Europe

Rasputin and the downfall of the Romanovs

Paul Hemphill Leave a comment

… the protagonists of 1914 were sleepwalkers, watchful but unseeing, haunted by dreams, yet blind to the reality of the horror they were about to bring into the world
Christopher Clark, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914

The mystique of the mesmerising muzhik

For readers unfamiliar with him, Grigori Rasputin was a Siberian peasant, self-styled holy man and wandering mystic who somehow found his way into the innermost circle of the last Russian imperial family. Born in 1869 in the remote village of Pokrovskoye, he possessed no formal religious training yet acquired a reputation as a healer and spiritual adviser. His influence grew largely because Tsarita Alexandra became convinced that he could alleviate the suffering of her hemophiliac son, Tsarevich Alexei, whose illness threatened both the family and the succession itself. From that point onward, Rasputin became a lightning rod for public anger, rumour and scandal. To his admirers he was a man of God; to his enemies a charlatan, sexual predator, political manipulator and symbol of everything rotten within the late Romanov regime.

History has rarely been kind to him. The very name “Rasputin” conjures images of dark-eyed depravity, hypnotic influence and imperial decadence, making him one of those figures who seem destined to play the villain in the historical imagination.

My own first encounter with him came not through history but through Hammer Horror’s gloriously lurid Rasputin: The Mad Monk (1966), in which Christopher Lee – already such a vampire icon that he’d earned the epithet “Draculee”. He played Rasputin with such operatic menace that it was not difficult to assume he must have personally engineered the fall of the Romanov dynasty between bouts of hypnotism, partying and priapic indulgence. The reality, as is so often the case, was both less theatrical and considerably more complicated. Like Boney M’s disco hit  a decade later (more on that at the end if this essay), it was great entertainment, if not necessarily great history. [In later life, Christopher Lee played a suitably malevolent Saruman in Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings, resembling very much what Rasputin might have looked like had he reached old age. Lee really wanted to play Gandalf, but he was doomed to be typecast]

The mystical muzhik

Which brings us to acclaimed British historian Anthony Beevor’s latest book Rasputin and the Downfall of the Romanovs.

As happens often In That Howling Infinite, what begins as a review  ultimately becomes something larger than that. The book is the point of departure, but the essay then widens into a meditation on Russia itself and on historical continuity; and in this case, on the recurring problem of elites mistaking symptoms for causes, and on the peculiar human inability to recognise catastrophe even when its scent is already in the air.

I have read most of Anthony Beevor’s books and, on the whole, found them riveting, informative and refreshingly free of sensationalism. Stalingrad, Berlin, The Ardennes, Arnhem, Russia: Revolution and Civil War. Beevor is one of those rare historians who combines scholarship with narrative flair, making vast and complicated events accessible without sacrificing seriousness. Which is why I came to Rasputin with high expectations, and why I finished it feeling vaguely disappointed.

Not because it is a bad book. It is not. It is readable, entertaining, meticulously researched and full of fascinating material. But compared with Beevor’s finest work, it feels curiously slight: overextended and underdeveloped at the same time. There is enough material here for a long magazine essay, a television documentary; but not quite enough analytical depth to sustain a truly great work of history.

The title itself is slightly misleading. This is not really a biography of Rasputin. The so-called Mad Monk looms over the narrative like a spectral presence, but remains oddly elusive. Readers expecting a deep exploration of his Siberian origins, religious beliefs, charisma, psychology, sexuality, or the mythology that has accumulated around him often come away unsatisfied. Rasputin functions less as a subject than as a lens through which Beevor examines the final years of the Romanov court. What the book actually delivers is the story of imperial collapse between 1914 and 1917.

And what a royal court it was. Beevor presents a world populated by sycophants, grifters, mystics, opportunists, flatterers, courtiers and assorted aristocratic parasites orbiting an increasingly dysfunctional monarchy. Ministers come and go with bewildering speed. Rumours swirl through Petrograd salons. Schemes flourish and collapse. Rasputin dispenses advice, Tsarita Alexandra dispenses influence, Tsar Nicholas retreats ever further into passivity, and meanwhile the empire bleeds. All of this makes for compelling reading. Yet one gradually begins to suspect that the court is being asked to carry more explanatory weight than it can reasonably bear.

Certainly Nicholas II was an inadequate ruler and often dominated by his spouse. Certainly Alexandra was politically naïve – though that didn’t deter her from meddling: “Lovey”, she wrote to him in August 1915 while he away with his army, “I am your wall in the rear. I am here, don’t laugh at old wifey, but she has ‘trousers’ on unseen.” And both were catastrophically dependent upon Rasputin.

Certainly, the dynasty had become detached from the realities of modern Russia. But the Russian Revolution was not simply the consequence of a dysfunctional royal family making poor decisions in a palace. Russia’s problems ran far deeper than the imperial nursery. By 1917 the empire faced enormous peasant land hunger, rapid but uneven industrialisation, militant labour unrest, revolutionary traditions stretching back decades, ethnic tensions across a vast multi-national state, a fragile constitutional settlement after the failed revolution of 1905, catastrophic military losses on what we call the Eastern Front to distinguish it from the brutal stalemate on the Western one, economic breakdown, logistical paralysis and food shortages. Above all, it faced the immense pressures of total war. Even a far more capable monarch would have struggled. The Romanovs were undoubtedly part of the problem. They were not the whole problem.

Indeed, one of the ironies of Beevor’s narrative is that the closer he gets to Nicholas and Alexandra, the less convincing they become as the sole explanation for the catastrophe unfolding around them. The real story increasingly lies beyond the palace walls.

And then there is the nursery talk. The surviving correspondence between Nicholas and Alexandra is authentic, and Beevor quotes it extensively – perhaps too much. Endless references to “Sunny,” “Hubby,” “Wifey,” “baby” (the sickly heir apparent), pet names, sentimental endearments and emotional dependency reveal a couple inhabiting a private emotional universe increasingly disconnected from the realities of the empire they ruled. The first few examples are illuminating. The next fifty plus merely reinforce the point. One understands quickly enough what Beevor wishes to demonstrate: that the Tsar and Tsarina had retreated into a cocoon of domestic intimacy and religious certainty while the state around them was disintegrating. Yet repetition eventually diminishes rather than strengthens the effect.

I found myself feeling less contempt than pity, particularly for Alexandra. Beevor’s portrait is harsh, and not without justification. She was deeply unpopular even before the arrival of Rasputin. Her German origins became politically disastrous during wartime. Her interventions in ministerial appointments were often disastrous. Her faith in Rasputin was politically suicidal. Yet behind the political incompetence stood a tragic figure: a woman consumed by anxiety over a hemophiliac son whose death seemed perpetually imminent, a husband she believed had been divinely appointed, and a political system she scarcely understood. Her mistakes were enormous. Her burdens were equally profound.

The children, meanwhile, are perhaps the saddest figures in the entire story. OTMA, the Grand Duchesses Olga, Tatiana, Maria and Anastasia. The family acronym itself has become strangely poignant, a small domestic joke preserved in history. Throughout the narrative I wondered how much they understood. Did they recognise that the dynasty was already doomed? Did they understand that the empire around them was beginning to crack apart? Olga especially emerges as a fascinating figure. Many contemporaries remarked upon her intelligence and seriousness. She often appears more politically aware than either parent. Had Russia permitted female succession, might she have made a better sovereign than Nicholas? It is impossible to know, but it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that several members of the younger generation among a myriad of dukes and duchesses possessed more common sense than the adults steering the ship of state.

As for Alexei, history has wrapped him in the melancholy glow reserved for doomed children. Understandably so. Yet had he survived to inherit the throne, one suspects he would have faced the same impossible contradictions that destroyed his father: autocracy confronting modernity, privilege confronting reform, dynasty confronting history itself.

The last of the Romanovs – Tsar Nicholas and his family, murdered by the Bolsheviks in July 1918

The road to Ekaterinburg

Let papa (Nicholas II) not plan war. It will be the end of Russia and
all of us. We shall be destroyed to the last man
Grigori Rasputin July 30, 1914

But if there is a deeper weakness in Beevor’s account, it lies not with the Romanovs, but with what overshadows them. The giant elephant in the room is the First World War. Without the war, Rasputin remains an eccentric holy man from Siberia. Alexandra remains unpopular. Nicholas remains mediocre. The Romanov dynasty perhaps limps on for another decade or two. With the war, every weakness becomes fatal.

Russia entered the conflict militarily, economically, politically and socially ill-equipped for the demands of modern industrial warfare. It possessed manpower but lacked organisation. It could mobilise millions of peasants but struggled to arm, supply and transport them. Railways buckled. Food shortages worsened. Casualties mounted on a staggering scale. Most importantly, the largely peasant army itself became fertile ground for revolution. The officer corps remained socially distant from the rank-and-file. Military disasters shattered confidence. Discipline deteriorated. Radical ideas spread. By 1917 the army was not merely losing battles. It was losing faith in the system it served. When revolution finally arrived that February, not with a bang but a slow-mo disintegration, it was little wonder that, encouraged by agitators in its ranks, the Russian Army did what we like to imagine most soldiers would like to do: lay down their arms and head for home – often first shooting their officers.

This, surely, was the real story. The gossip in Petrograd salons and restaurants drawing mattered. But millions of armed peasants questioning the legitimacy of the state mattered rather more. One occasionally wishes Beevor had spent less time recounting the latest court scandal and more time examining the immense structural forces pulling the empire apart.

Because by 1916 some observers could already smell danger. The writer Mikhail Lemke, serving at Stavka, the army headquarters, captured the mood perfectly: “Oh, the holy stupidity of the Romanovs. We are moving at full speed towards some terrible abyss, a dreadful end that is not clear to anyone but is inevitable… It is clear that the finale is going to be terrifying and in its haphazard nature.” It is a remarkable observation insofar as it captures something larger than the Romanovs themselves.

History is full of such moments. Barbara Tuchman encountered them repeatedly. Christopher Clark found them among the sleepwalkers of 1914. One finds them before the collapse of Austria-Hungary, before the fall of the Ottoman Empire, before Yugoslavia’s descent into war. People sense that disaster is approaching. The clouds gather, the pressure changes, the atmosphere becomes electric, even if the precise lightning strike remains unseen.

Beevor quotes Russian poet Alexander Blok expressing something similar when he wrote of the “peculiar merry horror that sits in the Russian soul.” It is one of those observations that sounds simultaneously profound, unfair, insightful and impossible to verify. Yet it evokes a Russia that appears repeatedly in its literature and history: exuberant and despairing, mystical and brutal, comic and tragic, capable of extraordinary creativity and extraordinary destruction, often simultaneously.

Reading these passages, I found myself thinking not only of Beevor but of my university tutor Tibor Szamuely who has featured often in In That Howling Infinite. Szamuely believed that Russia punished simplification. Its history moved in circles rather than straight lines. Revolutions proclaimed liberation only to rediscover autocracy in new forms. The Romanovs fell; the Bolsheviks inherited the imperial reflexes. The Soviet Union collapsed; empire returned draped in Orthodoxy, nationalism and Eurasian destiny. Beneath the turbulence remained what he called The Russian Tradition – the title of his one and only book, now out of print: centralised power, messianic consciousness, siege mentality and the recurring sanctification of suffering.

Szamuely believed that the bloodstained drama of 1917  and beyond – the February Revolution, the Bolshevik seizure of power in November, the Civil War, the creation of the USSR and Stalinism – often obscured the deeper continuities of Russian history. He did not live to see the collapse of the Soviet Union, the rise of Vladimir Putin or the war in Ukraine, but his argument remains strikingly relevant. The frequent upheavals that have overtaken this vast continent have often produced changes that were, at bottom, superficial, leading ultimately to the intensification of old authoritarian structures under new names.

One of the more revealing moments in Beevor’s narrative comes when Alexandra writes to Nicholas on December 14, 1916: “Be firm. Russia loves to feel the whip – it’s their nature – tender love and then the iron hand to punish and guide”. The observation is deeply revealing. It suggests a view of governance fundamentally at odds with constitutional politics. Whether one accepts Szamuely’s thesis or not, one cannot help noticing the irony. The Romanovs fell. Liberal democracy survived only briefly. The whip did not disappear. It merely changed hands. Lenin’s whip proved heavier. Stalin’s heavier still. Perhaps Alexandra was disastrously wrong about her own era and yet, in some darker sense, glimpsed something enduring about Russia’s future.

And that reminded me, oddly enough, of Deadwood. One of the reasons David Milch’s masterpiece remains such extraordinary television is that it understands something many historians understand and many politicians do not: catastrophe is usually visible before it arrives. Not in its precise form, certainly. Nobody sees the exact bullet, the exact revolution, the exact market crash. But the atmosphere changes. The clouds gather. The animals become restless. And somebody, somewhere, notices. Viewers who are paying attention notice too because the background music becomes jangly and minor key.

In the episode ominously titled Suffer the Little Children, world-weary Madame Joanie Stubbs asks  the young opportunist Flora a simple question: “Can you smell danger?” Joanie, from experience, can. The fey and feckless Flora cannot. She sees only opportunity and the immediate game she is playing and fails to recognise the larger forces closing around her. The result is one of the most violent conclusions in a series notorious for its displays of wanton brutality.

The same pattern appears repeatedly in history. People like Lemke could smell danger. Alexander Blok could smell danger. Many officers, politicians, intellectuals and ordinary Russians could smell danger. But did Nicholas and Alexandra? The evidence suggests not. Or perhaps they did but convinced themselves otherwise. In that sense they resemble the tragic Flora. Not wicked. Not entirely foolish. Simply trapped within assumptions that prevented them from recognising reality. Every warning became another irritation. Every crisis was temporary. Every setback could somehow be managed through faith, loyalty and persistence. Meanwhile the empire was bleeding to death.

The Romanovs spent years mistaking symptoms for causes. Rasputin was a symptom. Ministerial instability was a symptom. Court gossip and innuendo was a symptom. The disease lay much deeper: a political system incapable of reforming itself, a society under immense strain, and a war exposing every weakness simultaneously. By 1916 the smell of danger was everywhere. The tragedy is that those best placed to act either could not smell it or convinced themselves that the storm would somehow pass.

Tsar Nicholas in captivity

Which brings us to where Beevor’s book ends. Rasputin is assassinated by nobles determined to save the dynasty itself – treating a  symptom, not the disease (see below); the Tsar abdicates in March 1917; and the last of the Romanovs and his family disappear down the melancholy railway line to Ekaterinburg and death. The curtain falls. The reader must supply the rest. And the rest matters enormously. For all their failings, Nicholas and Alexandra were not succeeded by enlightened constitutional reformers. They were succeeded by the Bolsheviks. The road that began with Rasputin’s influence at court led through revolution, civil war, famine, terror, collectivisation, purges and the Gulag.

One leaves the book with an uncomfortable thought. The Romanovs were unquestionably part of the problem. But history’s eventual solution proved vastly more destructive.

Perhaps that is the most haunting aspect of the entire story. The downfall of the Romanovs solved one set of problems and unleashed others on an unimaginable scale. The train that Lemke saw hurtling toward the abyss did indeed reach its destination. But beyond the bend in the track lay not merely revolution, but decades of violence, repression and suffering.

In the end, Rasputin and the Downfall of the Romanovs is worth reading. The story itself remains compelling. Yet it is a lesser Beevor work: repetitive where his best books are incisive, narrowly focused where his best books are panoramic, occasionally so absorbed by court intrigue that it loses sight of the immense forces gathering beyond the palace gates. Like the dynasty it describes, it becomes most interesting when viewed as part of a larger story.

And perhaps that is the final irony. Rasputin, Nicholas, Alexandra, the four princesses, poor Alexei, the plotting dukes, ambitious ministers and aristocratic parasites all occupy centre stage for a time. Yet beyond them looms the true protagonist of the drama: Russia itself – vast, restless, wounded, contradictory, moving, as it has so often moved, between reform and reaction, idealism and coercion, hope and catastrophe.

The revolution was coming regardless. The tragedy of the Romanovs was not merely that they failed to stop it. It was that, like Flora ignoring Joanie Stubbs’ warning, they scarcely seemed to understand it was happening at all. The smell of danger was everywhere. The locomotive was already gathering speed. And somewhere ahead, beyond the next bend in the track, lay Ekaterinburg, the Civil War, Stalin, the Gulag, the Soviet century and perhaps even the long shadows that still stretch across Russia today.

The passengers continued gossiping, plotting, arguing and reassuring one another. A few looked nervously out the windows. A few could smell the storm. But by then it was already too late.

Bolshevik recruiting poster 1917

Explaining Rasputin’s power – Russia’s peasant complex

Rasputin arrived in St Petersburg trailing not merely Siberian mud on his boots but centuries of Russian argument about the peasantry.

For much of the nineteenth century, Russia’s educated classes had romanticised “the people” from a respectful distance. The peasant was imagined as the keeper of Holy Russia’s soul: patient, devout, long-suffering, close to the land and somehow morally superior to the fashionable, French-speaking aristocracy that governed him. Tolstoy found wisdom amongst peasants. Dostoevsky found redemption there. Intellectuals went “to the people” in search of authenticity, only to discover that actual peasants could be suspicious, conservative, superstitious and decidedly unimpressed by visiting idealists from St Petersburg.

Out of this tension emerged the Narodniks, the great “to the people” movement of the later nineteenth century. Young idealists abandoned universities and cities and went into the countryside to live amongst the peasants, educate them, organise them and, in some cases, save them. The peasants frequently responded by assuming they were spies and reporting them to the police.

Russia has always possessed an unusual talent for disappointing its romantics

Rasputin landed squarely in this contradiction. To admirers, he was the authentic Russia that the salons had spent generations searching for: a wandering pilgrim, a holy fool, a man of the soil with the smell of birch forests and woodsmoke still clinging to him. To his enemies, he represented everything that modern Russia was supposed to leave behind: ignorance, mysticism, obscurantism and the triumph of superstition over reason.

The aristocracy had always liked peasants rather in the way that modern urbanites like farmers’ markets — as long as the mud remained somebody else’s problem. Then one of them walked into the Winter Palace and sat down with the Tsarita.

Even popular culture recognised the type. At one point, Christopher Lee’s wonderfully excessive and inebriated Rasputin, breaks into an exuberant Russian dance to Stenka Razin, the great folk lament about the rebel Cossack who throws his Persian princess into the Volga to prove his loyalty to his comrades. Watching it as a teenager, I remember thinking not of Cossacks and river pirates but: “Hang on! That’s The Carnival Is Over.”

Tom Springfield had indeed borrowed one of Russia’s most famous melodies and transformed it into a global hit for The Seekers. Russia has always had a habit of turning up unexpectedly in other people’s stories. [See, in In That Howling Infinite,“High above the dawn is waiting” … the unlikely Russian origin of an English pop song]

Rather like Rasputin himself.

The resurrection of the Romanovs

One of the enduring ironies of Russian history – and indeed of history generally- is how often “all that is old is new again.” Revolutions announce themselves as clean breaks with the past, yet the past has a habit of returning through side doors and forgotten corridors. The symbols change, the slogans change, the uniforms change, but old habits, assumptions and institutions frequently re-emerge in unexpected forms.

Russia provides perhaps the most spectacular examples.

Much attention is paid to the persistence of the autocratic state: the succession from Tsarist secret police to Cheka, NKVD, KGB and FSB; the recurring preference for centralised authority over pluralism; the enduring suspicion of foreign influence; the tendency to frame political life as an existential struggle between order and chaos. These continuities are real enough.

Yet the return of older Russia extends well beyond the machinery of coercion. One of the most remarkable developments of the post-Soviet era has been the resurrection of the Russian Orthodox Church. The institution that survived persecution, marginalisation and attempted eradication under Soviet rule has re-emerged as one of the central pillars of contemporary Russian identity. Cathedrals demolished by the Bolsheviks have been rebuilt. Religious symbolism once dismissed as superstition now appears alongside state ceremonies and military rituals. Patriarchs once monitored by the Party have become influential public figures. Patriarch Kyril , the current head of the Russian Orthodox Church is a close political and ideological ally of Putin. Orthodoxy, once pushed to the margins, has returned to the centre of Russian public life.

And with Orthodoxy has come a reconsideration of the Romanovs, murdered along with their servants (and pet dogs) by bullet and bayonet by local Bolsheviks, on Lenin’s orders it is claimed, on the night of 16th and 17th July 1918 – ostensibly to prevent their rescue by Kolchak’s White forces who were closing in on Ekaterinburg. Many of their family and friends were executed in the days and months afterwards.

For much of the Soviet period, Nicholas II occupied a relatively simple role in the official story: a weak ruler whose incompetence justified the Revolution that swept him away. Post-Soviet Russia complicated that narrative. The Romanovs gradually ceased to be merely the defeated rulers of a vanished age and became, for many Russians, symbols of national martyrdom. Nicholas and Alexandra, together with their children, were canonised as Passion Bearers. Pilgrimages developed around sites associated with their imprisonment and murder. Their deaths came to be viewed not simply as a political execution but as a spiritual tragedy and a national wound.

The process was aided by the gradual revelation of what actually happened in the cellar of the Ipatiev House in Ekaterinburg. Soviet accounts had long been evasive. The fuller story proved profoundly unsettling. The murder of Nicholas and Alexandra is one thing. The murder of Olga, Tatiana, Maria, Anastasia and the sickly Alexei is quite another. Whatever one’s judgement of the Romanov regime, if the witness statements gathered after the slaughter are reliable, it is difficult not to recoil from the sheer brutality of what occurred that night. The image of frightened young women surviving the first fusillade because jewels sewn into their clothing deflected bullets, only to be finished off with bayonets and revolvers in a chaotic mess of panic and gun-smoke possesses a dreadful power.

That sympathy has done much to reshape public memory. The Romanovs who emerge in popular imagination are often not the rulers of a vast empire but a doomed family. The focus shifts from Nicholas the inadequate monarch to Nicholas the husband and father; from Alexandra the politically disastrous empress to Alexandra the anxious mother. Martyrdom eclipses governance.

There was to be, however, no martyr’s crown for Grigori Rasputin, whom we had lost sight of when we widened the scope of our review of Beevor’s historical pot-boiler.

The death of Rasputin

To borrow from the Bard of Avon (Macbeth, that is), “nothing in his life became him like the leaving it”. Rasputin’s demise has passed into legend largely because it seems to belong less to history than to black comedy.

In December 1916 a group of aristocratic conspirators, led by Prince Felix Yusupov and Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich, decided that the self-styled holy man had become a mortal threat to the monarchy and must be removed. What followed has often been retold as a Gothic horror story in which Rasputin was poisoned, shot, beaten, drowned and somehow kept coming back for more.

Beevor, however, strips away much of the mythology and reveals something closer to a tragic farce. The conspirators were astonishingly amateurish, repeatedly losing control of events, contradicting one another, panicking and improvising as their carefully laid plan unravelled. Reading Beevor’s account, one is reminded less of a sinister political assassination than of a darkly comic Ealing caper performed by nervous aristocrats hopelessly out of their depth. Yet the absurdity only heightens the symbolism. Here was the Russian elite, convinced it was saving the Empire, bungling even a murder. Rasputin’s chaotic end became a grotesque metaphor for the regime itself: confused, incompetent, riddled with fantasy, and staggering towards disaster while imagining it was still in control.

No wonder it provided such irresistible material for a shonky Hammer Horror melodrama. Rasputin’s life already contained all the necessary ingredients: a mysterious peasant mystic, aristocratic decadence, rumours of hypnotic powers, political intrigue, sexual scandal and a violent death wrapped in myth and exaggeration. His assassination only added to the legend. Poison that apparently failed to work, bullets that seemed unable to stop him, panicked noblemen stumbling through a murder plot and a corpse eventually dumped into the icy Neva – it all reads less like sober history than a fever dream concocted by a screenwriter after too many vodkas.

Hammer simply leaned into the absurdity. With Christopher Lee glowering, glaring and generally chewing the scenery as only Christopher Lee could, Rasputin became less a historical figure than a gothic supervillain, somewhere between Dracula and a mad prophet. The remarkable thing is that the real story, stripped of its embellishments, remains almost as bizarre as the cinematic version. Indeed, one suspects that if a screenwriter had invented the entire affair from scratch, critics would have dismissed it as implausibly over-the-top.

History, as usual, had other ideas. And therein lies the enduring fascination of Rasputin: not merely the man himself, but the way his life and death seem perpetually suspended between fact and folklore, political history and popular mythology.


The book of the film?

Whilst reading Beevor’s account, I wondered if he had recently watched the 1971 British film Nicholas and Alexandra. It is an appealing fancy, and not an entirely implausible one.

Anthony Beevor is a serious historian, of course, and his account of the Romanovs, Rasputin, and the revolutionary years rests on decades of scholarship rather than any cinematic influence. Yet historians are also human beings, and good historians often have a keen sense of narrative, character, and scene. Reading some passages in Russia: Revolution and Civil War, one occasionally gets the feeling that Beevor can see the events unfolding before him in almost cinematic fashion.

The 1971 film Nicholas and Alexandra remains one of the most ambitious attempts ever made to dramatise the collapse of Imperial Russia. Although it was something of a commercial disappointment, it assembled a remarkable cast of British acting royalty. Michael Jayston’s Nicholas II and Janet Suzman’s Alexandra are perhaps best remembered, but the supporting cast reads like a roll-call of twentieth-century British theatre and film: Laurence Olivier as Count Witte, Michael Redgrave as Sazonov, Jack Hawkins, Harry Andrews, Timothy West, Ian Holm, and a young Brian Cox in one of his earliest screen appearances as Leon Trotsky.

Then there is Tom Baker as Rasputin: wild-eyed, bearded, charismatic, unsettling, simultaneously ridiculous and strangely compelling. It remains one of the screen’s most memorable Rasputins, capturing something of the paradox that has fascinated generations- the peasant mystic who became confidant to an empress, faith healer, political liability, and eventually a figure of near-mythic notoriety. [Tom Baker reincarnated in 1974 as the Fourth Doctor, to become the longest serving time lord in that venerable television series, and, to hark back to our opening paragraphs, like Christopher Lee, he also pitched unsuccessfully to play Gandalf in The Lord of The Rings]

As for Ian Holm, His role is actually an interesting footnote. In Nicholas and Alexandra, he played Vasily Yakovlev, the Bolshevik commander who supervised the execution of the imperial family in Ekaterinburg in July 1918. Yakovlev survived the civil war and perished during Stalin’s Great Terror in 1938 while Holm morphed into the devious cyborg Ash in Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979).

Whether Beevor recently watched the film is impossible to know. But if one were writing about the twilight of the Romanovs, it would be hard not to have the film somewhere in the back of one’s mind. For all its historical simplifications, it remains one of those grand old epics that lodged themselves in the cultural imagination.

And perhaps that is one reason the movie endures despite its reputation as a flop. It was not merely recounting history. It was staging the last act of an entire civilisation – the chandeliers still glittering, the uniforms still immaculate, the orchestra still playing, even as the floorboards beneath the Russian Empire were already beginning to crack.

When Josef met Vladimir

There is a scene in Nicholas and Alexandra that takes us down one of history’s intriguing rabbit holes where fact, folklore and political mythology sit together at the same table – perhaps even, over a pint.

It depicts the First Conference of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in Tampere (then part of the Grand Duchy of Finland) in December 1905. That conference is generally accepted by historians as the first documented meeting between Lenin and Stalin. Stalin himself later recalled it as their first encounter, describing how the younger Georgian revolutionary was somewhat disappointed to discover that the legendary Lenin was not the towering, commanding figure he had imagined, but rather a relatively ordinary-looking man who blended easily into the crowd.

And yet, according to a London tradition, the two had met earlier at the Crown Tavern on Clerkenwell Green, a pub situated opposite what became the headquarters of the Twentieth Century Press, where Lenin worked while editing Iskra during his London exile. The tale has enormous appeal. One can easily picture the scene: two future dictators of the twentieth century sharing a beer in a smoky London pub while discussing the fate of the Russian Empire, utterly unknown to the drinkers around them.

The problem, though, is evidence. Lenin certainly spent considerable time in Clerkenwell. Stalin certainly visited London in 1907 for the Fifth Congress of the RSDLP. Both men undoubtedly walked the same streets. The Crown Tavern proudly embraces the connection. Yet hard documentary proof that they actually sat down together there before the 1905 Finnish conference is elusive. Soviet historians, who were often eager to document Lenin’s revolutionary activities in minute detail, generally treated the Tampere meeting as the first confirmed encounter. Modern historians tend to do the same.

That does not necessarily make the pub story false. Revolutionary underground movements were not renowned for maintaining meticulous attendance records. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. But it does leave the tale in that charming grey zone occupied by so much historical folklore.

There is also a delicious irony in the setting. Clerkenwell Green was one of the great centres of radical politics in Victorian and Edwardian London – a place where exiles, anarchists, socialists, trade unionists and political dreamers gathered. The British Empire, then at the height of its power, provided refuge to revolutionaries who were plotting the overthrow of other empires. London was simultaneously the capital of global capitalism and a sanctuary for those dedicated to its destruction.

If Lenin and Stalin really did share a pint at the Crown Tavern, neither man could have known that within two decades one would have created the Soviet state and the other would inherit it. Nor could the Londoners around them have guessed that two obscure Russian exiles would become among the most consequential figures of the twentieth century.

That, perhaps, is why the story survives. Whether true or not, it captures the peculiar magic of history: the possibility that world-changing events sometimes begin not in palaces, parliaments or battlefields, but in an ordinary corner pub on an ordinary London afternoon.

And, finally, from the surreal to the ridiculous …When it comes to exuberant absurdity, one cannot match that of German reggae, funk and disco group Boney M.

Ra- ra-ra Rasputin

For an entire generation, Boney M’s 1978 disco hit Rasputin probably did more to shape popular perceptions of the man than any serious work of history.

It is, of course, ridiculously inaccurate. Rasputin was not literally the “lover of the Russian Queen”; there is no credible evidence that he and Alexandra were lovers, despite endless rumours at the time. Nor did he “rule the Russian land and never mind the Tsar.” Even at the height of his influence he remained more symbolic than omnipotent, a trusted adviser whose access to the imperial family far exceeded his actual political competence.

Yet the song captures something important about how Rasputin entered popular mythology. He became less a historical figure than a larger-than-life archetype: part holy man, part conman, part libertine, part political puppet-master, wrapped in an aura of sex, mystery and impending catastrophe.

It compresses a complicated story into a memorable caricature. The real Rasputin was almost certainly less powerful, less sinister and less glamorous than legend suggests. But legends endure because they tell us something about the fears and fantasies of their age. To Russians watching their empire stagger towards collapse, Rasputin became a convenient embodiment of everything that seemed wrong with the Romanov regime. To the wider world, he became the bearded mystic with hypnotic eyes, impossible appetites and nine lives.

Boney M simply took that mythology, added a disco beat with a Russian flavour, Euro-pop chorus and a dash of Cold War exoticism, and produced one of the strangest historical stories ever to hit the dance floor.

Indeed, there is a curious progression in the way many of us first encountered Rasputin. First came Christopher Lee’s wild-eyed Hammer Horror incarnation in the 1960s; then Boney M’s improbable disco supervillain in 1978; and only much later the actual historical figure lurking behind both performances. By that stage, poor old Grigori scarcely stood a chance. History had already handed him over to popular culture, where villains, mystics and monsters invariably enjoy a much longer shelf life than ordinary men.

Paul Hemphill, June 2025

For more on Russia, Ukraine and the Soviet Union in In That Howling Infinite, see Russky Mir – Russian history’s long shadow

Rasputin, Bony M (1978)

There lived a certain man in Russia long ago
He was big and strong, in his eyes a flaming glow
Most people look at him with terror and with fear
But to Moscow chicks, he was such a lovely dear
He could preach the Bible like a preacher
Full of ecstasy and fire
But he also was the kind of teacher
Women would desire

Ra-Ra-Rasputin, lover of the Russian Queen
There was a cat that really was gone
Ra-Ra-Rasputin, Russia′s greatest love machine
It was a shame how he carried on

He ruled the Russian land and never mind the Tsar
But the kazachok, he danced really wunderbar
In all affairs of state, he was the man to please
But he was real great when he had a girl to squeeze
For the Queen, he was no wheeler-dealer
Though she’d heard the things he′d done
She believed he was a holy healer
Who would heal her son

Ra-Ra-Rasputin, lover of the Russian Queen
There was a cat that really was gone
Ra-Ra-Rasputin, Russia’s greatest love machine
It was a shame how he carried on

But when his drinking, and lusting and his hunger for power
Became known to more and more people
The demands to do something about this outrageous man became louder and louder

“This man’s just gotta go,” declared his enemies
But the ladies begged, “Don′t you try to do it, please”
No doubt this Rasputin had lots of hidden charms
Though he was a brute, they just fell into his arms
Then one night some men of higher standing
Set a trap, they′re not to blame
“Come to visit us,” they kept demanding
And he really came

Ra-Ra-Rasputin, lover of the Russian Queen
They put some poison into his wine
Ra-Ra-Rasputin, Russia’s greatest love machine
He drank it all, and he said, “I feel fine”
Ra-Ra-Rasputin, lover of the Russian Queen
They didn′t quit, they wanted his head
Ra-Ra-Rasputin, Russia’s greatest love machine
And so they shot him ′til he was dead

Oh, those Russians

Writer(s): Frank Farian, Fred Jay, George Reyam

Afterword

Being a longtime student of the Middle East, and having visited Jerusalem many times, whilst assembling this essay, I was surprised to discover a direct connection between the murdered Romanovs and the Holy City. Tsarita Alexandra’s sister, the Grand Duchess Elisabeth, who was executed along with other nobility on the sane night as The Tsar and his family, and later, interred in the incongruous and ostentatiously Muscovite Church of Saint Mary Magdalene in the Garden of Gethsemane on Mount Olive – which she and her husband had helped build – and in 1982, canonised as “new martyr” of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia.

