Tag Archives: Book review

Arts, Books, China, History

Book Review: Blood Letters

REVIEW

Blood Letters: The Untold Story of Lin Zhao.

ON THE outskirts of Suzhou, near Shanghai, there’s a tomb in a cemetery that has a surveillance camera trained on it, keeping a perpetual eye on visitors.

Once a year, on the anniversary of the deceased, plain-clothes policemen arrive to block access to the tomb and to rough up any persistent pilgrims.

It’s the tomb of a remarkable woman called Lin Zhao, who was shot by firing squad at the age of 35 in 1968, at the height of the Mao regime.

“In death even more than in life,” writes the author of this important and significant biography, “Lin Zhao has become a nemesis of the Communist state.”

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A letter of protest that Lin wrote from her prison cell to the editor of the People’s Daily newspaper, never sent and long-suppressed, appeared on the internet in China in 2004.

It caused a sensation and became a manifesto for dissent in China that applies to this very day. Because it’s incendiary and remains a live story some of it can’t yet be told.

All of Lin’s interrogation records, which document the endless hours of questioning, probably conducted under duress and torture, are still filed away as part of the “criminal evidence” in her case.

Lin was an inveterate protestor and letter-writer. Astonishingly, the letters she wrote to her mother from prison, though they were confiscated at the time and not sent, were saved and eventually returned to the family.

Those letters were not written in ink, but in blood. As a punishment for he refusal to comply with the rules of the brutal Shanghai Municipal Prison, where she was incarcerated for being an “impatient counter-revolutionary”, Lin was deprived of ink. That was not going to stop her.

 

SHE had grasped the evils and depravities of Mao’s regime and refused to keep silent. In her cold, damp and freezing cell, she pricked her thumbs, dripped the blood into a small plastic spoon and wrote to her mother with a bamboo pick, a hair clip or the plastic handle of her toothbrush sharpened against the concrete floor, sometimes on a strip of bedsheet, rather than paper.

“Alas, Mama, they have communised China into a country of beggars.” She continued: “When the morning light of freedom shines upon the vast land of this country, we shall pour out our hearts to each other.”

But that yearned-for moment of reunion never came.

To make us appreciate Lin’s bravery and courage, Lian Xi, who has pieced together her life story, reminds us just how rare it was during Mao’s reign for anyone to dare to speak out. Lin was “the rare one who stood upright in an era when the entire country prostrated themselves”.

It was so much easier to keep quiet and go along with it all – and so much safer for the rest of the family.

There was a Chinese scholar in the prison, a once-renowned Yale Shakespeare expert, who submitted to copying and learning by heart reams and reams of Mao’s Little Red Book. He did so in order to earn remission points. Lin refused to do any such thing. When we’re most angry, it’s often because we’re angry with ourselves – and, reading between the lines, it’s clear that Lin’s fury was directed partly at herself. As a student in the early 1950s, she had fallen head-over-heals in love with Communism – to such an extent that she referred to Chairman Mao as “Dear Father” and reported her own father to the Government for illegally listening to an American radio programme.

“A revolution is not a dinner party,” Chairman Mao declared. “It is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another.”

Landlords were made to wear tall paper hats and paraded through the streets, denounced by jeering crowds.

Lin, at first, thought this a necessary stage towards the birth of a fairer society.

Then Mao pulled a really dirty trick. He announced a movement with the slogan: “Let a hundred flowers bloom.” Students were encouraged to voice their feelings about the less nice aspects of his regime, which many did, including Lin.

It turned out to be a ploy to “enforce the snakes out of their lairs”. All who had dared to voice protests were labelled “Rightists”. Many were sent off to exile for years of “redemption through labour” in the frozen north.

Lin managed to evade that exile; but her brief, passionate love affair with a student called Gan Cui was brutally cut off when he was banished to work on a construction battalion seven days’ journey away – an exile that would last for 20 years. The two never saw each other again.

