Johann Hari

In the endless babbling torrent of news, it’s easy to miss the small signs of how a culture – and a country – changes. For me, a marker almost as sweet as a black man in the White House flickers into Britain’s cinemas today. Clint Eastwood is the quintessential icon of the old America: an icy Everyman who made his fame cursing liberals, shooting down suspects, and slaying Injuns on screen. But now, in his eighth decade, Eastwood has done something remarkable. He has been making beautiful, understated movies that apologize for the filth he pumped out early in his career – and propagandize for a very different America. Yes: Dirty Harry has turned pinko-peacenik.

Eastwood strutted into the American consciousness in the 1950s in the TV series ‘Rawhide’ and a string of big-screen Westerns. He caught the tail-end of the uncomplicated Us-vs.-Them cowboy flicks where the Indians were evil scalping savages who had to be destroyed by the white heroes. The films were gorgeous, romantic accounts of a genocide, told adoringly from the perspective of the genocidaires. The attitude of the genre was typified by John Wayne’s jeer: “I don't feel we did wrong in taking this great country away from them… the Indians were selfishly trying to keep it for themselves.”

The approach lovingly idealised by Wayne and Eastwood lingers long: George W. Bush told his staffers to read a book that describes the Middle East as “Indian territory.” Even today, Washington D.C. has a museum dedicated to the genocide in Europe, but not the one on which their own society is built.

But Eastwood found his most iconic role as a new kind of urban cowboy. In the 1971 film ‘Dirty Harry’, he plays Inspector Harry Callhan. It was the first of the wave of backlash movies, explicitly taking on the sixties counter-culture and accusing it of destroying America. The plot focuses on a serial killer called Scorpio, who is a pansy-parody of the peace movement: a long-haired, androgynous, lisping hippie who wears the peace logo. He shoots random civilians on the streets of San Francisco, and says he will only stop if he is paid a ransom of $100,000.

Dirty Harry is an old-style cop, fond of beating and torturing confessions out of suspects. He summarises his approach by saying: “I shoot the bastard, that’s my policy.” His colleagues boast that Harry “is an equal opportunities hater – spicks, niggers, kikes, dagoes – especially spicks.” He sets out to catch the killer – but at every turn, he is emasculated by insane liberal regulations. The new laws prevent him from breaking into homes without a warrant, committing torture, or harassing suspects. Appalled, Harry spits: “That man has rights?... The law is crazy!”

As a result of the evil liberals fettering Harry, Scorpio is left free to suffocate a fourteen-year old girl and hijack a schoolbus full of kids. In the end, Harry shoots Scorpio in cold blood and throws his police badge away in disgust.

Pauline Kael, the greatest film critic of her time (or any time), famously called the film “fascist”, saying it “propagandizes for para-legal police power and vigilante justice.” It is designed to make you curse the fact the police aren’t allowed to shoot or savage whoever they please, and scream at the screen: “Kill, Harry!” Dirty Harry’s motto – “Go ahead, punk. Make my day” – became a classic.

In the 1980s, it looked like Eastwood’s shtick had run into the sand. His films were becoming even nastier and more right-wing – he was the only film-maker to glorify Ronald Reagan’s insane anti-democratic adventures in South America. In the end, he was reduced to co-starring alongside orange apes, even less convincingly than Reagan himself.

But then something odd happened. The old black-and-white world of Dirty Harry bled away – and a subtle, supple film-maker emerged in his place. There were hints of a change in ‘Unforgiven’, his 1992 Western. Suddenly, the old gun-slinger at the centre of the film – played by Eastwood – was broken and traumatized by the sadism he had inflicted in his earlier life. We no longer yelled for him to kill more: we felt uncomfortable, and ambiguous.

Since then, Eastwood’s films have been populated with people broken by the kind of casual violence inflicted to such noisy cheers by Dirty Harry. ‘The Changeling’ is the true story of what happens when the police disobey the rules and embark on torture and violence to achieve their goals – told from the perspective of the victim. ‘The Flags of Our Fathers’ is the true story of the soldiers who raised the US flag on Iwo Jima during the Second World War – and how the Native American soldier there, Ira Hayes, returned to face internal Apartheid and abuse. The companion-film, ‘Letters From Iwo Jima’, is even more bold, telling the story of the war from the other side – of the Japanese soldiers who faced them on the battle-field. Eastwood began to be attacked by the likes of Rush Limbaugh for becoming “liberal.”

But with his latest film, ‘Gran Torino’, Eastwood makes his repentance explicit. He plays Walt Kowalski, a cussed old widow and Korean war vet living alone in a neighbourhood that is increasingly populated by immigrants. Walt could be Harry Callhan in retirement: he curses the “babbling gooks” who move in next door and clings to his fat guns.

