Posts Tagged ‘War’
Stop the War Coalition holds ‘Trade Union’ Conference.
Meeting addressed by, amongst others, top Trade Unionist Salma Yaqoob, Leader of the Respect Party from 2005 until 2012, representing the party on Birmingham City Council.
Watch out for the Ideological State Apparatus!
The Event the World is Waiting for: Stop the War’s ‘Festive’ Fun ‘Fundraiser’.
Love Island: Crop Circles, Snapshot Humour, Stalin ate my Political Brains, Counterfire Clowns, Up with Skool! and more...
And just like that…It’s the most wonderful time of the year again!
To celebrate we’d like to invite you to Stop the War’s annual Festive Fundraiser! Join stars of stage and screen and friends of the movement for an evening of anti-war entertainment hosted by the fantastic Steve Parry.
This event will be online once again to bring some festive cheer directly to your homes, across the UK and internationally!
Joining this year’s Xmas bash line-up is Mark Rylance, Stella Assange, Alexei Sayle, Claudia Webbe, Don Biswas, Lindsey German, Shareefa Energy and more! And of course, it wouldn’t be the Stop the War Xmas celebration without our famous auction hosted by Kevin Courtney.
From Dogged Newshound, Paul.
Enjoy!
Sub Culture. The Many Lives of the Submarine. John Medhurst. Review.
Sub Culture The Many Lives of the Submarine. John Medhurst Reaktion Books.
“I can imagine the foundations of nautical towns, cluster of submarine houses, which like Nautilus, ascend every morning to breath air at the surface of the water, free towns, independent cities.”.Captain Nemo, John Medhurst continues, made a “cry for a radical ecological alternative” in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. But while “fictional eco-warriers” have yet to appear in the flesh and take to the depths of the oceans, militaristic visions of the future of underwater warfare are anchored in fact. Submarine fleets, a sought-after sign of superpower status, are owned by Iran, South Korea, India, Turkey and Israel, beyond the expected Cold War players, although the second division has, for more the moment, disel-electric rather than the nuclear-powered vessels of the top tier. A coming generation of full automated submarines could be used to explore an “ice free artic” for “sub-sea extraction of oil and gas” which may contribute further to “escalating climate change and have disastrous long-term consequences.”
“In 332 BCE Alexander the Great is reported to have descended into the Aegean Sea in a glass sphere to observe aquatic life”. Sub Culture ranges from imaginative fiction, if the report of the Greek Conqueror’s exploration be considered fabulous, to explore the “story of the submarine”. It covers its “representation in pulp, mainstream literature, “popular and esoteric art and film” and its history from the American civil war to the present, “at the centre of modern history and international politics.”
Few narratives are more intentionally arcane than the H.P. Lovecraft story, The Temple (1925). The Manuscript of Karl Heinrich, Graf von Altberg-Ehrenstein, Lieutenant-Commander in the Imperial German Navy and in charge of the submarine U-29, ends with his discovery on the ocean floor of a ruined temple, his “awe at a culture in the full noon of glory when cave-dwellers roamed Europe and the Nile flowed unwatched to the sea”, and, calling him to his death, a “madness-inspired impulse to depart the U-boat”. Medhurst says that Lovecraft “hints” it is the “infamous corpse-city of R’lyeh” Tomb of the Older God Cthulhu”. Yet few books, he indicates, rival the “immersive realism” “of Lothar-Günther Buchheim’s 1973 Das Boot, a “masterpiece of world literature” and “honest story of ordinary men in appalling circumstances and surviving as best they can”. The 1981 film by Wolfgang Peterson, “creates a new way of experiencing the submarine” with a crew “that is hot, unshaven, seating and afraid.” Submarine activity in the two World Wars does not lend itself to heroics. The “claustrophobic hothouse of periscopes, sonar, torpedoes, depth charges” – the impression left by the film and no doubt the series that has followed, with Season Three to be released this year, focuses on the submariners. Their combat was centred on “attacking civilian and merchant vessels without warning.”
Sub Culture delves into the less memorable world of thrillers, the politically charged The Hunt for Red October (1984), “literally political propaganda”. This “military techno-thriller” and film, which perhaps like many this reviewer has steadfastly avoided reading of seeing, despite many, if not more, opportunities on television, involved, we learn, a potential Soviet First Strike from a Nuclear submarine against the US. Medhurst compares this, and more recent calls to day to boost to military sending, to pre-Great War novels warning against looming German military threat. Efforts by the US military to justify its spending, a need accelerated by the collapse of the Soviet Union, continue at present. The drive for Full Spectrum Dominance onwards, we finish up with present day escalation of marine armoury.
“In March 2021 Boris Johnson’s Conservative government announced an increase in the total number of the UK’s stockpiled Trident nuclear warheads for the first time since the height of the Cold War.” Other countries have also invested in a “new generation of submarines and their warheads”, France, Australia, the USA, China and Russia have engaged in this build up. “in February 2022 Russian submarines entered the Black Sea ti support Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.” With “military escalation, populist nationalism, and a “naïve belief”, that sees the “the nuclear submarine as a dazzling display of red-hot technological prowess and disguising the genocidal nature of it weaponry” some may come to think that a “nuclear war is winnable.”
Sub Culture is an impressive work. Although living within short distance from the East Anglian coast of the North Sea, a “submarine graveyard”, I, as with most people, easily ignore most of the history and importance of submarines. For all readers this book opens up a whole world with insights about something “rarely seen whole”: the submarine, whose “active self is a hidden thing, moving through the deep and waiting for its moment.”
John Medhurst ends with a call to revive the spirit of E. P. Thompson and European Nuclear Disarmament (END) in order to re-create that kind of open internationalist alliance against the nuclear arms race and the threat that nuclear submarines pose to the “biosphere and all life upon it.” One might observe that forces with that moral authority and political clarity remain, at present, hidden under the water.
Tendance Coatesy 