The past beats inside me like a second heart
John Banville, The Sea
Why is this blog called In That Howling Infinite? It refers to Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, a magnificent study in mania and obsession:
“But as in landlessness alone resides highest truth, shoreless, indefinite as God – so better is it to perish in that howling infinite, than be ingloriously dashed upon the lee, even if that were safety!” Moby–Dick, Chapter 23
In a figurative sense, it speaks of the themes and schemes that are addressed in the thoughts, ideas, songs, poems and stories that feature in this blog. We are, as Bob Dylan sang, “condemned to drift or else be kept from drifting”. And we like to hope that, as the ancient Greek lyric poet Sappho said, “someone will remember us, I say, even in another time”
Here are the most recent articles in In That Howling Infinite.
Smyrna 1922 and the Ottoman endgame. The expulsion of the millennia long Greek presence in Anatolia was one of the last chapters in the extraordinarily violent disintegration of the Ottoman Empire.
Beside Strange Waters. The dark side of former Pink Floyd front man and currently, controversial political activist
Rasputin and the downfall of the Romanovs. To admirers he was a man of God; to his enemies, a charlatan, sexual predator, political manipulator and symbol of everything rotten within Russia’s last royal dynasty.
The featured picture at the head of this page is the interior of St George’s Greek Orthodox Church in Madaba, Jordan, home of the sixth century Madaba map, discussed in Maps, memory, and the myth of fingerprints
Sydney Sweeney has good jeans
Ten favourites:
A Short History of the Rise and Fall of the West. In one of the first essays published in In That Howling Infinite, we walked down what Welsh poet RS Thomas called ‘the long road of history”, beginning with the usual suspects: power and pride, greed, and aggrandisement, and as accessories after the fact, dolour, devastation, and death.
Blood and Brick … a world of walls. Hadrian’s Wall, the Theodosian Wall, the Berlin Wall, Northerm Ireland’s Peace Wall, Israel’s Separation Wall, George RR Martin’s Ice Wall, the wall you can see from space, and walls that most people have never heard of. If walls could talk, what take they woukd tell. While walls are destined to fall one day, people like them. They project a language of security – but they stem from a sense of insecurity, a fear of losing what you have.
One Land, Two Peoples: History, Memory, Continuity, and Inheritance. The history of Israel and Palestine does not yield to forensic neatness. This land holds layered attachment; Jewish longing and Palestinian dispossession; British imperial design and Arab nationalist pride; secular aspiration and religious revival; survival strategy and ideological fervour. None alone explains the whole. Together they form the sediment of a century.
The Twilight of the Equine Gods. An illuminating canter through the story of the “Centaurian Pact” between humans and horses. it is at once a ride and revelation. The horse, as German academic and cultural scientist Ulrich Raulff’s tells us, “has been man’s most important companion – forget cats and dogs – and the most durable of historical alliances – against which every other covenant into which we have entered has been fragile and ephemeral – not even our relationship with our gods has shown a comparable degree of stability”.
The Sport of Kings. CE Morgan’s “great American novel” is not a history book – nor is it an historical novel. But it is most certainly about history. And about identity. As Morgan puts it: “You would never escape the category of your birth”. It is also about memory and myth: “Repeated long enough, stories become memory and memory becomes fact”.
Blue remembered hills – a land of lost contentment. “Nostalgia”, literally the pain associated with the thought of home, or homesickness, is derived from the Greek “nostos” – a theme used in Ancient Greek literature most notably in the recently reimagined Odyssey, involving an epic hero returning home after a long time away. Nostalgia reveals the deep longing for a home that our younger selves took for granted, and bittersweet return to people and places that have changed forever. But it isn’t all it’s cracked out to be, and, indeed, can bring out the worst in us, becoming a millstone of bitterness and regret strung about the necks of discontented souls who drift off into a maze of memories, meanings and emotions.
A cowboy key – how the west was sung. My riding days are over, but I have been into westerns all my life, and the songs inspired by them – in films, musicals and popular song, from ghostly herds to outlaw chic, Frankie Laing to Leonard Cohen and Taylor Swift. And, as a onetime musician myself, I have, back in days gone by, penned songs in a cowboy key.
McGoohan’s Blues – sunbathing in the rain. How an eighteen minute digression from the concept if not the plot of an iconic if indecipherable ‘sixties’ television series made an indelible impression on an impressionable twenty year old who remains mightily impressed with this song by Britain’s high priest of angst.
The Boys of Wexford – memory and memoir. “Fast forwaranother century, and I was “on the Holy Ground once more” attending the wedding of an old pal held in an old pub in the heart of Ireland. Getting there, we’d done a whistle-stop tour of the south, including Inis Córthaid (my mother’s hometown), Wexford and Ross, the heartland of the ‘98 rebellion … I was best man at that wedding, and in a speech largely devoted to the groom and our mutual, lifelong appreciation of Bob Dylan, I was able to relate to guests young and old tales of my Irish childhood, taking us all “down the foggy ruins of time”, and sang extracts from songs I actually did learn at my mothers knee, the song-lines of my Celtic twilight.
About the creator of this blog
Paul Hemphill is a British-born Australian songwriter, poet, and blogger.
Once upon a time, he was an accountant by profession, a manager, mentor and mediator. A long-time resident of Sydney, he is now living in the middle of the forest on the mid north coast of New South Wales, Australia, where he spends much of his time in the great outdoors.
His interests include music, poetry, politics and history. He has had a lifelong passion for the history, politics and people of the Middle East. Over the years, through study and travel, he has acquired a working knowledge of standard and colloquial Arabic.
Listen to some of Paul’s songs on SoundCloud and YouTube. Search under Paul Hemphill or HuldreFolk (but ignore the Flemish death metal band of the same name). He has assembled seven volumes of poetry and verse, and these can be read on this blog.
