In praise of the 10-part television series on “The Vietnam War”

November 1st, 2017 by Roger Darlington

Over the past few weeks, I’ve watched recordings of every episode of a new 10-part American television series titled simply “The Vietnam War”. The script was written by Geoffrey C. Ward and narrated by Peter Coyote with direction by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick. In the USA, the series was broadcast by PBS while, here in the UK, it was shown on BBC4 (two episodes at a time over weekly intervals). The whole thing runs to seventeen and a quarter hours.

I was a young adult at the time of the Vietnam War, so I remember all the major events and all the controversy. Indeed I spent three months in the USA in the summer of 1970 in the middle of it all. As someone who is British, I acknowledge the wisdom of Harold Wilson, our Prime Minister from 1964-1970, in resisting American pressure to commit British troops to the war.

In 2006, I visited Vietnam [my account here] and, during my journey, I read a novel by a former North Vietnamese soldier who is one of the 74 interviewees in the television series [my review here].

I’ve been enormously impressed by this series: the stunning – and often very disturbing – visuals, the eloquent – and often intensely moving – personal testimonies, and the balance provided by so many ground-level views from both American and Vietnamese participants.

Perhaps the major theme of the whole series is that, from an early stage, the most senior political and military figures in the United Sates knew that the war could not be won but felt that America as a super-power could not lose face by giving up on the South Vietnamese. And a result, so very many died unnecessarily: 58,318 Americans and anything between 2-4 million Vietnamese. Richard Nixon is revealed to have cynically blocked a peace initiative to assist his presidential election campaign.

Another theme, on the other side of the conflict, was the utter determination – and indeed ruthlessness – of the North Vietnamese leadership (notably Le Duan) which sacrificed huge numbers of young fighters to advance the Communist cause.

The series contains so many memorable incidents that it is invidious to single out one, but I was stuck – perhaps because I was unfamiliar with it – by the story of American soldier Hugh Thompson Jr who tried to halt the My Lai massacre and highlighted it to his superiors only to suffer ostracism as a result.

If you failed to see the series or cannot find it on catch-up-up TV, you can buy the DVD set.

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How can you understand what’s really going on in the world’s conflict zones?

October 30th, 2017 by Roger Darlington

There are so many conflicts around the world and each has its own complexities which are rarely covered in the media. Recently, a briefing was put together for British Parliamentarians by a significant number of international non-governmental organisations (NGOs) under the leadership of the Humanitarian and Conflict Policy groups of the organisation Bond for which my son now works as Campaign Director.

You can check out the sections on individuals countries – with a note on key challenges and recommendations for Government action – here:

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A review of the under-known and under-appreciated 1971 film “The Last Valley”

October 29th, 2017 by Roger Darlington

Over my many years of cinema-going, I’ve viewed a whole range of movies with titles beginning “The Last ..” including “The Last Emperor” (1987) and “The Last Samurai” (2003). “The Last Valley’ may not be the best-known film with this kind of title, but it made an impression on me when I first saw it at the cinema in 1971 and still resonated with me when I viewed it again on DVD some 46 years later.

It is partly the unusual historical context: the story is set during the repeated bloody clashes of Catholic and Protestant armies largely in German-speaking continental Europe in the Thirty Years War of 1618-1648 and reference to a particular battle in a line of dialogue places the period more precisely in late 1643 and early 1644. It is partly the important subjects that it addresses: the narrative is a sharp critique of the role of religion and superstition in fostering hatred and war and the leading character eventually shouts at the local priest: “There is no Hell. Don’t you understand? Because there is no God. There never was. Don’t you understand? There is no God! It’s a legend!”.

This British film was written, produced and directed by James Cavell before he became famous for his blockbuster novels. The 17th century village in question was recreated in the valley of Trins in the beautiful Tyrol region of Austria. The Catholic villagers who live there may look rather too clean and well-clothed for the period but the mainly Protestant soldiers who occupy the valley certainly look the part. The music is from John Barry who had made his name with the early James Bond movies.

At the heart of the story is the changing fortunes of the characters as they are subject to competing sources of power: civil authority in the shape of the head villager Gruber (Nigel Davenport), religious dogma provided by the village priest Father Sebastian (Per Oscarsson), military authority imposed by a character known only as The Captain (Michael Caine), and the voice of reason and tolerance offered by the academic refugee Vogel (Omar Sharif). In the course of the story, each will have his moment of triumph but each will suffer grievously in this under-known and under-appreciated film.

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This is a (very, very scary) story of which I previously knew nothing

October 28th, 2017 by Roger Darlington

“A senior officer of a Soviet submarine who averted the outbreak of nuclear conflict during the cold war is to be honoured with a new prize, 55 years to the day after his heroic actions averted global catastrophe.

