THE LIBERAL DEMOCRATS ATTACK THE CONSERVATIVES

There have been some surprised comments about the suddenly vituperous tone taken by Nick Clegg and by some other leading Liberal Democrats as the date of the Alternative Vote referendum approaches.  Clegg has now accused Cameron of telling "lies" and Huhne is even threatening the Conservative led No campaign with legal action. 

Some construe these statements by the Liberal Democrats as part of a strategy to show to the electorate that they are not puppets of their Conservative coalition partners.  I disagree.  The attacks the Liberal Democrats are making on the Conservatives go far beyond what would be expected if they were the product of political calculation.  Indeed some of the comments are so extreme that I for one find it difficult to believe that they  will be quickly forgiven or forgotten.  Rather as they are bound to leave a bitter aftertaste and will put more strain on the coalition they could be said to be actually unwise. 

What these comments in my opinion reflect is the increasing fear on the part of the Liberal Democrat leadership that the vote for the Alternative Vote is going to be lost.  The latest opinion polls suggest that opinion may be hardening against it. If so as I discussed in my previous posts this has the potential to cause a serious crisis for Clegg's leadership and within the Liberal Democrat party.  In a last effort to prevent this happening the Liberal Democrats are therefore pulling out all the stops. 

TODAY IN RUSSIA

Following up on my previous comments about the liberals in Russia, today is the anniversary of Lenin's birth, which used to be a public holiday in the USSR and which this year has come directly after an important speech that Putin gave to the Russian parliament in which he discussed the country's economic position and its progress in relation to the plan for its economic and social development up to 2020 that was announced in 2008. These two events and their response to them provide a good opportunity to assess the state of the liberals in Russia and where they stand in relation to their own society.  In my opinion liberal discussion of these two events provides a good illustration of my earlier point that in Russia the liberals continue to misunderstand popular opinion and that this leads them down blind alleys and wrong turns.

To begin with the liberals have seriously misrepresented and/or misunderstood data on the subject of Lenin provided by recent opinion polls.  They claim for example that a recent opinion poll in Russia said that 62% of Russians want Lenin's body removed from the mausoleum in Red Square and reburied in a cemetery.   Opinion polls in Russia are notoriously unreliable since they tend to be run by polling agencies, which were set up in the years of the liberal ascendancy of the 1990s and which continue to be closely affiliated to the liberals.  They tend therefore to have a strong pro liberal bias, which inevitably affects their work and distorts their results.  In any event in this case the opinion poll in question did not say what the liberals want to  believe it said.  On the contrary what it said was almost the exact opposite.  It said that 44% (not 62%) of Russians support Lenin's reburial and that the majority of Russians (over 50%) currently oppose it.  The figure of 62% is only achieved by transferring from the column of those who oppose Lenin's reburial to the column of those who support Lenin's reburial the 18% of Russians who say that Lenin should only be reburied when all the people who admire him are dead.  That of course could turn out to be never.  Another opinion does in fact suggest that it that might actually turn out to be never (see below).

Whilst misrepresenting one opinion poll the liberals at least judging from their English language websites have preferred to ignore another opinion poll about Lenin that came out today details of which I found on the Russian Communist Party's website and on the website of Levada Centre.  This was produced by the Levada Centre, which of all the opinion poll agencies in Russia is known to be the one most closely associated with the liberals.  This opinion poll shows that 58% of Russians assess Lenin positively as opposed to just 24% of Russians who assess him negatively.  Only 5% agreed with the view that he was a brutal dictator.

The Levada Centre has been conducting similar opinion polls on a regular basis since 1995.  The consistent trend in these polls is for positive views of Lenin to increase.  Thus in 1995 the Levada  Centre put the number of Russians with negative views of Lenin as high as 45% (as opposed to 24% now) whilst Lenin is now assessed positively by every Russian age group (including those under 25), whereas in 1995 Russians under 40 tended to assess him negatively.

It is undoubtedly true that as Lenin recedes into history Russians feel much less strongly about him than they once did.  Certainly they feel far less strongly about him than they do about Stalin who remains a contemporary rather than a historical figure.  This mirrors the way in the Nineteenth Century that the French tended to feel far more passionately about Napoleon than they did about say Robespierre. If the French example repeats itself then in time things will balance out. The point is that with the passage of time the number of Russians who share the liberals' extreme hostility to Lenin and who by extension accept the liberal interpretation of Russian history is tending to get smaller not greater.

Meanwhile the liberals have reacted very negatively to Putin's speech to the Russian parliament, which they claim somehow contradicts Medvedev's "modernisation project".  Having read the speech carefully I cannot for the life of me see how it does.  In saying this I should say that I do think Medvedev is making a serious mistake when he talks about Russia's need for "modernisation".  This is a nebulous concept at best and one that has the disadvantage of lending force to the common claim that Russia is somehow a "backward" as opposed to a relatively poor country, which by most parameters it is not.  However Putin was hardly opposed to "modernisation" as such (what politician ever is?) and his speech on the contrary discussed at length questions about how productivity and innovation in the economy and society should be increased.  This has led some liberals to say that Putin is promoting a policy of "innovation" in rivalry to Medvedev's policy of "modernisation", which frankly I think is ridiculous.

The main liberal critique of Putin's speech is that the programme he discussed is "paternalist".  Extreme believers in free markets such as the liberals in Russia always refer to government involvement in the economy as "paternalist" and always use that word to criticise welfare policies and social spending.  Those of us who do not share these beliefs do not use this term or share in the criticism it implies.  One liberal commentator has complained that in his speech Putin showed "no understanding of a post industrial society".  If so I say Amen to that!  I would also say that if Putin does not not understand a "post industrial society" it is probably because no such thing exists. To my mind the single most bizarre criticism that some liberals have made of the speech is that Putin devoted too much time in the speech to a discussion of agricultural questions.  I do not understand this criticism at all, which to my mind merely shows how detached from reality Putin's liberal critics are. 

In all of this criticism the liberals however miss the fundamental point, which that the things Putin said in his speech that he plans to do and which they most vehemently criticise him for are precisely those things that every opinion poll and election that has happened in Russia shows will make him more popular.  Every survey of opinion shows that Russians strongly support generous social and welfare spending and take it as axiomatic that the state should provide it.  Criticising Putin for saying he plans to increase social and welfare spending will make the liberals less popular not more.  Calling for a return to the sort of unadulterated free market policies that in Putin in his speech expressly repudiated merely reminds Russians of the 1990s when precisely such policies were tried with disastrous results and gives  Russians yet one more reason for not wanting the liberals back.  One liberal critic complained bitterly that Putin's policy had a real prospect of success because "half" (only half?) the population would support it.  He did not explain why in that case he is the "democrat" and Putin is not.

In the meantime all liberal hopes in Russia seem to be pinned on a falling out between Putin and Medvedev.  Some sections of the liberal media in Russia seem to be working flat out to try to provoke such a split.  Often this involves seriously misrepresenting things Medvedev and Putin say about each other.  For example certain totally innocuous words Medvedev said about Putin to a Chinese journalist were misrepresented by liberal commentators to suggest a serious disagreement between the two about which one of them would run for the Presidency in the election next year.  I happened to have read this interview before I was aware of the liberal spin on it.  Not only did I see nothing in the interview that supported the interpretation the liberals are trying to foist on it but I found the interview so uncontroversial as to be frankly uninteresting.

