Book review of We Are Bellingcat by Eliot Higgins

This is an interesting account of the fight against what the author calls the “Counterfactual Community”, which includes but is not limited to the Russian FSB and assorted multi-national internet extremists. I came to this book having known pretty much what the author, as the blogger “Brown Moses” had been up to regarding Syria a few years ago, and that “Bellingcat”, the offspring of his blog, had tracked down those responsible for the Salisbury Poisonings when the police and MI5 had not (or at least, not so far as we know). Precisely because Bellingcat uses open source information, it is able to publish its successes when traditional national intelligence agencies have to keep quiet or lose their secret sources

The author describes not only the basic open source investigative methods he invented for the Brown Moses blog, but also how these have evolved, through the Bellingcat years, to meet threats, needs and opportunities alike. It is interesting to see how he keeps ahead of the counter-factual community as their own methods change, not necessarily in the directions of either enlightenment or sophistication, but towards a sort of amplified assumed ignorance which they impiously hope will prove contagious. The author sees this as a tendency to deliberately confuse issues rather than explain them and to pretend that there is no such thing as truth. He also sees this is a trait which some people have, rather than a policy that someone invented. In my own view, if anyone in modern times invented the “post-truth world” it was Vladislav Surkov, who is notable amongst those involved in Vladimir Putin’s rise to power by virtue of the fact that he is still alive and he is, if anything, more influential than he once was (everyone else has been sidelined or has had a heart attack). Imagine, if you will, a version of Alistair Campbell who gets his way by throwing thinking fits rather than shouting blood-curdling threats down the phone at editors and ministers alike. The author makes no mention of Surkov and clearly has never investigated him, but should he choose to do so, he might be able to cast even more light into dark corners than he has done already. But the post-truth world is not just a modern invention: “what is truth?” was a popular way to justify falsehood and injustice in the Roman world and we have Pontius Pilate as an example of where treating truth as an illusion will get you.

The author is not a fan of Wikileaks and Julian Assange. The Wikileaks methodology is described as leaking such a huge mass of data at once that it is impossible to verify it all. (Even assuming it is all true, the weapon of the righteous is the sword of truth, not truth’s cluster bomb.) The author does not really explain his reservations about Wikileaks as clearly as he might, certainly not at any length, so here’s my understanding of what he means:

A great mass of largely incomprehensible facts are assembled, in the knowledge that what the mainstream media will do upon their release is to use search engines and other software tools of varying degrees of sophistication to quickly cherry-pick all the “relevant” (in other words: “juicy”) bits. All the malign actor needs is a grudge against someone (Hillary Clinton, in Assange’s case) and they can sow their gigabyte or so of factual but largely incomprehensible data with some really nice-looking cherries, which the journalist’s predictable cherry-picking search terms will be sure to find. But because the data as a whole is so indigestible, the verification process has already been abandoned because the carefully-timed release of the huge mass of data has put competitive journalists under pressure of time as they seek to be first to find the best cherries and publish them. So mostly or even completely true facts, in sufficient concentration, can become a “Weapon of Mass Disinformation.” And Ms Clinton’s reputation has been trashed. Or anybody else’s reputation, on the left, right or even the extreme centre represented by Tony Blair and Immanuel Macron. I do not perceive Ms Clinton to be a martyred innocent, but suggestively shaving some truths to the bone and letting journalists discover them, as if by their own efforts, in the middle of a pile of factual irrelevance is a tool which could convict anyone of anything. The ultimate injustice is to harness truth to evil ends

The author does not mention the ICIJ, but I’d regard them with some of the same reservations he clearly has about Wikileaks, because they also tend to gleefully pack their truth into cluster bombs.

And although, from the very beginning of his investigative career Eliot Higgins has battled the FSB (which takes considerable courage), the need now is for someone to take the fight to China’s 610 office and the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps. The FSB is only committing murder, after all, whilst the 610 Office and the XPCC are doing worse than that. They are not working together to commit genocide, so much as working independently to each eliminate a completely separate victim community. The FSB seeks to pick a fight and then win it, which is how Mr Higgins comes to be fighting them (and, touch wood, winning). The 610 Office and the XPCC are currently having their way without any fight at all. 

 

We Are Bellingcat is published by Bloomsbury, on the 4^th of February 2021

Book Review of The Ends of the Earth by Abbie Greaves

 

This is a well-written novel with a great deal of understanding behind it. When you first start to read it, The Ends of the Earth puts you in mind of a Leslie Thomas novel (I have read at least two such) about a middle-aged man running away from home, except that it’s seen from the perspective of the woman left behind. Actually, it isn’t like that at all, but the true character of this novel does not emerge all at once. The truth comes in layers and none of the characters really want to believe it all.

The author ultimately allows love to heal all, but not until the truth is uncovered and faced and ghastly mistakes that might have “justified” lasting animosity or even legal action, are forgiven. And the “happy ending” is nothing like what the reader is expecting or hoping for, for most of the story. The quiet but firm portrayal of forgiveness as a necessity rather than a mere virtue makes this book a very non-trivial love story indeed.

 

The Ends of the Earth by Abbie Greaves is published by Random House UK, Cornerstone Century on the 29^th of April 2021.

 

The following two promotional videos have been supplied by the publisher. Matthew K. Spencer is not being paid for this review.

 

Lessons from the Holocaust about Forced Organ Donation

Firstly, for those who believe that the CCP and the 610 Office are pretty nice folks who would never resort to forced organ donations from prisoners of conscience and oppressed ethnic minorities, here is a short (16 minute) video which summarises the published evidence. (There was also a two-page spread starting at page 32 in the Mail on Sunday for March the First 2020, quite independent of Chris Chapell and his sources. This seems to have been widely ignored, but no-one has credibly refuted it.)

During the video, Mr Chapell claims that not even the NAZIs resorted to organ-harvesting during the holocaust. Of course this is largely true*, but only because, prior to the conception and development of immuno-suppressant drugs in the sixties, human body organs did not have a significant market value in the forties. In fact, everything about holocaust victims (those who died in actual concentration camps) that had a commercial value, was exploited. I have an American friend whose landlord proudly boasted that she had a tablelamp with a shade made from human skin, which her GI husband had brought back from Dachau. (There are times when I need reminding which side the US Army was on.) Body fat was famously turned into soap, gold teeth were extracted, live victims were experimented on, especially during the execution of commercial contracts which the SS had with Bayer -a firm that is still very much in business- and even human hair was taken and sold. (Recently, three tons of hair from Uyghur prisoners was found and confiscated at a US port. Each person contributes a few ounces of hair, so three tons equals an awful lot of prisoners and this was only one shipment.)

But above all, the Holocaust was designed and organised to maximise the harvest of the victims' possessions, property, money and investments. The whole point of fairly-publicly loading each batch of victims onto trains and transporting them across Europe, was to give the Jews and other victim populations the idea that they had all better keep their most precious possessions hidden in their luggage or about their persons and not bury them in the woods where they might never be found if the lawful owner died. Those suspected of having substantial investments were given special attention aimed at making them pay these investments over as a ransom for their own lives and those of their loved ones. In some cases, just enough cases, such people were actually allowed to cross into Switzerland. But many more were simply tricked and bullied out of their investments on their way to the death camps. Once there, their heads were shaved and they were made to leave their luggage in piles and undress before they were gassed. (Traces of cyanide gas would have made it more difficult to search the clothes for hidden jewels, gold coins or share certificates.) Even spectacles and shoes were collected, though many of these items remained in the camps at liberation. Above all, the NAZIs prized the assets which victims already had in banks and safety-deposit vaults outside the Reich. Especially those in Switzerland. Taking control of those assets, by blackmail or torture of the password-holders, saved the guilty men the trouble of moving the assets to where they hoped to flee when the NAZI state collapsed, which the smart NAZIs always knew it would. The Holocaust was intended to and to some extent succeeded in completely liquidating the commercial value of the Jews being exterminated. THAT is the lesson we must learn, if we are to both understand and deal with what is happening in Communist China in the present day.

