Fair fa’ your honest, sonsie face,
Great chieftain o’ the pudding-race!
Aboon them a’ yet tak your place,
Painch, tripe, or thairm:
Weel are ye wordy o’a grace
As lang’s my arm.

Ye Pow’rs, wha mak mankind your care,
And dish them out their bill o’ fare,
Auld Scotland wants nae skinking ware
That jaups in luggies;
But, if ye wish her gratefu’ prayer
Gie her a haggis!

To the haggis, and later to the ladies, I raise my glass to you!

Anyway, will be back soon and the site needs an overhaul so please bear with the default wordpress look and the wiki is still available here

This book Fall Back makes a huge deal about credible leadership between the two main characters and their peers. The author, Peter Niesewand, tries to hammer this ethos across through the words and the actions of the characters, trust in me and I will see you right – “have I ever gave you a bum steer?”

David Cane is a super DIA, “an intelligence structure within an intelligence structure”, operative. Killer, super agent, super fit, patriotic, the best of the best, fluent in Russian and well respected by his peers, yet also a loving family man who wont impart secrets to his wife or son as that would be against his warrior code and make them targets for the KGB. Also he has claimed to his wife that he has never slept with any other woman. A man who is morally pure, unlike fellow operative Clive Lyle. Lyle is a man who seduces woman for secrets before leaving them to their fates in the hands of their gentle local South American counter-intelligence units and for this Cane abhors Lyle.
The character Cane is managed to be described well enough so that he appears to be a normal bloke who is a healthy and a good agent, not some superman.

Dr. Martin Ross is a professor, an old-ish man who leads and is well respected in the international community of computer science, a man who also speaks fluent Russian. However, age and a bit of sedentary lifestyle are catching up with him and thus his physical health doesn’t match his mental health.

These two are brought together when it is discovered that the Russians have developed a computer system for their missiles which makes a first strike nuclear war winnable. This has terrified Ronald Reagan, so he has tasked the DIA to remove the threat. This threat can only be nullified be posing as KGB officers and inputting undetectable code on the central computer at the Vologda base, near Sverdlovsk, a base 500 feet underground in the Urals. For the mission to be successful, Cane now has to train Ross in becoming a lean, yet old, fighting machine, and for Ross to work out and understand the language used by the Russians on their computer. This brings them together closer than father and son, rather they are soldiers who share a foxhole together and depend on each other to survive, and where each others skill-set will make them credible leaders to each other at certain points in the operation.

So Cane creates the impression very successfully to Ross that he is a credible leader, that he will successfully train and motivate him to succeed in this mission that Ross would normally have no expectation of succeeding in. The old Doctor starts to believe in it, warms to the physical training and also to the mental challenge of trying to understand what code that the Russians are using.

To understand this code, there is the second story of a disgruntled and victimised Russian armaments captain. Captain Filipp Ivanovich Levin is suffering from the sins of his grandfather who fought for the White Russians against the Bolsheviks, and we all know the Russians believed that past generational sins will resurface in their descendants. Levin is fighting back by being a traitor in the pay of the USA and information about the base, personnel and the computers may be obtained through him. Through the sponsorship of his general, Colonel General Georgi Borisovich Stupar, the head of Chief Artillery Directorate, where Levin is his aide de camp, Levin gets invited to a party at the US embassy. There he meets his CIA controller for the first time in a social setting and more importantly he meets Jean Buchanan, a secretary at the embassy. This meeting with Jean is noticed by the KGB and they decide to put Levin in a golden cage and turn him into a sparrow*, a man-whore, so that he can compromise Jean and lead her to betray secrets from the embassy. So the KGB set Levin with a flash apartment staffed by a maid and a chef, a Volvo, and gives him access to banned literature, American music and the drug enhanced cookies. He takes Jean to some real peasant and Muscovite experiences and they begin to grow a genuine affection towards each other. Levin finds out almost immediately that Jean was planted by the Americans to be a better contact than the clandestine letter boxes that he currently uses. The KGB focusing on her potential for blackmail falls for the trap.

Peter Niesewand does follow the road of many others in the cold war genre and highlighting that the Russians of having two markedly different societies – the haves and the have-nots, as if poverty doesn’t exist on our side of the Wall. However, instead of using the have-nots as simple peasants who rage at the authorities and using them for some propaganda, he paints them as having acceptance of their status. It doesn’t matter who is in charge or what political system is in charge the Russian peasant will always have a poor life, so why not seek solace in comradeship at the pivnoyzal, the worker beer bars.

With Levin having the affair, the DIA through the CIA believe they have a pipeline into the Vologda base, however the information that they so badly need is beyond Levin’s security clearance, however they have a stroke of luck as the head of computers from the base, Major Metkin is coming to London. Armed with a drug that will allow someone who is being interrogated to tell the truth and not remember the interrogation Cane and Ross head to London. There the dynamic duo come up with a plan of sneaking through crawl spaces in the ceiling and gassing the KGB guard of the programmer. Yet the KGB does not play nice and decide to make things difficult, by moving the Major into a different room than what was previously reserved for him. The only way to get access to the Major’s room is by accessing an adjacent room and knocking out through the exhaustion of sex, a young Frenchman or a middle aged Australian woman. With help from the British secret service, the Frenchman is introduced to a stunningly beautiful woman who makes it clear that she wants to sleep with him, however in a betrayal of his French heritage, the young man says no. Cane now has to seduce the Australian and knock her out. He manages to do that and he and Ross successfully interrogates the Major and as a bonus finds out that the Major is in London to organise the defection of Britain’s leading computer expert. As they are clearing out through the Australian woman’s room, she wakes up and Cane has to sleep with her again, and at this point Ross experiences jealousy and homo-eroticism as he watches Cane perform his duty.

