Michael Burleigh

Hunger

Friday 7th November 2008
Today's Guardian has a brilliant review of 'Hunger', the latest British film to sentimentalise the murderers of Provisional IRA/Sinn Fein. See here http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/filmblog/2008/nov/03/hunger-bobby-sands. No need to see the movie after reading this outstanding piece. I'd recommend Gomorrah instead. It is the polar opposite of every Hollywood gangster movie. The public housing is unbelievably squalid, the countryside polluted with toxic waste dumped on behalf of northern industrialists, and even haut couture is not free of the Commora's attentions. The fate of the Chinese sweat shop owner who tries to sneak into the trade is chillingly instructive. Although the Commora make 500,000 Euros a day just from drugs, none of the bosses in the film lead enviable lives. They are huge thugs with gold chains and fake tans, living in shabby flats and unremarkable suburban homes. One of them has the sort of artificial voice box of someone with throat cancer. At the end of the movie the makers noted that 4,000 people have been murdered in Naples by these criminals. That's more than the death toll from the Troubles in Northern Ireland. I suspect that the Provos more properly resemble the men shown in this film than they do the haloed characters of every British movie about the Troubles. Great that Gomorrah is tipped to win the best foreign film Oscar. Perhaps Hollywood will think again before it sentimentalises Irish murderers too.
2:42 pm
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COMMENTS

Will
November 10th, 2008
7:11 PM
Terrorism seems to fall into two main categories. Intellectuals or pseudo-intellectuals who combine grandiose schemes for human transformation with a taste for violence and contempt for actual people, and then violent types who see terrorism as a career path preferable to cutting bacon or the like. The latter groups indicates how fine a line there is between ordinary criminals and political ones. The IRA and UDF seem like the Crips and Bloods or Cammorra with a veneer of mission. Your discussion above prompts this conclusion

mburleigh
November 11th, 2008
10:11 AM
Yes Will. Always recall that Andreas Baader's favourite reading was Mickey Mouse comics rather than Marx. Unfortunately BBC news reported last night that Continuity and Real IRA are re-tooling and retraining, with a perceptible increase in violence in the Province. At the moment it seems to involve burning vehicles or burned out Loyalist halls, but I suspect it they will graduate to killing policemen soon.

Will
November 12th, 2008
11:11 PM
It will be interesting--and not very much fun--to see how the dynamics of poltical terrorism and organized crime merge. Veronica Guerin may be as much a harbinger as the folks in Northern Ireland about whom you've written. Just as terrorists lurch towards crime, I wonder whether some criminals will grap for political justifications. The Commorra often had vague political ties, or at least their 19th century antecdents did. Will ethnic gangs in Western societies that define themselves against the host cutlture pick up this too? Not things we're supposed to talk about in the age of tolerance and brotherhood.

mburleigh
November 14th, 2008
5:11 PM
A very good C4 Despatches programme called Jail to Jihad dealt with this complex of issues. Radical imams were licensing them to rob the 'kuffar'. Veronica Guerin is one of my favourite films with its sudden shifts between the plangency of the Emerald Isle and psychotic violence.

Jeremy Wilkinson-
November 17th, 2008
4:11 PM
Prof Burleigh You ought to be ashamed of yourself for praising Cox's review. The man clearly is proud to advertise that he fantasises about torturing people - something he thinks "just". Do you support torture (and no ticking time bomb absurdities available here)? And, lest we forget, Bobby Sands was never convicted of killing anyone - merely possessing firearms. One doesn't have to support the IRA (I don't their activites were disgusing and all perpetrators deserved very hefty prison sentences) to be disgusted by Mr Cox. Do you only support torture for terrorists? How about torture for those who launch unjust wars, abortionists etc.? Or should you perhaps, as a public intellectual, rethink your endorsements. Torturing people is not "conservative" - it is a blatant attack on the moral values which keep us civilised. If you want to overturn them join the revolutionaries you abhor. btw way, in case you ask, I abhor terrorism and suicidal hunger strikes. I can't see that Mr Cox can consistently abhor such things given the contempt for human dignity he displays in his articles. I expect more from you.

mburleigh
November 17th, 2008
6:11 PM
No I don't support torture and have written quite a lot attacking its use (see Daily Mail). I didn't make as much as you of Mr Cox's fantasies of violence against the Shinners- who, he should have pointed out, routinely practiced torture against their own dissidents, not to speak of druggies and delinquents in so-called 'republican communities'. The review appealed to me because of its lambasting of Hollywood sentimentalisation of the Oirish- a trait all too evident in what passes for a contemporary British film industry.

Jeremy Wilkinson
November 19th, 2008
4:11 PM
Thank you for the rejoinder. I vaguely remember your opposition to torture, which is probably why I found the fawning ("brilliant") over Cox's nasty piece somewhat distressing. As to sentimentalising etc. - agreed - but why didn't Cox just leave it at that? Perhaps he was influenced in his thuggery by the sentimentality of the "War on Terror" and superpower self-pity which is the mirror image of terrorist prima donnas and grinning nihilists. Or maybe it was the constant celebration of torture that the US pumps out in shows like "24" where a torturing barbaric cop is portrayed as an utterly necessary and heroic defender of the civilised world. I suspect Cox won't be condemning such dangerous (and significantly more dangerous than Hunger) drivel anytime soon. Come to think of it...

mburleigh
November 20th, 2008
9:11 AM
I agree completely about 24 and gave up watching it pretty quickly. Ironically, people say it played a role in the 'normalisation' of Obama in the sense of showing a sympathetic African-American president. I have written elsewhere that it also 'normalised' torture, using utterly specious 'ticking bomb' scenarios, which only exist in moral philosophy seminars rather than in real life. There has been one, and just one, instance of such a thing, involving a German detective who threatened to torture a suspect who had a girl hanging in a drain who was very likely to die. The detective didn;t actually touch the suspect who confessed her whereabouts. She was already dead; the detective was prosecuted. Such is real life.

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