In his latest series, Shifty, he repeats this story for our own collapsing regime, at times obliquely and at others through more direct comparison. “There come moments in societies when the foundations of power begin to move,” reads the caption at the beginning of each episode, setting up what is essentially the origin story of today’s troubled and quasi-revolutionary UK, witnessing “the last dying gasp of an old system of power.”

Early in the five-part series, we see miners hauling wooden pit props into the shafts by hand, pensioners bundled against the cold trudging through vast, alienating Modernist housing estates, and families fighting to survive in damp, freezing council flats. The effect is to conjure Soviet-style squalor and quiet collapse. Yet the cure, we soon see, is worse than the disease: “In 1986 Mrs Thatcher opened Britain to the full force of international capital,” the caption reads. “A new breed of tycoon emerged. They used the vast power of this new money to take over landmarks of the old Britain.” With his disembodied captions — a stylistic device introduced in TraumaZone in place of Curtis’s old, avuncular voiceover — he later observes of privatization, “and just like the Soviet Union/many of the old state managers were now running the companies/and just as in the new Russia they exploited the new system ruthlessly.”

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The birthpangs of today’s UK are presented as a horror story. Discordant electronic drones and whines soundtrack the camera as it hurtles along silent corridors, abandoned factories and empty Tube stations with the superhuman speed of a pursuing wraith. At other times, there are glimpses of folk horror between the imagery of industrial decline, and a picture of some lost pastoral England that functions as a dark, bitterly ironic Anglofuturism. We see cricket matches under electric pylons, fox hunting in front of closing coal mines: like the hulk of Brunel’s SS Great Britain abandoned on a lonely Falklands shore, Britain’s industrial future is a forgotten relic. Landscapes both bleak and bucolic break up the scenes of urban decline with bitter irony: Thatcher reads a Rupert Brooke poem to the sarcastic accompaniment of Britten’s Peter Grimes, riot police break up a New Age Traveller encampment in Wiltshire’s ancient countryside, an electric storm breaks over the forbidding Belfast Hills. In undercutting the shallow myths of Our Island Story, Curtis still alludes to something older and more powerful beneath the ailing state.

The series plays on the feeling, surely common now, that today’s headlines are the fodder of some future history, establishing the background of the dark events to come. Foreboding news stories screen in the background: footage of riots in northern England play across the screen in the window of a TV rental shop, as an employee dusts the sets unconcernedly. Dark, paranoid themes — state surveillance, masonic conspiracies, the illusory nature of reality — are introduced, and abandoned, as either consciously unresolved loose ends or spinning off in strange directions. The effect is unsettling, disorientating: we are not witnessing a logical argument being constructed, but a society coming apart, with all the surrealism that entails. Northern Ireland features heavily: for Curtis, as for other dissidents, the province functions as a dark mirror revealing the British state’s true form. In Belfast, young Loyalist women clap along to songs of sectarian violence with footage of flames and the pounding tribal rhythm of drums. “When Britain was powerful it could hide its dark secrets and cruelties,” we are told, “Now as the power declined they were going to start coming to the surface.”

Curtis’ politics, always a matter of speculation, are here laid out in economic terms as resolutely Old Labour. In pursuit of a Utopian vision, the Thatcher government’s privatization and financialization schemes (in one scene, a City trader rattles off an impeccable Marxian critique of them) are shown to have established the dysfunctional political economy of today’s ailing UK. On the other issue roiling modern Britain, that of immigration, Curtis works more obliquely. Footage of skinheads and of victims of racist violence punctuate each episode as mood music, without textual commentary. An old man listens to a recording of the last evensong in a deserted Rotherham church; we see the birth of al-Muhajiroun; Morrissey wanders the Manchester streets of his childhood, saying “The place I grew up no longer exists. Now it’s just so foreign to me, and that’s sad I think.”

