The unfolding of this operation, led by future Liberal Democrat peer, Ray Asquith – called Roy Ascot in this book – at the time head of the MI6 station in Moscow, provides a gripping climax to this wholly satisfying account of Cold War combatants.

Oh – and Donald Trump is almost certainly a KGB asset since the 1980s.

The Future of the SDLP

Posted on February 8, 2019 by aidanjmcquade

The Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) of the North of Ireland has always been a coalition. There are folk in the SDLP who, if they were living in Dublin or Cork or Galway, would be in Fianna Fáil, or Fine Gael, or Labour. But, faced with an existential challenge around the issues of civil rights and peace, they coalesced into a movement that sought to advance the ideals of social and liberal democracy in the face of horrific violence and sectarianism. Such coalitions are significant in history: Both the African National Congress in South Africa, and Congress in India drew together similar diverse elements in the common cause of liberation.

For myself, if I was living in the south of Ireland I would be Labour. But that does not mean I have any less respect for comrades and compatriots from different political traditions who have, with empty hands, faced down the authoritarianism of both the Provos and the British Government to create a peace process out of the nothingness of thought and compassion. It is they, more than anyone, who have, on the streets of Belfast and Derry and Newry and every other town and village in between, brought about the peace process when so many others turned their faces away from the fratricidal bloodshed.

Many southern leaders have also made extraordinary contributions to this struggle for peace and civil rights in the North of Ireland. Sean Lemass, Justin Keating, Garret Fitzgerald, Peter Barry, Dick Spring, Albert Reynolds, Bertie Aherne, Enda Kenny, Leo Varadkar, and Simon Coveney are amongst the most prominent of these leaders and I believe and hope they will be properly honoured by history.

But all of these apart, perhaps, from Sean Lemass, have been guided by the collective wisdom and experience of the SDLP. The SDLP, while consciously standing aside from the political disputes of the 26 counties, have forced the ideal of a new Ireland – one uniting Catholic, Protestant and Dissenter within the framework of an united Europe – back onto the political agenda of the whole island even in the bloodiest and most sectarian moments of our recent history.

This remains a vital and unfulfilled ideal.

There may be a time in the future when the SDLP should break up into the different Irish traditions of Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and Labour, or, preferably, contribute to a fundamental realignment of these elements into clearer conservative and progressive formations.

But today, with Brexit and the disfunction of the British state again threatening war in Ireland, is not the day for that reckoning.

The SDLP is a vital independent voice for social democracy in the islands of Ireland and Britain. It must remain so.

Brexit: just when you think things can’t get any worse, they can

Posted on December 29, 2018 by aidanjmcquade

Common sense does not always prevail. Situations and circumstances can take on their own momentum leading to disastrous outcomes.

Take the case of the First World War. Nobody in the chancelleries of the Great Powers wanted or foresaw war when news of Gavrilo Princip’s bloody action in Sarajevo was first heard. Very quickly however imperial bellicosity, diplomatic ineptitude, and the demands that railway timetables imposed on the movement of German troops led to a conflagration that engulfed all of Europe.

For those who think such things couldn’t happen again it is worth looking at Bob Woodward’s exploration of the decision-making leading up to George W Bush’s invasion of Iraq. This describes how an initial request for a contingency plan quickly ballooned, as part of the planning process, into troops and armour in the desert and with that a overwhelming pressure for invasion and war. The consequences of the resultant chaos is with us still.

“Events, dear boy, events” still, as they have always, drive decision makers to places they do not necessarily want to go. And, as certain as that, is that whenever there is a Big Red Button that should never be pushed there is always a Father Dougal there to push it no matter how catastrophic the consequences.

I suspect that is where we are with Brexit now. Every – EVERY – credible report and study shows it will be a disaster. Logic alone suggests that cutting your country from its closest allies at the behest of Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin is a poor idea. The consequence may be a relatively small disaster, as in the case of Theresa May’s vile, xenophobic deal. Or it may be a disaster comparable to a small war, as in the case of a “no-deal” Brexit. But whatever shape Brexit ultimately takes there will be one commonality – it will be a disaster.