The Church of St. Mary Magdalene, viewed from the walls of Jerusalem. P.Hemphill, May 2014

Whitewashing slavery’s deep and dark history

Paul Hemphill Leave a comment

Forward. The Gravest Crime – and selective conscience

On March 25, the UN General Assembly declared the transatlantic slave trade the “gravest crime against humanity.” 123 countries voted in favour, three against, and 52 abstained – including the UK, all 27 EU member states and Australia.

The moral core is unobjectionable. The slave trade was monstrous, its consequences did not end with abolition, and saying so plainly is not theatre  –  it is history. But UN resolutions are not history lectures. They are political instruments.

This one was carefully engineered. Its most controversial element was the recognition of slavery as a violation of jus cogens  – peremptory norms of international law binding on all states. Not a historical observation, but a legal foundation for future liability claims. The EU noted the resolution’s “unbalanced interpretation of historical events” and legal references inconsistent with international law, including retroactive application of rules that simply did not exist at the time.

The 123 who voted yes include states with active, present-tense records of forced labour and ethnic persecution. Their zeal for condemning 18th-century European slave traders carries a faint whiff of convenience. And the Western abstentions were the diplomatic equivalent of leaving before the bill arrives – not endorsement, but not courage either.

Slavery was real. The suffering was immense. But a resolution shaped by reparations politics and the arithmetic of bloc voting is not the act of collective moral reckoning it claims to be. It is politics, dressed, as so much UN business is, in the language of justice.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Whitewashing slavery’s deep and dark history

Slavery sits in the human story like a dark, deep river that refuses to keep to its banks. It runs from the Assyrian deportations and Roman estates, mines and galleys, through the markets of old Baghdad and the longships on the rivers of Keven Rus, down into the Atlantic crossings from Africa to the Americas and thence to Europe. and out again into the contract-labour regimes and hidden rooms of the present. Names change – thrall, concubine, slave, servant, “sponsored worker” – but the underlying grammar is stubborn: power converting vulnerability into utility, often with a theory to justify it and a market to sustain it.

Into this long, uneasy history steps the modern urge to judge it – to apportion blame, to rank crimes, to extract from the past a usable morality for the present. The UN resolution is one such attempt: part commemoration, part indictment, part politics by other means. A counter-brief insists that this particular ledger has been selectively drawn, that some entries are inked in heavily while others are left in the margin or omitted altogether. Between them lies not a settled account but a contested one, in which the Atlantic system with its Islamic trades, and African agency, “King Cotton” and John Brown, and modern forms of coercion all jostle for place and proportion.

The following essay does not endeavour to tidy that argument into a single verdict. It widens the frame without dissolving the particulars; to hold in view both the universality of slavery and the distinctiveness of its forms; to recognise the rarity of abolition without mistaking it for completion. History, in this register, is less a courtroom than a map – dense, overlapping, and resistant to clean lines.

The deep and dark river 

That UN resolution formally condemned slavery as a universal crime – indeed, the “gravest crime”. But, in practice it narrows its indictment to the transatlantic trade of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, presenting it as a distinctively Western, racialised, and capitalist enterprise.

It is precise, almost prosecutorial, assigning blame, embedding the trade in a narrative of structural injustice that echoes into the present. Yet it grows evasive when confronting the forces that ended slavery: the Enlightenment, abolitionist movements, legal reforms – reduced to a kind of historical afterthought.

More significantly, as economist and commentator Henry Ergas argues in an article in The Australian, republished below, the resolution omits the long and substantial history of slavery in the Islamic world – trans-Saharan, Red Sea, Indian Ocean – systems that endured for centuries, moved millions, and in many places persisted well into the modern era. Unlike in the West, he contends, there was no sustained, institutionalised moral revolt against slavery at scale; abolition came late, often under external pressure, and in some cases remains incomplete in practice.

He pushes further. By declaring the slave trade “the greatest” crime against humanity, the resolution risks collapsing distinctions – most notably between exploitation and extermination – thereby, in his reading, relativising the Holocaust. And finally, he notes the political choreography: strong support from authoritarian states and those with troubling contemporary records, contrasted with the hesitant abstention of many Western democracies.

That is his case – straightforward, and cleanly drawn –  perhaps a little too cleanly. Because once we widen the frame, the lines begin to blur in ways that resist both the UN’s moral staging and Ergas’s counter-brief.

Slavery is not an aberration of one civilisation but a near-constant of many; and it spans millenia. The Assyrians and Persians deported whole populations as instruments of empire. Sennacherib and other potentates would empty a conquered land of its indigenous peoples and replace them with deportees from another conquest. The Romans built an economy on servile labour whilst the Byzantines continued the practice. Muslim caliphates and emirates, including the Abbasids and Ayyubids, Mamluks and Ottomans, sustained vast networks of concubinage and domestic and military slavery.

The Vikings – often reduced in popular memory to picturesque if violent raiders – operated something closer to a transcontinental syndicate. The river systems of the Rus, threading south through the Volga and Dnieper, connected the Baltic to the Black Sea and Baghdad. Silver flowed north; human beings flowed south. This was not episodic plunder but a business model – structured, repeatable, and profitable. And conducted across astonishing distances. Baghdad and York sat at the far ends of a human supply chain. [The illustration at the head of this article is that of a young Slavic woman being sold into slavery by Vikings to a Persian merchant (Image: Tom Lovell / National Geographic)]

So, in short. Salvery has existed in some form in almost every known civilisation. In the ancient world, captives were routinely taken, bought, sold, and traded. Greek city-states enslaved defeated populations; Rome built much of its economy on slave labour; raiding societies from the Eurasian steppe to the Atlantic world, and across the ocean, among the First Nations people of the Americas, treated slavery as part of warfare and survival. For most of human history, slavery was seen less as a moral evil than as an accepted social institution, however tragic it might be for those caught within it.

It is necessary therefore to resist any account that isolates the Atlantic trade as if it emerged sui generis from European wickedness. The Islamic world sustained large-scale slave systems over a long durée; and African polities were not merely passive victims but active participants in capture and sale; Arab traders were integral intermediaries. The Atlantic system, or “the Middle Passage” and “Triangular Trade” as it was euphemistically described, depended in its operation on a web of local agency as well as European demand. To acknowledge that is not to dilute culpability but to complicate it – uncomfortably, but necessarily.

And yet – here the counterweight – the Atlantic system was not merely one more iteration of an ancient practice. In the Americas – north and south –  fused race, heredity, and commerce into something peculiarly rigid and self-reproducing. Slavery became not just a condition but a caste, encoded in law and biology, and scaled through plantation economies that fed a global market. Cotton, sugar, coffee and tobacco were not marginal commodities but engines of early modern capitalism. The system’s brutality was not incidental; it was structural.

It is here that the North American story assumes its central, paradoxical role. Chattel slavery became both foundational and explosive – so deeply embedded in the economy that its removal threatened the entire edifice, and yet so morally corrosive that it generated its own opposition. The American Civil War was among many things, the moment when that contradiction could no longer be managed rhetorically or regionally; it was settled, instead, in blood. Abolition here was not simply argued into being; it was fought into being.

Slavery was America’s original sin, and its malign influence ricochets still through its politics and society. [See American historian Sarah Churchwell’s.chilling account of darkest Dixie in In That Howling Infinite’s The Wrath to Come. Gone With the Wind and America’s Big Lie]

Which brings us to what may be the most historically unusual feature in all of this: not slavery itself, but the sustained movement to abolish it. The West generated, from the 17th century onward, a mounting moral and political challenge to slaver, in legal cases, religious agitation, popular campaigns – that eventually dismantled it – significant help from the Royal Navy. Comparable, system-wide movements were less evident in the Islamic world, where dissent existed but did not crystallise into mass abolitionism with similar force or effect.

The distinction matters. Saying it did not happen is a statement of fact; suggesting it could not have happened, or that its absence reflects some deeper civilisational failing, goes beyond the evidence. The divergence likely owes as much to political economy, state structure, and the contingencies of modernity as to theology alone. Which is where English historian and The Rest is History podcaster Tom Holland’s excellent doorstop of a book Dominion hovers, suggestively, over the argument [See In That Howling Infinite’s Getting back to the garden – Tom Holland’s Dominion 

Holland’s claim – broadly put – is that the moral vocabulary underpinning abolition in the West owes much to a Christian inheritance: the elevation of the weak, the insistence on the equal worth of souls, the suspicion of unrestrained power. Even as the Enlightenment secularises these ideas, it carries their imprint. One need not follow him into every chapel of that argument to see the outline: abolition is historically anomalous, and anomalies tend to have genealogies. The West did not simply stumble into anti-slavery; it argued its way there, drawing on intellectual and moral resources that had been accumulating, often ambivalently, for centuries.

One must exercise caution here. Moral discomfort with slavery existed elsewhere and earlier, even if it did not produce mass abolitionist movements in the same way as in the West. Nor does the existence of Western abolition somehow erase the brutality or scale of European colonial slavery, particularly the Atlantic slave trade and plantation economies. The West occupies both roles in history: architect of the largest racialised slave system in modern history, and birthplace of the most influential abolitionist movements against it.

History is often untidy like that.

Old poison, new bottles

The story end in the 19th century however much resolutions might prefer it to. The Gulf states remind us that abolition in law does not always mean abolition in practice. The kafala system – sponsorship, contract labour – operates in a grey zone where dependence can harden into coercion. Passports withheld, mobility constrained, recourse limited: not chattel slavery, but an echo, or perhaps a mutation. History rarely repeats itself verbatim; it adapts, keeping the structure while altering the terminology.

And then there are the moments when the past returns not as echo but as revival. ISIS, with its enslavement of Yazidi women, did not merely exploit chaos; it articulated a doctrine. Slavery, and most particularly, sexual slavery, was justified, systematised, and bureaucratised with price lists, allocations, and rules, and even, trans-national trafficking: one captive ended up in Gaza where she was eventually rescued from a war zone. It was, in the grimmest sense, a reactivation of an old logic under modern conditions. Old poison in new bottles. If abolition was an anomaly, here was the reminder that anomalies can be reversed.

Governments and citizens of ostensibly westernized states should look to their self-awarded laurels. We should be wary of treating coercion as something that happens “over there.” The exploitation of domestic workers – underpaid, over- controlled , sometimes effectively trapped – appears not only in the Gulf but in Lebanon, Israel, and also parts of Western Europe and North America, where immigration status and private households create shadows the law struggles to reach. And closer still, in our own economies, sweatshop labour, debt bondagea and various forms of servitude persist at the margins, along with physical violence and sexual exploitation – which is precisely why regulation, inspection, and enforcement remain not moral luxuries but necessities.

Against this broader canvas, the UN resolution begins to look less like a statement of history than a negotiation, negation, even – of memory. Its selectivity – foregrounding Western guilt, backgrounding Western abolition, omitting other systems – is not unusual in such documents; it is, in some sense, as we have often seen, their defining feature. They are less concerned with completeness than with consensus, less with analysis than with alignment. Countries with difficult presents often find it convenient to condemn curated pasts.

Ergas is justified in objecting to that selectivity. Where he overreaches is in answering it with a counter-selectivity of his own – one that risks understating the distinctiveness of the Atlantic system and overstating the clarity of civilisational contrasts. History, inconveniently, refuses to stay within either brief.

On the question of the Holocaust, however, his warning lands. To rank atrocities – to declare one “the greatest” – is to turn history into a macabre competition. More importantly, it obscures differences of intent. Most slave systems, however brutal, were premised on exploitation; the Holocaust was premised on annihilation. That distinction is not a matter of moral bookkeeping but of historical substance.

And so we arrive, circuitously, at a position that satisfies no one entirely – which is probably how one knows it is closer to the truth.

Slavery is not the property of any one civilisation; it is a recurrent human institution, appearing wherever power, profit, and permission align. The Atlantic trade is distinctive but not unique; Islamic and African systems are substantial but not singular; modern forms persist under altered names and legal veneers. What is genuinely unusual is the emergence of sustained, organised movements that declare slavery illegitimate and succeed – partially, unevenly – in abolishing it.

Between the UN’s moral narrowing and Ergas’s corrective widening lies a more uncomfortable landscape: one in which culpability is diffuse, agency is shared, and progress, where it occur, is contingent, fragile, and slow. The past does not arrange itself into neat indictments or tidy vindications. It lingers, instead, as habit and warning.

And, if one is honest, as a question still not fully answered.

On the Holocaust comparison, Ergas is on firmer ground. Collapsing all historical crimes into a single ranked category – the greatest” – is less analysis than moral theatre. The distinction between exploitation and extermination is not pedantic; it goes to intent. The Nazi project was annihilatory in a way most slave systems, however cruel, were not. History flattens at our peril.

And then there is the politics of the thing. UN resolutions are not monographs; they are negotiated texts, shaped by blocs, interests, and the quiet arithmetic of votes. Selectivity is almost baked in – as is prejudice. Countries with uncomfortable presents often find safety in condemning selective pasts. Western abstentions, too, are rarely acts of intellectual surrender; more often they are the diplomacy of not quite wanting to pick a fight that cannot be cleanly won.

Unfinished business 

So we end where we began, with a familiar tension. Yes, slavery is a near-universal inheritance, and any telling that singles out one civilisation to the exclusion of others is suspect. But neither does the universality of the crime dissolve its particular forms. The Atlantic system, the Islamic trades, ancient chattel systems – they rhyme, but they are not identical verses.

And there remains a broader, less comfortable truth: the story of slavery is not a morality play with a single villain, but a long human habit, periodically challenged, never entirely extinguished, and always ready, given the right circumstances and excuses, to return.

History, in other words, refuses both the courtroom brief and the absolution. It is messier than Ergas allows, but also less conveniently moralised than the resolution he criticises.

It leaves us not ranking guilt, but paying closer attention. The Atlantic system was distinctive; the Islamic and other trades were vast and enduring; African rulers and Arab merchants were participants as well as intermediaries; the West generated powerful abolitionist movements even as it profited from what it eventually condemned. None of these claims cancels the others. Together they form a picture that is, at once, more accurate and less flattering than any single narrative allows.

And the present refuses to sit quietly beneath the verdicts we pass on the past. The exploitation of domestic workers in the Gulf, Lebanon, Israel, and parts of Western Europe; the persistence of sweatshop labour, debt bondage, and coerced work within Western economies themselves – these are not historical footnotes but contemporary reminders. Laws and conventions matter, but so do inspection, enforcement, and the unglamorous work of closing the gap between principle and practice.

Which is why the most suspect posture, at the end of such an inquiry, is self-congratulation. There is no stable ground here for laurel wreaths, no civilisational vantage point from which to survey a completed moral victory. At best there is a difference in degree – of scrutiny, of institutional capacity, of willingness to act. And even that requires constant renewal.

Slavery, in its older forms, has been dismantled in many places; in its newer guises, it adapts. The question is less who was worst than who is still looking, and still prepared to do something about what they find.

Postscript: Etymology

The history lingers, as it often does, in the words. They carry within themselves their own freight.

“Slave” in English carries within it a map of early medieval Europe. The term is widely traced to the Latin sclavus, itself derived from Sclavus – “Slav” – a reflection of the large numbers of Slavic peoples captured and sold through the trading networks that ran from the Baltic down the great river systems to Byzantium and the Islamic world. What began as an ethnonym hardened into a condition. By the High Middle Ages the word had shed its geographic specificity and settled into general use- esclave, schiavo, esclavo, slave – the person eclipsed by the status, the origin story buried in the syllable. The modern word is not, in itself, a slur; but its lineage is a reminder of how readily a name can be stripped of personhood and repurposed as a category of subjection.

Arabic offers a parallel, though not an identical one. The root ʿabd (عبد) denotes a servant or slave, but in its primary register it is theological: ʿabd Allāh, servant of God – a posture of submission before the divine rather than a description of worldly bondage. Yet the plural ʿabīd (عبيد) – once a straightforward term for slaves – acquired, over time and in certain contexts, a sharper edge, used for Black slaves and, by extension, Black people more generally. In modern usage it can carry derogatory force, depending on context and intent, illustrating how a neutral descriptor can drift into insult as it absorbs the hierarchies of the societies that use it.

In both cases, language records a quiet transformation. A people becomes a condition; a condition gathers associations; those associations harden into overtones that may wound long after their origins are forgotten. The vocabulary survives the systems that shaped it, carrying their traces forward – compressed, half-visible, but still there for those inclined to listen.

Afterword: Thraldom, it’s unwinding and its afterlives

A final turn of the lens, back to northern Europe, where the language and the practice briefly align – and then, tellingly, reappear in altered guises.

In Anglo-Saxon England, þræl – thrall – named a condition within a broader spectrum of unfreedom. These were the captured, the indebted, the born into it: men and women who laboured in households and on estates, who could be bought and sold, though not yet within the fully racialised, hereditary system that would later define Atlantic chattel slavery. The boundaries were hard but not always impermeable. Manumission occurred; over generations, absorption was possible. It was a system of subjection, but not yet a totalising one.

The British port of Bristol stands as a reminder of how visible and organised that system could be. It became wealthy with the transatlantic slave trade. But in the 11th century it also functioned as a significant slaving port, exporting captives – often from Wales and the Welsh borderlands – into Irish and wider networks. This was not an anomaly but a node in a broader medieval traffic in human beings, linking the British Isles to circuits that extended, directly and indirectly, toward the Mediterranean and beyond.

Nor was England unique. Across medieval Europe, slavery persisted in varied forms: Italian city-states drew on Black Sea supplies; Iberian polities, both Muslim and Christian, trafficked in captives amid the long wars of the Reconquista; eastern Europe fed human cargo into Byzantine and Islamic markets. The word “slave” itself, with its Slavic root, is a linguistic fossil of that traffic (see below)..

And yet, in England at least, something shifted – and the Norman Conquest appears to have hastened it. On the eve of 1066, Domesday would soon record servi in significant numbers, perhaps around a tenth of the population. By the 12th century, however, chattel slavery had largely withered. The causes were less a single decree than a convergence. The Norman regime imported a more continental feudal logic, in which labour was bound to land rather than owned outright; a villein, fixed, dues-paying, and reproductively stable, was often more useful than a saleable slave. The Church, already critical of slave trading – Wulfstan of Worcester’s condemnation of the Bristol trade is emblematic. – found firmer footing in the new order, aligning moral pressure with institutional power. Trade patterns shifted too, as England’s orientation tilted across the Channel, loosening older Irish Sea networks that had sustained export markets.

None of this amounted to abolition in the modern sense. What replaced slavery was serfdom: a different architecture of dependence, less overtly transactional but hardly free. The change was real, but it was also a translation—from one form of unfreedom into another, quieter one.

And, as if to underline the point, elements of the older logic resurfaced later under new names. In the 17th and 18th centuries, Britain exported large numbers of indentured labourers – many English, but also Scots and Irish, including prisoners of war and political rebels after uprisings – to the American colonies and the Caribbean. Bound by contract rather than owned outright, they nonetheless occupied a coercive world of limited rights, harsh discipline, and restricted movement. The loss of the American colonies in 1783 did not end this habit of displacement; it redirected it. Transportation – of convicts and dissidents – to Australia became the next imperial outlet for managing surplus and troublesome populations, a system different in law but recognisably akin in its logic of removal and compelled labour [see in In That Howling Infinite, Farewell to Old England forever … reappraising The Fatal Shore 

Meanwhile, further east, a different trajectory prevailed. In eastern Europe and Russia, serfdom did not wither but intensified. From the late medieval period into the early modern era, landlords consolidated control over peasant populations, binding them ever more tightly to the land and to service. In Russia, this culminated in a system that, by the 18th century, bore striking resemblances to slavery in practice, if not always in name – serfs bought, sold, and mortgaged along with estates, their mobility sharply curtailed, their obligations exacting. Emancipation would come late: 1861 in Russia, and even then imperfectly, leaving behind structures of dependency that proved stubbornly durable.

Which is, perhaps, the thread worth keeping in hand. Systems of coercion rarely disappear cleanly; they evolve, recur and rephrase. From thrall to serf, from market to manor, from indenture to transportation, from eastern estate to western plantation. The names change; the grammar does not. Waiting, as ever, for the conditions that allow it to harden once again. waiting, as ever, for the conditions that allow it to harden once again.

In that Howling Infinite, May Day 2026

This essay was written in conversation with an AI language model, which contributed to researching, drafting, phrasing, and conceptual articulation. What appears here is not unmediated thought, but considered thought: directed and selected, revised and revised again, and owned.

See also in In That Howling Infinite, A Political World – Thoughts and Themes, and A Middle East Miscellany


Coda

When this essay was published on Facebook, it elicited several comments that amounted to a polemical defense of the West that began with a legitimate historical observation – slavery was historically near-universal and abolitionism emerged most powerfully from Enlightenment Europe – but then overextended  the claim into a triumphalist narrative about Western moral uniqueness and non-Western incapacity for self-criticism. Its tone is combative, culturally chauvinistic, and marked by sweeping generalisations about “the Third World,” Islamic societies, Arabs, and Asian civilisations.

Intellectually, they mixed valid historical points with selective history, rhetorical exaggeration, and resentment politics. They treated “the West” as unusually self-critical and morally generative, while caricaturing other societies as conformist or authoritarian. The result is less a sober historical analysis than a reaction against contemporary anti-Western discourse, expressed through broad-brush civilisational language.

A more balanced critique might read as follows:

Slavery has existed in some form in almost every known civilisation. In the ancient world, captives were routinely taken, bought, sold, and traded. Greek city-states enslaved defeated populations; Rome built much of its economy on slave labour; raiding societies from the Eurasian steppe to the Atlantic world treated slavery as part of warfare and survival. For most of human history, slavery was seen less as a moral evil than as an accepted social institution, however tragic it might be for those caught within it.

One of the major intellectual shifts of the Enlightenment era was the emergence, particularly in Western Europe and North America, of the idea that slavery itself was morally illegitimate. Philosophical ideas about natural rights, combined with religious and humanitarian movements, helped give rise to organised abolitionism. Britain, France, and the United States were deeply implicated in the Atlantic slave trade, yet they also produced influential movements that eventually challenged and dismantled it. Modern international norms against slavery owe much to these developments.

At the same time, slavery was not uniquely Western, nor was opposition to injustice confined solely to the West. Different forms of servitude and human bondage existed across Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and the Americas, and criticism of oppression has emerged within many cultures and traditions. The historical record is complex: societies can simultaneously perpetrate injustice and generate the ideas that challenge it.

Contemporary debates about slavery and colonialism sometimes oversimplify history by treating Europe and the West as uniquely culpable, while overlooking the broader global history of slavery. But responding to that simplification with sweeping condemnations of non-Western societies is equally reductive. A more useful approach is to recognise both the universality of slavery in human history and the particular historical significance of the abolitionist movements that emerged during the Enlightenment and after.

UN resolution on slavery falsifies history by ignoring Islamic world’s role

Henry Ergas, The Australian, 1 May 2026

The UN resolution on slavery has sparked debate over historical interpretation. Picture: Getty Images

The UN resolution sparks debate over historical interpretation: Getty Images

Henry Ergas, The Australian, 1 May 2026

That the African slave trade was a monstrosity, inflicting unspeakable cruelty on millions of innocent victims, is beyond dispute. But the resolution the UN General Assembly passed two weeks ago, marking the trade’s commemoration, is nothing less than an appalling falsification of history.

Formally, the resolution condemns the African slave trade as a whole. Substantively, every concrete reference targets the transatlantic trade, fixating on a “racialised capitalist system” and its purported Western antecedents. The cumulative effect is unmistakeable: to brand the trade a distinctively Western crime. To sustain that impression, the resolution parades a sequence of decrees, starting with the papal bulls of 1452 and 1455, which it casts as the founding charters of the enslavement and “structural racism” that still unjustly impoverishes Africa, thereby grounding a claim to substantial reparations.

Yet, having been forensically specific about blame, the text turns conspicuously evasive when it confronts the forces that brought the Atlantic trade to an end. The Enlightenment, the abolitionist movements, and the Western legal and political campaigns that culminated in the trade’s eventual demise are, it appears, unmentionable.

While the offending decrees are named, dated and indicted, the tide of opposition to slavery, which gathered momentum in the 17th century, is dismissed as “certain legal challenges and judicial developments in the 18th century” that “questioned the legality and morality of chattel enslavement”.

That descent into vagueness reflects a deliberate strategy: to particularise the guilt while diluting the credit. Merely cataloguing the misrepresentations, confusions and factual errors this strategy produces would require far more space than is available here. What is especially striking, however, are the omissions.

It is, for example, intellectually dishonest to invoke the papal bulls of 1452 and 1455 while ignoring Pope Paul III’s bull of 1537, which denounced as an invention of the devil the idea that native peoples “should be treated as dumb brutes created for our service”, and affirmed “that they may and should, freely and legitimately, enjoy their liberty”.

Paul III’s exhortations had limited immediate effect; so too did Cartwright’s Case (1569), which declared that England’s air was “too pure for slaves to dwell in”. What matters is what they reveal: an unceasing moral interrogation of slavery within the West itself – an interrogation that gave abolitionism the bedrock on which to build.

Here, too, the resolution’s selectivity is purposeful. It allows it to avoid an obvious and crucial comparator: the long history of slavery under Islamic rule, which it ignores altogether. From the Arab conquests to the early 20th century, some 14 million black slaves were transported into the lands of Islam via the trans-Saharan, Red Sea and Indian Ocean routes, with nearly a million more carried beyond the East African coast. Add to these more than a million white slaves, and the total comfortably exceeds the 10 million to 12 million who landed in the Americas.

Yet the numbers are not what is most significant. The salient fact is the absence of any sustained doctrinal or institutional challenge to the morality and legality of the slave trade within the Islamic world – even where it starkly contradicted the Koranic prohibition on enslaving Muslims. As Bruce Hall shows in his study of Saharan and Sahelian slavery, by the 19th century – when the West was vigorously suppressing chattel slavery – the operative presumption among Maliki jurists was that black Africans, routinely described as “savages”, were enslavable by default, whatever their faith.

There were individuals who objected strenuously to chattel slavery, such as Syrian reformer Abd al-Rahman al-Kawakibi (1855-1902); but no Muslim opponent of slavery ever forged those concerns into a mass movement. Bernard Lewis’s verdict that “even the most radical Muslim modernists” fell well short of matching the fervour and effectiveness of Western abolitionists retains all its force.

It is therefore unsurprising that Islam’s leading theologians, far from championing abolition, actively resisted it – beginning with the infamous 1855 fatwa, issued with the full authority of Mecca’s Shaykh Jamal, which declared any prohibition of the slave trade “contrary to the holy law of Islam” and any official who attempted to enforce it “lawful to kill”.

Nor is it surprising that Saudi Arabia and Yemen abolished slavery only in 1962, the United Arab Emirates in 1964, Oman in 1970, and Mauritania – after repeated ineffectual measures – in 2007. Moreover, even where slavery was formally abolished, forms of vassalage have remained firmly in place: of the 10 countries with the highest incidence of “modern slavery”, eight are majority-Muslim.

But the resolution does not merely distort history by pretending Islamic slavery didn’t exist. It declares the slave trade “the greatest” crime against humanity ever committed. Although not explicitly stated, a central purpose of this travesty – which converts the horrors of the past into a “suffering Olympics” – is again transparent: to relativise the Holocaust.

It is frankly obscene to degrade moral evaluation into a body count, with medals of ignominy awarded by a show of hands. Yet even in so repulsive a spectacle, realities should have been allowed to intrude. Those realities are well known. Death rates in the Holocaust – whose unrelenting aim was the complete extermination of Jews – were close to or above 90 per cent. So complete was the indifference to fatalities that the German railways were paid whether the Jews being shipped by them lived or died during their transport – and the few who survived the journeys were killed, on average, within days of arrival.

In contrast, as investor Thomas Starke wrote to Captain James Westmore in 1700, “the whole benefit of the voyage lyes in your care of preserving negroes’ lives”. As a result, strenuous efforts were made to ensure slaves remained alive and saleable, including by granting handsome bonuses to captains for high survival rates and imposing stiff penalties for excess mortality.

Although those efforts hardly eliminated the trade’s horrors, they did mean that by the late 18th century, death rates for black slaves on the “middle passage” had declined dramatically, to the point where they were only marginally greater than those for crews. To pretend otherwise is to erase the distinction between exploitation and extermination: for there was nothing in the slave trade even remotely comparable to the systematic mass murder at the heart of the Holocaust.

But to acknowledge those facts – which flatly contradict the assault on the standing of the Holocaust – might have eroded the overwhelming support the resolution secured. And the composition of that support says everything one needs to know about the resolution.

Thus, every one of the 20 countries that have the highest incidence of modern slavery and forced labour cynically voted in its favour; so did all the authoritarian states that participated in the vote, with the exception of Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan; and, again with the exception of Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, it received the active backing of every Muslim-majority country.

Yet that is not the real tragedy. Rather, it is that only three Western countries – the US, Israel and Argentina – had the decency to vote against the falsification of history, instead of abstaining, as Australia and the European Union did. Those three were willing to oppose this charade. Why weren’t we?

 

Dire straits. The bottleneck that behaves like a universe

Paul Hemphill Leave a comment

Oil tankers, container ships and bulk carriers shimmer all over the horizon to the left of the windswept beach here at the entrance to the Strait of Hormuz. They have been bottled up in the Persian Gulf ever since the US and Israel launched the war on Iran more than a month ago.  To the right, with the Iranian coast only 65km away, the dark-blue sea is completely empty. Only a handful of vessels a day manage to cross the Strait of Hormuz, down from well over a hundred ­before the war. They take a circuitous route through Iranian territorial waters, often paying the Iranian regime a hefty toll.

Tehran’s ability to control this international waterway, through which one-fifth of the worldwide oil supply used to pass, has become Iran’s biggest leverage against the US, its Gulf neighbours and the global economy. Whether the war ends in a success or defeat for Iran depends first and foremost on whether Tehran emerges from this conflict still holding the strait – and, with it, the keys to the worldwide energy markets.

Yaroslav Trofimov, Wall Street Journal, 3 Aptil 2026

What follows is a piece for history tragics – and for all who, metaphorically or intellectually, nostalgically or romantically, still yearn to “go down to the sea in ships and do business in deep waters”. For those who hear, beneath the churn of headlines and hot takes, the older music: the creak of hulls, the logic of tides, the long memory of trade and war written across the surface of the world.

Because when the Strait tightens, when Hormuz flickers from map detail to global anxiety, there is a reflex, almost tidal in itself, to reach backwards. To steady the present with the ballast of the past. The antique mariners Francis Drake and Walter Raleigh, the classical strategists Alfred Mahan and Halford Mackinder, the catechisms of geopolitics and sea power half-remembered, half-invoked. The old grammar returns: command the sea, command the world.

And yet, while the past is summoned, it does not settle easily over the present. It frays at the edges. It argues back.

Some voices insist on restoring the full weight of history – reminding us that the Persian Gulf was not merely sailed but administered: the Royal Navy’s long vigil, the latticework of protectorates, Aden and Suez as imperial hinges. Sea power, in this telling, was never abstract; it was local, granular, enforced in specific places against specific resistances. Empire did not “command” the sea so much as continuously work it.

Others, just as insistent, suggest the sea’s primacy has already ebbed. Pipelines, railways, overland corridors – the new Silk Roads – quietly subvert the tyranny of chokepoints. Hormuz matters, yes, but not as it once did. The map has thickened; the old determinisms loosen.

And threading through it all – more unsettling than either nostalgia or revision – is a harder recognition: that the balance has tilted. That it is now easier to disrupt the sea than to command it. That a few well-placed risks – mines, missiles, drones, or even the rumour of these can achieve what fleets once guaranteed.