The book is now at the halfway point and I am thoroughly enjoying it. Peter Niesewand has written the book well, I trust him to lead me on a very enjoyable second half with a rousing finish. Then there is a dramatic plot twist. Ross is diagnosed with cancer and only has a short time to live. The doctors do not know whether it is six hours or six months, but the result is that he won’t be able to complete the mission. What a good turn-up for the book and this leaves the agency and the President in turmoil, the future of the world rests on what happens next.
What do the Americans do:

a) Abandon the mission and hope the Russians never do the unthinkable?
b) Train the wife of Ross as she too is a fluent Russian speaker and is also super computer whiz?
c) Nuke the Russians? Anything is possible with Reagan
d) Train Levin in computers and he will disarm the warhead programme?
e) Train David to be a super computer whiz?
f) Suicide mission from the old man who will sneak into the base and on his last breath write the code that stops the missiles?
g) Train and allow the British traitor to defect and he re-writes the computer code.

No, instead the author chooses h, have the boss of the agency terminate the young super agent and then transplant the brain from the old man into his head, thus creating the ultimate agent. I honestly never saw that coming, and this made me sceptical for the rest of the book. I love escapism – that is the whole point of cold war fiction, but it has to be credible escapism. For instance, I thought The Power by James Mills about telepathy was one of the worst books I have ever read, yet Larry Collins Maze, which set along the same lines was quite good he managed to credibly explain the science coupled with good character development and a decent plot. In one fell swoop, the author has turned a very good cold war spy book that had all the right ingredients into something that is frankly a bit stupid.

Peter Niesewand at this point tries to justify this by having the doctor character a man who has successfully swapped brains in dogs and explaining briefly about the science of brain glue that will allow the body to accept the new brain. The consequence is dogs that can do old tricks in new bodies, so why not use it on humans and save the world. But I am still flabbergasted at where this book is heading and I can’t absorb it. My trust in the author has gone and I am wondering do I read the rest of the book? The result is that I now don’t care what happens to the main characters and their super-important mission, instead I am now more interested in the second story of the Levin.

Anyway, the transplant is a success; we have pages describing the flickering of an eye before the Steve Austin resurrection. I still don’t care, there is some interesting talk at this point whether he is still married to his wife or not, same brain-different body plus as he has his new body why should he bother with his old wife?
The book still tries to mention the ethos of having credible leadership by the re-introduction of Clive Lyle who will force the old man/young man, through the obstacle course and mentally prepare him for the world in his new body, but Peter Niesewand has no credibility with me and it is just now unemotional words on a page.

Sadly too, the story of Levin also loses momentum, and when the hybrid agent and the traitor meet up to perform the mission it is all a bit lacklustre. If I read the end of the book without knowing the brain transplanting I am sure it would have been an exciting finish, but I did, so it isn’t.

Overall:
According to the book, who would win the cold war: The West. The Russians can not fire their missiles and the West can create super humans.

Explosives/fight scenes etc.. : Some killer transformation of the old man in a mock fight, two super agents go hand to hand. A fledging passeridae gets his wings pulled off.

Believability of the goodies:
Ross and Cane – I won’t describe as they are now unbelievable and has left me still in shock

Captain Filipp Ivanovich Levin – Was well written, there was clear motivation and justification of his actions. I enjoyed the parts of the story that he took part in, however by the end he seemed to fizzle out and suffered a realistic ending.

Jean Buchanan – There always seems to be a double standard in Western fiction where the Russians and their satellites cynically employs woman to be sparrows or state whores, where in the West if a young woman has to do it, it is a one off as none of our pure Christian warriors would allow herself to be defiled that way unless it is clearly for the good of the nation. Maybe it is the industrialisation of the production line in sparrows that we in the West find so offensive.
Jean Buchanan was written rather nicely and the author managed to give you a complete false impression of her throughout the book till the very end. She was portrayed as a demur, gentle young woman, seeking love and that could only be found in the arms of Levin. Like Levin she is ecstatic about the happy coincidence where she can, through state encouragement, meet her soul mate. However, she is just a well-acted black hearted state sponsored whore who once Levin gets killed, she moves along to her next target.

Believability of the baddies

In spy books, the upper echelons of spy agencies are seen as one of three types:
a bit clever, with their weakness being an underlying stupidity that they don’t realise that their blunt plans are a bit too obvious
a bit absent-minded and leads their opponents to under-estimate them, which masks their complete brilliance and Machiavellian plots.
a cold hearted bastard who do anything to get the job done.

