Wodehouse, War and Woes

by Shruti Rattan

For someone whose most productive period of writing for adult readers spanned from 1910 to 1960, with some more years adding a few titles at both ends, P.G. Wodehouse surprisingly maintained his balance on the tightrope of comic masterpieces.

There was World War One that he witnessed in his early thirties. He had volunteered but was rejected because of poor eyesight.

The world went into a deep depression while he was at his most productive.

He spent a major portion of World War 2 interned in a German camp.

Following that, around him, the very lords, earls and dukes he wrote about felt the uncomfortable winds of change as society was shaken up, tottered and fell face down into a flattened expanse.

Yet, throughout the expanse of his enchanting world, master’s characters seldom talk about war, don’t complain about prohibition, financial problems and class distinctions. They continue to trot up to the Drones Club with their biggest concern being the type of shirt to wear. They get entangled in romantic riff knots, enjoy the eternal sunshine of English summers in the fields of stately homes of British peerage while sophisticated butlers carried their salvers to and fro. In the words of Evelyn Waugh, “Wodehouse there has been no fall of Man; the gardens of Blandings Castle are the original gardens of Eden from which we are all exiled.”

Perhaps it was a complete disinterest in the rest of the world and an acute distaste for any sort of politics that landed him in that deplorable soup during the Berlin Broadcasts.

P.G. Wodehouse, interned in a German camp at Tost in Silesia, near the Polish border. He stayed in captivity for forty nine weeks, but was spared the rigours of manual labour because of his fifty nine years of age. When he was released in 1941 and kept in relative freedom in Hotel Adlon of Germany, he agreed to broadcast a series of five talks – which he wrote himself in his inimitable style – to be aired in the United States of America.

The talks, which gave an account of camp life in his own light hearted, side-splittingly hilarious manner, sucked him into controversies that a person like him would never have dreamt about.

In reaction to shamefully vitriolic attacks by some glorious trendsetters of the modern machinery of yellow journalism, and public condemnation by some of his brother authors, in voices that in retrospect seem more than a little tinged with envy at his enormous popularity, England was soon up in arms against the very man they loved to read. The general consensus, even before anyone in England knew what the contents of the five talks were, was that the German publicity machinery of Dr. Goebbels had actually leveraged the famed Wodehousean political naiveté and had bargained a release in exchange of propaganda.

While not many really believed in the scathing attack launched on the master by one of the most despicable journalists of England, William N. Connor under the pseudonym Cassandra of Daily Mirror, the public bought the idea that Wodehouse, without any perceivable understanding of politics, had caused a lot of damage by agreeing to air these talks.

While there have been studies and arguments which, today, clears him of most of the charges levelled on him by people during the time, my intention is to argue that we definitely give the celebrated humorist less credit than is due where socio-political awareness is concerned. He was not as totally unaware of social and political landscapes, although he did not really enjoy writing about the same. And finally, his talks, when read today, contain exceptionally brilliant disguised criticism of Germany considering the constrained liberty of airing them at their behest.

In The Inimitable Jeeves, the following dialogue takes place when Bertie Wooster wants Jeeves to find a way of persuading Old Mr. Little, Bingo Little’s uncle, to allow him to marry an waitress.

‘The method which I advocate is what, I believe, the advertisers call Direct Suggestion, sir, consisting as it does of driving an idea home by constant repetition. You may have had experience of the system?’

‘You mean they keep on telling you that some soap or other is the best, and after a bit you come under the influence and charge round the corner and buy a cake?’

‘Exactly, sir. The same method was the basis of all the most valuable propaganda during the recent war.’

The publication date of the semi-novel is 1923, and obviously Jeeves is referring to the First World War, infamous in history for the use of propaganda and public reaction. Hence, in some very subtle nooks and crannies of his lyrical prose, PGW did sometimes enclose a political comment.

He was distinctly aware of the changes in social structure as well, as in some of his novels he does speak of finishing schools which prepare the English peerage for honest labour.  The term ‘idle rich’ does occur quite often in his books, and Bertie Wooster is sometimes a classic representation of the same. In one of the Ukridge stories, a tramp murmurs the words and is recruited by Ukridge to throw a piece of cake at a bridegroom during a wedding.

In a rather significant piece of his Jeeves and Wooster canon, Bertie escapes from a boat by colouring his face black, impersonating one of the all black music band. When he discusses the scheme with Jeeves, he refers to the black musicians as ‘niggers’ whereas Jeeves calls them ‘negroes’.

Roderick Spode is another striking piece of political satire of Wodehouse. He is described by Bertie as an amateur dictator who leads a farcical group of fascists called the Saviours of England, also known as the Black Shorts, who go about wearing footer shorts. The abominable thought of Spode going about in footer shorts makes Bertie shudder and almost drop his Gasper. According to Gussie Fink-Nottle in The Code of the Woosters, "by the time Spode formed his association, there were no shirts left" a masterly allusion to various fascist or right-wing groups – Mussolini's Blackshirts, Hitler's brownshirts, the Irish Blueshirts and Greenshirts, the South African Greyshirts, Mexico's Gold shirts, and the American Silver Shirts.  Spode himself is modelled on Sir Walter Moseley, leader of the British Union of Fascists – also known as the Black Shirts.