Which is precisely why this moment—and this place—invites a longer gaze. For Hormuz is not merely a crisis point. It is a lens. A narrow passage through which history, strategy, and imagination are forced to pass in close quarters, revealing not just what we think we know about the sea – but how much of that knowledge still holds when the waters grow tight.

And so we follow the thread.

A choke point and a global hinge

The essay, republished below, by English historian and author Peter Francopan turns on an old, almost Elizabethan intuition – Walter Raleigh’s dictum that “whoever commands the sea commands the trade… and so the world” – and asks whether it still holds in the age of drones, pipelines, and petro-politics. The Strait of Hormuz, that narrow, anxious funnel through which a fifth of the world’s oil must pass, becomes his stage: not merely a geographic chokepoint, but a historical echo chamber where empires, from the Portuguese to the British to the Americans, have tested the proposition that control of the sea is control of destiny.

The core argument is deceptively simple. However much globalisation has diversified supply chains, the world remains perilously dependent on a handful of maritime arteries. Hormuz is the most critical of them. Iran, by geography alone, sits with its hand on the tap.

What follows is a kind of strategic paradox. The United States possesses overwhelming naval superiority, yet cannot easily guarantee safe passage. Iran, comparatively weak in conventional terms, can still disrupt—through mines, missiles, drones, and plausible threat alone—the flow of global energy. Control, in other words, has become asymmetrical: it is easier to deny the sea than to command it.

Frankopan folds this into a wider historical arc. Sea power has long structured global order – from the Iberian empires to Pax Britannica to the American century—but it has never been absolute. It is contingent, fragile, and dependent on political will as much as on fleets. The current crisis exposes that fragility. The cost of keeping Hormuz open – economically, militarily, psychologically – may exceed what even a superpower is willing to bear indefinitely.

Layered atop this is his reading of Trump’s confrontation with Iran: a clash driven as much by misapprehension and political impulse as by coherent strategy. The implication (never quite stated, but hovering like heat haze) is that great powers still stumble into old traps—overestimating control, underestimating local resolve.

Obstacle Course. Credit: New York Times

Command of the sea, or command of risk?

If Frankopan writes like the historian he is, the comments read like a dockside argument, a fractured chorus of rum, empire, drones, and Trump all sloshing together.

Several bridle at Francopan’s selectivity. Where, they ask, is the Royal Navy in the Gulf? The British protectorates? Aden? The Portuguese seizure of Hormuz in 1515? There is something almost touching here: a yearning to reinsert imperial continuity into a narrative that feels too compressed, too presentist. History, they insist, is longer – and perhaps more reassuring – than Frankopan allows.

Yet beneath the pedantry lies a point: chokepoints are never just geography; they are administered spaces, historically managed through bases, treaties, and coercion. Hormuz did not simply “matter”—it was made to matter, policed into significance.

A sharper critique comes from those who accuse Frankopan of naval determinism, of succumbing to Mackinder in sea going form. Where, they ask, are the pipelines, the highways of the modern Silk Road? If oil can flow overland, if energy can be rerouted, then the tyranny of chokepoints diminishes. The vulnerability of Hormuz is not just a military problem but a failure of diversification. If the Strait can be “closed,” it is because the world has allowed it to remain indispensable. Overland infrastructure does exist, but not at sufficient scale, nor with sufficient redundancy, to replace maritime flow quickly. The sea remains cheaper, denser, stubbornly dominant. Mackinder haunts the room after all.

Then there is the Trump versus Iran morality play. And here, the thread fractures into familiar ideological lines. One camp sees Trump as reckless, blundering into war without strategy; another as a hard realist confronting an implacable regime. But more interesting than the partisan positions is the shared assumption beneath them: that the conflict must be read through the personality of a single leader. Structural forces – energy dependency, regional rivalries, the logic of deterrence – fade into the background. The theatre of personality displaces the machinery of geopolitics.

Meanwhile, a darker undercurrent runs through several comments: casual talk of forcing the Strait, toppling regimes, even nuclear options. The language slips, almost unconsciously, from analysis into annihilation. One is reminded how easily strategic abstraction can become moral amnesia.

What the article and its commentariat together reveal is not a consensus but a tension – between old frameworks and new realities.

Francopan is right, broadly, that chokepoints still matter. Geography has not been abolished. Hormuz remains a lever capable of moving the world.

But his critics are right, too, that the nature of control has shifted. The age of decisive naval supremacy – Trafalgar, Jutland, Midway – has given way to something murkier. Control is now probabilistic. It lies in deterrence, in risk calculation, in the shadow of what might be done rather than what is done.

Iran does not need to “command” the Strait in Raleigh’s sense. It need only make others doubt that it is safe.

And here the deeper irony emerges. The more globalised the world becomes, the more sensitive it is to disruption at key nodes. Interdependence, that liberal promise, doubles as systemic fragility. A few missiles, a handful of drones, a rumour of mines—and the bloodstream of the global economy clots.

The comments circle this insight without quite naming it. They argue about navies versus pipelines, Trump versus Tehran, Britain versus decline- but beneath it all is a shared unease: that no one, not even the United States, can fully guarantee the openness of the system on which everyone depends.

Raleigh revisited

Raleigh’s maxim survives, but in altered form. To command the sea once meant mastery – fleets, flags, unquestioned passage. Now it means something closer to managing uncertainty, policing risk, absorbing disruption. Or, to invert it (and perhaps this is the real lesson of Hormuz): whoever can unsettle the sea can unsettle the world.

The Strait, narrow and ancient, becomes a kind of TARDIS of geopolitics – small on the map, vast in consequence, containing within it centuries of empire, trade, ambition, and miscalculation. You can sail through it in hours. You can be trapped by it for decades. Hormuz is one of those places where scale misbehaves.

On the chart it is almost an afterthought: a narrow blue incision between Iran and Oman, barely 21 nautical miles at its tightest navigable squeeze. A cartographer’s margin note. You could blink and miss it, the way you might skim over a comma in a long sentence. And yet – inside that comma, the world pauses.

Tankers queue like thoughts that cannot quite be completed. Insurance markets twitch. Futures spike. Admirals rediscover their relevance. Presidents improvise resolve. Somewhere in Delhi or Shanghai, a planner recalculates the cost of keeping the lights on. The Strait is not large, but it contains largeness: economics, empire, anxiety, history – all folded into a channel so narrow that a missile battery on one shore can imagine the other.

That is the TARDIS trick: disproportion. Interior vastness concealed within exterior modesty. A space where time thickens. Because Hormuz is not just a place. – it is an accumulation. Portuguese forts, British gunboats, American carrier groups, Iranian fast boats – all still present in the mind, layered like ghost traffic moving in opposite directions through the same confined lane.
And like the TARDIS, it distorts power. The strong discover their strength is conditional; the weak discover they possess a lever. To command the sea here is less about domination than about enduring the possibility of interruption.

It is gigantically small, metaphorically huge, a bottleneck that behaves like a universe.

In a wide ocean, power projects as a roar – carrier groups, satellite grids, the choreography of dominance. In a narrow strait, the same power ricochets. It echoes, distorts, sometimes even dampens. The voice is still large; the space refuses to carry it cleanly.

Hormuz does this to everyone. It compresses asymmetry into something almost theatrical. A superpower arrives with an orchestra; a regional actor needs only a well-timed cymbal crash – mines, missiles, the rumour of both – and suddenly the symphony falters. Not silenced, but unsettled. Hesitant. Listening to itself.

It tells us less about the decline of hegemony than about the environments in which hegemony operates. Power at sea is expansive; power in a choke point is negotiated, contingent, on the edge

The old imperial instinct – force the passage- still murmurs in the background (you can hear it in the comments: convoy the ships, clear the mines, damn the cost). But the modern world hesitates, because the cost is no longer just ships sunk – it is markets convulsed, alliances strained, escalation spiralling in ways that do not end neatly at the waterline.

Which leaves us with a paradox worthy of the place: the hegemon can still roar – but here, in this narrow theatre, it must decide whether the echo is worth the noise.

In That Howling Infinite, March 2026

Hormuz: Iran’s dire Strait

Command the seas and you command the world

Peter Francopan, Unherd, March 12 2026

Historians these days doubt that Sir Walter Raleigh ever laid down his cloak to stop Queen Elizabeth I from stepping in a puddle. They do agree, though, that he understood the nature and benefit of maritime power. “Whosoever commands the sea commands the trade,” he wrote in A Discourse of the Invention of Ships in the early 17th century. “Whosoever commands the trade of the world commands the riches of the world, and consequently the world itself”.Raleigh lived in a different era, of course — one that most of us imagine as a time of swashbuckling sailors and risk-taking pirates, when control of the High Seas was a competition between the European states building empires in both the New and Old Worlds.

This was also an age when geography mattered every bit as much as resources. Many of the first European footholds overseas were chosen less for what lay in the ground than for where they sat along the great sea routes that were beginning to bind the world together. The Portuguese seizure of Malacca in 1511 was not about spices growing nearby but about controlling the narrow maritime gateway between the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea through which much of Asia’s trade passed.

The same strategic logic shaped the expansion of the British empire. Outposts were established above all because of their position along the world’s shipping arteries. The British occupation of Gibraltar in 1704 secured control over the entrance to the Mediterranean and the vital route between the Atlantic and Europe’s inland sea. In the Caribbean, islands such as Jamaica — seized from the Spanish in 1655 — were major naval and commercial hubs sitting astride the shipping lanes linking the Americas and Europe. Likewise, further south, control of Cape of Good Hope allowed Britain to dominate the maritime passage between the Atlantic and Indian Oceans.The empire that Raleigh’s generation started building was not only created through conquest and extraction: it was built through the control of the sea lanes and strategic points that allowed commerce, information and manpower to move across the oceans. The same ports that handled cargo could shelter naval squadrons, repair ships and project force across vast distances. Britain’s empire was fuelled by sugar, silver, slaves and more; but it was built on being able to move these at will across the oceans, and on the islands, harbours and strongpoints that underpinned maritime, economic and imperial power.

These days, we have become used to future-gazers insisting that the future belongs to those who control data and algorithms, or satellites and space rockets, or rare earths and critical minerals. Ships, shipping, and transport networks do not sound quite so exciting, so fresh or so unknown. To a historian, though, in a world that is hyper-connected, logistics are king.

In its heyday, Britain’s reach rested heavily getting the basics right. At Gibraltar, ships entering or leaving the Mediterranean could refuel and undergo repairs, while Malta secured British control of Mediterranean shipping routes. Further east, Aden functioned as a crucial coaling station at the mouth of the Red Sea once steam navigation transformed long-distance travel; or there was Singapore, which, from the early 19th century, grew into a key naval base guarding the approaches between the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea.

Each of these places mattered less for what they produced than for the services they provided: coal, water, repairs, provisions, intelligence and protection. Ships could not roam the oceans indefinitely; they required an interconnected chain of harbours capable of maintaining hulls, repairing sails or (later) overhauling, to provision with fresh food and water. Maritime power was not just about ships, captains and crews — but about a dense mesh of locations that were spread out around the world and reinforced each other.

Over time, however, it became easy to forget just how central these routes and nodes were. In the decades after the end of the Cold War, the world entered a period of globalisation underpinned by overwhelming American economic, political and military power — and by the mantra of free trade being the engine of prosperity and the bedrock of the international world order. Attention shifted elsewhere, and strategists and commentators forgot about shipping lanes. Yet as geopolitical competition intensifies and the world moves into a more multipolar era, the importance of the arteries of global commerce has once again become startlingly clear.Maritime transport moves over 80% of goods traded worldwide. Around 11 billion tons of goods are transported by sea each year — roughly one and a half tons per person. Ships carry around two thirds of global oil production, as well as around a fifth of natural gas, moving energy to places where they are most needed. Without global shipping networks, computers can’t be switched on, assembly lines can’t work, and houses can’t be heated.While the crisis in Iran and the Gulf have focused attention on oil, liquefied natural gas (LNG) and petroleum products, global shipping is fundamental in almost every aspect of daily life. Seaborne trade moves almost two billion tonnes of iron ore per year, with major exporters in countries like Australia, Brazil and South Africa being matched with demand in China, Japan, South Korea and elsewhere. Hundreds of millions of tonnes of bauxite and alumina are sent by sea from mines and processing plants in Guinea, Indonesia and Australia, as are tens of millions of tonnes of copper ores from Chile, Peru and south East Asia.

Global shipping is not just the backbone of international trade; it is crucial in keeping the world fed. According to the Food and Agriculture Organisation, a UN body, international trade plays a crucial role in supporting global food security by linking food surplus with deficit areas and enabling access to basic food products. 80% of agricultural commodities are transported by sea, with shipping again playing a crucial role in matching “breadbasket regions” with those that suffer from food production deficits.As Sir Walter Raleigh would have recognised, globalisation makes control of the seas more, not less important; as peoples, regions, goods and resources get moved from one part of the planet to another, dependencies rise — and so, therefore, do vulnerabilities. Things that we take for granted are always ones that we should pay special attention to, not least since it never seems to cross people’s mind that small shocks can have major implications.

In the summer of 2011, Thailand experienced catastrophic flooding as a result of unusually high levels of rainfall, which had an enormous impact on global car production. At the time, Thailand was one of the world’s leading producers of hard-disk drives and wiring harnesses for cars, as well as electronics modules. As factories closed because of flooding, the effects spilled over into the global economy. Hard drive prices doubled in a matter of weeks; shortages of parts crippled automotive production not only in Thailand, but across Asia, North America and even Europe. The associated costs ran to tens of billions of dollars.

If that gives one example of the risks that come from the assumption that supply chains are dependable, then another comes from Covid-19. Lockdowns and collapsing industrial demand caused an immediate decline in maritime activity. Global maritime trade volumes fell sharply, with estimates suggesting a reduction of as much as 10% in the first eight months of 2020, representing cargo worth at least $225 billion in trade value — if not considerably more, precipitating an unprecedented logistics crunch.

In the past few days we have seen another classic case of the risks posed by pressure on supply chains. Energy markets have been spooked by the implications of attacks on infrastructure in the Gulf following US and Israeli strikes on Iran, with oil prices almost doubling in a matter of days. But it is shipping prices that have truly gone through the roof. Spot charter rates for LNG carriers are six times larger than they were before 28 February — a rise some industry experts refer to as “unthinkable”. Some charterers are paying as much as 10 times the rate they paid before the attacks on Iran began to secure prompt tonnage because of the scale of the shock.

The Strait of Hormuz is one of the world’s key chokepoints, a narrow stretch that connects the Gulf with the Arabian Sea and Indian Ocean, a crossroads where geology and geography dovetail to create perfect opportunities for disruption.

Bordered by Iran to the north and Oman and the United Arab Emirates to the south, the Strait is one of the world’s most strategically significant waterways. At its narrowest navigable point, the shipping lanes are only a few kilometres wide in each direction, meaning that at a time of conflict — such as today — the ability to restrict shipping is considerable. Considerable volumes of goods pass through the Strait — something that is clear from the fact that Jebel Ali in Dubai is the ninth-busiest port in the world. But Hormuz is more crucial to global energy markets, with around 15 million barrels of oil passing through each day, equivalent to about one-fifth of global petroleum consumption. Other chokepoints are significant; but Hormuz is the most important oil chokepoint in the world.At the moment, almost no shipping is transiting the Strait, with an estimated 1000 vessels waiting for the conflict with Iran to pass. A small handful of ships have sailed through, with several others reported to be trying their luck by either claiming to be Chinese or by turning off transponders that reveal both their location and their true identities. More than a dozen ships have been damaged so far, with Iran saying that British ships are “legitimate targets”.Political leaders have tried to project confidence. Donald Trump said that merchant crews and shipowners simply needed to show “some guts” if they wanted trade to keep moving through the Strait. Yet the reality suggests that courage alone is rarely enough to keep maritime commerce flowing during wartime. Guts are one thing; a US Navy ship being damaged by Iranian mines, missiles or attacks from land is another. For now, then, such are the risks to crews, cargo and hulls that shipping in the Gulf is at a standstill.Just how high the strategic stakes have become is clear from the military deployments now underway. That message has not been lost on Greece, Italy or France — all of which have dispatched warships towards the Gulf to secure maritime traffic and monitor the Strait, although it remains unclear whether or how they will solve the problem of getting traffic moving again. In Britain, there has been fierce criticism of the Royal Navy’s absence from the Eastern Mediterranean and the Gulf, but the absence is not imminently solvable. It is the result of the British government’s catastrophic lack of foresight, decades of not investing in the sort of naval forces one needs in this century.Trump has insisted that the shutdown in the Gulf is temporary and that oil, gas and more besides will soon start to flow again. It is typical fighting talk from a president who chose to start a confrontation with Iran because he was not able to understand why the regime in Tehran had refused to “capitulate” to American demands regarding nuclear enrichment, ballistic missile programmes and more.Trump came to office promising never to drag the US into “forever wars”, sneering at the “so-called nation-builders, neocons or liberal nonprofits” from who had inflicted disaster on the Middle East. Now, while Trump and his team work out how to stop Iran from inflicting damage on its neighbours, others must pay the price. India imports the overwhelming majority of its oil and gas by sea, partly because it has access to a limited network of pipelines. So the collapse of shipments from the Gulf is producing an existential crisis: although the US has granted a “temporary waiver” to allow Delhi to buy Russian oil, the facts that the rupee has weakened sharply, and that authorities are reportedly speeding up customs procedures to allow faster unloading, are signs that compression of logistics at sea is already having ripple effects. Moscow emerges as an unexpected beneficiary of the crisis, as the spike in oil and gas prices will provide much-needed relief to a beleaguered economy. Russia’s geopolitical role could be additionally bolstered by the country’s purported long-standing “security concept for the Persian Gulf” as an off-ramp for the US intervention in Iran.The consequences of the current crisis, however, extend well beyond the coming days or even the coming weeks. What we are witnessing is not simply a temporary disruption in the Gulf, but a reminder of a deeper truth about how power works in the modern world. Maritime routes remain the arteries through which prosperity, security and resilience flow. Data, algorithms, satellites and artificial intelligence may dominate the language of the 21st-century economy, but they still depend on the movement of physical goods across oceans. Microchips require minerals, energy and specialised manufacturing equipment that must be transported. Data centres require copper, aluminium, rare earths and vast amounts of energy infrastructure. Without ships and secure sea lanes, even the most advanced digital economy quickly runs into very practical limits. Power is and always has been about logistics.For Britain in particular, this requires a series of profound shifts. The protection of shipping routes is already a central strategic task. The Gulf is one theatre where the risks are currently obvious, but it is far from the only one. The North Atlantic and the High North are rapidly emerging as arenas of growing geopolitical competition as melting Arctic ice opens new routes and as submarine cables, energy infrastructure and shipping lanes become ever more exposed to interference and disruption.These are not challenges that can be addressed through strategy documents or policy papers; they require investment in ships, in platforms, in training and in the infrastructure that allows maritime forces to operate effectively across long distances. They also require the rebuilding of the kind of interconnected networks of ports, facilities and partnerships that once underpinned Britain’s global reach. In an increasingly multipolar world — one in which predation, risk-taking and opportunism are often rewarded — maritime resilience will become a defining measure of national strength.In that sense, the current crisis offers a glimpse of the future. Control and protection of shipping routes is key to stability, to reduction of risk and to long-term national resilience. The resources on which new economies depend may have changed, technologies may have evolved and ships may look different. But the underlying reality remains exactly the same as when Raleigh wrote four hundred years ago: whoever commands the sea commands far more than the sea itself.

Peter Frankopan is the author of The Silk Roads (2015), The New Silk Roads (2018), and The Earth Transformed (2023). He is also a Professor of Global History at Worcester College, Oxford

A curated selection of comments from Unherd readers

This includes everything that carries an argument, stripped of noise but not over-pruned. There was a lot buried in that thread once one scraped away the rhetorical noise. Francopan’s essay and the comments rehearse empire, contest strategy, litigate politics, invoke technology, argue personality. They reach for certainty and find, instead, contingency.
Here they are:

Historical framing matters. Analyses of maritime power that ignore Britain’s long role in the Persian Gulf, its protectorates, and control of trade routes through Aden and Suez are incomplete. Control of sea lanes has always been exercised locally, even when its effects are global.

There is a fundamental tension between classical naval theory and modern infrastructure realities. Traditional doctrines of sea power emphasise chokepoints, yet pipelines, rail corridors, and overland routes increasingly challenge that dominance. Disruption of maritime trade today may reflect failures of diplomacy and diversification as much as limits of military power.
The strategic importance of the Strait of Hormuz is clear, but control is asymmetric. It is easier to threaten shipping than to secure it. A weaker power can impose risk without achieving dominance, using missiles, drones, and dispersed systems that are difficult to eliminate.

Modern warfare reinforces this asymmetry. Low-cost technologies can disrupt high-value assets, raising questions about the long-term viability of traditional force projection. At the same time, countermeasures are evolving, suggesting an ongoing cycle of adaptation.The scale of resources required to secure global shipping is immense. Sustained convoy operations would demand naval capacity that is not readily available. Even if assembled, such efforts would be costly and unlikely to restore previous economic conditions quickly.Alternative strategies exist but are slow to implement. Expanding pipelines, rerouting supply chains, and hardening vessels can reduce vulnerability, but require long-term investment and coordination.

Many states failed to prepare despite the predictability of such a crisis.There is deep disagreement over the nature of the current conflict. Some view it as a necessary confrontation with a regime that threatens regional and global stability. Others see a lack of clear objectives, inconsistent strategy, and the risk of open-ended escalation.The question of escalation remains unresolved. One side retains capacity to intensify, while the other relies on disruption. Proposals for decisive action raise further uncertainties about feasibility, consequences, and post-conflict stability.

Regime survival is interpreted differently. Some argue that mere survival constitutes success under pressure; others contend that survival after severe degradation would represent strategic defeat.Geopolitical decision-making often operates without clear or fixed end states. Objectives may shift in response to opportunity, reflecting the contingent nature of strategy rather than coherent long-term planning.

Historical analogies are widely used but often misleading. Claims of past maritime dominance are contested, with evidence that control has always been partial and constrained by other factors such as air power and competing theatres of war.

Debate over Western power reveals competing narratives. Some emphasise decline, overstretch, and lack of strategic coherence. Others point to enduring capabilities and the need for renewed investment, particularly in naval forces.

The scale of global security challenges exceeds the capacity of individual states. Effective responses likely require collective action, yet coordination remains difficult and politically constrained.

New vulnerabilities complicate traditional strategy. Subsea infrastructure, including data cables, represents a vast and exposed network that is difficult to defend, illustrating the expanding scope of strategic risk.

Legal frameworks exist but are contested in practice. International law mandates freedom of navigation, yet interpretations of neutrality and belligerency vary, particularly in complex conflicts.

Economic interdependence amplifies the consequences of disruption. Even limited interference with key trade routes can trigger wider global effects, including energy shocks and recessionary pressures.

At root, the issue is no longer simply control of the sea. The emerging reality is a system where disruption, deterrence, and alternative routing shape outcomes as much as traditional dominance.

Ulster’s history and the long shadow of The Troubles

Paul Hemphill Leave a comment

This is not a comprehensive history of Ireland. It is, rather, an explainer – a guide for the interested reader to understand how the late twentieth-century conflict, known in euphemistic understatement as The Troubles, began, endured, and proved so intractable. Though the guns and bombs have for the most part fallen silent, memories endure. In some quarters, the bitterness remains, the venom lingers, and the need to keep fighting – at least in memory, at least in ritual – has not entirely faded. As the old rebel song goes, “No surrender is the war cry of the Belfast Brigade”. Its notes echo still across streets, walls, and the ever-present consciousness of a place where the past is never far from the present. Though the hatchet may be buried, many remember where they buried it.

The Troubles did not begin in 1969 when civil rights marchers were viciously ambushed by Protestant gangs. They erupted then. Their deeper roots stretched back to the early seventeenth century, when the English Crown undertook the Plantation of Ulster after the defeat of Gaelic lords in the Nine Years’ War (1594–1603). After the Flight of the Earls in 1607, when those lords fled to continental Europe, James VI of Scotland –  now also James I of England – set about remaking Ulster. Confiscated land – taken from Irish Catholic chieftains – was granted to “undertakers” from England and, crucially, from lowland Scotland. This was not mere migration; it was a state project of demographic engineering, designed to pacify and anglicise a rebellious province.

The Plantation was not simply an English imposition; it was profoundly Scottish. Tens of thousands of Presbyterian Scots crossed the narrow North Channel. The geography made it almost inevitable: on a clear day you can see Scotland from Antrim. What had once been a porous Irish sea became, in effect, a corridor of Protestant settlement.

These were not aristocrats alone. Many were farmers, tradesmen, smallholders – industrious, Calvinist, wary of episcopal hierarchy and religious certainly wary of Rome. They brought with them kirk discipline, covenant theology, and a hard-earned suspicion of both Catholic rebellion and Anglican condescension. In the seventeenth century they were themselves dissenters within the British confessional order – not the establishment, though they would become it locally. From that moment, land, religion, and political loyalty fused. Ownership mapped onto confession. Power mapped onto identity.

So when we speak of “settlers,” it is not an abstraction. It is families. It is surnames. It is my own father’s ancestors crossing from Ayrshire or Galloway into Antrim or Down, carving farms from confiscated land, building kirks, speaking Scots-inflected English, marrying within their community, and slowly – almost without noticing – becoming native to a place that had been politically engineered for them. Over generations, the settler becomes the local. The memory of arrival fades; the memory of threat remains.

The seventeenth century hardened the divide. The 1641 Irish Rebellion, with massacres of Protestant settlers, entered Protestant folk memory as proof of Catholic barbarity; Cromwell’s subsequent campaign (1649–53), with its sieges and land seizures, entered Catholic memory as atrocity and dispossession. The Williamite War (1689–91), culminating in the Battle of the Boyne, sealed Protestant ascendancy. In Ulster especially, victory became ritualised memory –  parades, commemorations, banners – history as annual rehearsal.

That is one of the deep paradoxes of Ulster: both communities can claim indigeneity and grievance simultaneously. Catholic memory looks back to dispossession; Protestant memory looks back to siege – 1641, the Boyne, 1798. One narrative emphasises loss of land; the other, survival against massacre. Each contains truth. Each edits.

The eighteenth century formalised Protestant dominance through the Penal Laws, which marginalised Catholics politically, economically, and educationally. Landownership remained overwhelmingly Protestant. Catholics were not exterminated; they were subordinated. Resentment, therefore, did not burn out. It banked.

The nineteenth century complicated everything. The Act of Union (1801) abolished the Irish Parliament and bound Ireland directly to Westminster. Catholic Emancipation (1829) removed many legal disabilities, but not structural inequities. An Gorta Mór (The Great Hunger) (1845–52) devastated the island demographically and psychologically; in Ulster, its effects were uneven, reinforcing regional distinctions. Meanwhile, industrialisation made Belfast a Protestant-majority, shipbuilding powerhouse – economically dynamic, culturally British, and deeply anxious about being subsumed into a Catholic-majority Ireland.

By the nineteenth century, the descendants of those Scottish Presbyterians were no longer temporary colonists but industrial citizens of Belfast — shipbuilders, linen magnates, skilled labourers — economically confident, culturally British, and deeply anxious about being subsumed into a Catholic-majority Ireland.  As Irish nationalism (increasingly Catholic in composition, though not exclusively) pressed for Home Rule — limited self-government within the United Kingdom. Ulster unionists resisted fiercely. “Home Rule is Rome Rule” was not merely a slogan; it was an inherited reflex. Paramilitary formations appeared before the twentieth century: the Ulster Volunteer Force (1912) to oppose Home Rule; the Irish Volunteers (1913) to advance it. Guns were imported on both sides. The pattern was set.

The First World War postponed the crisis but did not dissolve it. The Easter Rising (1916), the War of Independence (1919–21), and the Anglo-Irish Treaty (1921) partitioned the island. Six counties of Ulster -with a built-in Protestant majority – became Northern Ireland, remaining within the United Kingdom. Partition did not resolve identity; it institutionalised it.

Northern Ireland’s new parliament at Stormont operated, for decades, as a Protestant-dominated state. Catholics faced systemic discrimination in housing allocation, employment, and electoral boundaries. This was not apartheid in the South African sense, but it was structured inequality, visible and resented.

By the 1960s, inspired partly by global civil rights movements, Northern Irish Catholics began peaceful campaigns for equal voting rights, fair housing, and an end to discriminatory practices. The response from elements within the Protestant community and the security apparatus was defensive, sometimes violent. Marches were attacked. The police (RUC), largely Protestant, were perceived as partisan. In 1969, serious sectarian rioting broke out; the British Army was deployed initially as peacekeeper. Very quickly, it became another protagonist.

From there, the Troubles crystallised: Provisional IRA campaigns against British presence and unionist authority; loyalist paramilitary violence against Catholics; tit-for-tat bombings, assassinations, internment without trial, Bloody Sunday (1972), hunger strikes (1981), urban segregation hardening into peace walls and psychological walls alike. Roughly 3,500 people died between the late 1960s and the Good Friday Agreement in 1998. That number, in global terms, is small. Its density in a small place was immense.

Which is why the Troubles cannot be reduced to simple binaries of coloniser and colonised, though that language has its place. The Ulster story is more entangled. Plantation created a settler community; centuries created a rooted one.

The Good Friday Agreement did not erase those centuries. It acknowledged them obliquely: consent as the principle of sovereignty; power-sharing between unionist and nationalist parties; recognition that identity in Northern Ireland could be British, Irish, or both. It was less a solution than a framework for managing disagreement without bloodshed.

And that, perhaps, is the long arc: from plantation to partition to power-sharing. Land engineered into loyalty. Religion hardened into political identity. Memory ritualised into grievance. Grievance institutionalised into governance. Governance resisted into violence. Violence exhausted into compromise.

History hardens. Families blur.

Memory, and the theatre of symbols

If history is the argument, memory is the costume in which it appears on stage.

In Ireland — and perhaps nowhere more intensely than in the North — the past does not lie quietly in archives. It walks. It marches. It drums. Specifically, the Lambeg drum is a large traditionally orange-painted drum, beaten with curved malacca canes brought out for  Unionist and the Orange Order’s street parades. Along with the bagpipes, it is one of the loudest acoustic instruments in the world, frequently reaching over 120 dB. Named for the village of  Lambeg it is commonly believed to have come to Ulster with the English settlers orvekse with the army of William of Orange during the Williamite war. Having its roots in 17th-century European military instruments, it was originally smaller. Traditionally it was accompanied by the shrill fife, a small transverse flute similar to the piccolo – and sometimes irreverently referred to as the Audi Orange Flute.

Oliver Cromwell is not merely a seventeenth-century general and dictator; he is a moral shorthand. For Catholics, his name condenses siege, massacre, confiscation – Drogheda and Wexford becoming synecdoche for atrocity itself. “To Hell or to Connacht” may not survive scholarly cross-examination as a verbatim decree, but as memory it requires no footnote. It signals dispossession. It names a wound. Invoke Cromwell and one need not rehearse the details; the symbol carries the freight.

William of Orange – King William III – King Billy – performs a parallel function on the other side of the ledger. Astride his white horse at the Boyne, he is less a Dutch Protestant prince than a guarantor of survival. The Battle of the Boyne (1690) was, in European terms, a minor theatre in a wider war. In Ulster, it became sacrament. Each Twelfth of July, sashes are worn, drums beaten, banners unfurled – if through or adjacent to Catholic areas, so much the better – not to refight the battle but to rehearse belonging and dominion.The Orange Lodge is both fraternal society and mnemonic device. Its rituals keep memory warm. Its parades trace routes that are never neutral, geography turned into catechism.

Thus Oliver Cromwell and King Billy face each other across centuries like bookends of grievance – one representing conquest, the other deliverance –  though each is also more complicated than the emblem allows.

Move forward, and symbolism thickens.

The War of Independence (1919–21) and the Civil War (1922–23) fractured Irish nationalism itself. Partition in 1922 was not only a constitutional arrangement; it was an emotional amputation. For nationalists in the North, the new border confirmed abandonment and unfinished struggle. For unionists, it secured a state in which they would not be submerged. The same act – partition – functioned simultaneously as betrayal and salvation.

Martyrs followed. The executed leaders of 1916. The hunger strikers of 1981, their faces rendered in mural form, eyes large and unsurrendered. Martyrdom, in Ireland, has rarely required embellishment; death itself supplies the poetry. Funerals render it local – masked men in military dress fire shots into the damp airship air. Graves become pilgrimage sites. Names become incantation. Commemoration ceremonies bind past sacrifice to present purpose, as if history were an unfinished sentence demanding completion.

And always, the Protestant marches. The Twelfth of July. Apprentice Boys in Londonderry – a name that changes with  one’s allegiance. Even the name of the city is a declaration. The ancient Derry” gestures toward Gaelic continuity; “Londonderry” toward plantation charter and imperial connection. To choose a word is to choose a side. Language itself becomes boundary wall.