History has a habit of turning up unexpectedly in everyday life.
Some fifteen years ago, a muso friend of ours told us about his family’s Greek origins in Ottoman Smyrna. We were in the Black Sheep wine bar in King Street, Newtown, sitting down with a Greek Australian who’d just finished a great set of blues and soul standards talking about events that occurred almost a century earlier. Nationality, language, religion and ancestry did not always fit the neat boxes into which the twentieth century subsequently tried to place them.
We visited Smyrna – now modern İzmir – in May 2014. We walked along the harbourside promenade, looked across the Aegean Sea, and took photographs that we sent them to our friend. They were ordinary holiday snaps, in one sense: the waterfront, the sea, the city behind us. But they carried something else with them. We were standing in a place from which his Greek forebears, had once looked towards the same water in circumstances unimaginably different from ours.
It is one of the peculiarities of history that the past can sometimes feel closer through a family anecdote or a photograph than through a library full of books. The old cliché about history leaving fingerprints is, perhaps, not entirely a cliché. Places retain traces of people who have gone, even when almost nothing visible remains of the communities that once inhabited them.
Smyrna is an especially powerful example.
It was once an Ancient Greek city located at a strategic point on the Aegean coast of Anatolia, and was actually two successive settlements: Old Smyrna, founded around the 11th century BC as an Aeolian settlement before being taken over and developed by the Ionians during the Archaic Period, and Smyrna proper, the new city founded from the 4th century BC onward, whose establishment is associated with Alexander the Great. Due to its advantageous port conditions, its ease of defence, and its good inland connections, Smyrna rose to prominence, reaching metropolitan proportions under the Roman Empire, with most of its surviving remains dating from that era, largely following reconstruction after a 2nd-century AD earthquake. Since 1930, the city’s official name has been İzmir.
Modern Izmir, May 2014
In September 1922, the city’s waterfront became the final refuge of tens of thousands of Greek and Armenian civilians as Turkish nationalist forces entered the city and violence and fire engulfed its Christian quarters. Within a few years, the overwhelmingly Greek character of one of the great cities of the eastern Mediterranean had largely disappeared. But Smyrna was not the beginning of this story. It was one of the last chapters in the extraordinarily violent disintegration of the Ottoman Empire.
The story reaches backwards through the Balkan Wars, the Ottoman-Russian conflicts, the massacres of Armenians in the 1890s, the First World War and the destruction of Armenian and Assyrian communities, and forwards through the Greek Turkish and War, the Treaty of Lausanne and the compulsory exchange of populations. It is a story of imperial collapse and national self-determination, but also of refugees, massacres, deportations, competing territorial claims and the brutal desire of emerging nation-states to make populations conform to political borders.
It is therefore tempting to reduce it to a morality tale. There is certainly no shortage of moral horror in the record. But moral judgement and historical explanation are not alternatives. The challenge is to understand how a multi-ethnic empire that had survived for centuries gave way, through war and revolution, to a collection of more nationally defined states — and why that transformation was accompanied by such extraordinary human suffering.
That is the longer story of Smyrna, and of the Ottoman endgame.
The leaving of Smyrna, September 2022
Smyrna and the Ottoman Endgame
In September 1922, the cosmopolitan city of Smyrna became the final, terrible act in a drama that had been unfolding for more than a decade. The city’s waterfront filled with Greek and Armenian refugees as Turkish nationalist forces entered the city and Christian neighbourhoods were engulfed by fire. Behind them lay the ruins of communities that had existed in Anatolia for centuries; ahead was the Aegean and, for many, an uncertain escape to Greece.
The familiar account of Smyrna begins here, with the fire, the refugees and the ships of the Allied powers lying offshore, apparently unable or unwilling to intervene in one of the final acts in a war that they had effectively lost. But history did not begin in Smyrna. Nor did the destruction of Anatolia’s Christian communities begin with Turkish commander Mustafa Kemal’s nationalist movement. To understand what happened in 1922, one has to go back through the Balkan Wars, the Ottoman defeat in the First World War and, before that, the increasingly violent crisis of the Ottoman state’s relations with its subject peoples.
This is the broader story told, with considerable geographical and archival range, by Sean McMeekin in The Ottoman Endgame. It is also the story exploredin In That Howling Infinite’s The fall of the Ottoman Empire and the birth of Türkiye : the dissolution of an empire was not a single event but a succession of wars, revolutions, occupations, expulsions and attempts at national reconstruction. The First World War was the central episode, but it was also part of a much longer Ottoman endgame.
The wars before the war
It is convenient to imagine Europe as peaceful until August 1914. It was not. The Ottoman Empire had already been fighting for its survival.
Italy went to war with the Ottomans in 1911, seizing Tripolitania and Cyrenaica, the territories that became Libya. Then came the Balkan Wars of 1912–13, in which the Ottoman Empire lost almost all its remaining European territories. Greece, Serbia, Bulgaria and Montenegro expanded at Ottoman expense, while Albania emerged as an independent state. Romania, often included rather casually in this account, was already an independent kingdom, although it acquired territory from Bulgaria after the Second Balkan War.
The Balkan Wars were particularly important because they demonstrated what the disintegration of a multinational empire could mean in an age of nationalism. Armies advanced, borders changed and populations moved. Christians were expelled from territories conquered by Muslim powers and Muslims were expelled from territories conquered by Christian states. Villages were destroyed, civilians massacred and refugees displaced on a large scale. The demographic transformation of the Balkans was already underway before the First World War began.
This matters because the later violence in Anatolia did not occur in a political vacuum. Ottoman Muslims, many of them themselves refugees from the Balkans and the Caucasus, had seen their homes and communities disappear. The Ottoman state increasingly came to regard the survival of its Muslim population as a matter of national security. At the same time, Christian minorities – particularly Armenians and Greeks – increasingly looked beyond the empire towards their own national movements and, in some cases, to foreign powers.
