Sent on a journey with the wrong map

This phrase is from a Graham Greene novel... yet another well-known writer who worked during the war for the British Secret Service and probably after since much later he went to Moscow to see Philby and ask him to come back. His work drew in a different way from Fleming on his experiences and favoured a Conrad/Expressionist mood often described as seedy but he saw the drama in poverty and quiet desperation in a context of moral dilemma and the slide into crime. The film made of his book, “The Third Man” with Orson Welles playing a “noir” role - seized a bleakly hypnotic post-war atmosphere in Vienna and preceded the Bond films in making its theme tune a world-wide hit - “The Harry Lime Theme”.

Here are links between the Secret Service, Hollywood Leftism (Welles), Central Europe and expressionist intensity. Set in former scenes of political clashes of ideas and violence, spiritually near to Kafka territory. A concept which haunts the dark side of modernism along with its sparkling Utopianism ; they are inextricable.

The refugee community in Britain had some gifted film people and their talent and attitudes could be seen at popular and high-brow ends right through to the 60’s, but American controls on distribution quotas always ensured that their Hollywood diaspora got the lion’s share of fame and success-in the UK and elsewhere. The nascent ambitions of the British film industry were to find themselves hemmed in by all sorts of constraints which never let up - for a while the Americans made use of the local talents to produce their big films more cheaply but locals were kept on a hire and fire basis - contract lawyers saw to it that rights were never distributed so that when they decided the locals were getting too expensive they de-camped leaving many, (who had assumed a deeper trust was the basis of a kind of equal collaboration), to repent at leisure. Not having their contract lawyers always by their side - relying on gentlemen’s agreements. Recalling the Goldwynism “a verbal agreement is not worth the paper it’s written on”.

Most of Europe’s cultural battles with the US were lost on that issue - older cultures had learnt that professional trust was essential to high quality work so they simply appeared gullible when actually they were more sophisticated. Globalization’s boastful aim to copyright and contractualize everything, including plants and genes, ensures a) resistance on a global scale by the intelligentsia everywhere and b) they will be joined by the dis-possessed. Battalions of lawyers will be helpless to prevent the power of the idea whose time has come and that is to call a halt to the gathering madness. No amount of big-brother surveillance will prevail : because the basic idea is uncouth and anti-people.

The upping of the already-established cultural Olympics (with prizes galore for almost everyone), is in the process of being elaborated. US handlers claiming yet again a permanent place at the top of the pyramid. The quality of the people who began the cultural hidden management via the CIA can be deduced from Stonor Saunders’ book plus the telling remarks by Philby in his memoirs. Unidentified US officials were directing cultural strategy and tactics for national and personal interest with no legitimate mandate to do so. Nor professional qualifications - another reason secrecy was so important to maintain. The light of day would of spelled an abrupt end to the edifice and its funding by tax-payers. The device of a wrong map is still being assidiously maintained.