The main Russian bad man is Colonel Mikhail Ilich Malik, Head of the First Department, Second chief Directorate is the first type. He is your journeyman spy boss. His unoriginal plans are straight out of the book, seduce a foreigner, then blackmail them into supplying secrets. Keep a tight grip on your operative through fear and more often than not this plan succeeds.
Did Peter Niesewand write him well? Yes and no. There was no need to expand too much creative energy on him as he was character created by ticking off a baddy checklist. Black as sin : check, Cold evil stare: check, Rules through fear: check. Double standard to Russian citizens: check ..you get the idea. Well written, yes but economical with character uniqueness and development.

General Yardley. Director of the DIA, is the third type. He will do anything to anybody to achieve his goal. Normally in fiction, ‘our side’ describes our leaders or guardians as doing dirty jobs for the good of us all, and the author plays a sympathy card where the character realises in the cold wee hours of the morning the mental/ moral suffering that they are inflicting. However the author is South African/Rhodesian , so he has no loyalty to give to the Americans or to the West and by the same token to the East, and so he presents General Yardley as simply a cold hearted bastard. Would a character like General Yardley take the risk of sacrificing his best agent and using the special brain glue, hope that a one in a million chance is successful? Yes, I believe he would as you can mould more agents, but you can’t get more computer-whiz brains in a hurry. General Yardley, like all the others was written in a clear style where you can identify with them as Niesewand took the time to describe him and his motivations. Sometimes when you read books, you find the characters aren’t believable as they do actions which appear out of their described personality, where in this book, the characters stayed in character.

In conclusion, I was enjoying the journey that Peter Niesewand was taking me on, the odd red herrings, the options which could have happened with the old man falling ill and the secondary story with the Russian who wants to defect to the West. But one critical turning point, followed by 5 or 6 pages of detailed description of a brain transplant destroyed it all. I can see the merit in the author putting up obstacles stopping his goodies from having everything their own way else the book becomes a formulaic procession of good guys winning, but the option he chose was not necessary wrong, but rather the plot and the language never supported it. I admire Peter Niesewand for thinking well outside the box. To say it was poorly written would be incorrect, the book is well written, rather the credibility could not stretch far enough to smoothly hammer the square peg into a round plot-hole.

3 out of 5 stars 4 stars for the first half, 2 stars the second.

When chapman billies leave the street,
And drouthy neibors, neibors, meet;
As market days are wearing late,
And folk begin to tak the gate,
While we sit bousing at the nappy,
An’ getting fou and unco happy,
We think na on the lang Scots miles,
The mosses, waters, slaps and stiles,
That lie between us and our hame,
Where sits our sulky, sullen dame,
Gathering her brows like gathering storm,
Nursing her wrath to keep it warm.

Now, wha this tale o’ truth shall read,
Ilk man and mother’s son, take heed:
Whene’er to Drink you are inclin’d,
Or Cutty-sarks rin in your mind,
Think ye may buy the joys o’er dear;
Remember Tam o’ Shanter’s mare.

As I looked around the club, from my high moral pedestal mind you, I equated the sad losers next to the stage as Bond fans. Eh? I hear you cry! Well the girl walking down on two legs or on all fours, is expected and has an arrogance about her, she knows she is in charge and there are no real surprises, no real emotion, and has a half decent soundtrack just like Bond. There is no emotional connection, rather she has a role to play and will get a big fat cheque at the end of the night. She has her own marketing as the issue of Penthouse where she is on the front cover is left on a few tables so that we know who she is and that it is a supposedly privilege to see her. Bond has an arrogance about him, there is no real suspense in a Bond movie, at no point do you think that he might die, rather all the lead actors are going through the motions in order to earn the big fat pay cheque whilst the producers use the movie as a vehicle to product place anything and everything. As I am scanning the room, looking like a bad undercover cop or a lost little bored boy, I am thinking of A Dandy in Aspic, on how to write the post, when one of the hostesses comes up to talk to me.

My conversation with the very nice looking 20 year old hostess was:

She: “Hi gorgeous”
Me: “Sorry, what?”
“I said “Hi gorgeous” ”
“Oh, sorry! Hi to you too, sorry I can’t hear you as I have a cold and the music is so loud” At this point my brain is screaming at me to keep it friendly, but say no to spending money as I nearly had to take out a small loan to buy a beer here.
She said something, god knows what it was so I replied
“Sorry, what was that again?”
Some more things she says but I can’t hear over the music, but was I truly making the effort to listen properly? Or was I using all my efforts trying to look non-perverted, even though I’m in a club, how to reject her requests for a drink or even worse a very expensive private dance, so I said to her “Sorry, I can’t hear you, you have a nice night” and she says “You too gorgeous, maybe see you later” before she sashes away. At this point, I’m still thinking I’m looking cool, but I’m sure I looked relieved, but my brain is telling me well done on saving some money – how would you explain having a credit card charge from here, and also I will have to tell my wife this story when I get home which when I do, she is obviously impressed in how I reject this brazen harlots approach, but this impressiveness is hidden beneath her laughing at my social awkward panic attack. I am clearly no Robert Hanssen, I won’t be saving a Miss Ohio Stripper of the Year or writing laughably bad porn like he did.

