[ Under the slick suits and high tension shootouts, America’s
favorite thrillers are hiding something.] [[link removed]]

PORTSIDE CULTURE

THE POLITICS OF THRILLERS  
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Praveen Tummalapalli
December 22, 2020
Current Affairs
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_ Under the slick suits and high tension shootouts, America’s
favorite thrillers are hiding something. _

"dreamers" by Emiliano Grusovin is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0,

 

As a staple of airport newsstands and dads’ birthday gifts,
thrillers are wildly popular. With $728.2 million in American book
sales, crime and mystery books are second only to romance and erotica,
and, when lumped in with mysteries
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“50 percent of respondents in a recent [Book Ad Report] survey
stated that mystery/thriller books were their favorite genre of
e-books.” Thriller authors tend to be prolific, with many writing a
book a year, and cultivate loyal audiences that will read most, if not
all, their books, exposing readers to a frame of thinking over and
over. These novels tend toward conservatism but are not exclusively
reactionary; nonetheless, popular conservative hosts like Glenn
Beck—who has dabbled in writing thrillers himself—and Hugh Hewitt
have used their platforms to heavily
[[link removed]] promote 
[[link removed]]reactionary
conservative thrillers that reinforce their own worldview. Thrillers
are usually fun adventure romps but, read uncritically, they also have
the potential to influence how readers view real-life foreign policy
and national security issues.

One of the architects of the thriller as we know it today was Ian
Fleming, whose James Bond novels have inspired one of the most famous
and enduring film series of all time. In the Bond movies, the handsome
British spy is generally a debonair man of action who uncovers a
megalomaniacal villain’s plot, leading him on an adventure complete
with travels to exotic locales, hypermodern gadgets supplied to him by
irascible inventor Q, and encounters with two or three women—at
least one of whom must be killed. The novels themselves tend to be
less formulaic; Fleming, for instance, often exposes Bond’s
vulnerability and fleshes out his relationships with women in greater
detail. And in the early stories, Bond’s adversary is generally
SMERSH, the USSR’s real-life counter-intelligence organization,
rather than imaginary or non-state actors. The books were wildly
popular: in fact, John F. Kennedy even cited _From Russia With
Love_ as one of his ten favorite books
[[link removed]]. Fleming passed away in
1964 but the Bond franchise lives on, in novels written by a slew of
(male) authors who have tried to carry on the Bond legacy. Still, none
have matched the success of the Fleming originals, which have
sold more than 100 million copies
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Like many spy novelists, Fleming was a former intelligence officer
himself. As Ben Macintyre details in his Fleming biography, _For Your
Eyes Only_, many British intelligence officers of that era were
selected from the ranks of the upper class. Born to a wealthy family
and the son of a member of Parliament, Fleming was recruited shortly
before the advent of World War II to the role of personal assistant to
the Director of Naval Intelligence. In that position, Fleming wrote
memos devising possible intelligence operations. Later in his career,
he would direct a group of British Commandos that operated near the
front lines to steal documents. Bond was, in Fleming’s words, “a
compound of all the secret agents and commando types I met during the
war,” though some character elements—from Bond’s preferred brand
of cigarette to his penchant for scrambled eggs—were more clearly
autobiographical.

As author of 
[[link removed]]_Goldeneye:
Where Bond Was Born—Ian Fleming’s Jamaica_, Matthew Parker,
has detailed
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the Bond series was Fleming’s attempt to grapple with the post-war
dissolution of the British empire. British intelligence agencies like
the Secret Intelligence Service were losing prestige, and the United
States had overtaken Britain as the preeminent global superpower. The
result of this was a fantastical man of action who could roam the
world freely, advancing British interests, something Fleming largely
frames as positive and stabilizing for the world, while ignoring
the crimes 
[[link removed]]and bloodshed 
[[link removed]]perpetuated
by the British Crown. 