When I decided to deal with the issue of organ harvesting (amongst others) in my novel "The Lord of Billionaires' Row", I decided to do it logically and not emotionally, because the sort of mind we are dealing with here does not really experience emotions at all. Not only are the victims totally exploited for everything they have got as well as everything that they are, but before they are even taken into custody they are selected as worth exploiting. The victims all follow some kind of spiritual practice: in this case either Falun Gong or Christianity, but elsewhere in the book it is made clear that ALL of China's Muslim minorities are also targets, not just Uyghurs. This is simply because spiritual practice and some kind of moral code means that the unwilling donor is unlikely to have been a drug user or sexually promiscuous, so they will be much less likely to carry HIV or other deadly viruses. The majority of victims in my novel are portrayed as Falun Gong practitioners and indeed the video, above, suggests that Asian people wanting to buy black market human organs from the CCP tend to regard Falun Gong practitioners as particularly healthy and the source of the very best-quality organs. This belief may indeed be the primary reason why Falun Gong is persecuted in China!

Apart from being fit and healthy, the harvesting victims in my novel are selected because they are prosperous: either very prosperous or moderately prosperous; they are all believed to have something worth stealing. My anti-hero, Mr Ren, is surprised when a 610 Office supervisor accuses him of having assets worth two hundred million US dollars. Firstly, he's always been satisfied to be on an upward trend and has never totted up the sum total of his wealth, and secondly, doing so in US dollars strikes him as unpatriotic. But, given the imperatives of the totalitarian forces condemning him to death, the fact that Mr Ren has substantial assets that are already outside Chinese jurisdiction makes him a much more attractive victim than those whose wealth is all locally-held.

This is not me exercising an author's imagination so much as logic, based on my having read a great deal of material about the Holocaust over more than forty years. This isn't just the way it happens in my book: it is the way it happens.

The video above merely aspires to present evidence that forced-organ harvesting is happening in Communist China, partly for the benefit of wealthy recipients from outside China. (Uyghur donors are attractive to those from the Middle East who require organs that have been nurtured on a halal diet. Trying to force Uyghurs to eat pork, as the CCP routinely does, helpfully identifies those who will not break halal rules to save their lives. (It's an irrational requirement: nothing stolen is halal.))

But an understanding that every victim who has assets will have been stripped of them before their body organs are harvested, and any assets so confiscated that are already overseas or in an attractive currency will tend to end up in the personal portfolios of the officials organising the harvesting, is key to gathering evidence that will bring to justice those responsible for what is, for all practical purposes, another Holocaust.

*Selected body organs were harvested by SS doctors from Holocaust victims who had been carefully exposed to experimental medicines, poisons or general industrial chemicals, on behalf of Bayer. So that they could see how much good/damage the chemical did.

Book Review of Ask No Questions by Claire Allan

 

This is an excellent journalistic thriller, set in Derry with enough local colour to assure any middle-class liberal readers that they are not in Islington any more.

Ask No Questions really is a novel about assumptions, both those of the leading characters and those of the gentle reader. Although many of the characters either know or suspect that there has been a frame-up and a cover-up, most of them have wasted a quarter century of their lives on one wrong assumption or another about just what that was. The police and the law are mostly in the background of the story, but their wrong assumption, as is sometimes the case in real life, is that somebody who is less capable of dealing with everyday life than the average man, is somehow going to be more capable of murder.

Murder is a talent which most of us lack, and in times of war the majority of conscript soldiers cannot bring themselves to actually aim to kill unless they are in immediate personal danger themselves; many of them cannot do it even then. This is why murder as a talent is sought after by organised crime, terrorist gangs and paramilitaries the world over. Even when the victim is a little girl, the search for a murderer needs to be a search for the rare talent which allows someone to kill another human being, not for the disability which sets a person apart, but which generally mitigates any harm they might do.

There is a cover-up as well as a murder and in this story the motive of the person who is instrumental to that cover-up is so surprising and unsettling that the reader probably won’t guess what it is until the very end. Murders can happen with very little motive, or at least the motive is often meaningful only to the murderer, but cover-ups always need a motive and that can be more shocking than the crime being concealed.

 

Ask No Questions by Claire Allan is published by Avon Books UK on the 21^st of January 2021.

Text of letter to a member of (UK) Parliament about honesty and excess deaths due to lockdown

Dear Mr ******.

I must say at the outset, that I believe that the balance of risks are in favour of the lockdown announced by the Prime Minister. That is, if we don't do it, 85,000 dead from Covid-19 is probably a realistic outcome.

However, the question is not as open and shut as it is presented as, and I am troubled by this.

Non-covid excess deaths during lockdown and over the summer seem to have been something like 20,000+ and whilst this is less than 85,000+, it certainly isn't a negligible figure, and were the same factors to be at work over the dark days of winter the non-covid excess deaths might be higher still. And yet, it's hard to know what the true figure is for people who have died BECAUSE of the last lockdown and its aftermath, and if relevant data is being published, it certainly isn't being publicised very hard. Because the Prime Minister is so focused on making people accept the inevitable, the closest he's come to an admission that lockdowns kill people is to say that he regrets the anguish that will be caused. I would trust him more if he were honest enough to admit that the government is effectively killing some people to ensure that a larger number survive, because that is the calculation being made.

I think this crisis could have the effect of making the Conservative Party unelectable because of decisions and outcomes that none of the other parties could have done differently. There is no party in the world that hates the Conservatives more than the SNP does: they have done essentially the same things as the Conservatives throughout. But presentation is all, and at the moment the inevitable is being successfully presented as either a choice willingly made, or a random act by a Prime Minister in chaos. And, yes, Sir Keir Starmer is the person successfully presenting both of those two mutually-exclusive points of view. This is what Tony Blair would look like if his duplicity was somewhat less transparent.

However, the Prime Minister still exhibits a flaw that has been evident to me throughout his political career, and it is that any argument, objection or even objective fact that he hadn't considered or which doesn't help his case is "piffle" and it is swept aside with an impatient sweep of the hand and an off-the-cuff remark which not infrequently betrays a total unwillingness to grasp the point being made. Such as his assertion that there was no need to protect ancient woodlands because there was no such thing as ancient woodlands because there were no trees in England older than, I think his figure was 160 years. This was so wrong as to be demented, yet he never actually acknowledged this. I could go on, for hours, because this isn't something he does every now and then, but really quite frequently.

So while what he is asking of Parliament is probably the right thing, no course of action which condemns thousands to die can possibly be completely right and, therefore, none of his critics and opponents are completely wrong. If this side of the scales cannot even be acknowledged, then the obvious ill effects of lockdown will be compounded by even worse political divisions than we already see.