So panic attack over, my brain returns to the movie and as it does I start thinking that the Harry Palmer films are represented by the non-penthouse strippers – why are they called strippers when they have next to nothing to take off. Palmer is like these strippers, more workman like than the Pet, but still with a certain level of looks and flexibility, and like the Pet, there is a lack of emotion that connects the performance to the audience. Palmer is suave, cool, has an arrogance about him, but you know he too, like Bond, will survive.

Palmer and Bond are clearly not the ugly ducklings of the stage, and this is where A Dandy is Aspic comes in. This movie is the not so ugly girl who can only serve drinks, still good looking but not good enough to make men swoon. Rather she may have confidence issues as she knows she is third tier in an environment where looks not personality or brains is the only criteria and this is reflected in her walk. A high-level stripper has an arrogance as she prowls her territory where a drinks girls scurries about bringing drink orders to the sad men who wont give them a glance. A Dandy in Aspic is all about confidence, self mortality and how a spy works rather than someone who swans through their operational life.

The opening credits, represented by the puppet getting pulled every which way by the East and the West, who are represented by the colours of the background, gives us a stylish clue of which sort of film it will be. It will be a film of mixed loyalties and that agents are, without labouring the point, just puppets on a string and thus expendable and there to be exploited. The puppetry is further used in the end credits too, and you feel that whoever was responsible for the credits has actually made a good job of mirroring the story, rather than just sticking on opening credits which make no sense or relevance to the movie. Take a hint Bond credit producers.

The movie opens in an English countryside church where a man is being buried. A poor attendance, and those who are attending look officious and dressed in a black and you know they are there to bury a spy. A black man hurries off to use his car phone and inform London that the man has been buried. At this point, I did question whether this man is an accurate representation of the Secret Service as he would need to be pretty important to have a car-phone and what looks like a secretary in his expensive looking car. I am solely basing on this on the fact that in those days I would think MI5 and MI6 management would have been strictly male and white, with them becoming more ethically diverse in the late 70s, 80s, rather than 1968 when this film was released.

We are introduced to the main character, Alexander Eberlin, who is actually Krasnevin a KGB assassin. Eberlin is like Molotin or Colonel Maxim Maximovich Isayev, a Russian who has managed to pass himself as a local and infiltrated the local Security establishment, in this case British Intelligence. By appearing to be a “sexless” “arrogant” or easily bored with the world man, like myself in a strip club, he is conveys to the outside world to be your stiff upper-lip Englishman and thus unflappable. However inside he is tired of his false charade, cracks are starting to appear in the Russian support organisation around him and he is yearning to go home.

Eberlin is very much a man who does not know who he is, and so he sub-consciously starts the process of professional suicide by picking up a party girl, Caroline, played by Mia Farrow. During the introduction of this character we find out that she took a picture of him in Morocco, whilst he was there on an assassination mission, and he and the viewer begins to think she is a plant by the SIS in trap him into confessing that he is not who he appears to be. Caroline says she could be a model, but I was left thinking maybe as a sexless plain looking woman who looks like a little boy type of model.

Eberlin then watches a Russian agent getting killed in London, though he could have stopped it, rather he professionally lets the man escape to his death and decides he has enough of London, its climate and wants to go home. His best friend, his local controller has became a junkie, and he too needs to escape back to the Rodina. So Eberlin requests to go home, but he is rejected by his bosses. Despondently he is then tasked by the British to find out who is Krasnevin and is teamed up with Gatiss. This tasking to Eberlin sends him into an internal panic attack, but externally maintains his facade of coolness. The viewer will either like or hate how this panic attack representation is done – I liked it, as how else can you show an internal panic attack where you go red, your ears pound, you go deaf and you want to take flight but your brain shuts down, immobilizing your limbs but your face surprisingly looks the same.

Gatiss is a young man looking to make a name for himself and wanting to turn the Cold War into a full on agent war. Eberlin later wonderfully describes Gatiss as “You [Gatiss] haven’t got an ounce of understanding or emotion in your body. You died the moment you were born. And when your heart finally stops beating, it’ll be a mere formality.”

Eberlin flies to Berlin, and upon arriving tries to defect to the East, however the East Germans refuse him entry and upon his rejection he bumps into Caroline who too has just been refused entry at the same border crossing. They hook up, and it being a spy film you now take it for being granted that she is definitely working for the British. However, I wont write much more about her as she doesn’t add much to the story, she is there simply as a bit of eye-candy, it was simply a coincidence she meets Eberlin and I think Eberlin knows that the end is near, so why not indulge himself and let some feelings show.

Gatiss in Berlin is probing looking for the Krasnevin the hitman, and is getting frustrated with Eberlin for his laissez-faire attitude in trying to find him, so Gatiss turns to the only way he knows how to try and flush Krasnevin out. That is to be a hot headed nuisance, create chaos and up the ante in Berlin with deaths of the Russians and hope that the KGB tasked Krasnevin to kill him. Gatiss, to flush out Kranevin, creates a distraction at the motor racing, which effective as it was the distraction seemed to be well over the top.