There are assurances from parliamentarians that parliament will not countenance a “no-deal” situation. But to avoid such an outcome requires rational thought and moral courage. That is in spectacularly limited supply amongst the current membership of the House of Commons. From the sinister, such as Jacob Rees-Mogg and Kate Hoey, to the cravenly self-serving, such as Boris Johnson and Theresa May, to the simply stupid, such as David Davis, Andrea Leadsom, Priti Patel, Steve Baker, Nadine Dories, to the Lexit fantasists like Jeremy Corbyn, there is a such a plethora of clowns and charlatans lining up to press that Big Red Button, that it is a brave person who will bet that sanity will triumph.

That so much of the media is still treating this gallery of eejits and gobshites as credible and serious-minded leaders foretells a future reckoning for the Fourth Estate. Truly this has not been their finest hour.

In the course of its long and blood-stained history England, aside from a few brief episodes, has managed to avoid the deprivations it has inflicted on so much of the rest of the world. This has led to a considerable sense of exceptionalism that still pertains: “What has happened to others cannot happen to us.” Why? “Because we’re English, that’s why.”

But the English are as human as the rest of us and cursed with the same flaws and fears that have driven disasters in so many other parts of the world. Having placed their trust in the array of shysters that now infests the Palace of Westminster, it may simply now be their turn, and Brexit their reckoning.

However it may be some small consolation for those who will suffer Brexit’s bitterest consequences that those who have led them to this juncture will not share in their suffering. Rees-Mogg, Johnson, Davis et al will remain ensconced in wealth and privilege no matter how deep the economic downturn, and those who can least afford to pay will bear the brunt. In the century since the lions were first led by the donkeys to the slaughter of the First World War the donkeys will finally be unequivocally in charge again. And God help us all when that happens.

Devil in the White City, by Erik Larson

Posted on August 24, 2018 by aidanjmcquade

102B1280-1D11-4621-BBAA-F47CE042B218 Summary: the gripping interwoven tales of an architect and a murderer in 1890s Chicago

The largely now forgotten World Fair in Chicago in 1892 changed the world. Amongst other things it gave us the first large scale testing of electric lighting from alternating current, a vision of how beautiful cities could be instead of the squalid, dirty things they often were, and the Ferris wheel.

Devil in the White City is a compelling account of how the Head of Works for the Fair, Frank Burnham, a Chicago architect, marshalled the resources of the city to overcome an overwhelming set of organisational, technical and bureaucratic obstacles to deliver this world changing event.

If the book were only about Burnham and the World Fair it would be a compelling, though perhaps niche interest, work. Everyone who was anyone, except Mark Twain, seems to have been involved somehow with the Fair: President Grover Cleveland opened it. Buffalo Bill Cody put on a show there attended by Susan B Anthony; Theodore Dreiser escorted a party of schoolteachers who had won their trip from his newspaper. And amidst the crush of new visitors to Chicago, a doctor and pharmacist by the name of Herman Webster Mudgett, murdered and robbed dozens of innocent men, women and children, unbeknownst to the Chicago Police Department.

Devil in the White City is a combination of social and architectural history interwoven with a tragic and horrific story of a murderer and his desperately sad, trusting victims. It is an extraordinary work quite unlike anything else I have ever read.

Postscript: It was only on reading David Blight’s outstanding biography of Frederick Douglass that I discovered the deliberate exclusion of African-American experiences from the World’s Fair and the important protests that Douglass and Ida B Welles raised in the face of this institutional racism. The absence of any discussion of this from The Devil in the White City is an astonishing lacuna from the book, and leads me to think altogether less of it.

Apollo 8: the mission that change everything, by Martin W Sandler

Posted on August 4, 2018 by aidanjmcquade

Summary: up close to the raggedy edge of human exploration

In 1968 a rocket blasted off from Cape Canaveral in Florida. Its crew were tasked with testing if Jack Kennedy’s ambition of putting a human on the moon before the end of the decade was at all feasible. So untried was the technology they were using and so enormous was the task they had been set, no one was quite sure if everyone on board was going to come back alive.

Human beings at the cutting edge of exploration is a recurrent theme of Marty Sandler’s work, and Apollo 8 is a gripping addition to his oeuvre. It tells the story of the first humans to break the ties of Earth and travel to the orbit of another planet. It is, as one might imagine, filled with incredible drama. But it is also, as Sandler very convincingly argues, a journey which changed the course of human history.