On 27 October 1962, Vasili Alexandrovich Arkhipov was on board the Soviet submarine B-59 near Cuba when the US forces began dropping non-lethal depth charges. While the action was designed to encourage the Soviet submarines to surface, the crew of B-59 had been incommunicado and so were unaware of the intention. They thought they were witnessing the beginning of a third world war.

Trapped in the sweltering submarine – the air-conditioning was no longer working – the crew feared death. But, unknown to the US forces, they had a special weapon in their arsenal: a ten kilotonne nuclear torpedo. What’s more, the officers had permission to launch it without waiting for approval from Moscow.”

This is the opening of a short piece in today’s Guardian” newspaper which you can read here.

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The unequal distribution of wealth in modern Britain

October 26th, 2017 by Roger Darlington

Last week, the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) published the latest in a series of discussion papers for the IPPR Commission on Economic Justice. “Wealth in the twenty-first century: inequalities and drivers“, by Carys Roberts and Mat Lawrence, sets out the facts and trends on the distribution of wealth in the UK. Stark inequalities exist between individuals and families, between areas of the country, generations and genders, and between people from different ethnicities and class backgrounds.

The report’s key findings are as follows:

  • Wealth inequality is twice as great as income inequality. The wealthiest 10 per cent of households own 45 per cent of the nation’s wealth, while the
    least wealthy half of all households own just 9 per cent. The wealthiest 1,000 individuals and families in Britain have a combined wealth of £658 billion. By contrast, the net wealth of the lowest 30 per cent of households is £200 billion.
  • The next generation is set to have less wealth, largely due to housing inequalities. Fewer than half of ‘millennials’ (those born between 1981 and 2000) are expected to own their own home by the age of 45, based on current trends. Every generation since the post-war ‘baby boomers’ has accumulated less wealth than the generation before them had at the same age.
  • Among the least wealthy half of Britain, the average household has on average just £3,200 of net financial, property and pension wealth. This compares to the £1.32m held on average by the top 10 per cent. The total wealth of the top 10 per cent of households is 875 times the total wealth of the poorest 10 per cent.
  • Debt is likely to rise faster than disposable income over the next decade. In 2017 prices, household disposable income is forecast to rise by 10.3 per cent by 2027 (from £48,000 to £53,000). This implies an average debt per household in 2027 of £85,700, a 21.8 per cent increase from £70,400 in 2017. This includes a projected £28,400 of unsecured debt, a 39.8 per cent increase from £20,300 in 2017.
  • London and the South East are pulling away from the rest of the country. The total value of housing stock in London is now greater than the housing stock of all of Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland and the North combined. Median household wealth in London increased by 14 per cent between 2010 and 2014, but in Yorkshire and the Humber it fell by 8 per cent. By 2030, it is estimated that a quarter of homes in London will be worth £1 million or more, compared to fewer than 1 per cent of homes in the North East, Yorkshire and The Humber, North West, Wales, Scotland and East Midlands. If house prices per square metre continue to grow at the rates they have in different regions since 2009, by 2027 a square metre of property in London will be 10.9 times the price of a square metre in the North East.
  • A majority of people want the Government to take greater action to reduce wealth inequality and think 18–24 year olds will have more debt and less wealth than previous generations. New polling for this report shows that 57 per cent of people think the Government should do more to reduce wealth inequality. 74 per cent of people think 18–24 year olds will have less savings and investments than previous generations and 72 per cent think they will have less housing wealth. 80 per cent think they will have more debt.
  • Trends in the labour market, capital returns and technology threaten to increase wealth inequality. The longest pay squeeze in 150 years, combined with growing labour market insecurity, is making it harder for many people to save. Real returns to capital have risen at an average rate of 6–7 per cent per year since the 1980s, much faster than earnings, further driving disparities of wealth between lower and higher income households. The concentration of wealth is likely to be exacerbated by automation and digitalisation in the economy, as the returns to capital increase and the returns to labour decline.

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How can newspapers survive when advertising revenue is pouring online?

October 26th, 2017 by Roger Darlington

I am a paid subscriber to the “Guardian” newspaper which has just issued this encouraging statement:

“The Guardian is now funded by more than 800,000 supporters from more than 140 countries. Half a million readers are subscribers or members, or give to us on a monthly basis, while over the past 12 months we’ve received another 300,000 individual contributions from readers all over the world. We are also seeing strong sales of our print Guardian and Observer newspapers.

We are encouraged and cheered by the hundreds of thousands of you who are supporting our journalism. In the last year alone, the number of readers who support us regularly has more than doubled; and we now receive more income from our readers than we do from advertisers. This is a significant step.

We will continue to rely and build on this in the year ahead as we aim, with your help, to reach many thousands more committed supporters and sustain that support for the long term so that we keep investing in quality, investigative journalism. We haven’t put up a paywall. Instead, we want to remain a strong, progressive force that is open for all. So we need many more of our readers to fund the Guardian and the role it plays in the world.”

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What’s going on in Kenya’s (second) presidential election?