Lin was arrested in 1960 for her contribution to an underground magazine in which she’d written a poem calling Mao’s regime “the Fascist rule of a centralised state” and ridiculing his Great Leap Forward as “a Great Leap Backward”.

On hearing of his daughter’s arrest, Lin’s father committed suicide by taking rat poison. “His darkest fear about where Lin Zhao’s adolescent pursuit of communism might lead her was realised.”

A simple and efficient method of torture was used as a matter of course in Chinese prisons: handcuffs, and not one pair but two, the upper and lower arms cuffed together behind the back. At one point, after causing trouble, Lin was put into double handcuffs for six-and-a-half months.

With no public trial or defence lawyer, she was sentenced to 20 years. Cajoled and tortured to confess, she refused.

 

MOST other inmates were soon begging for a chance to confess, so as to have an easier life. Not Lin, even though she was ill with recurring and worsening tuberculosis.

Out of handcuffs, she took five months to compose a long letter to the People’s Daily. “Mao must be the first to bear responsibility for the tragedy of our land swarming with famished refugees and the corpses of the starved filling up the valleys,” she wrote.

She predicted the course of the regime’s escalating orgy of violence brought on by Mao’s 1966 exhortation to smash “the four olds: old ideas, old culture, old customs and old habits of the exploiting class”.

She kept the prison guards in a state of perpetual exasperation with her shouting, her ranting and her refusal to comply.

Her cheerful spirit was never crushed: she sketched her favourite Disney characters (Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse) on a flattened toothpaste tube using a small nail. From October 1967, she was writing one blood-inked protest per day to the prison authorities.

The Military Control Committee authorised the death sentence, pronouncing her “truly a diehard, unrepentant counter-revolutionary”. Her Christian faith kept her going, to the end. “Let me turn over all my pains, hopes and dreams to my Lord,” she wrote.

Forced to wear a “monkey king cap” – a rubber hood placed over her face with slits for the eyes – she was taken out to the prison’s execution ground and shot.

The next morning, officials arrived at her mother’s door to deliver the news – and to demand a 5-cent “bullet fee”, as her daughter had “wasted a people’s bullet”. Mao’s officials knew just how to inflict the highest degree of pain on bereaved families of the condemned.

They, though, are now forgotten, while Lin Zhao is remembered; revered for her refusal to be silent in the face of Mao’s inhumane and appalling regime. This book is a worthy and credible tribute to her.

– Blood Letters by Lian Xi is published by Basic Books for £25

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Arts, Books, Britain, History, Second World War

Book Review – Arnhem: The Battle For The Bridges, 1944

REVIEW

This book, written in Beevor’s inimitable and gripping narrative style, is about much more than a single dramatic battle. It looks into the very heart of war. And, why, the Battle of Arnhem was so very wrong from the outset.

EVERY time a paratrooper in Britain’s airborne regiments goes to the stores to pick up his parachute as a prelude to going into action, it’s handed over with the same old corny gallows-humour banter – ‘Bring it back if it doesn’t work and we’ll exchange it.’

You could apply the same logic to the Parachute Regiment’s most famous World War II mission: the abortive attempt to capture from the Germans the bridge over the Rhine at the town of Arnhem in the north-east of the Netherlands in the autumn of 1944.

It spectacularly did not work – and, once it got under way, there was no chance of exchanging it for one that did.

In ten days of blood-letting battles along a 65-mile axis, thousands of men needlessly died, were wounded or taken prisoner, while afterwards, the Dutch people, who aided the British, were savagely punished by their Nazi occupiers with summary executions and deliberate starvation of the entire population.

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Arnhem – codenamed Operation Market Garden – was never the partial victory that deluded and self-serving British top brass, headed by the vainglorious Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, always claimed it to be. It was a military disaster and had been one in the making from its very inception.

The idea was to catch Hitler unawares by invading Germany through the back door. But the plan was so full of holes that, like a defective parachute, it was never going to float.

