The book Spycatcher, by former British intelligence officer the late Peter Wright, is a fascinating examination of the world of espionage by a long term insider. Published in 1987, I still have a dusty old copy of the book, plus a cassette tape audio version, gathering dust since I last accessed them. Its publication was subject to numerous legal actions and attempted blockages by the British government of then prime minister Margaret Thatcher.

Recently declassified documents from the UK National Archives make clear that Thatcher was left emotionally devastated by the tell-all memoir of Wright. The latter details, for instance, that the chief of MI5 from 1959 to 1965, Sir Roger Hollis, was a Soviet spy. Wright also elaborated on how MI5 targeted the Labour government of Harold Wilson, and how various foreign embassies were bugged.

Wright, who passed away in 1995, was an insider who revealed the intricate workings and labyrinthine power struggles within British intelligence. While there was considerable controversy regarding the eventual publication of the book, involving high profile lawyers and Australian merchant banker Malcolm Turnbull, it is not the publication itself which should attract our attention. Rather, it is the predatory and criminal covert activities of British intelligence which should arose our outrage and protests.

Armchair warriors do not understand, or perhaps wilfully misrepresent, spying and intelligence gathering activities. British intelligence has always engaged in a particular confluence – that of covert activities enmeshed with criminality. We are all enthralled by the stereotype James Bond version of spying – the suave, debonair Lothario whose consumption of alcohol and bedding of women is only matched by his proficiency with high tech gadgets.

In fact, James Bond is a terrible spy – he constantly uses his real name for a start. Wasting thousands of dollars worth of sophisticated equipment, he is open to blackmail given his dedication to sleeping around with women – a sure fire way to capture him. And his penchant for alcohol; you know, I am not a spy, but I would venture to suggest surreptitiously poisoning his vodka martini as an effective way to silence the legendary agent forever.

Peter Wright, unlike James Bond, actually noticed and uncovered the mole-agents within his own organisation. Counterintelligence is a skill that spies are supposed to possess. Be that as it may, let’s leave aside the Hollywood make-believe world of spying, and concentrate on the actual activities of British intelligence.

In the days before the expression ‘fake news’ became popular, British intelligence was engaging in a sophisticated and widespread network of creating and promoting fake news. Deception became a politically useful device – for the innocuously Information Research Department (IRD). Created in 1948 by British intelligence and the Foreign Office, it quickly became the soft power source of anti Communist and pro-Imperial British propaganda. Tasked with countering socialist and labour-friendly ideas, it built up a network of writers, artists and cultural figures dedicated to the maintenance of British imperial ideology.

George Orwell, Bertrand Russell, and historian Robert Conquest were just some of the writers who either worked for the IRD, or had their publications promoted by magazines and cultural outlets financed by the secretive organisation. Expanding beyond anti Communism, the IRD’s surreptitious activities included smearing anti colonial figures from Britain’s former colonies. Deliberately maligning anti-imperialist movements as ‘communist inspired’, British intelligence did its level best to counter the popular movements for decolonisation.

The case of Yugoslavia is an interesting one, because it reveals the levels of deception – and the unrelenting deluge of lies distributed – by Britain’s ruling circles. Yugoslavia, while nominally a Communist nation, defied the authority of Moscow.

Expelled from the Eastern Bloc in 1948 for defying Stalin, Belgrade gravitated towards the West. Taking loans and financial help from the Western European nations, including Britain, Yugoslavia adopted a more effective model of health care, education and multicultural mixing than other Eastern bloc nations. Whitehall was loudly anti communist, so providing material assistance to a communist nation would only expose London to charges of hypocrisy.

Yugoslavia’s agricultural sector, for instance, was reasonably efficient compared to the experiences of other Eastern bloc countries. The IRD was careful, discreetly encouraging Belgrade’s defiance of the Soviet bloc, but all the while downplaying the achievements of Yugoslavia’s mixed market-socialist economy. While portraying Tito as a fiercely independent and courageous leader for snubbing Moscow, Britain’s ruling circles were careful to omit any reference to Yugoslavia’s official support for multinational mixing and cultural pluralism.