I wont go much into the rest of the story, as really it is your job, based on my strong recommendation to go out and watch this film. I hate reading reviews where the reviewer takes you through each line and nuance of the movie, I don’t mind it if it is a movie which is hard to find, but for one that is readily available why should I spoil this for you? However, I though the ending made sense as it puts an end to any aberrations of the rules of an intelligence war, where targeting each others agents is not allowed.

This is a sort of film where if you want entertainment, you will be disappointed, if you want to remove your brain and have everything explained to you, you will be disappointed. Instead, if you enjoy spies real and fictional, the psychological pressures of hiding behind a mask for years and feeling everyone is out to get you, then send the kids and your partner to bed, have a good glass of red and simply enjoy this masterpiece.

Truly this is one of the greatest spy movie of all time. This movie is so good that it makes the Harry Palmer films look like your average journeyman spy films. It strips further away the glamour of spies and instead shows that they are fragile and acutely aware of their mortality.

5 out of 5 stars Fantastic.

Here are the lyrics, written by Don Walker.

Well the last plane out of Sydney’s almost gone
Yeah the last plane out of Sydney’s almost gone
And it’s really got me worried
I’m goin’ nowhere and I’m in a hurry
And the last plane out of Sydney’s almost gone

And yes, the song has been hi-jacked by the bogan (translation Australian red-neck) crowd, but who cares as it’s still simply a great piece of music.

5 out of 5 stars

This book raises in the reader certain issues and these include:
1) In war, you have to do whatever it takes to stay alive and kill the enemy. War is no place for rules and any action is excusable on the battlefield, even if it is seen as reprehensible in civilian life. Even if you go a bit chicken oriental (mental for the non cockney readers) you stick to the golden rule of I kill you before you kill me.

2) This then creates a state of mind which can later, if successful, be put back into its box. However every so often it can slip out and only massive amounts of self control can stop your actions. If you are psyched up for 12 months, you can’t suddenly flick a switch and be normal. Characters in this book who fought on opposite sides during the war now interact with an understanding of each others experiences, however in some cases they have trouble holding themselves back from having a street brawl.

3) The US soldiers of the Vietnam War felt completely unsupported by the media, the civilians and by the politicians, however that didn’t matter as they trusted each other, it created an internal code of conduct and made them stronger as a corps. I must admit that I’ve used this tactic in real-life where I’ve became responsible for badly performing teams at work, and you then create a culture at the start where you say everybody hates us, lets work together and prove them wrong. Some sporting managers use it, the most notable being Alex Ferguson from Manchester United. However, this makes you, and on a a far larger scale in Vietnam, angry and shocked when one of your own later turns against you. In this book, the soldiers don’t mind everybody is against them, so long they stick together, but what they find is the lowest of the low is soldiers using the war for their own personal monetary gain and thereby helping the enemy. This covers things such as selling shipments of goods to the black market which are then later used against you by the VC (referenced in Steel Tiger review coming soon) or in this book stealing money and killing your fellow combatants to cover up your theft.

4) Ambassadors and their hangers on. They are a drain of the public purse and all that time is wasted on ass-kissing by their courtesans. I detest that rubbish where ambassadors are excused and thus take no responsibility for spy missions. Ambassadors should be accountable for all the state sponsored actions of their countrymen, else why are you there unless it’s just a junket. A few months ago I did some quotations from Ion Pacepa’s Red Horizons and I liked how the Romanian ambassadors were also intelligence agents and that should be their job, none of the endless tea parties and fact finding missions that they do as a reward for being a failed politician.

5) How we in the West harp on and constantly feel the need to excuse the actions of the US soldiers during the war. Yes, there were some acts which were reprehensible and are war crimes, however we gloss over and willfully forget the atrocities committed by the VC against civilians and enemy combatants. Is there an element of racism where we classify our actions as being beyond the pale, yet we excuse the North Vietnamese actions as this is what you would expect from what we deem to be uncivilised savages? The Vietnamese clearly won the propaganda war, and this allows them to hide their atrocities and subsequently make us forget them.

6) In an ideal world, the leader of your country is supposed to be the best-est and fairest of all, instead what happens is that we have the best politician representing us with all their flaws. I wont go into what I think of Royalty, especially the UK Royal family, as simply they are just a bunch of inbred, money wasting, unaccountable oxygen thieves, and as for those who dote on them and lick their boots, well viva la revolution and off with all their heads. In this book, you wonder what immoral act should rule you out from having high office, and if others know your secret, doesn’t that make you a compromised and ineffective politician and therefore you can’t perform and respect the duties of your Office.

7) Urban planning after a war. Seriously this is a fascinating subject, as it is always interesting when friends or conquerors impose their town designs on another country. In this book East Germany re-builds Vinh in their ghastly concrete style which looks out of place in Vietnam and I remember years ago passing through Le Harve in France which was rebuilt after the Second World War and that was just a city made out of concrete and the street widths were huge giving you the impression that you were in a American town built by the East Germans and the people spoke French as they ignored the British ferry travelers. I quote from wikipedia “UNESCO declared the city centre of Le Havre a World Heritage Site on 15 July 2005, in honouring the “innovative utilisation of concrete’s potential.”