But one day, Walt sees a gang attacking his Hmong-immigrant neighbours, as they stumble onto his lawn – and he scares them off with a gun. The Hmong family begin to shower him with gifts and affection, as the gang circles every closer. It becomes clear Walt is broken by the violence he committed fifty years ago in Korea. “You want to know what it’s like to kill a man?” he asks. “It’s gooddam awful and the only thing worse is being given a medal of honour for killing a guy who just wants to live.”

Yet it becomes clear that Walt will fight back against the gang to defend his neighbours – and it seems like progress from Dirty Harry, but not much. Yes, liberal vigilantism is better than illiberal vigilantism, but only by inches.

But then the film surprises you – and shows how far Eastwood has really come. (If you don’t want to know the ending of the film, skip this paragraph.) He goes to confront the gang, and we expect a gleeful shoot-out. But the gang are waiting for him, armed like a militia. Walt watches them slowly, sadly, and reaches into his jacket. As he does, he dares the gang to shoot him first. “Go ahead,” he says – deliberately echoing Dirty Harry. They fill him with lead, there, in the street. But it turns out Walt was unarmed – and now the gang is going down for life. His neighbours are free at last. The echo of the old catch-phrase is ironic: Eastwood’s smiling form of apology. The first time the actor said “go ahead” on the big screen, he was sacrificing the law with violence to attack liberals. This time, he was using the law and non-violence, to defend immigrants.

In an age of forced apologies, here is a real one. This shift in one of America’s greatest icons is – I think – a helpful, hopeful sign of the wider shift in American culture. Although it was obscured by the back-lash jolts of 9/11 and the Bush years, the US has been slowly becoming a more liberal and open-minded society. Look at the difference between the reaction to the My Lai massacre in Vietnam and the Abu Graib horror in Iraq. When My Lai broke – the deliberate massacre of a whole village, including children – 40 percent of Americans defended it, and songs celebrating it topped the charts. When Abu Graib broke, only the madder fringes of talk radio praised it; more than 90 percent were repulsed.

The old Dirty Harry racism and brutality is abating, as the country’s great civil rights movements slowly win. Of course, that doesn’t mean the actions of the government will necessarily follow Walt and public opinion. They are often driven by forces that aren’t as accountable to democratic pressure, like corporate power, or the super-rich – but in time, they too can be eroded. If Inspector Harry Callhan can say sorry and change, anyone can.

Go ahead, America – make our day.

The critics of Vladimir Putin – Russia’s Prime Minister, and former KGB agent – have a strange habit of being found shot or stabbed or poisoned. This week, I met a man who is half-expecting an assassin’s bullet – here, in London. He is not alone. Ahmed Zayakev – a big, broad man with a grey beard and grief-soaked eyes – says: “I remember holding a press conference near here with my dear friends Alexander Litvinenko and Anna Politkovskaya. Now they are murdered, and I am the only one left. But I have no right to sit in a hole and shake. I have to speak.”

Zakayev is a Chechen, and his people have been pounded by Putin and his predecessors for too long. The people of his small mountainous province in the Northern Caucusus – rich in natural resources – are one of the most abused populations on earth. In the 1940s, Joseph Stalin deported every single one of them to Siberia and elsewhere. A third died on the way there; a third died on the way back. “My grandmother never recovered from this,” Zakayev says. When the Soviet Empire finally fell in 1991, the people of Chechnya tried to carve out some autonomy from their vast neighbour – and they were pummelled into submission by aerial bombardments and ground invasions that killed hundreds of thousands of people. “There were corpses everywhere. I see them [in my mind] all the time,” Zakayev adds.

The current killing-spree of Russian dissidents is, in part, an attempt to silence criticisms of these crimes. Anna Politkovskaya was a journalist – one of the greatest of our time – who travelled to Chechnya to expose the mass torture and slaughter by Russian troops there. She believed that Chechnya was a test-bed for tyranny that was spreading back across Russia itself, leading to “the re-establishment of the Soviet Union.” As if to prove her point, first she was poisoned. She survived. Then she was shot dead in the lift-shaft of her apartment block. Last week, the trial for her killing ended in Moscow. The case conspicuously avoided asking who ordered her killing, or why. It focused on “the middlemen” – the alleged driver and look-out for the assassin. They were acquitted. Nobody will be punished now.