This tactic of trying to foment a split between Medvedev and Putin is of course no more than another example of the same tactic the liberals in Russia always follow, which is to try to gain power through the backdoor by pursuing intrigues and by manipulating those in power.  In this case there is no possibility that this will work. Firstly it appears to be based on the assumption that Medvedev is somehow on their side.  I see no evidence for this at all.  Yet having convinced themselves that this is the case the liberals are now busy egging Medvedev on to stand in the Presidential elections next year on an anti Putin platform and even to run against Putin if Putin decides to stand himself.

As it happens I do not think that Putin is going to stand for the Presidency next year.  I believe that the present arrangement of Medvedev as President and of Putin as Prime Minister and leader of the majority party in the Parliament will continue.  It has worked well until now and I see no reason why either man would want to change it. Putin spoke in his speech about the overriding need to maintain political stability, which to my mind is the clearest possible indication that he wants things to stay as they are.  Apart from a recent short spat over Libya, hardly a serious issue in Russian political terms and one where Medvedev anyway has since fallen into line with Putin, I see no difference on policy issues between the two men.  Putin is more emotional and outspoken and makes no effort to conceal his contempt and dislike of the liberals and of certain politicians in the west whilst Medvedev tends to be more circumspect but that to my mind is as far as it goes.  As for the social and welfare programmes that the liberals find so objectionable and which they condemn as "paternalist", when Putin was President Medvedev was in charge of them and largely authored them so it is difficult to see why he would object to them now.  Nor has Medvedev said anything that suggests a fanatical belief in free markets, which would anyway be odd coming from someone who was formerly the government's representative on the board of Gazprom.  As for the idea that Medvedev would want to stand for the Presidency on an anti Putin platform a glance at any opinion poll would show why that would be an act of political suicide.  The idea is actually crazy and once again shows just how detached from reality the liberals have become.

Rather than speculate on a split between Medvedev and Putin that will almost certainly not happen the liberals would be far better advised to make a credible pitch to Russian voters on issues that Russians genuinely care about.  That is the policy of the Russian Communist Party, the only opposition party in Russia that has shown an ability to win elections and to harvest millions of votes, which has shown no interest in the subject of the supposed split between Medvedev and Putin but which instead campaigns equally against both between whom it refuses to distinguish whilst promoting its own platform and policies.  The result is that unlike the liberals the Communist Party remains a genuine political force in Russia and at local level is even in places a serious contender for power.

If the liberals were to re examine their stance and were to try to connect with Russian society as it genuinely is as opposed to how they want it to be they might with hard work find that they were achieving some positive results.  Russia needs a strong liberal movement.  Authoritarian (as opposed to "autocratic") tendencies do exist in Russian society as they do in all societies everywhere.  Russia however lacks a credible liberal movement to counter them. There is a strong need for example for a feminist movement that would address the difficult situations (including rampant domestic violence) that so many Russian women face in their everyday lives. There are serious questions about the brutal treatment of people who are regarded in Russian society as social deviants such as gay people and others who are in some way nonconformists.  There are the dreadful conditions in Russian prisons and the way in which the Russian authorities routinely imprison people (especially young people) for trivial offences causing Russia to have a prison population proportionately as great as the one it had in the 1930s and second only in size to that of the United States.  There is the growing and increasingly reactionary influence of the Orthodox Church, which is trying to impose its patriarchal notions on questions of social policy even though only a small minority of Russians actively identify with it.    These and numerous other such issues would benefit from an effective and campaigning liberal movement prepared to take a stand.  The liberals in Russia instead  show almost no interest in these questions, which they neglected when they were in power in the 1990s.  Instead they remain obsessed with questions of political power for themselves, which they combine with a rigid and even fanatical commitment to free market economic policies and pro western foreign policies that in Russia are unpopular and discredited. 

MORE ON THE POLITICS OF THE ALTERNATIVE VOTE REFERENDUM

There have been some interesting articles about the way in which the Alternative Vote referendum is going with Cameron being criticised by Conservative columnists like Bruce Anderson for his muddled message and his failure to give a clear lead to the no campaign and with The Times criticising Ed Milliband for being lacklustre in his leadership of the yes campaign.  Both criticisms are justified.  What the commentators who make these criticisms miss is the reason why Cameron and Milliband are being so unconvincing.  I explained the reason in an earlier post.  This is that in each case Cameron's and Milliband's respective interests are best served by the opposite result to the one they have to appear to want so that Cameron's chances of remaining Prime Minister are greater if there is a yes vote and Milliband's chances of becoming Prime Minister are greater if there is a no vote.

THE NEO KEYNESIANS AND THE POSSIBLE DOWNGRADE OF THE US

I have just been reading the comments of a neo Keynesian economist called Stephen Galbraith of the University of Texas who has laughed off the announcement of the rating agency Standard & Poor that because of the US's failure to rein in its deficit the US risks a downgrade in its credit rating.  Galbraith's response to this is that it is "impossible" for the US to default on debt denominated in its own currency, by which I take him to mean that if the US were to experience repayment problems on its debt it could solve them by simply printing more dollars.

I do not take seriously anything any of the big credit agencies say.  I suspect that the reason for the warning from Standard & Poor is that it is preparing a downgrade of certain European countries with better debt to GDP ratios than the US and does not want to be exposed to charges of bias.  Having said this I have to say that I find the casual way in which some extreme neo Keynesians like Galbraith treat the issue of the US's deficit and debt to be both frivolous and reckless.  If the US government can pay its debt by simply printing more dollars why can it not pay for all its spending that way?  Why in fact does it in that case need to borrow money or raise taxes at all?

The growth of the US deficit or to be precise the growth of the US's trade and budget deficits and the steady deterioration of the US's fiscal and trade position, which has been getting steadily worse since at least as far back as the mid 1960s, is a very serious problem that lies at the heart of the global imbalances that have caused the world financial and economic crisis.  It is legitimate to discuss what the right solutions to this problem are and as it happens I am firmly of the view that cutting social, education and health care spending as opposed to defence spending is the wrong solution.  However to deny or pretend that the problem does not exist is delusional.

THE MAU MAU "REVELATIONS"

Anybody who tries to keep up with the way British history is written sooner or later will experience a sense of deja vu.  This comes from the way the British every so often rediscover something about themselves that has in fact been known about all along.

The latest Mau Mau revelations are a case in point.  Anybody with even the slightest knowledge of British colonial history in Africa will have known about the brutal way in which the British suppressed the Mau Mau revolt in the 1950s and how this was covered up at the time.  There were in fact courageous British MPs and journalists who were telling the truth about the Mau Mau revolt as it was actually taking place.  The brutal nature of its suppression has been universally accepted amongst academic historians of the late colonial period since at least the 1970s.  The latest revelations drawn from formerly secret Foreign Office files provide some new details but they do not in any way change the overall picture.  I am therefore at something of a loss to understand all the excitement and I suspect that quite a few of those who write professionally about the subject are as well.   

LIBERALISM AND DEMOCRACY IN RUSSIA IN 1991 AND MIKHAIL GORBACHEV

Someone who has read my post on the Russian liberals and who knows Russia well has made a point that I want quickly to touch on.  Her point is that Gorbachev has lost most of his popularity in 1991.  I presume this point was made in response to my comment that the parliamentary elections to the USSR and Russian Parliaments of 1989 and 1990 were on the basis of the number of votes counted won by the Communist Party and its supporters.

