Murder in Notting Hill Paperback – Illustrated, August 31 2011 by Mark Olden Zero Books 205 pages
Mark Olden’s book Murder in Notting Hill is a well-researched and crafted investigation into the racist murder of Kelso Cochrane in 1959. Unsurprisingly, the killer was never caught despite being well-known in the area. Olden outs the killer in the book, saying, “After I began investigating the case in 2005, I learned that the killer’s identity was “the worst kept secret in Notting Hill”. Three people identified Digby to me as the man who struck the fatal blow. Two of them had been questioned by the police about the murder; the third was Digby’s stepdaughter, Susie Read. Breagan, who insisted he was innocent, told me that when the police detained him, he was placed in a cell next to Digby, where he was able to iron out a discrepancy in their stories – after which the police released them both.”
Cochrane’s murder is one of the first recorded racially motivated murders in the UK. Olden is an excellent journalist and, among other things worked at the BBC. While there, he worked on the BBC programme Who Killed My Brother? Broadcast in 2006, Which examined the Cochrane Murder. Much of the book is influenced by that programme.
While working at the BBC, he gained access to material that a layperson could only dream of. Olden supplemented his research with a significant number of interviews. Many of the people interviewed were speaking publically for the first time. They give a real sense of what it was like to live in Notting Hill in 1959.
As part of his research for the book, Olden spent significant time at the National Archive in Kew, London. Perhaps unsurprisingly, he found out that the Labour government and police were more interested in suppressing political opposition to the fascists and containing the riots in London and Nottingham than solving a murder.
Olden points out that there are remarkable similarities between the way that Kelso’s death was investigated and the investigation into the murder of Stephen Lawrence. On April 22, 1993, 18-year-old Stephen Lawrence and Duwayne Brooks were attacked by five racist white youths in Eltham, southeast London. Stephen was stabbed to death. It was only in 2012 that two men were convicted of Lawrence’s murder after a long and bitter campaign by his parents. It was only a small measure of justice. Cochrane never did get justice. His murder remains unsolved to this day.
During his time at the National Archives in London, it would be fair to say that Olden would have been astonished to find that the National Archives authorities would thwart his attempts to establish the truth behind the Cochrane murder by refusing to release papers about the murder until 2044/54 on spurious grounds it ‘could put at risk certain law-enforcement matters, including preventing or detecting crime, arresting or prosecuting offenders and the proper administration of justice’. It was all the more galling because the man named by Olden as the probable murderer was dead, but still, a state-led cover-up was in place.
Only after a bitter and long campaign by members of Cochrane’s surviving family and their lawyers did the Metropolitan police permit the National Archives to release the files that were originally to be opened in 2054. Even a cursory look at the new files showed that this was a premeditated murder by outright fascists. It would be naïve to think that after all this time, the police will bring the family justice that can only be achieved by the mobilisation of the one force that can achieve justice, and that is the working class black and white.
While Olden’s book cannot be faulted as a piece of journalism, Olden has no explanation as to what social, economic and political conditions gave rise to the growth of Fascism in London and Nottingham at the time and also how the fascists could be opposed and defeated. The only class that could have opposed the racists and fascists was the working class. However, Olden believes that the white working class was either passive or racist.
But as Cliff Slaughter explains so well in his article Race Riots: the Socialist Answer,“So long as we look only at the surface of social life, so long as we try to deal with each question separately as it arises, we shall continue to find ourselves bewildered by events like the race riots. But they are no nine days’ wonder. Every worker in the country must clearly understand this. Only if we can trace the social roots of racial conflict shall we be able to weed them out and, with them, those who profit from it. The starting point for the working class must be unity and solidarity against the employers and their political representatives—in the first place, the Tory Party. All the problems the working class now faces—growing unemployment, the housing shortage, rent increases, the rising cost of living, attacks on wages and working conditions, and, above all, the threat of an H-bomb war—can be solved only by the unity and determined action of the working class. It is no accident that the steady growth of unemployment over the last year has been accompanied by an insidiously growing campaign around the slogan ‘Keep Britain-White’.
Slaughter goes on to explain the nature of fascism: “Fascism is a movement financed by big business which seeks support from the ‘middle classes’ and the most backward workers. Fascism’s real aim is to provide a mass basis for the smashing of workers’ organisations by a State machine which permits no democratic rights and rules with the whip and the torture chamber. To succeed, fascism must detach from the working class discontented elements who can be persuaded that something other than big business is their real enemy. This is why the fascists have recently returned to one of their favourite themes—racialism. Fascists were prominent in the Notting Hill riots and will cash in wherever they can on anti-coloured feelings. They will try to create a mob ready to use violence and to attack any scapegoat rather than the workers’ real enemy.”
Murder in Notting Hill is a good book. As a piece of investigative journalism, it is second to none. On the question of fascism, workers and youth need to look elsewhere to understand its rise and how to defeat it. As the great Marxist revolutionary and writer Leon Trotsky wrote, “Fascism comes only when the working class shows complete incapacity to take into its own hands the fate of society.”
Review: Permanent Record by Edward Snowden - 352 pages- Macmillan-(17 Sept. 2019)
“It is hard to think of a greater stamp of authenticity than the US government filing a lawsuit claiming your book is so truthful that it was literally against the law to write,”
Edward Snowden
“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”
― George Orwell, 1984
The ink on Edward Snowden’s new book had barely dried when the US government sought to block the proceeds of his memoir Permanent Record.