The result was a vicious feedback loop. Nationalism encouraged separatism; separatism encouraged repression; repression encouraged further separatism. War made the whole process considerably worse.
Armenians and the First World War
The Armenian catastrophe has to be treated separately from what happened to the Greeks and Assyrians, although there were connections between them.
The massacres of Armenians during the reign of Sultan Abdulhamid II in 1894–96 were already a warning of what could happen when imperial authority, Muslim majoritarian sentiment and fears of territorial disintegration collided. Hundreds of thousands of Armenians were killed in massacres and associated violence. The Young Turk revolution of 1908 initially raised hopes of a more constitutional and inclusive Ottoman order, but those hopes deteriorated rapidly as the empire suffered military defeat, territorial losses and political crisis.
When the Ottoman Empire entered the First World War in late 1914 on the side of Germany and the other Central Powers, the Armenian question acquired an altogether more dangerous dimension. Ottoman forces were fighting Russia in the Caucasus, and some Armenian organisations and volunteers did indeed cooperate with the Russians. Armenian soldiers fought in Russian formations, while armed Armenian groups operated behind Ottoman lines. Ottoman fears of an Armenian fifth column were therefore not entirely invented.
But this context does not explain what followed, still less justify it.
In 1915 the Committee of Union and Progress government – what we know as The Young Turks (now a common term to describe ambitious young upstarts) – began the systematic deportation of Ottoman Armenians. Armenian political and community leaders were arrested and killed. Men were separated from their families and frequently murdered. Women, children and the elderly were deported southwards, many towards the Syrian desert. Deportation became a mechanism of destruction.
The death toll remains debated in detail, as such figures inevitably are, but the broad historical conclusion is not seriously in doubt: hundreds of thousands, probably well over a million Armenians, died through massacre, deportation, starvation, disease, exposure and deliberate deprivation. Many women and children were forcibly converted or absorbed into Muslim households. Sexual assault was commonplace. Armenian property was confiscated. An ancient community was not merely displaced; its institutional, demographic and economic foundations were systematically dismantled.
The Ottoman government and its successors have contested the term genocide and have emphasised the extraordinary circumstances of wartime collapse, Armenian collaboration with Russia and the deaths of Muslim civilians. Those Muslim deaths were real and often horrific. But they do not negate the evidence for the organised deportation and destruction of the Armenians. Nor does acknowledging Armenian collaboration with Russia turn an entire ethnic population into a legitimate military target.
The same period brought massacres and deportations of Assyrian Christians in southeastern Anatolia and northern Mesopotamia. The historical record is less comprehensive than for the Armenians, but the destruction of Assyrian communities belongs to the same wider story of wartime demographic violence.
The Greek catastrophe was different – and connected
The fate of the Ottoman Greeks followed a somewhat different chronology.
Greeks had lived throughout the Ottoman domains for centuries. In Anatolia they were concentrated particularly along the Aegean and Black Sea “Pontic” coasts, but Greek communities were also found in the interior. They were not simply recent immigrants or colonial settlers. They were part of the social and economic fabric of the late Ottoman Empire.
During the First World War, some Greek communities were deported or otherwise subjected to coercion and violence. In the Pontic region of the Black Sea, Greek nationalists and armed groups also became involved in conflict with Ottoman authorities and later with Turkish nationalists. The question of Greek communities in Anatolia consequently became entangled with the wider struggle over what would replace the Ottoman Empire.
The decisive change came after the Ottoman defeat.
The Armistice of Mudros in October 1918 effectively ended Ottoman participation in the war. Allied forces occupied strategic parts of the empire, including Constantinople. The victorious powers then contemplated a drastic settlement of Ottoman territory. The Treaty of Sèvres in 1920 proposed a severely truncated Ottoman state and envisaged Greek control or influence over substantial parts of western Anatolia.
The Greek military landing at Smyrna in May 1919 was therefore not an isolated act of Greek aggression. It occurred within the post-war Allied occupation and with Allied approval. Greece, was encouraged by its wartime territorial ambitions and by the vision of the Megali (great) Idea, – a Greek nationalist and irredentist vision that emerged after Greek independence (1821–1829) that called for the revival of the Byzantine Empire by uniting all regions with significant Greek populations – including parts of the southern Balkans, Anatolia, and Cyprus – still under Ottoman rule into a single Greek state.
Greece believed that it had an opportunity to incorporate territories containing substantial Greek populations and places of enormous symbolic importance to Greek history. But the settlement soon collided with another nationalism: Mustafa Kemal and the Turkish counter-revolution
Mustafa Kemal Pasha, the Ottoman commander who had become famous at Gallipoli, emerged as the principal leader of the Turkish nationalist movement. The movement rejected the partition of Anatolia contemplated at Sèvres and sought to establish national sovereignty over the Turkish heartland.
Mustafa Kemal and other Ottoman officers at Gallipoli
This was not simply an Ottoman army fighting a foreign invader. The Ottoman government in Constantinople accepted the Allied settlement; the nationalist movement centred in Anatolia rejected it. Turkey therefore experienced something approaching a war of national liberation combined with civil conflict.
The Greek army advanced deep into Anatolia. For a time, it appeared that Greece might achieve a substantial territorial settlement. But Turkish resistance stiffened. The nationalists defeated the Greek advance and, in August–September 1922, launched the offensive that drove the Greek army back towards the Aegean.
The Greek retreat was accompanied by atrocities and destruction on both sides. Turkish nationalist forces and irregulars committed massacres and expulsions against Christian civilians; Greek forces and retreating troops were themselves responsible for atrocities against Muslim civilians during their occupation and withdrawal. None of this is usefully understood through a simple morality tale in which one side was innocent and the other intrinsically barbarous.
