Misapplied Force

Recently, partly for academic purposes, I’ve read John Newsinger’s Dangerous Men: The SAS and Popular Culture. In many ways this is an interesting book, exploring the unique warrior-cult which British society has formed around the SAS. Newsinger convincingly argues that this cult stems from a Thatcherite attempt to resurrect popular militarism: the SAS has existed since 1941, but it was only following the Iranian embassy siege in 1980 that the unit was celebrated in popular culture.

There are, however, some serious flaws with the book. I felt that much of its analysis was too superficial, or that analysis was simply lacking. This is particularly apparent in the chapter on SAS fiction, which Newsinger spends masquerading as a literary critic rather than doing any sociology. I had already guessed that most SAS novels are appallingly written, and that the film Who Dares Wins is so mind-destroyingly bad that it might explain why Britain no longer makes action films. What I wanted more on was what relevance and role the warrior-cult has in a modern western society.

In fairness, these questions are addressed to some extent, but the answers given are so obvious that you probably don’t need to buy the book: backlash against feminism, desire to solve complex international problems through brute force, desire to see the existence of a national/racial elite. What goes unanswered is why Britain has this warrior-cult, while other nations seem to lack it – as far as I am aware, French popular culture does not worship the Foreign Legion, Russians do not idolise the Spetznatz. Comparisons with other nations are, however, almost completely absent from Newsinger’s work.

In addition to this, there are some worryingly simplistic segments of analysis. For example, when discussing the SAS deployment in the Malayan Emergency (1948-1958), Newsinger claims that the SAS role was ineffective in that they only killed 108 of the 6000 Communist guerrillas who died in the conflict. The equation of “most effective = kills the most people” is misleading and gung-ho, which, had the claim been made in an SAS biography, Newsinger would have been the first to point out.

Newsinger’s understanding of how people work also seems somewhat skewed. His model of British society in the 1980s goes as follows:

1) Thatcher tells people things.
2) They believe her.

Thus, in this analysis, all Thatcher had to do to resurrect British popular militarism (dead since the failure at Suez in 1956) was to point to the SAS as being efficient at the Iranian embassy, and win a bizarre colonial war in the Falklands three years later. However, it is impossible for popular culture to be dictated from the top down. While the political leadership can influence popular culture, there has to be a receptive audience. This is the flaw at the heart of Newsinger’s work. Nowhere can I find a reason why the British people took to popular militarism again in the 1980s. Here’s a half-baked theory of my own though: after the disaster of Suez in 1956 the popular perception of the British military was that it was brave but incompetent. Therefore, Britain would have to rely on American power for protection during the Cold War. However, the Vietnam War showed that the Americans could also fail - the unforgettable fall of Saigon in 1975 (a mere five years prior to the Iranian embassy siege) going out via mass-media. It is possible, then, that the British public now saw that America could fail, and perhaps felt that Britain needed to protect itself. Such a mood would be highly receptive to the muscular military nationalism promoted by the Thatcherite Conservative Party.

Reading the above back to myself, I appear to have thoroughly disliked this book. That isn’t true. Newsinger does effectively destroy many of the myths which have sprung up about the SAS, and provides some telling analysis: I was much taken by his claim that the classic image of the SAS, clad in black chemical-warfare suits and gas-masks, resembles nothing so much as fetish gear! The discussion of SAS involvement with counter-terrorist operations in Northern Ireland, and how they may have served to prolong rather than end the conflict, is highly interesting given the current world situation (the book was published in 1997).

In conclusion then, Dangerous Men: The SAS and Popular Culture would serve as a useful initial textbook for “SAS Studies” (does that course exist yet?) As a sociological work, however, it is too shallow in its analysis to be truly useful, and so merely provides a useful jumping-off point into other works.