Indeed, highlighting the economic workings of the Yugoslav system, and its dependence on Western loans, would only add credence to the Soviet charge that Belgrade was a ‘lackey of the capitalist West’ – a charge London was anxious to deny. By the early 1990s, long after Tito’s death, nationalist and pro-market forces inside Yugoslavia became the very lackeys of US and British imperialism Moscow warned against, driving the secessionist breakup of that multinational federation.

Portraying Yugoslavia’s alternative economic model as entirely independent and free of Western backing helped to conceal the role that British intelligence, among others, had in fomenting the dissolution of that federation. Covert activities thrive in the dark, and shining a spotlight on them is a necessary component of exerting democratic accountability over those actions. No, I am not going down the pathway of conspiracy theories. I am simply asking that if we are supposed to be a democratic nation, why are the activities of intelligence agencies, and the malign ideological influence they peddle, not subject to public scrutiny?

The initial impetus for this article comes from a quote by science fiction writer Ursula K. Le Guin. While I am not a sci-fi aficionado, one quotation from her has always remained with me. It is the following;

“If a book told you something when you were fifteen, it will tell you it again when you’re fifty, though you may understand it so differently that it seems you’re reading a whole new book.”

That quote came back to me, as I was contemplating the relevance (if any) of Joseph Conrad’s now classic novella Heart of Darkness, first published in serial form in 1899. A deeply pessimistic look at the activities and impact of colonial rule in sub-Saharan Africa, Conrad’s novella has been adapted numerous times, mostly famously into the relocated and phantasmagoric 1979 Hollywood movie Apocalypse Now.

The darkness that Conrad relates refers to the jungles, the irretrievably primitive and ‘savage’ black Africans, and the hopelessly quixotic project by some imperial powers to ‘uplift’ the indigenous peoples they have conquered. Conrad does make some mild references to the injustice of imperialism – his novella is located in the Congo, a former Belgian colony. However, when it came to his adopted nation’s practice of imperialism – Britain – Conrad was noticeably silent.

I first encountered this novella in my teenage years, and yes, it spoke to me. However, I always felt a certain unease regarding its portrayal of Africans. Now, in my fifties, I think I am better able to articulate what exactly is objectionable in his book. Conrad, no doubt reflecting the thinking of his times, cannot see Africa as anything other than backwards, culturally regressive and ‘savage’. I would like to venture an alternative perspective.

The darkness is not in the hearts and minds of sub-Saharan Africans; it is not in their skin colour, nor in the dense jungles that you may find in equatorial Africa. The darkness is the looming shadow of the imperialist project itself, and how colonialism drives its subject peoples mad. While the protagonist of the novella, Kurtz, is insane living deep in the jungle, it is not the weather, or the ecology that has produced his condition.

Conrad, working in British shipping, was able to view the practices of English colonial expansion at first hand. Grappling with the horrendous consequences of such violent conquest would have taken considerable foresight and courage. However, Conrad was also bound by the limitations of his time. His outlook narrow, he could do nothing else except wring his hands at the ‘madness’ of it all. One cannot help agree with Chinua Achebe’s assessment that for Conrad, Africa was all the antithesis of civilised Europe, a repository of bestiality and primitivism.

A modern day equivalent of Conrad would be the Trinidadian-born British Indian novelist V S Naipaul (1932 – 2018). Winning the Nobel prize for literature in 2001, his book A Bend in the River is considered a modern classic. Published in 1979, his book is highly reminiscent of Heart of Darkness, in that the African characters are all primitive, subject to superstitious beliefs, irrevocably backward and prisoners of their inherent savagery. Trekking into the ‘dark heart’ of Africa results in internal turmoil, corruption and psychological descent.