There was, however, an important asymmetry in the final outcome: the Turkish nationalist victory made possible the consolidation of a Turkish nation-state in Anatolia, while the Greek population of much of the region was about to disappear.
Smyrna, September 1922
The events at Smyrna remain among the most contested episodes of the war, particularly regarding responsibility for the city’s fire and the precise number of people killed. The broad outlines are clearer.
Turkish nationalist forces entered Smyrna on 9 September 1922. The Greek Orthodox metropolitan, Chrysostomos, was murdered. There followed widespread looting, violence and attacks on the city’s Christian population. On 13 September a fire began in the Armenian quarter and subsequently consumed large parts of the Greek and Armenian districts.
The city contained a large Muslim population as well as substantial Greek and Armenian communities, and the precise course of the fire remains disputed. What is not disputed is the appalling predicament of the refugees trapped along the waterfront. Tens of thousands, probably far more, sought escape by sea. Allied warships were present. Their crews could see the fire. Their governments were reluctant to intervene militarily in what had become a Turkish nationalist victory and were constrained by the political circumstances of the time. Some Allied personnel and ships did rescue refugees; the larger failure was that the international presence did not prevent the catastrophe.
Smyrna was therefore both an atrocity and a symbol. It marked the end of a substantial Greek and Armenian presence in one of the great cities of the eastern Mediterranean.
But it was not, strictly speaking, the moment when that population vanished. Much of the Greek population had already fled or been displaced during the preceding years, and the final settlement was still to come.
The leaving of Smyrna, September 2022
The population exchange
The Treaty of Lausanne in 1923 replaced Sèvres and internationally recognised the sovereignty of the new Turkish Republic over Anatolia and eastern Thrace. Mustafa Kemal, now Atatürk, had won the war.
Lausanne also gave international legitimacy to the compulsory exchange of populations between Greece and Turkey. Approximately 1.2 million Orthodox Christians were transferred from Turkey to Greece, while roughly 400,000 Muslims were transferred from Greece to Turkey, subject to various exemptions, including the Greek population of Constantinople and the Muslim population of western Thrace.
The exchange was presented as a solution to the problem of minorities. In reality, it was the formalisation of a demographic revolution already substantially achieved through war, massacre, deportation and flight.
It is important not to describe this simply as the expulsion of Christians from Anatolia. Muslims had also been expelled from territories lost by the Ottoman Empire during the Balkan Wars, and the compulsory exchange itself displaced Muslim as well as Christian populations. Nor was the exchange an exclusively Turkish initiative: Greece and Turkey agreed to it, and the victorious European powers incorporated it into the Lausanne settlement.
It was nevertheless an extraordinary admission of failure. The ideal of a multi-ethnic Ottoman political order had effectively given way to the principle that stability could be achieved by separating populations according to religion and, increasingly, nationality.
The irony was profound. The Ottoman Empire had survived for centuries precisely because it did not require everyone within its borders to be Turkish, Arab, Greek, Armenian, Serbian or Bulgarian. Its subjects belonged to overlapping religious, linguistic and local communities. The nineteenth and early twentieth centuries progressively replaced that imperial pluralism with nationalism. By the 1920s, population transfer had become one of the instruments by which the new states sought to make their populations conform to their national boundaries.
The longer Ottoman endgame
This is why I find McMeekin’s The Ottoman Endgame such a useful corrective to the conventional Western story of the First World War.
The war in the Ottoman world was not merely a sideshow to the trenches of France and Belgium. It stretched from Gallipoli to Gaza, Baghdad to Baku, the Caucasus to the Arabian Peninsula. Its consequences extended from the Balkans through Anatolia and the Levant to Mesopotamia. And it was intimately connected with the Russian war, the Russian revolutions and the subsequent Russian Civil War.
The Ottoman collapse also cannot be reduced to the familiar caricature of Britain and France simply carving up an otherwise coherent Middle East according to the lines of the Sykes–Picot Agreement. Sykes–Picot was real and consequential, but it was one of several competing wartime schemes for the disposition of Ottoman territory. Russia, too, had imperial ambitions. Constantinople had long been an object of Russian strategic and religious aspiration. France had its own ambitions in the Levant. Britain was concerned with India, Egypt, Mesopotamia, the Persian Gulf and the routes linking them.
And the Arabs, Armenians, Greeks, Kurds, Turks and other peoples of the empire were not merely passive pieces on a European chessboard. They had their own political ambitions, national movements and armed organisations.
The same complexity applies to Gallipoli. The campaign was certainly a military disaster, and Churchill was one of its principal advocates. But it was not simply Churchill’s personal folly, as the mythology subsequently suggested. It emerged from a much wider strategic debate about how best to defeat the Ottoman Empire and assist Russia. Its failure helped establish Mustafa Kemal as a military leader of consequence.
That matters because the man who became the founder of modern Türkiye was not an outsider who suddenly appeared after the Ottoman collapse. He was an Ottoman officer, a product of the imperial military system and a veteran of the Balkan Wars, Libya and Gallipoli. The Turkish Republic was born not from a clean break with the Ottoman past but from its ruins.
A demographic revolution
There is a tendency, particularly in polemical accounts of this period, to describe the destruction of Anatolia’s Christian communities as a single uninterrupted campaign stretching from the Hamidian massacres through the Armenian genocide to Smyrna. The chronology is more complicated than that.
There were massacres under Abdulhamid II. There were the catastrophic deportation and destruction of the Armenians under the wartime Committee of Union and Progress. There were attacks on Assyrian communities. There were violence and displacement affecting Ottoman Greeks during and after the First World War. There were massacres of Muslims during the Balkan Wars and the Greek occupation and retreat in Anatolia. There was the Turkish nationalist war against Greece. There was Smyrna. Finally, there was the compulsory population exchange.
