Latest news with #Blackshirts
The Citizen
15-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Citizen
When clothes speak louder than words
From boarding school khakis to MAGA-red caps, clothes often carry meanings that go far beyond the wardrobe. Growing up, the phrase 'the clothes maketh the man' was an injunction to eschew jeans for chinos and T-shirts in favour of collared shirts. There's a lot of truth to it; try getting an upgrade on a flight when you're in slops, PT shorts and a slogan T-shirt, versus a suit and tie, or going to the boss to wheedle an increase. But just as the clothes we wear tell the world a little about who we want to be seen as, we've got to be careful of being condemned by association. For a while in the '80s, khaki clothing – the old tough cotton pants and button-up shirts beloved of farmers and boarding school pupils alike, was rendered toxic because of its association with rightwing extremism. The Brits had Oswald Mosley's Blackshirts; the Germans had Ernst Rohm's Sturmabteilung Brownshirts. South Africa had Eugene TerreBlanche's AWB in khaki. As a journalist in the early '90s, it was a strict rule not to go out on assignment wearing military surplus clothing, lest you be mistaken for a member of the security forces. At the same time, many of us writer types wanted to be mistaken as cool press photographers and deliberately wore the sleeveless cotton and canvas gilets loved by fishermen, hunters – and press photographers stuffing their lenses into pockets that normally took shotgun shells. ALSO READ: Gold and Glamour: Masango by Siphosihle dazzles at the Hollywoodbets Durban July It marked those of us who did it as poseurs in the newsroom and earned us the derision of our seniors, who literally had been there and done that without seeing the need to get the T-shirt, but it was harmless – and most of us outgrew it. Not all articles of clothing are so forgiving. Shemaghs and keffiyehs can be problematic for the unwitting: the Saudis and Emiratis wear red checked ones – while the black checked version has become synonymous with the Palestinian cause. Red hats are another, thanks to the unfailing efforts of Donald Trump's drive to Make America Great Again. I was wearing a red British and Irish Lions cap, of the exact shape and hue popularised by the tariff king, out on a walk last week when a passer-by looked me up and down witheringly. He shook his head pityingly. 'Xha! Sorry for you, né!' he said. It took 10 years for my khaki wardrobe to be socially acceptable again. Hopefully the radioactive half-life on my Lions' cap will be a lot less. NOW READ: Gold and Glamour: Masango by Siphosihle dazzles at the Hollywoodbets Durban July
Daily Mail
19-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
CHRISTOPHER STEVENS reviews Outrageous: This Downton Abbey with added fascism is frightfully unconvincing
How odd that no one can do a 1930s BBC accent any more. Any performer who attempts it sounds like Mr Cholmondley-Warner, the plummy twit from Harry Enfield's sketch show. The pre-war radio announcements in Outrageous sound like stilted send-ups. It's almost as though actors harbour a subconscious fear that, if they mimic those patrician tones too perfectly, people will imagine they are also imbued with the snobbish, class-ridden attitudes of the times. How frightful! Sadly, the dialogue is as unconvincing as the accents in this six-part period drama, a sort of Downton Abbey with added fascism. Beginning in 1931, and set in the gilded world of the British aristocracy, all country houses and glittering debutante dances, it's the story of the six ultra-privileged Mitford sisters. Joanna Vanderham plays the most famous of them, socialite Diana, who dumps her fabulously rich husband Brian Guinness to run off with the leader of the Blackshirts (Joshua Sasse). With the six young women, their parents and a brother, plus various chums all requiring introductions, screenwriter Sarah Williams relies on captions reminding us of their names. The producers have taken the trouble to put together a press pack for journalists, including a family tree with more than 25 names across four generations, that looks like the wiring diagram for Blackpool illuminations. Since viewers don't have that cribsheet, the characters constantly have to tell each other who they are. At one cocktail party, man-with-toothbrush-moustache approaches woman-with-tiara-glued-to-her-forehead and announces: 'Mrs Guinness? Oswald Mosley. Everyone calls me Tom.' Sadly, the dialogue is as unconvincing as the accents in this six-part period drama, a sort of Downton Abbey with added fascism Beginning in 1931, and set in the gilded world of the British aristocracy, all country houses and glittering debutante dances, it's the story of the six ultra-privileged Mitford sisters She blushes and demurs: 'I don't think we've been . . .' 