As for the mechanism by which lockdown kills people, I would suggest that as soon as lockdown is declared, people with pains in the chest or increasingly obvious symptoms of their diabetes being out of control, stop even trying to obtain medical help -and this continues even after lockdown has been lifted and will continue until the government and its scientific advisors issue a positive message that the health service is willing and able to offer treatment and that it is safe to accept this. Another mechanism is at work with suicides, and there have been hints but no explicit admission, that suicides account for a very significant part of the non-covid excess deaths. No-one in their right mind wants to be held in a mental health unit when the virus breaks lose there, and there is nothing like a daily dose of bad news and discouragement from "SAGE" via the BBC to crush whatever hopes a potential suicide is clinging to. I don't think that any member of SAGE has ever considered how their regular woeful pronouncements might sound to someone who's already struggling with life. They show no sign of grasping the psychological impact of what they say whatsoever. If the PM cannot sack anyone from SAGE, could he at least appoint a few senior mental health professionals to balance the buggers?

Meanwhile, there has been no admission by our government, the WHO or most other national governments around the world outside Scandinavia, that nutritional deficiencies (of vitamins or other trace elements whose blood levels are easily measured) play any role in how a patient copes with a major challenge to the system, be it Covid-19, 'flu, bacterial chest infections or a car-crash. And yet, you don't need to be a top scientific expert to realise that any person with a nutritional deficiency will cope less well with a wide range of challenges to their health. It is a matter of record that about 60% of the UK population are deficient in vitamin D (and zinc) during the winter. If there was no pandemic on, I'd probably have no difficulty making my case that we ought to do something about this! But since there is a pandemic on, filters are in place against any sort of "fake science" "conspiracy theories" and, it seems, long-established and widely accepted scientific facts, such as a majority of people outside the tropics being vitamin-D deficient whenever their hemisphere is in winter. This is an annual reality. If something were done about it, not only might the death-toll from Covid-19 be reduced, the death rate from all manner of other infections and even injuries might be reduced as well, long after Covid-19 becomes a distant memory.

In the last two or three hundred years, most of the advances in human health have actually been advances in hygiene and nutrition, not medicine as such. The pandemic does not stop this being true, nor will it cease to be true in the foreseeable future.

Book Review of Sleepless by Louise Mumford

* * * *

This is an excellent, page-turning thriller. The heroine begins by fighting insomnia and ends up fighting to stay alive against a malicious entity that she sees as a “Big Tech” company and that her mother describes as a cult. The author explores the difference between the two and ultimately finds that there is none. Many Big Tech companies are indeed run the same way as religious cults (and God help the customers and shareholders in the long run). Commentators and especially cartoonists were describing Apple, the Corporation and its strangely-loyal customer base, as a religion back in 1986 and it hasn’t altered course much in the following third of a century. Sleepless, however, is timely, because we are now at a fork in the road, where Big Tech’s proprietors either get their way (which will be perfect only in their own minds, while to most of us it will be intolerable) or they finally receive the wages of high-handed arrogance.

Not every large company producing tech products is like this: I can’t remember Joseph Lucas telling me how to live my life the way that Bill Gates, for example frequently does -and considering that Joe was paying me, while it’s me who pays money to Bill Gates, I cannot see from quite where Mr Gates obtains the moral or legal right to have things this way round. 

 Sleepless by Louise Mumford is published on December 11 2020 by HQ and HQ Digital.

Book Review of “The Lamplighters” by Emma Stonex

 

This is a chilling yet satisfying read. One thread of it is a crime thriller, another is about a father’s love for his departed son: this is intertwined with a thread about the resentment another man has about his own upbringing by an ailing and abusive father. Still another is about a writer trying to write the books his father would have liked. (Oh, how I know!) The author has been praised for the way that she shows things from the perspective of the women in the story, but she’s actually doing pretty well with the men and must actually have known some, which isn’t always apparent with every much-lauded female author.

About a lighthouse crew, their wives and girlfriends (John le Carre fans will have momentarily thought something different if they saw the title without the cover illustration), this novel has not only been well-researched, but well understood. The author knows what all her facts mean, and this, again, is not accomplished by all authors.

And for all the author’s story-telling skill and her care for emotional narratives, this is a story about a life-saving device and a triumph of engineering, which also quietly destroys the men who make it work.

“The Lamplighters” is published by Pan Macmillan/Picador on the 4^th of March 2021

Book Review of "Rough Magic" by Lara Prior Palmer

This is an autobiographical adventure story by a young author brave enough to question the cornerstone of modern morality. Everything in the modern world, not just the modern “Western World” but the whole modern world, is founded on ambition. We are educated toward realising our ambitions; our families are both part of our ambitions and a support mechanism for the essential business of ambition-realisation; we are deviant if we measure success in any way other than the realisation of ambitions. For the moment, we are sometimes allowed to hold ambitions which are not hurtful to our fellow-man, perhaps even ones that help him, but even that, in the current model of morality, serves to beautify the single-minded pursuit of ambitions. Lara Prior Palmer shows us that ambitions are not an undiluted virtue and that unbridled ambition ought not to allow one to win a horse race, especially not the “World’s Wildest Horse Race”, the Mongol Derby.

At age nineteen, having failed to get into Oxford University, the author decides, on something a bit less decisive than a whim, to raise money and take part in the Mongol Derby, after applications to take part had officially closed. This leaves her with no time to carry out the essential preparations, or even discover basic facts about Mongolia or the race. Her account is sprinkled with all the facts and small gems of Mongolian literature, philosophy and folklore which she didn’t know at the time and found out about as she went along or afterwards -and this enriches the book because it immerses the reader in the author’s learning experience rather than grandly impressing the author’s knowledge upon us. After the pre-race briefing, where the author learns the rules and even the basic structure of the race for the first time (to the disbelief and derision of officials and other riders), a well-supported young, female Texan rider makes an ambitious prediction of her own performance, which sets the author against her. The author is not, initially, seen as having any chance at all of winning, nor, of course, does she harbour any such ambition.

But, not having learnt anything beforehand, and finding that attempts by the communist regime in Mongolia to impose the modern world on the country have had very little impact in the countryside, the author learns the ropes as she goes along, rides what she is given without over-stressing any of her mounts (there are heart-rate checks after each leg) and eventually discovers that she is now seen as a potential winner. Despite a considerable language barrier, she accepts the advice of Mongolian herdsmen when other riders are trying to impose their will on the Mongolians. Sometimes this does not work well, but most of the time it works well enough.

An enjoyable book, and frequently thought-provoking, too.

Rough Magic is published by Penguin Random House UK 6^th of June 2019 & 23rd of November 2020

Book Review of "Total Blackout" by Alex Shaw

This is a competent action thriller with a more credible Geo-political scenario than most. The key plot device is an apparently non-nuclear Electro-Magnetic-Pulse device which knocks out pretty well all electrical and electronic hardware in the continental United States. As a plot device this is fine: it allows the protagonists to move through Maine and indeed Washington DC as if the authorities are not there, for to all intents and purposes they are not. The hero is an ex-SAS man, Jack Tate, who is believable. However, he's portrayed as working for a direct-action division of MI6, and direct action is something MI6 has never been keen on in real life. Action is largely incompatible with intelligence-gathering, in their view.

The enemy is a partnership between a Chinese electronics company and a Russian private military contractor. (These do exist and one came to grief in a big way in Syria at the hands of American forces a little while back.) However, while Russia is an authoritarian state, Communist China is a totalitarian one and there is no such thing as a Chinese company (with more than 30 employees) outside of direct, daily and detailed Chinese Communist Party control, even though they all claim to be independent when targeted by American sanctions!