I want to make it absolutely clear that I fully accept that Gorbachev had lost most of his popularity in 1991.  In fact opinion polls showed that he had become massively unpopular.  By 1991 things appeared to be falling apart with a bitter "war of laws" underway between the USSR and Russian Parliaments, a mounting economic crisis and escalating unrest in the Caucasus, the Baltic States and elsewhere.  Inevitably as the person in charge Gorbachev was blamed for these problems and there is no doubt that he made his position worse by a succession of serious political mistakes.

The reason I mentioned Gorbachev in connection with the elections in 1989 and 1990 was that I did not want my comment that the majority of votes in those elections went to members of the Communist Party and its supporters to be misunderstood as my saying that in those elections the majority of Russians cast their votes for Stalinism and for dictatorship.  During his talk last Tuesday Martin Sixmith on several occasions came very close to saying and on one occasionally even appeared actually to say that Russians have a cultural and political predisposition to prefer dictatorship (or "one man rule" or "autocracy") to democracy.  I did not want my comments about the elections of 1989 and 1990 in my previous post to be read as giving support to this thesis, which I happen to think is nonsense.

The elections that took place in the USSR and in Russia in 1989 and 1990 were the result of a powerful democratic impulse that has very deep roots in Russian culture and society and which in 1989 and 1990 was one that was shared by most Russians who would at that time have defined themselves as Communists.  I happen to believe that the revolution that took place in 1917 in both of its manifestations of February and October was also a result of that impulse.  In 1989 and 1990 Gorbachev embodied that impulse and it is right therefore to associate his name with it.  The point is that though that impulse was and is democratic it is not liberal as every election that has ever been held in Russia on anything remotely approximating a free and fair basis has consistently shown.       

AHEAD OF THE REFERENDUM THE POLITICS OF THE ALTERNATIVE VOTE

I have been reading a great deal about the forthcoming Alternative Vote referendum.  I am not going to discuss the merits of the Alternative Vote about which I have not yet come to a view.  I do however want to challenge one piece of wisdom that is floatng around, which I think is wrong.

Several commentators are saying that a vote for the Alternative Vote would do more harm to Cameron that a rejection would do to Clegg.  The grounds for saying this are some rather wild comments that have appeared in certain articles by some right wing commentators writing in the Daily Telegraph, the Daily Mail and on the internet.  These comments are fiercely critical of the Alternative Vote and of David Cameron for agreeing to hold a referendum on the Alternative Vote.  They reflect the standard view of the Conservative Party, which is to oppose the Alternative Vote and to stick with first past the post, though they express it with extreme vehemence.  These comments have been seized on by some centre left commentators who support electoral reform and the Alternative Vote and who are using these comments to suggest that Cameron would  be in serious trouble if the referendum result were to be a yes vote for the Alternative Vote.

The analysis is wrong.  I think it comes from a natural desire on the part of these centre left commentators to overcome the reluctance of Labour voters to vote for something wanted by Clegg.  Cameron would not be in any serious trouble if the referendum for the Alternative Vote were to go in its favour.  The right wing commentators who write the articles dislike Cameron anyway.  Though they undoubtedly do reflect a current of opinion within the Conservative Party whilst the Liberal Democrats stick with the Coalition Cameron has nothing to fear from them.  However angry they may be with Cameron no faction within the Conservative Party will move against Cameron if by doing so the existence of the Government is put at risk.  If a right wing faction within the Conservative Party were to oust Cameron then the Government would immediately fall since it is inconceivable that the Liberal Democrats would stick with the Coalition if Cameron were no longer heading it.  There would be a General Election, which the Conservatives having exposed their divisions would lose.  No Conservative however angry he or she may be with Cameron would want to trigger such a course of events, which could only end with Labour being returned to power probably with a big majority.

Cameron therefore has nothing to fear from a vote for the Alternative Vote.  On the contrary since a vote for the Alternative Vote would strengthen Clegg and would secure the existence of the Coalition, Cameron has everything to gain by it.

By contrast Clegg would be in serious trouble if the Alternative Vote were to be rejected.  One of the main selling points of the Coalition to the Liberal Democrats is that it provides at least the possibility of electoral reform.  If the Alternative Vote is rejected and there is no electoral reform then the Liberal Democrats will be faced with a future in which the next General Election and probably all other General Elections for the foreseeable future will continue to be fought under the existing rules.  In that case and given the hostile attitude to the Coalition on the part of many centre left voters who have in the recent past voted or considered voting for the Liberal Democrats there is a serious risk that at the next General Election the Liberal Democrats might be wiped out.  Even if they were not the overwhelming probability is that one or other of the two main parties would secure a majority in which case the Liberal Democrats would be right back where they started and once again in the wilderness.  Given this prospect and the feelings of anger and dismay many Liberal Democrats would undoubtedly feel if the Alternative Vote were rejected a challenge to Clegg's leadership would surely come measurably closer.  What after all would the Liberal Democrats as a party (as opposed to individual MPs) have to lose?  Since they would be faced with the certainty of defeat and loss of power at the next General Election anyway many Liberal Democrats might calculate that getting rid of Clegg and ending the Coalition as quickly possible might be their best chance of rebuilding their support amongst centre left voters.  Is it in fact too much to suggest that some such positioning is already going on and that Vince Cable's public disagreements with Cameron on the subject of immigration are being made with precisely such calculations in mind?

If this analysis is correct then we have the curious situation of a referendum in which the leaders of the two big parties are publicly taking positions, which may be the opposite of the ones they hold in private.  Cameron in order to appease his supporters has to pretend to oppose the Alternative Vote even though he probably wants the referendum to go in its favour.  Milliband in order to please his supporters has to pretend to support the Alternative Vote when he probably would prefer to see it rejected.  I would suggest that it is precisely because of this ambiguity in the positions of the leaders of the two big parties that the campaign for the Alternative Vote referendum has so far failed to take off. 

BRITISH FILM ADAPTATIONS OF D.H. LAWRENCE

I have recently watched the latest BBC Television adaptation of D.H. Lawrence's The Rainbow and Women in Love.

In some ways I found it very impressive.  The pace did not flag, the actors were well chosen and did their work well and the period setting was perfect.  Despite this I still found the end result somehow unsatisfactory as if the total was less than the sum of its parts.

All British film adaptations of Lawrence that I have seen have this effect on me.  I have seen suggestions by some critics that British film makers and actors are too reserved to cope with the sexuality of Lawrence's novels.  I disagree.  British actors since the 1960s and even before have repeatedly shown that they are perfectly at ease with sexuality.  Rather I think the problem is that the British tradition of filming is firmly rooted in realism, which is not what Lawrence is about.  Lawrence uses his characters far more openly as vehicles to express ideas than is acceptable in a realist novel and the situations he often places them in are not realistic.  To film a Lawrence novel in a realistic way is to make the characters appear excessively wordy and even tiresome.  It also risks weighing the film down with a mass of period detail, which is both distracting and irrelevant.  It also loses the intensity, the humour and the occasionally surreal and even grotesque quality that I for one find in his novels.  All of these flaws were apparent in the BBC adaptation.