For all the misery he presents, there is a constant nostalgia evoked by the footage, shown in BBC employees assembling Airfix kits to cover the Falklands War, joyful house parties in the provinces. Curtis is happy to deconstruct the myths of the old Britain, yet also deftly shows that its replacement is simply… nothing. As New Labour struggle to fill the Millennium Dome with banal platitudes, we are told that “The liberal establishment had dominated British culture for 150 years/now they had built a dome that revealed a terrible truth/they no longer had anything to say about Britain and its future/and they were left with practically nothing.” As well as a farewell to the postwar social-democratic state, the recent past is reassembled as a bricolage portrait of today’s UK. Unease, distrust and paranoia are everywhere. Vigilantes film their sex-crime stings, with the captions noting, from an ambiguous vantage point, that “They didn’t trust the corrupt mainstream media to expose the corruption of the police.”

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What does it all mean? Is it a chronicle, cataloguing the disconnected succession of events, or a history, driven by an overarching narrative? Time across the series is meaningless, chronology is complicated: narratives overlay each other like audio samples. A subplot on the introduction of the synthesizer observes of its pop-cultural fruits that “They became known as remixes. Others realized they could use the same technology to manipulate and play back images from the past/ They could remix history, which meant that maybe you couldn’t trust the past.” Here the auteur, always in love with digital media, reveals his own craft: “Is this just another feedback loop of nostalgia/repeating back sounds, dreams and images of the past? Which is the way the system controls you/and is the way this series is made?”

The most obvious, though perhaps counterintuitive, parallel to Curtis in British politics is Dominic Cummings: both reach back to historical parallels, and use scientific metaphors, to explain the current moment of regime crisis. Indeed, both Curtis and Cummings have recently likened the present moment to 1848, and both anticipate a revolutionary tumult to come. The series concludes, over footage of fiery riots and revolution, with the question “Will people come together as they have in the past and fight back?” Like the viewer he has guided to the dismal death spasms of our old political system, Curtis views its looming, so far formless replacement with a mixture of hope and apprehension, scrying a vision of the future like the soldiers in rural Northern Ireland he shows struggling to make out a Magic Eye picture. We already live in post-Soviet Britain, Curtis shows us, but something else is coming: whether it is something new or very old is a matter of interpretation.

A constant rebuke to the increasingly dumbed-down stylistic tropes of 2020s TV programming, the Curtis series begins with long, Tarkovskian, establishing scenes of a continent-spanning nation in disarray. Then, as the collapse accelerates, the scenes are cut shorter, harder and become increasingly hard to watch: images of communities ravaged by war, corruption and economic catastrophe, in which mere survival is paramount and cynicism is universal. After the decade of anarchy and degradation we have witnessed, Putin’s arrival on the scene in 1999 seems to come almost as a relief: the horrors of the present still lie offstage, waiting to be born.

While it is a brilliant work of recent history, can we draw parallels with our own society, which faces a comparable loss of faith in its guiding structures, and confusion and cynicism about any possible political futures?

I ask him, when we meet at UnHerd’s new Westminster club, whether, like the marginal aestheticising rebels on which his films so often centre, such as Tupac Shakur and Edward Limonov, he considers himself a dissident.

“No, no, I’m just a hack,” he says. “But what I’m interested in is finding individuals who embody the dilemmas of our time. I think Tupac’s absolutely fascinating because he was trying to do that thing of talking about power, talking about politics, but as an individual, and expressing it individualistically through his music. Most talked the radical talk, but they gave up on radical action. Tupac didn’t, he really tried to fuse those two together. He knew individualism and self expression was sort of the thing of our age — you couldn’t go back to collective organisation, no one wanted that any longer. But he tried to fuse that with radical action. And ultimately, it didn’t work, it’s a sort of tragedy.”

And Limonov?

“Limonov founded the National Bolshevik Party in the mid-Nineties. And many people just saw him as a fascist. And he was interested in fascist ideas. But actually, what he became was a focus for all those people who had been completely pulled away from what was happening in the rest of Russian society — all kinds of punks, all kinds of radicals, all kinds of ecologists.”

Yet Curtis’s interest in marginal political figures, holding up a distorted mirror to their crumbling political orders, is hard to separate from his own position within the state broadcaster, deconstructing the ideological pieties of our time from a standpoint, as E.M. Forster said of the poet Cavafy, “at a slight angle to the universe”. Similarly, in his sympathetic portrayal of the efforts of reformist Communists to preserve their crumbling system, it’s possible to discern a certain conservatism of the Left in his work, in which the rampant consumerism and individualism of capitalist society, when it hits the Soviet Union like a nuclear strike, is revealed to us afresh as something absurd and horrifying. What, then, are Curtis’s own politics?

