1942: Unknown Battle

Recently a list of the 10 top Russian war movies cropped up on Facebook, most of which I hadn’t seen. If I were putting together my own list right now, I’d put the newly released “1942: Unknown Battle” at the top of the list. It is based on the battles that took place in Rzhev between January 1942 and March 1943 that turned the tide against the Nazi invaders. Because of the disproportionate losses suffered by the Soviet Army, the campaign became known as the “Rzhev Meat Grinder”.

The film recreates the fighting that took place in and around the tiny farming village of Ovsyannikovo that encapsulated the desperate attempt by an understaffed, underequipped and undertrained Soviet company equipped only with small arms against a Nazi battalion with tanks and heavy artillery and many more men.

The opening scene of this powerful film depicts the Reds driving a smaller detachment of Nazis out of Ovsyannikovo in the most gruesomely graphic fashion of any war film I’ve ever seen outside of Stephen Spielberg’s “Saving Private Ryan”. Unlike Spielberg’s “greatest generation” film that ended with America triumphant, “1942: Unknown Battle” concludes with an exhausted and lightly armed marching toward certain disaster. The contrast between the triumphalist tone of American WWII movies and this Russian film could not be more glaring. The American victory led to the USA becoming the world’s hegemon and ultimately accomplishing what Hitler could not: the ascendance of capitalism in the USSR.

Unlike the war movies made during the USSR, “1942: Unknown Battle” dramatizes the conflict between the average soldier motivated to defend the motherland and the counterintelligence officers imposing repressive Stalinist regulations that threaten to weaken the resolve of those willing to sacrifice their lives for the good of the nation. After a Nazi plane floods the village with leaflets promising safe passage for any Red soldier that defects, the counterintelligence officer threatens the men with a court-martial if a leaflet is found in their pockets. When a grizzled old fighter confesses that he does have a leaflet but only for use as rolling paper for his cigarettes, he is taken into custody and marched across no-man’s land between the two opposing armies. When the counterintelligence officer is wounded by Nazi gunfire, the old fighter drags him into a foxhole, which leads to an extended dialogue about their clashing values. As much as I valued the action scenes throughout the film, it was this scene that will stick with me.

“1942: Unknown Battle” can be rented now from the usual VOD sites listed at Kino, the film’s distributor, for a mere $3.99. For those of us who understand that it was the USSR that was mainly responsible for the destruction of the Third Reich, this film is a must.

The Wikipedia entry for Battles of Rzhev will give you a sense of its troubled legacy. As much as humanity can thank the USSR for the sacrifices the country made, historians have demanded that a full recounting of the toll it took be made.

In 2009, a television movie was aired in Russia entitled Rzhev: Marshal Zhukov’s Unknown Battle, which made no attempt to cover up the huge losses suffered by Soviet forces. As a consequence, there were public calls in Russia for the arrest of some of those involved in its production. In the movie, the casualties of Soviet forces are given as 433,000 KIA. The journalist Alina Makeyeva, in an article of Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper which was published on 19 February 2009, wrote: “The number presented by the historian is too low. There must be more than one million Soviet soldiers and officers killed! Rzhev and its neighboring towns were completely destroyed.”; however, Alina could not present any proof. Journalist in her article which was published in the newspaper The Violin (Russia) on 26 February 2009 also claimed that more than 1,000,000 Soviet soldiers were killed at Rzhev. The number of casualties again was raised with the claim of journalist Igor Elkov in his articled published in the Russian Weekly on 26 February 2009. Igor said: “The accurate number of casualties of both sides is still dubious. Recently, there are some opinions about from 1.3 to 1.5 million Soviet soldiers was killed. It may reach the number of 2 million”.

In my view, the film reflects the thinking of people like Alina Makeyeva, Elena Tokaryeva and Igor Elkov.

Beanpole

Opening at the Film Forum in N.Y. tomorrow, “Beanpole” is a Russian film set in Leningrad just after the war has ended. In addition to the shattered buildings left behind in the 900-day siege, there are also shattered human beings who survived by their wits and a stubborn desire to enjoy a normal life once again.

Among those who will have the hardest time living a normal life again are the veterans in a military hospital who have suffered either grievous wounds and/or post-traumatic stress disorder. The nurses caring for them have suffered as well, including Iya, who is nicknamed beanpole because of her towering height and willowy build. When we first meet her, she is standing as still as a statue in the nurses’ quarters. As a former anti-aircraft gunner, her PTSD is manifested by unpredictable freezes that last for a few minutes and that made her unfit for further duty.