'Introduced?' he adds helpfully. A voiceover is supplied by the oldest of the sisters, Nancy (Bessie Carter), who was a comic novelist with an acid turn of phrase — a sort of P.G. Wodehouse with a nasty streak. The real Nancy M. would have been mortified to have leaden lines like this foisted on her: 'This was the calm before the storm but, in a few short years, all hell would indeed break loose, and not just for my family but for the world.' If you're happy just to watch for the sumptuous sets and fabulous costumes, the sheer look of the thing does go some way to redeem this show. Turn the sound down and you could almost be seeing outtakes from Brideshead. But it's impossible to believe in this 21st-century version of the Mitfords. Vanderham in particular seems desperate to hold her character at arm's length, as though she's ashamed of playing the part. And Nancy's reluctant boyfriend, Hamish Erskine (James Musgrave) was once described as, 'like a kingfisher — all colour and sparkle and courage'. All we get is an insipid campness, like Mr Humphries fending off the attentions of Miss Brahms on Are You Being Served? 'Ground floor: perfumerie, stationery, Nazi salutes . . . going up!'
New Statesman
18-06-2025
- Politics
- New Statesman
Living by the sword
'T his will go down in history,' said Israel's prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, in his wartime press conference on 16 June. 'What we're saying today, I must say – as a son of a historian,' he continued, 'will go down not only in the annals of our nation, but also in the history of humanity.' Netanyahu's mention of his historian father was not a meaningless aside, but the reflection of the deep influence that his father's ideology, conceptions of Jewishness and world history, and ideas about power and powerlessness, continue to exert over his decision-making. Indeed, Israel's current war against Iran owes it shape, at least in part, to Netanyahu the elder's world-view, to which the son has always seen himself as faithful. Netanyahu is not a religious man. He does not observe the Sabbath or follow a strict kosher diet. Perhaps he does not believe in God. But he does believe in history – that the history of Jews has its own course and logic (perpetual, existential danger), and that Jews are meant to serve as an example to the Judaeo-Christian West (as a healthy nation willing to fight and die for its sovereignty). He did not merely come to these ideas on his own. He inherited them. Benzion Netanyahu, who died in 2012 aged 102, was a scholar of the Spanish Inquisition and, no less significant, an uncompromising right-wing ideologue. As a young man he served as secretary to Vladimir (Ze'ev) Jabotinsky, the charismatic leader of the militant but secular Revisionist Zionists, whose adherents hoped to claim both sides of the Jordan River for a Jewish state. Some within the Revisionist ranks drew inspiration from the authoritarian Sanacja movement of Piłsudski's interwar Poland and the Blackshirts of Mussolini's fascist Italy. In his best-known historical work, The Origins of the Inquisition in Fifteenth Century Spain, Benzion Netanyahu controversially claimed that the Inquisition was not only, or even primarily, aimed at rooting out vestigial Jewish observance among the Marranos (Jews whose ancestors had been forced to convert to Christianity), but constituted the invention of the racial anti-Semitism that would reach its exterminationist terminus under Nazism. Born under tsarist rule in today's Poland, Benzion possessed a dark and pessimistic view of the world and the place of the Jews within it. 'Jewish history,' he once told the New Yorker editor David Remnick, 'is in large measure a history of holocausts.' Benjamin Netanyahu, the family's middle child, has made this catastrophic world-view his own. He has also largely adhered to his father's ideological legacy. In the early 1990s, he rose to national political prominence as the fresh face of the right-wing Likud Party and opponent of the Oslo Accords and the dovish Yitzhak Rabin's Labor-led government. For nearly his entire political career, Netanyahu has aimed to prevent the creation of a Palestinian state. Indeed, it has been one of the central animating goals of his life. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe But while Netanyahu is a territorial-maximalist, he is not a messianist. The radical, religious West Bank settlers, with whom Netanyahu has found common cause, believe that the Palestinian dilemma can be solved (or eliminated) through an apocalyptic conflagration that would lead to the expulsion of the Palestinians from all the territory under Israel's control and end, they hope, with the dawning of the Messianic Age. Lately, Netanyahu has embraced some of the religious right's rhetoric: the idea of 'transferring' Palestinians out of Gaza; referring to Hamas as 'Amalek', after the biblical Israelites' enemy, whom they are told by God to wipe out. But this reflects domestic realpolitik more than genuine conviction. Instead, Netanyahu has tended towards a kind of brutal realism. Rather than the settlers' preference for a 'decisive' eschatological rupture, his preferred approach is an indefinite and, if necessary, eternal war of attrition. 'I am asked if we will live forever by the sword,' Netanyahu once said in 2015. His answer is 'yes'. He does not consider the Palestinians a real people deserving of national self-determination. He remains convinced that, after enough oppression, devastation, punishment and humiliation, they will surrender their dreams of freedom, and if not, that they can be subjugated in perpetuity. It is this logic that, in part, accounts for the way Israel's criminal destruction of Gaza has been executed – and why Netanyahu has refused any postwar arrangement that would allow for independent Palestinian self-governance. In his 1993 book, A Place Among the Nations, Benjamin Netanyahu sketched out his theory of machtpolitik, which has guided his successive administrations for more than 15 years. And while in the realm of domestic politics Netanyahu is known for his flagrant mendacity, when it comes to geopolitics, he has been rather more consistent. According to his strategic vision, military might is the only guarantee of security. 'The only peace that will endure in the region,' he writes, 'is the peace of deterrence.' There is, in other words, no such thing as real peace; there is only preparation for the next round of fighting. Or as he put it, 'ending the state of war is a must, but that will not end the possibility of a future war'. For Netanyahu, Israel's only way to guarantee its survival is to maintain overwhelming military supremacy such that it can threaten any potential rival with outright defeat. Weakness, it follows, is an existential threat. 'If you lack the power to protect yourself,' Netanyahu writes, 'it is unlikely that in the absence of a compelling interest anyone else will be willing to do it for you.' It is here that echoes of his father's world-view can also be heard: the experience of the Jewish people in the 20th century – specifically, the destruction of European Jewry during the Holocaust – is taken as proof that defencelessness is a death sentence while sympathy is much less an insurance policy than the force of arms. The world stood by idly when the Nazis sent Europe's Jews to the gas chambers; there is no reason to expect that, were the Jewish state to find its survival jeopardised, the world would act differently this time. Such a view is widely shared in Israel and has been almost since its establishment. It was a pillar of Israeli defence strategy many years before Netanyahu came to power. It is the reason why Israel sought nuclear weapons of its own, and why it has acted unilaterally on many occasions to destroy the military capabilities of other states it sees as threats to its survival. In 1981, for instance, Israeli fighter jets destroyed the Osirak nuclear reactor located deep in Saddam Hussein's Iraq. The success of the operation gave rise to 'the Begin Doctrine' – after the prime minister Menachem Begin, Jabotinsky's successor as leader of the Revisionist movement, who authorised the strike (and who came to power in 1977 in Israel's first transition of power from left to right). Begin vowed that in the future Israel would carry out pre-emptive attacks to stop any enemy state from gaining nuclear capabilities. In 2007, under Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, Israeli warplanes bombed a suspected nuclear reactor in Bashar al-Assad's Syria. Israeli leaders have warned for years that Iran was next on the list. In 2012, Netanyahu