For many space programmes, such as Apollo, seem extravagant wastes of money given the challenges of hunger and poverty that face so many on Earth. Jack Kennedy’s own brother Edward made this very observation in the early 1970s. But, as they orbited the moon the crew of Apollo 8, Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and Bill Anders, became the first humans in history to witness the Earth rising over the horizon of the moon. The photos they took of this captured the public imagination and conveyed in a way that words could not, the fragility of human existence in the vastness of the universe. Consequently it became an impetus for the environmental movement.

Apollo 8 tells the whole story of this extraordinary journey and its implications in Sandler snappy prose style. And the photographs that accompany the text are glorious.

The Things They Carried, by Tim O’Brien

Posted on August 1, 2018 by aidanjmcquade

Summary: a profoundly moving American meditation on the war in Vietnam, rightly regarded as a classic

The Things They Carried is an extraordinary book. An exquisitely written, deeply moving, sometimes extremely funny, sometimes simply horrifying, collection of linked short stories revolving around the soldiers in “Alpha Company”, including one called Tim O’Brien, who after the war becomes the author of this book.

The Vietnamese are generally only minor characters in this book. But while the book is a tender portrait of American troops in Vietnam, it does nothing to glorify the US engagement in that war, which is clearly seen as pointless and immoral. O’Brien’s first encounter with a dead Vietnamese is with an old man killed by an indiscriminate air bomardment of a village called in reprisal for a brief and ineffective sniper attack on O’Brien’s own platoon.

The terrorism that the Americans practice upon the Vietnamese is so routinised that it is almost unremarked upon, frequently considered by the troops as little more than youthful hi-jinks. O’Brien reminds the reader that those doing this, the American GIs, are just kids, mostly conscripts barely out of high school, unleashed from the bounds of civilisation and morality, desperate just to survive and unconcerned about those who die in order to ensure their survival.

But of course not all survive. Vietnamese action repeatedly bleeds the Americans, and vice versa. In one chapter O’Brien meditates on the humanity of a dead Vietnamese soldier, killed in his ambush, and, like his killers, someone who probably wished he was somewhere else, living his own young life rather than being involved in ending the young lives of others.

The Things They Carried, since its publication, has come to be regarded as a classic of American literature and O’Brien as one of the finest writers of his generation. The accolades are deserved.

Turbulence, by Giles Fodden

Posted on August 1, 2018 by aidanjmcquade

Summary: Weather as a metaphor for war as a metaphor for weather

It’s 1944 and the Allies are preparing for the largest amphibious assault ever mounted to retake Europe from Nazi tyranny. What might thwart their cunning plans though, even more than the Germans, is the weather. A sufficient period of decent weather is essential to land all the troops and equipment necessary to establish a robust beachhead on the coast of North-Western France. Hence inordinate pressure falls upon the weather forecasters to provide the necessary information to the generals to make a decision upon which the lives of untold thousands and the future of Europe itself depends.

Giles Fodden’s novel follows, in flashback, a brief portion of the career of its fictional protagonist, Henry Meadows. Meadows a physicist turned metrologist in wartime service, is sent to Scotland to try to extract the secret to a more accurate forecasting method from a brilliant reclusive, and pacifist, metrologist, opposed to giving any assistance to the war effort.

Meadows, an intellectually brilliant but socially naïve character, is our guide through both the complexities of the science and the chaos of the war. It’s an engaging read, even though some of the discussions of weather forecasting can be confusing. It conveys the awful weight that the planners of the D-Day landings had to bear and how in brutal ways the randomness of war echoes the randomness of the weather.

Inglorious Empire: what the British did to India, by Shashi Tharoor

Posted on June 29, 2018 by aidanjmcquade

World’s Best Taoiseach

Summary: a scathing reminder that treating people with racism and brutality does not generally make a country many friends

A while ago I had a conversation with a South Asian friend about Leo Varadkar, the Irish Prime Minister. “It’s noticeable”, my friend said, “how Leo is being much tougher with the British than his predecessor. Do you know why that is?”

“Why?” I asked.

“It’s because Leo is also Indian,” which indeed he is – his father is from Mumbai. “So when he talks about famine, he is not just thinking of the Irish Famine but also of the British manufactured famines though the history of the Raj, including the appalling one in East Bengal in 1943. When he talks about partition, he is not just thinking of Irish partition, but the much, much, much bloodier British engineered division of the sub-continent into India and Pakistan.”