October 26th, 2017 by Roger Darlington

In the last two years, I’ve been out to Kenya four times because my son has been working there. So I have more than a passing interest in the political situation in the country.

On 8 August 2017, a presidential election was held in which the incumbent was declared to have won by nine percentage points but, following protests from the leading opposition candidate, the Supreme Court ruled that the counting – if not the balloting – was procedurally unacceptable and the election must be re-run within 60 days. The second election is being held today, but the opposition is boycotting the poll because they have not achieved the changes in electoral procedures that they feel are necessary to make the poll sufficiently democratic.

Since the first presidential election, about 50 people are reported to have been killed in violent encounters. The opposition had wanted the repeat ballot to be held at a later date, but a bid to delay the election re-run fell apart after only two of seven Supreme Court judges attended a hearing this week.

In Europe and America, voting on a class basis has tended more recently to be replaced by voting on the basis of identity but, in Kenya, voting has always been on tribal lines. There are 23 tribes in Kenya with the largest being Kikuyu (22%), Luhya (14%), Luo (13%), and Kalenjin (12%).

The presidential election has been dominated by two coalitions of parties: one called Jubilee and the other titled the National Super Alliance or NASA. Jubilee is led by the current President Uhuru Kenyatta (who is Kikuyu) and the current Vice-President William Ruto (who is Kalenjin). NASA is headed by Presidential candidate Raila Odinga (who is Luo) and Vice-Presidential candidate Kalonzo Musyoka (who is Ukambani).

Both Kenyatta and Odinga – the leading candidates in the presidential election- are sons of former political leaders who dominated the early years of post-independent Kenya. Constitutionally this is the last presidential election that Kenyatta can contest while, in terms of his age, 72 year old Odinga could not really fight another presidential election. So the stakes are high.

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The Russian Revolution: the centenary

October 25th, 2017 by Roger Darlington

Today marks the 100th anniversary of the start of the second – the decisive October – Russian Revolution, a massively important event in modern history.

You can read my short review of a recent book on the revolution in the context of the period 1891-1991 here.

If you’re really interested in the subject, you can access the long Wikipedia page on the revolution here.

Happy reading, comrade!

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A review of “The Girl From Venice” by Martin Cruz Smith

October 24th, 2017 by Roger Darlington

This is the third novel that I have read by prolific American author MCS, folowing “Gorky Park” and “Havana Bay”. I guess that the title has been chosen to encourage sales because the feminine noun seems to everywhere. The trend was probably started by the spectatular success of the English-language translations of the three Millennium novels of Swedish crime writer Stieg Larsson starting with “THe Girl With The Dragon Tattoo” but, in the last few years, I’ve read “Girl With A Pearl Earring” (Tracy Chevalier), “Gone Girl” (Gillian Flynn), “The Girl On The Train” (Paula Hawkins) and “The Girl Who Fell From The Sky” (Simon Mawer).

In the case of the Smith novel, the title is a bit of a come-on because the central character is actually an uneducated fisherman called Cenzo rather than the sophisticated Jewish teenager Guila and indeed, in the middle third of this 300-page work, the girl is totally missing from the narrative. Even the use of Venice in the title is a bit of a misnomer since a good deal of the action is not in Venice and, when it is, the locale is not the parts of the city familiar to tourists but the little-known lagoon island of Pellestrina.

What makes the novel distinctive and interesting though is the setting in the last weeks of the Second World War, the location of much of the story in Salo (the rump state ostensibly led by Mussolini from late 1943 to early 1945), and the detail about fish and fishing. Although Cruz is essentially a mystery novelist, this latest work by him can be taken as a romance between an unlikely couple. Cenzo muses: ‘Yet only one woman would do. And not just any one, but the most obstinate, impossible woman he had ever met.”

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The Toxicity Charge (T-Charge) and improving air quality in London

October 23rd, 2017 by Roger Darlington

Today Sadiq Khan, the Mayor of London, introduced the Toxicity Charge (or T-Charge) in central London to tackle emissions from the oldest polluting vehicles. Since I’ve lived in London for 46 years and visit central London several times a week, I welcome this policy.

The T-Charge is part of a package of actions intended to help clean up London’s dangerously polluted air which contributes to thousands of early deaths each year in London. It also impacts our health over the course of our lives – leading to smaller lungs in our children and greater risk of dementia and strokes as we get older.

The T-Charge is said to be the toughest vehicle emission standard of any world city and is a step to implementing an Ultra Low Emission Zone with even tighter standards from April 2019 (subject to consultation). The Mayor has more than doubled funding to improve London’s air quality to £875 million, and is cleaning up London’s bus and taxi fleets.

The powerful response to the smogs of the 1950s and 1960s shows that it is possible to improve air quality in London if we are bold enough. But to do this the leadership shown by the Mayor needs to be matched by equally ambitious action by Government, including a national diesel scrappage fund, a new Clean Air Act and stronger powers for regional and local authorities to tackle non-transport sources of pollution.

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