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“I’m very much of my time. I don’t have a fixed politics,” he says, adding that his 2002 series The Century of the Self, which traced the roots of the Nineties Third-Way consensus back through the midcentury advertising industry to the birth of psychoanalysis, could be interpreted as “a crystal perfect piece of neoconservative ideology, domestic neoconservatism, because what it’s actually arguing is the rise of individualism acted like an acid eating away at the fabric of social organisations, leaving a society of people bereft, individuals alone, supported by a wave of debt on their own, and just waiting for the crash, which is a sort of moralistic neocon attitude. That’s not actually what I think. But you could argue that about most films, I think. I don’t know really what my politics are.”

“I mean,” he adds, “I don’t share a thing that a lot of the liberals have, which is I’m always quite interested in Right-wing ideas, because I think for a long time, they were quite confident that they made the running. And even now I hear people like Peter Thiel talking about René Girard on mimetic desire. I think it’s quite interesting. Because actually, if you ever wander around a bookshop, everyone else is looking at what everyone else is buying, you understand what mimetic desire really is — it’s that if you’re on your own, how do you know what identity you want? That’s why everyone is curtain-twitching at the moment on the internet, because they don’t know what they want to be.”

Curtis’s films are, in essence, works of intellectual history, which outline how the ideological fixations of elites, particularly their quest for constructing political utopias, break apart on contact with the messiness and ambiguity of the real world, often creating dystopias for the people who have to live with the consequences. But in constructing his own all-encompassing theories of everything, which draw links and parallels between widely different events with an often hallucinatory clarity, is he constructing his own counter-mythology? Is Curtis, in fact, a conspiracy theorist himself?

“I do think there’s something very interesting that has happened in the last 20 or 30 years… in this country and America, the political parties have become increasingly homogenised,” he told me. “Despite all the rhetoric and the squealing, there is actually very little difference, and you can see this with the election that’s coming up here. What, then, has happened is that the word “conspiracy”, I’ve noticed, has changed its meaning… It’s also increasingly used by people deep within that narrow bandwidth as a criticism of people who are outside the bandwidth, who may actually have a reasonable, alternative attitude to the world.”

“So sometimes I get accused of being a conspiracy theorist. What I would say to that, is that it often comes from the sort of people who used to go on about how there were weapons of mass destruction out in the deserts of Iraq, and the very fact that you couldn’t find them proved they existed. And those people who for years went on about how Cambridge Analytica or Vladimir Putin and various other evil people gave you Brexit and Trump. Well, that’s a bit rich, excuse me, because the one thing I have never done in any film is allege anything like that. What I’m intrigued by is going outside that bandwidth because I think it’s so narrow…”

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“I’ve been shouted at by sort of nice, sweet liberal people at dinner parties, saying, ‘Well, I’ve read the Mueller report…’ Within the bandwidth it leads to that madness. It is madness. It’s sort of dying away now, but they went mad. And this goes back to my thing about ‘What have we just been through?’ A really odd time. And then we come out of it, and we press buttons to try and make things better, and none of them work. It makes me think, what’s the solution to that?”

What is the solution, in a world where we have lost faith in the organising myths of our society, but there is no obvious successor ideology? Perhaps the clearest insight into Curtis’s own sense of political futures can be drawn from the concluding sequence of 2021’s Can’t Get You Out of My Head, whose psychedelic bricolage of themes from 20th-century history provided an alternative cultural hinterland to the angry populisms of the 2010s. In it, Curtis ends on the suggestion that not just the West but also its autocratic rivals China and Russia are “exhausted, empty of any new ideas”, and that “all of them have corruption that is burrowing deeper into their institutions, corruption that the politicians seem powerless to stop”. Yet the series ends on a surprisingly optimistic note, concluding with the famous quote from the anarchist anthropologist and political theorist that “the ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently”.