Refugees during the Partition of India

Whether or not Leo is thinking about these things as he tries to negotiate with an increasingly disfunctional British government unfettered by reality, Shashi Tharoor, an Indian politician and intellectual certainly is. He details all these atrocities, and more, in his book Inglorious Empire, based upon a celebrated speech to the Oxford Union that he gave in 2015, in which he exposed some of the fundamental truths of Empire that the British conspire so aggressively to forget.

At the time at which the British first began their invasion, India represented over one-quarter of the global economy, dwarfing the UK. Over the subsequent centuries Britain reversed this through systematic transfer of India’s wealth to Britain through an undisguised looting of the sub-continent (“loot” being an Indian word). Violent theft and punitive taxation were the order of the day. Britain also employed an aggressive policy of deindustrialisation, destroying the competition from, among others, India’s shipping, textile and metallurgy industries which, at the beginning of the 18th Century were the most advanced in the world.

Tharoor does acknowledge certain benefits of British colonialism: “tea, cricket, and the English language.” But otherwise his book is a forthright repudiation of the deceitful arguments of hard-Right ideologues such as Niall Fergusson who seeks to recast the brutal, racist project of colonialism as some sort of philanthropic endeavour.

This book must also be a warning to the fantasists of the Brexit movement whose warm fuzzy beliefs about the British Empire are unconstrained by facts or any imaginative understanding of what it meant to those subjugated by its depredations. In the years to come, as Britain becomes the sort of third-rate power that its exit from the European Union entails, ordinary Britons can only hope that, now the boot is on the other foot, India will act towards Britain in future trade and others dealings with a measure of justice that Britain never showed India.

Bengal famine, 1943

Brexit, Trump and Vladimir Putin’s assault on European and US democracy: The Road to Unfreedom, by Timothy Snyder

Posted on June 17, 2018 by aidanjmcquade

Summary: A terrifying and convincing account of the assault of Russian fascists and their useful idiots upon Western democracy

Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands, like Ron Chernow’s biography of Alexander Hamilton, is a book that makes you fundamentally rethink your understanding of history. With The Road to Unfreedom Snyder makes us fundamentally rethink our understanding of the present.

The recent political success of far Right elements in the UK, Poland, Hungary and the US are not mere fluctuations in normal politics, Snyder argues. Nor are they solely a product of domestic political turmoil. They are also a consequence of a deliberate and aggressive foreign policy pursued by Vladimir Putin in order to undermine the systems of rule of law that underpin the democracies of the US and the European Union.

Synder argues that since 2010 Vladimir Putin has embraced a particularly Russian brand of fascism, with its pronounced homophobia, as a way in which to entrench in Russian society the kleptocracy over which he presides. Richard Evans, the distinguished British historian takes some issue with this, noting that Putin’s favorite thinker, Ivan Illyin, was a conservative ultra-nationalist rather than a fascist. However the authoritarianism that Putin has established, like fascist regimes of the past, defines itself by its enemies, and for enemies Putin has chosen the European Union and the United States. Snyder notes that this is not because of anything that these have done, but rather because of what they are. The EU in particular stands as a telling contrast to the Russian Federation. Russia’s thieving oligarchs have made it the most unequal country on earth. On the other hand the EU has provided a better standard of living for its people within the frameworks of human rights and the rule of law, ideas anathema to Russian fascism.

Authoritarianism arrives, Synder notes, “not because people say that they want it, but because they lose the ability to distinguish between facts and desires.” Hence much of Putin’s assault has been in the realm of cyber-space: weaponising systems like Facebook to direct focused, usually fictional, racist, homophobic and anti-democratic propaganda to the users in a way that distorts their perceptions and bolsters their prejudices; or surreptitiously hacking vital information systems, such as those underpinning the US and Ukrainian electoral systems. These cyber-warfare processes are assisted by an array of corrupt “assets” and “useful idiots” who publicly advocate Russia’s desired outcomes even while Putin is attacking their own countries. These include former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, the Czech President Milos Zeman, former Polish Defence minister Antonio Macierewicz, Marin le Pen, the French Far Right leader, Nigel Farage, the disgusting former leader of the UKIP, Seumus Milne, Jeremy Corbyn’s current communications and strategy director, and, of course, Donald Trump and many of his inner circle.