In 1969, the Bogside in Derry turned symbolic geography into lived confrontation. “You Are Now Entering Free Derry” was not merely graffiti; it was a claim to moral and territorial autonomy. The walls and wire that later cut through Belfast –  peace walls, they are called, with a certain exhausted irony –  materialised distrust in concrete and corrugated steel. They were defensive architecture, but also mnemonic devices. Every barrier says: remember.

And then the murals.

On the Falls Road and the Shankill, gable walls became galleries of memory. Masked volunteers with rifles. King Billy crossing the Boyne. Bobby Sands’ thin, resolute face. The Red Hand of Ulster. Palestinian flags in nationalist districts; Israeli flags in loyalist ones – global conflicts borrowed to refract local identity. These images are not random decoration. They are narrative shorthand, pedagogy in paint. Children grow up under them. They learn who they are by the stories on the wall.

Symbolism, of course, simplifies. It flattens ambiguities into heroes and villains, saints and tyrants. Cromwell the monster. King Billy the saviour. The hunger striker the pure martyr. The volunteer the defender of the realm. Real history is messier: Cromwell was brutal and also a product of his century’s ferocities; William’s victory secured Protestant liberties while entrenching Catholic subordination; the independence struggle produced both liberation and internecine slaughter. But symbols do not trade in nuance. They trade in clarity.

Yet the Good Friday Agreement, too, is a symbol – though a quieter one. No horse. No musket. No mural of triumphant death. Its symbolism is procedural: consent, parity of esteem, power-sharing. It offers not a martyr but a mechanism. Its genius is almost anti-theatrical. It asks people to live with ambiguity rather than resolve it in blood.

And so Northern Ireland today remains a place where the past is both curated and contested. Bonfires blaze each July; wreaths are laid each Easter; murals are repainted; walls still stand, though some have gates that open by day. Memory has not faded. It has been domesticated, partially, into ritual rather than riot.

Perhaps that is the final paradox. Symbols once mobilised for war now coexist within a fragile peace. The same banners flutter, but fewer guns answer them. The same songs are sung, but often as heritage rather than summons.

History argues. Memory performs.

And in Ulster –  and in the bloodlines that carry it beyond Ulster — the stage is never entirely dismantled.

What have I now?” said the fine old woman
“What have I now?” this proud old woman did say
“I have four green fields, one of them’s in bondage
In stranger’s hands, that tried to take it from me
But my sons have sons, as brave as were their fathers
My fourth green field will bloom once again” said she
Tommy Makem

Personal Reflection

For me, this is not abstract history. My own lineage embodies that braid: Scottish Protestant migration on one side, Irish Catholic inheritance on the other – far from Belfast or Derry, those threads met in my family; I grew up carrying both memories, the power of both histories.

When I watch film footage or view pictures of Orange parades and civil rights marches, of explosions, street riots and military manoeuvres, of walls and murals, I am not a casual onlooker viewing a “quarrel in a far-away country between people of whom we know nothing”, to borrow Neville Chamberlain’s fateful words. I feel weight of dual inheritance. Scottish Presbyterian settlers on one side, Irish Catholic dispossessed on the other –  both lineages threading through my own family, colliding and entwining in Birmingham, far from the streets of Belfast or Derry.

I grew up knowing these histories not as abstractions but as intimations, as stories that shaped who I was. Though vicariously, I feel the pull of both pasts –  the grievance and the survival, the displacement and the rootedness. Perhaps that is the quiet hope: that memory, with all its violence and ritual, can also be inherited as empathy, that symbols can teach not just fear, but recognition; that families, however braided by history, can live in the space between suffering and reconciliation.

This short history of The Troubles was largely written by an AI language model as an explainer first and foremost, and not as an opinion piece. 

Read more on The Troubles in In That Howling Infinite in Free Derry and the battle of the Bogside: and on Irish history, Mo Ghile Mear – Irish myth and melody, The Boys of Wexford – memory and memoir and O’Donnell Abú – the Red Earl and history in a song 

Dreaming in the night, I saw a land where no man had to fight
Waking in your dawn, I saw you crying in the morning light
Lying where the Falcons fly, they twist and turn all in you e’er blue sky
Living on your western shore, saw summer sunsets asked for more
I stood by your Atlantic sea and I sang a song for Ireland
June and Phil McLough

Postscript … from Blood and Brick … a world of walls

In Belfast, the capital of Northern Ireland, there are imposing walls that have actually stood longer than that in Berlin. Now called the the Peace Walls, they were first erected by the British army in 1969. They were temporary affairs of corrugated iron, as the inter-community conflict solidified and ossified, they were soon extended and upgraded to bricks, steel and concrete. The walls separated predominantly Protestant loyalist and Catholic nationalist enclaves throughout The Troubles, the three decades of bombings, murders, riots and civil-rights protests.

Though not all linked, 38 kilometres of walls still slice through the city, outliving the conflict that engendered them. Only some short sections have been removed – partly they’ve become a tourist attraction, while the communities that live closest to them say they still provide a sense of security – though tensions may have eased, people are easily divided and it’s much harder to bring them together again. In the Shankill and Falls roads area of western Belfast, which were particularly notorious during The Troubles, the wall is splattered with political messaging, which makes it easy to know which side you’re on. One side has portraits of British soldiers and the queen and kerbs are painted red, white and blue. On the other the colours of the Irish flag predominate, framing portraits of Republican heroes and hunger-strike martyrs.

Belfast’s Peace Wall

Blood and Brick … a world of walls

A forgotten Anzac story in Greece’s bloody history

Paul Hemphill Leave a comment

A king sate on the rocky brow
Which looks o’er sea-born Salamis;
And ships, by thousands, lay below,
And men in nations—all were his!
He counted them at break of day – 
And when the sun set, where were they?
Lord Byron, Don Juan

Christopher Allen, The Australian’s art critic, writes of how Greece’s antiquity presses in on the present. It is a lightweight piece, surveying as it does three millennia of history, from the days of the Greeks, Alexander, the Great and the Romans to those of the Ottomans and their successor states –  but it is elucidating nonetheless.

It is a brief reminder of the veracity of the phrase “history is always with us”, and of how the past continues to shape the present through its influence on culture, human nature, and ongoing events – a constant guide, providing both cautionary tales and inspiration for the future, as we carry our history with us in our identities, cultures, societies and recurring patterns of behaviour. As author and activist James Baldwin is attributed to have said, “History is not the past. It is the present. We carry our history with us. We are our history”.

Greece has always lived a double life. To the casual visitor, it is a sun-splashed idyll of sea and sky, but its history tells a darker story – a long, hard ledger of heroes and horrors, and the stubborn will to survive wedged between warring empires. The last two and a half millennia have been less a tranquil Mediterranean tableau than a parade of conquerors, liberators, and the occasional poet-adventurer.

Over time, Greece has drawn to its shores soldiers and adventurers, poets and dreamers – and naive youths like myself. I hitch-hiked down from what was then Yugoslav in the summer of 1970, a young man with a second-hand rucksack and followed the looping Adriatic highway from Thessaloniki and Athens. I knew enough history to feel the charge of passing near Thermopylae, where Spartans once made their famous last stand against the might of Xerxes. But I wasn’t to learn until over half a century later that an army of ANZACs battled overwhelming odds just a valley away.

The past, in Greece, as in the Middle East, always stands just offstage, awaiting its cue and refusing to stay politely within its own century. It is not merely one of the world’s most benevolent postcards; it is a crossroads of empires, a battleground of ambitions, a cavalcade of famous names and places, where East and West have met, mingled, clashed, and sometimes embraced in the long swirl of history, where the mythic and the modern travel together.

One particular reference also reminds me of how history sends out roots, twigs and branches throughout the settled and hence recorded world.

Tempe, on Sydney’s Cooks River, wears its classical inheritance more openly than most Sydney suburbs. When Alexander Brodie Spark built Tempe House in the 1830s, he christened the estate after the Vale of Tempe in northern Greece – a narrow, ten-kilometre gorge carved by the Pineiós River as it threads between Olympus and Ossa. The poets imagined Poseidon’s trident had cleft the mountains to make it; Apollo and the Muses strolled beneath its laurels; sacred branches were cut there for Delphi. Spark, standing between his own modest “Mount Olympus” and the river, saw a faint echo of the Greek idyll and gave the place its name.

But the Vale of Tempe was never entirely pastoral. Armies have squeezed through that narrow defile for millennia. The Persians marched through it on their way south – Tempe lies just north of the iconic pass of Thermopylae, part of the same chain of passes that determined so much of Greek military history. And in the twentieth century it would again become a stage for outsiders in uniform.

In April 1941 Australian and New Zealand troops, together with British units, were thrown into Greece as Lustre Force – outnumbered, outgunned, and facing a German army with air superiority and modern communications. One of the hardest-fought delaying actions took place – inevitably, given the geography – at Tempe Gorge on 18 April (the featured image of this post, from the collection of the Australian War Museum). The Australian brigade was commanded by Brigadier A.S. Allen, who had formed the first battalion of the new AIF. His “Anzac Force” (apparently the last operational use of that designation) held the gorge long enough to impede the German advance and allow wider Allied withdrawals. The serene valley Spark had sentimentalised became, for a few violent hours, an Anzac bottleneck: those same narrow walls that once sheltered shrines now channelling rifle fire and Stuka attacks. Many of those men would soon find themselves on Crete, resisting the first large-scale parachute assault in military history.

And then – because Australia never resists a touch of Mediterranean whimsy—the Hellenic (and Hellenistic) echoes continue in our own neighbourhood on the Midnorth Coast. Halfway along the road from Bellingen to Coffs Harbour lies the township of Toormina, home to our closest shopping centre and to the Toormi pub. Its name began its life on the slopes of Mount Tauro in Sicily, in the ancient town of Taormina, the site of a famous amphitheater. In the 1980s local Italian residents of who were clients of developer Patrick Hargraves (the late father of a good friend of ours) suggested the name “Taormina” for the new subdivision. He liked the idea but clipped the opening “a” to make it more easily pronounceable- and Toormina entered the Gregory’s and thelocal vernacular.

So in our small corner of New South Wales, Greek myth, Persian marches, Anzac rearguards, and Sicilian nostalgia all whisper from the signposts. Tempe and Toormina: unlikely twins, proof that even the quietest suburb can carry the long shadows of the ancient world.

See also in In That Howling Infinite, Ottoman Redux – an alternative history and The fall of the Ottoman Empire and the birth of Türkiye 

Uncovering a forgotten Anzac story in Greece’s bloody history

From ancient battles to World War II, a visit to Athens’ War Museum exposes the dramatic military history that shaped modern Greece. Christopher Allen’s deeply personal connection unravelled in the process.

Christopher Allen, The Australian, 21 November 2025
James Stuart, View of the Erechtheion, Athens, October 1787. Photo: Royal Academy of Arts, London. Photographer: Prudence Cuming Associates Limited.

James Stuart, View of the Erechtheion, Athens, October 1787. Royal Academy of Arts, London. Photographer. Prudence Cuming Associates Limited.

A little over 200 years ago, the Greeks began their war of independence from the Ottoman Empire, which had conquered most of the Byzantine world in the 15th century; the renaissance in Western Europe thus coincided with the beginning of a new dark age for the Greeks under Turkish oppression. Some islands held out for longer: Rhodes, home of the Knights of St John, was taken in 1522, forcing them to withdraw to Malta; Cyprus, ruled by the French Lusignan dynasty from the time of the Crusades and then by Venice, was brutally conquered in 1571, and Crete, held by Venice since 1205, finally fell after a generation-long siege in 1669.

The Ottoman Empire reached the apogee of its power in the early 18th century, but then began a slow decline, one of whose incidental effects was to make the Greek world more accessible to Western travellers: James Stuart and Nicholas Revett spent time in Athens from 1751 and published their Antiquities of Athens in several volumes in 1762. By the early 19th century, Greece had become part of the itinerary of the Grand Tour; by 1816, the Parthenon Frieze was in the British Museum and profoundly transformed modern understanding of Ancient Greek art.

Meanwhile the Greek War of Independence began with revolts in the Peloponnese in 1821 and a Declaration of Independence in 1822, eliciting a savage response from the Turks and sympathy from intellectuals and the educated public in Western European countries. The slaughter of the population of the island of Chios in 1822 led Eugène Delacroix to paint his famous Massacre at Chios, exhibited in the Salon of 1824 and purchased in the same year for the national collection; it is today in the Louvre. In 1823, the most famous poet of his day, Lord Byron, who had already demonstrated his sympathy for Armenian culture and independence from the Ottomans, went to Greece to help in the fight, both personally and financially.

This 1813 portrait by Phillips depicts Lord Byron, the famous English poet, wearing traditional Albanian attire. It captures his fascination with the Balkans and his travels, marking a moment of cultural exchange in his life. Picture: Alamy

This 1813 portrait by Phillips depicts Lord Byron in traditional Albanian attire. Alamy

Byron’s death in 1824 at Missolonghi only attracted more attention and sympathy to the cause of Greek freedom, and the great powers – Britain, France and Russia – warned the Turks about further repression, even though they were also committed, for different reasons, to maintaining the integrity of the crumbling Ottoman Empire. In 1827, at the Battle of Navarino, an international fleet led by the British and commanded by Sir Edward Codrington destroyed the Turkish and Egyptian navies. After further interventions on land by Russian and French forces, the Ottoman Empire was compelled, by the Treaty of Constantinople in 1832, to accept the independence of mainland Greece, although initially only as far north as the so-called Arta-Volos Line. The north, including Thessaly, Macedonia and Thrace, remained in Ottoman hands and Mustafa Kemal Ataturk was born in the former Byzantine city of Salonika in 1881.

Instability in the Balkan provinces of the Ottoman Empire in the 1870s gave the new Greek nation the opportunity to annex the central region of Thessaly in 1881 (while Britain incidentally acquired Cyprus in 1878). Further important gains were made during the two Balkan Wars (1912-13): much of Epirus in the northwest as well as Salonika and most of southern Macedonia, most of the Aegean Islands and Crete; the British had already ceded the Ionian Islands in 1863 and the Italians would relinquish the Dodecanese after World War II in 1947. Meanwhile, in the aftermath of World War I, Greece had briefly seized eastern Thrace and territories in Anatolia, soon to be retaken by the Turks with immense loss of life in the Great Fire of Smyrna in 1922.

Model of Byzantine warship from the War Museum

Model of Byzantine warship from the War Museum

This is of course a very much simplified version of the extraordinarily complicated story of Balkan politics from the mid-19th century, which forms such an important part of the lead-up to World War I. All of these events were accompanied not only by terrible military casualties on all sides, but by massive disruption to the population of lands where people of different ethnicities and faiths had lived side-by-side for centuries as part of a multiethnic empire, including war crimes and atrocities against civilians and non-combatants. And Greeks who had previously enjoyed political and economic prominence throughout the Ottoman world, including the Phanariots of Constantinople, were first stripped of their privileges, then persecuted and finally expelled in the tragic population exchange of 1923.

All of these events and many more are covered in the exhibits at the Athens War Museum, which I had never visited until a few weeks ago, but which gives a vivid idea of the almost continuous warfare that has been carried on over the past couple of centuries in a land most tourists imagine as a paradise of sea, sun and waterside taverns. The events of the war of liberation, especially as we pass through so many bicentenaries in the current decade, are naturally well represented: there is, for example, a new and interactive display devoted to the sea battle of Navarino and events surrounding this decisive moment in the war.

There are portraits of the many famous leaders of the independence movement in their picturesque costumes, as well as dramatic reimaginings of heroic battles, and of course weapons and equipment of the time. The resonance of the Greek struggle in Western Europe is recalled in a copy of Delacroix’s Massacre at Chios, as well as a version of Thomas Phillips’s portrait of Lord Byron in exotic Albanian costume (1813), of which the original hangs in the British embassy at Athens; another replica by the artist himself, but only of the head and shoulders, is in the National Portrait Gallery in London.

Eugène Delacroix, The Massacre at Chios

But there is much more about the history of Greece in Antiquity, and the chronological arrangement of the displays makes this an effective way to follow the sequence of events, especially the main episodes of the Persian Wars – with the great battles of Marathon in 490BC and Salamis in 480 – as well as the subsequent conflict between Athens and her quasi-subject states on one side and Sparta and her Peloponnesian allies on the other, known as the Peloponnesian War.

This disastrous war (431-404 BC) was followed in the second half of the fourth century by the rise of Philip of Macedon to hegemony, for the first time, over almost all of mainland Greece. After his assassination in 336, his young son, who became Alexander the Great, embarked on a spectacular campaign that led to the conquest of the whole of the vast Persian empire, from Egypt to what are now Afghanistan and Pakistan. Alexander’s conquests led to the extension of Greek language and civilisation deep into Asia, creating the international culture of the Hellenistic period, characterised among other things by a rich and complex exchange of ideas and forms between East and West.

He left an indelible impression on all the lands he conquered and is, for example, the first historical figure in the Persian national epic, the Shahname. By the time of Ferdowsi, who composed this masterpiece a millennium ago, the Persians had forgotten about the Achaemenid dynasty that first created the Persian empire in the sixth century BC; even the great site of Persepolis was and still is called Takht-e Jamshid, the throne of Jamshid, one of the mythical rulers from the great epic.

Each of Alexander’s battles – he is one of the handful of great generals never to have been defeated – is illustrated in clear diagrams, but they are also recalled in later images, in this case particularly in a series of 17th-century engravings whose story is probably unknown to almost all visitors to the museum. These are reproductions of gigantic paintings made as cartoons for tapestries commissioned by the young Louis XIV in the 1660s from Charles Le Brun, who was to become his court painter and who was later responsible for the decorations at Versailles, including the Hall of Mirrors. The series illustrates the valour but also the magnanimity of Alexander, as is clear from the moralising inscriptions attached in the engraved versions. For a long time, the huge canvases were not displayed at the Louvre, but for the last few decades have had their own room upstairs in the Sully wing.

Following the chronological sequence from antiquity we eventually get back to the war of independence and its sequels already mentioned above; but the story continues, after what the Greeks call the Asia Minor Catastrophe of the early 1920s, with a new calamity two decades later. For Mussolini invaded Greece in October 1940 expecting, like Putin in Ukraine, to achieve an easy victory and utterly underestimating the strength and resolve of the Greek army. By the following spring, it was clear that he was getting nowhere, and Hitler decided to come to his rescue by invading Greece in April 1941.

A. Bormans, engraving after Charles Le Brun Alexander and King Porus

A. Bormans, engraving after Charles Le Brun Alexander and King Porus

An Allied army, mostly consisting of Australian and New Zealand troops as well as some British units, was hastily put together and sent from Egypt to Greece as Lustre Force. It was heavily outnumbered by the Germans, who were also massively better equipped and had the benefit of air cover and wireless radio communication. Nonetheless, the Allied army put up a determined resistance in a series of battles including one notable action on April 18, 1941 at Tempe Gorge commanded by my grandfather, then Brigadier AS Allen, who had formed the first battalion of the new AIF and taken our first troops to World War II. The brigade he commanded at Tempe was known as “Anzac Force”, apparently the last use of the term, after the designation Anzac Corps for the whole Australian and NZ component of Lustre Force.

After the evacuation of mainland Greece, my grandfather was sent to fight the Vichy French in Syria, but many of our troops were taken to Crete, where in May 1941 they were faced with the first and only large-scale parachute assault in military history, in which the Germans suffered appalling casualties but ultimately prevailed. Next year will be the 85th anniversary of these dramatic events in Greece and Crete, and among other things will be commemorated by an exhibition of Australian and NZ artists whom I accompanied on a two-week tour of these battlefields in the second half of October.

It was a moving experience to visit what are today the peaceful sites of such desperate battles almost three generations ago, aware at the same time of the long history of warfare in the same lands: the Persians marched through Tempe, which is just north of Thermopylae; Caesar defeated Pompey at Pharsalus (now Farasala), which you pass on the train from Athens to Salonika (now Thessaloniki), and; Cassius and Brutus died at Philippi in Macedonia, defeated by the Caesarian forces of Octavian and Mark Antony.

Christopher Allen is the national art critic for Culture and has been writing in The Australian since 2008. He is an art historian and educator, teaching classical Greek and Latin. He has written an edited several books including Art in Australia and believes that the history of art in this country is often underestimated.

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Answering the call – national service in Britain 1945-63

Paul Hemphill Leave a comment

And I guess that’s why they call it the blues
Time on my hands could be time spent with you
Elton John

My sweetheart is a soldier as handsome as can be
But suddenly they sent him away across the sea
So patiently I waited until his leave was due
Then wrote and said, my darling,
I’ll tell you what to do:
Come to the station, jump from the train
March at the double down lover’s lane
Then in the glen where the roses entwine
Lay down your arms
And surrender to mine
Geoff Downes, John Payne and Gregory Hart

Not long after the unfortunate and former British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak appeared to be pandering to older voters by campaigning to bring back national service for Britain’s youth, an article appeared in the e-zine Unherd entitled “National values … grasping for something that doesn’t exist” by regular columnist Terry Eagleton. He wrote:

“Right-wingers … have a disreputable history of picking on that particular cohort. The young, and not just those of Muslim persuasion, are more likely to question the conventional mores of the time than the middle-aged, which is why they make a lot of conservatives uneasy. Maybe national service will get them to shape up. This is really quite a smart idea from a Tory standpoint, since many of the values which young people in Britain are wary of are military in origin … they are cultural traits rather than basic moral values. Loyalty, team-spirit, toughness, honour, character, valour, austerity, self-discipline, leadership, physical prowess: the nation divides between those like the present monarch who consider these values utterly vital, and those who think they have their origin in a tiny, unrepresentative sector of society (the officer class, public schools, Boy Scouts and so on), and stem ultimately from Britain’s repressive colonial history”.

Sunak’s call triggered some sympathetic martial bugles here DownUnder. There were letters to the editor aplenty in Australian newspapers, including our own Coffs Harbour News of the Area (an actual printed newspaper too). I couldn’t resist writing a response – and it was actually published:

“There’s been a couple of letters recently suggesting that national service would be a suitable panacea for the problems of delinquent youth, and another by Bellingen’s Warren Tindall (an old pal of mine, by the bye) on the “perils of national service”, reminding us that whingeing about the younger generation is timeless and generational. The notion appears to appeal to folk of a certain age who lament the lack of respect, discipline and Australian values (whatever that means) amongst Australian youth – the “knock some sense into them” law and order types who would like disorderly young folk to be “out of sight and out of mind”, and effectively, someone else’s problem. They naively believe that the induction of potentially underage and recalcitrant youths would somehow contribute to our defense manpower shortfalls and bolster our military preparedness. On the contrary, the conscription of unwilling and probably unfit recruits, and the time, effort and money needed to render them of use in any military capacity is are the last things a proficient defense force needs.

In countries culturally and politically unaccustomed to national service, conscription has historically been considered a burden on the forces. In western countries with national service – most notably the Scandinavian and Baltics, and Israel – young people grow up with the expectation of service and the national duty that implies, and are culturally and temperamentally prepared for it by the time they come of age. It is not a military trainer’s job or even skill set to “instil a sense of purpose”, teach “physical and mental coping skills” or “positive career paths” or “train responsible human beings”, whilst “reducing our prison population” seems like something like Vladimir Putin would do”.

All this brings me to British author Richard Vinen’s enthralling book National Service in Britain 1945-1963. It charts the institution’s origins, administration, and social consequences, painting a vivid picture of postwar Britain negotiating the uneasy transition from empire to welfare state, revealing how conscription shaped not only military efficiency but the habits, ambitions, and identities of an entire generation – a cultural imprint whose echoes still surface in debates about civic duty, and national identity.

Reading it a while back, I recalled the promotional video for the Elton John song quoted above with its nostalgic visual narrative of young lovers separated by a call to duty, including footage of young army conscripts and of the early British rock ‘n roll era. I also recalled the BBC serial Lipstick on Your Collar – a particular favourite of mine; A romantic pop song Lay down your arms featured in its finale. [More on Potter’s story below] Both dramatise a decade and more of British social history that few recall today when over two million young men were conscripted to serve in the armed forces for up to two years, and sometimes more, at a critical time in their social, intellectual and emotional development.

We republish below a comprehensive overview by Davenport-Hines But first, here are a some of my own recollections, and themes explored by Vinen that are not covered therein.

A grave new world 

After the Second World War (1939-45), the young men of Britain were called upon to meet new challenges facing the country in a rapidly changing world – the Cold War between the USA and its European allies, and the Soviet Union.

The post-war world was a tenuous time for the old empires. Whilst old King Canute demonstrated his inability to control the tides, when Britain faced emergent and powerful nationalist movements, it sought to reassert its control in de facto colonies as far-flung as Egypt and Palestine, Cyprus and Kenya; and together with France and the Netherlands, actually fought to reclaim and hold on to their “possessions” (a term that reflected a mindset as much as political reality) that had fallen to the Japanese. Portugal, Spain and Belgium likewise fought to prevent their subject peoples breaking loose. Few outposts of empire endure today. 

The decision to repurpose wartime conscription in 1947 was a response to these challenges and also to the threats presented by the Soviet Union and a multitude of communist-inspired and Soviet-nourished national liberation movements. And yet, only a very small proportion of conscripts served overseas – and most who did were stationed in what was then West Germany and isolated and divided Berlin.

To meet the military manpower needs of this grave new world, the National Service, a standardised form of peacetime conscription, was introduced in 1947 for all able-bodied men between the ages of 18 and 21. Nowadays, when all sorts of evasion, dodges, and exceptions are common in society at large, it is hard to imagine a nationwide system in which all were actually deemed eligible, lord or landless, toff or tough, brains or bozo, had to serve. endured and was endured for over a decade; its abolition was announced in 1957 but continued until 1960, and the last conscripts were not demobbed until 1963. Every fortnight some 6,000 youths were conscripted, with a total of 2,301,000 called up over the sixteen years.

And then it was over, not with a bang but with a series of whimpers, stuttering indecisively to a close, leaving few traces on the cultural topography of late twentieth century Britain. Whilst many soon to be famous authors, playwrights, producers and musicians served, only a few wrote of their experiences. Nor did many other conscripts, although Woodfield Publishing carries a range of memoirs by ordinary men who resolved to record their experiences for posterity. The most important films and television programs about National service were comedies. Carry on Sergeant, which appeared in 1958 was the first and the most innocent of the long “carry on“ series. It was filmed at a real army camp.

There was no tangible ‘outcome’ to National service. There was no single conflict that ended in victory or defeat. There were none of the collective events – bonfires, parties, mutinies – that marked the end of the two world wars. It was ‘ending’ almost soon as it began because individual men were demobilized every two weeks. They went back to work – in the tight labor market of 1950s some of them started jobs on the Monday after they were demobilized – and to marriage and families in the dour but brightening fifties. It was not until they retired in the 1990s that most of the former servicemen had much time to reflect on their youth – which is why national service was so little discussed in the three decades after it ended.

Setting a date for the end of conscription was awkward. No one wanted to be the last conscript. There was a danger that the whole system might come to an end in “a most ragged and unsatisfactory manner” if men knew the precise day on which was ceased to operate, especially since as officials recognized, they would not have the resources to track down and prosecute evaders once the machinery of National service had been put into mothballs.

Though the last years of national service were uncomfortable for many conscripts, in someways, they were even worse for regulars particular, particularly for regular officers in the army. The tone of civil-military relations changed. when the first peace time conscripts had been called up, the army still had some of the prestige that went with victory in the second world war and with the military traditions of the Empire …

Those who regarded themselves as defenders of the interest of the army, had implied that peace time. conscription was a burden for the forces and look forward to the day when a well trained well paid and dedicated professionals were combined comprise a lean flexible and hard, hitting army. At least, in the short term this did not happen, and the end of conscription went with an undignified period when middle-aged officers scrambled to hold onto their jobs.

In one sense conscription was just one aspect of a British illusion of great power status, an illusion few people outside Britain, and perhaps a few people outside the British governing classes, believed or cared about

As Vinen reminds us in his enthralling story, the public’s historical memory of the institution imperceptibly faded from the national consciousness once it had ended, once parents no longer fretted about their sons being called up and once young men no longer needed to be anxious about interrupting or postponing careers and higher education. High rates of employment, rising incomes and standards of living during the fifties and early sixties, the attractions of consumerism and new forms of mass entertainment, and the lowering of Cold War tensions with the death of Josef Stalin, gave rise to fresh and less war-like circumstances and expectations.

The end of national service coincided with the beginning of the cultural era now known as the sixties (which actually lasted from about 1963 until about 1973). Changes in British society in the 1960s would have made it increasingly difficult to call men up even if the government wished to do so. It was a time remembered for self-consciously irreverent attitudes towards the British establishment, the class system, the almost casual racism of the past, and indeed history itself. It manifested the in theatrical reviews of the early sixties like Beyond the Fringe and the scatological and iconoclastic Private Eye magazine, and also the so-called youth culture which revolved about fashion and pop music.

In 1964, a year after National Service finally ended, a British band called the Barron Knights recorded an awful parody medley called Call Up The Groups which imagined many popular British groups being conscripted. It was hammy and cringeworthy then and it has not aged well, but when listened to sixty years on, it seems like an irreverent dated relic of Britain’s stuttering “farewell to arms”.

The very last line of Vinen’s book says it all: the culture in which national service existed belongs to a different age. To repurpose LP Hartley’s well used line, the past was another country where people thought and did things differently.

Descent from Glory

As noted in our introduction, present day advocates of conscription – or “national service”, which soothes the sting of compulsion – argue that it would encourage young people to “shape up”, to inculcate in them those treasured values that many of a certain age believe have been lost in the tide of modernity – to reiterate, like patriotism, loyalty, respect, honour, character, valour, leadership, toughness, self-discipline and physical prowess. And yet, the society that existed in those postwar years, and the values it espoused and revered, are long gone. The historical, political, social and cultural conditions that rendered national service universally acceptable no longer exist.

The British Empire had created a political culture that took greatness for granted and victory in the Second World War had reinforced this, even as it eroded the resources with which great power might be supported. The leaders of both political parties shared this culture as did most of the officials who advised them; and during the early years of National Service, most people of all classes accepted the shared obligation to serve, and with the memory of the war years still fresh and the Soviet and communist “threat” manifest, the populace as a whole were onboard with what could be described as official patriotism.

Most national servicemen had grown up in a period when there were no great ideological divisions in Britain. At least they were mostly young and the forces provided them with little in the way of political education. Of the small number who were actually posted overseas, many went without having much idea of what they were being sent to defend, and rarely understood what they were doing. In farflung outposts like Cyprus and Palestine, Kenya and the Far East, they were fighting people with whom they were not at war and often, as in Korea and later, in Egypt, countries that were not British possessions. The army didn’t get down to the politics what it was all about, and some national servicemen appear to have thought about the political significance of their actions at Suez, or in Malaya only years after the event.

Regular Army officers introducing themselves to conscripts would advise to tell them that the British preferred the term national service to conscription, because, to quote Vinen, “that is what it is “a service to the nation, each national serviceman contributes towards giving the nation, strong and efficient army”.  Judged on an international perspective, however, the most striking thing about national service is, that was not actually very national

And yet, the military authorities never tried to instill patriotism.

Often, particularly in new states many ethnicities and religious affiliations and little social cohesion, military service is regarded as a “school of nation” inculcating presumptive national loyalty, values, interests. This was not the intent of the designers of national service. It was not intended to inculcate patriotic feelings. Nor was it really designed to foster manly martial virtues. Service for most conscripts was monotonous and seemingly pointless, whilst stories of bullying and mistreatment were common. One serviceman, Peter Burns, noted in a memoir years later: “In the old phrase, I went in a boy and came out a man, but not a very nice man”. He did not elaborate further.  

It was manpower first and foremost, “boots on the ground” and potentially, on the battlefield – though technological innovation was rendering “serried ranks” redundant. Military authorities, determined to make things easier for themselves, were reluctant to call up, as a War Office report put it “a social group that is poorly integrated in the nation. For example, barrow boys, gypsies, the racing community, Liverpool Irish, foreign communities in London, the Glasgow community from which the gangs are recruited, etcetera … “. Indeed, the forces were probably glad to be rid of some of their potential and actual delinquent conscripts. 

Conscription was never applied in the part of the United Kingdom where the largest number of people was likely not to feel themselves British: Northern Ireland. In Scotland and Wales, there was a small amount of overtly nationalist opposition to fighting for a ‘foreign’ government. more important was the general sense that conscription did not fit with the social structure of either Wales or Scotland. The Welsh dislike of the armed forces, rooted in chapel going respectability, was very different from the antipathy to army discipline that was associated with some working-class Scotsman. Sometimes the single word that aroused most terror in the war office was Glasgow”. 