When she is not caring for the patients, she is in her room looking after Peshka, a toddler who craves both her attention and food. The first she can easily supply, the second on a hit-and-miss basis. Although the siege has ended, the population is just one step ahead of feeding on cats and dogs as had been the case during the war. One day, as she was playfully roughhousing with the boy, she freezes up when he is beneath her and becomes collateral damage of the Nazi’s genocidal attack.

Not long after the boy has died, Iya’s sister anti-aircraft gunner Masha shows up at the hospital to reunite with Peshka, who has been left in her friend’s care. Iya breaks the sad news that the boy has died but in his sleep rather than under her immobile body. Having been robbed of normal human reactions by four years of fighting on the front lines, Masha takes the news in stride and even remains dispassionate after learning later on that Iya was at fault.

After taking a job as a nurse, Masha hopes to rebuild her life. With her husband a casualty of the war, her top priority is finding a man who can provide the seed she needs to create a new life. Learning that battleground wounds have left her sterile, she insists that Iya must become pregnant on her behalf. Since Iya is suffering from PTSD and had little interest in men to begin with, that becomes a demand that threatens to destroy their friendship.

Unlike any film I have seen in decades, “Beanpole” hearkens back to the golden age of Russian cinema as seen in “And Quiet Flows the Don” or “The Cranes Are Flying”. Like the second film, it is a wrenching tale of the emotional and physical costs of WWII. Mikhail Kalatozov’s 1957 classic is a tale of redemption and concludes with the characters looking forward to life of peace and socialist prosperity. Given the post-Soviet sensibility of the 28-year old director/screenwriter Kantemir Balagov, hopes are placed most of all in the sisterhood the two principal actresses share.

In the director’s statement that accompanies this film that is the Russian entry for best foreign film in the upcoming Academy Awards, he stresses the importance of telling not just the story of the two women but a city that perhaps one day will be renamed Leningrad in honor of the resistance it made famous:

Beanpole is my second feature film. It is very important to me that my story takes place in 1945. My heroes, like the city they live in, are mangled by a horrible war. They live in a city that has endured one of the worst sieges in the history of warfare. This is a story about them and about people they meet in Leningrad, the obstacles that they have to overcome and the way they are treated by society. They are psychologically crippled by the war and it will take time for them to learn to live their normal lives.

I am interested in the fates of women and especially women who fought in the Second World War. According to data, this was the war with the highest participation of women. As an author, I am interested in finding an answer to the question: what happens to a person who is supposed to give life after she passes through the trials of war?

The Chenogne Massacre

Ben Ferencz, the 98-year old chief prosecutor of Nazi war crimes at Dachau who calls “the greatest generation” those men and women who resist war, not those who fight.

By far, the best show on NPR is Reveal, a hour-long show co-produced by the Center for Investigative Journalism and PRX, a distribution network for public radio. When I wake up early on Saturday morning, as I did today, I tune in to WNYC to listen to the show that begins at 6am.

Today was an exceptionally powerful episode that dealt with the January 1, 1945 massacre in Chenogne, Belgium during the Battle of the Bulge when American soldiers murdered 71 German soldiers who had just surrendered. Just days earlier, the Germans had killed about the same number of GI’s who had surrendered in the town of Malmedy. I paid close attention to the story since my father had been close to the fighting in Bastogne, about 5 miles away. My father was a mess sergeant assigned to the 10^th Armored division while the men fighting in Chenogne were in the 11^th Armored division.

Part of the show consisted of an interview with a GI, who had fought in Chenogne. He describes the mass killing but did not take part in it. That being said, he admits to killing two Germans in a foxhole who had their hands up earlier in the day. Now in his 90s, the act still haunts him. Another interviewee is a Belgian who was born in 1946 and became obsessed with the events that day, so much so that he built a house in Chenogne where he began an career as an amateur historian trying to get to the bottom of what happened. Finally, there’s an interview with Ben Ferencz, a Jewish soldier and the last surviving prosecutor of German war crimes at a trial in Dachau after the Germans surrendered. Just before he got the job as a prosecutor, he had been a janitor in company headquarters. They selected him because he had a Harvard law degree with a specialty in international law. He is still alive at 99 and quite lucid, as would be indicated by the interview.