Putin and his boy

The success of Russian disinformation can be seen in the pages of even the Guardian, which has published puff-pieces for Putin by supposedly Left-wing journalists such as Milne and John Pilger, whose opinions have been untroubled by actual reporting. It is enabled further by the refusal of British and US Republican political leaders to acknowledge the effectiveness of Putin’s undermining of their democracy.

Carol Cadwalladr’s investigations for the Guardian have turned up probable corrupt links between, in particular, the Brexit establishment and Russia. Robert Mueller‘ s investigation in the US hints at exposing further, perhaps treasonous, criminality. But, Synder notes, much of the information about Putin’s web of influence, and his destructive intent is publicly available. Putin has not made his embrace of fascism a secret, frequently citing Ilyin in his speeches, passing aggressive homophobic laws, trampling roughshod over rule of international law with this invasion of Ukraine, and his sneering attitude toward the corruption of the US election.

The invasion of Ukraine is something of a pivotal event in this book. The Russian processes of disinformation and cyber warfare that corrupted both the Brexit vote and the 2016 US elections, bringing the neo-fascist Trump to power in spite of the popular vote against him, may have come into sharp focus with Mueller’s and Cadwalladr’s investigations. But the warning signs were there to be seen with the Russian invasion of Ukraine – a warning that most of Europe and the US failed to heed.

That so much of this has been missed and mis-reported must arise from a lack of proper journalism commissioned by editors with sufficient international awareness to understand emergent trends and geo-politics, and conducted on the ground by investigative journalists fluent in the languages of the countries they are reporting on. Synder dedicates this book to reporters, and it is the investigative journalists of Russia, Ukraine, Poland and elsewhere who have provided much of the raw material upon which Synder constructs this vital history of our times.

The Shortest History of Germany, by James Hawes

Posted on May 13, 2018 by aidanjmcquade

Summary: A spectre is haunting Europe and it is the spectre of Prussia

In this book James Hawes argues there are two Germanys. One is in the West, orientated towards Paris, Brussels and the rest of Western Europe. This part of Germany conforms to the part that was Romanised, and subsequently formed part of Charlemagne’s empire. This part is substantially Catholic and was notably resistant to Nazism in the past and the far Right and far Left in the present.

On the other hand there is Prussia: Protestant and Russian-orientated, it formed in territory that was conquered and colonised, and which, under Bismarck, conquered Western Germany to establish the German Empire. The rump of this state, which the Allies tried to bury beneath modern Poland at the end of the Second World War, still persists in the East.

To this day, Hawes argues, many of the inhabitants of Prussia continue to bear the racist attitudes of colonisers, regarding themselves as somehow “special” compared to the ordinary mass of human beings. Prussia more than any other part of Germany facilitated the rise of militarism and Nazism in the late 19th and 20th Centuries, and provides fertile ground for extremists to this day.

The reunification of Germany in the 1990s brought together again these two quite different countries to restore the borders of Bismarck’s Empire. This reunification, Hawes argues, was not undertaken for any carefully considered reasons regarding how these two German states should best grow and develop. Rather Helmut Kohl saw that Christian Democrat support in the East would guarantee him a further term as Chancellor so he went full steam ahead for that with little thought of anything else.

The consequence has been something of a return to the pre-war arrangements between West and East: Since reunification the West subvents the impoverished East to the tune of trillions of Euros with little sign of obtaining any change in those repellent aspects of Prussian culture that have caused so many problems for Germany and the rest of Europe over the past 200 years.

Hawes notes that “what makes people vulnerable to wild scares and promises isn’t just income but culture.” And it is the culture of the peoples of the old colonial and imperial powers of Europe, such as Prussia, such as Britain, clinging to their notions of superiority and exceptionalism, that prove most susceptible to the promises of political snake-oil salesmen. Recognising this, and confronting such prejudices in Britain, Germany and elsewhere offers a more promising prospect of eroding them than the pusillanimous approach of pandering to them and insisting they must be respected when presented as “the will of the people”.

The Shortest History of Germany is a fine, lucidly written and thought-provoking account of German history covering over 2,000 years from Caesar to the present day. It packs a startling amount into a very short text, and is essential reading for all Europeans