National service did not create a more homogenous and disciplined society – on the contrary, it worked partly because Britain, mainland Britain at least, was already homogenous and disciplined.

But there were the outliers. As Vinen writes: “Would that substantial group of men of Irish origin living in mainland Britain have been called up during the northern Irish troubles? What would the forces have done about non-white immigrants? Black Britons were not excluded from national service, but given how rare such men were, it is significant that they were quite common amongst those that officers regarded as ‘difficult’. The British army recruited 2000 West Indians in 1960, partly to make the shortfall that sprang from the imminent end of national service. However, the authorities decided that coloured soldiers should not make up more than 2% of the strength of any corps”.

Lipstick on your collar … national service through Potter’s prism

Lipstick on Your Collar is a 1993 British TV serial written by the late socialist playwright Dennis Potter, acclaimed for his television dramas The Singing Detective, Karaoke and Cold Lazarus. He also wrote the brilliant screenplay for the film adaption of Martin Cruz-Smith’s most excellent novel Gorky Park, itself, in my opinion, one of the best ever film adaptations of a novel.

Potter was a national service conscript along with many soon to be well-known British politicians, sportsmen, authors, poets, playwrights and performing artists – including Rolling Stones bass player, former RAF private, Bill Wyman, iconic actor and national treasure Michael Caine, late actors Sean Connery and Michael Gambon, onetime Conservative Party firebrand Michael Heseltine, and the  ‘Angry Young Men’ of letters Allan Sillitoe, John Braine, Arnold Wesker and Joe Orton.

Royal Fusiliers conscripts circa 1952. Maurice Joseph Micklewhite (Michael Caine) is in the back row, fourth from the left.

The story is for the most part set in a British Military Intelligence Office in Whitehall during 1956.  A small group of foreign affairs analysts find their quiet existence is disrupted by the Suez Crisis. A young conscript is completing his national service as a translator of Russian documents, but bored with his job, he passes time in fantasy daydreams in which his very straight colleagues break into contemporary hit songs. The character is portrayed by a young  Ewan McGregor went on to movie fame in Star Wars and other major films. His fellow language clerk is a clumsy Welsh intellectual and admirer Russian poets and playwrights – Pushkin and Chekov in particular- whose academic career has been interrupted by his call up. collar.

The subtext is the conflict between the old order, as represented by the middle-aged and-patriotic regular army officers, the conscripted ‘other ranks’ as portrayed by the two privates, and the new ‘rock ‘n roll’ generation, illustrated her by dance halls, coffee bars, and ‘fifties American popular music.

Denis Potter studied at Ministry of Defence’s Russian Language School. Apparently, those few conscripts who graduated as interpreters and translators were regarded as the crême de la crême of conscripts. Often, trainees would put on concerts of Russian songs and plays for their own amusement. A natural linguist, he’d learned Russian whilst undergoing compulsory national service in the fifties. One such graduate was Tom Springfield, the elder brother of diva Dusty Springfield. He borrowed the melody of The Seeker’s timeless song The Carnival is Over from Stenka Razin a traditional Russian folk tune that told the tale of a drunken seventeenth century Cossack rebel who threw his Persian bride of one night over the side of his boat into the Volga River when his men accused him of going soft. Tom changed the story entirely though he retained a nautical riff and cast the star-crossed lovers as the theatre characters Pierrot and Columbine rather than casting them overboard. See “High above the dawn is waiting” … the unlikely origin of a pop song


Boomers born at the right time

For the sake of this story, let’s jump back to 1945, the year a six year long worldwide war ended. As an early piece in In That Howlng Infinite wrote:

“And what a year that was! With peacetime restored, the British electorate immediately voted out its esteemed and beloved war leader, Winston Churchill, and bought Labour’s promise of a democratic socialism. In his excellent documentary The Spirit of ‘45, film maker Ken Loach describes the nationalisation of public services and industries and their subsequent privatization three decades later. His interviewees provide poignant anecdotes about the poverty of the 1930s, the dangerous and exploitative working conditions, poor housing, and abysmal health care, and the renewed sense of purpose and optimism a the end of the war and Labour’s landslide victory. He recounts the subsequent expansion of the welfare state, with its free to all medical service and the nationalization of significant parts of the British economy, most notably, electricity, the railways, and the mines. The Attlee government was elected due to a general belief that nothing would or could be as it had been before. Britain had pulled together to win the war; now, it would transform the peace.

But for ordinary folk, life in the immediate postwar years wasn’t that rosy. Britain emerged from the war victorious and though brave, physically battered and financially broke, its towns and factories in disrepair, and it’s people coming to terms with a not so brave new world of disappointed expectations and ongoing privation. Rationing, introduced early in the war on most foodstuffs and consumer items, remained in place and was only gradually lifted until its end in 1954.”

If we’re born in forties and early fifties, and look back, to our childhoods or to contemporary photographs and films, there is a patina of austerity and drabness. It was mirrored in how people dressed and in the fashions of the time. During the conflict and long after, clothing and colour were rationed due to the shortage of fabrics and of dyes as industry and manufacturing were directed to “essential industries” contributing to the war effort. This is why images of the time look so monochrome, or when colourized all blacks, browns and greys. Until the technicolor explosion that is now synonymous with the “swinging sixties”, enabled by the invention of new, often synthetic fabrics and an insurrectionist generation of designers, artists, and entrepreneurs.

I was born at the right time in the right place. I missed the Second World War, and arrived to be blessed with the benefits of the National Health Service – launched by Labour health minister Aneurin Bevan on 5th July 1948 – which had had at its heart three core principles: that it met the needs of everyone, that it be free at the point of delivery, and that it be based on clinical need, not ability to pay – and The Education Act , or ‘Butler Act’, of 1944 which promised and then delivered ‘secondary education for all’. I was too young to do National Service in the fifties, and caught the wondrous wave of the sixties in all its freewheeling, rumbustious glory, whilst Harold Wilson kept us potentially eligible conscripts out of America’s Asian war in Vietnam.

When I was a nipper, the Second World War was tangible. I born less than four years after the fighting finished. It was nearer than Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and even Northern Ireland are today. We just called it “The War”. We had family, friends and relations who had lived through it, fought in it, and died in it, as had many of the schoolmasters who taught us. Many wore scars and infirmities from the war, and some bore invisible wounds.

We played war-games on bombed-out “wasteland”. Rationing continued into the fifties, so it constrained our lifestyles. War stories were ubiquitous, on the screen and in print; James Bond had served in the war, as had George Smiley. In the boys’ comics, gallant British Tommies invariably overcame superior numbers of Germans, who were portrayed as mindless automatons and referred to contemptuously as ‘Krauts’ or ‘Jerries’. In the sixties, we built Airfix warplanes, battleships and fighting vehicles.

Conscription was reintroduced in 1948 to maintain what remained of Britain’s imperial dream; young men in uniform were always around whilst older cousins and friends’ big brothers had to do their national service. Little wonder that the war’s echoes reverberated through our imaginations, pastimes and preoccupations.

My own memories of National Service are are just fleeting images of young relatives in army uniforms and of school pals mentioning that their brothers or uncles were doing their bit. To us children, it was relatively unobtrusive and taken for granted. I commenced grammar school in September 1960 at a time when many grammar schools imitated the practise of public schools with a military training outfit called the CCF or Combined Cadet Force. Once a week, toy soldiers would strut about school in khaki attire. Prefects, another practise borrowed from public schools (along with the term “fags” for first and second formers – though none the servile duties immortalised in that fabulous movie If) were naturally officer-cadets. And they would march up and down the square with real guns! No ammo, but. I was already a Boy Scout by then and that was enough of matters martial and patriotic for me. And my Irish folks said “No!”

Whether by design or coincidence, by 1963, conscription and our school CCF were no more. And I did not notice the passing of either.

We were taught and accepted the narrative that wartime prime minister Winston Churchill had promulgated: that the period after the fall of France, when Britain had stood alone against the Axis powers, had been our finest hour and that the eventual defeat of Nazi Germany made all the sacrifices worthwhile. We also accepted His word for his pivotal role in it. “History will be kind to me”, he famously wrote, “for I shall write it”.  And we were inculcated with the values that he fostered and indeed, personified: courage, duty, obedience, self-denial, reticence, restraint – the qualities that had won the war, or at least had enabled Britons to survive it. This is what being a man meant, then. 

The are not values that resonate today. By the beginning of the sixties, “the times were a’changin’”, slowly but surely. Changes in British society in the 1960s would have made it increasingly difficult to call men up even if the government wished to do so. Rising levels of education, and also, of affluence wrought changes in attitudes and ambitions. The fifties gave rise to the phenomenon of “the teenager”, an American concept that took off in drab Britain as rationing came gradually to an end and as life in general took on more colour and excitement – young people were less accepting of authority, discipline, and ageing and anachronistic concepts of Queen and Country – and as the songs at the head if this post illustrate, love was always in the air …

Rather than keeping a stiff upper lip, we are encouraged to show our emotions; rather than keeping it in, we are supposed to let it all out. Like most of us today, I share these modern, peacetime values; yet I retain a respect for the men of my father’s generation. Without them, our lives would have been very different.

The world was much smaller then

In those days, young people did not travel too much, and accordingly, did not move far from their economic and social circles. Vinen notes that schools and later, universities, were for many, the most important gatehouses on the social frontiers. Until then, few folk got close enough to see the middle class or conversely, the working class closeup. The eleven plus was the border crossing where children who’d come through primary school together were filtered off onto different paths.

My recollections concur totally regional differences were less pronounced in primary school where children were drawn from a particular locality, where even Scottish, Welsh and Irish accents were to a degree diluted and normalized by schoolmates. My Roman Catholic primary school in Yardley Wood in south Birmingham was located between middle- and working-class neighbourhoods, the former on the eastern side of Trittiford Road, the latter on the west and south, so we were a socially mixed bunch. But Catholics all. Of Irish parentage, went through primary school without mixing socially with non-Catholics. Secondary schools drawing on a wider yet still local catchment saw more familiarization with differences accents, often of a social character. But it was in tertiary education that young people came into continued contact with contemporaries and teachers from all over the country and even from abroad.

Conscription in the Anglosphere post 1945

The following is a brief overview of postwar conscription in Australia and the United Sates, particularly with reference to its introduction in the light of these countries’ controversial involvement in the Vietnam War. Britain sat this one out – to the great relief of myself and my peers, who were all of conscription age and had no inclination to take part in America’s Asian war – although US President Lyndon B Johnson endeavoured unsuccessfully to strongarm and indeed blackmail British Prime Minister Harold Wilson into committing British troops to the conflict. A more comprehensive overview of conscription in the Eastern and Western blocs during and after the Cold War is provided in an addendum at the end of this post.

Britain had done away with military service in 1963; Belgium did so in 1992. France in 1997 and Germany 2011, between 2004 and 2011, a vast swathe of Europe did away with national service. Only Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Cyprus, Greece, Austria and Switzerland have never abandoned conscription.

In Australia, I’d meet veterans who’d been conscripted for the Vietnam War through the notorious, discriminatory birthday ballot – a method actually rejected by the British government as inequitable, unfair, and contrary to the notion of universal obligation.

It was introduced in April 1964 primarily to meet the challenges if of the Indonesian “confrontasi” and the emerging threats from communism in Asia and Australia’s overseas commitment to Cold War allies. Tensions were increasing between North and South Vietnam by May 1965, and as an ally of the US, Australia agreed to allow national servicemen to be sent overseas to Vietnam.

Australia sent over 60,000 military personnel to Indochina between 1962 and 1972, including large combat units and conscripts under the National Service Scheme. Most 20-year-old Australian men had to register for national service between 1965 and 1972, and 15,300 ‘nashos’ as they were called were conscripted into. More than 200 died and at least 1,200 were wounded on active duty.

Conscription was generally supported by Australians. Polls showed widespread support for the policy. Parents saw it as a way of instilling discipline in their sons, as well as teaching valuable life skills. At the time, the Australian media portrayed conscription in a positive way. Army life and national service were generally praised. The army was not so enthusiastic. Instead, it argued the need for skilled tradesmen and officers and not what it considered a ragtag selection of semi trained men. Public support waned after the first conscripts were killed, stirring the anti-war movement. Australia’s last combat troops came home from Vietnam in March 1972, and the national service scheme ended that December after the election of the Whitlam Labor government.

Like Britain, Canada did not enter the Vietnam War. New Zealand, the last of the ”Five Eyes” allies did, for similar geopolitical reasons to Australia’s.There was domestic opposition, but never on the scale or intensity of Australia’s anti-Vietnam movement. New Zealand’s total deployment was around 3,500 personnel over the whole war, but all of them were volunteers. There was no conscription in NZ and therefore not the same resentment about people being forced into service – major driver of Australian protests. The protest narrative focused on the morality and legitimacy of the war, not the injustice of conscription.

While in both countries, the conservative governments framed Vietnam as part of the Cold War “forward defence” strategy and alliance obligations (SEATO, ANZUS). the scale and visibility of the commitment in NZ were smaller, and the government carefully emphasised the limited nature of the force.

Early in the war, like in Australia, public opinion was more favourable toward involvement, partly due to alliance loyalties and the perception of a communist threat in Asia. Opposition grew in the late 1960s and early 1970s, particularly among students, churches, and parts of the Labour Party –  but large street protests only became common toward the end, especially around 1970–72. There was no equivalent of the huge moratorium marches across the Tasman.  NZ began winding down combat deployments earlier than Australia; the infantry company was withdrawn in late 1971, with only a small training team remaining until 1972. The Labour government elected in 1972 (Norman Kirk) quickly ended remaining involvement. It never became the same national political crisis that it did in Australia, but it did, help cement a more independent foreign policy during the 1970s–80s, culminating in the nuclear-free policy and tensions with the US.

America’s Vietnam conscription experience was combustible and cathartic. Between 1964 and 1973, the U.S. military drafted 2.2 million American men out of an eligible pool of 27 million. All men of draft age (born January 1, 1944, to December 31, 1950) who shared a birthday would be called to serve at once.

Although only 25 percent of the military force in the combat zones were draftees, the system of conscription caused many young American men to volunteer for the armed forces in order to have more of a choice of which division in the military they would serve. While many soldiers did support the war, at least initially, to others the draft seemed like a death sentence: being sent to a war and fight for a cause that they did not believe in. Some sought refuge in college or parental deferments; others intentionally failed aptitude tests or otherwise evaded; thousands fled to Canada; the politically connected sought refuge in the National Guard; and a growing number engaged in direct resistance. Antiwar activists viewed the draft as immoral and the only means for the government to continue the war with fresh soldiers. Ironically, as the draft continued to fuel the war effort, it also intensified the antiwar cause. Although the Selective Service’s deferment system meant that men of lower socioeconomic standing were most likely to be sent to the front lines, no one was completely safe from the draft. Almost every American was either eligible to go to war or knew someone who was.

© Paul Hemphill 2024.  All rights reserved

Global areas of operation for National Servicemen, 1947-63

National Service: Conscription in Britain 1945-1963 

The forgotten history of Britain’s peacetime conscription

Fifty years ago, at the dawn of the cultural revolution of the 60s, there had never been so many ex-soldiers and ex-sailors in British history. Mods and peaceniks were reacting against generations that had been mobilised during two world wars. Yet the militarisation of British society was not just the outcome of war. Under the National Service Act, introduced in 1947, healthy males aged 18 or over were obliged to serve in the armed forces for 18 months. After the outbreak of the Korean war in 1950, the length of service was raised to two years – more onerous than elsewhere in Europe. In practice national service was a catch-all for men born between 1927 and 1939 whose childhoods had already been overcast by economic depression, wartime bombing and evacuation. Although its abolition was announced in 1957, it continued until 1960, and the last conscripts were not demobbed until 1963.

Every fortnight some 6,000 youths were conscripted, with a total of 2,301,000 called up over this period. The army took 1,132,872 and the RAF much of the rest, leaving relatively few sailors. After discharge, conscripts remained on the reserve force for another four years, and were liable to recall in the event of an emergency. Many drilled men became conformist and respectful of authority, but others reacted to their experiences with a lifetime of insubordination and resentment. National service did not cause the upheaval or leave the distressed aftermath of the US draft in the Vietnam war, but the significance of the forgotten militarisation of mid-20th century Britain is enduring.

National Servicemen relax in the NAAFI canteen at Weybourne Camp, April 1954

In an era when it was hard to recruit enough regular soldiers to meet Britain’s commitments in Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Asia, conscripts trained to police regions occupied by the British after the war, to provide a reserve of troops who could be called up in any future major conflict, and they were available for immediate deployment, notably in the decolonisation wars in Malaya, Kenya and Cyprus. Most of them were not yet old enough to vote (voting age was only lowered from 21 to 18 in 1970) and felt disempowered. They had scant pay, and provided a cut-price way for Britain to maintain its illusory great power status. But withdrawing this number of fit youngsters from the economy at a time of labour shortage harmed British post-war reconstruction.

Vinen admits that he could write a whole chapter on a Conservative MP’s claim that he was offered a commission because an officer spotted that he was circumcised and concluded that he must be a public school boy. In turn, a reviewer could write a monograph on Vinen’s book, which is chock-a-block with important themes, provocative ideas, arresting stories, heartbreak and good jokes.

Nowadays we commemorate the launch of the National Health Service as promoting a historically unprecedented mentality whereby a benign state provided its citizens with social benefits rather than treating them as subjects serving the needs of the nation. The National Service Act was the negative counterpart of the NHS, whereby civilians were dragooned into compliance with the demands of the state. Its chief proponent was Field Marshal Montgomery, the posturing bully who was in a permanent panic of denial about his repressed homosexuality, and hoped to use military service to mould national character towards chaste combative virility. For many conscripts their sense of the state was not the benign NHS but the bullying of national service square-bashing.

Generally, though, national service was not intended as an instrument of social discipline. It was disliked not only by antimilitarists and left-wingers, but by middle-of-the-road people because it disrupted the lives of their sons in a period when there was full employment for the working classes. Welsh chapel-going traditions were hostile to conscription. Working-class Scotsmen fought army discipline. As Vinen writes, “Sometimes the single word that aroused most terror in the War Office was ‘Glasgow’.” Regular army officers resented national service, especially during its early years, because the need to train a constantly renewed stream of conscripts was dull, repetitive and diminished “real soldiering”.

The Church of England, unlike the nonconformists and the Catholics, encouraged its clergy to undertake national service. Anglicanism and “manly morality” were promoted together by the military authorities. An army guide of 1947 declared, “the sexual appetite was implanted in man for the lawful use in Wedlock”. Yet Christian morality had minimal influence on the sex lives of conscripts. Rather, says Vinen, national servicemen, as opposed to regular soldiers, believed in “that greatest of all postwar virtues: deferred gratification”. His findings support Claire Langhamer’s wonderful study The English in Love (2013) in showing how strongly young men of the 1950s were romantics who believed in love at first sight, idealised virginity and had sweet dreams of domestic bliss within the institution of marriage. The discomfort and violence of military life, the lack of privacy and the mindless rules imposed without consent produced a generation that cherished intimacy and non-confrontation. Most conscripts came from families where defiance of the law was inconceivable. Yet the armed forces gave innumerable opportunities for non-commissioned officers and clerks to exploit conscripts, pilfer stores and make dodgy deals. Many conscripts learned how to duck and dive, to break rules and subvert authority. One RAF clerk issued instructions that officers must count the number of flies stuck to flypapers at all bases. Such experiences chipped away at the law-abiding, respectful traditions of Britain before peacetime conscription.

Vinen depicts “the hellish chaos of basic training”: its violence, verbal savagery, the dumb misery of military drills, the horrors of bayonet practice. Several young men killed themselves during training – usually by hanging from a lavatory cistern, because “the shithouse” was the only place that gave a moment’s privacy – but suicide statistics seem to have been doctored by officials. Sergeants with booming voices and curling moustaches were fabled figures, but it was corporals who gave the orders in training – many were malevolent, sadistic figures. Vinen gives numerous instances of cruelty, both in training and in combat. These include the massacre in 1948 by a Scots Guards patrol – mainly national servicemen – of 24 Chinese labourers on a Malaysian rubber plantation, killings and mutilations in Kenya and a rampage by troops in Cyprus after two British servicemen’s wives were shot. A serviceman described: “wholesale rape and looting and murder”, including “a 13 year old girl raped and killed in a cage”.

Royal Engineers homeward bound from Suez on the SS ‘Dilwara’, 1954

National Service may prove to be the most original social history book of 2014. It is written with cool, elegant lucidity and there are neither ideological tricks nor obscure jargon. The book is bigger than its ostensible subject, embracing class, masculinity, sexuality, compliance, rebellion, combat atrocities, petty crime, notions of national identity, group solidarity, the fallibility of memory and what it means to be a man.

How National Service introduced in 1949 saw more than two million young men take up military roles 

  • Males aged between 17 and 21 were conscripted between 1949 and 1960
  • Initially recruits had to serve for 18 months, but this was extended to two years
  • Did YOU do National Service? Email harry.s.howard@mailonline.co.uk

Harry Howard, History Correspondent, Daily Mail, 31st August 2023

Between 1949 and 1960, more than two million men aged between 17 and 21 were conscripted into the armed forces as part of National Service.

Among them were acting legend Michael Caine, boxing champion Henry Cooper and former Conservative leadership contender Michael Heseltine.

Only those who failed the medical or who worked in the three ‘essential’ industries of coalmining, farming and the merchant navy were exempt.

This week, Commons Leader and former Defense SecretaryPenny Mordaunt backed a National Service-style scheme that could see every 16-year-old in Britain sign up.

The proposals – mooted by think-tank Onward – would not be compulsory, but youths would have to opt out if they did not want to join. As many as 600,000 youngsters could be involved.

Between 1949 and 1960, more than two million men aged between 17 and 21 were conscripted into the armed forces as part of National Service. Above: Triplets Allan, Brian and Dennis Kirkby (front, left to right) reporting with other recruits at North Frith Barracks, Hampshire, in 1953

Triplets Allan, Brian and Dennis Kirkby (front, left to right) reporting with other recruits at North Frith Barracks, Hampshire, in 1953

Michael Caine (back row, fourth from left) was among the men who were called up. He served in the Royal Fusiliers from from April 1952 and ended up fighting in the Korean War

Michael Caine (back row, fourth from left) was among the men who were called up. He served in the Royal Fusiliers from from April 1952 and ended up fighting in the Korean War
National Service was deemed necessary in part because of Britain’s military commitments abroad.
The British Empire – although diminishing – still existed and both Germany and Japan were still occupied following the end of the Second World War.

Ministers also wanted to re-establish British influence in the world, including in the Middle East.

Further manpower demands were imposed by the Cold War with the Soviet Union, whilst Indian independence in 1947 meant Britain no longer had the huge Indian Army to call upon.

Those who were conscripted as part of National Service would have to sleep 20 to a room in ramshackle barracks, with little heating, primitive toilets and poor washing facilities.

They would be woken at 5.30am and spent hours marching on the parade ground, with afternoons taken up by field or rifle training, ten-mile runs and obstacle courses.

Recruits spent their evenings cleaning the barracks, their kit and their rifles in a routine that was known as ‘the bull’.

Former boxing champion Sir Henry Cooper (pictured left with his twin brother George), who died in 2011, spent two years in the Army after representing Great Britain at the 1952 Olympic Games in Helsinki

Former boxing champion Sir Henry Cooper (pictured left with his twin brother George), who died in 2011, spent two years in the Army after representing Great Britain at the 1952 Olympic Games

Sir Henry Cooper (left) is seen on a training jog with other recruits during his National Service

Sir Henry Cooper (left) is seen on a training jog with other recruits during his National Service

Former Conservative minister Michael Heseltine, 90, was called up for National Service but served for just nine months before obtaining leave to stand as a Tory candidate in the 1959 election. Above: Lord Heseltine (middle row, fifth from right) with fellow conscripts at Caterham Guards Depot in 1959

Former Conservative minister Michael Heseltine, was called up but served for just nine months before obtaining leave to stand as a Tory candidate in the 1959 election: (middle row, fifth from right) with fellow conscripts at Caterham Guards Depot in 1959

National Service conscripts are seen at a depot in Kingston upon Thames in 1953

Conscripts are seen at a depot in Kingston upon Thames in 1953
National Servicemen at a depot in Kingston upon Thames enjoy a smoke as a comrade examines his rifle in 1953

National Servicemen at a depot in Kingston upon Thames enjoy a smoke as a comrade examines his rifle in 1953

National Servicemen are seen marching at a depot in Kingston upon Thames

National Servicemen are seen marching at a depot in Kingston upon Thames

National Servicemen are seen training with the Royal Air Force at RAF Booker in Buckinghamshire in 1951

National Servicemen training with the Royal Air Force at RAF Booker in Buckinghamshire in 1951

Punishments for any slip in standards included being confined to barracks, washing latrines or peeling potatoes.

Recruits also had little chance to see their families. They were given just 14 days’ leave for every eight months of service.

Basic pay in 1949 was 28 shillings (£1.40) a week, much less than the average weekly wage of around £8.

But the men still had to buy all their own razor blades, shaving soap, boot polish, haircuts, dusters and Brasso for polishing any buckles and badges.

If any kit was lost, recruits would have to pay for it twice. Once to replace it and once as a fine.

After finishing basic training, conscripts were posted to regiments both at home and abroad. Overseas postings included Germany, Cyprus and the Middle East.

Other National Servicemen who went on to become household names include Oliver Reed, Tony Hancock, and Bill Wyman of the Rolling Stones

Around 125,000 National Servicemen were deployed to war zones such as the conflict in Korea and 395 lost their lives in combat.

Others saw action in Malaya and during the Suez Crisis in 1956.

Although for some the experience of serving was a negative one, many National Service veterans look back fondly on the period.

They often formed bonds that have stayed with them ever since.

During his stint in the Royal Fusiliers, which began in 1952, Sir Michael, now 90, served in the Korean War.

He recalled his experiences in an interview with the Daily Mail in 1987.

Commenting on the tactics employed by the enemy, he told of ‘attack after attack, you would find their bodies in groups of four’.

‘We heard them talking and we knew they had sussed us…Our officer shouted run and by chance we ran towards the Chinese. Which is what saved us; in the dark we lost each other,’ he added.

Lord Heseltine, 90, served for just nine months before obtaining leave to stand as a Tory candidate in the 1959 election and then getting his solicitor to persuade the War Office that he did not need to return to the barracks.

Sir Bobby, 85, combined his football career at Manchester United with a stint in the Army in the mid 1950s.

He served with the Royal Army Ordnance Corps in Shrewsbury, meaning he could still play football at the weekend.

Former boxing champion Sir Henry Cooper, who died in 2011, spent two years in the Army after representing Great Britain at the 1952 Olympic Games in Helsinki.

Eighteen-year-old conscripts on parade at the Royal West Kent Depot in Maidstone, Kent, having been called up for National Service, November 195

Eighteen-year-old conscripts on parade at the Royal West Kent Depot , November 1955

Teenagers conscripted for national service line up at the Royal West Kent Depot in Maidstone for their inoculations in November 1954

Teenagers line up at the Royal West Kent Depot in Maidstone forinoculations in November 1954

Major General Sir Reginald Laurence Scoones of the British Army takes the salute at the passing-out parade of 32 National Service and regular recruits from the depot of the Royal Fusiliers (City of London Regiment) at the Tower of London, October 17, 1958

Major General Sir Reginald Laurence Scoones of the British Army takes the salute at the passing-out parade of 32 National Service and regular recruits from the depot of the Royal Fusiliers (City of London Regiment) at the Tower of London, October 17, 1958

National Service recruits who have entered the Army are seen lined up in 1952

National Service recruits  lined up in 1952

He joined up with his twin brother George. Recalling his first day, Sir Henry previously said: ‘Well, it’s all a bit nerve-wracking because we didn’t know what to expect.

‘We went to Blackdown where we did our basic training.

‘We had to have medicals, strip off in front of doctors, put our arms up and they stuck a needle, one in our shoulder, one in our arm, and we wondered what was going on.’

He added: ‘They were hard on you in those days. Thank God we were a little bit better than a lot of the ordinary guys.

‘We were very fit because we’d been training as amateur boxers so the physical fitness side didn’t bother us at all.’

Sir Henry was crowned Army Boxing Association champion two years’ running and went on to win the Imperial Services Boxing Association title.

In the late 1950s it was decided to bring National Service to an end, in part because of the burden it placed on the Army and the fact that workers were being drained from the economy.

Rifleman E Akid showing National Service recruits a captured Korean flag at the Royal Ulster Rifles Depot in Ballymena, County Antrim, Northern Ireland

Rifleman E Akid showing National Service recruits a captured Korean flag at the Royal Ulster Rifles Depot in Ballymena, County Antrim, Northern Ireland

Yorkshiremen are seen in 1956 posing for a group photo before they entered the armed forces for their National Service

Yorkshiremen a posing for a group photo before they entered the armed forces 1955
A group of national servicemen in the canteen at their barracks, November 1954

A group of national servicemen in the canteen at their barracks, November 1954

Swansea Town and Wales international footballer Cliff Jones serving his National Service at with the Kings Troop Royal Horse Artillery regiment of the British Army. Here he is having his rifle inspected at the St John's Wood barracks, October 14, 1957

Swansea Town and Wales international footballer Cliff Jones serving his National Service at with the Kings Troop Royal Horse Artillery regiment of the British Army. Here he is having his rifle inspected at the St John’s Wood barracks, October 14, 1957

Recruits are seen taking part in an assault course in 1955 after being called up for National Service

Recruits taking part in an assault course in 1955

The last recruits entered the armed forces in November 1960, with their service coming to an end in 1963.

The last man to be discharged was Second Lieutenant Richard Vaughan of the Royal Army Pay Corps, who departed on June 14, 1963.

Ms Mordaunt enthusiastically endorsed the blueprint for the new National Service-style scheme yesterday in an article for the Telegraph, saying it would foster the ‘goodwill and community spirit, energy and imagination’ of teens.

She also insisted it could promote ‘good mental health and resilience’ after the upheaval of the Covid crisis.

Addendum – Around the World

Britain 1945–1962

  • Name: National Service (post‑WWII call‑up)
  • Period: Men born from 1927–1939 were called; effective peacetime service formally ran 1947 to 1960 for new call‑ups, with final discharges in 1963 (legal end often cited as 1960–62 depending on measure). (Double‑check exact administrative end dates for your footnote.)
  • Age at call‑up: typically around 18–20 (varied).
  • Length of service: initially 18 months (later raised to 2 years during Korean War era, then cut back to 18 months by the 1950s).
  • Exemptions/deferrals: students, those in reserved occupations, medical unfitness, and conscientious objectors (who faced tribunals and could receive civilian or non‑combatant service).
  • Context: early Cold War, Korean War, decolonisation operations; political consensus for a peacetime force to meet global commitments. Abolished as Britain moved to a smaller professional army and as political pressure mounted against peacetime conscription.

Comparative snapshot: selected Western & allied countries (1945 → present)

Note: “Present” means status as of mid‑2024 unless otherwise noted. Please ask if you want this converted into a formal table with citations.

France

  • Post‑1945 pattern: Mandatory service re‑established after WWII; heavily used during the Indochina and Algerian wars.
  • Length: historically 18–28 months at various times.
  • End/suspension: Standing conscription ended in 1996 (President Chirac suspended the appel). France shifted to a professional army; short mandatory civic training (Journée Défense et Citoyenneté) remains.
  • Notes: Algeria and decolonisation had big effects on French policy and public debate.

Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) / GDR (East Germany)

  • West Germany (FRG): Introduced conscription in 1956 (Bundeswehr). Length and rules changed over decades. Suspended in 2011 (modern Bundeswehr since then volunteer‑based; conscription remains in law but de facto suspended). Alternative civilian service existed.
  • East Germany (GDR): Conscription existed until German reunification in 1990.
  • Notes: Reunification led to integration and later suspension in unified Germany.

Italy

  • Post‑1945: Universal conscription throughout Cold War.
  • End/suspension: 2005 (Italy moved to an all‑volunteer force).
  • Notes: Length and structure varied; alternative civilian service for conscientious objectors established in the 1970s.

Spain

  • Post‑Franco transition: Conscription continued during Francoist era and into the transition.
  • End/suspension: Abolished in the early 2000s (commonly cited as 2001), moving to a professional force.

Netherlands

  • Post‑1945: Conscription kept for Cold War.
  • Status: Compulsory service suspended in 1996 (military became professional; registration obligations remain in law).
  • Notes: Like many NATO states, transitioned in the 1990s.

Sweden

  • Post‑1945: Long tradition of universal conscription.
  • Suspension and reintroduction: Suspended in 2010, reintroduced in 2017 (partial, gender‑neutral selective conscription) in response to regional security concerns.
  • Notes: Good example of 21st‑century reintroduction.