 

THERE was much heroism, narrated in this absorbing new account of the battle with the eye for telling personal detail that we have come to expect from Antony Beevor. A British soldier hurls himself from the first-floor window of a house on to a German tank in an attempt to drop a grenade into the turret, but is shot down in mid-air.

There is much poignant suffering, too, endured bravely. A teenage recruit croaks the opening bars of God Save The King as he lies dying in hospital and those around him try to stand to attention in their beds until he falls silent.

At Arnhem bridge itself, where the advance party of Paras – outnumbered and battered by German tanks – hung on for four days in the vain hope of a relief column arriving, one soldier’s jet-black hair turned white with stress.

And there is much horror, epitomised by an officer in the thick of it who saw ‘Mervyn with his arm hanging off, Angus clinging to the grass in his agony and a soldier running across an opening, the quick crack and the surprised look as he clutched his neck and then convulsed as more bullets hit him.

‘I only hope the sacrifice that was ours will have achieved something – yet I feel it hasn’t.’

He was dead right. It all proved pointless. As Beevor scathingly makes clear, this was not just ‘a bridge too far’, the much-quoted epithet about Arnhem which suggests laudable over-ambition. This was a campaign that should never have been launched in the first place. One can understand the mood that encouraged it. Since D-Day, there had been months of hard fighting in Normandy before, in August, the Allied forces broke out and raced through France, with the Germans in full retreat.

But over-enthusiasm allied to war-weariness should have given way to good military sense and probably would have done if Monty had not felt slighted by the ascendancy of Eisenhower and the other American generals and been determined to put on his own tally-ho show.

With Allied forces massed in southern Holland, he proposed a dramatic thrust to the north-east, dropping airborne troops – consisting of parachutists and soldiers in gliders – behind enemy lines to seize strategic bridges and hold them until the tanks and land troops advancing overland caught up with them.

With Arnhem (the furthest away) under their belts, they could spill out into Germany itself. Next stop Berlin and goodbye Hitler.

But there was a basic flaw, as the Dutch Prince Bernhard, knowing the geography of his own country, warned Monty. It could take for ever to get those tanks 65 miles up a narrow road with water meadows on either side, rather than the two days Monty thought possible, leaving those paratroopers up ahead at risk of being stranded. The prince was ignored, as were all the other naysayers. Optimism (and Monty’s egocentricity) triumphed over reality.

It might just have succeeded if every component of the plan had worked. But, in practice, blunder after blunder compounded the original conceptual error.

The fundamental concept defied military logic, Beevor writes, because it made no allowance for anything to go wrong, nor for the enemy’s likely reaction.

Yet, as the operation collapsed into ignominy, surrender and retreat, stuffed-shirt British generals such as Frederick ‘Boy’ Browning looked round for excuses and shamefully criticised a Polish brigade to divert attention from their own failings.

It was typical of the arrogance behind the whole unfortunate Arnhem episode.

Casualty figures were colossal. Of 12,000 airborne soldiers who went into battle, 1,500 were killed and 6,500, many of them badly wounded, were taken prisoner. Only a third made it home.

In some units, the attrition was even greater. The 4th Parachute Brigade started out for Arnhem with more than 2,000 soldiers and returned with just nine officers and 260 other ranks.

Strong men wept when they saw how many of their comrades were not coming back – all the more so when they realised how little, if anything, had been gained by their sacrifice.

This, indeed, was a case of lions led by donkeys. As for its consequences, it was not just that the mission failed dismally in the boast of its instigators that it would shorten the war by six months. Hardest of all to swallow is that it worsened the fate of the people of the Netherlands, who were subjected in the aftermath to Nazi vengeance.

The town of Arnhem was evacuated at gunpoint, its entire population forced to leave on foot with what little they could carry, before it was looted and reduced to rubble and ashes.

In Amsterdam, Rotterdam and the other major cities, food supplies were withdrawn, and the population lived – or, rather, died – through the harsh winter of 1944-45 on a diet of sugar beet and thin air.

