Max Porter: Does the devil wear a grey M&S suit with comfy brown Merrells?
This is a video of Max Porter reading Wild West, his piece about the arms trade at an event titled How Empires End, hosted by The Palestine Festival of Literature which took place last December in London. You can watch the entire event here. A transcribed version of the reading is added after the video.
I first saw it shared on social media, and glad it’s now available on YouTube to be able to share it here with you.
It is powerful and full of rage. We need more of this.
Transcribed version:
It’s an honour to be here and to stand in solidarity and love and rage with you all.
This is a piece about what your neighbour does for a living. I've read this piece before.
I write it again and again and again, and it disgusts me and I literally cut and paste chunks verbatim from the BAE systems website.
Cut, paste, read, weep.
I can't tell the difference between something I made up to satirise the horrific, banal language of industrial murder, and the language of denial, obfuscation.
The small print of precision killing and trade agreements.
The atrocity in numbers, percentages, the language of a politician.
A so-called human rights lawyer asked to vote to stop the killing, replying “Well, now look, there's an election next year. We'll have to wait and see what the polls say. It's a complex situation.”
The language of abject, squalid immorality, the language of a sold soul.
The numbers keep growing, the technology keeps improving. The race is still on to find better and better ways of killing.
Names change. The facts remain the same.
Business is booming.
It's an evil, easily measured in mourning, the size of this world. We become one another.
We who have spoken with the tongues of arms trade websites and .gov diktats and tech fair sound bites and Hansard-bleached Westminster gossip and those who have locked on, or given up or never cared or don't yet know or look another way, or only just found out and feel it's a bit late to say anything now anyway.
British Publishing [blows lips]
How do we live with ourselves?
How do we lie to ourselves?
Well, we adhere to the highest ethical standards and strive to be responsible corporate citizens. I'm so proud to work for a company that is committed to global stabilisation and giving back to the community.
What is it that Uncle Carl does for a living?
Notice how we speak when the body politic is long dead from poisoning, but the lips still move.
Tech, defence, security. Church on a Sunday. Arms fair on Monday.
Blacked out windows so my kids are invisible to prying pacifist eyes.
Pretty offices in a restored Georgian townhouse on the outskirts of a normal English town, designing a product called Storm Shadow which we will sell to Saudi Arabia to drop on Yemen.
But I can drive fast down the bypass, get home in time to play Fortnite, with my son. Peow peow!
He’s only allowed war games after he's done his homework.
Then time for a shower before the wife serves up my favourite lemon and herb risotto.
You keep banging on about Gaza as if I'm sat here with a f**king atlas making plans, making travel plans.
I sell to clients.
It's a free world.
We own it. We made it.
We make it. We run it.
We're not a nation state, yeah!
We're a global business community.
We are legion.
The soil is always fertile, we just chuck the seeds around.
Borders mean swords, mean orders.
Oh sorry, Israel.
I can't do business with you because my niece has read an Edward Said book and says I'm a naughty man.
You think my team are down there by the water-cooler picking over the nitty gritty of 1948?
We're making a product because there is high demand for it.
If demand dries up, we will make another product to better serve the client's rapidly developing needs. Full stop.
You're imagining a more complex situation than there is, darlin’.
There's me with a price-list and a Rolodex full of contacts and a cup of lukewarm Nescafé.
Brazil, Egypt, Bahrain, China. All I see is markets.
I don't see bodies, stories.
I see a tacit arrangement with this government and the government before them.
And you can bet your f**king a*se the government that’s coming in next year.
Them more than most, frankly.
And I see ML4’s ML22’s, ML10’s a stack of licenses and a stack of sums.
We're a little local industry and we sleep really well at night thank you for asking.
I'm not the poor sod washing the PR pants for Lockheed Martin.
If you've got a problem with what I do for a living, call Joe Biden, yeah?
The freight is pretty well proportioned to the groove, mon ami.
Money's all there is and that is all we know about money.
Pop, pop, democracy.
We’re doing shots at the bar.
Say you need a stealth combat aircraft.
You ideally need an F-35 to get above a small strip of land like that and take out an apartment block or a hospital.
Yes, gents?
So what do you need if you want an F-35?
That’s right you bloody legends!
Boys, mates, guys, gents, fellas, chaps, chums, you f**king stand-up-normal every-men, late for work ‘cause you stop for a Costa Coffee on the M4 and had to download a new episode of the Alastair Campbell-Rory Stewart podcast.
That's right!
If you want to put together an F-35 you need 15% of that bombers parts which are made in bloody Britain.
And if you snooze, you lose ‘cause it's not getting easier.
We’re the only f**ker who's trafficking freight around here, yeah?
Have you met Jemima’s dad that I play squash with?
Yah, he made an absolute killing in Syria and spent the pandemic moving it all into PPR and hand-sani’. Clever bastard, yeah!
The only word I know is ‘Yes’.
Yes. Use our meeting room, use our soldiers, use our MPs, think tanks, lobbyists.
Use The Telegraph any way you want to use the frothing fascist tw*ts.
Use our air bases in Cyprus.
Use our shipping lines, use our BBC, use our Foreign Secretary, use our existing colonial mindset.
Use the industrial machinery of exploitation and distant atrocity that’s underpinned our ideal of operations for 2000 years and also launder the money in London and we will chuck in some Lion King tickets.
It is as complex as how much does an MP cost.