Cold War fiction has always been dominated by the names of le Carré, Deighton and Clancy, however since starting the stasi.com I’ve found that I have enjoyed the books of DeMille and Allbeurey far more. John le Carré books have lost their relevance and his writing hasn’t stood the test of time, Deighton hit some very high highs (the very well written Funeral in Berlin and maybe some of Michael Caines ’60s coolness adds to its appeal), but I found re-reading his Game, Set, Match a bit dull, and Clancy should have stopped writing when the millennium started, yet I think I could pick up a DeMille or an Allbeurey and enjoy the story-telling no matter how old I get.

DeMille writes highly enjoyable remove your brain, settle into a comfortable position for hours, very readable novels, he does use the odd cliché and in this the most obvious one, and my pet hate, is the one where the stunningly beautiful female operative, killing machine extraordinaire, falls in love with the protagonist and goes against her orders and her nature and subsequently follows the new righteous path dictated by the man. However, that doesn’t distract from what is a very good book and DeMille skilfully uses his Vietnam experience, as he did in Word of Honour.

Fabulous book, well worth its rating.
5 out of 5 stars

The story is an ex-CIA agent has become a werewolf and is now running amok during the Vietnam war and the narrator is recounting the story of what happened and how it was killed at the end. The problem sometime when it’s a narration, you know the person must have survived so that he can tell the story so they is no twist. Where in The Sixth Sense it was so obvious he was dead at the start, and I felt a fool waiting for the twist that everybody said would blow your mind when you already assumed him being dead was part of the story at the start, but hey I’m a genius, yet I did like the Keyser Söze twist from the Usual Suspects. In a 20 minute film, you don’t expect to have too much of a detailed story, you want something to happen straight away and that it makes sense and it flows kinda straightforward. An example of Cold War literature which would make a great 20 minute film is Twinkle Twinkle Little Spy by Len Deighton as that is a very short and simple book and things happen one after the other and there is no hidden meanings or sub-plots in the book.

When a films budget is only $2k you don’t expect much and you therefore accept this will be reflected in the costumes (blokes in t-shirts running about with a helmet on), the classified report is just a pad of lined A4 paper and some of the acting is below par, however you are willing to forgive all that. The language in the film doesn’t sit right and Maddocks, the narrator, shouldn’t be in the War as he can’t use his gun and fights rather poorly. However, he being the hero does have the phenomenon which is what I term “The Rocky Punch” in his arsenal. This punch features in most action films where the bad guy is absolutely kicking the living daylights out of the hero, when suddenly the hero throws a lucky punch, which stuns the bad guy, gives the hero new hope and the music starts and you know the battle is going his way now. Maddocks pulls out the punch and knife in his fight with the werewolf after he has internal trouble using his gun and thinks maybe it’s better if he goes the kung-fu fighting style rather than filling a beast of the dark with lead. There are other characters in the movie which are no more believable, Turner who is a gun toting cliché who sacrifices it all for the team and the fat kid from the Fat Boy Slim Album cover who is wearing a badly painted helmet.

I have to be honest and say I’ve never watched a whole horror movie, I exclude teen-wolf and its sequels from that, however this wasn’t really a horror movie as it felt like you were watching at times a movie you find during a computer game. I wont write much more as it will take you longer to read this post than actually watch the film so in conclusion, the film is a bit rubbish, but thoroughly enjoyable.

3.5 out of 5 stars

So I emailed them and I kindly got this response from the Pastor:
The Klan was and is virulently anti-Communist. However we never went around trying to flush the reds like quail. The Klan stood and stands for “Americanism” the polar opposite of Socialism, Communism and dictatorship,

It was felt the best examples of Americanism were the most effective deterrent to the lure of Communism. So we stood for strong public schools, we donated Bibles, flags and flag poles to schools. We worked for and helped to get passed the Blaine acts in several states.

We worked to support and still support the Christian Religion, believing Christianity a certain bulwark against Communism.

There were certainly pamphlets, and drawings, and publications of every sort, sadly most of the ephemera has long ago disappeared, like so much of our Nations history it has been purged. It has been replaced with legends and Hollywood’s propaganda.

In the 1960′s Communism again made a bold play using “civil rights” to push their agenda, This is not some Klan rhetoric, many believed it including J. Edgar Hoover. Sadly we were right but, once again could not prevail.　

Yet the struggle goes on to this hour for we do not face the old Russian style Communism, today we face the reality of Marxism gone wild under the guise of being Earth Friendly, men like Al Gore pontificating how we must pay higher taxes to cure the problem, and president who wants to, “spread the wealth”.

Our educational system is a joke, where teachers, teach to the test, and ONLY to the test, much as it has been done in every Communist Nation, our schools are political indoctrination centers teaching Alinsky politics, and Keynesian economics.

“The Capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them.” – Vladimir Lenin.