Norway

  • Status: Conscription continued after WWII and remains active; Norway extended recruitment to women (practical gender‑neutral service).
  • Notes: Nordic model with broad reserve obligations.

Finland

  • Status: Conscription has been continuous since WWII and remains active; long service and comprehensive reserves are central to defence doctrine.
  • Notes: Key example of a small state with universal conscription for territorial defence.

Switzerland

  • Status: Active conscription for men with militia model; long tradition dating well before 1945 and continuing to present.
  • Notes: Extensive reserve system; alternative service exists.

Greece

  • Status: Conscription has persisted; length and requirements have varied but it remains active (security focus with Turkey as contextual factor).
  • Notes: Frequently among the longer service lengths in Europe.

Turkey

  • Status: Mandatory military service continues; important political and social role.
  • Notes: One of the larger countries with longstanding conscription.

Israel

  • Status: Conscription active and central to society (included here though not in “Western Europe”).
  • Notes: Universal for men and women; unique labour/defence mix.

United States

  • Post‑1945: Draft (Selective Service) used during Korea and Vietnam (peacetime draft active through early 1970s).
  • End/suspension: All‑volunteer force established in 1973; Selective Service registration remains mandatory for men (no draft since 1973).
  • Notes: US is important precedent for transition to volunteerism.

Canada

  • Post‑1945: Canada did not maintain peacetime conscription after WWII (it had conscription in WWII and limited measures in WWI). No peacetime universal conscription for most of the Cold War.
  • Notes: Canada used volunteers and reserves; National Service not used after WWII.

Australia

  • Pattern: Australia used selective/periodic national service schemes post‑1945: e.g. conscription for Korean War era? (there were early 1950s programmes) and notably 1964–1972 conscription for the Vietnam War (National Service Scheme) — abolished in 1972.
  • Status today: All‑volunteer force.
  • Notes: Australia shows intermittent use tied to specific conflicts and governments.

New Zealand

  • New Zealand’s post-1945 conscription story is short and quite different from Britain’s or Australia’s. Compulsory military training (CMT) existed during the war; at the end of WWII, conscription was wound down but not entirely abandoned.
  • In 1949, New Zealand reintroduced Compulsory Military Training for men aged 18–26. This wasn’t the same as Britain’s two-year full-time National Service — instead, recruits did a few months’ full-time training (initially 14 weeks), followed by years in the reserves with annual camps. New Zealand’s 1949–1958 scheme was short-term training + reserves rather than Britain
  • Korean War period: CMT supplied trained reservists but no direct mass call-up for the Korean front; active service was still voluntary.
  • Abolition: The peacetime CMT scheme was abolished in 1958 by the Labour government (Walter Nash PM), in part due to cost and a belief that a small professional army plus reserves would suffice.
  • Later conscription: No peacetime conscription after 1958. During the Vietnam War, New Zealand’s forces were all-volunteer (unlike Australia’s mixed volunteer/conscription model).
  • Current status: No conscription; military is all-volunteer.

Cross‑cutting themes & political context

  1. Cold War & immediate post‑war security environment — NATO, Warsaw Pact, and decolonisation shaped demand for mass armies in 1940s–1960s.
  2. Colonial wars and conscription politics — France (Indochina/Algeria) and Britain (Malayan Emergency, Suez, later emergencies) faced public controversy and political consequences.
  3. Economic costs vs. professionalisation — By the 1990s many democracies shifted to volunteer forces to improve quality, reduce political resistance, and cut costs; the end of the Cold War accelerated this.
  4. Social effects & demographics — Education deferments, social class effects, and the experience of the working class vs. middle class; conscription often politicised by student movements (e.g., US/Vietnam).
  5. Conscientious objection & alternatives — Growth of legal alternatives, tribunals, civilian service provisions from the 1950s–1980s onward.
  6. Reserves, mobilization policy & territorial defence — Nordic and Swiss models retained conscription because of territorial defence doctrines; small states with perceived existential threats (Finland, Israel, Greece, Turkey) kept universal systems.
  7. Gender & conscription — Mostly male‑only until the 21st century; some states (e.g., Norway) expanded to gender‑neutral service in recent years.
  8. Legal suspension vs. abolition — Some countries (Netherlands, Germany) suspended conscription or kept the law on the books; others formally abolished it.

The USSR and the Warsaw Bloc (1945–1991)

The Soviet bloc had a very different conscription story to that of Western democracies, both in duration and in the political role of the draft. Here’s a condensed but detailed overview for the USSR, post-Soviet Russia, and Eastern Europe from 1945 to present:

  • Status: Universal male conscription was a central feature of Soviet defence. It had existed since before WWII and continued uninterrupted until the USSR dissolved in 1991.
  • Length:
    • Immediately after WWII: usually 3 years in the army, longer in the navy.
    • Reduced slightly in the late 1950s–60s (Khrushchev era) to about 2 years army / 3 years navy, which remained the basic Cold War standard.
  • Scope: All able-bodied men aged roughly 18–27; women could be drafted in wartime but were not subject to peacetime call-up.
  • Exemptions: Health grounds, some students (especially in priority fields), certain ethnic minority exemptions in early post-war years.
  • Role:
    • Central to the USSR’s massive standing force, supporting Warsaw Pact commitments.
    • Ideological as well as military — military service was seen as a key Soviet citizenship duty.
  • Notes: Discipline was often harsh, with hazing (dedovshchina) a chronic problem; conscripts served both in domestic garrisons and abroad (e.g., Eastern Europe, Afghanistan).

Post-Soviet Russia (1991–present)

  • 1990s: Conscription continued under the Russian Federation; legal term reduced in the 2000s from 2 years to 1 year (army) under reforms completed around 2008.
  • Exemptions/avoidance: Student deferments remain; draft evasion became common in the 1990s/2000s due to unpopular wars (Chechnya).
  • Current status: Conscription still active (as of 2024); men aged 18–30 serve 1 year. In wartime (e.g., Ukraine 2022–), the Kremlin has also mobilised reservists and in some cases extended service.
  • Differences from USSR: Smaller total force, more reliance on contract soldiers (kontraktniki), but conscription is still a key manpower source.

Eastern Europe – Warsaw Pact members (1945–1991)

  • General pattern: Every Warsaw Pact state maintained conscription for men during the Cold War; service length typically 18–36 months.
  • Common features:
    • Universal or near-universal male service, with medical and limited educational exemptions.
    • Conscripts formed the backbone of armed forces aligned with the USSR.
    • Political indoctrination part of military training.
  • Examples:
    • Poland: 2–3 years service until 1980s; some reductions late in the Cold War.
    • East Germany (GDR): Introduced conscription in 1962 (before that it was nominally voluntary); 18 months army service; alternative service existed from 1964 (construction units for conscientious objectors).
    • Czechoslovakia: 2 years for most of the Cold War; universal male service.
    • Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania: 18–24 months typical; service deeply integrated into socialist “citizen duty” ideology.

Post-1991 – Eastern Europe after communism

Ended or suspended conscription (most NATO-aligned former Warsaw Pact states)

  • Poland: Suspended 2009 (professional force; registration remains).
  • Czech Republic: Suspended 2005.
  • Slovakia: Suspended 2006.
  • Hungary: Suspended 2004.
  • Romania: Suspended 2007.
  • Bulgaria: Suspended 2008.

Retained or reintroduced conscription

  • Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania:
    • Lithuania suspended in 2008, reintroduced in 2015 due to Russian aggression in Ukraine/Crimea.
    • Estonia and Latvia have maintained or reintroduced forms of conscription (Latvia restarted in 2023).
  • Belarus: Maintained continuous conscription (close Russian ally).
  • Ukraine: Maintained conscription post-1991; partially suspended in 2013, reinstated in 2014 after Crimea; now fully mobilised for war.

Key contrasts with Western Europe/Britain

  • Longevity: USSR and its satellites kept conscription far longer, with no 1960s/70s abolition wave seen in Western Europe.
  • Purpose: In the East, conscription was linked not just to military manpower but to political indoctrination and socialist identity.
  • Transition after 1991: Most former Warsaw Pact states that joined NATO abolished conscription by the late 2000s, while Russia and some post-Soviet states retained it.
  • Resurgence: Some Eastern states (Baltics, Ukraine) have reintroduced or strengthened conscription due to perceived Russian threat — a trend not mirrored in Western Europe except in Sweden.

Key comparative themes

  1. Duration & timing: Britain’s National Service was a comparatively short post‑war peacetime draft (roughly late‑1940s → early‑1960s) vs. the Soviet bloc’s continuous Cold War conscription and the patchwork Western transition to volunteerism from the 1970s–2000s.
  2. Purpose & doctrine: Western shifts towards professional forces were driven by expeditionary/NATO interoperability, cost/quality debates and changing public opinion; Eastern conscription prioritized territorial mass, political control and bloc commitments.
  3. Colonial/operational effects: Colonial wars (France, Britain) made conscription politically salient; in contrast, Moscow used conscripts for garrisoning client states.
  4. Political contestation & social impact: Student movements, anti‑war activism (Vietnam, Algeria, late‑1960s), and changing labour/economic expectations shaped abolitionist pressure in the West; in the East, conscription was harder to contest publicly under single‑party regimes.
  5. Resurgence & selective reintroduction: Recent security shocks (Russia’s actions 2014–present) have prompted reintroduction or reinforcement of conscription in parts of Eastern Europe; Sweden’s 2017 reintroduction demonstrates the flexible, security‑driven character of modern conscription policy.
  6. Legal suspension vs formal abolition: Some countries suspended conscription (kept the law on the books) while others formally abolished it — an important distinction when discussing future reintroduction.

The Night of Power – Robert Fisk’s bitter epilogue

Paul Hemphill 5 Comments

“All wars come to an end and that’s where history restarts”

“History stretches out into the future as well as the past”

“All wars may end in negotiations, but not all negotiations end wars”

The indefatigable British journalist, author, and longtime Beirut resident Robert Fisk Robert Fisk died of a stroke in St Vincent’s Hospital, Dublin, on October 30, 2020. He was 75. Fearless and inquisitive, often iconoclastic and controversial, “Mister Robert,” as he was known from Algeria to Afghanistan, was one of the finest journalists of his generation—the greatest reporter on the modern Middle East. There is probably no better body of work for understanding the region. Respected and reviled in equal measure by left and right alike, Fisk spoke truth to power for more than half a century.

He was obsessive, he was angry, and – having read many of his books – I believe he suffered from undiagnosed PTSD throughout his career in the Middle East. His lifelong obsessions were the arrogance and misuse of power, the lies and impunity of the rulers: presidents and prime ministers, kings and emirs, dictators and theocrats, torturers and murderers. And always the countless innocents who endured and suffered, dying in their tens – and tens – of thousands on the altar of power and greed.

The Night of Power 

His last book, The Night of Power: The Betrayal of the Middle East, published posthumously in 2023, takes up where his monumental The Great War for Civilisation (2005) ended—with the contrived U.S.-British-Australian invasion of Iraq. The Great War for Civilisation was a tombstone of a book, literally and figuratively, as was its predecessor Pity the Nation (1990), his definitive history of the Lebanese civil war.

The Night of Power  is no less harrowing, covering the occupation of Iraq, the 2006 Israel–Lebanon war, the Arab Spring, the rise of Egypt’s new pharaoh Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, the lonely death of Mohammed Morsi, Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and seize of Gaza, and the Syrian civil war. It ranges widely – but its coherence lies in Fisk’s unrelenting theme: the cycle of war, the corruption of power, and the persistence of memory. To read it is to feel Fisk’s own cynicism, sadness and anger.

The title is deeply symbolic. In Islamic tradition, Laylat al-Qadr, the Night of Power, is the night the Qur’an was first revealed to the Prophet Muhammad: “The Night of Power is better than a thousand months … Peace it is, until the rising of the dawn” (Qur’an 97). It is a night of blessing beyond measure, greater than a lifetime of devotion. The title is bitterly ironic: the “night of power” he recounts is one of betrayal, cruelty, and endless war.

It is both a summation of his life’s work and a testament to his method. Over four decades, Fisk was a witness to almost every major conflict in the Middle East — Lebanon, Iran, Iraq, Palestine, Algeria, Afghanistan, Syria, Egypt — and the wars of the Yugoslav succession. His dispatches carried both forensic detail and moral outrage. This last work, published in the year of his death, is less a memoir than a vast chronicle of empire, war, betrayal, and resistance.

Fisk had long insisted that reporters must “be on the side of those who suffer.” He was no neutral stenographer of official sources. He distrusted governments – Western and Arab alike – and prized first hand testimony, walking the ruins, speaking to survivors, writing down the words of the powerless. The Night of Power continues in this vein, but with a sharpened sense of history. Fisk threads together centuries of conquest and resistance, showing how imperial arrogance, local despotism, and religious zealotry have conspired to devastate the region.

The last two paragraphs Robert Fisk wrote before his death, closing The Night of Power, cut like a blade through the pieties of Western journalism:

“Failure to distinguish between absolute evil, semi-evil, corruption, cynicism and hubris produced strange mirages. Regimes which we favoured always possessed ‘crack’ army divisions, ‘elite’ security units, and were sustained by fatherly and much revered ruling families. Regimes we wished to destroy were equipped with third-rate troops, mutineers, defectors, corrupt cops, and blinded by ruling families. Egypt with its political prisoners, its police torture and fake elections, was a tourist paradise. Syria with its political prisoners, police torture and fake elections, would like to be. Iran, with its political prisoners, police torture and fake elections was not — and did not wish to — be a tourist paradise.” (p. 533)

In the end, according to those closest to him, including his wife Nelofer Pazira-Fisk, an award-winning Afghan-Canadian author, journalist and filmmaker, who edited the book and wrote its final chapter, Fisk despaired. He feared that nothing he had written over four decades had made any difference – that things had, in fact, grown worse. As Kent says to the blinded King Lear, “All is cheerless, dark, and deadly”.

And yet the worst was arguably still to come: the chaotic retreat of America and its allies from Afghanistan and the Taliban’s reimposition of rule, including the literal silencing of women’s voices; Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and its murderous war of attrition that has now passed its thousandth day; Hamas’s atrocity of October 7, 2023, Israel’s biblical-scale revenge, and the utter destruction of Gaza; and the latest Israel–Lebanon war that saw the decapitation and emasculation of Hezbollah.

The Legacy of a Fearless Reporter

The Night of Power stands as a testament to Robert Fisk’s fearless journalism and his relentless moral compass. Across decades of war reporting, Fisk bore witness to suffering few dared to confront. He was unflinching in exposing the hypocrisies of Western powers, the brutality of dictators, and the costs of occupation, war, and empire. Yet he also captured the human dimension: the courage, endurance, and resilience of those who suffered, whether in Iraq, Gaza, Egypt, or Syria.

This final work synthesizes Fisk’s signature qualities: exhaustive research, direct engagement with the people whose lives were upended, and an ethical rigor that held both oppressors and complicit outsiders accountable. The Night of Power is not merely a chronicle of events; it is a meditation on power, betrayal, and history itself.

Fisk’s prose, vivid and often lyrical, reminds readers that journalism can be a form of witness — bearing truth against overwhelming odds. Even in despair, he recognized the persistence of human agency, the cycles of history, and the moral imperative to see, to name, and to remember. His death in 2020 marked the end of a career unparalleled in courage and conscience, but his work, particularly this last book, endures as both a warning and a guide for understanding the Middle East and the forces that shape our world.

In reading The Night of Power, one cannot avoid Fisk’s central lesson: history may restart at the end of every war, but the witness to injustice is what shapes the moral memory of humanity. The quotations at the head of this review, indeed, the final words of the book, weary yet resolute, are a fitting epitaph. Fisk saw the world as it was, not as we wished it to be: corrupt, cruel, but always turning, always restarting.

All wars come to an end and that’s where history restarts
Robert Fisk, The Night of Power

Postscript

The final chapter of The Night of Power was written by Fisk’s wife Nelofer Pazira-Fisk, She was based in Beirut for fifteen years working alongside her late husband and reported from Iraq, Afghanistan, Turkey, Egypt and Syria. The following podcast by American war correspondent Chris Hedges, with Fisk’s first wife Lara Marlowe is a worthy tribute .

See also, in In That Howling Infinite The calculus of carnage – the mathematics of Muslim on Muslim mortality 

The following briefly summarizes the main themes of The Night of Power drawing largely upon his own words

Robert Fisk’s Catalogue of Carnage

Hear the cry in the tropic night, should be the cry of love but it’s a cry of fright
Some people never see the light till it shines through bullet holes
Bruce Cockburn, Tropic Moon

Iraq: Catastrophe Foretold

Fisk argued that Iraq’s occupation was fraudulent from the start, brutal in execution, and ferocious in its response to insurgency. The Americans tolerated the inhuman behaviour of their own soldiers, relied on mercenaries and “greedy adventurers,” and mixed Christian religious extremism with an absurd political goal of “remaking the Middle East.” It was “tangled up in a web of political naivety and Christian muscularity”.It was bound, he wrote, to end in catastrophe.

“We were pulling at the threads of the society with no sense of responsibility as occupiers just as we had no serious plans for state reconstruction. Washington never wanted Iraq’s land. Of course the countries resources were a different matter, but its tactics did fit neatly into the prairies of the old West. The tribes could be divided and occupiers would pay less in blood. as long as they chose to stay. One set of tribes were bought off with guns and firewater the other with guns and dollar bills. Serious resistance, however, would invoke “the flaming imperial anger” of all occupation armies.

The rhetoric echoed the 19th century missionary zeal of empire. Western fascination with the Biblical lands was used to justify conquest: as Lieutenant General Stanley Maude told the people of Baghdad in 1917, the Allies wished them to “prosper even as in the past when your ancestors gave to the world Literature, Science, and Art, and when Baghdad city was one of the wonders of the world” (p. 92).

The modern occupation, Fisk observed, was nothing but “the rape of Iraq”. Oil wealth was divided up in a scandal of corruption involving US contractors and Iraqi officials. “The costs were inevitably as dishonest as the lies that created the war … I knew corruption was the cancer of the Arab world but I did not conceive of how occupying Power supposedly delivering Iraqi their long sort freedom could into a mafia and at such breathtaking speed”.

Security became a malignant industry; by 2006 mercenaries accounted for half of Western forces, sucking money out of the country. The food system, 10,000 years old, was destroyed by Paul Bremer’s infamous Order 81, which forbade farmers from saving their own seed. Iraq became a “giant live laboratory for GMO wheat,” its people “the human guinea pigs of the experiment”.

And through it all, a campaign of suicide bombings –  unprecedented in scale –  turned Iraq into the crucible of modern terror. Editors never tried to count them. The figures, Fisk noted, were historically unparalleled.

The trial of Saddam Hussein

The US ambassador to Iraq once claimed she had been “unable to convince Saddam that we would carry through what we warned we would.” Fisk dismissed this as absurd. Saddam, he argued, was well aware of Western threats, but the framing of his trial was designed to obscure deeper truths.

If Saddam had been charged with the chemical massacre at Halabja, defence lawyers could have pointed out that every US administration from 1980 to 1992 was complicit in his crimes. Instead, he was tried for the judicial murder of 148 men from Dujail — heinous, but “trifling in comparison” (p. 92). The great crimes of the Baathist regime — the 1980 invasion of Iran, the suppression of Shia and Kurdish revolts in 1991 — were deemed unworthy of the court’s attention.

Pakistan: Fragile State, Useful Pawn

Fisk’s lens widened to Pakistan, where he recorded with scorn the ISI’s admission that the reality of the state was defined not by American might but by “corrupt and low-grade governance”. A US intelligence officer boasted: “You’re so cheap … we can buy you with a visa, with a visit to the US, even with a dinner.”

This, Fisk suggested, was not just Pakistan but almost every Arab or Muslim state in thrall to Washington: Egypt, Jordan, Syria, the Gulf states under their dictators and kings, even Turkey. He wrote that Osama Bin Laden’s choice to hide in Pakistan embodied a weird symmetry: the man who dreamed of a frontierless caliphate sought refuge in the very sort of corrupt, Western-backed dictatorship he despised.

Rendition: Complicity in Torture

The “war on terror” extended beyond borders. CIA, MI5 and MI6 operatives were deeply involved in rendition. Prisoners were knowingly dispatched to states where torture was inevitable, even fatal. Fisk insisted on repeating this uncomfortable truth: Western democracies had integrated torture into their security architecture.

Israel and Palestine: The Last Colonial War

Fisk was unsparing in his treatment of Israel’s expansion. He rejected any obfuscation: Israel seized the opportunity to consolidate its control with a land grab for the most prominent hilltops and the most fertile property in the West Bank for settlements constructed on land legally owned for generations by Arabs, destroying any chance the Palestinian Arabs could have a viable state let alone a secure one.”). These settlements, he wrote, “would become the focus of the world’s last colonial war.”

He surmised: “Will the Jews of what was Palestine annex the West Bank and turn its inhabitants into voteless guest workers and all of mandate Palestine into an apartheid state? There was a mantra all repeat that only other way to resolve Israeli rule in the West Bank would be a transfer of the Palestinians across the Jordan into the Hashemite kingdom on the other side of the river. In other words, expulsion”

The Wall 

Fisk’s Fisk’s description of the Separation Wall is dramatic and unforgettable: an   “immense fortress wall” which snakes “firstly around Jerusalem but then north and south of the city as far as 12 miles deep into Palestine territory, cutting and escarping its way over the landscape to embrace most of the Jewish colonies … It did deter suicide bombers, but it was also gobbled up more Arab land. In places it is 26 feet or twice the height of the Berlin wall. Ditches, barbed wire, patrol roads and reinforced concrete watchtowers completed this grim travesty of peace. But as the wall grew to 440 miles in length, journalists clung to the language of ‘normalcy’ a ‘barrier’ after all surely is just a pole across the road, at most a police checkpoint, while a ‘fence’ something we might find between gardens or neighbouring fields. So why would we be surprised when Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlisconi, traveling through the massive obstruction outside Bethlehem in February 2010 said that he did not notice it. But visitors to Jerusalem are struck by the wall’s surpassing gray ugliness. Its immensity dwarfed the landscape of low hills and Palestinian villages and crudely humiliated beauty of the original Ottoman walls Churches mosques and synagogues .. Ultimately the wall was found to have put nearly 15% of West Bank land on the Israeli side and disrupted the lives of a third of the Palestine population. It would, the UN discovered, entrap 274,000 Palestinians in enclaves and cut off another 400,000 from their fields, jobs, schools and hospitals. The UN concluded that many would “choose to move out.” Was that the true purpose?“.

Leftwing Israeli journalist Amira Haas, who lives in the West Bank, takes Fisk on a tour of the wall: “Towering 26 feet above us, stern, monstrous in its determination, coiling and snaking between the apartment blocks and skulking in wadis and turning back on itself until you have two walls, one after the other. You shake your head a moment – when suddenly through some miscalculation surely – there is no wall at all but a shopping street or a bare hillside of scrub and rock. And then the splash of red, sloping rooves and pools and trees of the colonies and yes, more walks and barbed wire fences and yet bigger walls. And then, once more the beast itself, guardian of Israel’s colonies: the Wall”.

See also, in In That Howling Infinite, Blood and Brick … a world of walls

Banksy on The Wall. Paul Hemphill, May 2016

Gaza: Junkyard of History

Although Oslo’s creators fantasied that it would become part of the Palestinian state, Gaza’s destiny was isolation. It has been a junkyard of history variously ruled by Christians and Muslims, ruined and rebuilt under the Ottomans, and fought for by the British and Turks in the First World War, and now reduced to a prison state.,

Egypt: A Revolution Betrayed

Mohammed Morsi embodied both hope and tragedy. “An intelligent, honourable, obtuse, arrogant and naïve man”. No visionary, he was “was shambolic, inspiring, occasionally brutal and very arrogant”.  He set off down the road to Egyptian democracy with no constitution no parliament and no right to command his own countries army …set off down the road to democracy “with no constitution, no parliament and no right to command his own country’s army”. And when the end came, as come it must, he could not smell trouble; he did not see what was coming.

In a coup that was not a coup, which former British prime minister Tony Blair called “an awesome manifestation of power”, “the democratically elected president was suspended, the constitution annulled, tekevion stations closed, the usual suspects arrested … Yet President Obama could not bring himself to admit this. He asked the Egyptian military “to return full authority back to a democratically elected civilian government… Through an inclusive and transparent process” without explaining which particular elected civil civilian government he had in mind”.

This was just the beginning. In the six years that followed, Egypt’s executioners and jailers were kept busy. “They hung 179 men, many of them tortured before confessing to murder, bomb attacks or other acts of terrorism”. It was claimed that Al Sisi had returned the country to a Mubarak style dictatorship in the seven years of his own war against the brotherhood between 1990 and 1997. Mubarak’s hangman had executed only 68 Islamists and locked up 15,000. By 2019  Al Sisi had 60,000 political prisoners

To Fisk, this was a sign of fear as much as it was evidence of determination to stamp out terror. Al Sisi had three separate conflict on his hands: his suppression of the brotherhood on the ground that they were themselves violent terrorists, the campaign by Islam extreme groups against Egypt’s minority Christian cops, and most frightening of all the very real al Qaeda and ISIS war against Al Sisi’s own regime. “The prisons of the Middle East, Fisk concluded, were “universities for future jihadi”.

See also, in In That Howling Infinite and Sawt al Hurriya – remembering the Arab Spring

Remember and witness

Silencing the women of the revolution 

The misogyny if the counterrevolution was stark. Fisk wrote: “… if the senior officers wished to prune the branches of the revolution the participation of women was something that could not be tolerated. Why did there suddenly occur without apparent reason a spate of sexual attacks by soldiers that were clearly intended to frighten young women off the street,  revealing a side to the Egyptian military that none of us had recognised. The misogynistic and shocking display of brutality towards women that could not have been the work of a few indisciplined units”. With sexual assaults on women protesters, virginity tests and public humiliation, “heroes of the 1973 war had become molesters”.

The lonesome death of Muhammad Morsi

Morsi would struggle on for years before a series of mass trials would entrap him and his brotherhood colleagues and quite literally exhaust him to death. Morsi’s slow death in solitary confinement was, Fisk insisted, “utterly predictable, truly outrageous and arguably a case of murder”. He was denied treatment, denied family visits, denied a funeral. “To die in a dictator’s prison, or at the hands of a dictator’s security services”, Fisk wrote, “is to be murdered.”

It did not matter, he continued “if it was the solitary confinement, the lack of medical treatment or the isolation, or if Morsi had been broken by the lack of human contact for those whom he loved. “The evidence suggested that Morsi’s death must’ve been much sought after by his jailers, his judges, and the one man in Egypt who could not be contradicted. You don’t have to be tortured with electricity to be murdered”.

Fisk’s description of Morsi’s death is a sad one. “Symbolism becomes all”, he wrote. “The first and last elected president of a country dies in front of his own judges and is denied even a public funeral. The 67-year-old diabetic was speaking to the judges, on trial this time for espionage, when he fainted to the floor. Imagine the response of the judges when he collapsed. To be prepared to sentence a man to the gallows and to witness him meeting his maker earlier than planned must’ve provoked a unique concentration of judicial minds. could they have been surprised groups had complained of Morsi’s treatment for the world media and the world had largely ignored the denunciations. What might have been surprising to his judges was that he managed to talk for five minutes before he departed the jurisdiction forever?”

See also, in In That Howling Infinite, Nowhere Man – the lonesome death of Mohamed Morsi 

Mohammed Morsi in the cage of justice

Russia in the Syrian Cockpit

Regarding Russia’s critical intervention in the Syrian civil war, Fisk wrote:

“We Westerners have a habit of always looking at the Middle East through our own pious cartography, but tip the map 90° and you appreciate how close Syria is to Russia and its Chechen Muslim irredentists. No wonder Moscow watched the rebellion in Syria with the gravest of concern. Quoting Napoleon, who said “if everyone wants to understand the behaviour of a country, one has to look at a map”, my Israeli friend (the late) Uri Avnery wrote that “geography is more important than ideology, however fanatical. Ideology changed with time”.

The Soviet Union, he continued was most ideological country in the 20th century. “It abhorred it predecessor, Tsarist Russia. It would have abhorred its successor, Putin‘s Russia. But Lo and behold – the Tsars, Stalin and Putin conduct more or less the same foreign policy. I wrote that Russia is back in the Middle East. Iran is securing its political semicircle of Tehran, Baghdad Damascus, and Beirut. And if the Arabs – or the Americans – want to involve themselves, they can chat to Putin”.

Yarmouk camp, Damascus. Once the thriving home of Syria’s Palestinian refugees, September 2025

Author’s note

Laylatu al Qadri

لَْيلَُةاْلَقْدِر َخْيٌر ِّمْنأَْل ِف َشْھٍر. َسَلاٌم ِھَي َحَّتى َمْطلَِعاْلَفْجِر
Laylatu alqadri khayrun min alfi shahriin.Salamun hiya hatta matla’i alfajrii
The night of power is better than one thousand months.
(That night is) Peace until the rising of the dawn.
Al Qur’an al Karīm, Surat Al Qadr 97

I first learned about the Quran and The Night of Power in Cairo when I was staying at the home of Haji Abd al Sami al Mahrous a devout Muslim doctor who had cared for me when I had fallen ill. There was a particular beauty and magic about the idea of a night that surpassed all other nights in sacredness. The fascination stayed with me, and when I returned to London and was learning Arabic and studying Middle East politic at SOAS, it inspired a song.

Shape without form, a voice without sound,
He moves in an unseen way;
A night of power, eternal hour,
Peace until the break of day;
The doubter’s dart, the traveller’s chart,
An arrow piercing even to the coldest heart,
A hand surpassing every earthly art,
And shows everyone his own way
Paul Hemphill, Embryo

When Freedom Comes, She Crawls on Broken Glass

In an earlier post in In That Howling Infinite, I wrote:

My song  When Freedom Comes is a tribute to Robert Fisk (1946-2020), indomitable, veteran British journalist and longtime resident of Beirut, who could say without exaggeration “I walk among the conquered, I walk among the dead” in “the battlegrounds and graveyards” of “long forgotten armies and long forgotten wars”. It’s all there, in his grim tombstone of a book, The Great War for Civilization (a book I would highly recommend to anyone wanting to know more about the history of the Middle East in the twentieth century – but it takes stamina – at near in 1,300 pages – and a strong stomach – its stories are harrowing).

The theme, alas, is timeless, and the lyrics, applicable to any of what Rudyard called the “savage wars of peace” being waged all across our planet, yesterday, today and tomorrow – and indeed any life-or-death battle in the name of the illusive phantom of liberty and against those intent on either denying it to us or depriving us of it. “When freedom runs through dogs and guns, and broken glass” could describe Paris and Chicago in 1968 or Kristallnacht in 1938. If it is about any struggle in particular, it is about the Palestinians and their endless, a fruitless yearning for their lost land. Ironically, should this ever be realized, freedom is probably the last thing they will enjoy. They like others before them will be helpless in the face of vested interest, corruption, and brute force, at the mercy of the ‘powers that be’ and the dead hand of history.

The mercenaries and the robber bands, the warlords and the big men, az zu’ama’, are the ones who successfully “storm the palace, seize the crown”. To the victors go the spoils – the people are but pawns in their game.

In 2005, on the occasion of the publication of his book, Fisk addressed a packed auditorium in Sydney’s Macquarie University. Answering a question from the audience regarding the prospects for democracy in the Middle East, he replied:

“Freedom must crawl over broken glass”

When Freedom Comes, She Crawls on Broken Glass 

There goes the freedom fighter,
There blows the dragon’s breath.
There stands the sole survivor;
The time-worn shibboleth.
The zealots’ creed, the bold shahid,
Give me my daily bread
I walk amongst the conquered
I walk amongst the dead
Paul Hemphill, When Freedom Comes

I reference this melancholy state of affairs in man of my songs:

High stand the stars and moon,
And meanwhile, down below,
Towers fall and tyrants fade
Like footprints in the snow.
The bane of bad geography,
The burden of topography.
The lines where they’re not meant to be
Are letters carved in stone.
They’re hollowed of all empathy,
And petrified through history,
A medieval atrophy
Defends a feeble throne.
So order goes, and chaos flows
Across the borderlines,
For nature hates a vacuum,
And in these shifting tides,
Bombs and babies, girls and guns,
Dollars, drugs, and more besides,
Wash like waves on strangers’ shores,
Damnation takes no sides.
Paul Hemphill, E Lucevan Le Stelle

100 years of Mein Kampf … the book that ravaged a continent

Paul Hemphill 1 Comment

Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after,
And the poetry he invented was easy to understand;
He knew human folly like the back of his hand,
And was greatly interested in armies and fleets;
When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter,
And when he cried the little children died in the streets.
W H Auden, Epitaph On A Tyrant (1939)

The English poet W. H. Auden spent some time in Berlin during the early 1930s – the last years of the Weimar Republic prior to the Nazi ascendency –Some commentators suggest that Auden actually wrote Epitaph on a Tyrant in Berlin. But It was published in 1939, the year that the Second World War broke out – and Auden had departed the city before the end of Weimar in 1933. But he was full aware of where the world was heading – during the mid-thirties, he’d briefly journeyed to Republican Spain in the midst of the Civil War and to Kuomintang China during its war with Japan – see In That Howling Infinite’s Journey to a war – Wystan and Christopher’s excellent adventure.