Why reread this novel now – why not just ignore it? Because like it or not, Conrad’s views on African ‘darkness’ inform our wider perspective of sub-Saharan Africa as untamed, savage and unchangingly primitive. What is an alternative?

This month marks the 60th anniversary of Kenya’s independence. No, it is not the Congo, but it is part of sub-Saharan Africa. A nation colonised by Britain, the Kenyans – mainly the Kikuyu people – fought a stubborn war of independence in the 1950s. The British colonial authorities responded to the uprising with mass violence, setting up concentration camps, rounding up entire populations, torturing suspected militants (castration was a favourite technique employed by British soldiers) – anticipating the ‘strategic hamlets’ tactic used the US in Vietnam.

The Kikuyu fighters, portrayed as backward, vicious sadistic psychopaths, did kill white settlers – 32 in total. Hardly the conduct of a nation of violent savages. The King’s African Rifles, a British military unit deployed to fight against the Mau Mau uprising, was composed of Africans loyal to the English. One notable officer from this unit, who would go on to become a household name – was Idi Amin. The latter became a demonised monster after he turned against his former paymasters.

Kenya today has a growing economy, a nascent fintech silicon savanna, an airport, busy streets, green energy, and hosts safaris for rich tourists. That is all well and good, and Kenyans have a great deal to be proud of. However, let’s not lose sight of one incontrovertible fact – the Kenyan government is a loyal proxy of Western imperialism. Aligning its foreign policy goals with that of the US and Britain, Kenyan troops have served as proxies for colonial wars and interests in Africa.

Intervening in neighbouring African nations under the dubious pretext of ‘humanitarian intervention’, the government of President William Ruto has become the embodiment of everything the Mau Mau fought against. Joining the United States, Nairobi has offered its support for the state of Israel, encouraging the genocidal violence waged by the latter against the Palestinians in Gaza.

Every classic novel and work of art is inevitably a product of its time and circumstances. Conrad’s books are no exception. However the purpose of a novelist is not simply to recycle the prevailing attitudes of the time, but to expose the hypocrisies on which they are based. How about we incorporate the works of African writers when exploring the cultural practices of sub-Saharan Africa? It is not such an outlandish or difficult request to fulfil.

Let’s be clear from the outset – this article is not a review of the movie Oppenheimer. There has been a deluge of commentary about Christopher Nolan’s film, and I do not want to regurgitate all those observations here.

Now that all the hoopla and fanfare regarding Oppenheimer the movie has died down, we can focus on the serious ethical and science issues raised by the Manhattan project, the US effort to build a nuclear bomb. Examining the social impact of the Manhattan project is required, but not enough. The release of the movie, and its popularity, does provide an opportunity to discuss topics which receive scant attention – the ethical responsibility of scientists.

As a group, scientists must take into account the social and ethical consequences of their research, as the current debate around AI demonstrates. The ferocious debates surrounding vaccines, the ugly tactics of the anti-vaxxer groups, the fear-mongering surrounding the use of AI and ChatGPT, all highlight a serious deficiency of our times. What deficiency? Read on….

The capitalist business model has prioritised technology as a commodity, ready to be sold in mass quantities. We have ignored the ethical consequences of technology, and failed to ask for whose benefit scientific innovations are developed and deployed.

The Manhattan project specifically revealed two interconnected features of scientific work – the major impact the sciences had on the wider society, particularly military technology. It also revealed that scientific work can be moulded by big project funding. Major dollar amounts – in this case from the US government – undergirded a massive intertwined effort by physicists, engineers, technicians and workers from various industries. Indeed, the Manhattan project, far from being the product of a few heavy duty formulas derived by physicists – important as they were – marked the beginning of the military-industrial complex.

It took a project on the scale of Manhattan to make us realise that science is not something purely of concern to scientists only. Indeed, scientists such as Oppenheimer realised that their work has consequences for the wider society. He was definitely not the only physicist to recognisable the social and ethical implications of their work.