He definitely did not want to pile on political ideas on his reading public – he says famously that “there  are two ways to write a novel. One is mine, making the thing a sort of musical comedy without music, and ignoring real life altogether; the other is going down deep into life and not caring a damn.” But, real life did sometimes creep into his writing between the lyrical genius – and although he decided to ignore real life, it is not axiomatic that he did not know it.

If the political and social nuggets in his prose seem to be too infrequently interspersed to clear him of the allegation of a complete unawareness about reality, we need to turn to the early days of his career for a conclusive proof of his astute statements beneath a generous layer of hilarity.

We need to go back to 1903, when he was starting out as a talented writer who wrote, amongst others, for the Daily Express. The great political issue of the day was free trade. Joseph Chamberlain, who believed the empire could be held together by material ties, was in favour of a measure of imperial preference which would involve a tariff barrier against other countries. He was supported by a majority of the Unionist Party, although opposed by a minority. Being unable to persuade the Prime Minister to accept his policy at that time, he resigned from the government in order to hold meetings all over the country to put forward his ideas. “If you are going to give preference to the colonies,” he told the House of Commons, “you must put a tax on food.” Free trade meant that food would cost more, an idea used by the Liberal Party to eventually come to power on this issue.

On 30^th September, 1903, Daily Express, a Unionist and protectionist paper, started a series of Parrot verses, all on the first page, which depicted a parrot giving his views on fiscal matters. These verses were written in fascinating verses and excellent political acumen by none other than P.G. Wodehouse. The opinions of the Parrot were published six days a week right through October until 15^th November, after which it became intermittent. The Parrot mostly commented on political issues or mused on other important topics of the day.

Here are some of the verses:

When you show him that a duty is a thing of perfect beauty,

That it sets the mills a-buzzing with an ever-growing roar,

That our wages will be rising to an altitude surprising,l

He offers the suggestion that: ‘Your food will cost you more’

**

In the Moscow Zoo a rumour

Quickly spread from wolf to puma,

Causing even modest lions

To emit a dreadful roar,

For a Parrot fresh from London

Had declared they all were undone

Since in some surprising manner

‘Food will cost you more’

When the elephant was lunching,

Perched the bird and watched him munching

While a sad commiseration

Was the look the Parrot wore:

Till at last he started yelling –

As the beast with buns was swelling,

Swelling in the plumpest manner

‘Marvrick,  food will cost you more.’

Facts defying, reason scorning,

Through the noon, the night, the morning,

Sat the wicked bird repeating

His suggestion o’er and o’er

While poor Marvrick, growing thinner,

Dropt his breakfast, lunch and dinner

In economic terror,

Lest his food should cost him more.

MORAL

And his sad extermination

Is a lesson to our nation

Of the folly in attending

To a troglodytish bore.

As the elephant diminished,

So will British trade be finished

If we listen to the Parrot

With his Food will cost you more.

**

That anyone capable of penning these lines daily and manufacturing magical rhymes while brimming with political message can metamorphose into an absolutely politically agnostic scribbler living in a dreamland of his own is somewhat difficult to believe.

If we look at his writings, the initial novels and stories of the tens and early twenties did keep somewhat in step to reality, while as he became popular and immensely so, he gave free rein to what he wanted to write about. He plainly did not want to produce social commentary or political satire, unless irritated by someone like Sir Walter Moseley. When he is in captivity, he says in his interview with a Columbia broadcaster, Harry Flannery, that his novels of the future would definitely not have anything to do with the life of a prisoner of war. “Good God, no, Mr. Flannery. There are enough other people writing about the war, and my readers, I believe, would rather have something different.”

However, when scripting the broadcasts, I fully believe he used his genius in leaving specks and traces of critical commentary of situation in the jovial humour of the narrative.

It is of little wonder that while headline happy journalists steeped in yellow ink and envious fellow writers eager to bring him down from his giant stature as an author launched a vindictive and contemptible attack on him in England before the broadcasts were even heard there, in America, they were used by the intelligence training schools as models of writing Anti-Nazi propaganda.

Here are a few excerpts which demonstrate how the genius worked in letting the world know about German atrocities even while maintaining the fascinatingly amusing tone of his writings.

One's reactions on suddenly finding oneself surrounded by the armed strength of a hostile power are rather interesting. There is a sense of strain. The first time you see a German soldier over your garden fence, your impulse is to jump ten feet straight up into the air, and you do so. About a week later, you find that you are only jumping five feet. And then, after you have been living with him in a small village for two months, you inevitably begin to fraternize and to wish that you had learned German at school instead of Latin and Greek. All the German I know is 'Es ist schönes Wetter', I was a spent force, and we used to take out the rest of the interview in beaming at one another.

I had a great opportunity of brushing up my beaming during those two months. My villa stands in the centre of a circle of houses, each of which was occupied by German officers, who would come around at intervals to take a look at things, and the garden next door was full of Labour Corps boys.

It was with these that one really got together. There was scarcely an evening when two or three of them did not drop in for a bath at my house and a beaming party on the porch afterwards.