The poem has been interpreted as a very brief study in tyranny, but few could doubt whom Auden had in mind. In this very short poem, Auden turns a familiar phrase from the New Testament in upon itself   evoking and then evicting ‘But Jesus said, Suffer little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me: for of such is the kingdom of heaven’ (Matthew 19:14). There is nothing Christlike about this tyrant: he will not suffer the little children to come unto him. The little children, instead, will be the ones to suffer. he also inverts a specific phrase by the nineteenth-century writer John Lothrop Motley, in The Rise of the Dutch Republic (1859), citing a report of 1584 about the death of the Dutch ruler William the Silent: ‘As long as he lived, he was the guiding star of a whole brave nation, and when he died the little children cried in the streets.’

I recalled the poem, one of the very first of Auden’s poems I encountered nearly sixty years ago, as I was reading the essay republished below written by the most erudite economist and academic Henry Ergas on the occasion  of the centenary of the publication on 16 August 1925, of Mein Kampf  (lit. ‘My Struggle‘), Nazi Party founder and leader Adolf Hitler‘s combined autobiographical reflections and political manifesto, encompassing an uncompromising ideological programme of antisemitism, racial supremacy, and expansionist ambitions.

A century later, the impact of Mein Kampf on the world remains both undeniable and deeply troubling. Initially dismissed by some as the ramblings of a failed revolutionary, the book became the ideological blueprint for the Nazi regime, legitimising policies that culminated in the Holocaust and a world war that claimed tens of millions of lives. Beyond the destruction of the mid-twentieth century, Mein Kampf has endured as a symbol of hate literature, resurfacing periodically in extremist movements, political propaganda, and debates over free speech and censorship. Its centenary compels reflection not only on the book’s historical role in shaping one of the darkest chapters of human history, but also on the persistence of the prejudices and authoritarian impulses it so virulently expressed.

Mein Kampf‘s bitter harvest

The Second World War began on 2nd September 1939 with Germany’s sudden and unprovoked invasion of Poland on 2nd September, and Britain and France’s declaration of war on Germany the day after. On 17 September, the Soviet Union invaded the country from the east in accordance with the Treaty of Non-aggression between Germany and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics,  ,forever known as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. a neutrality pact between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union signed in Moscow on August 23, 1939, by foreign ministers Joachim von Ribbentrop and Vyacheslav Molotov, respectively.

Japan formally entered the war on September 22, 1940 with the invasion of French Indochina, having been at war with China since 1931, and officially formed an alliance with Germany and Italy five days later. The United Kingdom declared war on the Empire of Japan  on 8 December 1941, following the Japanese attacks on British Malaya, Singapore and Hong Kong on the previous day, as well as in response to the bombing of the American fleet at Pearl Harbour on December 7. The United States to enter World War II the following day.

World War II ended in Europe on May 8, 1945, with Germany’s unconditional surrender, known as Victory in Europe Day (V-E Day). The war in the Asia Pacific concluded on September 2, 1945, with Japan’s formal surrender aboard the USS Missouri, designated Victory over Japan Day (V-J Day). This followed the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the Soviet Union’s declaration of war on Japan

The Nazis, with a little help from their allies and collaborators, murdered (there is no other word) an estimated six million Jews and 11 million others In camps and jails, reprisals and roundups, on the streets of cities, towns and villages, in fields and in forests, and in prison cells and torture chambers. And in the fog of war, the dearth of accurate records, and the vagaries of historical memory, the actual number is doubtless higher – much higher.

The term ‘Holocaust’ generally refers to the systematic and industrialized mass murder of the Jewish people in German-occupied Europe – called the Shoah or ‘catastrophe’ by Jews. But the Nazis also murdered unimaginable numbers of non-Jewish people considered subhuman – Untermenschen (the Nazis had a way with words!) – or undesirable.

Non-Jewish victims of Nazism included Slavs who occupied the Reich’s ostensible lebensraum – living space, or more bluntly, land grab (Russians – some seven million – Poles, another two – Ukrainians, Serbs and others in Eastern Europe caught in the Wehrmacht mincer; Roma (gypsies); homosexuals; the mentally or physically disabled, and mentally ill; Soviet POWs who died in their tens of thousands; Roman Catholics, Protestants, and Orthodox Christians who defied the regime; Jehovah’s Witnesses and Freemasons; Muslims; Spanish Republicans who had fled to France after the civil war; people of colour, especially the Afro-German Mischlinge, called “Rhineland Bastards” by Hitler and the Nazi regime; leftists, including communists, trade unionists, social democrats, socialists, and anarchists; capitalists, even, who antagonized the regime; and indeed every minority or dissident not considered Aryan (‘herrenvolk’ or part of the “master race”); French, Belgians, Luxemburgers, Dutch, Danes, Norwegians, Albanians, Yugoslavs, Albanians, and, after 1943, Italians, men, women and young people alike, involved with the resistance movements or simply caught up in reprisals; and anyone else who opposed or disagreed with the Nazi regime. See below, Ina Friedman’s The Other Victims of the Nazis and also, Wikipedia’s Victims of the Holocaust

Worldwide, over seventy million souls perished during World War II. We’ll never know just how many …

Lest we forget …

From In That Howling Infinite’s  2nd September 1939 – the rape of Poland (1)

The immoral mathematics of World War II – Deaths by Country 

COUNTRY MILITARY DEATHS TOTAL CIVILIAN AND MILITARY DEATHS
Albania 30,000 30,200
Australia 39,800 40,500
Austria 261,000 384,700
Belgium 12,100 86,100
Brazil 1,000 2,000
Bulgaria 22,000 25,000
Canada 45,400 45,400
China 3-4,000,000 20,000,000
Czechoslovakia 25,000 345,000
Denmark 2,100 3,200
Dutch East Indies — 3-4,000,000
Estonia — 51,000
Ethiopia 5,000 100,000
Finland 95,000 97,000
France 217,600 567,600
French Indochina — 1-1,500,000
Germany 5,533,000 6,600,000-8,800,000
Greece 20,000-35,000 300,000-800,000
Hungary 300,000 580,000
India 87,000 1,500,000-2,500,000
Italy 301,400 457,000
Japan 2,120,000 2,600,000-3,100,000
Korea — 378,000-473,000
Latvia — 227,000
Lithuania — 353,000
Luxembourg — 2,000
Malaya — 100,000
Netherlands 17,000 301,000
New Zealand 11,900 11,900
Norway 3,000 9,500
Papua New Guinea — 15,000
Philippines 57,000 500,000-1,000,000
Poland 240,000 5,600,000
Rumania 300,000 833,000
Singapore — 50,000
South Africa 11,900 11,900
Soviet Union 8,800,000-10,700,000 24,000,000
United Kingdom 383,600 450,700
United States 416,800 418,500
Yugoslavia 446,000 1,000,000

WORLDWIDE CASUALTIES*

Battle Deaths 15,000,000
Battle Wounded 25,000,000
Civilian Deaths 45,000,000

*Worldwide casualty estimates vary widely in several sources. The number of civilian deaths in China alone might well be more than 50,000,000.

Read also, in In That Howling Infinite: Righteous Among the Nations and Las Treces Rosas – Spain’s Unquiet Graves 

Mein Kampf made depravity the highest form of morality: Hitler’s ‘Nazi bible’ a playbook for hate

Henry Ergas  The Australian, 16 August 2025
A picture-illustration showing Adolf Hitler in Munich in 1932 and his book, Mein Kampf. During WWII Hitler wore a simple uniform rather than the elaborate costume of a supreme commander, highlighting his affinity with the ‘grunts’ on the line. Picture: Heinrich Hoffmann/Archive Photos/Getty Images

A picture-illustration showing Adolf Hitler in Munich in 1932 and his book, Mein Kampf. During WWII Hitler wore a simple uniform rather than the elaborate costume of a supreme commander, highlighting his affinity with the ‘grunts’ on the line. Picture: Heinrich Hoffmann/Archive Photos/Getty Images


When Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf (My Struggle) was published exact­ly 100 years ago, the reviews were scathing. The reader, proclaimed the Frankfurter Zeitung, could draw from the book one conclusion and one conclusion only: that Hitler was finished. The influential Neue Zurcher Zeitung was no kinder, lambasting “the sterile rumination of an agitator who is incapable of rational thought and has lost his grip on reality”. As for Karl Kraus, the great Austrian essayist and critic, he famously dismissed it, quipping: “When I think of Hitler, nothing comes to mind.”

But while the book that would become known as “the Nazi bible” was hardly an immediate bestseller, it was far from being a dismal flop. By the end of 1925, nearly 10,000 copies had been sold, necessitating a second print run, and monthly sales seemed to be trending up. Even more consequentially, Mein Kampf, with its comprehensive elaboration of the Nazi world view, proved instrumental in consolidating Hitler’s until then tenuous position as the leader of the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei  (National Socialist German Workers’ Party) or NSDAP. Both Hitler and Max Amann, who ran the Nazis’ publishing house, had good reason to be pleased.

After all, the initial circumstances of the book’s production were scarcely promising. When Hitler arrived at Landsberg prison in November 1923, following the failure of a farcically mismanaged putsch, he was assessed by the staff psychologist as “hysterical” and suicidal. However, having determined to end it all by embarking on a hunger strike, he sat down to write his valedictory statement – and with the full support of the prison’s director, a Nazi sympathiser who was happy to accommodate his every need, the project soon expanded, until the writing came to consume Hitler’s days.

Once Emil Georg, a director of the powerful Deutsche Bank and generous funder of the NSDAP, provided the aspiring writer with a top-of-the-line Remington typewriter, a writing table and all the stationery he required, Hitler’s new career as an author – the profession he proudly declared on his 1925 tax return – was well and truly under way.

The difficulty, however, was that Hitler wrote very much as he spoke. Page after page required substantial editing, if not complete revision. Some of it was undertaken by Rudolf Hess, who had a university degree, and Ernst Hanfstaengl, a German-American Harvard graduate. But many of the most difficult sections were eventually worked over by the unlikely duo of a music critic, Josef Stolzing-Cerny, and Bernhard Stempfle, a priest.

The greatest tensions arose in settling the title. Hitler, with his habitual grandiloquence, had called it Four and a Half Years of Battling Lies, Stupidity and Betrayal. Convinced that title would doom it to failure, Amann adamantly insisted on, and seems to have devised, a shorter alternative. Thus was Mein Kampf, the name that would go down in history, born.

Mein Kampf’s singular lack of focus proved tobe a strength.

Mein Kampf’s singular lack of focus proved to
be a strength.

Viewed superficially, the text, despite its editors’ best efforts, seems inchoate, veering across a bewildering range of grievances, pseudo-historical accounts and exhortations. Yet its singular lack of focus proved to be a strength. It meant there was something in it for each of the social groups the Nazis were attempting to mobilise, with every one of those groups finding the real or imagined harms that afflicted it covered in its pages. And whenever they were discussed, each group’s darkest nightmares were portrayed in striking, often lurid terms.

Hitler himself explained his approach in the book’s discussion of propaganda.

“Most people,” Hitler said, “are neither professors nor university graduates. They find abstract ideas hard to understand. As a result, any successful propaganda must limit itself to a very few points and to stereotypical formulations that appeal to instincts and feelings, making those abstract ideas vividly comprehensible.”

That is exactly what Mein Kampf set out to do – and it did so by hammering three basic themes: that the Germans were victims; that the culprit for the wrongs they had suffered were the Jews; and that only a fight to the death against “world Jewry” could bring Germany’s redemption and return it to the pre-eminence that was its birthright and historic destiny.

What gave the book its resonance was that each of those themes was well and truly in the air. Nowhere was that clearer than in respect of victimhood.

Thus, the end of World War I had not been viewed in Germany as a military defeat. Rather, the widespread perception, vigorously propagated by General Erich Ludendorff, was that had the German army, which retained undisputed mastery over its home soil, not been “sabotaged” by liberals, freemasons, social democrats and communists, it would have held out, forcing the Allies to a settlement.

Key themes in Mein Kampf was that the Germans were victims and the culprit for the wrongs they had suffered were the Jews.

Key themes in Mein Kampf was that the Germans were victims and the culprit for the wrongs they had suffered were the Jews.

The capitulation was, in other words, the result of a “stab in the back” that treacherously delivered the nation to the harsh, grotesquely unjust, treatment eventually meted out at Versailles by the war’s victors.

Closely associated with the resulting sense of unfairness, and of an undeserved defeat, was the smouldering resentment felt by returning soldiers.

World War I had ushered in the glorification of the rank and file, expressed in countries such as France, Britain and Australia by the erection of national memorials for the Unknown Soldier. Here was a figure that represented both the individual and the mass: sanctified by the nation, the Unknown Soldier also stood for the multitudes sent out to die and too quickly forgotten.

That was the case almost everywhere – but not in the newly established Weimar Republic. Unlike its counterparts, the republic erected no national monument, created no worthy memorial: the ghosts of the dead were left unburied.

Moreover, unable to deal with the trauma of the war, the republic accorded veterans no special status: even when their wounds made them entirely disabled, they were entitled only to the paltry benefits accorded to others suffering from similar levels of disability.

With the country’s new leaders abandoning those who had borne so many risks and so much pain on Germany’s behalf, an unbridgeable cleavage opened up between “those who had been there” – with all of their rage and frustration, fury and disillusionment – and those who had not. It is therefore no accident that both for innumerable forgotten soldiers and for the families who had lost their sons and fathers, Hitler, who had lived through the carnage, came to symbolise the unknown soldier of World War I.

Nor is it an accident that during World War II he always donned a simple uniform rather than the elaborate costume of a supreme commander, thereby highlighting his unshakeable affinity with the “grunts” on the line.

Hitler, chancellor of Germany in 1933, is welcomed by supporters at Nuremberg. Picture: Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Hitler, chancellor of Germany in 1933, is welcomed by supporters at Nuremberg. Picture: Hulton Archive/Getty Images

The last, but perhaps most broadly felt, source of the sense of victimhood was the devastation wreaked by the “great inflation”.

The immediate effect of the price hikes, which began in 1921, accelerated in late 1922 and became a hyperinflation (that is, one involving monthly price increases of more than 50 per cent) in 1923 was to obliterate the savings of skilled workers, pensioners and the middle class. No less important, however, it also shattered those groups’ social standing which, in a society still geared to honour and respectability, relied on the ability to conspicuously maintain a dignified lifestyle appropriate for one’s status. Instead, for the first time in their lives, previously comfortable professionals, foremen and highly trained workers were reduced to a struggle of all against all, as they vainly attempted to sell once prized, often hard-earned assets that had suddenly – and mysteriously – become utterly valueless.

And as well as leaving a legacy of trauma, that experience created an enduring sense of unpredictability, casting the new republic as incapable of maintaining intact even the elementary foundations of daily life.

Stefan Zweig was therefore not exaggerating when he wrote, in his The World of Yesterday, that “nothing ever embittered the German people so much, nothing made them so furious with hate as the inflation. For the war, murderous as it was, had yet yielded hours of jubilation, with ringing of bells and fanfares of victory. And, being an incurably militaristic nation, Germany felt lifted in her pride by her temporary victories. But the inflation served only to make it feel soiled, cheated, and humiliated. A whole, scarred, generation could never forget or forgive.”

But where there are victims there must be victimisers – and Hitler delivered those too. Towering among them were the Jews.

Mein Kampf’s obsession with Jews is readily demonstrated: including cognate terms, such as Jewry, the 466 references to Jews in the book outnumber those to every other substantive term, including race (mentioned 323 times), Germany (306), war (305) and Marxism, which gets a paltry 194 – still ahead of national socialism and national socialists which, taken together, are referenced only 65 times.

It is certainly true that there is, in those obsessive references, virtually nothing original. Hitler’s tir­ades largely reassemble the anti-Semitic tropes that had emerged in the late 19th century and that were widely disseminated in a notorious forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

But Hitler’s formulation, while substantively irrational, was arguably more logical than most in the way it combined and superimposed elements from conventional anti-Semitism, pseudo-biology and social Darwinism.

Mein Kampf’s promise of redemption was crucial … from the midst of despair, a new notion of German glory and greatness began to emerge. Hitler with Nazi officials in Munich in the summer of 1939, just before the start of WWII.

Mein Kampf’s promise of redemption was crucial … from the midst of despair, a new notion of German glory and greatness began to emerge. Hitler with Nazi officials in Munich in the summer of 1939, just before the start of WWII.

Thus, relying on a loose biological metaphor, it defined Jews as a parasite – but as one that had deliberate agency and that consciously (and collectively) sought to infect its victims, notably the “purer”, more advanced “races”.

Second, it asserted that the resulting infection was not only fatal to its victims but ultimately to their entire “race”.

Third, it projected on to that account the image of a Darwinian struggle that had been fought across recorded history’s entire course, between Jews on the one hand and the superior races on the other: a struggle that could end only with the extinction of the Jews or their adversaries.

And finally, it argued that, unless anti-Semites learnt to display the same degree of ruthlessness, the same insistence on ethnic loyalty, the same stealth and the same forms of manipulation of media and the public sphere, the Jews stood every chance of triumphing because they entirely lacked ethical standards, were exceptionally cunning, ambitious, aggressive and vindictive and – last but not least – had a natural bond to each other, combined with a murderous hatred of others.

The resulting portrayal of Jews was as terrifying as it was bizarre. Jews, it seemed, were chameleons, who were both subhuman yet extraordinarily capable, both fanatical Bolsheviks and natural capitalists, both physically repulsive yet immensely able to seduce and “infect” innocent Aryan maidens.

Moreover, they could shift effortlessly and surreptitiously from any one of those myriad shapes into any another, choosing whatever form was most likely to succeed in destroying their opponent.

As the great German philosopher Ernst Cassirer later recalled, he and his other Jewish friends found those claims “so absurd, so ridiculous, and so crazy, that we had trouble taking them seriously”. But others did not have any difficulty in doing so.

Many forces were at work. Some resulted from the war years. For example, the terrible food shortages caused by the British blockade (which was lifted only two years after the war ended) had resulted in spiralling prices for basics on the black market – with the finger being readily, although entirely incorrectly, pointed at alleged hoarding by Jews.

And more indirectly, but no less potently, the horrific second wave of the 1919 influenza pandemic, in which 400,000 Germans died, had given enormous prominence to notions of infection and contagion. As careful statistical studies subsequently showed, that prominence had enduring effects, as the Nazis secured significantly greater electoral support in the worst affected areas than in those where the death toll was lower.

But by far the greatest factor was the profound disruption of the post-war years, when everything Germans had taken as solid melted into thin air, leaving a pervasive feeling of bewilderment.

For all of its myriad flaws, the Kaiserreich, as the German Empire was known, had exuded a stability that made the future predictable. Now, with one seemingly incomprehensible event piling up on top of another, the desperate search to make sense of the world triggered an equally desperate search for someone to blame.

That was precisely what Hitler’s vast Jewish conspiracy offered. Mein Kampf, Heinrich Himmler pithily noted, was “a book that explains everything”. If it was so effective, Hannah Arendt later reflected, it was because its playing on tropes and stereotypes that were relatively familiar could, at least superficially, “fulfil this longing for a completely consistent, comprehensible, and predictable world without seriously conflicting with common sense”. All of a sudden, things fell into place – with consequences for Europe’s Jews that would forever sully Germany’s name.

Sign erected by British forces at the entrance to the Bergen-Belsen camp. Picture: Imperial War Museum

Sign erected by British forces at the entrance to the Bergen-Belsen camp. Picture: Imperial War Museum

Bodies being flung into a mass grave at Belsen. Picture from the book Children's House of Belsen, by camp survivor Hetty Verolme

Bodies being flung into a mass grave at Belsen. Picture from the book Children’s House of Belsen, by camp survivor Hetty Verolme

If those horrendous conse­quences eventuated, it was because Mein Kampf did not only identify an alleged disease; it also set out a path to national redemption. In that respect, too, its main points were entirely unoriginal.

However, what was relatively new, and especially important, was the unadulterated celebration of death and violence in which they were couched.

Whether Hitler called for Jews to be massacred is a matter of interpretation. What is beyond any doubt is that he came as close to it as one possibly could. The Jews, he claimed, would “accentuate the struggle to the point of the hated adversary’s bloody extermination”. As that happened, it would be absolutely impossible to defeat them “without spilling their blood”. And when it came to that, their opponents, locked “in a titanic struggle”, would have to “send to Lucifer” – that is, to hell – “those who had mounted an assault on the skies”: that is, the Jews.

There would be, in the process, countless victims; but the Aryans who perished would be martyrs, “acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator”, and like Hitler himself “fighting for the work of the Lord”.

As with so much of Mein Kampf, the sheer violence of those calls, and of the text more generally, fell on fertile ground, again especially among veterans.

If those veterans had one thing in common it was the experience of “total war”, characterised by the ever-growing porousness of the boundaries between soldiers and civilians both as combatants and as targets of destruction.

Once they got to the front, it did not take long for ordinary soldiers to discard the fantasies of splendid bayonet charges across fields of flowers. Instead, burrowed underground in trenches filled with slime and excrement, rats and rotting body parts, what many learnt was that life was war, and war was life.

And at least for some, the sacrifice and devotion of their comrades also taught that violence brought out the best qualities in man.

Winifred Williams, a Welsh woman who became a friend and supporter, provided the paper on which Hitler wrote Mein Kampf while he was in jail.

Winifred Williams, a Welsh woman who became a friend and supporter, provided the paper on which Hitler wrote Mein Kampf while he was in jail.

Rendering that habituation to violence even more extreme was the experience of the 5 per cent or so of German soldiers who volunteered for Freikorps (Free Corps) units that fought, from 1918 to 1923, against the wave of revolutionary movements throughout central and eastern Europe.

Particularly in the Baltic states, those struggles were brutally uncompromising, with mass executions not only of adversaries but also of entire villages of helpless Jews. It was in those struggles that many ingredients of Nazism were forged – its symbols, like the death’s head and the swastika; its core staff, who later largely comprised the leading personnel first of the Nazi’s paramilitary units and then of the SS; and the unbridled anti-Semitic savagery of its killing squads. To all those who lived through those struggles, Mein Kampf seemed to perfectly capture their world view.

But Mein Kampf’s promise of redemption was crucial, too. Yes, Germany experienced the aftermath of World War I as an unmitigated disaster. Yet, from the midst of despair, a new notion of German glory and greatness began to emerge. When the war finally ended, the survivors could not but feel an urge to endow it with meaning – with the hope that the countless deaths would be redeemed by creating a better future, not only for themselves but also for the nation, a future shorn of the causes of everything that had gone wrong.

And no one, in the chaos and misery of post-World War I Germany, painted the path to that national salvation as starkly, and as effectively, as Hitler.

Death and destruction follow delirium as surely as dust and ashes follow fire. Two long decades, punctuated by Hitler’s accession to power in 1933, separated, almost precisely, the publication of Mein Kampf from the “Zero Hour”, as it became widely known, on May 7, 1945, when Germany, reduced to rubble, surrendered and officially ceased to exist. The vision – or hallucinations – Hitler had produced in Landsberg’s ja

Death and destruction follow delirium as surely as dust and ashes follow fire. Two long decades, punctuated by Hitler’s accession to power in 1933, separated, almost precisely, the publication of Mein Kampf from the “Zero Hour”, as it became widely known, on May 7, 1945, when Germany, reduced to rubble, surrendered and officially ceased to exist. The vision – or hallucinations – Hitler had produced in Landsberg’s jail ensured that the 20th century’s fields of glory would be sown with the corpses of innocent victims and the distorted fragments of shattered ideals.

Between those dates, the book’s fortunes closely tracked those of its author. After the crash of 1929, and the onset of the Depression, sales boomed; and once the Nazi regime was in place it became ubiquitous. A second volume had appeared in December 1926; it was added to the 400 pages of the first in 1930.

To cope with the length, the combined book was printed on extremely fine paper, exactly like a bible. Soon after that, an ever-wider range of formats – going from cheap paperback versions to extremely luxurious versions bound in leather – was offered to readers.

The regime recommended that municipalities give a good quality copy to newly married couples as they stepped out of the wedding ceremony; estimates vary but it seems two million couples benefited (if that is the right word). The book also became the standard prize in schools, workplaces and party organisations, bestowed on recipients with all the pomp the Fuhrer’s great work demanded. Altogether, by the “Zero Hour”, 12.5 million copies had found their way into the hands of potential readers – yielding Hitler copyright payments, partly deposited in a Swiss bank account, that made him an extremely wealthy man.

How many Germans actually read it is hard to say; the answers given to immediate post-war surveys were understandably evasive. What seems likely, however, is that its influence came less from the scrupulous consumption of the “Nazi bible” than from short excerpts, read out at meetings and over the radio or printed near the mastheads of major papers, as well as from the million or so copies of “reader’s digest”-like variants sold during the Reich’s golden years.

In the chaos and misery of post-WWI Germany, no one painted the path to that national salvation as starkly, and as effectively, as Hitler

In the chaos and misery of post-WWI Germany, no one painted the path to that national salvation as starkly, and as effectively, as Hitler

But its greatest impact was almost certainly indirect. Regardless of what ordinary Germans may or may not have done, abundant evidence shows it was carefully studied and frequently consulted by the Nazi leadership. The regime’s core principle, the so-called Fuhrerprinzip, specified that “what the Fuhrer says is law”: but what the Fuhrer had actually said, and even more so, what he wanted, was almost always hopelessly unclear – yet entire careers depended on guessing it accurately.

As a result, the everyday life of the Nazi hierarchy’s upper echelons was consumed in a competi­tion to “work towards the Fuhrer”, as Hitler’s great biographer, Ian Kershaw, called it: that is, in trying to anticipate the Fuhrer’s will and show that no one could be more ruthless or determined in putting it into effect. It was in that process that Mein Kampf was absolutely fundamental, invariably referred to and systematically used.

And it was through that process that Hitler’s words made depravity the highest form of morality, atrocity the surest sign of heroism, and genocide the key to redemption.

Outside Germany, very few grasped that those horrors would unfold. Winston Churchill, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Charles de Gaulle and David Ben-Gurion were among those few, carefully annotating early versions and gasping at the book’s implications.

But their warnings were ignored because Mein Kampf was plainly the work of a madman. As the British Labour Party’s leading intellectual, Harold Laski, said, when he was asked why he dismissed it, rational men and women “could not bring themselves to contemplate such a world”, much less believe that “any child of the twentieth century” would regard it as a realistic possibility.

But the Nazi art of politics, as Joseph Goebbels concisely defined it, consisted precisely in making the impossible possible and the absolutely inconceivable a practical reality. That art did not disappear with Nazism’s demise, nor did the murderous anti-Semitism whose seeds Hitler sowed a century ago.

As we mark Mein Kampf’s grim anniversary, we must, this time, take them seriously.

Putin’s war … an ageing autocrat seeks his place in history

Paul Hemphill Leave a comment

In That Howling Infinite’ has written often about Russian and Ukrainian history, not only because personally it has been of long-term academic interest, but also, because of the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war.

In In That Howling Infinite’s post, Borderlands – Ukraine and the curse of mystical nationalism, we wrote:

“Like many countries on the borders of powerful neighbours, Ukraine has long endured the slings and arrows of outrageous history. Its story, like that its neighbours, is long and complex. In competing national narratives, Russians and Ukrainians both claim credit for the creation of the Russian state, though others attribute this, with some credence, to the Vikings. The historical reality of Ukraine is complicated, a thousand-year history of changing religions, borders and peoples. The capital, Kyiv, was established hundreds of years before Moscow, although both Russians and Ukrainians claim Kyiv as a birthplace of their modern cultures, religion and language.

I highly recommend Serhii Plokhy’s The Gates of Europe, a well told and fascinating story of the origins of Ukraine and Belarus, and how their histories were intertwined, and entwined with those of of Poland, Lithuania (which was a large and powerful state once) and Russia. Ukraine has historically been the border between the catholic west and the orthodox east, the division running virtually down the middle. The name Ukraine is Slav for border land. Its geopolitical location and natural resources have led to the land being inflicted by invaders, civil wars, man-made famine and repression.

Eastern European countries, Ukraine included, have with good reason no love for Russia, be it Czarist, Soviet or Putin’s. Hungarians, Czechs, Poles and East Germans have seen Russian “peacekeeping” troops and tanks on their city streets, as have the Baltic countries, Afghans and Chechens. Millions of Ukrainians died under Stalin’s rule (and many, many millions of fellow-Soviet citizens). The 20th Century was not kind to the countries of Central and Eastern Europe. Historian Timothy Snyder called them “the blood lands”.

We republish below a recent article in The Australian by Melbourne historian and academic Mark Edele. It gives the uninformed but interested reader a short but comprehensive history of the relationship between Russia and Ukraine from the ninth century to the present day.

Here are posts in In That Howling Infinite, about Russia, Ukraine and Eastern Europe:

Putin’s puppet sells out Ukraine

Donald Trump’s bullying ‘peace plans’ to end the Ukraine war will only embolden Vladimir Putin, who fancies himself a leading a great power with historical rights beyond his borders.

Mark Edele, The Australian, 8 March 2025

Last weekend, the United States vacated the post of leader of the free world. Supporters of democracy the world over watching in disbelief as the US President and Vice-President berated, belittled, and bullied the leader of a democracy at war. On Monday, then, followed what this “great television”, as Donald Trump called it, was all about: a pretext to halt military aid to Ukraine, followed soon by the end of intelligence-sharing. The end goal: force Ukraine to the negotiation table with no security guarantees included in a “deal” with Vladimir Putin.

Four things will come out of an emboldened Russia now: more air raids on Ukraine’s civilians; a renewed push at the frontline; praise for the US administration and its visionary leader; and a disinformation campaign to convince the democratic world that black is white, up is down, left is right, Ukraine the aggressor and Russia the victim in this war. Astonishingly, we can also expect the White House to parrot such propaganda. Welcome to the era of strategic chaos.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov noted the obvious: The US’s shift from supporting its allies to courting Moscow “largely coincides with our vision”. Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova ladled on now familiar Russian propaganda. Volodymyr Zelensky, she claimed, was the head of a “neo-Nazi regime”, a “corrupt individual who lost his grip on reality”, whose “outrageously rude behaviour during his stay in Washington … reaffirmed his status of the most dangerous threat to the international community”. Zelensky was an “irresponsible figure”, a “terrorist leader” who had “built a totalitarian state” and is “ruthlessly sending millions of his fellow citizens to their deaths”.

Sigmund Freud would have classified these statements as “projection”: they are true, but apply to Zakharova’s boss, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin. Born in 1952, Putin grew up in St Petersburg, then called Leningrad. Surrounded with stories of World War II, in which his father served and his brother perished, he came of age on the rough streets of Leningrad during the heydays of Soviet superpower. In 1975 he joined the KGB, an organisation that deeply formed his world view and behaviour. His sport is judo, a deeply tactical martial art focused on exploiting the opponent’s weaknesses and redirecting the adversary’s momentum.

Putin came of age on the rough streets of Leningrad during the heydays of Soviet superpower. Picture: AFP

After the breakdown of the Soviet empire in 1991, he served in the city administration of St Petersburg. Later he moved to Moscow to make a career in the administration of the first president of post-Soviet Russia. When Boris Yeltsin looked for a successor who would guarantee his own and his family’s safety, Putin’s name came up. He was seen as competent but unthreatening to the oligarchs running Russia at the time. In 1999, Putin became premier. Later the same year, he was appointed acting president. His tenure was defined by the brutal second Chechen War, which he prosecuted with utter ruthlessness. In 2000, he was elected President. He remained in this post until today, with a stint stepping back to the prime ministership in 2008-12, to get around term limitations in the constitution (subsequently changed).

In the quarter-century he ruled Russia, Putin broke the power of the oligarchs, rebuilt the state as a security organisation run by former KGB officers, suffocated free speech, pluralism and the opposition, and built one of the most unpleasant electoral dictatorships of the post-Soviet space. Despite an economy still only a quarter of that of the EU or the US (to say nothing of China’s), Putin fancies himself as leading a great power with a right to a sphere of influence and a major say in shaping the international order.