A more appropriate and far more effective way of filming Lawrence would be to use the cinematic language of much of German and Russian cinema, which is far better adapted to the translation of the works of someone like Lawrence onto a film or television screen than is the American or the British or even the French cinema of today.  What Lawrence needs is someone like a Fassbinder or a Tarkovsky and perhaps one day he will find one since the potential is certainly there.

LIBYA AND THE LETTER BY OBAMA, CAMERON AND SARKOZY

I have just read the letter on the situation in Libya that Obama, Cameron and Sarkozy have co authored and signed.  The letter is riddled with contradictions.  The letter claims that the western powers are bombing Libya in accordance with the mandate given them by Resolution 1973.  The letter then admits that Resolution 1973 does not authorise the western powers to remove Gaddafi from power by force.  The letter then says that the bombing will continue until Gaddafi is removed from power, in effect by force.

Even more troubling are certain comments in the letter concerning the referral of the case of Libya to the International Criminal Court, which was made by the Security Council under Resolution 1970.  The letter commends the International Criminal Court for undertaking an investigation of the situation in Libya and then flatly declares that Gaddafi has committed crimes against his own people who are under continuing threat from him.  In other words the letter pre judges Gaddafi guilty before the criminal process and investigation has even begun.  I for one cannot see in this anything other than a public instruction to the International Criminal Court to pronounce Gaddafi guilty in which case what we are looking at is a show trial.

The contradictions in the letter are so obvious that they seem to be causing some concern even within the governments involved.  The comment by the French Defence Minister that a further UN Resolution is necessary is surely a sign of this unease as are the calls from some Conservative MPs in Britain for Parliament to be recalled.  Meanwhile Italy, the Netherlands and Spain, who at one time appeared willing to participate in the bombing campaign, have quietly withdrawn from it.  Amongst other NATO states Germany and Turkey were opposed to the bombing campaign from the outset and significantly they have now been joined by Poland, which has made its opposition clear.  This is first time I can think of since the end of the Cold War when Poland has aligned itself with Germany and Russia and against the United States.

The western powers have got themselves into this tangle because they are persisting in the same mistake that they made right from the outset of this matter.  This is to underestimate Gaddafi's tenacity and staying power.  When in February the first uprisings against Gaddafi took place the western powers assumed that he was about to fall and rushed out statements that he had lost his legitimacy.  When he did not fall they persuaded themselves that a quick bombing campaign would achieve the same result. Now that this has failed to work they find themselves obliged to escalate further whilst making contradictory statements that internationally undermine their position.

LIBERALISM AND DEMOCRACY IN RUSSIA

I went to a talk at Foyle’s in London on Tuesday given by the former BBC journalist and academic Martin Sixsmith to introduce his new book and radio series on Russian history.  I found it a depressing experience.  The thesis was that in Russia “autocracy” (never defined) is always the default mode and that Russia has supposedly flunked repeated opportunities (or “choices”) in its history to take a democratic path.

In my opinion this judgement though pretty conventional is fundamentally and radically wrong.  I think it expresses a western view of Russia that has very little connection with the actual country.  I think it is based on a misunderstanding of Russian history and of the course and nature of Russian political, economic and social development.

This is a large subject and not one I can hope to deal with in a single post.  There is one point however that I do want to make because I think it is important.

Throughout his talk on Tuesday and in the various questions and answers that came from the floor it was clear to me that Sixsmith and his audience share one basic assumption, which is that the people in Russia they refer to as “democrats” actually are such.  In fact these people are not “democrats” but liberals.  It is a fundamental mistake to conflate Russia’s liberals with democrats.  By liberals I mean Russian politicians and their supporters who favour a pro western foreign policy, a free market economy and private enterprise without all of which they appear to believe (or claim to believe) that human rights and political freedoms are meaningless.

Whilst in Russia today liberals always refer to themselves as “democrats” and are invariably referred to in that way by their western sympathisers and supporters, their actual practice whether in Russia today or over the course of modern Russian history has been anything but democratic.  The reason for this is because they have never at any time accounted for more than a very small fraction of the Russian population, which has instead and consistently since the first introduction of elections in Russia in 1906 overwhelmingly supported political groups and parties that have completely different agendas and views.  In no election that has ever taken place in Russia have liberals or liberal parties ever won anything that remotely comes close to a majority.  The best showing the liberals have managed was in the very controversial parliamentary elections that took place in December 1993, when the result was heavily manipulated in their favour but in which they still only managed to win around 25% of the vote.  In every election that has taken place since 1993 the aggregate liberal vote has fallen and now stands at a derisory 1-2%.  The same was also true of the elections that took place in Russia between 1906 and 1918, when the various liberal or liberal oriented parties only won small minorities in such genuinely free and democratic elections as took place.  This fact is obscured for this period because from 1907 to 1917 elections to the Russian parliament were conducted under a very restricted franchise that favoured the liberal and monarchist parties disproportionately.

 If by “democratic” we therefore mean standing for the will of the majority as this is expressed in democratic and free elections fought on the basis of universal adult suffrage then the liberals in Russia have never remotely been in a position to claim such a title for themselves.

The liberals have attempted to compensate for this lack of popular support through two different devices.  Firstly they have leaned very heavily on the support of the west.  This has been true at all times in recent Russian history.  It was as true of the Tsarist period as it was true of the Soviet period and as it is true today.  This support whatever its material and psychological advantages has however come at a heavy price.  It has meant that Russian liberals far too often address themselves more to western audiences rather than to their own people, which inevitably makes for a distance and a lack of mutual understanding between the liberals and their own people.  In an interview for an American news magazine Putin made precisely this point when he drew attention to the fact that one of the present liberal leaders, the former world chess champion Gari Kasparov, had in a political speech he had made in Russia chosen to speak in English rather than Russian.   Inevitably reliance on the west has also exposed the liberals to the charge, often justified, that they are unpatriotic and are either agents of the west or, if not actual agents of the west, that they are still people who love other countries above their own.

The second device is to try to gain power through the backdoor.  In 1917 the Provisional Government (touted by Sixmith as a “democratic” government) did not come to power because it was voted into office by the Russian people or because it was elected or appointed by anyone with the power or authority to appoint or elect it.  It emphatically did not represent the people who formed the revolutionary crowds who had demonstrated against the Tsar and whose actions had brought the monarchy down.  The Provisional Government was instead  formed and consisted of a group of liberal politicians who had previously been members of the Russian parliament (the Duma), who when the Tsar abdicated simply proclaimed themselves the government of Russia.  It is important to say that though these individuals were as I have said former members of the Russian parliament, the Russian parliament did not elect or appoint them to their office.  This was because before the Provisional Government was formed and in accordance with the wishes of the politicians who formed it, the Russian parliament had been suspended by the Tsar's government shortly before the Tsar abdicated so that when the Provisional Government was formed the parliament did not exist.  For a very few weeks the liberal politicians who made up the Provisional Government were able to bluff Russia and the world into accepting them as the government of Russia largely because they enjoyed the support of the senior leadership of the army and of the western powers.  Very quickly however their bluff was called and upon their right to govern the country being challenged their authority quickly unravelled so that when the October Revolution took place their government immediately collapsed.

In passing I must correct a common error also made by Sixsmith in his lecture on Tuesday that on being formed the Provisional Government ordered elections for a Constituent Assembly elected on a democratic basis to decide the future of Russia.  On the contrary the Provisional Government consistently refused to call such elections because it knew that because of the Provisional Government's lack of support in the country if a democratically elected Constituent Assembly had ever met its very first act would have been to vote the Provisional Government out of power. 