So there are many aspects to this tale which are realistic, but the EMP device itself is not.
Non-nuclear EMP devices, or Explosively-Pulsed Microwave Weapons do exist, but being powered by non-nuclear sources they work by focusing the limited energy available onto a small area, a few acres, say. They can be quite efficient at damaging equipment in the small area and even in underground bunkers, because the microwave energy they radiate can be coherent (like a laser) as well as focused and directional. But to affect the whole of the United States they would have to be converting energies on the scale of a largish single-stage nuclear bomb. (Multi-stage thermonuclear devices are less efficient at producing EMP. But they can make up for what they lack in efficiency by sheer power.)

Furthermore, the EMP device is portrayed as killing all modern electronic devices unless they are specially shielded, when in fact many modern devices could escape EMP effects simply by being too small for meaningful energy to be collected from an EMP and discharged in a way that would do permanent harm. So the all-powerful EMP device in the story is a plot device, (or a propaganda threat) not likely hardware.

 

Total Blackout is published by HQ on the 25th of September 2020

Book Review of the SS Officer’s Armchair by Daniel Lee

It took me longer to marshal my facts and my thoughts to write my review of this book than it took me to read it. This is because, while I must praise unreservedly the patience, diligence and fairness with which the author researched, travelled and interviewed his way to the completion of his work, I will be putting forward some areas for further inquiry and further thought.

Starting with a bundle of personal documents found hidden in a chair by a Czech emigre in the Netherlands, the author sets out to track down the descendants and investigate the life of one Robert Griesinger, a German bureaucrat in occupied Prague, who seems to have died there in 1945 at the time of the liberation. It turns out, but is not immediately obvious, that Griesinger was a member of the Allgemeine SS and the first thing for the reader to understand is that this organisation, sister to but distinct from the armed paramilitary Waffen SS, was very big and was key in the first instance to making the German state function as a NAZI state, and then to making various annexed and occupied territories function as slave states. (What is also true, but the author doesn’t quite discover, is that civilian Allgemeine SS men, like Griesinger, throughout the NAZI bureaucracy, enabled the Waffen SS to function as a front-line military force. This is because the SS was never a fully-authorised client of the official German ordnance procurement system, especially for small arms, and most of its firepower had to come from sources other than the main German arms factories. Czechoslovakia was an important source of small arms for the SS, ranging from pistols up to the SS41 anti-tank rifle. The Allgemeine SS bureaucrats had to keep certain factories running, no matter what others wanted, to ensure that the Waffen SS was indeed armed. Hollywood films which show SS and Gestapo men with Luger and P38 pistols are very misleading. In the main they would have been supplied with almost everything except Luger and P38 pistols, which were reserved for the Werhmacht. The Radom pistol factory was moved from Poland to France by the Nazis, specifically to equip the Gestapo. Czech “CZ” pistols were supplied to the SS. Some German policemen ended up with stripper-clip-fed Steyr Hahn pistols from the Austro-Hungarian Empire.)

The author traces Robert Griesinger’s journey from Stuttgart to Prague, and his father’s journey to Stuttgart via New Orleans. Griesinger did not start out as an SS man in any form: like many career-minded young men he held pretty right-wing views but did not actually join the NAZI party till he had to, in order for his career to progress -and that did not happen till the NAZIs had power, of course. This is why the NAZI Party always drew a distinction between those who joined before they had power, and those who joined afterwards. It was not an arbitrary distinction, either, because the author finds that early and late members of the party were different types of men! Griesinger never really departs from the path of self-advancement and self-promotion, and the system was designed on the assumption that this would be so. The party had no illusion that his generation was serving it from any sort of principle. He was respectful to his wife and kind to his children, but there was an instruction manual telling Allgemeine SS men to be respectful to their wives and kind to their children. A caring party leaves nothing to chance.

The New Orleans connection leads the author to compare Nazi race laws with American ones and the American ones were (in the thirties and forties) more exclusive. (I already knew that even today, the US Government’s definition of “white” for census purposes is more exclusive than that used in Apartheid South Africa. The official American definition of “white” would make President Botha turn quite pale.)

The author describes deep hatred by German people (not necessarily NAZIs) of black people: there’s more in this subject than he appears to think, for two reasons:

It was the policy of the French occupying forces in German after WW1 to subject German citizens under their control to regular humiliations. Not only whenever a citizen had to deal with French soldiers or officials, but during regular parades in all the notable towns under French occupation, where racist caricatures of German people were carried through the streets by French soldiers and citizens simply couldn’t avoid seeing. It was also policy for these humiliations to be largely executed by black colonial soldiers in the French army. (Source: “Travellers in the Third Reich” by Julia Boyd.) By the time the occupation was over, the deliberate humiliation had bred hatred and in 1940 it boiled over onto any black troops, especially black French troops, the Germans captured.

But that hatred was not universal: not all Germans hated all black people; even Hitler had courteous dealings with some. An African-American scholar, Dr Milton S. J. Wright, did his Economics PhD at Heidelberg University, where he found himself an object of curiosity rather than hatred. When he had lunch with his friends at a hotel where Hitler was staying, he was invited by two SS men to meet Hitler and several hours of debate (over tea) ensued. Dr Wright found Hitler a bit disturbing, but not threatening or unfriendly, and Hitler would later make Dr Wright’s thesis required reading for German officials engaged, like Robert Griesinger, in economic work. (Source, again, “Travellers in the Third Reich”. I must commend Julia Boyd’s work to readers of “The SS Officer’s Armchair”, not out of some PC-requirement for “balance” but for the sake of a more complete understanding of the world in which Robert Griesinger grew up and found himself drawn into the NAZI party by his own self-interest.)

The author also notes, prominently, that Griesinger and many of his SS peers came from Protestant backgrounds. You wouldn’t go out of your way to state that nearly all of Mussolini’s men had been brought up as Catholics, or that many of Stalin’s thugs had Orthodox Christian roots. The significant thing is, and the author misses this, that the NAZIs saw Christianity in ANY form as a rival for the love and loyalty of the Germany people, and proceeded to infiltrate and take over the Protestant Church in order, not to make it the official religion of NAZI Germany, but to make it extinct (altars were desecrated, bibles replaced by Mein Kampf, pastors sent to concentration camps if they failed to accept blasphemous doctrines and so on.) Georg Elser and Sophie Scholl were also from a protestant background, and, like Robert Greisinger they were born in Wurttemberg. In different ways they did their best to oppose Hitler (or do him in, in Elser’s case). What more could they have done, other than what they did do and which the NAZIs executed them for?

I am not finding fault, I am urging the reader to look at the subject of SS bureaucrats in a wider and deeper way than this book, by itself, allows. And the reason why I want this is because the holocaust-related mantra of “never again” has failed and once more we see a vast and powerful militarised bureaucracy building and populating concentration camps, destroying religions in detail, putting the image of the party leader above the altar in the churches, herding blindfolded victims in their hundreds onto trains departing for unknown destinations. The parallel between the Allgemeine SS and the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps is actually pretty strong, and so many people have already compared the “610 Office” to the Gestapo that it’s almost superfluous to make the point. We need to know exactly how Robert Greisinger and the other SS bureaucrats functioned, because there is another bureaucracy: the same thing, but bigger and stronger with technological tools that Himmler could only dream of, that needs to be defeated if we are not to imminently witness another holocaust, both bigger and more technologically-advanced than that of 1942-1945.