These events were not identical. Their perpetrators, political circumstances and immediate objectives differed. Nor should the existence of Muslim suffering be invoked to dilute the particular historical responsibility for the Armenian genocide.
But they belong to the same larger transformation: the violent passage from empire to nation-state.
What disappeared was not literally a civilisation that had remained unchanged for two thousand years. Anatolian Christianity itself had changed enormously over those centuries. Byzantine Christianity, Armenian Christianity, Syriac Christianity and Greek Orthodoxy had their own histories and communities. Ottoman society was neither a paradise of tolerance nor a permanent state of persecution. It was a hierarchical imperial order in which religious communities possessed considerable autonomy while remaining unequal before the state.
What disappeared in the early twentieth century was that plural Ottoman world.
By the middle of the 1920s, the Armenian presence in Anatolia had been largely destroyed; the great majority of Anatolian Greeks had gone; Assyrian communities had been devastated and dispersed; and millions of Muslims displaced from the Balkans and Caucasus had been absorbed into the Turkish heartland. The new Republic of Türkiye inherited an Anatolia that was considerably more homogeneous than the Ottoman Empire had been.
The transformation was accompanied by enormous human suffering and the appropriation of property on a vast scale. It also produced the demographic foundations of the modern Turkish state.
The wars of Ottoman succession
Seen from this distance, the Balkan Wars, the First World War and the Turkish War of Independence can be understood as parts of a longer sequence: the wars of Ottoman succession.
The Ottoman Empire had once encompassed much of southeastern Europe, the Middle East and North Africa. Its disappearance created a succession problem of extraordinary dimensions. Who would inherit its territories? Russia, Britain, France, Greece, Italy and the emerging Arab states all had answers. So did the Turks. The Balkan peoples had already answered the question in their own way before 1914.
The wars did not end neatly in 1918. The Ottoman defeat was followed by the Greek-Turkish war; the Russian Revolution and Civil War transformed the Caucasus; Britain and France established mandates in former Arab Ottoman territories; the Turkish Republic emerged from the nationalist victory; population exchanges attempted to impose demographic order upon territories in which communities had been intermingled for centuries.
That is one reason the consequences remain visible today.
The modern Middle East was not simply invented at a European conference after the First World War. Nor was it simply the inevitable product of ancient ethnic and religious hatreds. It emerged from the interaction of imperial collapse, nationalism, local political movements, European intervention, Russian expansion, war, revolution and demographic engineering.
Smyrna was therefore not the beginning of the story, and neither was it quite the end. It was one of the last great convulsions of the Ottoman endgame.
The ships in the harbour in September 1922 were looking at more than a burning city. They were looking at the consequences of a political order that had been collapsing for generations. Behind the flames lay the Balkan Wars, the deportations of 1915, the battles between Greeks and Turks, the Russian-Ottoman struggle in the Caucasus, the Allied occupation, Sèvres and the nationalist revolt led by Mustafa Kemal. Ahead lay Lausanne, the population exchange and the Republic of Türkiye.
The Ottoman Empire had gone. The Greek presence in Anatolia had largely gone with it. So too had the Armenian communities that had survived there for centuries.
But the story was not one of an ancient world simply disappearing beneath the flames. It was the much messier story of modern nationalism being born from the wreckage of empire.
And that is perhaps the more uncomfortable historical lesson. Empires can suppress national conflict without resolving it. When they collapse, the suppressed conflicts do not necessarily disappear. They can return in a more radical form, as competing peoples attempt to turn mixed imperial territories into national homelands. Borders are drawn; populations move; minorities become suspect; refugees become instruments of politics; and, in the worst circumstances, demographic homogenisation becomes a military objective.
The Ottoman Empire was not the only empire to discover this. The Habsburg, Romanov and German empires would suffer their own violent disintegration. Timothy Snyder’s later description of the lands between Germany and Russia as the “Bloodlands” has a broader resonance here. The territories left behind by the collapse of Europe’s great empires became some of the most violent political spaces of the twentieth century.
The Ottoman endgame was one of them. And it is still playing its echoes.
Izmir, May 2014
When we stood on the Izmir waterfront in 2014, there was little to suggest what had happened there ninety-two years earlier. The promenade was busy; the Aegean glittered beyond the harbour and modern İzmir was very much a Turkish city looking confidently towards its future. There was no visible boundary between the city that had been and the city that is.
Yet somewhere in the photographs I sent to our friend back home in Australia was a connection between those two worlds. His family’s roots lay in a city whose Greek population had once been large enough to constitute one of its defining communities. The people themselves had gone, their neighbourhoods transformed, their institutions dispersed, their descendants scattered across Greece and the wider diaspora. But the sea remained.
That is the strange persistence of history. People disappear; places survive. Names change, buildings are demolished, languages fall silent and populations are exchanged. Yet descendants carry fragments of the vanished world with them. Sometimes it is a family story, sometimes a photograph, sometimes a surname whose meaning has travelled further than its bearers ever imagined.
A Greek family descended from Smyrna and living in Sydney is itself a reminder of the untidy human geography of the Ottoman world. It tells us something that maps coloured in the clean shades of modern nation-states cannot: people moved, intermarried, converted, fled, were expelled and reinvented themselves. Their identities were rarely as tidy as the borders that eventually enclosed them.
The history of Smyrna is therefore not simply the story of one massacre or one burning city, terrible though those events were. It belongs to the much larger history of the collapse of empires and the rise of nationalism. The Balkan Wars, the First World War, the Armenian genocide, the destruction and displacement of Assyrian and Greek communities, the Greek advance into Anatolia, the Turkish nationalist victory and the compulsory population exchange were different episodes, with different actors and circumstances. Together, however, they transformed the demographic and political landscape of the eastern Mediterranean.