Basically, he regarded the Chenogne massacre as a war crime but one that would never be prosecuted by a state that had just won the war. When asked if Stephen Spielberg and Tom Brokaw were justified in calling WWII GIs “the greatest generation”, he scoffed at the notion and stated emphatically that the greatest generation are those who resist war, like during Vietnam.

Like the soldier who killed two Germans in Chenogne, Ferencz has direct experience on the dehumanization war breeds. In a 2005 Washington Post article titled “Giving Hitler Hell” that dealt with Jewish soldiers during WWII, he recalled what that hell meant:

Ferencz, who today is 85 and lives in New York, cautions against making sweeping armchair moral judgments. “Someone who was not there could never really grasp how unreal the situation was,” he says. “I once saw DPs beat an SS man and then strap him to the steel gurney of a crematorium. They slid him in the oven, turned on the heat and took him back out. Beat him again, and put him back in until he was burnt alive. I did nothing to stop it. I suppose I could have brandished my weapon or shot in the air, but I was not inclined to do so. Does that make me an accomplice to murder?”

Ferencz — who went on to a distinguished legal career, became a founder of the International Criminal Court and is today probably the leading authority on military jurisprudence of the era — cannot specifically address Weiss’s actions. But he says it’s important to recall that military legal norms at the time permitted a host of flexibilities that wouldn’t fly today. “You know how I got witness statements?” he says. “I’d go into a village where, say, an American pilot had parachuted and been beaten to death and line everyone one up against the wall. Then I’d say, ‘Anyone who lies will be shot on the spot.’ It never occurred to me that statements taken under duress would be invalid.”

To hear the Reveal episode titled “Take No Prisoners”, go to https://www.wnyc.org/story/take-no-prisoners-rebroadcast.

Also, there is a Wikipedia entry on the Chenogne massacre at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chenogne_massacre

It refers to the Reveal episode:

According to a declassified file Harland-Dunaway got access to, a soldier named Max Cohen described seeing roughly 70 German prisoners machinegunned by the 11th Armored Division in Chenogne. General Dwight D. Eisenhower demanded a full investigation, but the 11th Armored were uncooperative, saying “it’s too late; the war is over, the units are disbanded.” Ben Ferencz, an American lawyer who served as a prosecutor at the Nuremberg Tribunal, upon acquainting himself with the declassified report said: “it smells to me like a cover-up of course.”

 

 

WWII ended the Great Depression, not New Deal economics

My views on these matters were first put forward in a blog post titled “Did World War Two End the Great Depression”, written in September, 2011. It cited a Paul Krugman Op-Ed piece written in 2008 and titled “Franklin Delano Obama?”. Krugman made the case that “What saved the economy, and the New Deal, was the enormous public works project known as World War II, which finally provided a fiscal stimulus adequate to the economy’s needs.” With respect to the public works projects mentioned by Al Ronzoni, Krugman described them as “largely offset by other factors, notably a large tax increase, enacted by Herbert Hoover, whose full effects weren’t felt until his successor took office.”

In Krugman’s view, FDR was someone who “thought he was being prudent by reining in his spending plans.” Sounds rather like Obama, doesn’t it? In fact, Krugman’s op-ed was a cautionary tale warning Obama, the supposed new FDR, not to be as tightfisted with government-funded recovery programs as occurred during the New Deal unless he wanted to take “big risks with the economy and with his legacy.”

Well, given the high costs of another world war (after all, those H-Bombs can make a real mess of things), Obama didn’t even create a public works program—the only option open to him. In fact, as I have argued, Obama was inspired more by Herbert Hoover than FDR. As someone who relied heavily on U. of Chicago economists, he was not likely to embark on a new New Deal despite all the advice he got from Paul Krugman, The Nation Magazine, Huffington Post, et al.

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The Ritchie Boys

Not too long ago I discovered that Werner Angress, the historian from whose “Stillborn Revolution: The Communist Bid for Power in Germany, 1921–23” I have been posting excerpts, was a Ritchie boy. After he died in 2010, The American Historical Association commemorated his life, including information on Ritchie:

Drafted into the army in 1941, he was trained as an interrogator at Camp Ritchie (he is featured in the film, The Ritchie Boys, about this remarkable institution), and parachuted (his first jump) into France with the 82nd Airborne on D-Day. Despite his extraordinarily youthful appearance and rather small stature, Angress was a tough and resourceful soldier who was eventually promoted to Master Sergeant and awarded the Bronze Star and the Purple Heart.