In fact so far from governing or trying to govern the country democratically in the way that Sixmith imagines the Provisional Government or at least Alexander Kerensky its head was (as was conclusively established by the White Russian historian George Katkov in the 1970s) heavily involved in an abortive attempt in August 1917 to establish a military dictatorship through a military coup (see George Katkov’s book on The Kornilov Affair).

Nor did the liberals come to power in Russia democratically in 1991.  In the parliamentary elections that took place in the USSR and in Russia in 1989 and 1990 the liberals only won a fraction of the votes and only held a very small number of the seats in the parliaments that were elected as a result of the elections that took place in those years.  The liberals did not come to power in 1991 because they were elected to power.  Nor did the Communist Party lose power because it was voted out of power democratically.  Rather the liberals came to power because following the political crisis that caused the USSR to collapse the Russian President Boris Yeltsin (who was himself no liberal) turned to them in the deluded belief that they were the best people to get the economy back on its feet. 

Nor once they came into power in 1991 did the liberals exercise their power in any sort of manner that could be described as “democratic”.  On the contrary once in power the liberals pursued an extreme policy that was not only profoundly unpopular in the country but which was also economically and socially catastrophic.  When this policy provoked opposition the response of the liberals was anything but democratic.  Instead of relinquishing power democratically or seeking to compromise with their opponents the liberals opted instead for the illegal and violent dissolution of the Russian parliament in 1993, the systematic rigging of a whole succession of elections (including the March and December referendums  of 1993, the parliamentary election of 1993 and the Presidential election of 1996) as well as the almost complete suppression of all contrary voices in the newspapers, on radio and on television.  Though the liberals today complain bitterly of the extent to which the Russian media is biased against them they in fact have far more access to the Russian media (including control of several newspapers and the Ekho  Moskvy radio station) than in the 1990s they allowed their opponents.  During the 1996 Presidential election campaign not only did the liberal controlled news media monolithically support Boris Yeltsin, but Yeltsin’s challenger the Communist leader Gennady Zyuganov, was denied access to television save for a single 15 minute broadcast. 

To refer to such people as “democrats” is ridiculous and obscures the larger truth that the 1990s were for Russia politically speaking a massive step backwards.  The democratic breakthrough did not take place in Russia with “the fall of Communism” and the defeat of the August coup attempt in 1991 but with the democratic elections to the Soviet Parliament that took place in March 1989.  These elections (as well as regional elections including those for Russia’s own parliament that took place in 1990 and the All Union referendum and Russian Presidential election that took place in the first half of 1991) were the cleanest and most transparent elections to have taken place in Russia to date.  As I have said the liberals came nowhere close to winning any one of these elections save that they did support Yeltsin in his successful run for the Russian Presidency in the Russian Presidential elections of 1991.  In all other respects and calculated on the basis of the number of votes cast the winners of these elections, all of which took place whilst the USSR was still in existence, were the Communist Party and its supporters, which of course was led at this time by the country's reformist leader Mikhail Gorbachev.  The disastrous course Yeltsin, the liberals and their western backers imposed on the country in the 1990s, with its pattern of vote rigging, media manipulation, unconstitutional behaviour and political violence, threw all this progress into reverse and transformed a promising political process into a corrupted and repressive one.

Since Yeltsin’s fall in 1999 the country has slowly got back onto its feet, the economy has been stabilised and the election process has been cleaned up.  This has in turn allowed some elements of the original reformist agenda of the 1980s (such as prison and judicial reform) to be revived.  Valuable time has however been lost and the human losses have been enormous.  The present conduct of Russia’s liberals shows that they have however failed to learn any lessons from the debacle of the 1990s and that they still come to politics with the same overwhelming sense of entitlement that caused the catastrophes Russia experienced on the two occasions when they have held power in 1917 and in the 1990s.  It is of no benefit to Russia or to the liberals for westerners to pander to this sense of entitlement by making heroes out of people who are not and by calling them “democrats” when they are anything but.

Metropolis - A Film Review and Analysis of the Restored Classic

I have finished watching the restored Metropolis and it has been a revelation.  However before discussing the film itself I will say something about its history since I think this is important to understanding its reception and the many misunderstandings and confusions around it.

Metropolis was filmed in 1925 and 1926 on the basis of a screenplay written by Thea von Harbou the wife of the film’s director Fritz Lang.  The film originally lasted 153 minutes and was initially released and shown in this form in a single cinema in Berlin near the zoo by UFA the German film studio that made it in January 1927.  No less a person than Sergei Eisenstein visited the film set whilst filming was taking place though he and Fritz Lang did not get on with Eisenstein finding Fritz Lang patronising.  UFA was partly American funded and it was at all times intended that Metropolis, which was UFA’s most ambitious film, would be shown internationally and in the United States where it would be distributed by the important Hollywood studio Paramount.  Both Paramount and UFA were unhappy with the length of the film and from July 1927 it was shown both in Germany and elsewhere (except as it turns out in Argentina) in a drastically cut form that lasted just 90 minutes.  It seems that the executives at UFA arranged to have most of the unused footage destroyed.  Most people who have seen the film and who have formed views about it have only seen the film in this shortened 90 minute form.  The DVD I have just bought contains a review of the film written in 1927 by Luis Bunuel and extracts from a review by H.G. Wells.  Both these reviews were obviously written on the basis of the 90 minute version.  The rather beautiful tinted version of Metropolis released in 1982 in Britain with a rock music score is also based on the 90 minute version further cut to just 80 minutes.   Apparently because of copyright disputes this version of Metropolis is no longer available.

After the fall of Berlin in 1945 the entire UFA film archive fell into Soviet hands and was transferred from Berlin to Moscow.  The Soviet archivists on going through this archive discovered in 1961 a version of Metropolis that though incomplete seems to have been in a better condition than any other version then in circulation.  This inspired them to embark on a project to restore the film as far as possible to its original form.  They located additional missing scenes in an archive in Prague but then took the decision to transfer all the Metropolis material in their possession, both that from the UFA archive and that found in Prague,  to the East German film archives who took the restoration project over.  The East Germans eventually released their restored version to general indifference at a film festival in Bucharest in 1972.  The East German restoration however formed the basis of a further project to restore the film undertaken in his spare time by a West German film historian called Patalas who added to the East German version further material he had located in film archives in New York and in Australia and New Zealand.  The final result, known as the Patalas version, came to 120 minutes and was released for the first time at a film festival in Moscow in 1987 and on DVD in 2006. 

I have not seen the East German or Patalas versions.  I suspect that the true nature of the film would be obvious from a viewing of either.  Given that the East German version has been around since 1972 and the Patalas version since 1987 it is disturbing that perceptions of the film still seem to be largely based on the 1927 90 minute version.

Whilst all this was going on in Europe right up to 1959 Metropolis was being shown in Argentina in its original 153 minute form.  There is no clear or fully satisfactory explanation in the leaflet that accompanies the DVD as to why Argentina should have been different and should have been showing the film in its original 153 minute version, which it was assumed had been destroyed, and not in the 90 minute version shown elsewhere.  It says much for Argentina’s isolation that the fact that Metropolis was being shown there in its original 153 minute version seems to have passed completely unremarked and unnoticed. 