And so, day by day, all through June and July, our quiet, happy life continued, with not a jarring incident to mar the serenity. Well, yes, perhaps one or two. One day, an official-looking gentleman with none of the Labour Corps geniality came along and said he wanted my car. Also my radio. And in addition my bicycle. That was what got under the skin. I could do without the car, and I had never much liked the radio, but I loved that bicycle. I looked him right in the eye and said 'Es ist schönes Wetter' - and I said it nastily. I meant it to sting. And what did he say? He didn't say anything. What could we have said? P.S. He got the bicycle.

While ostensibly giving the impression that the incidents were light enough to be made fun of, he does say that the houses were invaded, his car and radio and bicycle were taken away.

In a striking example of what the press can do without adding a single word, the same Daily Express  for which Wodehouse had penned the parrot poems vitally misquoted him by printing “There was scarcely an evening when two or three of them did not drop in for a bath at my house and a (beaming) party on the porch afterwards”  from the above passage, omitting the word beaming and changing the perception altogether. It was rumoured that Wodehouse had hosted parties for the Germans in his villa.

Here is another passage through which he relates the way he was made to pack up and leave for the camp in ten minutes. Related again with exceptional humour, one can see the infernal German guard standing behind him, barking orders to be quick, while in a heart-wrenching scene, he is separated from his wife and dogs, while his heart sinks with uncertainty of separation. The way he packs tobacco and Shakespeare and forgets his passport also tells us a lot about the man, who wanted to live in his own erudite world, and spoke about it in his own way.

Presently the interpreter stepped forward and announced that we were ad going to be interned. It was a pretty nasty shock, coming without warning out of a blue sky like that, and it is not too much to say that for an instant the old maestro shook like a badly set blancmange. Many years ago, at a party which had started to get a bit rough, somebody once bit me on the bridge of the nose with an order of planked steak. As I had felt then, so did I feel now.  That same sensation of standing in a rocking and isintegrating world.

I didn't realize at the time how much luckier I was than a great many other victims of the drag-net. All over France during that Sunday, British citizens were being picked up and taken away without being given time to pack, and for a week those in Boulogne had been living in what they stood up in at the Petit Vitesse railroad station. For some reason, Le Touquet was given a substantial break. We were allowed to go home and put a few things together, and as my home was three miles away, I was actually sent there in a car.

The soldier who escorted me was unfortunately not one of those leisurely souls who believe in taking time over one's packing. My idea had been to have a cold bath and a change and a bite to cat, and then to light a pipe and sit down and muse for a while, making notes of what to take with me and what could be left behind. His seemed to be that five minutes was ample. Eventually we compromised on ten.

I would like my biographers to make careful note of the fact that the first thing that occurred to me was that here at last was my chance to buckle down and read the complete works of William Shakespeare. It was a thing I had been meaning to do any time these last forty years, but somehow, as soon as I had got, say, Hamlet and Macbeth under my belt and was preparing to read the stuffing out of Henry the Sixth, parts one, two and three, something like the Murglow Manor Mystery would catch my eye and I would weaken.

I didn't know what interment implied - it might be for years or it might be for ever - or it might be a mere matter of weeks - but the whole situation seemed to point to the complete works of William Shakespeare, so in they went. I am happy to say that I am now crammed with Shakespeare to the brim, so, whatever else internment has done for me, I am at any rate that much ahead of the game.

It was a pang to leave my novel behind, I had only five more chapters of it to do. But space, as Jeeves would have pointed out, was of the essence, and it had to go, and is now somewhere in France. I am hoping to run into it again one of these days, for it was a nice little novel and we had some great times together.

I wonder what my listeners would have packed in my place - always remembering that there was a German soldier standing behind me all the time, shouting "Schnell" or words to that effect. I had to think quick. Eventually what I crammed in were tobacco, pencils, scribbling blocks, chocolate, biscuits, a pair of trousers, a pair of shoes, some shirts and a sock or two. My wife wanted to add a pound of butter, but I fought her off. There are practically no limits to what a pound of butter can do in warm weather in a small suitcase. If I was going to read the complete works of William Shakespeare, I preferred them unbuttered.

In the end, the only thing of importance I left behind was my passport, which was the thing I ought to have packed first. The young internee is always being asked for his passport, and if he hasn't got it, the authorities tend to look squiggle-eyes and to ask nasty questions. I had never fully realized what class distinctions were till I became an internee without a passport, thus achieving a social position somewhere in between a minor gangster and a wharf rat.

Having closed the suitcase and said goodbye to my wife and the junior dog, and foiled the attempt of the senior dog to muscle into the car and accompany me into captivity, I returned to the Kommandantur.

In his second broadcast, he speaks of the abysmal food supplies on which he had to survive with his cell mates in the first gaol in which he was interned. The description, as usual is side splittingly funny, but underlines the inhuman conditions, forging them into the mind through the potent weapon of laughter.