Years before Oppenheimer became a household name, Hungarian-born and Jewish refugee physicist Leo Szilard (1898 – 1964) emphatically opposed the deployment of nuclear weapons, even though his scientific work led directly to the Manhattan project. Szilard spoke out against using the atomic bomb, and advised US government military authorities to organise a technical demonstration of the bomb on an uninhabited target, as a way of providing a preview to the rulers of Imperial Japan. His suggestion was ignored.

Joseph Rotblat (1908 – 2005), a Polish born British physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project briefly, resigned in protest after discovering its military objectives, and campaigned against nuclear weapons for the rest of his life. He was awarded the Nobel peace prize in 1995.

Oppenheimer has became the archetype of the morally tragic figure. A committed scientist, he threw himself wholeheartedly into the Manhattan Project, only to recoil at the horrific destruction wrought by his nuclear creation. He was hounded out of the military-scientific community in the McCarthyite atmosphere in the immediate post-war period. But setting aside his personal emotional and moral turmoil, he still accepted the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, thus making him a war criminal, albeit a morally conflicted one.

Numerous scientists involved in the Manhattan Project understood their obligations to inform the civilian authorities of the moral implications of their work. Many were refugees from Europe, and had dealt with the ethical responsibilities of weapons research. Sensitivities to the moral considerations of their work, they were rebuffed by an increasingly aggressive domestic military industrial complex.

As has been demonstrated by historians and scholar of the period, the atomic bombings of Japan were completely unnecessary and unjustified from a military point of view. It was the entry of the Soviet Union in the Eastern theatre of war that convinced the Imperial Japanese government to surrender. The US had been intercepting Japanese government communications, where Tokyo officials were discussing various options of surrender. American government documents from the time reveal that they knew the atomic bombings were not the decisive factor in persuading Tokyo’s ruling circles to surrender.

Lets not recycle this tiresome debate for the umpteenth time, and stick to our story.

Did Oppenheimer ever consider the fact that Nagasaki, the second Japanese city to suffer nuclear annihilation, was a sanctuary city for Japanese Christians? Japanese Catholics who felt marginalised or discriminated against found refuge in Nagasaki prior to 1945. Did Oppenheimer and the US authorities realise that they condemned to death thousands of Christians, a religion America’s rulers profess to observe?

Did Oppenheimer ever consider the fate of the first victims of radioactivity, the residents of the New Mexico community directly impacted by the very first nuclear weapons test in July 1945? The people of Tularosa Basin, New Mexico, suffered the immediate as well as long term effects of the atomic bomb testing. In the decades after 1945, Tularosa residents have been experiencing higher than average levels of cancer. To paraphrase one resident, it is not a matter of if you will get cancer, but when and what type.

Do not misunderstand – this is not a denunciation of scientific research, or scientists, or the scientific method. It is rather an examination of an area that does not receive enough attention. As genomic companies aggregate our DNA, as scientists consider whether to revive extinct species, (de-extinction to use the term for a proposal to restore the thylacine ‘Tasmanian Tiger’), or AI researchers in their quest for what they define as ‘consciousness’, the obligations to humanity must be paramount in our considerations, not the relentless pursuit of corporate profits.

The Sydney Opera House, one of the most iconic structures in Australia (and possibly the world) turned 50 earlier this year. Officially opened in 1973, the story of its architectural design and construction involves labyrinthine intrigues, vitriolic conflict and multiple political clashes. Sixteen years in the making since it was first proposed, (Utzon won the design competition in 1957), it is remarkable that the Opera House was completed, given all the snarling controversy over its design and excessive budgetary strain.

Gradually becoming known as the ‘People’s House’, there is more to the story than just the controversies over its unique architectural design and construction. In 1960, Paul Robeson performed for audiences while the opera house was still being built. Invited by the construction workers, Robeson had been targeted by a McCarthyite campaign of exclusion and blacklisting by the American authorities. This was Robeson’s first world tour since the reinstatement of his passport.