Graeber “was a really, really interesting person”, Curtis told me, “because he wasn’t just an anarchist, he was a bit like Murray Bookchin. They’re the anarchists that [PKK leader Abdullah] Ocalan knew, he was sort of almost a libertarian socialist, which is a thing that I’m really fascinated by, because I do think that individualism isn’t going to go back into the box. But if you want to change the world, you’ve got to come together in some kind of way, because that’s the only way you’re ever going to be powerful. Because if you’re on your own, it’s lonely, frightening, and you’re not powerful. And no one’s managed to square that circle. And I’ve always thought libertarian socialism is sort of trying to get to that point. And I really, really liked the quote I used, which is that actually, we made this society, it’s not like it came out of nothing, it was just imposed on us, and that does mean we can remake it if we want to.”

And yet, Curtis’s films make clear we are locked in an iron cage of ideology, enforced by increasingly shrill and hysterical political taboos, where any attempt at exploring alternative futures is cast as a one-way journey to the horrors of the 20th century. We are trapped in a failing system, whose morbid symptoms become ever more grotesque, yet in which popular attempts to correct its failing course are pathologised as merely the devious machinations of shadowy elites, who have hypnotised the dull-witted masses to do their bidding for them. Yes, things are bad, say the defenders of the current order as it collapses around them, but the only alternatives are far worse.

“What I’m so fascinated by in our time,” Curtis tells me, “is the ideology, and I think it’s okay to call it an ideology, that prevents us doing that. It’s a really interesting ideology, because it isn’t like other older ideologies, which would say ‘No, this is fantastic, this is the dream world’ — which is what they did in the Soviet Union, right up to the end. In this society, the press, the think tanks, all the wonks, have this sort of view that ‘We know it’s crap. We know it’s not ideal, we know it’s not wonderful. We know there’s corruption, but we can’t do anything about it. We know there’s injustice, we know there are inequalities, but we can’t do anything about that. But you’ve got to accept it. Because the rest is so horrible. The rest is much worse.’

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“And what they mean by that is the alternatives are terrifying. They’re like the terrifying autocracy that Vladimir Putin has created in Russia. They’re like the technocratic, brutal surveillance system that Xi Jinping is running in China, or even worse and darker than that, there is radical modern Islamism, which you see in Iran, and also, if you take the New York Times as your Bible, the terrible fascism that Donald Trump and his followers are going to bring to America.

“What I find so fascinating about now is that all those things have proven to be much more fragile, much weaker than the established view said. Putin would seem to be a transitional figure in a yet fully collapsing empire, who probably will lose power in some way or another. I have a friend in China, whose parents are quite high up in the Communist Party. They are quite frightened about what’s happening in the protests. They know there’s a real problem. And also, that there is an enormous amount of debt in China, far more than we had in 2008. Iran… I think what might happen in Iran in the future might be extraordinarily important.

“And quite frankly, despite all the efforts of the New York Times, Donald Trump is beginning to be seen as what he probably was — as some weird grifter, who managed to occupy a space that we’d left open, because we were attending to something else, and just occupied that space and touched on something in America.”

For Curtis, it seems, the looming failures of the West’s rival autocracies, for all that they are held up by liberals as justification for preserving our own failing system, and by some radical conservatives as models to be emulated, open up a strange and unlikely moment of possibility. At the other end of the present global crisis, perhaps, lies the opportunity to finally transcend the long 20th century. Things may seem bad, but a better future may already be straining to be born.

“They’re all fading away,” he says, “which makes me — I mean, this is a really weird thing to say at this present moment in time — quite optimistic, because it’s like the way is open now to actually start thinking in quite a radical way… and that actually, maybe that’s the kind of journalism we should be doing.”

***

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Further setting the stage for what might be his final farewell a poem attributed to Surkov was published on Facebook a few days later. It is suitably full of contradictions, opening with the declaration, “I stand at the bottom of a pit, like a mountain’s summit, like the culmination of a drama, like the beginning of the game”. Its macabre ending — “I am going out into the negative, like Magellan into the Ocean” — may describe his fate, or that which he has engineered for Russia.