After 1959 cinemas in Argentina stopped showing Metropolis in its original 153 minute form because as a result of overuse the 35 mm film on which the film was recorded and which had presumably been acquired in 1927 had deteriorated to the point when it had become unwatchable.  At some point in the 1960s this original film found its way into the possession of a private collector who in 1968 bequeathed it to a small film museum in the suburbs of Buenos Aires.   In view of the terrible condition of the film at some point in the early 1970s the museum transferred it from its original 35 mm film tape onto 16 mm film.  This was done in a slapdash way with no attempt to clean or repair the original 35 mm film so that the version preserved in the museum perpetuates all the damage in the 35 mm original making it unwatchable in its raw state.

Bizarrely, it seems that the fact that right up to 1959 Metropolis was being shown in Argentina in its original 153 minute form up was thereafter forgotten even in Argentina itself so that when the film was rediscovered in the museum in 2008 this caused as much of a sensation in Argentina as it did everywhere else.  The condition of the film is however so bad that the Munich archive that owns the rights to Metropolis decided to use the Buenos Aires material to fill out the gaps in the Patalas version rather than release a new version of the film based entirely on it.  The DVD I have just seen is therefore a combination of the Patalas version and of the Buenos Aires material, which after digital enhancement is just about viewable.  The Buenos Aires material has added a further 25 minutes to the Patalas version, bringing the total up from 120 minutes to 145 minutes out of 153 minutes.

This means that there are still 8 minutes missing, which have presumably been irretrievably lost.  Unfortunately these 8 minutes cover two important scenes that have a vital bearing on the development of the plot.  However the content of these scenes is known and with 145 out of 153 minutes now recovered it has now become possible to arrive at a properly informed impression of the film as it was originally made.  An important aid to understanding the film is the inspired decision of the Munich archive to release the film on DVD with its original musical score.  This was specially composed to accompany the film and is tightly integrated into the plot and is a very valuable aid to understanding the film.

All earlier impressions of the film including those of Luis Bunuel and H.G. Wells have been based on the 90 minute version, which is the version I have previously seen.  On the basis of that version the assumption has been that the film is about a workers’ revolution in a dystopian city of the future.  The ideology of the film is supposed to be left wing or even Socialist or Communist.  The film however ends with a scene of reconciliation between capital and labour, which seems so grossly inconsistent with what has been shown that it is universally derided lame and farfetched and even absurd and which is condemned as a compromise or even a betrayal of what the film is presumed to be about.  It is often suggested (and continues to be suggested in the leaflet accompanying the DVD) that this seemingly bizarre happy ending was inserted to satisfy either Paramount or the directors of UFA who would otherwise have been unhappy about the film’s supposedly Socialistic message.  Various other supposedly vulgar and sentimental elements in the film have also been routinely blamed on Thea von Harbou, the film’s script writer, who was Fritz Lang’s wife.

Having now seen the film in something very close to its originally form I can conclusively say that all of these impressions and assumptions are completely wrong.  The story of the film is completely coherent and the happy ending is fully integrated in the plot and is indicated in the film from the outset.  The elements in the film that have been called vulgar are also fully consistent with the plot.  In my opinion they are not vulgar but disturbing a fact which I find to be the case not just with these scenes but with the whole film.

Briefly it is clear to me that the film has been completely misunderstood and that its ideology is not as most people think left wing or Socialist or even Communist but volkisch and fascist.  That this is the case is demonstrated by the plot, which I would summarise as follows:

In a great European city of the future class tensions have reached breaking point as the city’s rulers press on with their plans heedless of the suffering this is causing the city’s workers.  These tensions are being secretly manipulated for his own ends by a sinister individual called Rotwang who is part occultist and part scientist.  Rotwang enjoys the confidence of the Ruler of the city, whom he manipulates.  At the same time by using a robot he has created Rotwang is inciting the workers of the city to revolution whilst demoralising the city’s elite by drawing it away from healthy activities such as sport, outdoor sex in the Eternal Gardens and nature worship into a life of luxury, decadence and hedonistic pleasure. 

Rotwang’s intentions are purely destructive.  He seeks to destroy the city out of jealousy and thwarted sexual passion.  Throughout the film he is obsessed by lust for two women both of whom reject him, the first being the Ruler’s wife and the second a Christian maiden who is the heroine of the story.  In the end Rotwang’s criminal plans are thwarted through the intervention of a Messianic figure called the Mediator, whom Rotwang tries to kill, whose coming is foretold throughout the film, who turns out to be the Ruler’s son and who is the hero of the story.  At the end of the film the Mediator fulfils his destiny by effecting a reconciliation between his father the Ruler of the city and the workers (ie between capital and labour).  In order to achieve this he has to demonstrate his virtue and gain the workers’ trust by saving their children whom Rotwang has tried to destroy.

To my mind this is as clear an expression as it is possible to get of the sort of fascist and volkisch ideas that were current in Germany and elsewhere in Europe in the 1920s.  Central to fascist and volkisch ideology was the desire to create a volkgemeinschaft, a harmonious national community into which class tensions would supposedly be subsumed.  This  of course is precisely what the Mediator achieves at the end of the film and what the happy ending is all about.  To reinforce the point the film constantly invokes  bruderschaft (as opposed to kamaradenschaft) with the Mediator for example always referring to the workers as his “brothers”.  Needless to say neither the Mediator nor anyone else in the film is ever elected to the role he fulfils.  Instead the Mediator emerges (or “comes”) to fulfil his destiny in exactly the way that a fascistic Duce or Fuhrer is supposed to do. 

It is not anachronistic to see these concepts in a film made in Germany in the mid 1920s.  Volkisch and fascist ideas were already by this time widespread and anyone in Germany  who in the mid 1920s was looking for an example of a fascist Duce or Fuhrer already had the example of Mussolini to hand.

At this point I would just make one further though rather tentative point.  This is that there is what seems to me to be one rather obvious similarity between the Fuhrer of Metropolis and the man who eventually became the Fuhrer of Germany.  The Fuhrer of Metropolis is always referred to as the Mediator, which in German is “Mittler”.  “Mittler” rhymes with “Hitler”.  A coincidence?  In 1923, the year before Thea von Harbou  wrote the screenplay for Metropolis, Hitler  had for the first time publicly staked his claim to lead Germany and achieved national prominence as a result of the Beer Hall Putsch.   Possibly the similarity in sound between “Mittler” and “Hitler” was unintentional.  After all the idea of the Mediator is fundamental to the film’s plot.  However the fact remains that at the time the film was made there were in Germany a great many people who had volkisch views, who were receptive to the idea of a Fuhrer and some though by no means all of whom were already starting to think of Hitler in that role.