The US Department of Justice filed suit on Tuesday against Edward Snowden and his publisher Macmillan. The aim of this vindictive move was to stop Snowden from receiving any money made from the publication of his new book. US Attorney G. Zachary Terwilliger stated, “This lawsuit will ensure that Edward Snowden receives no monetary benefits from breaching the trust placed in him.” Snowden's publisher Macmillan is also being sued “solely to ensure that no funds are transferred to Snowden, or at his direction, while the court resolves the United States’ claims.”
Snowden who has over four million Twitter followers is widely respected for his whistleblowing act and in some quarters is regarded as a hero said the book was written not for monetary gain but in order to set the record straight regarding his release of data that showed the US government had systematically and secretly tapped the internet records of every single person on the planet. In doing so successive, US government had violated constitutional rights on a massive scale.
As Snowden intimates in the book, the surveillance apparatus exposed has no real parallel in history. Companies like Verizon, Google and Yahoo helped the US government collect billions of emails, phone calls, texts, videoconferences and webcam recordings.
One writer said that it “allows the surveillance agencies to draw social and political profiles of every person in the US and hundreds of millions of people beyond America’s borders”.
The book itself contains no “secrets” it still nonetheless takes the breath away at the extent of spying the US government undertook. While not implying in the book Snowden has uncovered through a series of leaks “the very advanced framework of a police state, both illegal and unconstitutional. The National Security Agency (NSA) and the US spy network are engaged in the collection of virtually all communications and the assembling of vast databases for the purpose of monitoring the personal, social and political activities of the entire population”.
As Snowden graphically puts it in an interview “All of your private records, all of your private communications, all of your transactions, all of your associations, who you talk to, who you love, what you buy, what you read—all of those things can be seized and held by the government and then searched later for any reason, hardly, without any justification, without any real oversight, without any real accountability for those who do wrong”.
On a human level, this point was hit home in the book when Snowden was spying on someone and was watching his target through his computer. The target had his son on his knee all the while Snowden was spying on him.
As Snowden notes he could “actually see you write sentences and then backspace over your mistakes and then change the words and then kind of pause and think about what you wanted to say and then change it. Moreover, it is this extraordinary intrusion not just into your communications, your finished messages but your actual drafting process, into the way you think.”
One overarching aim of the lawsuit is to try to deter people from buying the book and discussing content such as the one above but as Edward Snowden tweeted “Yesterday, the government sued the publisher of #PermanentRecord for—not kidding—printing it without giving the CIA and NSA a chance to erase details of their classified crimes from the manuscript. Today, it is the best-selling book in the world.”
Snowden’s book is a cross between a novel, spy story and biography, and this makes it a cracking read. Reading the book, one is struck by a certain degree of irony. Although carrying out one of the most audacious revolutionary acts this century Snowden's early life would appear to have been the inspiration for the film The Truman Show.
Snowden grew up in the suburbs of Washington, DC. His family was all involved in the military or federal government in some capacity. Snowden himself becoming a trusted CIA employee and NSA intelligence contractor.
There is a lot to admire about Snowden. On a personal level, the fact that he was prepared to sacrifice everything to expose illegal US government spying shows he was a man of courage and principle. On a broader level, Snowden was radicalised by the multiple wars carried out by the US government during his most formative years. In this sense, Snowden is not alone.
The life experience of the 30-year-old Snowden reflects that of an entire generation. “The disaffection with and growing opposition to the existing social and political set-up reflected in the evolution of Snowden’s views is not simply an individual process, but part of a change involving millions of his generation. It is this fact that accounts for the extraordinary level of anger and fear within the state apparatus that has been generated by his actions”.
From reading his book, his whistleblowing was as much an act against the massive invasion of privacy as it was against a quarter-century of wars. It would appear that Snowden very consciously fought to oppose these wars in the one way that was open to him and that was whistleblowing.
Kevin Reed supports this sentiment adding“ millions of workers and young people are entering political struggle today—facing a crisis that will challenge and shake up their views about the nature of the US military, the two-party system, the unions, bourgeois nationalism, etc.—Snowden’s book provides an insight into the internal process by which one young intelligence worker came to act, on the basis of principles, against the entire military-intelligence establishment of the American government”.
There is much to like about this book. While Snowden had a reasonable idea of what would happen after he released his files nothing really prepared him for how fundamental his life would change. Once the files were released he planned to go to one of few countries that he would feel safe in that being Ecuador.
To do so, he had to fly via Russia while in the air Snowden’s passport was revoked by the US Department of State. Snowden lived at the airport in Russia for 40 days after which he was given asylum by the Russian government.
One striking aspect of the book is the degree of confidence Snowden has shown in his actions. There is not a moment of the doubt despite the years of threats and calumny by the US government. His courage and principled stand is not just a reflection of his personal courage but because he knows he has widespread support.
As Glenn Greenwald states “Snowden seemed to derive a sense of strength from having made this decision. He exuded an extraordinary equanimity when talking about what the US government might do to him. The sight of this twenty-nine-year-old young man responding this way to the threat of decades, or life, in a super-max prison—a prospect that, by design, would scare almost anyone into paralysis—was deeply inspiring. And his courage was contagious: Laura and I vowed to each other repeatedly and to Snowden that every action we would take and every decision we would make from that point forward would honour his choice.”
It would be pointless to hope this book gets a wide readership as it is already selling bucketloads throughout the world. It is hoped that the new generation of workers and students reading the book act upon his courageous and selfless action. In his book, he is refreshingly frank about the emotional crisis his whistleblowing caused to his family and partner Lindsay. While had to abandon his girlfriend without any warning it is comforting to know that their relationship was as strong as his principles.
Further Reading
A Quarter Century of War: The US Drive for Global Hegemony 1990-2016 Paperback – 27 Jul 2016-by David North (Author)- https://www.amazon.co.uk/Quarter-Century-War-Hegemony-990-2016/dp/1893638693