Alexander Litvinenko was a Russian agent sent to Chechnya in the 1990s. He believed he was “fighting terrorism” – but he was startled by what he found. For him, the turning point was when he arrested a sixteen year-old “resistance fighter”. He told the boy he should be at school. “I want to be,” the boy said, “but my school was blown up.” Litvinenko began to speak out against the assault on Chechnya – and had to run for his life, to London, where he became a British citizen. His food was spiked with nuclear material in a restaurant in Central London, and he died in agony, of radiation poisoning. The trail of nuclear material ran quite literally through British Airways planes – back to Moscow.

“Alexander knew who killed him,” Zakayev tells me, adding that he was with Litvinenko as he lay dying, “right to the end.” But despite extensive, documented claims, this suspect has not been charged, and the Kremlin has refused Britain’s extradition requests. “Indeed, he is a member of the Russian Parliament, and celebrated by Putin,” Zakayev says.

Europe allowed a Russian dissident to be murdered without consequences – so it is happening again. Umar Israilov was a 27 year-old bodyguard to Ramzan Kadyrov, the thug appointed by Putin to run Chechnya today, who describes the province as a “zoo” filled with “animals”, and brags “I will be killing as long as I live.” Israilov was horrified, so he fled to Austria, to speak out. He begged the Viennese police for protection, but they refused. On Jaunary 13th this year, he was chased through the streets of Vienna by a gang of hitmen – and shot twice in the head.

This is only going to get worse. Dissent in Russia was relatively low as the economy boomed, built on a swelling oil-price. But now Russia’s stock market has fallen by 75 percent since last summer, the biggest drop in the world. That’s why the ex-KGB chairman of the Duma’s Security Committee, Gennaday Gudkov, says: “We are expecting mass unemployment and mass riots.”

To prepare, Putin has restored the Soviet-era criminalisation of dissent. Now, if you “advise” a human rights organisation – merely by speaking to them – you are guilty of “high treason.” More people are going to flee to Europe – and we are going to have to choose between protecting them, or letting them be picked off on our streets.

Yet for Europe, human rights in Russia are a bitterly low priority. Our governments are partly responsible for this resurgence of dictatorship. After the fall of Soviet tyranny, it was Europe and the US that forced Russia’s infant democracy to privatize everything overnight in a programme of “shock therapy.” The social services were shut down overnight, and everything flogged off. As a result, the country’s assets were seized by piratical oligarchs, and – according to a major study by the Lancet – over a million ordinary Russians died of cold or hunger or extreme poverty. This chaos and mass death made the old anti-democratic propaganda seem true – and sent the population running back to the old, cold face of dictatorship.

Worse still, we in Europe are addicted to Russia’s gas supplies. If we anger Putin, he can turn off the gas taps, as he has shown with his bullying of Ukraine. Our government has made the bleak calculation that a dissident being murdered in central London doesn’t weigh much against keeping the lights on. There are many urgent reasons to end our dependence on fossil fuels. One of the most compelling is that, until we do, we will not be able to keep a democratic space for Russian dissidents to speak the truth, even here, on our own soil.

Zakayev looks out of the window, across the London skyline. “I do not want to die. Alexander and Anna did not want to die. But for the hundreds of my friends who are gone, I have to keep speaking.” We – the peoples of Europe – have to protect that right, at least, and at last.

POSTSCRIPT: As if to prove my point, there's been a flood of emails from extreme Russian nationalists like this:

"MANY YEARS LIVED IN THE WEST! I HATE ENGLISH-SAXON HYPOCRITES AS THEIR SPANIARDS HATE, ITALIANS, FRENCHMEN. HAS READ ARTICLE ABOUT DISSIDENTS - ITSELF HAS PERSONALLY WANTED TO SHOOT ZAKAEV AND THE AUTHOR OF THIS ARTICLE! THE MONGREL WHO JUSTIFIES TRAITORS OF RUSSIA! PERSONALLY WOULD OFFER MONEY THAT SOMEONE HAS SHOT THESE SELLING LIARS-MONGRELS, AND ZAKAEV - THE GANGSTER! SO 90 % OF RUSSIANS THINK! IT IS A PITY TO ME THAT THE GOVERNMENT OF RUSSIA ARE PUPPETS OF THE WEST! FOR A LONG TIME IT WAS NECESSARY TO CREATE THE NUCLEAR WEAPON IN IRAN, TO PUT NUCLEAR MISSILES ON CUBA, IN VENEZUELA ETC. FOR A LONG TIME IT WAS NECESSARY TO START TO HELP THE TALIBAN WITH AFGHANISTAN AS AMERICA HELPED TERRORISTS AGAINST THE SOVIET SOLDIERS WITH AFGHANISTAN, THE CHECHEN REPUBLIC AND OTHER COUNTRIES!
Johann Hari - GET OUT! THE FALSE PUPPET OF THE CHECHEN TERRORISTS AND SPECIAL SERVICES! IT IS A PITY TO ME THAT YOU YET HAVE NOT KILLED! KNOW THAT YOU ARE HATED BY 99 % OF RUSSIANS AND SUCH TRAITORS OF RUSSIA AS ZAKAEV, LITVINENKO, THE POLITKOVSKAYA - YOU WILL NOT RESCUE! ALL TRAITORS OF RUSSIA WILL DIE SOONER OR LATER! GOD WITH RUSSIA! MY GOD, DESTROY THESE MONGRELS!"