Publishing poetry is only one way that Surkov positioned himself as unique among Kremlin insiders. And he has always been taken at his own estimation. An advisor to Vladimir Putin from when he first assumed the presidency, Surkov made his name by not only acknowledging that the ‘sovereign democracy’ he helped usher in was a façade, but also by revelling in the fact that he was doing so publicly.

The brashness with which he effected this has made Surkov far better known outside of Russia than anyone else in Putin’s inner circle. In addition to articles in Foreign Policy and a Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) report dedicated to his ‘management’ of Russia’s proxies and media strategy in Ukraine, he has been profiled in both the London and the New York reviews of books. The Atlantic and Business Insider have also given it a go.

Surkov was an attractive subject because he would let Western journalists in on his not-so-secret tactics, and in a language they understood. His quip in response to being sanctioned in 2014 — “The only things that interest me in the US are Tupac Shakur, Allen Ginsberg, and Jackson Pollock. I don’t need a visa to access their work. I lose nothing” — brought him to the attention of those beyond the usual Kremlin-watchers. The fact that he wrote his own novellas, Almost Zero (gangsta fiction) and Mashinka and Velik (gaga saga), and had an on-and-off relationship with Russia’s avant-garde, meant he was also a subject of curiosity for the art establishment.

His ex-wife, the artist Yulia Vishnevskaya, founded Moscow’s Museum of Unique Dolls in 1996, the year they divorced. Since 2004, Surkov has been married to Natalya Dubovitskaya – adapting her name into Natan Dubovitsky as his nom-de-plume. She presents as an art-inspired interior designer but her glamorous Instagram, real estate holdings, and ever-expanding business interests are archetypal of the Russian elite. So too is the rumoured reason for Surkov’s purported arrest — pocketing cash intended to destabilise Ukraine.

Surkov arguably reached his peak cultural prominence when the director Adam Curtis used his ideas as the centrepiece of his 2016 film HyperNormalisation, arguing that Surkov had invented a “new system of political control” by “import(ing) ideas from conceptual art into the heart of politics”. Curtis warned it was spreading from the Kremlin to the West.

Curtis argues Surkov’s open acknowledgement of his puppeteering made it impossible to know what was real and what was true. What many in the West had failed to realise was that — much as he had done with the Russian people — he wasn’t letting them in on the secrets behind his choreography, but turning them into other marionettes.

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Perhaps Surkov once was once in love with the theatre of the absurd, and the idea that we are all mere puppets. But today he sees such postmodernism merely as a tool to impose what he does want to achieve, a strong “long-lasting Putinist state,” the title of one of his occasional public essays.

Surkov has revelled in using the Dadaist approach to mock what he sees as the decadence of the West. He might be the auteur behind the idea that “nothing is true and everything is possible” (as Peter Pomerantsev titled his book on the Kremlin), but on Putinist rule we can take Surkov at his word, given his actions in managing the Kremlin’s extension of power not only in Ukraine but in other parts of Russia’s ‘near abroad’ as well.

His former aide Inal Batuvych Ardzinba now serves as Minister of Foreign Affairs in Abkhazia, one of two Russian breakaway regions in Georgia beholden to Moscow. Surkov also managed negotiations for Ukraine’s Minsk Agreements, while simultaneously hand-picking much of the “separatist leadership” in Donetsk and Luhansk, knowing full well the pacts would not lead to peace. As central as the absurd may be to these actions, Surkov has long effectively managed the expansion of Russian power.

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Surkov’s 2019 article on Putinism did not explicitly ascribe any ideology to the regime he had dedicated himself to building. He spent most of it attacking the West for its failure to understand Russia, for its “distrust and envy”, and for its lack of “belief in the good intentions of public officials”. This, interestingly, runs counter to Jean-François Lyotard’s definition of postmodernism as an “incredulity towards meta-narratives”, dismissing decision-makers as people who merely “allocate our lives for the growth of power”. It seems Surkov was happy to do delve into postmodernism for its use in creating confusion, but expressly disagrees with the criticism of decision-makers. His Putinism article ends by using Albert Einstein’s witticism “sophisticated, but not-malicious” in describing the Russian people’s faith in Putin, painting it as quasi-religious.

