RED REBELS: The Glazers and the FC Revolution by JOHN-PAUL O'NEILL

RED REBELS: The Glazers and the FC Revolution

John-Paul O’Neill
Yellow Jersey Press/Vintage, 2017, 270 pages

Review by Phil Shannon

Sir Alex Ferguson was deeply affronted by the Manchester United Football Club supporters who got stroppy about the proposed takeover of the club by the US corporate raider, Malcolm Glazer, in 2004 - ‘they carried on to the degree where they actually thought they should have a say in the running of the football club’, exclaimed the outraged coach.

Ferguson had, however, gotten to the core of things by starkly asking just whose club it is.  Did it belong to moneyed managers like Ferguson?  To capitalist owners like Glazer or his profiteering predecessors (ever since 1902 when local brewers bought out and renamed the distinctly proletarian but near-bankrupt railwaymen’s team of Newton Heath as a vehicle to sell beer)?  To the foreign mercenaries (the players) who, without a drop of Mancunian blood in them, simply follow the transfer money?  Or, as John-Paul O’Neill, former passionate MU supporter and author of Red Rebels, believes, the fans who give their club its true local heart?

O’Neill saw MU as a football club not a business, a community not a commercial brand – unlike the view of the corporate pirate, Glazer, who eyed off MU for pecuniary reasons and bought a majority shareholding in the world’s richest club through a massive, debt-fuelled loan which was to be repaid by more profit-chasing corporate boxes, expensive seated areas, higher ticket prices and in-your-face sponsorship.

Whilst hoovering millions of pounds out of the club to keep its new owner in dividend heaven, and to keep pace with large interest repayments, Glazer has made the club itself the ultimate collateral against the loans, threatening the 126 year old institution with death from crippling debt should interest rates rise.

Fan resistance to the Glazer takeover looked doomed, however.  Glazer’s grip on MU was not to be prised loose by protests, pitch invasions, match disruption by tossing beach balls onto the field, boycotts of MU’s corporate sponsors, pulling the plug (literally) on TV coverage to sabotage the broadcasting revenue stream, the wearing of mourning black instead of MU’s trademark red, or a quixotic Shareholders’ United plan to buy back ownership (Glazer’s controlling stake was bought for £780 million, while most of MU’s 30,000 ordinary members owned a fiver’s worth of shares each).

O’Neill, editor of Red Issue, the independent fanzine famed for its caustic but literate criticism of the MU elite, floated one last ditch option – because Glazer’s financiers were banking on MU fans’ continued loyalty, why not seriously dent MU’s fan and revenue base by setting up, from scratch, an alternative Manchester team, one based on community ownership and control, one that would be obedient to democracy not the Dollar.

Thus was Football Club United of Manchester (FCUM) born as a protest tactic to pressure MU to abandon Glazer and return the club to its supporters.  O’Neill took his cue from rank and file AFC Wimbledon fans who had set up a supporter-owned replacement club when theirs was torn up by its London roots and transplanted north to become Milton Keynes Dons.

To work as an effective protest, FCUM would have to be viable but, only seven weeks out from the start of the 2005-06 season, the rebel movement had no club, no structure, no money, no ground, no coach, no players.  They also faced opposition from the doom-merchants and naysayers, the nervous nellies and cynics, the big talkers and empty promisers, hostile journalists (‘does anyone seriously believe people will stop watching MU because of who’s running the club?’, snarked one), logistical setbacks, the fading fires of enthusiasm, MU’s former hooligans who got physical, and devoted MU fans who taunted FCUM followers with cries of ‘Judas’ and ‘traitor’.

Nevertheless, all obstacles were overcome as the audacious football revolutionaries won the commitment of thousands of MU fans on the basis of the club’s founding principle of democratic ownership and control - each paid-up member would be a co-owner;  election of the governing board and all major club policy decisions would be decided on a one-member-one-vote basis;  ticket prices would be affordable;  local youth development would be prioritised for the playing ranks;  the club would be a non-profit organisation that avoided “outright commercialism” (including on-shirt sponsorship); any profits would be re-invested in the club.

 

Neither would the football revolution stop outside the club premises.  FCUM was dubbed the ‘Red Rebels’ by the local press not just because they were rebelling against MU’s traditional jersey colour but also because the club’s founders envisaged a club with a left-leaning “social conscience“.  Players and management, for example, banned interviews with the BBC in solidarity with the Beeb’s striking journalists.

 

The FCUM revolution, however, went a bit Animal Farm after its heady early days as the club’s philosophy was betrayed by a bureaucratic clique which developed around chief executive Andy Walsh, who appointed his former comrades from ‘Militant Tendency’ (the highly sectarian Trotskyoid entryists who had tried to take over the Labour Party from within during the 1980s) to “nice, cushy roles” and robust salaries within the administration whilst manoeuvring his allies onto the board.  The ‘Walshocracy’ recklessly pursued revenue and completely stuffed up the club’s finances with debt, ironically replicating the Glazer debt debacle at MU.