Feel free to reply to this email, it came from neznakomkappp@mail.ru

On the 21st October 1953, John Gielgud – the dream-voiced Shakespearian star of his generation, and Knight of the Realm – walked into a public toilet off the Fulham Road. There, he exchanged a few nods and prods with a young man who winked at him – and triggered Britain’s most high-profile prosecution for homosexuality since Oscar Wilde.

In ‘Plague Over England’, the entrapment of Gielgud by a “pretty policeman” is the centre of gravity for a play that swoops across the gay underworld of 1950s London – from the bushes of St James’ Park strewn with guardsmen to the Whitehall clubs where the crackdown on this “filth” is planned.

As Gielgud is convicted and shamed, a self-consciously gay London is emerging around him from the darkness of the toilets and parks, trying to find light. As panicked men approach their doctors for help with their “disorder”, they are prescribed oestrogen to shrivel up their genitals, or electric shocks to burn their urges away.

And in the middle of it stands Gielgud, an empty, air-headed genius, so great at donning masks because there is so little there. When he is caught, her mutters only a pitiful, desperate: “I’m sorry.” He sees no chance for political redemption: when somebody urges him to act like a Suffragette, he laments: “Ah, but they had a just cause.” He only achieves eloquence once in the play when, lost and facing ruin, he turns to the audience and quotes Shakespeare’s ‘Richard II’: “What must the King do now? Must he submit?... Must he lose/ the name of king? O God’s name, let it go.” Gielgud is only himself when he is pretending.

The play’s author, Nicholas De Jongh, is best known as the acerbic theatre critic for this newspaper. But here, in his terrific first play, he sensitively traces a lost world: the dark waltz of cottaging where men circle each other for small signs of lust, and of politicians pledging to “eliminate homosexuality” from these crevices. He manages to pull onto the stage the inner lives of a remarkable range of characters, and only fails in his depictions of the homophobes. They had complex, disturbing motives of their own – but here they are buffoonish caricatures motivated by only idiocy.

Of course, Michael Feast has an impossible job playing Gielgud. Nobody can bring back that voice – as pure and seductive as a Caribbean ocean – and nobody can bring back those eyes. But it is an extraordinary tribute that at times, there are flickers of the lost actor. As the play swings forward to the 1970s and the age of gay liberation, he captures the pathos of Gielgud still agonising. “The parade,” he says softly, “has passed me by.”

Fifty-six years after Gielgud ended up in court for a harmless act, it is a victory that “his crime” can now be re-enacted so compellingly on stage – in the knowledge the audience will damn the police, not the gay man.

Booking to 16 May. Box office: 0870 890 1103

The responses to my article about the riots in Calcutta has been overwhelmingly positive - especially from India. I'm particularly grateful to all the Muslims who have expressed their disgust at the Islamist attempts to shut down free speech.

Here are some of the most interesting: from the Hindustan Times, Katha Pollitt in The Nation, Index on Censorship, Shoayib Daniyal, The Daily Telegraph, Ophelia Benson, Stephen Poole, Andrew Sullivan, the Indian blogger Dance With Shadows, Salil Tripathi , the International Humanist and Ethical Union, Austin's Atheism Blog, Puny Mishra, the Indian blog Communalism Blog, Satya Brat and Russell Blackford.

There was an exceptionally stupid response from The Middle East Times

Please express your support for the editors of The Statesman here.

For the latest on what they are facing, click here. I'm doing what I can to support them, but for obvious reasons I'm told it's best not to talk about it right now. If you are outraged by religious assults on free speech and want to do something about it, please join the National Secular Society or volunteer for Butterflies and Wheels.

In the middle of complex crises that require hard work to explain, the political-media class loves to charge off in search of a piece of distracting, empty trivia. This week, they are obsessed with Jacqui Smith’s expenses forms. The Home Secretary is entitled to claim help for a house in London and in her constituency – but (hushed whisper) did she put them in the right order on the forms? Does she spend four nights a week in her sister’s house, or (drum roll please) only three?