Published by Jonathan Cape on the 1^st of October 2020.

Book Review of “We Are All the Same in the Dark” by Julia Heaberlin

This is a compelling psychological thriller, which is well-researched and also does well on local colour in its Central Texas setting. The novel primarily sets out to show how "life changing injuries" as the police describe them when they are inflicted on someone, actually change lives.

The author mostly manages to avoid careless stereotypes, although the psychologist character is seriously bonkers (that may be based on experience rather than prejudice and I am not finding real fault there) and the Baptist Minister is not only described as being like something out of the Handmaid’s Tale by one of the other characters: the character does indeed seem to hail from there.

This book is being offered to a British readership and whilst American readers may presumably take it as read that a Baptist minister is going to be a snake oil and brimstone phoney, “Baptist Minister” is one of those terms which has a much more positive meaning in the United Kingdom than it appears to have in the United States. Unless the negative view is something unique to the author or some faction which she represents. The positive image has a lot to do with John Bunyan, who preached and wrote, in England after the Pilgrim Fathers had sailed.

The suspense lasts until the end of the book, though the mystery frankly does not.

Published in the UK by by Michael Joseph on 6/8/2020

Book Review of Hidden Hand by Clive Hamilton and Mareike Ohlberg

Portrait of Xi Jingping flanked by CCP slogans replaces Christian images in a Catholic Church

Review based on an E-book copy obtained directly from Optimum Publishing International.

This is an excellent, if somewhat remorseless study of the unprecedented and ongoing campaigns of global influence and intelligence-gathering operated by the Chinese Communist Party. It names names, and goes on to name very many names indeed, of individual and corporate CCP collaborators in many Western countries. It deserves to be read for that alone, and any credible journalist should keep a copy handy, to consult prior to interviewing any member of their own country’s great and good on any matter pertaining to China, the CCP or “foreign influence.” Especially to determine if anyone frequently crying “foul” about his opponent’s alleged ties to Russia or the Ukraine, for example, has equally juicy ties of his own to the brutal totalitarian dictatorship that is the CCP.

The one flaw in this book is that it conflates “Brexit” with “CCP influence” despite the fact that it also details many, many examples of influence and intelligence-gathering within EU-related bodies and the governments of ALL EU member states. (Germany seems to be the most compromised state of all, possibly because the CCP programme to compromise German politicians is firmly rooted in the mighty German car industry.) Furthermore, the long and dispiriting list of great and good Britons who have proved to be entirely in the CCP’s pocket, includes a former Prime Minister, a former Northern Ireland Secretary and a former First Secretary and President of the Board of Trade, all three of them much better known for their unswerving devotion to the EU project in all its forms and at every level. Possibly the only obvious Brexiteer actually mentioned in the book as being influenced by China is Boris Johnson, currently leading the charge against the CCP over Hong Kong and the Uighurs, even as the aforementioned trio of the great and good persist in denying that there are any human rights abuses in China.

Boris aside, pretty well every Briton the book actually names as a red-flag-waving collaborator is also a blue-flag-waving Remainer and there is an obvious reason for this: these people have all chosen to support the CCP at a visceral rather than a sentient level, because they tend to either disparage democracy or only pay it lip-service whilst undermining it in practice and they are instinctively authoritarian with a Communitarian outlook on social and political affairs. Those are also the hat-measurements for unquestioning support for the European Project so it is almost inevitable that people who buy into the one should buy into the other. It’s like this: if you order “Federal European Utopia” on Amazon, your order confirmation will helpfully tell you that people buying this also purchased “world domination by the Chinese Communist Party.”

The reason why the CCP feels it needs to dominate the world is that it is convinced (again, somewhat like the Eurocrats), that it is perfect and that problems can only come from “outside” or a”tiny minority” (always 5% or less) of its own subjects. The global influence and intelligence-gathering campaign is ultimately intended to ensure that there is no “outside” to the CCP in this world, and the equally well-funded campaign by the CCP’s “610 Office” against all forms of religious practice and belief, both within China and outside, too, is similarly intended to make sure that there is no “outside” to the CCP in the world beyond. This is why images of the CCP’s core leader are now replacing images of Jesus and the Virgin Mary in churches and Uighurs are being blindfolded and herded onto trains carrying them who knows where.

Read this book, but do not do so unthinkingly. And do bear in mind that “unprecedented” usually means that there’s a very good reason why nobody has done this before.

Book Review of Idle Hands by Cassondra Windwalker

This is a novel about a mother trying to cope with an abusive husband and protect her children from ALL harm. The husband is portrayed in a way which fits fairly well with the sociopathic ex-partners of some women that I know. The twist is that the narrative is interspersed with passages in italics ostensibly giving the Devil’s view of proceedings and humanity in general. At the beginning of “The Screwtape Letters” by C.S. Lewis the author warns the reader that the Devil is by nature a liar and nothing he says can be relied upon. “Idle Hands,” with its female Devil, contains no such warning. Readers looking for insight and guidance about the human condition need to give this book a few cautious pokes with a long stick first because there is a very subtle and clever spin on this subject throughout, which gets stronger towards the end. (The Devil denies responsibility for humans behaving devilishly in a manner that’s worthy of Tony Blair.)

It is a good book, but not recommended to the unsceptical reader.

Idle Hands is Published by Agora Books on 23/7/20.

Book Review of The Resident by David Jackson

This is a compelling tale of Thomas Brogan, a self-described “serial killer” who is, technically speaking, more of a spree killer. Despite the somewhat nightmarish content, it is strangely easy to read, which is a bit disturbing in itself.

The main plot device is a row of terraced houses with interconnecting loft spaces, and this works very well and is quite plausible, because I can remember a junior school classmate who exploited just such a situation to commit his own little crime spree: in that case, the long row of 1960s terraced houses had a communal loft space which gave access to the tops of stud walls all the way along. My classmate exploited this situation to steal all sorts of things from all sorts of places, and hide them by tying bits of string to each valuable item and hanging them down inside the stud walls, where even police searches of the loft failed to find them. The masterplan was ruined, however, when one of the stolen items proved to be an alarm clock, which my classmate neglected to disarm before lowering it into its hiding place.

These communal loft spaces predictably turned out to be a lethal fire risk, however, especially in more modern terraces with stud walls as described above, and local councils made efforts to get them all fire-walled in the seventies and eighties. So it is also quite plausible that such a loft-space would be partitioned in the course of the story. I am not sure if any still exist in England, in fact: they may do, but they shouldn’t, for reasons that have nothing to do with serial killers.

The story is narrated largely by Brogan arguing with a voice in his own head, which lays the back story out nicely.

However, the one fault with this novel is that the author allows himself to fall into the trap of thinking that the back story of a serial killer has to include a real-life horror scene of some kind, for them to want to inflict similar horrors on others. This isn’t necessarily true. Often, the actual triggers are so banal that investigators think they must have missed something more significant. The biggest risk is not a horror scene in early childhood: young children undoubtedly suffer from such experiences, but without being turned into monsters. What creates the monsters is instability at home affecting male children between nine and eleven years old, or children in that age range being subjected to unremedied bullying in any setting. The lack of remedy or resolution matters, and the absence of a stable, preferably loving, relationship with a male parent or authority figure. This is not meant to be an attack on single Mums, it is an observation that absent or abusive fathers or carers can create threats to society as a whole. The author gets this bit pretty much right, but only after he’s put in the seemingly obligatory nightmare scene in early childhood, which confuses the issue.