At times, O’Neill got a bit down in the dumps with a touch of the Orwells, wondering if it was worth keeping the FCUM dream alive, but, together with his “small band of idealists”, he mobilised members behind FCUM’s original banner of “protest and rebellion” and, defying Orwell’s anti-revolutionary defeatist pessimism, there was a second, successful, revolution with the undemocratic, nepotistic, dissent-crushing board of betrayers routed in 2016.

On the field, after starting football life in the very bottom tier of English football, nine whole Divisions below MU in the Premier League, FCUM had stunning early success, winning promotion season by season until their part-time players met stiffer competition further up football’s professional pyramid where mid-table mediocrity and relegation scares awaited them.  But they have survived.

So has MU, however, where Glazer appears to have been accepted.  A trophy cabinet of silverware has lulled fans into passivity on ownership issues whilst a monetary era of record low interest rates has kept, for now, a lid on the debt time-bomb of £400  million bequeathed by Glazer even as the American tycoon has shovelled out £1 billion in money-for-nothing dividends.

Not just in terms of footballing glamour, but on fundamentally political issues of democracy, ownership and control, the member-run, community team of FCUM and the make-a-buck commercial team of MU are truly in different leagues.   Although the book’s regurgative, blow-by-blow, email-by-email account of the internal FCUM power struggle could have done with some cruel-to-be-kind editing, O’Neill has, with Red Rebels, played a blinder.

THE DOOMSDAY MACHINE: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner, DANIEL ELLSBERG

THE DOOMSDAY MACHINE: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner

DANIEL ELLSBERG

Bloomsbury, 2017, 420 pages

Review by Phil Shannon

 

One of the first reactions of Daniel Ellsberg to his revelatory acquaintance with US nuclear war planning in the 1960s was for the private sector consultant to the White House and Department of Defence to decline to join the superannuation scheme of his company, the RAND corporation.  Ellsberg had gloomily concluded that he would not last the distance to collect on any retirement pension because he believed that US atomic war strategy made nuclear Armageddon more likely, and frighteningly near.

 

Ellsberg’s other response, however, was to redouble his vow to oppose nuclear weapons, initially as a civilian alarm-raiser within the US administration, then by leaking the government’s nuclear war secrets in what would have been a precursor to his historic exposé of the US war in Vietnam (the Pentagon Papers).

 

In The Doomsday Machine, Ellsberg writes that it was the stark projections of a nuclear war’s body count - “the extermination of over half a billion people” from blast, heat, fire and radioactive fallout, and then, globally, from the crop-failure and starvation resulting from the sun-smothering, stratospheric soot and smoke of a decades-long ‘nuclear winter’ - that flicked him from technocrat-with-a-conscience to law-defying activist.

 

After failed attempts to rouse Presidents and Defence Secretaries, it was with “a different level of civilian authority in mind” that Ellsberg took direct action.  When he photocopied the Top Secret Pentagon Papers held in his office safe, Ellsberg also Xeroxed its other contents – eight thousand highly classified documents on US nuclear war planning. 

 

As public release of the Vietnam secrets took real-time priority, Ellsberg stashed the nuclear war material in a garbage bag buried in his brother’s backyard compost heap.  Barely one step ahead of the FBI who came poking around after their suspected Vietnam leaker, he relocated the bag to the local rubbish tip where it met disaster from the rain and wind of tropical storm Doria in 1971.

 

Ellsberg’s document retrieval team desperately searched for the lost bag but did not find it before the contents of the trash site were used as landfill and concreted over for the construction of an apartment complex.  Now, however, digging through his memory and subsequent research, Ellsberg, for the first time, tells what he knew and the nuclear myths that continue to need busting.

 

‘Nuclear deterrence’ has kept the peace for seventy years?  Myth.  Only extraordinary good luck has kept the weapons, locked-and-loaded during geo-political crises and always at the launch mercy of “false alarms, accidents and unauthorised launches”, in their silos.  Deterrence, the alleged principle behind the balance of terror that has supposedly prevented nuclear war for seven decades, is “a deliberate deception”.

 

The ability to inflict retaliatory atomic carnage was never the defining, ‘defensive’ feature of nuclear weapons.  Their whole point is to be the nuclear muscle behind offensive military and political aggression.  The Bomb allows a nuclear-armed state, like a fist-happy footballer ‘getting in first with the retaliation’, to land the first blow.  Why allow an enemy the first shot, especially when even one thermo-nuclear H-bomb (a thousand times more powerful than the Hiroshima-type A-bomb, which itself packed half the total firepower of all the bombs used in the second world war) would result in the mass frying and irradiation of untold civilians.