By the end of the second decade of his rule, however, the ageing dictator in the Kremlin began to worry about his legacy. His track record was mixed. The Russian population had been declining steadily until the 2010s. The following uptick was mostly undone again during and after the Covid pandemic, fuelling longstanding apocalyptic fears that the Russians would be dying out. The economy had grown significantly, but social inequality had exploded alongside, while political liberties continually atrophied. The Covid crisis was handled extremely poorly. Great-power status remained an aspiration. Putin worried what the history books would say about him. The answers respectable historians gave him when asked were evasive. And he was turning 70 in 2022.

History, and his place in it, obsessed Vladimir Vladimirovich. During his, quite extreme, Covid isolation, he read history books, immersing himself in the Russian imperialist tradition. Such historians had long denied that Ukraine was anything but a part of Russia. He summarised this traditional Russian view “on the historical unity of Russians and Ukrainians” in an essay of that title, published on July 12, 2021. It read like the musings of an ageing Russian imperialist. A bit over seven months later, it revealed itself as the ideological justification of a full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Ukraine and Russia: histories entangled but separate

At the heart of Putin’s worldview is that Russia continues to be a great power with historical rights on Ukraine. It thus bears repeating that Russia and Ukraine are separate nations, which trace their heritage back to a common origin: a collection of principalities centred on Kyiv, known as the Rus of the ninth to 13th centuries. After the Mongol invasions of the 1220s and 1230s, however, the southwestern and the northeastern parts of this civilisation developed in different and quite separate ways, eventually leading to Russia and Ukraine as we know them today. As a result of such divergence, Russian and Ukrainian have developed as separate, if related, languages.

Vladimir Putin attends the Victory Day military parade in central Moscow on May 9, 2024. Picture: AFP

Putin attends the Victory Day military parade in Moscow on May 9, 2024. AFP

Overlapping histories and linguistic similarities are not unique among nations. Both Germany and France claim the Frankish empire under Charlemagne (French) or Karl (German) as part of their deeper history. Yet nobody would suggest (any more) that therefore France should be part of Germany or vice-versa. Likewise, French and Portuguese have related grammatical structures and some overlap in vocabulary. And yet nobody would argue that Portuguese is a French dialect.

Ukrainians formed a state twice: once in 1649, the Cossack-led “Hetmanate” fighting for its independence from Poland; the second time in 1917-21, after both the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires had collapsed in World War I. Both were defeated militarily, but both were important inspirations for a democratically minded national movement.

Ukraine’s lands and peoples came into the Russian orbit in stages. First was the disastrous Treaty of Periaslav of 1654, when the Hetmanate joined a temporary military alliance with Muscovy against Poland, which the Muscovites read as a subjugation under the autocrat instead. After much fighting and diplomatic manoeuvring, Poland and Russia agreed in 1667 that Moscow could control the lands east of the Dnipro (“left bank Ukraine”) as well as Kyiv on the “right bank”. When Poland was partitioned at the end of the 18th century, what was left of Ukraine came partially under Habsburg and partially under Romanov rule. At the end of World War I, Ukraine emerged as one of the successor states of the Romanov empire, alongside Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Finland, Poland and Bolshevik Russia. In contrast to these states, however, it did not survive the wars and civil wars that followed the disintegration of the empire in 1917.

In 1921, it was divided between the newly resurrected state of Poland and the emergent successor of the vast majority of the lands of the Romanov empire: Bolshevik Russia. Within the latter, Ukraine was granted a pseudo independence as one of the Union republics making up the newly formed “Union of Soviet Socialist Republics”, or USSR.

The Ukrainian SSR was a Bolshevik ploy to disarm national sentiment while reasserting imperial, and increasingly totalitarian, control by Moscow. In the long run, however, it allowed not just the maintenance but even the growth of national culture and national self-awareness. Ukraine also grew geographically. During World War II, the Soviets gobbled up the rest of Ukraine from Poland and Romania. In 1954, the government transferred Crimea to Ukraine, to ease the economic development of a region with no geographic connection to Russia. Thus Ukraine acquired its current, internationally recognised borders. Eventually, they provided a ready-made demarcation of post-imperial Ukraine, once the Soviet empire collapsed in 1989-91.

After the Soviet Union

Of the 15 successor states of the Soviet Union, Russia is the largest in terms of territory (17.1 million square kilometres). Ukraine, with 0.6 million square kilometres, comes third after Kazakhstan (2.7 million square kilometres). In a comparison of population sizes, Ukraine occupies the second position, with 37.7 million in 2023, according to the World Bank, quite a way behind Russia with 143.8 million. By comparison, the most populous country of the EU, Germany, has 83.3 million, while the EU as a whole counts 448.8 million.

Of the 15 successor states of the Soviet Union, Russia is the largest in terms of territory. Picture: istock

As the largest country in the post-Soviet region, in 2023 Russia had the largest GDP adjusted for purchasing power ($US6.5 trillion), followed by Kazakhstan ($US0.8 trillion) and Ukraine ($US0.6 trillion). Again, compare this to Germany ($US5.7 trillion) or Australia ($US1.9 trillion), to say nothing of the EU ($US26.4 trillion), the US ($US27.7 trillion) or China ($US34.7 trillion).

As far as the political system is concerned, between the breakdown of the Soviet empire and today Russia has been on a steady downwards slope, from some early democratic promises to ever darker authoritarianism. Ukraine, meanwhile, evolved in three waves of democratic surges followed by counter movements: the 1990s, the second half of the 2000s, and from the middle of the 2010s. While not the freest country in the post-Soviet space (that privilege belongs to the three Baltic republics of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, all members of EU and NATO), it is in no way comparable to Russia. Zelensky was elected President in 2019 with 73 per cent of the vote. As of late February 2025, he had an approval rating of 52 per cent.

Zelensky was elected Ukraine President in 2019 with 73 per cent of the vote. Picture: AFP

Zelensky was elected president in 2019 with 73 per cent of the vote. AFP

The latest report on Ukraine from a Washington-based independent watchdog, Freedom House, notes that both the President and the current legislative were elected in free, competitive, and fair elections. Since 2022, there was some deterioration of political freedoms because of the war, including the suspension of elections due to martial law, new restrictions against parties that support Russia’s aggression, and greater control of the reporting in the main news channels. However, opposition parties continue to sit in parliament and their political activities “are generally not impeded by administrative restrictions or legal harassment”. Communication channels outside the official network, such as social media platforms, remain available and used freely.

All of this contrasts sharply to the repressive nature of Russian rule, not just in the occupied territories of Ukraine, but also in Russia itself. For 2025, Freedom House categorised Ukraine as a “transitional or hybrid regime”, while Russia was a “consolidated authoritarian regime”.

The war

Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014 after a popular revolution in Kyiv had ousted pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovych. Russia illegally annexed Crimea and fostered a proxy war in Ukraine’s east, the Donbas, at times fought with regular Russian troops; at others by Russia-sponsored rebels. Most observers at the time assumed that this was the endgame: taking over Crimea was popular among Russians who saw it as their own Riviera; the frozen conflict in Ukraine’s east served as a festering wound keeping the recalcitrant democracy down.

Ukrainian firefighters push out a fire after a strike in Zaporizhzhia in 2022, amid the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Picture: AFP

Ukrainian firefighters putout a fire after a strike in Zaporizhzhia in 2022. AFP

Two ceasefire agreements, Minsk I (September 5, 2014) and Minsk II (February 12, 2015), failed. After the first, Russia sent troops across the border to defeat Ukraine’s armed forces in the Second Battle of Donetsk Airport (September 2014 to January 2015) and the Battle of Debaltseve (January to February 2015). After the second, the frontlines remained frozen, but shelling and sporadic fighting continued. No part of the agreement was ever fully implemented and soldiers kept dying. The world, however, moved on.

Who had not moved on was Putin, dreaming of great power and empire. While convincing himself of the righteousness of his position by reading Russian imperial historiography, he observed “the West” move from crisis to crisis. In Europe, the liberal consensus was challenged by new-right populist movements. The UK was in political chaos. The US could not even execute an orderly withdrawal from Afghanistan, unlike the Soviet army in 1988. And that army, now Russia’s, had been modernised significantly under Putin’s watch. It was time to strike.

Preparations for the invasion started shortly after the fall of Kabul in August 2021. By October, the US had conclusive evidence that Russia planned an assault with the goal of controlling all of Ukraine and eliminating its President. Between then and the start of the war, the US tried repeatedly to create diplomatic off-ramps for the Kremlin. Putin was not interested.

On February 24, 2022, Putin unleashed his war of conquest. Within 10 days, Ukraine’s military was supposed to be disabled, the country’s leaders arrested or executed, pro-Russian popular support mobilised, and resisters detained. By mid-August, all of Ukraine would be occupied, the plan went. Then, it could be either annexed or given over to a puppet regime.

The plan failed. There were few collaborators and much resistance. The battle for Hostomel airport was lost by the Russian airborne forces sent in at short notice; two groups of assassins sent to kill Zelensky were hunted down and eliminated; the columns advancing towards Kyiv were stopped by the fire of artillery and main battle tanks, both of Ukrainian origin. While social media was obsessed by the David-versus-Goliath spectacle of US-made shoulder-launched missiles taking out Russian tanks, the real damage was done using Ukraine’s own resources. Victory in the battle of Kyiv was achieved by late March 2022.

Over the next three years, the war changed from a battle of movement to position warfare and a war of attrition. Russia began to rely on massed use of artillery and the liberal sacrifice of manpower. This looked like WWII: the frontal assaults, the artillery barrages, the utter disregard for human resources. But there was a new element as well: terror attacks on civilians and their infrastructure. This was not a Soviet tradition: during WWII, it was British and US air forces that had flattened German and Japanese cities. Such bombing was not part of the Red Army’s military repertoire. Its air forces were geared towards support of ground troops, not “strategic” bombing of civilians.

In its changed focus on hurting civilians from the air, Putin’s army drew on the neo-imperial wars he had overseen: Chechnya and Syria. It was here that the Russian air force first flattened cities (Grozny in 1999-2000 and Aleppo in 2015-16) and it was this experience that now came to bear on the war in Ukraine. Except that here they did not control the airspace and did not face defenceless civilians they could simply “de-house” at will. Instead, they had to deal with an enemy capable of shooting down not just bombers, which as a result were not sent into Ukraine’s airspace, but also many of the missiles and drones sent from a safe distance.

While air assaults on civilian targets became part of the normalcy of Russia’s changing way of war, tactics on the ground also evolved: rather than mass assaults after preliminary artillery preparation, increasingly Russia used surprise attacks by small groups of storm troopers to conduct reconnaissance by force. If they encountered major resistance, they would then call in airstrikes or artillery barrages. They also stopped frontal assaults on fortified positions, bypassing and encircling them instead.

But none of this led to major breakthroughs. The war bogged down.

Russia was better prepared than Ukraine for a war of attrition. It had long built a food system that could withstand international isolation, demonstrating that a major war had been on the minds of the planners in the Kremlin for a very long time. The discrepancy in the size of both the economy and the population also meant Russia had the edge in the long run. And while the militarisation of the economy came with increasingly serious economic imbalances, they were not serious enough to force Putin’s dictatorship to back down. Instead, military salaries and the growing investments in military industries led to economic mini-booms in several of the regions that supplied the volunteers and the weapons to fight in Ukraine. To many Russians, this continues to be a profitable war.

Putin’s overall strategy thus shifted from a lightning war of conquest to outlasting the democratic world. Having the Soviet experience of extreme suffering and endurance in mind, and construing “the West” as weak, effeminate and degenerate, he had every confidence that Russia would be successful in the long run. With Trump’s election victory, this confidence grew. With his behaviour in the first six weeks in office, it must have soared. Putin has less reason than ever to compromise. And he can achieve much by playing Trump diplomatically.

What now?

After the spectacular dust-up in the Oval Office a week ago, doom and gloom have descended over Ukraine and its supporters. A pouting US President seems to assume that if he pulls the plug on Ukraine, the war will simply end: “Zelensky better move fast or is not going to have a Country left,” he wrote a week before he ambushed him in front of the cameras.

The withdrawal of US support is a serious setback for Ukraine. The US and Europe have provided about equal amounts of money to Ukraine. If Europe were to try to replace US contributions, it thus would have to double its financial commitments at a time when the economy is not exactly booming and will soon be further hit by Trump’s trade wars.

The withdrawal of US support is a serious setback for Ukraine. Picture: AFP

The withdrawal of US support is a serious setback for Ukraine. AFP

The major victims of Trump’s retreat will be Ukraine’s civilians. The US air defence systems currently protecting cities cannot be replaced easily. An increase in civilian deaths is the inevitable result. The withdrawal of intelligence is also a serious blow and difficult to substitute.

However, the EU’s economy is big enough to replace US contributions. An increase equal to 0.12 per cent of Europe’s GDP would suffice. Germany’s taxpayers spend three times more on domestic subsidies for diesel fuel than they devote to military aid to Ukraine. And production capacity is growing. At the start of the war, most military aid came from quickly depleting stockpiles. By 2024, the vast majority of materiel fuelling Ukraine’s war effort are newly produced weapons and equipment.

More than half of Ukraine’s weaponry is produced in Ukraine, a further 25 per cent comes from Europe. The 20 per cent the United States contributes is particularly valuable and high-quality, but it is not the backbone of Ukraine’s capacity. In a war of attrition heavily dependent on artillery, Europe will produce some two million artillery shells for Ukraine this year. The US, before Trump pulled the plug, was expected to deliver less than one million. Elon Musk’s Starlink, providing communications at the frontline, can be replaced with alternatives.

Thus, Ukraine’s defences are unlikely to collapse. Russia has been advancing recently, but progress was slow. By the third anniversary of the invasion, Russia controlled about 20 per cent of Ukraine’s territory, including some 4000 square kilometres gained in 2024. However, Ukraine is a big country. Russia’s 2024 gains represent a mere 0.6 per cent of Ukraine’s territory. Russia has not taken major cities in 2024 and urban life continues everywhere.

Meanwhile, Russia lost parts of the Kursk region to a counteroffensive the Russian military was unable to reverse. Russia has likely enough materiel for at least another year of fighting, but not enough for a major breakthrough.

In an assessment of the war written at the end of 2024, one of the most perceptive analysts of the military side of the war in Ukraine, exiled Russian historian and former civil rights activist Nikolai Mitrokhin, developed four possible scenarios for what could happen in 2025. None of them included a complete breakdown. His “catastrophic” scenario was a “partial collapse of the front due to the reduction of Ukrainian forward units”, leading to a “rapid advance of Russian units to the left bank of the Dnipro”. He predicted that this might lead to a leadership change, but also a further rallying around the flag and a continuation of the fight.

Less catastrophic would be a return to a grinding Russian offensive, as in 2024. “At the current rate of advance,” wrote the Institute for the Study of War in its Ukraine Fact Sheet of February 21, 2025, “it would take Russian forces over 83 years to capture the remaining 80 per cent of Ukraine, assuming that they can sustain massive personnel losses indefinitely”.

This outlook explains why Putin is so enthusiastic about Trump’s “peace plans”. They might achieve diplomatically what he cannot achieve on the battlefield: the subjugation of Russia’s democratic neighbour to neo-imperial domination.

Mark Edele is a historian of the Soviet Union and its successor states, in particular Russia. He is Hansen Professor in History at the University of Melbourne. His latest book is Russia’s War Against Ukraine: The Whole Story (Melbourne University Press, 2023

Trump and Vance ambush Zelensky at the White House

Mama Mia! The enduring appeal of ᗅᗺᗷᗅ

Paul Hemphill 1 Comment

Fifty years ago, in April 1974, a quartet unknown outside its native Sweden – hardly a musical powerhouse in those days – won the celebrated (yet much maligned by “cool” folk and by progressives who view it as the epitome of capitalism and bad taste) Eurovision Song Contest. The rest, as we say, is pop history. In this age of historical illiteracy, most people today equate Waterloo with ABBA rather than with Napoleon Bonaparte.

I’d watched Eurovision since 1959, when Britain won Eurovision for the very first time – the very straight and formally attired Pearl Carr and Teddy Johnson singing the twee and tweeting Sing Sing Sing Little Birdie, in 1959. I watched Britain win again a few years later with Sandy Shaw and Lulu. But during the early seventies, I was without television and therefore missed the televisual feast of melody and harmony and of costumes that David Bowie would not have been seen dead in – it is said that the seventies was the decade that fashion forgot, and most critics would say that much of the blame for that could be dumped on the singing Swedes’ doorstep.

I confess that I was late in coming to ABBA. The late seventies and early eighties were eventful but distracting times for me personally, I’d heard many of the songs, but was had never really taken much notice, until, one in about 1985, whilst contemplating what it was that made a perfect pop song, I bought a CD of ABBA’s greatest hits.

It was a case of “do you hear the songs, Fernando?”

As a tribute to this now enduring but now virtual quartet, but I can’t better a recent article, republished below, by British author Giles Smith. Read on after the music. As an afterthought, if you’d like to use the iconic reversed B, but don’t know how, cut and paste it now: ᗅᗺᗷᗅ

For other posts on music in In That Howling Infinite, see Soul Food – music and musicians

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/weekend-australian-magazine/thank-you-for-the-music-how-abbas-appeal-finally-became-mainstream/news-story/4199e10316fb173ef966293117734a54

When did daggy old ABBA become pop demigods?

Loving ABBA was once a love that dared not speak its name – certainly not among 13-year-old boys in the playground. But 50 years after Eurovision victory ABBA is finally supercool.

By Giles Smith, The Weekend Australian, 11th May 2024

ABBA performs during the Eurovision Song Contest 1974. Giles Smith, at home in England, is watching on with his mum and dad. Picture: Olli Lindeborg
ABBA performs during the Eurovision Song Contest 1974. Picture: Olli LindeborgIt is Britain at the dawn of 1974, and things aren’t looking that great. Energy prices are through the roof. Strikes abound. Production is in decline and people are getting battered by galloping inflation and a soaring cost of living. The governing Conservative Party is badly split over trading arrangements with are through the roof. Strikes abound. Production is in decline and people are getting battered by galloping inflation and a soaring cost of living. The governing Conservative Party is badly split over trading arrangements with Europe, politicians on the far right are enjoying disproportionate levels of media attention, and the country will be asked to vote in two general elections in this single year – a level of political instability unknown in this country since 1910. Familiar? Yes, I know. Plus, extreme weather events are forecast: storms, floods and even tornadoes.

Embattled Prime Minister Edward Heath declares a fuel-saving “Three-Day Work Order” from New Year’s Day, ­restricting industry to three days per week – kind of “working from home”, but without the work. The Order will stay in place until March 7.

Meanwhile, on billboards and in leaflets, an “SOS” campaign is urging people to “Switch Off Something”, there are power cuts, and the national speed limit has been lowered from 70mph to 50mph in order to conserve petrol.

Swedish pop group ABBA in 1974. Picture: Olle Lindeborg
ABBA in 1974. Picture: Olle Lindeborg

Amid this general slide backwards, a feeling is spreading that Britain in general, and England in particular, can’t do anything properly any more – apart, possibly, from football hooliganism, which is about to enter a particularly busy period. So is the Irish Republican Army, whose mainland bombing campaign will, in the coming months, produce explosions at Westminster Hall, the Tower of London, and pubs in Guildford, Woolwich and Birmingham. If the fabric of society holds, the coming summer will at least offer the diversion of a football World Cup in West Germany – but not for England, who have failed to qualify.

It’s not all doom and gloom, though. On Saturday April 6, in Brighton and live on television throughout Europe, the UK will host the 19th Eurovision Song Contest. I am spending this particular Saturday night – like pretty much every other night, actually – watching TV in the company, more or less, of my parents.

I say “more or less” because it’s fairly obvious that the only one who’ll be fully concentrated on the screen throughout tonight’s protracted spectacular (subsequent programs may overrun, cautions our Cliff-Richard-fronted copy of the Radio Times) is going to be me. My mother, typically, with an anglepoise lamp ablaze beside her armchair, will be devoting her energies to creating one of the patchwork quilts that she seems to be producing in industrial quantities in this period. My father, equally typically, will be dividing his attention between the screen, a newspaper, and the backs of his eyelids.

After victory at Eurovision the Swedish quartet stroll hand-in-hand among daffodils in Hyde Park, London. Picture: Anwar Hussein
After victory at Eurovision in Brighton. Picture: Anwar Hussein

I alone in this room will be achieving the state of trancelike engrossment which Eurovision no doubt merits – though not, I should admit, because I am helplessly in thrall to the contest’s allure, but because I learned a long time ago in this sitting room that any discernible lapse in concentration on my part will automatically invite an instruction to go to bed. And at this point in my life, the avoidance of bed is essentially the mission every evening. (The contest, incidentally, is starting enticingly late for the semi-professional bed-avoider: 9.30pm.) Anyway, whether I make it to the end or not, Eurovision is on, which means that I am about to have my first meeting with Björn, Benny, ­Agnetha and Frida.

“And we move now across into Sweden,” says David Vine, the BBC’s voice; he usually commentates on skiing and snooker, but he’s on secondment to the Brighton Dome tonight.

Here they come then – the ABBA group. There’s a couple of bars of galloping guitar, bundled together with a brightly chiming piano, and as it plays, Agnetha and Frida come barrelling down the catwalk from the back of the stage and into our lives, microphone cables paying out behind them.

“My my!” they sing, and it’s as if the show has suddenly shifted a gear and somebody somewhere has stepped on the accelerator.

These days we are entirely comfortable with ABBA’s ubiquity, their presence in the air we breathe. I pluck this randomly from my own experience: in the summer of 2023, wandering around a market in France, I heard a stallholder break briefly into song while looking for change for a customer. “Money, money, money!” he sang. Then I went along the road and had ­coffee in a cafe where Knowing Me, Knowing You came on. Driving back to where we were staying, I stopped in at a supermarket and dropped food into a trolley to a backdrop of Take a Chance on Me.

Three casual encounters with the music of ABBA in the space of about 90 minutes, then. Just occasionally, as you move around Europe at this point in history, you can be forgiven for concluding that it’s ABBA’s world and we only live in it. What gets harder to remember is that it hasn’t always been this way. It would surprise many of the people happily thronging the ABBA Voyage show in London, unselfconsciously browsing the ABBA sweatshirts and ABBA key fobs and ABBA tea trays in the arena’s store, to hear that a love for ABBA was once a love that dared not speak its name – certainly not among 13-year-olds in a school playground. This author – with his carefully concealed copy of the 1975 album ABBA on ­cassette – can personally attest to that.

The fact is, for a long time it seemed that where ABBA had come from – both in the sense of Sweden and of the 1974 Eurovision Song Contest, where they first came to prominence – had placed a tight restriction on what the band and their music could ever be or mean to people. Almost three years after they sang Waterloo in Brighton, a review in the Guardian of a rare ABBA live performance in London described them wanly as “four Euro-persons” who made “elegant Eurorock pop”, and remarked by way of conclusion that it was “nice to be able to put four faces to a pleasant sound”. There is, of course, no term in the critical lexicon more damning than “pleasant”. As for the term “Euro“, it comes up again and again in writing about ABBA in this period and is rarely meant positively either.

Two years after that, in 1979, the American rock critic Robert Christgau, writing in the Village Voice, didn’t even try to gild it: “We have met the enemy,” he wrote, after experiencing ABBA in concert, “and they are them.”

Bjorn Ulvaeus, Agnetha Faltskog, Frida Lyngstad and Benny Andersson wear kimonos in 1976. Picture: RB/Redferns/Getty Images
Bjorn Ulvaeus, Agnetha Faltskog, Frida Lyngstad and Benny Andersson 1976.
Picture: RB/Redferns/Getty Images

As ABBA tried to make their way in the world, it rapidly emerged that the Eurovision Song Contest was a unique kind of springboard that could also function as a trap. Blasted high off that Brighton stage, ABBA would look around for months and years afterwards and discover that somehow all the scenery had tiresomely come with them and was threatening to drag them down again. So: a Swedish act, a Eurovision act … ABBA and their defenders would be a long time struggling to answer the band’s repeated arraignment on these twin charges, both of which, of course, had the disadvantage from the defence’s point of view of being completely undeniable.

“Personally, I hate what they stand for,” a critic wrote in 1979, “and think they are brilliant.” Here at least was evidence of a thaw. But it was also evidence that even defenders of ABBA for a while had to tie themselves in knots of equivocation. So great … and yet so cheesy. Even their most fervent admirers would find themselves acknowledging sometimes that there was something confounding about ABBA, something that was just beyond the grasp.

ABBA are the band you know best that you barely know. Of course, there are ABBA fans and superfans whose commitment to the study of Agnetha, Björn, Benny and Frida in all their manifestations is both clarifying and humbling. But in the slightly less specialised and more ad hoc place where ABBA intersect with the general listener, it’s clear that a certain amount of cloudiness about the band frequently persists.

Somewhat distant even at the blazing height of their fame, the band were only fully and openly embraced by the world some years after they had, to all intents and purposes, ceased to exist. Consequently, today, familiarity with ABBA’s music outstrips familiarity with anything else about them. The band’s members are, by any definition of the term, superstars, yet in 2024, even in circles where ABBA are adored, a confident and unerring ability to know your Benny from your Björn – or even, in some cases, your Agnetha from your Frida – ­betokens ABBA-knowledge at practically PhD levels. We know, perhaps, that they were two couples whose marriages came apart yet who somehow kept the band on the road even after that, channelling the pain of separation in timeless songs such as The Winner Takes It Alland Knowing Me, Knowing You. But Björn wrote the lyric for the second of those songs two years before he separated from Agnetha and when they were together, seemingly happy and enjoying the arrival of their second child. And Benny and Frida didn’t get married until after Björn and Agnetha had decided to split up.

“Personally, I hate what they stand for,” a critic wrote in 1979, “and think they are brilliant.” Picture: Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
“Personally, I hate what they stand for,” a critic wrote in 1979, “and think they are brilliant.” Picture: Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images

The truth is, we don’t know much, and most of what we think we know is wrong or ­improvised or conjecture or (most frequently of all) projection. Glory in its fullest form came to ABBA posthumously, when they had stepped down from the stage and out of the studio; and so, with a purity which is rare in the history of pop – and practically impossible in the social media age – Agnetha, Björn, Benny and Frida burn most brightly in our minds as a set of bombproof songs which a very large number of us appear tirelessly happy to hear. The songs, we do know. But how do we know them?

To all intents and purposes, ABBA finished being a band in 1982. They had eight years together as recording and performing artists – about the same as The Beatles. Then, albeit without ever making an official ­announcement that they were done, they withdrew, apparently exhausted or wrung out to some extent, and tired of each other’s company, and moved on to other things – solo albums in the case of Agnetha and Frida, the composition of musicals in the case of Björn and Benny. At that point, ABBA were widely felt to have outlived their purpose and, more than that, were regarded in many quarters as irredeemably naff.

There is no image of the members of the band on the cover of ABBA Gold – the 19-song compilation album put together by the Polydor label in 1992, 11 years after the band’s last set of studio recordings – because the album was carefully market-researched in advance of its release and the feedback from the focus groups was that although people were potentially interested in buying a record of ABBA’s hits, and more than happy and able to nominate the songs they wouldn’t mind hearing on it – Take a Chance on Me, The Name of the Game, Super Trouper – they didn’t especially want to own something with the band’s faces prominently displayed on it. So the label went with simple gold lettering on a black background. Such were the feelings around ABBA in 1992.

Yet it was ABBA Gold which began to change the climate around the band, ushering in what we can now regard as ABBA’s renaissance period, helped along, somewhat randomly, by the Australian films Priscilla, Queen of the Desert and Muriel’s Wedding, both released in 1994 – and in due course by the 1999 jukebox musical Mamma Mia! and, in 2008, the first of the two films that arose from it.

       At that juncture, a decade into the 21st century, ABBA, once presumed dead and buried, were arguably more alive than they had ever been. ABBA Gold has now sold more than 32 million copies worldwide and is behind only Queen’s Greatest Hits as the UK’s best-selling record of all time.

And then, as 2021 ended, almost out of nowhere, the band re-emerged among us – not just with one final, completely unexpected and time-defying burst of new music, but in the form of the magnetically engaging and mysteriously moving Voyage stage show, which was nothing less than a complete re-imagining of the live concert experience and which revealed the band as a set of idealised, computer-generated versions of themselves which were somehow at once entirely them and not them at all.

At this point, approaching 42 years since their last formally ticketed concert and with the band members now well into their seventies and apparently entirely indifferent to the idea of performing together in the flesh, ABBA had probably never been more prominent – and had arguably never been more ABBA.

ABBA in Melbourne, Australia get a rock star welcome from fans.
ABBA  get a rock star welcome from fans in Melbourne, Australia, 1977

“I’ve been reading you all my life,” a gushing fan once told the author Samuel Beckett.

“You must be very tired,” Beckett replied.

Well, here I am, a full half-century after ­Waterloo, and in a position to say much the same to the members of ABBA, were I ever to meet them. “I’ve been hearing you all my life,” I could say, “or for nearly all of it that I can remember. And no, actually, before you ask, I’m not tired. Or not of ABBA, anyway.”

Because what would it even mean, in 2024, to say you were tired of ABBA, except by way of admitting that you had run out of patience with pop music altogether, or that pop music had run out of patience with you?

What’s certainly true is that, over the 50 years since Waterloo, ABBA have been liked by pretty much every kind of person and in pretty much every way that it’s possible to like a pop group. They have been consumed in a hurry as sugary pop stars and appreciated soberly as abiding musical craftspeople of exceptional ­talent. They have been enjoyed ironically and enjoyed entirely sincerely. They have been a guilty pleasure and an utterly unashamed one. Their records have managed to define whole periods and to slip free of history altogether, with the result that, in 2024, their songs are warmly familiar both to 1970s nostalgistes, hungry to revisit their childhoods, and people who weren’t even born when the 20th century ended. They have been feted alike as exuberant gay icons and as the reliable providers of pan-generational dance music for heterosexual wedding receptions. Their music knows the unequivocal love of the very best among us, and yet has also been used to soundtrack lockdown-busting piss-ups in Downing St (the ­notorious “ABBA party” of November 2020, about which Benny Andersson said, with an understandable instinct for dissociation, “You can’t call it an ABBA party. It’s a [Boris] ­Johnson party”).

Souvenir edition the Daily Mirror celebrating of Abba’s arrival in Australia.
Souvenir edition the Daily Mirror celebrating of Abba’s arrival in Australia.
My My! ABBA Through the Ages by Giles Smith.
My My! ABBA Through the Ages by Giles Smith.

     In this wildly elastic range, they outperform even The Beatles. Certainly, it is given to vanishingly few groups to have been so many things to so many people at so many different times. It is given to even fewer to have been so many things to so many people while the group’s members simply sat in their various houses for four decades doing nothing (or, at least, nothing ABBA-related).

And that, surely, is the most delicious detail in the deeply satisfying narrative of ABBA’s eventual widespread vindication. All of the things for which they were routinely teased and dismissed along the way eventually turned into things for which they could be uncomplicatedly celebrated and loved.

All Björn, Benny, Agnetha and Frida had to do in order to be fully and resoundingly appreciated was … nothing. They just had to stand by until the rest of us came around.

Here I am, 44 years later, at ABBA Voyage, for the second time, watching not even ABBA but a simulation of ABBA sing this song about heartache, scars, grieving and the longed-for release from grieving. I’m also watching a very artfully realised total eclipse of the Sun, which is the backdrop for this number, the room glowing orange and then slowly falling dark as the song plays, which is quite something.

And, you see, the thing is, everyone at ABBA Voyage sings along to the chorus of Chiquitita. That’s the point of it – they all just pile in. They pile in on it like you wouldn’t believe, raising their arms and swaying.

Chiquitita – the power of the singing, the ­defiance of grief in it, the iron nature of its ­consolation, there is stuff in that song that I wouldn’t and couldn’t have got to with any amount of effort in 1979.

Bjorn, Agnetha, Anni-Frid and Benny attend the first performance of ABBA's Voyage in London in 2022. Picture: Nicky J Sims/Getty Images
Bjorn, Agnetha, Anni-Frid and Benny attend the first performance of ABBA’s Voyage, London  2022. Picture: Nicky J Sims/Getty Images

And it is just so extraordinary how this ­manifestly artificial show ends up evoking so much in the way of feelings. In an interview, ­co-producer Ludvig Andersson ­attributed that ostensibly unlikely outcome to the blurring of “the borderline between real and fantasy worlds”, and how the show’s peculiar position between those borders “triggers ­feelings about youth and ageing, mortality and immortality”.

And there seems to me to be a lot of truth in that, and especially at this exact point in the show, when the Sun is disappearing before our eyes and the audience has got hold of that ­chorus, and I mean, really got hold of it, and the whole place is a sea of arms in this gradually darkening room, and two of my brothers are dead and, oh, for god’s sake, now I’m crying in the middle of ABBA’s bloody Chiquitita.

My My! ABBA Through the Ages (Simon & Schuster, $34.99) by Giles Smith