There is a good surprise ending to the book. 

The Resident by David Jackson is published by Serpent’s Tail/Profile Books on 16/7/2020

Book Review of The Phone Box at the Edge of the World by Laura Imai Messina

This is an excellent novel about a community forming around a Japanese garden -and a phone box- that allows the bereaved to talk to those whom they have lost. None of the modern Western cliches: “closure”, “coming to terms”, “moving on” or the new one: “life affirming” really apply. Japanese people do not move on from dead loved ones, nor do they wish to close them off from their present and future lives and, instead of coming to terms with their loss, they communicate with those they have lost and, in this novel, those whom they have gained.

The setting is between a terrible Tsunami and a massive Typhoon, but some of the bereavements are the consequence of individual illness or accident, including a stupid accident. One of them isn’t strictly speaking a bereavement at all. There is an extraordinary amount of kindness and respect in this book and there is no religious exclusivity: the characters are interested in each other’s insights regardless of where they get them from. I commend this book to all readers; atheists may have to work at it to some extent, but the small effort involved will be worth it.

The Phone Box at the Edge of the World is published on 25/6/2020 by Manilla Press.

Book Review of Dark Waters by G.R. Halliday

Scottish Noir isn’t as well defined in the public consciousness as Nordic Noir but most people will know when they see it, especially when they read this book. Someone once wrote in The Guardian (it must have been Nancy Banks-Smith) apropos of a BBC wildlife documentary, that a Scottish Wildcat was a Tabby with knuckledusters. G.R. Halliday is sort of John Fowles with knuckledusters, even though no actual knuckleduster is referenced in the text. The author is properly Scottish and there would be Hell to pay if an English author wrote Scottish characters quite like this.

Everyone is flawed and taboos of all sorts are broken, though not trivial ones. A Scottish biker-gang leader widely believed to be responsible for a Manson-family type double murder proves to be one of the more helpful characters which the heroine, Detective Inspector Monica Kennedy, encounters. Tension is maintained throughout and the police find that the available leads do not build a case so much as a nightmare. Even once the heroine knows what is actually going on, she is consigned to helplessness by the situation she uncovers. And some matters remain unresolved. Perhaps for future novels, perhaps forever.

This is a good and compelling read, but it is unlikely that Tourism Scotland are going to happily endorse it for sale in souvenir shops and there are shocks as well as mysteries, and some very disturbing ideas and images are conveyed by the text. Spike Milligan couldn’t think of a fate worse than death: G.R. Halliday has a brave and bold try at inventing one.

Dark Waters is published by Random House, Vintage Publishing on 16/7/2020

Covid-19 and Genetic Engineering by Environmental Manipulation

As far as possible, the blog author intends that his readers should assimilate a few ideas and arrive at their own conclusions.

Several authorities have stated that the virus responsible for Covid-19, SARS-CoV2, has "not been genetically engineered." In the first of the videos linked to below, an authoritative scientific figure states that there is no evidence to support that conclusion. What he actually means is: the authorities who made this statement, very early on in the history of the current pandemic, had grounds only for saying that there was no evidence of the sort of gene-splicing that is the layman's and journalist's primary concept of genetic engineering. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, but that's not quite the point. The real point is that there are at least two ways of manipulating the genetic make-up of viruses that do not require any direct gene splicing, therefore they will not leave any of the signatures that the various scientific authorities piously looked for.

One method is a variation on the sort of environmental selective breeding that has, over many years, created many different breeds of sheep, suited to different parts of the United Kingdom. Essentially, you dump a herd down in a new environment and keep breeding from it in that environment. If the environment is harsh and lacking in food, sooner or later your sheep will become small, tough and agile (like Soay Sheep), to make the best of what they've got. On the other hand, take a herd of Suffolk sheep who have grown large to suit a more comfortable and frankly lush East Anglian environment and move them to even better pastures in Bedfordshire, and they will grow bigger still in less than a hundred years. Nobody is directly controlling what the sheep shall become: the sheep's own survival and fertility rate is doing that. A sheep generation is only a few years, but even a few weeks could represent an awful lot of virus generations.

To make a virus adapt itself to a new host, it is only really necessary to inject blood from an infected animal at the peak of its infectivity, into several animals of a different species. Then, samples of blood are taken from those animals that actually become infected (it might well only be one to start with), not at peak infectivity but at the point where the animal's immune system is close to getting rid of the virus altogether. Because that is when you are most likely to come across viruses which have a degree of adaptation to the new species. You then take samples from that animal and inject them into more animals of the same species. And you can go on doing this at regular intervals, dependent on the immune response of the new species. Four weeks would be a realistic interval, apparently. The virus will keep on mutating for as long as you care to do this, but the mutations will only survive as long as they better adapt the virus to its new host species. Eventually, and it might take several months or a couple of years rather than a century, the virus will cease to change significantly with each repetition: it will have stabilised in its new host species. By all accounts, SARS-CoV2 does not seem to be mutating all that fast in humans, which would rather suggest that it was already stabilised in humans before it escaped into the wild. (This could be circumstantial evidence for a serious breach of medical ethics by someone or other.)

Another method, which also leaves no trace of artificial gene-splicing, is to create hybrid viruses by infecting one animal (or tissue sample in this case) of the species you have adapted your virus/es to, with two viruses of the same family at once. They will inevitably swap genetic material (RNA rather than DNA with many viruses) and the main work will be infecting a few more test animals or cultures to separate out the different hybrids and selecting the ones you want, much as in the first method above.

A painstaking application and appropriate combination of these two simple methods is all that would be necessary to achieve the sort of novel virus creation being discussed by the professor in the first video, below.

These two videos are not connected with each other in any place other than this blog (by the time of publication at least!) and the two content creators have nothing to do with each other. There are thousands of other videos out there on related subjects, but if you watch these two videos one after the other, with the first one (and the methods described above) still in your mind, you might start having ideas...

Blogger no longer allows YouTube videos to be simply embedded. This means you may have to skip adverts to get to the actual videos.

Here is a link to the first video, by Sky News in Australia.

Here is a link to the second video, by the YouTuber Laowhy86.

He has lived in China for a decade and is fluent in Chinese. 

The other answer to "how can a virus like SARS-CoV2 be created?" is: "by accident, or at least by a series of deliberate actions that were meant to have another outcome."

Because SARS-CoV2 appears to have no cardinal virtues, other than being unusually well-adapted to binding to the human ACE-2 receptor described in the first video. A biological weapon would need to be much more lethal than this: most victims are not even incapacitated for more than a few days and some infected people are not incapacitated at all! A biological weapon is also rarely created without some way of shielding the creator's own population, which seems to be what's missing here. 

It does not appear to manipulate the victim's DNA as other viruses (notably HIV) are known to do. In fact, binding to ACE-2 receptors on cell membranes in the lungs and blood vessels is pretty much all that it does: it even reproduces without necessarily damaging the nucleus of the infected cell! The life-threatening symptoms all seem to be related either to the effect that binding itself has on the normal functions of the cells concerned, or to an over-reaction of the immune system to the presence of the virus. (This would explain why vitamin-D seems to help: vitamin D helps the body's  immune system to modulate its own responses.)