 

US nuclear war strategy was, from the start, designed for ‘first-use’, to take out all the nuclear weapons of the then-Soviet and Chinese foes, either in a pre-emptive attack or in an escalation of a regional Cold War conflict.  The “planned slaughter” of billions of people is in-built into such a system.

 

Nuclear weapons have never been used since Hiroshima?  Not so.  Every single President from Truman to Trump has made direct threats, risky bluffs or entertained thoughts of raining atomic fire and fury on an adversary.  All have kept nuclear weapons’ use as an option ‘on the table’ to force a geo-political adversary to back down, exactly as a gun pointed at the head is used as a persuader.  Ellsberg cites two dozen post-war occasions of such ‘atomic diplomacy’ by Washington, from Korea to Cuba, from Berlin to Vietnam, from Iran to Pyongyang.  The use of nuclear weapons is ‘unthinkable’?  Think again.

 

But at least there is no such thing as an omnicidal Doomsday Machine which is only the stuff of fiction?  Untrue.  The US nuclear arsenal, says Ellsberg, is a ‘Doomsday Machine’ (Russia has its own equivalent, too), a system that is pre-programmed to ‘use them or lose them’, to fire all its missiles at once.

 

A RAND colleague had once described such a Doomsday plan as a parody of ‘mutually assured destruction’, the nuclear deterrence strategy at the time.  Stanley Kubrick, gave the concept a darkly satirical run in Dr. Strangelove, his 1964 movie in which a lunatic general, using his delegated authority, initiates a nuclear attack against the Soviet Union, triggering the Soviet’s Doomsday Machine to unleash all its H-bombs in response and wiping out all life on Earth in a giant nuclear conflagration.  When Ellsberg saw the film, he remarked ‘That was a documentary!’.

 

The bomb is safely under Presidential veto control?  An illusion.  On hair-trigger alert, the bombs await only a presidential order to launch, or the command of the President’s many authorised delegates (top military officers) or, “reverberating downward in a widening circle” of launch authority, their numerous subordinates (field commanders, ship captains, even individual bomber pilots), on their own, possibly ill-informed, initiative.

 

Vote Democrat in the hope that wiser heads and warmer hearts will prevail in the White House?  Delusory.  Barak Obama, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate, presided, for eight years, over thousands of nuclear weapons and authorised $1 trillion to ‘modernise’ the US nuclear arsenal.  The ‘liberal icon’, Hillary Clinton, was as orthodox a nuclear hawk as one could fear to find.  The fiery ‘socialist’, Bernie Sanders, was a budget-conscious nuclear downsizer but no  abolitionist.  In these rancorous anti-Trump times, however, it has only been these Democrats’ nemesis, the bombastic Trump, who has worn any heat on the issue whilst the smooth Obama, the sensible Hillary and the radical Sanders were given a free pass.

 

As Ellsberg notes, it isn’t Trump who is mad but the nuclear weapons system itself.  Proliferation to rogue or unstable nations is less of a threat, says Ellsberg, than the existing nuclear weapons inventory of the nine nuclear-armed states, primarily the US and Russia, poised to launch at a moment’s notice - the bombs are a “catastrophe waiting to happen”.  Ellsberg finds that, with all its buttressing myths discarded, there is “a dizzying irrationality, madness, insanity at the heart and soul of our nuclear planning”. 

 

Ever since Hiroshima, which had appalled the young Ellsberg, he had abhorred nuclear weapons, even when he was swept up in a lot of anti-communist Cold War malarkey about fictional missile gaps and “cold-blooded Bolshevik leaders”, even when he served as a Commie-fighting officer in the US Marines, even when he was a leading Harvard scholar of deterrence theory as a ‘necessary evil’.

 

And even when Ellsberg, in the economics (not nuclear) arm of RAND, had to pitch in with RAND’s “military intellectuals” on immediate, and inevitably nuclear, Cold War crises, he tried, fruitlessly, to tame the bomb.  He drafted guidance for the Pentagon recommending alternatives to the Doomsday plan, including ‘limited’ nuclear war by attacking ‘just’ Russia and ‘sparing’ China, or attacking ‘just’ military, not civilian, targets.  It wasn’t much of an improvement, he now concedes, but “you should have seen the plan it was replacing!”.

 

Ellsberg learnt that all the original nuclear war principles and the Cold War fictions the US government and military lived by were political theatre and lies.  Such fundamental dishonesty and policy gibberish are still current - “the basic elements of American readiness for nuclear war remain today what they were almost sixty years ago,” concludes Ellsberg.

 

Ellsberg laments that public discussion of US nuclear war strategy is taboo but, despite the sometimes hard going technical matter and his frequently bewildering wanderings through the bureaucratic maze, Ellsberg’s book, and his courageous example of truth-telling, can only help to transgress the politically-induced complacency and acquiescence that surrounds nuclear weapons and their threat of planetary ruin.  Ban the Bomb!