In going through a backlog of DVDs received from publicists about a decade ago, I discovered that I had one for “The Ritchie Boys”. In extracting it from the package, it accidentally was damaged. Not willing to be deterred from seeing the film, I got a copy through the Columbia Library and was richly rewarded by a documentary that might be regarded as the ultimate alternative to Quentin Tarantino’s “Inglourious Basterds”.

Although Werner Angress and all the other German and German-speaking Jewish immigrants had every reason to want to kill every Nazi they got their hands on, the allied cause was better served by them functioning as “soft cops” to get information that could save the lives of fellow soldiers as well as civilians. Additionally, the Ritchie boys discover that many if not most of the German soldiers were ordinary workers forced to kill or be killed as deserters. The same thing was true of the German civilians they came in contact with.

Every Ritchie boy interviewed in the film was as ethically and politically informed as Angress, with some demonstrating the leftist politics they probably absorbed growing up in Weimar Germany. Among the most interesting is Si Lewin, a Polish Jew who was born in 1918 and died two years ago at the age of 97. Like all the other Ritchie boys, including Angress whose parachute got caught in a tree in Germany not long after D-Day, he has an amazing story to tell.

He was assigned to convince German soldiers to surrender by speaking to them through high-powered speakers wired to a batteries in a jeep. Routinely, German artillery honed in on Lewin and his comrades by geolocating the sound of the speakers until they figured out how to position them far from the jeep.

Si Lewin’s website is still up and running. In the about page, we learn that he was a close friend of Art Spiegelman who wrote “Maus”. In a Harpers Magazine article, Spiegelman describes “Parade”, one of Lewin’s most celebrated works:

By 1950, Si was pursuing an idea that had begun to gestate while he was still a soldier. Inspired by a lifelong love of movies — and in conscious resistance to the pure nonrepresentational abstraction that was coming to dominate contemporary art — he made the Parade.

The work begins with an excited crowd of flag-waving parents and children who gather to cheer a military procession of soldiers that turns into an abstract engine of war. Little boys playing with toy guns are beckoned from the arms of their mothers into the arms of a shrouded Grim Reaper, who transforms the children into helmeted, goose-stepping cannon fodder — interchangeable cogs in a relentless war machine. A series of vignettes focuses on scenes of escalating havoc and suffering — the disasters of war — replete with bayoneted mothers and babies, terrorized families fleeing bombed-out cities, and devastated farms. The images accumulate into a panoramic harvest of blood and death. The parade turns into a hanging row of severed heads, a procession of the wounded and maimed, a march of ravaged survivors staggering under the weight of the coffins they carry.

I had to make a tough decision in writing an article about “The Ritchie Boys” since it was neither available as VOD or even as a DVD with the standard pricing. The director Christian Bauer, a German, died in 2009 and the distribution company he founded died along with him. The only way to see the film is to buy a DVD on Amazon that is now going for $70 when it was available.

I saw no alternative except to put it up on Youtube, which took a bit of time and money to accomplish. Since the DVD is copy-protected, I had to pay $100 to have someone bypass the copy protection and make it uploadable. I doubt that Youtube will be hearing from anybody about copyright protection but just in case I wouldn’t waste any time watching this film since it is absolutely terrific.

Memorial Day 2018

I usually don’t pay much attention to Memorial Day but when I came across a film in progress on the Turner Classic Movie channel titled “Battleground”, I took notice because it was about the Battle of the Bulge that my father served in. As part of its holiday programming, TCM was featuring war movies. That included John Wayne in “They Were Expendable” earlier in the day, a 1945 film about PT boats defending the Philippines from an invasion. Needless to say, the movie did not take into account that the country had been occupied by the USA since 1898.