Democracy is the road to socialism. – Karl Marx

“We can’t expect the American People to jump from Capitalism to Communism, but we can assist their elected leaders in giving them small doses of Socialism, until they awaken one day to find that they have Communism” – Nikita Khrushchev

Very brief notes to the email:

Are they misrepresented by the media? Probably, aren’t we all, but that is because it is more entertaining and politically expedient to see the baddies represented in their most extreme forms, whether it is the KKK, communists, fascists etc…
Did the USSR support the civil rights movement? It would be a massive missed opportunity for the USSR if they didn’t take the chance to create internal conflict in their main enemy.
Blaine Act – This repealed the Eighteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution (also known as the Prohibition of alcohol). The repeal was formally adopted as the 21st Amendment to the Constitution on December 5, 1933.
I don’t see how helping the environment is Marxism?
Alinsky, according to wikipedia, is Saul Alinsky who is generally considered to be the founder of modern community organizing and has been compared in Playboy Magazine to Thomas Paine as “one of the great American leaders of the nonsocialist left”.
I actually agree with a lot of John Maynard Keynes theories.

I did read their website, (would I be allowed to under the censorship rules proposed by the Australian government?) and I wasn’t swayed by their arguments, but that is my right not be influenced by them. I do still strongly disagree with their aims and I deplore all forms of discrimination. You may have a fear of Big Brother or Corporate Brother monitoring your net usage, so I thought I would share five facts on their site that you might not otherwise learn about the KKK:

1) They boycott ebay and paypal due to what the KKK term unfair business practices

2) They do not allow homosexuals to be members, yet “The Ku Klux Klan, LLC. has not or EVER will have ANY connection with The “Westboro Baptist Church”. We absolutely repudiate their activities. “

3) “President of the United States, Warren G. Harding was a Klansman and his funeral in 1923 was conducted with full Klan honors and regalia”.

4) “President Woodrow Wilson, the Commander-in-Chief of the United States during World War I wrote in his epic book, The History of the American People, of the Klan as a great and honorable society”.

5) The Ku Klux Klan pay taxes and is not a non profit organisation.

The film industry is full of James Bond smutty pastiches, so why not have a KKK James Bond? You would wonder if he seduces ladies who are not white in order to save the world, or does he let the world go up in flames rather than compromise his beliefs? Would he have plastic surgery and wear makeup to pretend to be Japanese? Would he betray the world and help the goals of Moonraker be achieved? Would it be socially awkward if he is playing baccarat in Monte Carlo dressed in his robes? What are the names of the women? I can also see a whole range of James Bond posters with the Klansman instead of Bond. If you have the time and nothing better to do please feel free to submit your artwork or suggestions of the KKK Bond Universe.

Anyway, if you are a Klansman and you want to send me your anti-communist posters, or books where the protagonist is a KKK member involved in the Cold War, please get in touch. This also applies to all others from all sides of the political spectrum too, this is a neutral website. For instance in Australia is very hard to get books which were written from the communist point of view. I exclude “But the dead are many” by Frank Hardy as this seems to be in every second hand bookshop.

And just to re-iterate, this website does not support the KKK, Fascism, Communism, Marxism, or any other ism. By showing their posters, if they had any, am I giving them a voice? No, do I don’t believe I am! We should all be immune to 1960s propaganda and for historical purposes it would be interesting to see. Yet I do realise that I might be giving them a voice by publishing their email above, but surely that one email wont suddenly covert you to the KKK.

*When I refer to the Ku Klux Klan I refer to the Ku Klux Klan LLC as they seemed to be the most organized, have more of a public face, and lets be honest, far less scary than some of the 500 or so groups which fall under the KKK banner.

The cartoon, with the underscoring of Schubert’s Ave Maria opens with images in the style of the Adoration of the Magi, with Mary presenting the infant Jesus. This adoration, instead of being the Three Kings, is by fascist dictators and United States generals who are sending their soldiers off on a crusade in Vietnam. This crusade is to primarily support corporate America as money and our material possessions are the new God rather than God. The cartoon then pans to a Vietnamese family enjoying dinner, drawn in the style of da Vinci’s Last Supper, who then get incinerated by the black helicopters of the US. The aftermath of this Christian cleansing fire bombing results in dead bodies before the cartoon fades in a poster where the clean cut GI states how proud we are of our crusaders.

A woman, crucially not Vietnamese but white and dressed similarly to like the Virgin Mary talks about how the “Black Boeings in the night, steal our husbands away, far out of sight” and this theme is repeated for the next minute or so as it shows that not just Vietnamese husbands die, but also American ones as they will also be shot down too and you will have the US military funeral. On a side note, I bought a Vietnamese propaganda poster years ago in Vietnam which showed American B-52 bombing, and underneath was American prisoners in their stripy blue uniform with the meaning along the line of “if you bomb us, we will shoot you down”.

The cartoon also brings up the chemical bombing performed by the US and how it is destroying the Earth, and that GIs now in gas masks have no compunction in killing innocent children in a style reminiscent of the My Lai massacre that was carried out 4 years before this cartoon was made. The cartoon reinforces that the Vietnam War is a religious war, and that the tread of American soldiers will wipe out the right of other nations to worship a different God, and that the War is also ethnic cleansing. This ethnic cleansing has the full support of the decadent materialistic Americans who raise a glass in toasting the massacre of children.