And so, while the Bond novels are more nuanced than the movies in some
ways, they are even more reactionary, steeped in an ideology of
militarism and imperialism. They are also famously misogynistic and
quite racist. Even for the 1950s and 1960s, Fleming’s writing was
virulently racist, sexist, and homophobic, much of which was toned
down in the movie adaptations. In _Dr. No_, the Colonial Secretary of
Jamaica says:

“The Jamaican is a kindly lazy man with the virtues and vices of a
child. He lives on a very rich island, but he doesn’t get rich from
it. He doesn’t know how to and he’s too lazy. The British come and
go and take the easy pickings… It’s the Portuguese Jews who make
the most. … Then come the Syrians, very rich too, but not such good
businessmen… Then there are the Indians with their usual flashy
trade in soft goods and the like. They’re not much of a lot. Finally
there are the Chinese, solid, compact, discreet—the most powerful
clique in Jamaica…They keep to themselves and keep their strain
pure… Not that they don’t take the black girls when they want
them. You can see the result all over Kingston—Chigroes—Chinese
Negroes and Negresses. The Chigroes are a tough, forgotten race. They
look down on the Negroes and the Chinese look down on them. One day
they may become a nuisance. They’ve got some of the intelligence of
the Chinese and most of the vices of the black man.”

It doesn’t seem that Fleming (who frequently wintered in Jamaica)
means to indicate to the reader that the Colonial Secretary is a
racist, out-of-touch imperialistic scourge; rather, the Secretary’s
racist caricatures are largely treated in the world of the novel as
accurate depictions. At the conclusion of one particular chapter, the
ominousness of the cliffhanger hangs on the revelation that a certain
character is Chinese. The British domination of Jamaica is treated as
both a historical given and a morally correct condition; the
sun _shouldn’t_ set on the British empire, the books would seem to
claim.

"Crime @ the Library" by nataliesap is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
The popularity of Bond has influenced a generation of thriller
authors, many of whom have happily infused their books with the same
reactionary, imperialist ideology that drives the Bond universe. Tom
Clancy, Fleming’s clearest American counterpart, wrote 20 novels in
his lifetime, 17 of which became _New York Times _best sellers. His
thrillers have inspired blockbuster movies like _The Hunt for Red
October_, video games such as _Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon_, and most
recently the Jack Ryan television series produced by Amazon. At the
time of Clancy’s death in 2013, more than 100 million copies of his
novels were in print.
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Clancy wrote his own Bond-like character: Jack Ryan, a heroic CIA
officer. The Jack Ryan novels are somewhat different in approach:
they’re longer, less rooted to one protagonist, and focus more on
institutional operations than the heroics of any singular figure. And
Ryan—especially compared to the philandering James Bond—is a sober
family man. But there are also key similarities with the Fleming
works, particularly when it comes to ideology. Where Fleming dreams,
nostalgically, of an empire that never ended, Clancy often provides
neoconservative wish-fulfillment fantasies in which the already
dominant America gains even more power over its rivals.

In Clancy’s 1986 novel _Red Storm Rising_, for instance,
Azerbaijani militants destroy an oil production refinery in the USSR.
The Soviets respond with a plan to invade the Persian Gulf, but not
before they attack Western Europe. The Soviets’ goal is nothing less
than neutralizing the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the
mutual defense pact between the United States and Western European
countries,  founded after World War II to counter the USSR’s
growing power. In Clancy’s book, NATO proves too strong for the
USSR, and when hawkish members of the Politburo consider nuclear
retaliation, a Soviet military leader stages a coup. NATO’s military
superiority is asserted over the USSR and the status quo is restored.
Every neoconservative would have dreamed of this outcome at the time:
a scenario in which the USSR is the aggressor, giving the United
States and its Western European allies the moral high ground while
resoundingly proving their military superiority, and showing that NATO
could successfully contain the USSR, as it was designed to do.

In another extreme fantasy, _The Bear and the Dragon_ (set after the
fall of the USSR), U.S. intelligence learns that China plans to invade
Russia and take control of newly-discovered oil and gold resources to
compensate for an economic downturn. To deter China from carrying out
this plan, now-President Jack Ryan (yes, he gets to be president,
meanwhile poor Bond never gets to be prime minister) convinces NATO to
let Russia in, with the hope that China will back off in fear of
retaliation from NATO. 

Russia in NATO may seem like a wild idea, since again, in reality, the
main purpose of NATO’s was to serve as a counterbalance to the USSR.
When the USSR dissolved in 1991, the continued relevance of NATO was
up for debate. While the international body stayed intact, the U.S.
made tremendous efforts to get Russia to embrace neoliberalism and to
prevent Communists from taking power in subsequent elections. In
the 1996 election
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for example, Boris Yeltsin had an approval rating of 6 percent and a
decimated economy on his hands. Bill Clinton lobbied the International
Monetary Fund to give Yeltsin a $10 billion loan, providing Yeltsin a
major boost in the election, which he went on to win (there were,
however, serious allegations
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outright election fraud). Under Clinton’s direction, NATO continued
to expand into Eastern Europe, with Yeltsin’s somewhat confused
approval
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In _The Bear and the Dragon, _Clancy imagines a Russia that goes
beyond embracing America’s economic model to become an American
military ally. More than that, Clancy frames NATO as a body of the
utmost importance. The idea that NATO could someday include Russia
itself would’ve exceeded even Clinton’s wildest fantasies. 

