The End of Bill Savage?
Dealing with Howard Quartz – a modern day Lord Weird Slough Feg of infinite powers – is beyond Bill’s brief and his capabilities.
I’m delighted the 2000AD Ultimate Editions features the final Savage story set in Berlin: The Marze Murders and The Thousand Year Stare, drawn by Patrick Goddard, along with Defoe: The Divisor, which I talked about last week:
I know East Berlin fairly well and that’s where much of the story is set, along with Hitler’s Hospital, where the Volgans carry out their most nefarious experiments.
Soon after the Millennium I rented an apartment across the road from Treptower Park and every day I’d walk around the park thinking up stories.
In particular, I’d wander around the huge Soviet Union War Memorial commemorating seven thousand of the eighty thousand Red Army soldiers who fell in the Battle of Berlin in April–May 1945.
For me it also symbolized the 8.7 million Russian and other Soviet soldiers who died in the Great Patriotic War, freeing Europe from Nazism. I’ve also stayed in Prenzlauer Berg, where one street still has endless bullet and shell holes in its walls. Consequently it was regularly used by film crews and perhaps still is today. Just looking at the still damaged buildings brought the Battle for Berlin vividly to life.
Treptower Park is an astonishing memorial with its ‘comic book’ tableau and it features strongly in this last Savage, powerfully rendered by Patrick Goddard. Although I’m aware there is an official commemoration day, I also found astonishing is that no one visited it when I was there, around the millennium. And I was there every day. It was, literally, as silent as the grave. It’s understandable that Germans might not see a commemoration of their liberation from the Nazis in quite the same way as the Russians. And, after the conflict, surviving Nazis played a role in the East German Pankow as well as the Western Nato, so they wouldn’t have been keen on it. Sadly, neither would German women of that era.
Wikipedia says ‘This monument has earned some unflattering nicknames, such as the "Tomb of the Unknown Rapist", from the local population with references to mass rapes committed by Soviet occupation troops.’
British and American historians understandably dwell on the vile and horrifying aftermath of the battle, when Soviet soldiers raped the women of Berlin. By comparison, German historian Miriam Gebhardt suggests a number as high as one hundred and ninety thousand rapes by American soldiers out of an estimated total of 860,000 by all allied soldiers. But this is significantly less than the Soviet
crimes. Sean Longden states that while not on the scale of the Red Army in the Soviet Zone, the British Military Police regularly investigated reports of rape.
A friend of mine told me she was conceived in exchange for a loaf of bread – a business transaction between her German mother and a British soldier.
Then there was the establishing of an Iron Curtain across Europe, behind which Eastern Europeans were oppressed by forces as bad as the Nazis, as evidenced in powerful films like The Lives of Others. I don’t quarrel with any of their conclusions, although some of the Eastern Europeans I met elsewhere had very different and positive recollections of communism, but I have to assume that they must have been in a minority. Others I’ve talked to believe Stalin was about to invade Germany and then Western Europe when Hitler forestalled him, as related in Suvorov’s Icebreaker.
What is at issue for me is the lie of British and American exceptionalism, where we are constantly and relentlessly brainwashed, day after day, to see Russia as an endless force for evil and the West as an endless force for good – ignoring the latter’s conduct in the Middle East and the alliance with Bandera followers in the Ukraine, which I know is emphatically not the tiny, tiny, minority of fascists ‘you get in all countries’. It ain’t. Thus I don’t believe what I witnessed in the Ukraine Club in London is just the unrepeatable, eccentric behaviour of a minority of rabid Ukrainian expats. This was how one Western apologist tried to explain their Banderism away. But if it makes apologists more comfortable by believing that, then do carry on deluding yourselves.
A harder fact to explain away is the British invasion of Russia in 1919, where British officers in particular behaved exactly like the Soviet beasts of Berlin. It’s all there in John S. Clarke’s account of his visit to Russia in 1920. Even a cursory read of it would destroy the myth of British exceptionalism and fill you with disgust. I’ve quoted from it extensively in my Charley’s War commentary here on Substack.
Anything that can’t be excused away, is usually just ignored – bad luck for Western historians that I covered it in Charleys’ War, a series that is still being read avidly by kids today. Sorry about that. You really need to tighten up your censorship and improve your brainwashing. But ignoring unpalatable truth does work well most of the time. As a kid, I was vividly aware of the Western victories over the Nazis and really believed that the United States and John Wayne, in particular, in The Longest Day – had defeated the Nazis. It came as a massive shock to discover that actually it was the Soviet Union that was mainly responsible, something that is obscured even to this day.
The harsh reality is that they are all as bad as each other: West and East. The Western propaganda view is that Russia is way ahead in the league table of evil. I’d say the West are far better at lying and disguising their crimes, apart from in the Middle East, where they’ve been on display for decades. Critics of RTV and Russian cyber-crimes would disagree with me and perhaps they’re right. But they don’t acknowledge the West’s own cyber-crimes, surveillance, and propaganda while they’re at it. The role of the 77th Brigade for instance. They are the natural successors to MI7. My Sean Stone novels are about MI7, whose control of the media was shocking and that was back in 1917! I recall reading a Lobster article in the early 90s listing just about every British journalist as a secret service asset.