The Ottoman Empire had not been a harmonious multicultural paradise, and its dissolution did not produce violence from nowhere. But its disappearance removed an imperial framework within which different communities had lived, however unequally, alongside one another. The national states that replaced it promised sovereignty and security. Too often they sought both by making their populations more homogeneous.
That is the uncomfortable lesson of the Ottoman endgame. The twentieth century did not simply replace old empires with neat national democracies. It also produced refugees, minorities without homelands, homelands without their former minorities, and borders drawn through landscapes inhabited for generations by people who had never imagined themselves foreigners.
And yet history is not entirely erased by political transformation.
The harbour is still there.
In 1922, people crowded along that waterfront desperate to escape across the same Aegean. In 2014, an Australian friend of Greek Smyrna ancestry received photographs of that same waterfront from another traveller, standing there in very different circumstances. Between those two moments lies a century of catastrophe, migration and memory.
Perhaps that is what the old phrase about history leaving fingerprints really means. The fingerprints are not always found in monuments or memorials. Sometimes they survive in a surname, a family story, a photograph sent from a distant city — or in the simple recognition that, although the people have gone, you are standing where they once stood.
Roots and fruits.
The empire is gone. The city has changed. The people have dispersed.
… theprotagonists 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.”
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 Terrorin 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.
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
President Donald Trump has described the US bombing campaign against Iran as “a little excursion,” then a “skirmish,” then a “mini-war” – ostensible breaches of a subsequent ceasefire are called “trifles”. He was doing something powerful men have always done: reach for a word small enough to sit comfortably in a sentence while the fires it describes are still burning, without actually committing to the potential political consequences calling the conflict a war. The gesture is familiar. Vladimir Putin called his invasion of Ukraine a “special military operation.” History, in the end, has usually insisted on its own vocabulary. What begins as euphemism tends to end as a chapter heading.
The US-Iran conflict – a sustained bombing campaign, a naval blockade constricting a fifth of the world’s oil supply, and an increasingly fragile ceasefire – is, by any honest accounting, a war. That we have not yet fully agreed to call it one is itself revealing. Language shapes the choices we are willing to contemplate; the choices we refuse to contemplate have a habit of being made for us, usually at greater cost and on someone else’s timetable.
But naming the war is only the first act of reckoning. The second – and more treacherous – is understanding it. And here, almost instinctively, we reach backwards. Before the first campaign has properly unfolded, the analogies arrive.
For this is what nations do when confronted with uncertainty: they search the past for usable maps. Yet wars are not equations, and analogies illuminate only by partial light. Gallipoli warns of overconfidence and the fantasy of the decisive stroke. Crimea evokes mismanagement and systemic incoherence. Vietnam and Iraq conjure the slow dread of entanglement – wars that move, expensively and violently, without ever quite arriving at conclusion.
We rarely encounter a new war on its own terms. Before the first campaign has properly unfolded, it is already being narrated through the past – the Gallipoli, Crimea, Vietnam, Iraq – names invoked less as history than as instruments of comprehension. This reflex is not mere intellectual laziness. War, in its immediacy, is too vast, too contradictory, to grasp without scaffolding; analogy supplies the frame. It tells us where to look for overconfidence, where to suspect mismanagement, where to anticipate drift. Yet it also does something subtler, and more dangerous: it invites us to believe that the present can be read off the past, that by matching patterns we might master outcomes.
The essay that follows proceeds from that tension. It does not treat these conflicts as competing verdicts on America’s confrontation with Iran, but as different lenses trained on different moments of a war’s life: conception, execution, and duration. Each captures a recognisable failure mode – the decisive stroke that overreaches, the system that cannot align means to ends, the conflict that persists beyond its rationale. To “refight” these wars in argument is not simply to indulge historical memory; it is to reveal how deeply our strategic thinking remains shaped by unresolved experiences. The past, in this sense, is not behind us. It is the grammar in which we continue to write the present.
Seeking storylines to explain the present
The quest begins, as these often do, reaching backwards in search of a usable past, a storyline that suits the present and what is now unfolding between America and Iran.
No war arrives naked; it comes draped in analogy. War is too large, too chaotic, to apprehend all at once; analogy shrinks it to something graspable. Analogies, like maps, tell you where to look, but also, just as often, where not to. Gallipoli (1915–16) is summoned, and Crimea (1853–56), and then, inevitably, Vietnam (1955-75, the war of my generation, though one that we British chose not to join) and Iraq (2003-11), those twin lodestars of modern American unease. Each is offered up as a key. Each, in its way, fits a lock. None, taken alone, opens the door.
Start with the British campaign during WWI to seize the strategic Dardanelles straits with the aim of threatening Istanbul and taking the Ottoman Empire out of the war. That analogy tends to be invoked by those who see overconfidence at the top: a belief that a bold stroke – decapitation strikes, limited escalation, a sharp application of force – can produce a decisive political outcome in a complex theatre. Gallipoli was conceived as a shortcut around stalemate; it became a lesson in underestimating geography, logistics, and the enemy’s will. If the critique is that Washington imagined a controlled, almost surgical confrontation with Iran that would bend reality to its design, then Gallipoli fits – particularly in its early optimism curdling into stubborn, costly entanglement.
There is something almost aesthetic about the Gallipoli temptation. It promises clarity. A narrow strait, a defined objective, a hinge upon which the whole great mechanism might turn. Strategy reduced to geometry. Yet wars have a way of refusing such elegance. The Turkish defence stiffened; the terrain asserted itself; the timetable dissolved into dust and flies and blood. The decisive stroke became an extended ordeal. And here the analogy deepens: not merely in the initial miscalculation, but in the dawning realisation that what was meant to be quick has become something else entirely – sticky, resistant, unyielding.