appeared before the United Nations General Assembly and brandished a cartoon to illustrate his claim that Iran's enrichment levels were approaching those necessary for a nuclear weapon. Over the subsequent decade, Netanyahu warned many times that a nuclear-armed Iran would constitute an unacceptable threat to Israel, and that he would take action to eliminate it. Iran, for its part, has long claimed that it does not seek to possess nuclear weapons, notwithstanding its leadership's repeated, lurid promises to destroy the Jewish state. That an Israeli strike did not occur in years past owed much to dissent within Israel's military establishment, about whether Israel itself possessed the capabilities to take down Iran's nuclear programme on its own and whether it could withstand a potential Iranian counter-attack. Netanyahu has gambled his legacy on Israel's current war against Iran. He has said more than once that he hopes to be remembered as the 'protector of Israel'. And while the Hamas-led attacks on 7 October 2023 cast doubt on his claim to be Mr Security, it is clearly his hope that by destroying Iran's nuclear programme and, as he has not so subtly hinted, toppling the Islamic Republic's regime, he will restore his flagging domestic reputation and rewrite his place in history, masking with a stunning military operation the deadly, colossal intelligence and operational failure that preceded it almost two years earlier. Still, for Netanyahu, and indeed for many Israelis, what is at stake is much more than that – nothing less than the shape of the post-Cold War order. It has long been both Netanyahu's conviction and policy goal that Israel's integration and normalisation into the Middle East can be achieved without granting the Palestinians a state. Successive Netanyahu administrations have pursued the de-Arabisation and isolation of the Palestinian national cause, perhaps most spectacularly in the form of the Abraham Accords, brokered by the US in 2020, which Netanyahu believes even Saudi Arabia could one day join. Iran, through support for its proxies – in particular, Hamas, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Hezbollah – has constituted the most significant obstacle to this vision of removing the Palestinian issue from the global agenda, as well as the last standing substantial military rival to Israel's armed forces in the region. By taking down the Islamic Republic, or at least its nuclear programme, Netanyahu hopes not only to eliminate a threat he perceives as existential, but also to realise his long-held geopolitical fantasy. Yet the ongoing attempt to do so could just as well result in catastrophe – for the region and perhaps the world. At the time of writing, it is too early to know where the balance of power will lie after the last bomb is dropped and the final missile fired. The paradox of Netanyahu's perpetual struggle for Israel's security is that, in practice, it has meant that Israelis live under near-constant threat. For Palestinians it has meant decades of military occupation and, since 7 October, utter devastation, war crimes and ethnic cleansing in Gaza. Indeed, Benjamin Netanyahu's dream of a new Middle East – devoid of any military rival, absent any prospect of Palestinian self-determination – has only brought more death. [See also: Ideas for Keir] Related
Sydney Morning Herald
09-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Sydney Morning Herald
I lie and steal for a living, but what I did to my family shocked me
I stole from my family to write my debut novel, I Want Everything, or at least I thought I did. I told the dim myths of my relatives in broad strokes, their terrible deeds and those done to them, though I didn't probe for the particulars. This was not to protect the memories of ghosts I'd never met, rather I was worried real life would prove disappointing. But the truth was much stranger than I could have anticipated. It turned out I was not a thief but a liar. I Want Everything is about a literary parasite, a feckless writer who attaches himself to an ailing cult author, Brenda Shales, who reveals the secrets of how her sensational novels came to be. As one does in fiction, I grafted my family's stories onto Brenda and the characters in her orbit, hoping some of them would take, a way to better inhabit a time I knew little about, the political now personal. A few years ago, when I'd just begun the novel, my wife and I visited my paternal grandfather, Vincent, at his hospital bed. He was well over 