Meanwhile, on the other side of Westminster Bridge, crime is set to soar – and Smith’s policies will make it worse. It is an iron law of sociology that when the economy falls, crime spikes. If you increase the number of people milling around jobless and listless, you inevitably end up with more muggings and burglaries. So we need to talk now – urgently – about how we can stem this rise. The debate should be about your house, not Smith’s house.

There are two paths from here. The government can continue to posture as “tough” to gain applause in the right-wing press – and crime will get worse. Or they can get smart. Let’s look in this column at three policies that have been proven to slash crime. They don’t allow Smith to posture as a hard-woman beating up the baddies – but the facts show that if we introduce them now, we will avoid the worst.

Step one: Transfer the mentally ill to hospitals. The first thing that strikes you when you visit British prisons – as I do – is the sheer number of people there who are insane and barely know where they are. In the bowels of Wormwood Scrubs I found a man in his sixties who had been diagnosed with severe brain damage. He thought I was his father. He wasn’t so unusual. Michael Spurr, the operational head of the Prison Service, admits that ten percent of the prison population is “seriously mentally ill.” Almost everyone in the field considers this a serious underestimate.

This isn’t just a scandal – it makes you less safe. If you take somebody who is paranoid or delusional and lock them in a tiny cell without proper treatment, they get rapidly worse. A recent study by Professor David James found when you send a mentally ill person to jail rather than hospital, they become 50 percent more likely to reoffend. That’s a lot of muggings and attacks that will be wiped out by proper treatment.

Step two: Increase methadone and heroin prescriptions for chronic addicts. If you fall into heroin addiction, your body becomes so ravaged by the need for the drug that you will do anything for your next fix. That’s why a majority of the property crimes and sex-for-cash are carried out by junkies. Providing rehab is important – but the drug is so addictive that even the best treatment centres in the world fail 80 percent of the time. So for most addicts, the only safe option is for doctors to give them a legal prescription – which halts their crime overnight. The Cheshire Drug Squad found in the 1980s that the presence of a heroin-prescribing clinic on their patch caused a 94 percent drop in property crimes.

This week I visited the Addaction drug treatment centre in the suburbs of North London to see what can be done. A typical client of theirs – I’ll call him Andy – became depressed after his girlfriend died in an accident. He began using harder and harder drugs in an attempt to dull his pain, and soon became hooked on heroin. As the addiction got worse he began to fuel his habit through theft. He turned up at the centre for help and was prescribed methadone, which helped to stabilise his drug use. With the therapy and guidance he was given here, he was able to slowly cut back. Today, he is working, crime-free, and receiving only small doses.

Yet places like this are struggling. Under Labour, 15 of Britain’s 100 rehab centres have closed in the past year. David Cameron’s Tories, incredibly, want to go even further: Iain Duncan Smith’s policy paper called for an end to all prescription in favour of requiring immediate “abstinence”. Tim Sampey, one of the on-the-ground Addaction workers, says this would cause “a crime explosion.” Labour needs to stop being so cowardly and make the open case for medicalising drug addiction. In Switzerland, this policy was unpopular – until it was introduced and crime rates crashed down. Now it has overwhelming support.

Step three: Bring rehabilitation back to our prisons. Today, 60 percent of prisoners have a reading ability below that of a six year-old child – and most leave having learnt nothing. How can we be surprised that only 25 percent stay away from crime when they are released?

There are some brilliant rehabilitation programmes, but they are underfunded and sparse. Joe Baden has founded one of the best, The Open Book Project. When he was imprisoned in the seventies facing armed robbery charges, Baden was taught creative writing – and it inspired him to go straight. Today he goes back into prisons to help inmates get academic qualifications, supporting them at every step. He has taken prisoners from illiteracy to gaining degrees – and only 2 percent of the people he works with reoffend. Yet he warns me that “most rehabilitation today is just crap.”

As it stands, it is going to get even harder for prisoners to be matched up with retraining in the next few years. One in four probation officers is being sacked to save money. Instead of expanding the probation service to make sure released prisoners are not homeless, jobless and skill-less, the government is actually scything them back.

Is this the path we want to choose? Yes, it gives us all a cheap kick to be rhetorically “tough”, smacking around the insane, addicts, and illiterates who made horrible choices in their past – but it ends with more of us becoming victims of crime. That’s the inevitable dark alley we will stumble into now if we go back to jabbering about Jacqui Smith’s expenses while the economy tanks and our politicians unthinkingly smoke more of the crack-down crack. It’s time to get liberal – or get mugged.

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