So it’s safer to say that both sides are liars, both have hidden agendas, and both are guilty of war crimes, albeit at different places and different times.
All of this brings us back to Bill Savage. The series follows the rules of drama and continues to ascend until it reaches its conclusion in The Thousand Year Stare. I know there will be readers who would have liked it to be like The Sweeney, endlessly stuck in a South London time loop, but time moves on, even for The Sweeney – one of my favourite series – so that The Sweeney remake in 2012 really was the end of the line, just as this story is the end of the line for Bill Savage.
He meets a Volgan female cop and their adventures together heals Bill’s wound from 1999, when his wife and children were killed in the Volgan Invasion. When I started writing Savage, I took as my premise that it was a story of resistance that crossed borders. It wasn’t specifically anti-Volgan/Russian: it was global resistance. So I drew on classic stories of the French Resistance against the Nazis. Films like the superb It Happened Here, showing British collaborators with the Nazis. This was a film my father-in-law absolutely hated, claiming that the British would never behave so despicably (ignoring the German occupation of the Channel Islands and what followed). He is a good example ofbeing brainwashed to believe in British exceptionalism.
For the Russians as an occupying force, I drew heavily on David Irving’s Uprising! Hungary 1956. Yes, that David Irving. I don’t think anyone’s got a quarrel with this account. I spent three months in Iran, so you can imagine how much I drew on that country. Sadly, so much of Iran didn’t fit Bill’s cockney world. Like the vast tomb of the Ayatollah Khomenei I visited. Or a trip to the local video shop that only had very macho, pirated films to rent, like Judge Dredd and Rambo. Although Gone With the Wind was okay. But definitely, and specifically, not Citizen Kane. That was verboten. The mind boggles.
I always had trouble with the idea of the Volgans invading Britain and saw it more as a metaphor for all occupying forces across the globe. Although I was startled to recently see Piers Morgan saying, ‘But what if Russia invaded Britain?’ It was like going back in time to the early days of 2000AD. Hating Putin so much, Morgan didn’t seem to be posing an entirely hypothetical question. At the time, I used the rather more colourful, right wing Zhirinovsky as the Volgan leader. What fascinated me about him was he had the appalling views of ‘the man in the pub’, the opinionated drunk you might have misfortune to stand next to at the bar. Good comic book material. If I was writing Zhirinovsky today, I’d probably use Nigel Farage for inspiration. Putin would be daunting because it would require a massive amount of research to get his character right, the nuance that makes up a clearly complex person, rather than a shallow, propagandist Adolf Hitler Mark Two, which is how Piers Morgan likes to portray him.
Bill always managed to keep things simple, avoiding the complexities I’ve related here, driven by his hatred for what the Volgans did to his family and country. But his hero’s journey is complete when he discovers the globalists are ultimately responsible, with Howard Quartz revealed as a latter day Wizard of Oz. And so his work is done. Even though the door is left open so if Morgan was correct or there were some other invaders, Bill could always return to the streets of London with his trusty shotgun. Although these days he would be more likely to be condemned as a terrorist, as resistance fighters usually are before they become leaders, and then their terrorist past is quietly forgotten.
Dealing with Howard Quartz – a modern day Lord Weird Slough Feg of infinite powers – is beyond Bill’s brief and his capabilities. And probably mine. The World Economic Forum or similar global organisations are hard work to make sense of. I think I’ve come close in Sha, where the Destiny Foundation of leading politicians and corporate bosses are actually demons. It’s set in a Blade-Runneresque USA city called New Eden, so I’m afraid Tony Blair is not amongst them.
It must have been hard for Bill to come to terms with the true nature of evil: that both sides are actually as bad as each other. Not least because he was an ardent Thatcherite. I think we all, like Bill, yearn for a time when life seemed so much simpler. As described by the deeply emotional words of The Partisan, which inspired me to write Savage
I took my gun and vanished.
I have changed my name so often
I've lost my wife and children
It was a Ukrainian friend of mine who told me about another resistance song Bella Ciao. And the Ukrainian holocaust – the Holodomor, in which ten million died, she told me. I’d had no idea. Once again there was complexity that comic books so often don’t address, more for fear of being called polemic than anything else. But her Banderite anti-semitic explanation for the Holodomor is unrepeatable. However, the words of the songs of resistance, at least, are in no doubt.
Woke up one morning and there were soldiers
O bella ciao, bella ciao, bella ciao ciao ciao
Woke up one morning and there were soldiers
The Invasion had begun
And I will tell them; we will tell them,
Bella ciao, bella ciao, bella ciao, ciao, ciao,
That our sunshine is not for sale,
And wish the bastards drop down dead.
We miss you, Bill.
And, one day, we must get that bastard Quartz.
Cheers, Neil. There's something so compelling about resistance stories - it's why I wrote Savage for so long. But all resistance fighters - from every country - commit atrocities and that's one area I never properly covered with Bill. Thinking back, maybe I should have done, although it would have been controversial, especially as it would have been seen from Bill's pov, even if it was critical of him.
Thanks, William. Looking at the current news, everything gets ever more confusing and contradictory. As you say, maybe it was always that way and we're more aware today