What the morrow brought forth, at seven sharp, was a rattling of keys and the opening of a small panel in the door, through which were thrust three tin mugs containing a thin and lukewarm soup and three loaves of bread, a dark sepia in color. This, one gathered, was breakfast, and the problem arose of how to play our part in the festivities. The soup was all right. One could manage that. You just took a swallow, and then another swallow - to see if it had really tasted as bad as it had seemed to the first time, and before you knew where you were, it had gone. But how, not having knives, we were to deal with the bread presented a greater test of our ingenuity. Biting bits off it was not a practical proposition for my companions, whose teeth were not of the best: and it was no good hammering it on the edge of the table, because it simply splintered the woodwork. But there is always a way of getting around life's little difficulties, if you give your mind to it. I became bread-biter to the community, and I think I gave satisfaction. At any rate, I got the stuff apart.

In the fourth talk of the series, he speaks of the nasty Kommandant of the Huys camp, but does it again in the same innocent language with the vitriol tucked away in the sweetness of humour. But the message strikes home most incisively, while it gracefully dances around the strictest of censors. Wodehouse’s humour was an weapon for which dictators had no answer.

the  slogan seemed to be 'Go and see what the internees are doing, and tell them they mustn't'. I remember an extra parade being called, so that we might be informed that stealing was forbidden. This hit us very hard.

These extra parades were a great feature of life at Huy, for our Kommandant seemed to have a passion for them.Mind you, I can find excuses for him. If I had been in his place, I would have ordered extra parades myself. His headquarters were down in the town, and there was no road connecting the Citadel with the outer world - just a steep, winding path. So that, when he came to visit us, he had to walk. He was a fat, short-legged man in the middle sixties, and walking up steep, winding paths does something to fat, short-legged men who are not as young as they were. Duty called him now and then to march up the hill and to march down again, but nothing was going to make him like it.

I picture him starting out, full of loving kindness - all sweetness and light, as it were - and gradually becoming more and more soured as he plodded along. So that when he eventually came to journey's end with a crick in the back and the old dogs feeling as if they were about to burst like shrapnel, and saw us loafing around at our ease, the sight was too much for him and he just reached for his whistle and blew it for an extra parade.

Extra parades were also called two or three times a day by the Sergeant, when there was any announcement to be made. At Tost we had a noticeboard, on which camp orders were posted each day, but this ingenious system had not occurred to anyone at Huy. The only way they could think of there of establishing communication between the front office and the internees was to call a parade. Three whistles would blow, and we would assemble in the yard, and after a long interval devoted to getting into some sort of formation we would be informed that there was a parcel for Omer - or that we must shave daily - or that we must not smoke on parade - or that we must not keep our hands in our pockets on parade - or that we might buy playing cards - (and next day that we might not buy playing cards) - or that boys must not cluster round the guard-room trying to scrounge food from the soldiers - or that there was a parcel for Omer.

To me, these broadcasts were absolute gems, the supreme use of linguistic mastery to pass information transparently, in front of the eyes and ears of the lurking enemy. If these had been accepted as such and studied, they could have painted Wodehouse as a war hero at the age of sixty.

No wonder when asked later about the broadcasts, Plum lamented that they had been some of the best things he had written. Of course they were. They were the pinnacle of Wodehousean humour with scathing criticism of the Nazis, disguised as harmless fun.

Whether the man himself had intended them to be anti-Nazi propaganda or not is subject to debate. With Connor (Cassandra) using all his negative journalistic vices to launch an all out attack against PGW without referring to the actual transcripts, with Daily Express doing their subtle best to misquote him, and his envious brother authors nipping at his metaphorical ankles like scavenging hyenas, the master said that the main reason why he had agreed to the broadcasts was that he wanted to reply to the thousands of worried mails that he had received from America. He ends his broadcasts saying with very non-Wodehousean show of emotion, “With this talk, I bring to an end the story of my adventures as British Civilian Prisoner Number 796, and before concluding I should like once more to thank all the kind people in America who wrote me letters while I was in camp. Nobody who has not been in a prison camp can realize what letters, especially letters like those I received, mean to an internee.”

It was later proved that there had been no deal to release the author in exchange of the broadcasts. The idea of the broadcasts was born after his release, and, as some say, was welcome to Wodehouse because that gave him an option to make his work available to the world yet again. A prolific writer like him had been unable to publish anything for the duration of his internment. The channel may have seemed inviting. After all an author lives to reach out to his readers.

True, he did say in different forums that he had enjoyed camp, but that was because it was perhaps true. For a man such as him, with limited social skills, the camp camaraderie with its schoolboy code of honour and gallantry made him belong to a social group for the first time since college days at Dulwich. I personally believe that though he did not write about the experiences apart from in the broadcast scripts, he did store the episode in his sponge like mind to squeeze out subtle drops for his future work.

On the other hand, none of the people who attacked him had ever been interned in a German camp – and with a few exceptions, all had their hidden agendas.

Some of the personal attacks now read something out of Lord of the Flies, juvenile attempts at vile and malicious attacks at someone who had become successful through decades of incredible hard work.

A.A. Milne, the creator of Winnie the Pooh, was of the manufactured opinion that Wodehouse did not want to take responsibilities, but would like to be have all the reflected glory of one who did. “He once said to me that he wished he had a son, but added characteristically ‘but he would have to be born at the age of 15, when he was just getting into House eleven.” Years later, Richard Usborne realised and communicated to PGW that Milne had actually quoted from Psmith in the City.