The dissolution of the USSR also caused the American public and
politicians alike to question whether such a massive military budget
was necessary. In Clancy’s written world, the answer is a resounding
yes. At the climax of _The Bear and the Dragon_, the fetishization of
American military might and hardware that pervades so much of the
Clancy canon is on full display. Defeated by NATO forces, Beijing
launches nuclear missiles against America. But the Aegis Ballistic
Missile Defense System [[link removed]],
a real-life expensive military project designed to shoot down incoming
missiles, saves America at the last minute. What brings the enemy down
for good, however, is American ingenuity. Towards the end of the book,
U.S. intelligence broadcasts CNN reports about the invasion over a CIA
website to counteract Chinese Communist Party propaganda. This in turn
inspires a revolution reminiscent of the real-life Tiananmen Square
protests [[link removed]]. The Chinese
government topples, and here begins China’s transition to a
capitalism-friendly democracy (as if the real China hasn’t been
quite capitalism-friendly
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a while
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Clancy sells an America that always behaves nobly, and characters
whose moral goodness hinges on their patriotism. Meanwhile, her
rivals, the USSR and China, are always the aggressors. This is
ahistorical to say the least
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there are far too many examples of American aggression in the name of
anti-Communism to list in this article, but some of the most egregious
examples include the Korean war
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during which American escalation killed 3 million civilians, or 20
percent of the country’s population. Or consider the 1953 Iranian
coup
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in which the CIA overthrew Iran’s democratically elected Prime
Minister to restore authoritarian rule by the Shah, all to stop the
nationalization of Iranian oil. Then there’s American involvement in
the 1973 coup in Chile
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there, the Nixon Administration worked to destabilize the Chilean
government through economic warfare and election interference,
ushering in the brutal rule of Augusto Pinochet. But the truth of
these events doesn’t exist in Clancy’s world, where the American
empire can do no wrong.

While the Bond scenarios are more obviously outlandish (from a voodoo
cult leader smuggling pirate treasure to fund Soviet spy operations to
an allergy clinic brainwashing young women into destroying British
agriculture through biological warfare), Clancy’s have
been praised 
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their accuracy in portraying the workings of the military
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President Reagan famously recommended _Red Storm Rising_ to Prime
Minister Margaret Thatcher
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understand Soviet intentions and strategy in preparation for
nuclear-disarmament talks. “They’re not just novels,” former
Vice President Dan Quayle once said. “They’re read as the real
thing.” This reception, and the use of military-industrial complex
jargon throughout the books, has lent them a veneer of authenticity
that may let some readers believe they are being educated as well as
entertained. This, I suspect, primes readers to accept the ideology
underlying their rabidly conservative premises and expectations.
Clancy’s novels may be entertaining, but they’re quite clearly
propaganda. 

"Robyn's bookshelf" by OU Platform is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0
When the Cold War ended, America’s conservative thriller authors
searched for a new adversary to loom over their plotlines and to
justify militarism. The terrorist attacks on 9/11 provided just that.
The thriller writer most emblematic of War on Terror conservatism is
probably the late Vince Flynn, author of the Mitch Rapp adventures
(monosyllabic hero names aren’t a genre _requirement_, exactly, but
they convey a certain masculine abruptnes). Rapp is a counterterrorism
operative who routinely works in the Middle East, from where he
heroically protects the United States from terrorist attacks. Despite
the fact that torture tactics such as waterboarding are an illegal
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of human rights, and they have failed to prevent real terrorist
attacks
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radicalizing people against America, Rapp tends to choke people with
his bare hands in exchange for information. As in the Bond and Ryan
novels, the only good people among the native population where Rapp
finds himself are those allied with America
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Bush was declaring, “you’re either with us, or with the
terrorists,” Flynn was happy to paint anyone publicly skeptical of
the War on Terror as a traitor. His thriller _The Last Man_ contains
a subplot involving a U.S. Senator critical of American policy in
Afghanistan. Meanwhile, Rapp is focused on investigating the
kidnapping of the head of CIA clandestine operations in Afghanistan.
In a plot twist, Flynn reveals that the Senator had been in contact
with the Pakistani general behind the kidnapping plot. 