The Crimean War comparison is subtler, and in some ways more damning. Ostensibly a campaign by Britain and France (ironically, the architects of the Dardanelles venture) to challenge Czarist Russia’s design on the ailing Ottoman Empire – the so-called Eastern Question. Crimea was not just a military muddle; it was a war of misaligned systems: unclear objectives, poor coordination, inflated rhetoric masking administrative incompetence, and a media environment that amplified both heroism and absurdity (the Charge of the Light Brigade as both myth and indictment). If the Iran conflict appears strategically incoherent – multiple actors, shifting goals, allies pulling in different directions, public narratives outpacing operational reality – then Crimea begins to look uncomfortably familiar. It’s less about one disastrous decision and more about a system that cannot quite align means with ends.
Here the failure is quieter, but more pervasive. Not the single grand error, but the accumulation of smaller ones: supply chains that falter, commands that overlap, allies who agree in principle but diverge in practice. Crimea is what happens when the machinery of war – bureaucratic, logistical, political – fails to mesh. The guns fire, the troops advance, the dispatches glow with rhetoric, but somewhere beneath it all the connection between effort and outcome frays. One might say, borrowing that withering line in the 1960 Encyclopedia Britannica, that it becomes “perhaps the most ill-managed campaign in English history” – and the sting lies precisely in that word managed. Not conceived, not fought, but managed: as though war were an administrative exercise that has slipped its clerical bounds.
And then, inevitably, we arrive at America’s misbegotten wars in Indochina and Iraq. When people reach for these, they are usually pointing to something deeper: not the opening moves, but the trajectory. Vietnam is the archetype of gradual escalation into a conflict that cannot be cleanly won because its political premises are flawed. Iraq (particularly post-2003) adds another layer: the illusion of quick victory followed by insurgency, fragmentation, and the long tail of unintended consequences. If Iran becomes a drawn-out contest of proxies, asymmetric retaliation, and domestic fatigue – where tactical successes accumulate but strategic clarity recedes – then Vietnam/Iraq is the more predictive analogy.
Vietnam was once called “chaos without a compass,” and the phrase endures because it captures the feeling of the war more than its formal doctrine. There was, in fact, a compass – containment, credibility, dominoes – but it spun uncertainly, pointing in several directions at once. Washington oscillated between coercion and restraint, escalation and negotiation, measuring progress in tonnage dropped and bodies counted, even as the political centre of gravity drifted further out of reach. The war moved, violently and expensively, but it did not arrive. It accumulated.
Iraq echoes that pattern but begins differently – with a burst of clarity that dissolves into ambiguity. The regime falls; the statue topples; the map is redrawn in a matter of weeks; victory is declared. And then the afterlife begins. Insurgency, sectarian fracture, proxy entanglement- the slow discovery that winning the war is not the same as securing the peace. Iraq is what happens when the end state is assumed rather than constructed. It is, in that sense, less a campaign than a condition.
Set beside these, the earlier analogies sharpen. Gallipoli was not “chaos without a compass” at the outset; it had a very clear aim. Nor was it quite Crimea’s administrative farce, though elements of mismanagement crept in as the campaign stalled. Its distinctive flaw was the belief that a bold, limited stroke could shortcut the hard arithmetic of war – geography, supply, enemy adaptation. When that belief failed, the campaign slid, almost reluctantly, toward something more protracted, more wearing, with flashes of Crimean dysfunction flickering at the edges.
And this is the point at which the analogies begin to overlap, to blur into one another. The opening may be Gallipoli: confident, compressed, persuasive in its apparent simplicity. The conduct may drift toward Crimea: systems straining, coordination fraying, rhetoric outrunning reality. The trajectory may lengthen into Vietnam or Iraq: time stretching, purpose thinning, the war becoming less an event than an environment.
So which is most apt? If you’re judging initial strategic conception: then it is Gallipoli. If you’re judging systemic dysfunction and coalition incoherence: it’s Crimea. If you’re judging likely long-term dynamics and risk of quagmire: look to Vietnam and Iraq.
Forced to choose one, the most useful analogy is probably Iraq (with a Vietnam shadow). It captures both the confidence of the opening act and the chronic instability that can follow when political end states are ill-defined. Gallipoli was a failed gamble; Iraq became a condition. And it is the risk of becoming a condition – open-ended, absorbing, resistant to tidy resolution – that should trouble policymakers more than the memory of any single historical blunder.
For there is something peculiarly modern in that transformation. Nineteenth-century wars could be mismanaged; early twentieth-century campaigns could be disastrously conceived; but late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century conflicts have a habit of enduring. They slip their temporal bounds. They resist conclusion. They persist in the form of insurgencies, proxy struggles, regional destabilisations, so-called “forever wars” – echoes rather than endings.
History, in this sense, does not repeat so much as it offers a set of recurring traps, each labelled in a different hand. The names change – Lone Pine and The Nek, Balaclava, Khe Sanh, Fallujah – but the pattern is recognisable: ambition outruns understanding; institutions struggle to keep pace with intention; time erodes clarity; and strategy discovers, too late, that the map was never the territory.
The past, obligingly, provides the metaphors. The present decides which of them it is willing to become.
Forever wars and the persistent Eastern Question
Ironically, the repercussions and ricochets of the Crimea and Gallipoli linger still in the “forever wars” of the Ottoman Succession that continue to be fought in the Levant. Though the “sick man of Europe” has long gone, so-called “Eastern Question” that he precipitated is with us still. And the irony is not merely poetic, it is structural.
The Crimean War and Gallipoli were not just episodes in the long decline of the Ottoman Empire; they were moments in which the European powers tried, and failed, to manage that decline without resolving it. The Eastern Question – what to do with a weakening empire whose territories sat athwart trade routes, faiths, and ambitions – was never answered. It was deferred, patched, internationalised, moralised, and, when necessary, fought over. But never settled.