Wayne appeared in 8 other WWII movies over the years, all of them prefiguring the super-hero films that featured Sylvester Stallone and Chuck Norris, ones in which they would charge headlong into machine gun fire and always ending up victorious. Despite the image, Wayne did not serve during WWII. With his four kids, he was eligible for a deferment. His frequent director John Ford, a WWI veteran, had big problems with that as PBS reported:

Throughout the war, Ford urged the young actor “to get in it,” and each time Wayne would beg off until he finished “just one more picture.” Ford was disappointed to say the least, and he let Wayne know it. Wayne was growing richer as other men died. As the war continued, Ford’s strong disappointment fueled a growing conflict between the men and fostered a sense of guilt within Wayne. Wayne’s decision to stay out of the service would haunt him for the rest of his life.

By contrast, the men in “Battleground” want nothing more than to go home in one piece and continuously plea with officers to be spared from the almost certain death that awaited them in Nazi Germany’s last offensive. Whether it is high fever or frost bite, they soldier on. (The film can be rented on Youtube or Amazon for $2.99)

While the film is not cliché-free, it is certainly a lot more realistic than any WWII movie I have ever seen. There is very little hand-to-hand combat of the sort you find in “Saving Private Ryan”. Rather men hunker down in foxholes firing away at Wehrmacht soldiers about a 100 feet away, whose presence is marked only by the flashes from their muzzles.

This no doubt is a function of having a screenplay written by Robert Pirosh who served in World War II as a Master Sergeant with the 320th Regiment, 35th Infantry Division. During the Battle of the Bulge, he led a patrol into Bastogne to support the surrounded American forces there. Like Pirosh, my father supported the 101^st Airborne Division that was under siege in Bastogne.

Going through my father’s WWII memorabilia for the first time in 11 years when I wrote “Ruminations on WWII” triggered by the Ken Burns PBS documentary, I reread the commendation that went along with the Bronze Star he received:

It stated:

For Heroic Achievement

Bronze Star Medal

is awarded to

Staff Sergeant Jacob Proyect, 32 048 069

S/Sgt Jacob Proyect, 32 048 069, Hq Co 3d Tank Bn, U.S. Army. For heroic achievement against an enemy of the United States in Belgium on December 19th, 1944.

During the siege of Bastogne, Belgium S/Sgt Proyect, a mess sergeant, traveled several miles of infested enemy territory over a route being fired on by heavy artillery, mortar and automatic-weapons to deliver water to a unit that was surrounded. After distributing the water he volunteered to evacuate a wounded officer over the same route to Monte, Belgium. Both missions were successfully completed. The outstanding courage and personal concern for the comfort of his comrades in arms reflects great credit upon himself and the military forces of the United States.

My father was in the 10^th Armored Division that was part of the Third Army led by General George Patton. Just 38 days after my father got his medal, I was born in Kansas City. I am not sure when he came back to the USA but he probably had difficulty bonding with me as was often the case when servicemen are not present at the birth of a child. My only connection with him is through the box of memorabilia that he painstakingly put together when he was in the army—perhaps a way of marking his trail in the same way that I blog.

One of the things I came across today that was new to me was a letter he wrote to my mother on November 5^th from France, just 11 days before the Germans would launch their offensive. I am struck by both the beauty of his script—a dying art—as well as the tenderness he showed to my mother. After I reached the age of 10 or so, it became obvious to me that he didn’t like me very much and as such became a sticking point with my mother to whom nothing like the sentiments expressed in the letter would ever be offered again. (The missing snippet in the letter was no doubt the censors removing something that might have breached security. The image beneath it is some French mud my dad sent on the back of the letter.)

I am not into putting wreaths on a gravestone but this post is my way of memorializing a courageous and distant figure on Memorial Day.

Dearest wife,

I just got another V-mail tonite. It’s latest so far, written on the 17^th. Only eighteen days late. Glad everything is fine with you. Hope you stay that way and that nothing ever happens to hurt you in any way. Honey, I keep worrying about you all the time. I know what a hard time you’re going thru and I feel a little guilty about not being there to help you to the end [ie., my birth]. Next time will be peace time and I’ll be there with you from start to finish.

I’ve seen Paris—its quite a town. And the people are quite a … [couldn’t quite this make out because of the censor a bit of a let-down in my dad’s script.]

Guess they were sick and tired of the Boschies [Nazis]. But not all Frenchmen are friendly. I’ve come across batches of them that I’d hate to trust as a friend of the Allies—They look hate and distrust at us.

Have you received that fifty I sent from France? Are you receiving all the allotments you’re supposed to? How is the money holding out? We got enough saved yet to send the baby through college?