With regard to the potential breach of ethics. The blog author published (nearly two years ago) a carefully-researched novel "The Lord of Billionaires' Row", which, amongst many other ideas, tried to convey, through adventure fiction, that at least some factions within the Chinese Communist Party see no value in individuals who fail to conform to their ideology and obey their rule, other than the value of the assets that can be forcibly confiscated from them, which even extend to bodily organs which can be harvested and sold for their value on the illegal transplant organ market. If you can take that idea on board, you have within your grasp an understanding of how the SARS-CoV2 virus appears to have come into the world from an unknown animal host (the professor in the first interview took a proper look at bats and pangolins and it wasn't either of those), already exceptionally well-adapted to binding onto specifically human ACE-2 receptors. 

A recurring theme in Chinese medical research and medicine-marketing is longevity. There is a search for an elixir of youth that Western medical research largely dismisses as superstition. (In the West, the average lifespan has increased bit by bit as medicine concentrates on cures for specific ways of dying, one by one. This is good enough for Western scientists but perhaps not for others.) The odds are: if the research was generously-funded and done in China, then it was expected one day to extend the lifespans of the elite, rather than kill people. But it wouldn't have mattered if numbers of non-elite people gave their all for the research along the way.

The novel (like this article) is not an exercise in China-bashing, because, for example, it also sets out to show how establishment complacency about the corruption of police officers by UK Organised Crime is now a life and death issue for British democracy, which is going largely unreported, barely debated and is not being opposed in any effective manner. The novel sets out to show that two different political cultures can each create their own unique failure modes. It also shows how corruption in those two different cultures can be working hand in hand, even if minds do not exactly meet!

Book Review of “Against the Loveless World” by Susan Abulhawa.

This is a warm book about bleak situations, ranging from a Palestinian neighbourhood in Kuwait before the Iraqi invasion, through the Iraqi occupation and the return of a now-vengeful Kuwaiti government once the Iraqis were expelled, to a more difficult life in Jordan (a much poorer country than Kuwait) and then a life of knife-edge danger in Palestine itself. The heroine’s only defence against psychopathic treatment is to love those she can. (That’s what separates the sheep from the sociopaths.) The people she loves includes one person who appears to exploit her in a very serious way and another who initially despises her for her (largely misreported) sexual conduct.

Arab and particularly Palestinian culture is shown in loving detail, and this is a necessary antidote to the perceptions that Westerners usually have of Palestine, which is a dusty impact zone for whatever artillery is fired at it. That perception is shaped by journalists feeling they have to “tell the truth” about what seem to be the most important things: such as little boys being shot by Israeli settlers and so on. That needs to be reported, but if it is all you report, then the story you are telling becomes a falsehood, because you are not showing the world what is worthwhile about the culture that is being steadily destroyed. The author isn’t merely trying to show that Palestinian culture is being cruelly destroyed, but that it is well worth saving. That is not really what we get from the “victimology” of social-Marxism, because Marxism in any form seeks to destroy ALL existing culture in order for something “better” to rise from the ashes. (If the fire is hot enough, nothing ever rises from the vitrified ash at all.) Anyone seeking to “help” Palestine on the basis of such victimology is doing the work of the Israeli oppressors for them.

Along the way, the author allows her heroine to realise that if they did not have the Palestinians to oppress, the Israelis would almost certainly kill each other with vigour and enthusiasm. This may be more literally true than even the author realises: during my past attempts to befriend apparently reasonable Israelis, I was surprised and not a little disturbed to discover how just much they loathed Israelis of other persuasions and how much they were hated in return. I would refer readers to the last third or so of “Screwtape Proposes a Toast” by CS Lewis (if they cannot bear to read the whole thing, which is not very long.) This has been Israel’s problem for millennia.

The heroine and other Palestinians are not solely oppressed by the Israelis and Americans, however: they are oppressed by many Kuwaitis (not all, by any means), largely because the Palestinians were exploited by Saddam to supply a tissue of justification for his attempted conquest of Kuwait. The scope of this book does not extend quite to the present day, but the way that the Iranian regime is currently exploiting the Palestinian cause to further its own regional interests is sowing the seeds of further oppression of Palestinians by Arab regimes that the Iranian one seeks to destroy. Where, exactly, is the line drawn between such exploitation and direct oppression? Is there one?

Although this book depicts some inspiring acts of resistance and defiance (not just against the Israelis) it’s pretty clear that these will not create a solution by themselves and are really a form of pleading for some outside force to step in and change the situation. For this to happen, there has to be a change in the attitude and behaviour of several different governments, and for THAT to happen, it has to be possible for people with clean hands to access the top jobs in the countries concerned. As I have tried to make clear in my own work, if you have conventions or even formal systems which prevent persons with clean hands getting to the top (because, you know, you cannot trust anyone with clean hands: they will never do the necessary dirty work) you will be ruled by homicidal sociopaths in perpetuity and they will ALWAYS be able to think of more dirty work that needs doing.

Published by Bloomsbury Publishing 23^rd of July 2020.

Book Review of “The Doors of Eden” by Adrian Tchaikovsky

This is a good novel, but at one point the author succumbs to the temptation to be lazy (perhaps even ignorant) about his political villainy and this is why he misses out on the five star recommendation that he might have got.

It is about parallel worlds, but not necessarily parallel universes because if you travel far enough from Earth after reality has branched, the rest of the universe has not necessarily changed at all. Or, if it has, the changes may be unrelated to any change on Earth.

The novel builds on small ideas to convey bigger ones, which facilitates the suspension of disbelief necessary to its enjoyment. It starts off with a small adventure gone wrong and a mystery, and it also starts off with a pair of young lesbian heroines, which is not a bad thing. (I once wrote a whole series of SF novels about an entire planetary colony of lesbian heroines. Which I wouldn’t get away with doing in the 21^st century as it’s turning out so far.) The parallel worlds theme allows for both adventure and whimsy (there is a world where super-intelligent big cats suborn all other species to their will) and the author has some fun with the attempts of staid MI5 officers to understand the weird. Mystery turns to conspiracy and then existential crisis, for the universe and not just all the parallel Earths. The conspiracy surrounds the character of Daniel Rove, who for most of the novel is convincingly and accurately drawn as a sociopath (and insider-dealing venture-capitalist).

Parties in conflict must be turned, somehow, into a coalition to solve the existential crisis. This happens slightly too easily, really, given how divergent the world views are of people from the alternative worlds. I was disappointed that neither the big cats nor the intelligent bird-man dinosaurs were asked to contribute to the solution. Cat-logic can be brilliant, in its own way.

Despite dealing with parallel Earths, the narrative is mostly sequential until the end is nigh, at which point there are several alternative narratives. There is a good reason for this, though, and it’s not just an attempt to meet an overall “mind-blowing weirdness” target set by a deranged publisher. None of the divergent narratives is a solution to the crisis: the fact that there are divergent narratives is itself the solution, which is not what the coalition of experts solving the crisis want to hear.

It is at this point that the Rove character, hitherto an insider-trader and laissez-faire capitalist, turns into a 21^st century Oswald Mosley, complete with an England-fixation. Of course, in the 21^st century you are not allowed to hate anyone, except racists, so Rove has to have a “racist” placard hung round his neck so the author can decently lynch him.