Before he was removed from the corridors of power at the beginning of the year, Surkov was open about his role and intent in the Kremlin. In a 2021 Financial Times interview, he declared “I am proud that I was part of the reconquest. This was the first open geopolitical counter-attack by Russia [against the West] and such a decisive one. That was an honour for me.”

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He considered the propaganda that made him famous to be something that “people need”, comparing his output to McDonald’s and dismissing the need for “highly intellectual discourse”. Artistic intent usually requires taking pride in one’s work, or at least in having some underling meaning. For Surkov, his avant-garde tactics are merely a means to an end.

Surkov is by no means the only public intellectual — for that is how he is perceived, even if it fails to accurately describe his intent — to have fallen out with his avant-garde training. The liberal conservative Francis Fukuyama is another.

Fukuyama initially trained in political philosophy and literature, even studying in France under Jacques Derrida, perhaps the most famous of all postmodernists. The very title of his widely misunderstood book, The End of History and the Last Man, is a reference to a concept popular among other Marxist-inspired intellectuals, that there is a linear and perhaps even scientific path to historical development.

Like Surkov, Fukuyama today dismisses postmodernism — in 2018 he told an interviewer that what he had learned from his time in Paris was that postmodernist concept of deconstruction “was total bullshit”. The key difference between Fukuyama and Surkov in their divergence from heterodoxy, however, is in their approach to power.

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Surkov’s last polemic, entitled “Where Has the Chaos Gone: Unpacking Stability” published online in November 2021, placed “powerful statehood” at the basis of “the recipe for establishing and maintaining order”. He describes the state as “primarily an instrument for reducing social entropy”, before attacking the idea of social chaos that so many postmodernists have praised.

For his part, Fukuyama has acknowledged that his arguments about the future of world power are at least in part inspired by his earlier academic experiences, referencing the Marxist roots to his theory of liberal hegemony. But in his lectures in the years since, Fukuyama has emphasised that his belief in individual agency trumps any potential laws of history.

Both Fukuyama and Surkov’s criticise what they see as postmodernism’s offspring — identity politics, for example — and warn it can weaken the West. But Fukuyama recognises something that the war in Ukraine has made clear, and which Surkov has failed to see: namely that agency does not sit with the state.

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Surkov’s view that the state is the primary mover of history explains why he and Putin were so eager for war in Ukraine.

It would be generous to describe the Ukrainian state before Putin’s invasion as corrupt and fragile. Putin too appeared to believe this would make it an easy military target, apparently supported by “intelligence” from Surkov’s friends in the Federal Security Service (FSB). Meanwhile Surkov had helped Putin build a power-vertical that would enable the regime to position any propaganda as a crusade.

But it is Ukraine that retains its agency, while Russia has lost it. Its valiant defence of Kyiv, and litany of impressive actions on the battlefield have begun to forge a new unity and idea of Ukrainian nationhood. They also prove the fallibility of Putin’s own state: while Ukraine is recruiting volunteers from neighbouring countries, and even Russia, the Kremlin is resorting to conscripts, mercenary groups and favours from fellow dictatorships to bolster its ranks.

While Putin has sought to rewrite history in his 2020 article on the legacy of World War II and his diatribe the following year on Russian-Ukrainian”‘unity”, his ideas are not taken seriously. Russian policy academics may now bend their thinking to fit them — as do the once-respected Carnegie Moscow director, Dmitry Trenin, or the director of Russia’s International Affairs Council, Andrei Kortunov — but this hardly boosts his power.

The Ukrainian political scientist Volodymyr Ishchenko summarised Putin’s invasion not as the culmination of some superstate as Surkov would have it, but as a “crisis of hegemony; the incapacity of the post-Soviet and specifically Russian ruling class to lead, not simply to rule over, subaltern classes and nations”.

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Putin and Surkov have failed to build a Russia that serves as an alternative force in history. Instead — regardless of how much territory Moscow is able to claw away from Ukraine — they are witnessing the construction of that alternative by the Ukrainian people.

