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2 April 1998 Edition

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New in print

Britain's macho terrorists



Dangerous Men; The SAS and Popular Culture
By P Newsinger
Published by Pluto Press

This book on the SAS and British popular culture is a timely intervention. While its focus is the rise of the SAS under Thatcher's administration, it has many pertinent questions which are as relevent today as they were ten years ago.

Newsinger traces the history of the SAS from the second world war, though various colonial conflicts through to its present role as ``anti-terrorist'' force par excellence.

Disentangeling myth from fact, he argues that standard military history as much as adolescent comic books and party political spindoctoring have provided a distorted and politically motivated account of the SAS and their role in British culture.

The book is a critique of British notions of nationality and masculinity, framed in a right wing, ``survival of the fittest'' militaristic context which has for generations been exploited by political and military figures. The aim has been to construct mythical notions of Englishness.

While Thatcher's acclamation of the SAS storming of the Iranian Embassy might be the most glaring example, the Tories fall from power does not bring the current of the SAS to a close. Their continued role in the British military establishment, as well as in British culture generally, leaves many questions unanswered. And leaves the Mitchell Principles not worth the paper they're written on.

By Eoin O Broin


A republican war poet



Bobby Sands: Writings from Prison
Published by Mercier Press
Price £9.99

The greatest war poetry, like that of Owen, Rosenberg and Sassoon, does not glorify the sufferings of war. Wilfred Owen, arguably the best English poet of the First World War, referred to the British habit of mystification and glorification of their imperial war as ``the old lie''. He was disgusted and infuriated with the propagandists who wrote well away from the horror of the trenches. Instead, Owen wrote about what he called ``the pity of war'', about the misery and ugliness of war as well as the simple poignancy of much of it. It was in this poignancy that Owen found the real romanticism and glory of war. In Strange Meeting, for example, the poet dreams of death and of meeting a German soldier deep in the underworld who speaks to him:

I am the enemy you killed my friend. I knew you in this dark

For so you frowned as yesterday through me you jabbed and killed.

I tried to parry, but my hands were loathe and cold.

Let us sleep now...

With this long-overdue collected works, containing Sean MacBride's fine introduction from `One Day in My Life' and a foreword by Gerry Adams, Bobby Sands can take his place amongst the war poets; a different war against a different enemy certainly, but this is war poetry nonetheless.

In the blackness I awoke like a corpse in the grave,

Engulfed by the fear of a ghostly wave.

There were devils and angels by the foot of my bed

And they fought for my soul to the night sky fled.

That Sands was a talented writer, who would undoubtedly have developed this talent had he lived, is amply demonstrated by his poetry, which also captures the ``pity of war'' which Owen sought to convey. What is perhaps more surprising about Sands - given that he did not have the classical education of the British officer-class to which Owen belonged - is his instinctive technical ability; much of his verse was beautifully crafted, disciplined and carefully shaped. This, added to the circumstances in which it was written, makes his achievements all the more formidable.

Equally powerful in the collection is his prose writing, none more so than an account of a day in the life of a blanketman. Sands describes in minute detail the events of a single day beginning from the moment of his waking to his last thought before falling into exhausted sleep. We all know in some objective sense what happened on the blanket - of the beatings, abuse, hunger, isolation, boredom and the terrible, unrelenting cold - but the shock of reading first-hand accounts never lessens. Sands describes the indescribable, Dantesque, hell of the H-Blocks throughout with unflinching clarity. Like Owen there is no artificial glorification, no gung-ho nihilism. Sands, too, wants us to understand the sheer bloody misery and ugliness of it all.

There is, however, one vitally important difference between Sands and the British war poets and it is this. Bobby Sands believed, absolutely, in the cause for which he fought. He chose to fight because he knew he was fighting a just war. Underlying much of Owen's poetry is a sense of bewilderment, of anger at the futility of the imperial mess into which he has been unwillingly catapulted.

Not so with Sands. Emerging from his writing is the sense of his unshakable belief that if he is to die in this war he knows exactly why. It is this clear-sighted vision which saves him from the absolute despair suffered by Owen and which, despite the overwhelming odds, keeps him sane: ``Jesus! They're killing me. They're killing me. My head's light. Remember your spirit. `Blessed is he who does not give up his hope.' Don't give in, don't give in, they can't break your spirit, they can't ...''. Owen, after suffering shell-shock (what would now be referred to as severe post-traumatic stress) was accused of cowardice by his superiors. He returned to the front and was killed a week before the Armistice. He was 25.

By Fern Lane

An Phoblacht
44 Parnell Sq.
Dublin 1
Ireland