I’m okay—never better—not a thing to worry about—bye.

I love you, Jack

The US must have known about Japan’s “surprise” attack on Pearl Harbour

A Brian A. Mitchell guest post

The US must have known about Japan’s “surprise” attack on Pearl Harbour.

The US had intercepted and deciphered Japanese communications since 1940. With their surveillance and technology at the time, the US would have known about the “surprise” Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour on December 7 1941. With Britain and its empire on its knees; the US wanted to grab the chance to further dominate the world, and Pearl Harbour gave them the excuse they wanted to enter the war by overcoming the “isolationist” policy of the American public and Congress in opposition to involvement in the war. This is not “proof” that the US knew about the attack, but there’s no reason to conclude otherwise.

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“If by these [economic, trade and military] means Japan could be led to commit an overt act of war, so much the better.”

(Secret memo from US Naval intelligence officer Lieutenant Commander McCollum to Commodore Knox October 7 1940, detailing options for provoking Japan to attack the US, all of which were carried out. Not declassified until 1994. Many documents on this are still classified.)

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“we face the delicate question of the diplomatic fencing to be done so as to be sure Japan is put into the wrong and makes the first bad move – overt move.

(US Secretary of War Henry Stimson in his diary October 16 1941.)

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“For a long time I have believed that our best entrance into the war would be by way of Japan.”

(US Secretary of Interior Harold Ickes, in his diary, October 18, 1941.)

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“We are preparing an offensive war against Japan.”

(US Army Chief of Staff General Marshall, in a “secret” report, November 15 1941.)

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“Eighty percent of the American people in 1940… were against going to war in Europe against Hitler. Roosevelt did the next best thing… He needed something to cause an important trauma and make the Americans’ mind up regarding the war. Therefore, he provoked the Japanese into attacking us at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.”

(US author and political historian Gore Vidal.)

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“It may be taken as almost certain that the entry of Japan into the war would be followed by the immediate entry of the United States on our side.”

(Winston Churchill, in a secret directive to the British War Cabinet, April 28 1941.)

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“The President had said he would wage war but not declare it. … Everything was to be done to force an incident.”

(Winston Churchill, to the British War Cabinet, August 18 1941.)

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“[Roosevelt] brought up the event that we were likely to be attacked perhaps next Monday [December 1], for the Japanese are notorious for making an attack without warning, and the question was what we should do. The question was how we should maneuver them into the position of firing the first shot without allowing too much danger to ourselves.”

(US Secretary of War Henry Stimson, in his diary, November 25 1941.)

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“The task force, keeping its movement strictly secret and maintaining close guard against submarines and aircraft, shall advance into Hawaiian waters, and upon the very opening of hostilities shall attack the main force of the United States fleet and deal it a mortal blow. The first air raid is planned for the dawn of x-day. Exact date to be given by later order.”

(Japanese Admiral Yamamoto to Japanese Air Fleet, November 26, 1941, decrypted by the US.)

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“the news got worse and worse and the atmosphere indicated that something was going to happen.”

(US Secretary of War Henry Stimson, in his diary, December 6 1941, the day before the attack.)

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“Prior to December 7, it was evident even to me… that we were pushing Japan into a corner. I believed that it was the desire of President Roosevelt, and Prime Minister Churchill that we get into the war, as they felt the Allies could not win without us and all our efforts to cause the Germans to declare war on us failed; the conditions we imposed upon Japan – to get out of China, for example – were so severe that we knew that nation could not accept them. We were forcing her so severely that we could have known that she would react toward the United States. All her preparations in a military way – and we knew their over-all import – pointed that way.”

(US Rear Admiral Frank Beatty, Aid to Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox.)

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“Japan was provoked into attacking the Americans at Pearl Harbor. It is a travesty on history ever to say that America was forced into the war. Everyone knows where American sympathies were. It is incorrect to say that America was ever truly neutral even before America came into the war on a fighting basis.”

(British cabinet Minister of Production Oliver Littleton, June 20 1944.)

Brian was born in the bombed out wartime East End of London and developed an interest in political books early on. He worked in various technical fields for 20 years, all of which thoroughly bored him. He entered academic life (History and Classical Economics) and became an independent journalist, worked for the ANC (secret at the time) until the end of apartheid, and was a trade union representative in a large hospital. He is now retired and still works (when able) as an independent journalist.