The cartoon then splices actual footage of Vietnamese and American citizens protesting the War, and the suppression of those Western protesters. This footage from the newsreels lasts the final 2 minutes of the film and it actually destroys the message and effectiveness of the film. This is amateurish propaganda as it tries to show that the USSR is the caring Big Brother and whose role is to defend the rights of all men/children and the right of religious freedom and that frankly is nonsense. It would be to easy for me to point of the state enforced atheism of the USSR, how they sent millions of their own people to labour camps and the constant repression of the freedom expression, instead I wish to point out that this last two minutes of the film actually redeems the West. This redemption, in my view, shows to the Soviet audience that we have the right of expression, that we can protest the actions of the government, and even though the menacing looking riot police are fighting the protesters, this protestation is still shown to world unedited. How often do you think protests against the decrees of the Politburo were shown on Russian State television? There is also an attempt by the filmmakers to try and globalise the footage of protesters as it shows protesters from maybe East Germany, and their protest is very staid, orderly and impassioned and it contrasts sharply with the American protesters who are fighting and screaming against authority.

Why did this 9 minute cartoon effect me and make me feel so inhumane? Maybe it was the nice bottle of pinot noir that I am drinking influenced my emotions, but the Catholic Church, which this cartoon took aim at, annoys me. Graham Greene became a devout Catholic in later life, but instead I have lost my devoutness over time. This does not mean I am not happy to fake it, even if it means going to church every week for the next 15 years, in order that my daughter gets into a good Catholic school where we live.
My concerns with the Catholic Church include how that they tried to hide the abuse of the priests, they should have did a public cleansing and prosecuted the transgressors to the full extent of the law when the complaints were first raised. The Church comes second to your congregation, not the other way about.
Also how your actions don’t really count for much in the eyes of the Church. Rather it is whether you join the Church that saves you. It’s the same attitude of the medieval times where it didn’t matter if you were a lord who raped and pillaged across foreign lands, as long as on your deathbed you became a Catholic and gave a portion of your lands to the Church you were sorted in heaven. (too much Blackadder watching? maybe!) Your actions determines your character, not membership of some religious organization.
But my biggest bugbear is that every year the church is looking for funds to fix their leaky roofs, or to save children in Africa and this whole sense of poverty. I wager that if I went into the Vatican I could sell one painting and fix every Church roof in the world, and 3 paintings every Third World child would go to sleep every night contented for the rest of their life. At this point I would like to say a big hello to the Paix liturgique who send me their weekly French newsletter as they feel that my soul needs saving. Yes, I agree with some of your aims, that the Church is fragmented and you don’t really know what the Church stands for, with all its infighting and the possibility it betraying it roots and the wishes of its congregation. However, Latin is not very inclusive and I can’t stand an organization that coddles their hierarchy in untold wealth and riches. Wasn’t Jesus a carpenter who lived in modest means unlike your Pope.

The other main reason this cartoon resonated with me is that like most people I lead a sheltered life in that my life isn’t hard. I give money to charity, but should I mention that as isn’t there that quote which says something along the lines of the hidden deeds that you do when no one is looking determines who you are, (am I simply fishing for a backhanded complement), but my point is I don’t really struggle. I am not like the kids you see when you go to say Thailand begging in the streets from day dot. Surely my life should have more of a point than simply being a great dad , reading Cold War books, and watching Chuck, NCIS and Psych? Volunteering is an easy answer, but the opportunities available are demeaning and pointless. The only volunteering where I live is to sell old clothes and old books to old women, rather than actually using my skills and education to do something useful. My life lacks a purpose that I can be passionate about and be amply rewarded monetary and spiritually. This cartoon showed that it is great to display and convince an audience of your point of view through using your talents and for someone like me ,almost 40 years later, to still appreciate the beauty of your art.

When I watched this film, I didn’t see The West celebrating the death of children through the bombing, as the Vietnam War was a generation or more ago, rather I saw today The West celebrating the death of children due to their work in sweatshops through our constant desire to be judged by our materialistic gains. By the same token, if I watched this in the late 1800s I would have seen the death of children through coal mining. It doesn’t matter which era one lives in, there is always exploitation of the weakest. This is the selling point of Communism and therefore of this cartoon, that they will do away with all exploitation, that we are all equal. However Communism is the biggest disappointment of all our political systems as it brooks no opposition and out of all systems it creates the largest gap between the haves and have-nots with no possibility of social advancement.

Ignoring the newsreel, this cartoon is simply fantastic, but only if you absorb the message in isolation and ignore any contradictory thoughts you may have about Communism or more specifically the groups which lead the Communists. How it portrays the crusade if the West in it’s attainment of a singular worldwide religion and material wealth is very well done, how the artists have used the religious style of paintings and the sound of Ave Maria is great and by the end you do feel appalled by the callousness of man, but to do something about it is another story.

I have found that someone has already added this to youtube, so here it is:

5 out of 5 stars

On a final note, I had planned to do a Vietnam Month, but the same messages were getting raised from all the books and films, fiction and factual that i was simply repeating myself. Therefore I will split the posts out across the rest of the year, rather than forcing you to read the same points that all the sources were making.