Russia’s long-cuckolded oligarchs, intellectuals and their offspring now know they can make their voices heard by shouting Glory to Ukraine. Simultaneously, Russian soldiers are being killed while fighting under meaningless and unexplained Z’s. No Russian politician has even attempted to invent a symbolism. The BBC journalist Grigor Atanesian noted the absurdity of Russians fighting under a “symbol void of any meaning… like in a bad 1990’s post-modernist novel”. The Kremlin has not even bothered to revive the Novorossiya project — complete with faux-historical flags — that Surkov once engineered to justify further invasion of Ukraine.

Putin’s army may be fighting against something, but they are not fighting for anything.

The Ukrainians are fighting for the ability to move West, reinvigorated by Putin’s war, towards Fukuyama’s conception of history and away from Surkov’s. In doing so, Kyiv may also be re-invigorating the values postmodernism’s critics argue it had undermined, concepts such as freedom for freedom’s sake, while Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy revives the possibility that leaders will once again be seen as heroic.

Surkov’s means achieved the opposite of his ends. It turns out he was no puppet-master, just another puppet.

Malik features prominently in the first two episodes of Adam Curtis’s new film series, Can’t Get You Out of My Head: An Emotional History of the Modern World. It begins like many of his previous films, with the conviction that the current state of the world is confusing, and then proceeds to trace this confusion back to obscure movements and individuals in the past.

Curtis’s subjects include, besides Malik, Mao Zedong’s last wife, Jiang Qing, the British model Sandra Paul and her aristocratic husband, Robin Douglas-Home. These episodes are concerned, principally, with whether the individual can impose his or her own fantasies on the world — and at what cost. The viewing experience is trademark Curtis — a mishmash of visual clips juxtaposed with the narrative voice of the traditional BBC. David Lynch meets David Attenborough.

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Tracing Malik’s life in Britain, we see clips of him being interviewed on colour television; we also see him in black and white stills, adorned with the beard of a cult-leader. When he first appears in the film, with his softly-spoken Trinidadian accent, the impression is of a reflective man, not someone beholden to dangerous fantasies. His only discernible desires are the empowerment of black people and an end to racial injustice.

V. S. Naipaul, in his extraordinary essay on Malik, offers a very different impression of the man. Written in 1979, ‘Michael X and the Black Power Killings in Trinidad: Peace and Power’ presents him throughout as a narcissist utterly divorced from reality. He is ready to kill to fulfil his delusions. Naipaul’s point, still relevant today, is about how ostensibly noble politics can be deformed by individual pathology; and how idealism, when it is not rooted in reality, can degenerate into a sectarian fantasy. Naipaul notes that Malik espoused an essentialist view of black people: “the Negro who had not dropped out, who was educated, had a skill or a profession, was not quite a Negro; there was no need for anyone to come to terms with him. The real Negro was more elemental.”

After 14 years in Britain, Malik had grown frustrated with it. He was prosecuted and imprisoned for 10 months under the 1967 Race Relations Act for inciting hatred against white people. In 1971, he moved back to Trinidad to establish a commune. There he was visited by a strange couple.

Gale Benson was a 27-year-old divorced British model and socialite — and the daughter of a former Tory MP. Her lover, Hakim Jamal, was a black American revolutionary-playboy who had previously dated the actress Jean Seberg and the editor Diana Athill. (Athill, incidentally, was a long-term editor of Naipaul.) After two months staying in Malik’s commune, Benson was stabbed with a cutlass by Malik’s followers and buried. Very soon after Benson’s murder, a local Trinidadian man named Joseph Skerritt was also killed. Jamal was told that Benson had simply ran away; he subsequently left. A year later, he was killed in a gang-related incident in Boston.

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The bare facts are well-established. But Curtis and Naipaul diverge on the motivations behind these murders. Strangely, Naipaul’s explanation for them is more Curtisian than Curtis’s: they were the fulfillment, he suggests, of a fundamentally sinister fantasy. Naipaul describes Malik as a “Carnival figure”.

“He was an entertainer, a playactor; but he wasn’t the only one. He failed to understand that section of the middle class that knows it is secure, has no views, only reflexes and scattered irritations, and sometimes indulges in play: the people who keep up with revolution as with the theatre, the revolutionaries who visit centres of revolution, but with return air-tickets, the people for whom Malik’s kind of Black Power was an exotic but safe brothel.”