The journalists were not alone in misquoting the man.

A lot of others, including William Townsend and Dorothy L. Sayers  supported Wodehouse, but there were egomaniacs like Sean O’Casey, who could never digest the immense popularity of a mere humorist over more serious writers such as himself.  The lack of perspective, confusion of issues political and literal, petty schoolboy sense of rivalry and the frustrated sense of peer pressure drips from this particular piece of communication from O’Casey to Daily Telegraph.

It is amusing to read the various wails about the villainy of Wodehouse. The harm done to England’s cause and to England’s dignity  is not the poor man’s babble in Berlin, but the acceptance of him by a childish part of the people and the academic government of Oxford, dead from the chin up, as a person of any importance whatsoever in English humorous literature o ay literature at all. It is an ironic twist of retribution on those who banished Joyce and honoured Wodehouse.

If England has any dignity left in the way of literature, she will forget the pitiful antics of English Literature’s performing flea. If Berlin thinks the poor fish great so much the better for us.

It definitely seems that O’Casey could have done well to sit at the feet of Wodehouse to take lessons in coating acrimonious attacks in likeable charm. However, similar jealousy tinged confusion of issues was sadly expressed by another notable author E.C. Bentley.

In spite of malice and evil journalism, Wodehouse was cleared of any charges of collaborating or being sympathetic to Nazis. The British Foreign Office and Ministry of Defence papers, contained in the MI5 files, show that by 1947 the British authorities had concluded that Wodehouse had no case to answer either over the broadcasts or the money, and, in the words of the Foreign Office, contained in the file: Mr Wodehouse made the celebrated broadcasts in all innocence and without any evil intent.

In his article in Times Literary Supplement, Iain Sporat says:

In fact, nobody who reads the text of those broadcasts today can fail to see that they are no more than light-hearted accounts of Wodehouse's capture and internment by the Nazis. They contain not one single word of pro-Nazi, or anti-British, sentiment. Indeed, they poked fun at the Germans, and made clear that morale among British internees was high. As Wodehouse himself said in a cable to the editor of the American magazine, the Saturday Evening Post (America had not yet joined the war), who had complained, after the first broadcast, that Wodehouse had been "callous about England": "Cannot understand what you meant about callousness. Mine simple flippant, cheerful attitude of all British prisoners; it was a point of honour with us not to whine." In fact, in a conversation which I had last year with the distinguished historian, Barrie Pitt, who had been a fellow internee of Wodehouse's, he told me the following: to help keep up morale at Tost, it was decided by the British internees to have a series of talks and concerts. The first of these talks, one Saturday morning, was given by Wodehouse. The text of his talk was pretty much the text of the five broadcasts. The talk was received by his fellow internees with much laughter and applause.

Be that as it may, it left Plum with a lot of torment. The very facts that there was parliamentary questions and that he had to appear before Major Cussen for investigation of the broadcasts was a source of intense distress. For a peace loving soul like him, whose only interests in life were reading, writing and golf, the controversy must have been very, very awkward and painful. Primarily because, apart from being politically uninitiated, he did have an upright schoolboy standard of honour all life.

In his statement to the Cussen investigation, he said, “I should like to conclude by saying that I never had any intention of assisting the enemy and that I have suffered a great deal of mental pain as the result of my action.”

It speaks for the mental resilience and the indomitable discipline and spirit of work of the great man that this incident did not result in making his subsequent offerings bitter. If he at all had problems with his plots it was because What the devil does one write about these days, if one is a specialist on country houses and butlers, both of which have ceased to exist?

However, for nearly another three and a half decades after the broadcasts, he continued to delight us, doing what great men usually do in the face of most undignified and unjust antipathy, to go back and do what he did best, to go back to the tool of his trade, the type writer, and turn out those novels and short stories that have made more English speaking people laugh than any other author.

Shruti Rattan is a fictitious character who appears in Arunabha Sengupta’s latest novel The Best Seller.

An Amsterdam based researcher on political science, she is also a talented author and compulsive punster.

Is the Click Mightier than the Blast?

By 
Shruti Rattan

There is a proverbial pitfall well known to any statistician of merit. So perilous and rampantly ignored is this booby trap, that Wikipedia has an article specifically tited ‘Correlation does not imply causation.’


However, the current dynamics of the world – with its accelerating technological leaps, connected psyches and the media blurred boundaries between publicists and academia – have more often than not led trend watchers to ignore the tenet.


Revolutions are cropping up all over the world – well, at least in the Northern parts of Africa, and generalisation is but a sleight of words.
At the same time, in the cyber-conscious connected word, social media is burgeoning. Already archaic today is being heaved by the collar into the just-in-time juggernaut of tomorrow.
It is easy to conclude that the two are interlinked. It is optimistically heartening to think that the click is mightier than the blast and will end up promoting democracy and Starbucks the world over.
And at the same time, it is dangerous to make such pronouncements.