As for Rotwang, who is the pivotal character in the story, the film is careful not to identify him too obviously as Jewish, which would have been unacceptable to a film intended for international and American distribution.  He does not for example look obviously Jewish.  However the film contains a number of clear hints about where his allegiances lie.  He has a pentagram drawn on his front door and on the wall of his laboratory.  This is the occult symbol not the Star of David, which is a hexagram. Rotwang is however a scientist not a magician.  He does not engage in magical or occult activity so his reason for displaying the pentagram on his front door or on the wall of his laboratory is obscure.  Fritz Lang much later tried to explain this away by claiming that the original intention had been to make Metropolis a film about magic and that though he eventually abandoned the idea some visual elements of this such as presumably the pentagram survived in the film.  I find this completely unconvincing and as even the leaflet and documentary that accompany the DVD make clear nothing that Fritz Lang ever said about Metropolis can be taken on trust.  Frankly the suggestion that Rotwang was originally a magician or a sorcerer is so completely at variance with the rest of the plot that to my mind it makes no sense at all. I accept that there is a scene in which the doors of Rotwang’s house appear to open and close in a mysterious way but given the emphasis placed on Rotwang’s work in his laboratory there is no reason to think that this is due to occult as opposed to scientific powers.  In my opinion the presence of the pentagram is intended to hint at the Star of David.  The two symbols are sufficiently similar so that given what Rotwang is and does I suspect that anyone receptive to the thought would have no difficulty making the necessary connection. That after all is how racism and anti Semitism often communicate: through hints, suggestions and coded signals recognisable immediately by those in the know rather than through crude and direct statements. 

Rotwang’s name in my opinion also provides a further clue.   “Rot” is German for “red” and his name therefore links Rotwang with the colour red, which is of course the colour of international Communism and of the Communist movement, which in Germany in the 1920s was often called and called itself the  “Red Front”.  Rotwang’s manipulation of both the Ruler of the city and of the workers of course corresponds exactly with the common volkisch and fascist belief that capitalism and Communism are both tools of the international Jewish conspiracy.  Rotwang’s lust for Christian Aryan women and his attempts to destroy the workers’ children are of course standard anti Semitic fantasies.  Lastly his misuse of his intellect and of his scientific knowledge to achieve his criminal purposes corresponds exactly with volkisch notions of “diseased Jewish intellectualism”.

There are more elements of the film that betray its nature.  Some of the scenes modern audiences find so attractive were surely intended to suggest the supposed cultural decadence that the volkisch in Weimar Germany found so objectionable.  There are scenes of wild semi naked dancing accompanied by (“negro”) jazz music.  There are scenes involving black performers (hints of miscegenetation) and of orgies and of sexual passion ending in murders and suicides.  The music written to accompany some of these scenes breaks into jazz sounds (“jungle music”).  In contrast in other scenes including those involving the heroes the music uses a conservative late romantic Nineteenth Century “Germanic” idiom.  As in many other films of this and other periods virtuous women are chaste or sexually passive whilst the sexuality of wicked women (“femmes fatales”) is unbridled.  This film takes this conceit to an extreme. 

The film goes out of its way to emphasise the connection between this sort of decadence and physical and moral annihilation.  This theme was of course almost a commonplace in 1920s conservative and volkisch circles and still finds echoes in some conservative circles today.

As if to drive the point home the film is saturated with apocalyptic Catholic religious imagery.  At the beginning of the film one of the machines turns into the Biblical monster Moloch, who is the god of greed and avarice.  At the mouth of the monster as it devours the workers are two priestly figures in antique Middle Eastern robes.  A direct link is made between the city and the Biblical city of Babel with a parable at the start of the film about the original Tower of Babel and the discovery later in the film that the great skyscraper at the centre of the city in which the Ruler has his office is called “the new Tower of Babel”.  The film contains two readings from the Apocalypse of St. John (one being in one of the two scenes that is missing) with the emphasis in both scenes on the Whore of Babylon.  As Fritz Lang and Thea von Harbou would certainly have known “Babel” and Babylon” were one and the same place. 

The city is therefore the new Babylon, a city which like its predecessor is descending into a whirlpool of corruption, cruelty and decadence and which like the old Babylon is as a result hurtling towards its destruction.  Again in order to drive the point home the robot in its seductive female guise is expressly identified as the Whore of Babylon with the link between the sexual corruption and luxury that the robot embodies and the city’s destruction emphasised by the playing of the dies irae as the robot performs its erotic dance.  At the end of the dance Death himself appears carrying his sickle and we are informed by a caption that Death has come to the city.

The person responsible for the sexual corruption and decadence that overwhelms the city is ultimately Rotwang who is the robot’s creator and who is of course simultaneously also using the robot to incite the workers to revolution.  The supposed sexual corruption and decadence of Weimar was popularly attributed to Jewish influence.  In Weimar as in the film such corruption and decadence was condemned as demoralising and destructive and even death obsessed.  Again the parallels are too strong to seem unintentional.

As for the film’s famous slogan, that “the heart should mediate between the head and the hand” (taken up by such luminaries as Madonna) this is simply an expression of the well known fascist and volkisch mistrust of the intellect and their contrasting glorification of “feeling” and emotion.  It is this glorification of “feeling” and emotion at the expense of the intellect that Luis Bunuel and H.G. Wells and scores of later critics have found sentimental and vulgar.  Seen against the film’s ideological premises they are neither.  The film’s two heroes, the Mediator and the Christian maiden, are virtuous precisely because they let themselves be guided by their “feelings” and emotions.  By contrast the film’s characters who rely on their intellect: Rotwang and the Ruler, meet with disaster.  The outstanding intellectual in the film is Rotwang who is of course evil.

In the light of all of this it is not surprising to learn that Hitler and Goebbels were great admirers of the film and that Thea von Harbou, Fritz Lang’s wife who wrote the screenplay, joined the Nazi party in 1932 (before Hitler came to power) and remained an ardent Nazi until her death in the 1950s.

The major objection to this interpretation of the film is that Fritz Lang was himself partly Jewish and eventually became a strong anti Nazi going into exile after Hitler came to power when he also separated from his wife.   

I do not think this is a valid objection.  Fritz Lang’s mother, though Jewish, had converted to Catholicism before he was born and he was brought up a Roman Catholic, which doubtless explains the Catholic and Christian imagery in the film.  At no point in his life (even after he went into exile) did Fritz Lang ever identify himself as being in any way Jewish.  On the contrary he always downplayed his Jewish heritage.  In the mid 1920s it was still possible to hold volkisch views whilst possessing Jewish ancestors.  At this time anti Semitism still tended to define itself more in cultural than racial terms and still tended to acknowledge that it was theoretically possible for a Jew to repudiate his Jewishness by rejecting his religion and by assimilating entirely into the volk community.  That of course at the time was also a popular Christian belief and was also the official policy of the Catholic Church.  Significantly one character in the film appears to follow precisely this course.  The Ruler’s secretary is given what appears to be a Jewish name (“Josaphat”) but joins the Mediator and becomes his first disciple.  This of course mirrors the conduct of Christ’s disciples who before they converted and became disciplines were also Jews.  With the rise of the Nazi movement this position eventually became unsustainable and in the 1930s it was categorically rejected.  However in the mid 1920s it was still viable and there is no reason to suppose that Fritz Lang at that point did not share it.

Significantly Fritz Lang later made known his own dislike of the film.  In the light of what I have said it is not difficult to see why.  Fritz Lang’s own embarrassment about the film doubtless also explains the many misleading and untrue statements he subsequently made about it, such as for example that it was inspired by a visit he made to New York even though the plot outline was certainly written before this visit.

 Why then and despite the circulation since 1972 and 1987 of the East German and Patalas versions has the film’s volkisch and fascist outlook been overlooked?  Apart from a reluctance to believe that a well known anti Nazi such as Fritz Lang could have directed such a film I would suggest a number of reasons.