It is as complex as the death industry, the military industrial arm of white supremacy, the green leather benches of Whitehall, and the bought Lords the donor who pays for apartheid here, there and anywhere because it's just good for business.
It is business.
Follow the money and you get to a man like that and then another and then another.
Oh, Christ. Yeah. Have you met Hugo's dad?
Yeah. Legend.
He sends the Peep Show
‘Are we the baddies’ meme all the time and it's just very close to home, isn't it, lads?
Have you met Oscar's dad? He designed the Spearfish Heavyweight Torpedo, which is basically a global benchmark for underwater advantage.
And this isn't a secret. We can name it.
It is Elbit, BAE Systems, Buoyancy Aerospace, Rolls-Royce, Leonardo, Devonport, Chemring, AWE, RTX, Coventry Ordnance, Kineti-Tech.
It makes me want to f**king vomit reading this to you.
Boeing, Selex, Northrop Grumman, Metrics, DARA BUL, L-3 Harris, BMG, Accuracy International, Magellan Metals, Storm Irving, PGM Precision, Martin Baker, WSE, Mission Systems, Wimborne.
Oh, lovely place, Wimborne.
Fancy a charming little place like Wimborne having a factory where a charming man named Uncle Carl works and a charming lady called Anita runs the office and make sure the hanging baskets are flowering for the best kept village award.
It's almost as if some evil actions come from ordinary motives and are performed by people who don't appear to be radical outliers in terms of human psychology.
Or is this whole and green and pleasant land the psychotic outlier?
Does the devil wear a grey M&S suit with comfy brown Merrells?
Does he watch University Challenge?
Does he do a decent courgette loaf?
Does he say, “Take a seat, great to see you. This is Louis from Defence and Security Exports ‘our man in Westminster’, so to speak.”
Oh sorry, yeah, you met at Farnborough. Of course.
Your Uncle Carl, the nicest man you will ever meet. Wouldn't harm a fly.
Language itself shrinks into moulds of legal and financial fallacy by which compassion, morality, common sense are starved of cultural oxygen and just cannot work.
Carl is in the office laughing.
Your aunt's on the telephone. Click, click, conscience pinprick emotional half and half in PR disaster, and saying “If you carry on with this nonsense about Palestine, you'll ruin Christmas.”
God forbid we interrupt the turkey dinner with news of 20,000 dead civilians!
Carl takes off his charming mask and says “If those woke tw*ts keep spraying our factories with red paint and get arrested that would be pretty sweet. If that court case could go away, that would keep things neat. I run a support group for people in this industry who feel judged by their friends and family. F**king left wing novelists. It's called ‘I Don't Give a Sh*t.’ It's called ‘Get over it’. It's called This Is the World. This is the product. At no point in the production of this lollipop do I need to know who’s going to end up sucking it.”
Profound apologies to the BSL massive here!
Have you met Hugo's dad, have you met Hugo's dad?
Oh, when not at work Hugo's dad enjoys spending time with his wife and daughter. Tennis, photography, music and travel. He's raising money for Ukrainian charities and is a keen environmentalist and grows his own tomatoes. His expertise ranges from small arms through to mortars, artillery, tank, naval warheads and advanced payloads. He's currently a senior adviser to H.M. Treasury and a trustee of the British Museum. He is drowning in blood, but he mistakes it for the fresh air of the golf course.
Oy, please Hugo's dad, who I have met. As have you.
How, if you love Hugo so much, and I believe that you do, and you want the best for him, and you understand the miracle, the inexplicable miracle of having had a child who is alive who is breathing, who is thriving even, and who has access to water, clean water and food and doctors when he's injured and teachers when he's learning - this child who is so phenomenal you can hardly speak. You don't have the words. How can you still do what you do for a living?
You are killing another man's Hugo, Hugo's dad. You are a crucial component of that machine. And whatever the circumstances, whatever the God or the war or the brief or the deal, his Hugo and your Hugo on the same. They are made of the same flesh. And this is not an abstract proposition, Hugo's dad. Please tell me you understand that.
I'm sorry, Hugo's dad. I know you're watching the game. I know you were talking to Archie's dad about where the North Face is warmer than Timberland, but...
Hugo is dying every 10 minutes. Hugo is in pieces. Hugo is under the rubble, dead. And then again. And then again. And then again.
Don't you f**king dare look away, Hugo's dad!
This is the work that you do.
Is it because he's got brown skin? Is it because he's very, very far away? Is it because you don't want to offend your boss or lose your job or give a f**k because it's easier not to?
Shall I bring you the body of this far away dead Hugo?
So you can work out whether a human being is a human being after all and see how the bodies of children are all much of a muchness when you open them up, when you cease them to live?
When you end them, Hugo’s dad.
Am I the mad one here? Am I the mad one for suggesting that killing children is wrong? What spectacular moral and mental and political gymnastics, Midas-choked or tabloid-aroused, or think-tank-wanked insanity is this, Hugo's dad?
Must we keep going until there is no other?
There is nothing else.
There is only Hugo, alive, well, white, rich, the ghost victor of the forever war, alone on his island.
What a winner!
We say “Ceasefire now.”
They say “We continue to deliver a market leading product so that our customers can realise their priorities.”
We say “Genocide.”
They say “Things are going really well at work. Busy, busy times.”
We say “Without ethics, man has no future.”
And they say “So be it, man has no future.”