90, and his heart was slowly giving out, though he was sharp enough to complete The Age crossword every day. He was sweet with my wife, talked with alacrity about his boyhood in St Kilda, an unruly place back then, his father's imprisonment at the Tatura prison camps during World War II, a story I'd never heard. Like many Italian immigrants, my great-grandfather was suspected as a fascist sympathiser, though he'd already naturalised as a White Australian, renouncing his motherland along with my chances of ever obtaining a European Union passport. As he talked about those war years in which he'd eaten city pigeons and kelp washed up on Elwood beach, I felt the sick inkling familiar to every writer, when a story begins to present itself. My grandfather died not long after our visit, cremated in a coffin draped in the St Kilda flag. Alongside the usual sadness and regret, my writer's self rubbed its hairy paws in anticipation, itching to draft my version of my relative's imprisonment. More than 15,000 people were held captive at the Tatura camps, one of whom was a stand-in for my ancestor. In my novel, I created a communist who'd fled Italy when Mussolini's Blackshirts swept to power. He braved the harsh camp conditions before I shaved his head and sent him home, to become a symbol of Australia's suspicion of difference. I had no idea how much he resembled Pasquale, my great-grandfather, nor did I much care. My maternal grandfather, Frank, died on the toilet, long before I was born. My mother and aunts had always described him as a chain-smoking workaholic, and part of B.A. Santamaria's 'Movement', a secretive group of crypto-fascist, Catholic activists who rooted out communism in Melbourne's body politic. I always remembered a story my mother had told me, of waking in the middle of the night as a young girl to find her parents in the kitchen, her mother holding a bag of frozen peas to her father's head, his shirt sheeted in blood from a gash on his forehead. She didn't need to ask who had done it, and neither did I. In my novel, I hung Frank out to dry. I made him Brenda's father, a valiant defender of Christendom, vigilant against reds under the bed and in the submarine that spirited away poor Harold Holt from the choppy waters off Cheviot Beach. So far, so novelistic. Left versus right. Mum v Dad. The Centre and the Periphery. Once the novel was written, and my book deal was signed, it was time to perform my due diligence. Find out precisely who these men were, and what further biographical nuggets I might extract. But once I started digging into my family's backstory, I was dismayed to discover I knew next to nothing at all. I emailed museums and local historians about the Victorian internment camps in Tatura, Murchison and Rushworth. The researchers checked the files and archives, but could find no record of a Pasquale Amerena at any of the camps. I surmised my grandfather had been losing the plot; maybe the story was a fantasy, or stolen from someone else. I asked my wife what she remembered from that afternoon at the hospital. She clearly recalled him talking about his childhood in St Kilda, but nothing about prison camps, nor a disappearing father. When quizzed, my own father hadn't the foggiest what I was talking about. Loading Somehow I'd made the whole thing up, attached a traumatic backstory to a man I'd never met, replete with fantastic details (kelp!). But at least I had my Catholic fascist. Or did I? My mother vigorously disputed that characterisation of her father, a kind man by all accounts. Later, my aunt confirmed he'd been staunchly anti-union, but was the furthest thing from a thug. Needless to say, the incident with the bloodied shirt was an utter fiction I'd convinced myself was real. I'd forced my family into a history that wasn't theirs, conflating them with something I'd read about camps, communists and Catholics, attaching strangers' experiences onto the names of relatives so abstracted from my life they may as well have been characters in a novel. Perhaps we're all inclined to make heroes and villains of people we've never met, especially if they share our names. I don't usually write non-fiction because I have trouble sticking to the facts. I'm an infamous exaggerator, and seldom let reality stand in the way of a good story. Some men are born liars and some have lying thrust upon them. Lying I'm fine with, it's what I do for a living. But in the future, it would be nice to know when exactly I'm doing it, especially to myself.