In reality, most of our democratically elected leaders
enthusiastically supported and voted for the war in Afghanistan. The
sole member of either chamber of Congress to oppose the bill
authorizing military force in Afghanistan was Congresswoman Barbara
Lee [[link removed]]. For this vote, Lee was castigated
and sent death threats
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Her courage and conviction in the face of such opposition is a far cry
from the Senator depicted as craven and traitorous in _The Last Man_.
While the Iraq war wasn’t nearly as unanimously supported, it was
still championed by prominent members of the Democratic Party, from
the current President-Elect Joe Biden to John Kerry, the 2004
Democratic Presidential candidate who ran against Bush. 

Curiously, by the publication of _The Last Man_ in 2013, the Iraq
war and broader War on Terror, which, by that point, entailed bombing
campaigns in Afghanistan and six other Middle Eastern countries, were
all widely regarded as a mistake. But that didn’t stop Flynn from
treating skeptics of the War on Terror with just as much disdain as
Barbara Lee’s critics did at the time of her lone vote a few days
after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Following the big reveal, Rapp
confronts the Senator with evidence of the uncovered treason and
blackmails him into becoming a CIA lapdog. As a parting shot, he tells
the scheming politician, “There is a third option… I sneak into
your house in the middle of the night and snap your neck.” The
message is unambiguous. Anyone critical of the War on Terror is a
traitor, or as good as one, and only the noble deep state can keep our
corrupt representatives in line.

Thrillers, more so than any other genre, can be a powerful tool to
spread political messages. This is in part because they’re wildly
popular and also, because unlike fantasy or science fiction—much of
which is set in a world so dissimilar to ours that it must rely on
metaphor or allegory to make political commentary—thrillers tend to
unfurl in recognizable surroundings. The starting points of reference
require less effort from the reader seeking to decipher the politics
that make some characters heroes and others villains. A reader that
lacks a grasp of history and geopolitics might be tempted to adopt the
politics presented as “good” as their own. This is especially a
concern when the novels are precise and accurate in their portrayal of
military hardware and procedure—features that readers might
interpret as a sign of expertise in military affairs, leading them to
conclude that what Clancy and other conservative thrillers categorize
as “good” and “evil” is just as trustworthy. 

"The spy who came in from the cold, J. le Carré" by Peter576. is
licensed under CC BY 2.0
Now, there have long been liberal alternatives to conservative
thrillers (le Carré is one good example), but authors who directly
and specifically challenge American militarism from a leftist
perspective are in shorter supply. The best example of such an author
may be Barry Eisler, who made headlines after Elizabeth Warren listed
him
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one of her favorite authors during her Presidential campaign. Eisler
doesn’t describe himself as a leftist, preferring to eschew labels,
but his books and his blog
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liberty violations, warrantless surveillance, torture, and American
drone policy, all of which he has addressed in his novels.

In his standalone novel _The God’s Eye View_, Eisler builds on the
Snowden revelations that the National Security Agency ran
an unconstitutional surveillance program
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View_, an NSA employee discovers that one of her coworkers was
murdered because he intended to reveal their employer’s activities
and capabilities. Departing from Bond, Ryan, and Rapp, heroine Evelyn
Gallagher is a woman (with a multi-syllabic name) who works for the
NSA to make ends meet, rather than out of a deep-seated commitment to
its mission and belief that spying is necessary to keep Americans
safe. Once she suspects wrongdoing, Gallagher’s instinct isn’t to
defend the state; on the contrary, she quickly seeks to reveal the
truth despite the danger involved. At the time _The God’s Eye
View_ was published, whistleblowers who leaked information about
questionable national security or military activities were still
being ruthlessly targeted
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the Obama administration. For giving secret military documents to
Wikileaks in 2010, the former U.S. soldier Chelsea Manning was called
a traitor who threatened national security
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has been detained in conditions deemed torturous
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the United Nations. It’s a considerable change from both
conservative thrillers and mainstream news headlines to portray a
whistleblower as the hero.