In this mad rush of looking ahead towards the future, playing the self proclaimed visionary, resisting the temptation to glance back even for an instant - afraid of missing out on the birth of a new path-connecting innovation, it is indeed easy to forget something similar that took place as far back as 1848. One hundred and sixty odd years ago, rising food prices and high unemployment figures in Europe had resulted in the original revolutionary spring of nations across France, Germany, Denmark, Habsburg, Switzerland, Poland, Wallachia, Belgium and even on the other side of the Atlantic in New Grenada and Brazil. The populace across continental Europe and Latin America were not linked by any common society, let alone Social Media. Even Radio was not to be invented for a good many decades. Yet, there are many who believe The Arab Spring to be a series of revolutions made possible by the Socially Networked World. Historical agnosticism keeps many ignorant regarding the origins of the moniker.

 The claims of political clairvoyance and visionary foresight in this regard can be ignored as self propaganda and trumpet blowing. However what makes it dangerous is the way such proclamations can zip and zoom across the networked world and place actual real life people in mortal danger.

 The euphoria over the supposed Iranian Twitter revolution – the so called Green Movement that ultimately failed to match the initial optimism about tweeting in democracy and toppling authoritarianism – is not limited to harmless claims of the political potency of Web 2.0. The current trend of amateur fortune telling, a popular passion of ‘academic-experts’, did result in a rather drastically dangerous White House directive.


With the Obama administration caught up in throes of digital delight, the enmeshed and entangled world of the internet was deemed panacea without rational analysis. The tweets coming in from Iranian dissidents were interpreted as the ushering in of a new era. Consequently an email was sent from the Oval office or one of the adjacent rooms to the Twitter administrators to defer their maintenance schedule, to enable the digital dissidents to continue tweeting.


A lot of it probably has to do with the perception of the Hollywood prototype of the authoritarian dictator – a man caught in the Middle Ages, trying hard to protect his regime from the changing winds by hiding behind burkhas and Soviet era tanks.  The men responsible for sending out that email, and people like Jared Cohen going out all cylinders hyping FaceBook as the organic way to democracy, did not pause to think of the criminal damage these armchair actions could result in.


The very act of Western leaders and policymakers coming out in praise of the Social Networking tools alerted the techno-savvy dictatorial leaderships. That the Norwegian Nobel Committee did not object to the Internet being nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by the Italian Wired Magazine did not help things either. Add to that the Google publicists beating their genetic algorithm enhanced drums about association with the NSA, and the Twitter and FaceBook executives hobnobbing with the Homeland Security honchos. This has set in motion a series of actions and counter strategies by the governments of China, Russia, the fragmented Soviet nations and Iran – regimes where the United States still thinks Twitter and FaceBook will be playing the role of the modern day Samizdat.


 In Iran, the 2009 revolutions tripped on counter digital manoeuvres. As US based pundits went on talk shows about the current social media fad, Iranian bloggers were traced by following their messy internet footprints, many ending up in real life prisons. Counter measures, censorship and reverse propaganda using the same social network tools were launched, resulting in a rebellion that failed to load. In the debris of disappointment remained the question - how much of the much hyped tweeted dissent was actually generated in Iran. Statistics show around 0.027 percent of the Iranian population had Twitter accounts at the time of the 2009 elections. A lot of the freedom furore was the contribution of users like oxfordgirl, who, as the name indicates, was an Iranian journalist resident within the safe walls of the Oxford University. It is still unclear how many of the tweeters who registered their location as Tehran were actually tweeting from there rather than home and dry in the United States of America.


While the spread and globalisation of dissent is not discouraged, this article is mainly concerned about the counter electronic measures taken by the dictatorial regimes and how the safety, security, freedom and sometimes lives of activists have been compromised by the rather callous declarations by the Western policymakers and spokespersons.

Digital Footprints: Anyone who has used a web application like Amazon or TripAdvisor will be aware of the phenomenon of personal customisation. The sites seem to know the preferences, likes and dislikes of the visitor. Not only does the online provider remember the preferred items one shopped or showed interest in, they demonstrate an uncanny knack of predicting what the user will be interested in based on his past visits. Similarly, Facebook has the eerie tendency of suggesting who are likely to be our friends from their huge database of personal information.


With web analytics and surf based forecasting becoming emerging business tools, these technologies are in the upswing of development. Hal Varian - Google’s chief economist, Johan Bollen of Indiana University and others have already done path-breaking research in this area.
And while the preliminary algorithms had been focused on finding habits and connections on the web for targeted sales predictions, this has already been picked up by governments to sniff out dissenters and their associates.
The footprints left on the cyberspace by bloggers and networked activists have been used to apprehend, censor and sometimes punish not only the dedicated dissidents but also members on their friend lists. There have been instances of particular blogs and FB groups disappearing from the server all of a sudden. Real life security police have paid visits to the homes of activists, after locating them through tower and server tracking. Neutral individuals with activist friends on their electronic address books have been picked up for questioning.


Social Network Ugly Fact Sheet 1

Passport officers at Tehran international Airport checked for existing FaceBook accounts of Iranians living abroad, noting details of suspicious friends American Foreign Policy establishment went on record stating that bloggers now were more effective than Mao and Che combined. This caused many Iranian bloggerstrained by the US to be put in jail in Iran.