Emaciated bodies lay in the streets as the death toll rose to 20,000. Thousands of resistance fighters and hostages were executed in a vicious security clampdown. This was the unseen cost of Arnhem and the author counts it out with unconcealed dismay.

But there is inevitably a noticeable change in tone from his previous much-acclaimed World War II histories on Stalingrad, D-Day and the fall of Berlin.

The uplifting drama of these was their part in the Allied road to victory. It put the undoubted horror in a sort of perspective; made some sense of the slaughter.

This time, though, he turns his adept craft as a military historian to a subject of not just defeat, but dunderheaded stupidity.

It will likely leave most readers horrified and deeply downhearted at the unnecessary waste of it all.

– Arnhem: The Battle For The Bridges, 1944 by Antony Beevor is published by Viking for £25

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Arts, Books, Britain, Government, Legal, Politics, Society

Book Review: An Inconvenient Death

REVIEW

Dr David Kelly

July 15, 2003. Microbiologist Dr David Kelly during questioning by the Commons select committee, in London.

Intro: Fifteen years on from the apparent suicide of Dr David Kelly, a government scientist and weapons expert, we still don’t know the truth. Did he really kill himself? Or did he suffer a heart attack under interrogation by our own secret service? A new book reveals startling inconsistencies.

NATURAL conspiracy theorists are in abundance, but I’m not one of them. Maybe some might suggest that this is a weakness – an indication of being willing and ready to accept the official version of events and not to see evil plots lurking in the background.

Nevertheless, after reading Miles Goslett’s masterful book about the apparent suicide of the weapons expert Dr David Kelly in 2003, I am more persuaded than ever that the authorities have not told us the whole truth about this tragic case.

American and British forces invaded Iraq in March 2003. A few months later, Dr Kelly was a source – possibly not the primary one – of the BBC’s Andrew Gilligan’s explosive disclosure that the Blair government had “sexed up” the September 2002 dossier, which wrongly asserted that Saddam Hussein possessed “weapons of mass destruction”.

It raises the question as to whether Gilligan himself may have sexed up what Dr Kelly had told him, since the government scientist went to his death still believing these weapons might exist. Whether that’s true or not, the journalist’s essentially accurate allegation caused angst, panic and fury in official circles. Alastair Campbell, for one – Tony Blair’s spin doctor and media manipulator – strode into the Channel 4 News studio to denounce and heavily criticise the BBC.

Dr Kelly soon admitted to his superiors that he had spoken to Gilligan. In one of the most disgraceful episodes in a shameful saga, a meeting chaired by Blair effectively authorised naming the weapons expert to the Press. The scientist immediately became the centre of a media frenzy.

Just two weeks later, on the morning of July 18, Dr Kelly was found dead in an Oxfordshire wood, a few miles from his marital home. He had supposedly taken his own life, having gone for a walk the previous afternoon. His left wrist had been reported cut, and he had taken co-proxamol tablets.

Some newspapers blamed Blair and Campbell for hounding him to death. But did he kill himself?

An Inconvenient Death painstakingly assesses a vast amount of evidence.

 

GOSLETT is no loopy conspiracy theorist. He never says Dr Kelly was murdered. Instead, he exposes the authorities’ many contradictions and inconsistencies – and urges there should be a full inquest into the scientist’s death. For the extraordinary thing is that there has been no such inquest.

Within hours of Dr Kelly’s body being found, the then Lord Chancellor, Lord Falconer, had set up an official inquiry with miraculous speed. Falconer was an old friend and former flatmate of Tony Blair, who at that moment was in the air between Washington and Tokyo.

The legal effect of the decision to ask a senior judge – the elderly Establishment figure of Lord Hutton – to chair an inquiry into Dr Kelly’s death was to stop the inquest in its tracks.

But, as Goslett points out, neither Hutton nor his leading counsel James Dingemans QC had any experience of a coroner’s duties. And whereas in an inquest evidence is taken on oath, it wasn’t in the Hutton Inquiry.