But Eisler’s most innovative protagonist may be Ben Treven, the
elite soldier at the center of the novel _Fault Line_. At first
glance, Treven is similar to Rapp, Ryan, and other conservative
protagonists in the genre. He’s committed to American militarism and
distrusts foreigners and immigrants from presumed rivals such as Iran.
Treven finds American critics of U.S. foreign policy and militarism,
especially civilians, weak and naive. But while Rapp and Ryan truly
believe the American military behaves with the noblest of intentions,
and in the best interests of both Americans and the people they occupy
or bomb, Treven is less charitable. As Eisler writes in the early
pages of, _Fault Line:_

[Treven] thought about hate. America was hated overseas, true, but
was pretty well understood, too …  Americans thought of themselves
as a benevolent, peace-loving people. But benevolent, peace-loving
peoples don’t cross oceans to new continents, exterminate the
natives, expel the other foreign powers, conquer sovereign territory,
win world wars, and less than two centuries after their birth stand
astride the planet … It was the combination of the gentle
self-image and the brutal truth that made Americans so
dangerous. Because if you aggressed against such a people, who
could see themselves only as innocent… they would react not
just with anger, but with Old Testament-style moral wrath. Anyone
depraved enough to attack such angels forfeited claims to
adjudication, proportionality, even elemental mercy itself.
Yeah, foreigners hated that American hypocrisy. That was okay, as
long as they also feared it.

Treven may not share Rapp’s naive belief in the nobility of
America’s intentions, but he too starts out fully committed to
America’s militarism. In a Clancy or Flynn novel, Treven would be
the faultless hero—his worldview and righteousness
unchallenged—with the villains consisting of foreigners or critics
of American militarism. But under Eisler’s pen, Treven is faced with
the inadequacies of his worldview and the true horrors of which the
American military-industrial complex and intelligence apparatus is
capable, which are worse than he had imagined. Many of the horrors he
faces are based on real events. The second novel of the Treven series,
for example, prominently features the 92 tapes
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destroyed by the CIA, which contained evidence of Americans torturing
prisoners. Treven changes as a result of facing villainous forces
within the American military-industrial complex, and his prejudices
are interrogated as he comes to know and respect an Iranian-American
lawyer. Just as _The God’s Eye View_ upends the tropes in the
older generation of thrillers by reframing  those trying to warn the
public of their own government’s misdeeds as heroes,_ Fault
Line_ allows the hero to become enlightened upon exposure to
information that challenges his presuppositions. Liberal thriller
authors (such as Robert Ludlum, famous for _The Bourne Identity_ and
its sequels) often set their heroes against people within the American
intelligence apparatus, but these villains are usually portrayed as a
few bad apples with outlandish schemes, and the heroes safeguard
America’s noble institutions by defeating them. But Eisler goes
further by portraying the institutions _themselve_s as flawed, and
does so in a literary way by barely exaggerating what these
institutions are already doing. As such, he provides a stronger
counter-narrative to conservative thrillers than the liberal version.

The success of Eisler’s novels shows that there is an appetite for
thrillers critical of American militarism and imperialism, plots for
which America’s foreign policy provides ample material. Just as
conservative thrillers exploded in popularity following the success of
the James Bond novels, it’s possible that under the right
conditions, and with the right promotion, thrillers with a leftist
lens would have the potential to become just as popular and
influential over the coming decades. In the best of real-life plot
developments, they might even influence readers and politicians to
seriously question America’s foreign policy. Understanding this
phenomenon presents an opportunity for the left, not only to pay
attention to the most popular conservative thrillers in order to
challenge their political messages, but also to buoy thriller authors
who offer counternarratives to the standard neoconservative
normplot. 

For conservative thrillers to sell their ideology and defend American
militarism and aggression, they need to present a simplistic and
distorted view of the world. The result can be an entertaining story,
as long as you don’t ask too many questions about real-world events.
But any thriller rooted in a more complete, accurate view of the world
will invariably be forced to grapple with the damage and violence
caused by the American military-industrial complex and other issues
raised by leftists. The result can be stories that are far more
complex, thought-provoking, and truthful than any conservative
thriller while remaining just as entertaining, if not more so. In the
true history of American intelligence operations, there are more than
enough twists, turns, unlikely heroes, and powerful villains to put
James Bond and Jack Ryan to shame, without apologizing for any empires
along the way. 

SEE PRAVEEN TUMMALAPALLI’S OWN INTERVIEW WITH AUTHOR BARRY EISLER
BELOW!

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