In the superb German movie Das Leben der Andern (Lives of Others) made by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, one can witness the painstaking and remarkably expensive combination of equipments and manpower that were required by the Stasis to eavesdrop on the suspected dissidents of GDR . For the Big Brother to keep watching was laborious, time consuming and required clandestine visits to the house of the suspect to install sophisticated listening devices.
As a former KGB agent recently joked, nowadays all the secret police has to do is to browse through the Friend list of the activist.
While that may be trivialising the complicated cloak and dagger world, some disturbing truths lie underneath the surface of levity.
The activists of the pre-internet era swore by some ground rules which kept them from compromising their peers. The most important of all was never to carry address books. Any list which pointed to the members of a rebelling faction could be curtains for the entire movement. In contrast, by definition, the connecting power of the Social Web comes with the electronic record of these very interactions.

Social Network - The Ugly Fact Sheet 2

In early 2010, IBM struck a deal with China Mobile to provide it with technology to track social networks and individual’s messaging habits In 2010, FaceBook removed a 1000 member  group created by Moroccan activist El Ghazzali without warning or explanation. In February 2010, FaceBook was heavily criticised by critics for removing pages of a group with 84298  members that had been formed to oppose the pro-establishment and pro-Beijing party FaceBook has also shut down accounts of many Tibetan activists Twitter has been accused of silencing online tribute to the 2008 Gaza War Apple has been bashed for blocking Dalai Lama related iPhone apps from its App Store in China  Google has been zealous in removing supposed controversial content from Indian Orkut accounts for the sake of peace between the Hindu and Muslim communities. Microsoft censored the Bing search results of users in UAE, Syria, Algeria and Jordan. Twitter and FaceBook still refuse to join Global Network Initiative A lot of Internet companies and web site hosts refuse to conduct business in or for politically charged nations of the East or South.

Digital Watchdogs: Throughout the history of the 20th century, we have had examples of Western arms dealers supplying expensive arsenal to the totalitarian regimes. These arms deals, used by the dictators to curb the local dissent and rebellions, were purely profitable business for the West. In the sophisticated world of web based politics, a similar story is being played out. Many Western firms, sniffing returns of investment- caring as much for freedom and democracy as corporations habitually do - have taken up supplying software to regimes to track cyber activities of dissenters.


The governments have also adapted themselves to the modern trends of the connected world. To maintain scalable operations of censorship and tracking dissidents, they have taken the help of two popular strategies of current corporations.  Outsourcing and Crowdsourcing.
The companies offering the services of Web 2.0 where activists and dissident bloggers operate are, after all, service providers working in the real world. Powerful governments can bully them to censor and remove content that is offensive. Experiments carried out recently show such trends of censorship in China and Russia, where suppression is haphazard, effective and does not tax the resources of the governments.

Further, there is also the growing trend of alliances of tech savvy individuals loyal to government causes or ideology. 
Being a playing field of large numbers, the internet does attract all kinds. These enlightened pro-government surfers can and do play whistleblowers.
The fundamental problem with online activism is that it does away with a lot of axiomatic principles required for a successful revolution. For a revolution demanding sacrifice and commitment, a central command is necessary while the circle of activists need to be strongly connected and private. By definition, internet activism is a collection of weak links, decentralised governance and glaringly public.


While decentralised collective intelligence can work wonders for Wikipedia, it is the worst kind of association to foment rebellion. And a weak link – in the form of an armchair clicking dissenter who likes all FB posts of his activist friends, a pro government whistle blower or a compromised company providing web based services – can actually destroy and endanger the entire organisation.


Counter Techniques:  Countries like China and Russia have also started the logical and popular concept of domestic social networks. Services like RuNet are far more popular in Russia than FaceBook. In China, of the 300 million web users only 14000 are on FaceBook. This gives the government further control over the online activists by controlling the domestic companies. Dmitri Medvedev can now learn everything he wants from reports sent by the Russian hosting companies.
Another technique used by governments to silence online dissidents is DDoS or Distributed Denial of Service. All Websites have limits of occupancy, and dissident bloggers using censorship circumventing sites generally end up on servers that can handle much less numbers than a CNN.com or an Amazon. A DDoS attack, triggered by computers infected by malware or viruses, sends thousands of programs masquerading as users to the site, thus bringing the service down and making it unavailable. Nowadays, such applications for hostile takeover of sites are sold on eBay for a few hundred dollars.


Counter Intuitive Promotion: While censorship and silencing is one part of the game, wise authoritarian governments also promote the use of Internet – even the Western elixirs of democracy FaceBook and YouTube – for other completely different reasons.
One predominant driving factor is that, a centralised movement directed towards propaganda is still more powerful than scattered fragments of disconnected connections of denial.  The battalion of government funded Chinese bloggers infiltrating the blogosphere and manipulating public opinion is already well known. Hugo Chavez, not exactly known for his brevity, now sports a Twitter account which can be very appropriately viewed as his alter ego.


The other, slightly subtler, motivation stems from the social susceptibility to cheap entertainment. The more the younger generation is caught up with the videos of cute cats, the unchecked and immense opportunities of hooking up with virtual heavenly bodies and can satisfy their social conscience with a few likes on politically charged issues posted on Facebook, the government can sit back and watch the show without too many serious fires to douse.  With the young Russians waking up to Lady Gaga chimes, and spending hours watching ripped versions of Avatar, the government is spared the expenses and headaches to come up with boring state controlled entertainment programmes.
After all, contrary to what the West would like to believe, citizens in totalitarian and authoritarian regimes continue to be normal populace, not a regiment of Arthur Koestler characters.