This characterisation of liberals who fethisise black radicalism, whilst leading affluent lives, recalls a passage from Albert Murray’s 1970 essay collection The Omni-Americans. In it, he quotes a black resident of Westchester County who said to Murray: “If you don’t go in there moaning and pissing and moaning and making threats, they’ll call you a moderate and drop your butt fifty times faster than Malcolm ever could.” The resident later emphasises the gratuitous nature of this spectacle. Speaking directly about his wealthy white neighbours, he writes: “But damn, man, the minute you sound off, you realized they’ve tricked you into scat singing and buck dancing for them; because there they are, all crowding around, like watching you masturbate, like they are ready to clap their hands and yell, ‘Go man, go, get hot man’”.

This speaks directly to a tendency among many white progressives today who encourage black people to be angry. Of course, black people often have a justifiable reason to be angry, and solidarity against racism is a good thing. But the fixation of some progressive white people with that anger speaks more of condescension than solidarity. It implies that to be authentically black is to perpetually resent white people — which is another way of centring white people, and allows little space for the other emotions and experiences that constitute the life of a black person.

This is the way Naipaul presents Malik and Jamal: men whose radicalism was patronised, in both senses of the word, by affluent white people. And they seemed to welcome this. John Lennon, for instance, donated his hair and money to support one of Malik’s communes — even as he denounced the white liberal as the devil. Jamal pursued relationships with wealthy white women while promoting an especially sectarian brand of black nationalism.

Malcolm X had a different approach. Like them he grew up a petty criminal. After he underwent his prison transformation, however, the sanctimony of his rhetoric was consistent with his puritan lifestyle. Part of the reason he left the Nation of Islam was that Elijah Muhammad spoke like Pat Robertson to the public but behaved like John F. Kennedy with his secretaries.

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But Malcolm wasn’t simply puritan in his personal life — he was also frugal when it came to support from white people. There is one striking scene in Spike Lee’s film on Malcolm, for instance, where a young radical white female college student is trying to get his attention: “What can I do?”, she asks. How can I support the cause? Malcolm responds by calmly saying: “Nothing.” Self-described disciples of Malcolm, Malik and Jamal, might have said the same, but their actions reflect a different answer: give us lots of money and sleep with us.

This tension — between servility on one side and hatred on the other — is destructive for any type of politics concerned with social justice. Malik was a performance artist who gratified the appetite of white progressives, and whose desires were in turn encouraged. He was led to believe he was God; but he still needed the approval of white people for this. His mind was full of these strange, polarising extremes. When Jamal had apparently told him that Benson had become a “mental drain”, ordinary moral constraints need not apply: she would have to be killed. Malik and Jamal had developed a close bond, and she was getting in the way.

According to Naipaul, Benson was Jamal’s slave in the relationship. She wore African clothing and adopted the name Hal Kigma, an anagram of ‘Gale’ and ‘Hakim’, to represent her total devotion to her lover. The white liberal woman is either a slave to the empowered black man or a hindrance to the movement — a wolf in sheep’s clothing. And the murder of Benson, Naipaul’s account suggests, was the latter. After she was killed, Malik led members of the commune to wash in the sea. They wanted to purge themselves after killing a devil.

Curtis’s film offers a different account for the motivation behind the murder of Benson. According to Curtis, Malik’s actions were a reversion to his criminal past. The all-black commune he’d established, Black House, was simply a front for his drug dealing. He murdered Benson not out of race redemption, but because in Trinidad he was growing and exporting marijuana to America, and he thought Benson was going to rat him out. In Naipaul’s account, Malik’s Black Power rhetoric was underpinned by the fantasies of a madman. In Curtis’s film, by contrast, the Black Power rhetoric was underpinned by the logic of a callous gangster.

Curtis’s account certainly seems more plausible, but Naipaul’s account is more instructive for today. It is an indictment of a culture fascinated by the strength conferred by victimhood — a culture vulnerable to the grievous abuse of those who view reality through the prism of transgressive play. But it is also a critique of white progressives who, instead of treating black people with dignity, mistake condescension for solidarity — and confuse the rage of a black person with his entire personality.