The real Oswald Mosley was the anti-thesis of a laissez-faire capitalist. He was First Secretary in a Labour Cabinet and he was economically hard left, just like Hitler and Mussolini. The state was to own everything and everyone. He was personally wealthy, but he did not earn any of it, and this is the key to understanding Oswald Mosley. As George Orwell observed of his classmates at Eton, it was extremely common for someone with an expensive education and a socking great trust fund, to be a hard-left socialist. It still is. Most people who have worked for their own bread are sympathetic to the idea that it is a matter of natural justice for people to actually benefit from their own efforts. When you deny that this is so, as Mosley consistently did, and as many Momentum activists do today, then you and the slave-trader become one flesh. Pharaoh, Lenin, Mosley and Hitler were all willing to make people slaves to build their Utopia.

If the Mosley persona is just meant to be shorthand for “appalling racist” then it’s still problematical, because sociopaths are available in both racist and anti-racist versions. The former blatantly try to divide communities to manipulate them, the latter are generally less blatant and this means they actually do more damage, to individual victims and the fabric of society, because their subtle lies can divide brothers and sisters, even husband and wife, in a way that racist lies cannot do.

“The Doors of Eden” is published by Macmillan on the 20^th of August 2020.

Book Review of Love in the Blitz, by Eileen Alexander

The contents of this book might be of interest to a wider readership than it is going to get, due to the title and marketing.

This is a compilation of letters from a young woman to her young man, mostly in wartime, and ordinarily that would relegate it to the “social document” or romance shelves. But Miss Alexander tells her beloved, Gershon Ellenbogen, all sorts of anecdotes from a social circle that included cabinet ministers, senior military officers and captains of industry, as well as important academic figures. Having got a first in English at Cambridge University, Miss Alexander has an endless supply of quotes (often very funny indeed), not only for her letters, but for everyday conversation. Although it was the air raid precautions minister, Sir John Anderson, rather than her studies, who supplied her with “shut that book, Mary and pay attention to the air-raid.”

She admires the Labour politician Arthur Greenwood, who “spoke for England” in September 1939 when urged to do so by Conservative backbencher Leo Amery. (Less publicly, it was Greenwood, too, who swung Churchill’s cabinet behind Churchill and fighting on after the disasters of 1940. Greenwood’s position being that Britain did not have any choice other than fighting on, because any deal done with Hitler at that stage would be hugely disadvantageous from the outset and very easily broken at any moment that suited the Nazis. As Vichy France soon found out, on both counts.)

Her first wartime job is to work as third PA (which she translates as “Public Adorer”) to the Secretary of State for War, Leslie Hore-Belisha, another historical figure who perhaps deserves more attention than he gets. There is an irony here, because the book opens with Miss Alexander in hospital recovering from a road traffic accident, in which Gershon was driving -and the law he fell foul of was probably introduced by Leslie when he was Transport Secretary.

She is less fond of Michael Foot, who was still a prominent politician in my own lifetime, with a habit of rubbing an awful lot of people up the wrong way but occasionally putting into words what the nation thought and felt, as at the outbreak of the Falklands War. When, as editor of the Evening Standard, Foot responds to the King of Denmark’s announcement that he and the Royal Family would all proudly wear the Star of David (in response to the German occupiers imposing this on Danish Jews), Miss Alexander is impressed and thinks that Foot’s call for the world to show their appreciation of the Jewish contribution to world culture, came from deep conviction.

She also makes friends with Orde and Lorna Wingate, telling Gershon that Captain Wingate is a genius who will either be court-martialled or promoted to general (in a later letter she substitutes “Field Marshal”) and that would equate with what many people expected of him at the time. But she also shows great empathy with Lorna Wingate, who shares her own anguish at not being with the man she loves, only it’s worse for Lorna because her man is famously leading prolonged operations deep behind Japanese lines. To study Miss Alexander’s social circle is to study history in the making, so this collection of letters is not just a love story.

To some in the 21^st century, Miss Alexander’s standards of sexual conduct will seem antiquated if not absurd, but she sees a reality here: that women who try to exercise unusual sexual or social freedom are at risk of ending up in the hands of predatory men best described in modern idiom as “sociopaths”. This happens several times in her own 1940s social circle and I’ve known it to happen to several 21^st century women of my acquaintance. Some of the abusive conduct she describes would be outrageous and indeed criminal, even now, and it might provide some food for thought. (Modern studies suggest that as many as 9% of the male population are sociopaths and that proportion is not inconsistent with the number of Miss Alexander’s female friends who come to grief.)

Love in the Blitz is published by William Collins on the 30^th of April 2020

Book review of “Chassepot to FAMAS” French Military Rifles 1866-2016

“Chassepot to FAMAS” French Military Rifles 1866-2016

(English-language reference and popular history.)

This is the first book from the author, Ian McCollum, who is a mechanical engineer and firearms historian with both a popular blog and an equally popular YouTube Channel. (Proving the old adage that mechanical engineers study weapons and civil engineers study -and build- targets.)

Yann Carcaillon and Jonathan Ferguson are also contributors, James Rupley did the majority of the (uniformly excellent) technical photography, and the Editor was N.R Jenzen Jones. Following its crowd-funded launch, this book is published by Headstamp Publishing (2019) and is now available from them at this link.

This is a collector’s reference book and also a more popular history book on a slightly niche subject, which has already aroused sufficent widespread interest to justify itself. It is well-crafted in every sense of the word, in that it functions well as a reference book in addition to being absorbing to simply read through, and although the gilt page edges are unusual in a book of this nature (the crowd-funding was very successful indeed) in general the money has been spent on practical quality and durability rather than cosmetics, which is exactly what one might expect from a military firearms historian.

A reference book is only as good as the index and this one shows signs of careful thought rather than computer-driven auto-assembly. Some books this size have a forty-page index, this is four pages but, coupled with the way the actual text flows, you can use it to navigate to the section of text, if not an individual page, which should answer your questions. The index does not reference inside the data tables (it would drive everyone potty if it did), but these follow a standard format throughout and once you’ve found the one you want in one chapter, it’ll be in an identical form in a similar place in another. The book has its own logic in some ways, but it sticks to this consistently. Copious endnotes for each chapter are also a possible bane of reference works and here there are very few. Nearly everything the reader needs to know is in the text itself and doesn’t need an explanatory note. The chapter on the FR series precision rifles has exactly one endnote.

Most chapters contain some peripheral material: a one-page history of a particular arsenal, or a short article on a gun falling outside the main scope of the book but perhaps a parallel development to the main subject of the chapter. Some of these are written by the contributors. It is possible to skip these, but I found that they didn’t really break my concentration on the main issue of any particular chapter: rather, they added a bit of context. So I found the best thing to do was to take them in my stride as I read.

There is plenty of tabular data, which is what the specialist gun collectors will be here for, but it is presented at the point in the story of each rifle where someone reading out of a more general interest might also benefit from it. This isn’t going to do the collectors any actual harm.

Other information is available in a handful of appendices, such as directors of the various arsenals through the period covered by the book, or details of the cartridges used.

NB: cartridges are dealt with in a way consistent with a general historical approach and nowhere is there anything resembling loading data! Given the age and extremely varied condition of most of the rifles under discussion, publishing detailed data of this nature would be a pitfall rather than a public service. There is some guidance on decoding the headstamps for 7.5x54mm ammunition, however: this is published by Headstamp Publishing, after all!

Review Copyright (c) Matthew K. Spencer 23^rd of March 2020. Updated 19th of December 2020.