In fact, the Russian government is so clearly aware of these phenomena that they have linked the world of superficial entertainment with propaganda. This is conspicuous in the rise of Konstantin Rykov, the young godfather of Russian internet. While his claim to fame started on becoming Russia’s first pornographer, his immense popularity made him diversify into pro government propaganda as well, including entertaining games with strong conservative pro Russian undercurrents.

The modern fascination for independent bloggers has also been used to the hilt by the Russian authorities in promoting Maria Sergeyeva,  a stunning blonde, who posts anti immigrant propaganda, praises Catherine the Great and uploads pictures of cool parties with equal abandon. New York Daily has even gone as far as calling her Russia’s Sarah Palin.


The Chinese have followed suit as well, with the recruitment of a number of bright youths in the government to dominate the internet, popularising games which promote national traditions and posting video clips of actors posing as the random passersby who mouths positive sentiments about the government.


Gradually, these countries are waking up to another major and sophisticated truth, something that the United States of America discovered some decades back. It is easier to control dissent by allowing mild tongue in cheek criticism rather than bull-headedly banning every anti-government voice. The sitcom viewers watch with a smile while David Schwimmer of Friends presents his on screen son with a ten inch GI Joe, introducing the toy figure as the protector of American Oil Interests abroad. Thus amused and satisfied social consciousness keeps many of the audience from joining street rallies extolling the same cause. Chinese and Russian governments are now opening up many of the policies or even investigations to bloggers and web-activists, creating a pseudo open culture that anesthetises much of the internal agony that leads to rebellion.

Social Network - The Ugly Fact Sheet 3

DDoS attacks have been launched on  a.       Tomaar philosophy group of Saudi Arabia b.       Irrawady, Mizzima and Democratic Voice of Burma – Burma’s exiled media c.       Belarusian oppositional site Charter 97 d.       Russian Independent Newspaper Novaya Gazeta e.       Kazakh oppositional newspaper – Respublika f.       Cyxymu – popular Georgian bloggers       Hugo Chavez has his own twitter account @chavezcadanga . He also boasts having more than 5000 songs on his iPod.  In 2009, accused of police brutality and cover up of the murder of blogger Li Qiaoming, Chinese authorities asked netizen bloggers to help them investigate the issue. Fifteen bloggers were invited to the cell of death, but the evidence shown was scratchy. No conclusion was reached, but the authorities came off as transparent and liberal. In 2009, Kremlin School of Bloggers was launched, a series of public talks and workshops given by leading ideologues and propagandists. This was in response to anotherschool called School of Bloggers, funded by America’s National Endowment for Democracy and organised by the Glasnost Foundation. China’s pro government Internet commentators, the Fifty Cent Party, supposedly earn 50 cents for each pro-government comment. Their job is to neutralise undesirable public opinion in the cyberspace and to steer them in ideologically appropriate directions.        In 2009, the Nigerian government sought to enlist more than 700 Nigerians abroad and at home to create a new generation of pro-government bloggers. In the same year, editorials in official Cuban newspapers began calling for pro-government Cuban journalists to man the cyber-trenches. In 2010 Iran launched their own Social Networking site Valayatmadaran. Two Chinese games, Learn from Lei Feng and Incorruptible Warrior glorify traditional characters of Chinese History. Following its launch, the site of Incorruptible Warrior had to temporarily shut down so that more players could be accommodated. China promotes sms based competitions – rewarding party appreciated text messages. Russian extreme nationalists foment hate and ethnic discrimination through Social Networking Groups

Networked Fanaticism: Looking at the situation with retrospection, we come across another fact staring at us immediately under the contemporary scales on global eyes. Democracy by definition implies multiple thought and independence of opinions. In the decentralised social media, one can expect rich and diverse ideas, collaborative thought – but it is difficult to expect the concentrated leadership indispensable to any planned revolution. As will be seen in other articles, it is also a breeding ground for slacktivism.
In fact, it is far more likely that groups of like thinking fundamentalists will be united by common causes in the Social Networking Circles. Indeed, tweets, status updates and text messages to spread hatred and incite severe forms of racial and ethnic indiscrimination have been around for a while – something conveniently ignored by the Western policymakers who eulogise Web 2.0 as the technology driven messiah .
Wherever we see successful revolutions using social media, the common factor is undeniable. It is a long standing and stable movement with able leadership, which use Twitter, texting and FaceBook to organise the activism at low cost, thus neutralising the infrastructural advantage of the governmental authority. However, in the light of all that is discussed above, whether such an approach is recommended in the face of a thoughtful and technologically competent regime is subject to a lot of questions.


Till then we must desist the wishful thinking that a menu utility File --> Change --> History is enough for us to rewrite the times from the safe refuge of our couches and laptops.

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Shruti Rattan is a fictitious character who appears in Arunabha Sengupta’s latest novel The Best Seller.

An Amsterdam based researcher on political science, she is also a talented author and compulsive punster.