The Age
09-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Age
I lie and steal for a living, but what I did to my family shocked me
I stole from my family to write my debut novel, I Want Everything, or at least I thought I did. I told the dim myths of my relatives in broad strokes, their terrible deeds and those done to them, though I didn't probe for the particulars. This was not to protect the memories of ghosts I'd never met, rather I was worried real life would prove disappointing. But the truth was much stranger than I could have anticipated. It turned out I was not a thief but a liar. I Want Everything is about a literary parasite, a feckless writer who attaches himself to an ailing cult author, Brenda Shales, who reveals the secrets of how her sensational novels came to be. As one does in fiction, I grafted my family's stories onto Brenda and the characters in her orbit, hoping some of them would take, a way to better inhabit a time I knew little about, the political now personal. A few years ago, when I'd just begun the novel, my wife and I visited my paternal grandfather, Vincent, at his hospital bed. He was well over 90, and his heart was slowly giving out, though he was sharp enough to complete The Age crossword every day. He was sweet with my wife, talked with alacrity about his boyhood in St Kilda, an unruly place back then, his father's imprisonment at the Tatura prison camps during World War II, a story I'd never heard. Like many Italian immigrants, my great-grandfather was suspected as a fascist sympathiser, though he'd already naturalised as a White Australian, renouncing his motherland along with my chances of ever obtaining a European Union passport. As he talked about those war years in which he'd eaten city pigeons and kelp washed up on Elwood beach, I felt the sick inkling familiar to every writer, when a story begins to present itself. My grandfather died not long after our visit, cremated in a coffin draped in the St Kilda flag. Alongside the usual sadness and regret, my writer's self rubbed its hairy paws in anticipation, itching to draft my version of my relative's imprisonment. More than 15,000 people were held captive at the Tatura camps, one of whom was a stand-in for my ancestor. In my novel, I created a communist who'd fled Italy when Mussolini's Blackshirts swept to power. He braved the harsh camp conditions before I shaved his head and sent him home, to become a symbol of Australia's suspicion of difference. I had no idea how much he resembled Pasquale, my great-grandfather, nor did I much care. My maternal grandfather, Frank, died on the toilet, long before I was born. My mother and aunts had always described him as a chain-smoking workaholic, and part of B.A. Santamaria's 'Movement', a secretive group of crypto-fascist, Catholic activists who rooted out communism in Melbourne's body politic. I always remembered a story my mother had told me, of waking in the middle of the night as a young girl to find her parents in the kitchen, her mother holding a bag of frozen peas to her father's head, his shirt sheeted in blood from a gash on his forehead. She didn't need to ask who had done it, and neither did I. In my novel, I hung Frank out to dry. I made him Brenda's father, a valiant defender of Christendom, vigilant against reds under the bed and in the submarine that spirited away poor Harold Holt from the choppy waters off Cheviot Beach. So far, so novelistic. Left versus right. Mum v Dad. The Centre and the Periphery. Once the novel was written, and my book deal was signed, it was time to perform my due diligence. Find out precisely who these men were, and what further biographical nuggets I might extract. But once I started digging into my family's backstory, I was dismayed to discover I knew next to nothing at all. I emailed museums and local historians about the Victorian internment camps in Tatura, Murchison and Rushworth. The researchers checked the files and archives, but could find no record of a Pasquale Amerena at any of the camps. I surmised my grandfather had been losing the plot; maybe the story was a fantasy, or stolen from someone else. I asked my wife what she remembered from that afternoon at the hospital. She clearly recalled him talking about his childhood in St Kilda, but nothing about prison camps, nor a disappearing father. When quizzed, my own father hadn't the foggiest what I was talking about. Loading Somehow I'd made the whole thing up, attached a traumatic backstory to a man I'd never met, replete with fantastic details (kelp!). But at least I had my Catholic fascist. Or did I? My mother vigorously disputed that characterisation of her father, a kind man by all accounts. Later, my aunt confirmed he'd been staunchly anti-union, but was the furthest thing from a thug. Needless to say, the incident with the bloodied shirt was an utter fiction I'd convinced myself was real. I'd forced my family into a history that wasn't theirs, conflating them with something I'd read about camps, communists and Catholics, attaching strangers' experiences onto the names of relatives so abstracted from my life they may as well have been characters in a novel. Perhaps we're all inclined to make heroes and villains of people we've never met, especially if they share our names. I don't usually write non-fiction because I have trouble sticking to the facts. I'm an infamous exaggerator, and seldom let reality stand in the way of a good story. Some men are born liars and some have lying thrust upon them. Lying I'm fine with, it's what I do for a living. But in the future, it would be nice to know when exactly I'm doing it, especially to myself.