In 1990, soon after his release from a South African prison, Nelson Mandela addressed thousands of cheering supporters from the steps of the opera house. In 2003, anti war protesters scaled the heights of the building to paint ‘No War’ on its side. This slogan denounced the American led (and Australian supported) invasion of Iraq.

Lyndal Rowlands, writing in Al Jazeera, notes a particular irony:

And while the Sydney Opera House may be known as “the people’s house,” Sydney itself has become one of the most expensive places to live in the world.

The creeping commercialisation of property and real estate – it could now be considered rampant – has impacted the opera house as well. In 2018, former Australian prime minister Scott Morrison, indicating where his priorities reside, suggested advertising the Everest Cup, a horse race, on the Opera House building. Defending his decision, Morrison offered the pathetic excuse “it’s not like they are painting it up there.”

Let’s leave aside the reductive parochialism of the jumped-up advertising executive mislabeled ‘prime minister’, who regards public space only in terms of its utility as a giant billboard. I think the 50th anniversary of the Opera House’s official opening affords us an opportunity to reflect on how operatic performances can provide an inclusive platform for the entire community.

It is wonderful to see the Opera host the great works from the classical masters – Puccini’s Tosca, Mozart’s The Magic Flute, Verdi’s La Traviata, just to name a few examples from Sydney Opera’s upcoming repertoire. Yes, we should learn from and respect the masters. Classical music, including opera, is regarded as an elite spectator sport in Australia. Western Sydney, the homeland of so-called mass culture – football, gambling, cricket, alcoholism and anti-immigration, is conducive to raising generations of anti-classical music people.

For young men raised on a musical diet of AC/DC, Cold Chisel and barbecue socialisation, professing an admiration of any classical music makes one vulnerable to social exclusion and charges of that all-purpose Australian homophobic slur. Real men don’t go to the opera; only effete losers like that wimpy kind of foreign-originated classical muck. Richard Wagner is hardly the kind of music to pump out from your stereo system while hooning in the four-wheel drive.

Be that as it may, let’s get back to my suggestion – Omar the opera. What is that? First performed in 2022 in the United States, Omar tells the story of Omar ibn Said (1770 – 1863), an enslaved sub-Saharan African man, who wrote of his experiences in the Arabic language. His memoir, which has survived through the decades since his death in 1863, is on digital display in the US Library of Congress.

Omar ibn Said was an Islamic scholar, kidnapped by slave traders from his homeland in West Africa (what is today Senegal/Mauritania). It was not unusual for people from his region to be literate; the Islamic emirate of Futa Toro was an established society with laws, literature and government. Omar ibn Said was sold into slavery in Charleston, South Carolina. He escaped, was recaptured and returned to slavery, this time in Bladen County, North Carolina. Being literate, as most of the Muslim slaves were, constituted a lethal threat to the institution of slavery.

Completing his memoirs in 1831, he died prior to the implementation of the Emancipation proclamation and the abolition of slavery. His perspective is highly unique, not only because he was literate, but also because he was a member of a religious minority in a time of increasing Christian evangelism. The opera, written by Rhiannon Giddens and Michael Abels, tells an important story from a marginalised and oppressed community.

Surely the transatlantic trade of African chattel slavery was a uniquely American – and European – experience? That is true. So why should we import this opera, which is based on a particular American institution, into the Australian cultural repertoire?

In Australia, we have very consciously adopted those aspects of the European cultural experience which dovetail with the imperatives of the British empire. What is considered the cultural heritage of white Europeans finds a ready audience in Australia. If we are to question the relevance of Omar ibn Said’s story of slavery – and his use of Arabic – to the Australian scene, we could quite rightly question what relevance the Teutonic volkisch themes of Wagner’s operas have for Australian opera goers.

Music can give voice to those whose voices have been suppressed or silenced. Omar provides us with a particular opportunity to provide a platform for those whose perspective has thus far been ignored or written out of this history books.