The list of its errors and omissions is mind-boggling. A huge number of important witnesses who might have thrown doubt on the theory that a severely depressed Dr Kelly had killed himself were not called.

These included Sergeant Simon Morris, the Thames valley police officer who led the original search for Dr Kelly, and his colleague, Chief Inspector Alan Young, who became senior investigating officer.

Also never questioned was Mai Pederson, a translator in the American Air Force, and a very close friend of Dr Kelly. She later alleged he had a weak right hand, which would have made it more difficult for him to sever his left wrist.

Moreover, the knife he often carried with him – and was said to have used in the suicide – had a ‘dull blade’. She also claimed he had difficulty swallowing pills.

Dr Kelly’s friend and dentist, Dr Bozana Kanas, was also not examined. She discovered on the day his death was reported that his dental file was missing from her Abingdon surgery. This file was inexplicably reinstated a few days later. Police tests revealed six unidentified fingerprints.

Dingemans seemed intent on establishing that Dr Kelly had been downcast once the Press knew his name.

Yet according to the landlord of a local pub and several regulars, on the night the weapons expert discovered from a journalist that he was about to be identified, he happily played cribbage in the Hinds Head.

But neither the landlord nor Dr Kelly’s fellow players were called by Hutton to give evidence. This is particularly strange since at the very time he was said to be in the pub, he was, according to his wife’s evidence to the inquiry, with her in a car on the way to Cornwall, escaping from the media attention. There were other anomalies in her evidence which Goslett details, though he offers no theory to explain them.

Nor did the inquiry grapple with the oddity that in the early hours of July 18 a helicopter with specialist heat-seeking equipment spent 45 minutes flying over the land around Dr Kelly’s house, passing directly over the site where his body was discovered a few hours later.

 

ACCORDING to an official pathologist, Dr Kelly was already dead at the time of the flight, yet the helicopter did not locate his still-warm body. Might it have been moved subsequently to its final position in the wood? Hutton did not examine the pilot or crew.

Perhaps most striking of all was the inquiry’s failure to investigate conflicting medical evidence.

A volunteer searcher who discovered the body at 9.20am on July 18 testified that it was slumped against a tree, and there was little evidence of blood.

Yet police issued a statement asserting that the body was lying ‘face down’ when found, while the post mortem recorded a profusion of blood.

After the inquiry, a group of distinguished doctors expressed concern as to its conclusions. They doubted the severing of the ulnar artery on Kelly’s left wrist could have been responsible, as such an injury would produce relatively little blood. Goslett’s point is that a competent coroner would have picked up on this and the many other inconsistencies.

A properly constituted inquest would also have registered that Dr Kelly’s death certificate didn’t give a place of death. It states he died on July 17, though July 18 is equally plausible. Maladministration or conspiracy? It’s impossible to say. Despite having gathered all this evidence, which he presents in a gripping way, Goslett for the most part resists speculation to a degree – given his enormous accumulation of facts casting doubt on the official version of events – that is almost heroic.

At the very end, he airs the question as to whether Dr Kelly (who according to the post mortem had advanced coronary disease) might have suffered a heart attack under interrogation.

Is it conceivable that undercover intelligence agents panicked and dumped his body in an Oxfordshire wood?

This book by James Goslett does journalism a great service. The author’s forensic skills put the then government’s legal counsel to shame.

In a spirit of even-handedness, it should also be pointed out that it is incorrectly stated that Robin Cook resigned and demitted office as Foreign Secretary days before the invasion of Iraq. He was actually Leader of the House, having been replaced as Foreign Secretary two years earlier. Nevertheless, this is a formidable, and disquieting analysis. We should hope it has the effect of reigniting calls for an inquest. If our rulers believe in justice, they would surely sanction for the establishment of a full inquest with due haste and speed.

Yet, a future coroner would admittedly face a serious handicap: that Dr David Kelly’s body was recently mysteriously exhumed and, according to reports, secretly cremated.

–  An Inconvenient Death by Miles Goslett is published by Head of Zeus for £16.99

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