Firstly, in drawing out the fascist and volkisch ideas in the film in order to clear up misunderstandings and explain its plot I have inevitably given these elements excessive  emphasis and perhaps conveyed the impression that the film is an exercise in political propaganda.  It is nothing of the sort.  This is emphatically not a political film.  The makers of the film, Fritz Lang and Thea von Harbou, were first and foremost seeking to entertain and made the film for the purpose of entertainment not  propaganda.  The film in fact is entertainment not propaganda.  It contains fascist and volkisch ideas because those were the ideological beliefs of the film’s makers.  However though these ideas are woven into the fabric of the film, the film is eminently watchable as pure entertainment.  I have no doubt that that was Fritz Lang’s and Thea von Harbou’s intention when they made the film and I have also no doubt that was how the film was generally received in 1927just as it is how the film continues to be received today.

Secondly, we have moved so far from the ideological and intellectual world of the 1920s that we have difficulty taking volkisch ideas seriously and even recognising them when we see them.  We do not for example today associate ideas about the inhumanity of a world ruled by machines with volkisch notions or with the far right.  Today we tend to associate these ideas with the left.  This was emphatically not the case in the 1920s when the left on the contrary tended to embrace industrialisation and machines.  In fact hostility to machines and urban landscapes such as we see in the film and the worship of nature were in the 1920 and 1930s volkisch commonplaces that were much more likely to be associated with the far right.  They partly explain why so many people found the volkisch critique of contemporary society so attractive and why volkisch and fascist ideas had such a hold.

There is also a fundamental reluctance to admit that one of the great iconic modernist cinematic masterpieces of the Twentieth Century could be fascist in its ideology.  The belief that fascism was anti modernist is a stubborn though fundamentally mistaken fallacy as Modernism and Fascism an important new study of the subject makes clear.  It is also of course an equal and perhaps even greater fallacy that fascism is incapable of producing great art.

Lastly, the very incomplete form in which the film has been shown for most of its history has inevitably distorted impressions of it.  Having now seen the film in almost its complete form it is now clear to me that the severe shortening of the film whether intentionally or not had the effect of downplaying its fascist and volkisch aspects.  It has also had a further consequence in that it has fostered the idea of Metropolis as first and foremost a film that depends on its visual effects and which is a science fiction film.  The scenes that show the great modernist sets were left uncut with the result that since the story line has been drastically shortened and distorted they have dominated the film at the expense of the plot.  Now that that the film has been restored to its proper dimensions we are able to see these in their right places and contexts and reduced to their proper proportions.  The result is that we can now for the first time since 1927 take the story seriously.  Though Metropolis remains in some sense a science fiction film it is now also clear that it is one that remains firmly rooted in the cultural and political conditions existing in Germany in the 1920s.

Finally, having discussed the film’s ideological premises I feel I must say something about the quality of the film.  It has been suggested that the new material has added little of any artistic value and that the film remains a disappointment and that it is considerably less than the sum of its parts.

Having seen this film in what is almost its entirety, I can say that I totally disagree with this view.  in my opinion it is based on misunderstandings and expectations about the film still formed from watching the revised 90 minute version.  In my opinion the film is on the contrary an astonishing masterpiece with a well constructed and suspenseful plot and with all the elements fitting perfectly into place to make a well integrated and consistent whole.  Though the film is long and the plot intricate Fritz Lang never loses the thread and the film proceeds at a cracking pace.  Though the Mediator and the Christian maiden, the two heroes of the story, are trite and annoying and Rotwang is grotesque, seeing the film in almost its complete form has allowed the exceptionally strong cast of secondary characters to emerge from the shadows.  These include the Ruler of the city, Josaphat, the Ruler’s secretary who becomes the Mediator’s first disciple, Grot the foreman of the Heart Machine who controls the city’s electricity supply, Georgy the worker with whom the Mediator exchanges his clothes and who gets swept into the city’s cesspit of corruption and, most formidable of all, the Thin Man, who is in charge of the Ruler’s secret police.  Dominating the film is the character of the robot, performed by the same 17 year old actress who plays the Christian maiden, in what is one of the most astonishing star turns in all cinema.  The quality of the filming is at all times remarkable and the suspense is maintained throughout. 

Emily Bronte's "Second Novel"

A few days ago I went to the Tricycle Theatre in Kilburn to see a play about the Bronte family.  I thoroughly enjoyed it.  It was well written and well acted and in almost every respect excellent.  I was however surprised when I heard the actors twice say that Emily had written or partially written a second novel after Wuthering Heights that Charlotte supposedly destroyed after Emily’s death.  There is even a scene where Charlotte tears pages out of Emily’s book, throws them into a bucket and then sets them alight.

Since this seemed so unlike anything about Charlotte I had ever heard or read I thought I would check out the truth of it.  A quick internet search showed that there has in fact been quite a lot of talk about the existence of a supposed second novel of Emily’s written by her after Wuthering Heights, which Charlotte is supposed to have destroyed.  The basis for all this talk comes down to just three documents none of which were written by Emily. I have read the three documents all three of which are easy to find on the internet.  The first is a letter sent to Emily by her publisher Thomas Newby in which he tells her to take as long as she needs over her second novel because an author's reputation depends on the quality of the second novel, which should improve on the first.  The two other documents are two letters written by Charlotte during Emily's final illness.  Both letters say that Emily is too ill to write.  Some have construed this to mean that were Emily not ill she would be writing something and this has in turn led to further speculation that Emily must have been writing something before she fell ill.  In the second letter Charlotte also says words to the effect that when Emily recovers then it will be time to decide whether or not her present publisher is a worthy person to publish her second work.

In my opinion there are absolutely no grounds for seeing in these documents evidence for the existence of a second novel.  The first is a letter from Newby to Emily written following the success of Wuthering Heights.  The letter was obviously intended to prompt Emily to write a second novel that would build on the success of the first.  It was also clearly intended to ensure that when Emily did write her second novel that Newby would be the one who would publish it.  The comment that Emily should "take her time" was obviously intended to dispel the impression that Newby was being pushy.  Emily did in fact have good reason to be unhappy with Newby who had held back publication of Wuthering Heights until after the success of Charlotte’s novel Jane Eyre, which had been published by a different publisher whom Charlotte had approached after Newby had turned down Charlotte’s first novel The Professor.  As well as prompting Emily to write a second novel Newby’s letter was therefore clearly intended to placate her.  As for the two letters from Charlotte not only do they not show that at the time of her death Emily had written or partially written a second novel but on the contrary they strongly suggest the opposite.  Both say that Emily is too ill to write.  It is curious that some people have construed this to mean that Emily had written something when that is not what the letters say.  The letters do not say that Emily had been writing something but had been obliged to interrupt her work because she had fallen ill.  To argue that they do is to construe a positive out of a negative, which is false reasoning.  As for Charlotte's comment that in the event of Emily's recovery it would be the time to decide whether or not to persist with her present publisher, that is a comment about Newby not about the existence of a second novel that Emily might have been writing or might have written.  I gather that Newby had something of a dubious reputation and quite apart from any concerns about him that Emily (and Charlotte and Anne) might have had because of his belated publication of Wuthering Heights and Anne’s first novel Agnes Grey Charlotte would also have had cause to dislike him because of the way he had turned down her first novel The Professor.

No doubt Charlotte and Emily had their issues but there is no evidence that Charlotte ever destroyed anything that Emily ever wrote and especially given the complete absence of any evidence for the existence of any second novel by Emily I think it is unfair to Charlotte to suggest that she did.