Crimea was, in essence, a war about containment without clarity. Britain and France fought not to destroy the Ottoman Empire, nor to reform it decisively, but to prevent Russia from exploiting its weakness. The result was a kind of geopolitical holding operation – costly, confused, and inconclusive. The patient survived, but the illness deepened. The war did not solve the Eastern Question; it ensured that it would return, more complicated than before.
Gallipoli, sixty years later, was almost the inverse: an attempt at decisive intervention that miscarried. Where Crimea sought to stabilise the system, Gallipoli tried to break it open – knock the Ottomans out of what became known as The Great War, reorder the strategic map, and force a resolution. It failed, and in failing, prolonged the life of the very problem it aimed to solve. When the Ottoman Empire did finally collapse in 1918, it did so not through elegant strategy but through cumulative exhaustion – and the settlement that followed (the infamous Sykes–Picot agreement, the Treaty of Lausanne that ended the Great War and shaped the modern Middle East, the mandates, improvised borders, and the legacies inherited by Israel and Palestine, by Syria and Lebanon, and by Iraq carried within it the seeds of future instability.
And here is the connective tissue to the present: the “forever wars” of the Levant are, in a very real sense, the afterlife of those unresolved choices.
The Ottoman system, for all its inequities, provided a kind of imperial coherence – a loose, often improvised order that managed diversity through hierarchy rather than uniformity. Its removal created a vacuum that external powers attempted to fill with lines on maps and imported state structures, often indifferent to local realities, including religious and ethnic divisions. The mandates were not solutions; they were transitional fictions that hardened into permanence. The Eastern Question did not end; it metastasised.
Thus the region becomes a palimpsest of earlier interventions:
The Crimean instinct persists in modern coalition warfare – external powers seeking to contain instability without fully committing to its resolution, managing symptoms rather than causes.
The Gallipoli impulse reappears in periodic attempts at decisive intervention – strikes, invasions, regime-change strategies – each promising to reset the board, each discovering the board is more complicated than imagined.
And over all this hangs the long shadow of Vietnam and Iraq: the recognition that once engaged, these conflicts do not conclude cleanly, but evolve into layered, persistent struggles involving states, militias, proxies, and narratives.
What we call “forever wars” are, in this sense, not aberrations but continuations – the modern form of an old, unanswered question. The Ottoman Empire is gone, but the strategic problem it embodied remains: a region where internal fractures intersect with external interests, where no single power can impose order, and where every intervention alters the conditions for the next.
There is a quiet, almost melancholic symmetry in this. Nineteenth-century statesmen spoke of the “Sick Man of Europe” as though the problem were a patient to be diagnosed and treated. But the illness was never confined to the patient; it was embedded in the system around him. Remove the patient, and the condition does not disappear – it redistributes itself.
So when modern observers reach for Gallipoli, or Crimea, or Vietnam, or Iraq, they are not merely searching for analogies of method. They are circling, perhaps without quite naming it, the persistence of a problem without closure.
The Eastern Question was never answered. It simply changed its language.
Challenging the analogies
You can’t really make sense of the analogies – Gallipoli, Crimea, Vietnam, Iraq – without restoring Iran itself to the centre of the frame. Otherwise the country becomes a backdrop, a stage upon which other powers replay their historical anxieties. But Iran is not the Ottoman Empire in decline, nor Iraq in 2003, nor Vietnam in 1965. It is an old state with a long memory of being acted upon – and that memory shapes how it acts now.
What changes, once you bring Iran back in, is the direction of the analogy. The earlier comparisons mostly describe how outside powers misjudge wars. Iran’s history reminds you how those same powers are often experienced from the inside – as intrusion, manipulation, or existential threat.
Iran enters the story not as an abstraction – “the enemy,” “the regime,” “the theatre” – but as a historical actor formed in the crucible of the very system the earlier analogies describe.
In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Persia was itself entangled in a version of the Eastern Question, pressured by Russian and British imperial competition, its sovereignty compromised, its politics penetrated. The First World War and its aftermath did not dismantle Iran as they did the Ottoman Empire, but they confirmed its vulnerability to external design. The Second World War made that vulnerability explicit: Anglo-Soviet occupation in 1941, the removal of Reza Shah, and the installation of his son – an early demonstration that great powers could, when required, rearrange Iran’s internal order.
From there, the pattern sharpens. The 1953 coup against the democratically elected prime minister Mohammed Mossadegh – engineered by Britain and the United States – lodges itself in Iranian political consciousness as a defining moment: not simply a change of government, but a lesson about the limits of independence in a world of larger powers. The Shah’s subsequent rule, modernising yet authoritarian, Western-aligned yet domestically brittle, becomes the next act in this long drama of externally entangled sovereignty.
The Islamic Revolution of 1979 then reads, in part, as a rupture with that pattern- a violent reassertion of autonomy, clothed in religious language but grounded in political memory. “Neither East nor West” was not just a slogan; it was a rejection of the very dynamics that had shaped Iran’s modern history. Yet revolutions do not escape geography. The new regime inherits the same strategic environment, the same pressures, the same suspicions.
The Iran–Iraq War (1980–88) is crucial here. For eight years, Iran fights a brutal, attritional conflict against Saddam Hussein – largely isolated, facing external support flowing to its adversary. This is Iran’s Vietnam, one might say, but with a different lesson drawn: not the futility of war, but the necessity of endurance. The war entrenches a doctrine of asymmetry, resilience, and proxy capability – precisely the features that later confound American strategy in the region.
From that point on, the Islamic Republic is not simply surviving; it is adapting. It builds networks – Hezbollah, militias, regional alliances – not as ideological ornaments but as strategic depth. It becomes, in effect, a state that has internalised the lessons of the very wars others use as analogies. Where outside observers see Vietnam or Iraq looming, Iranian planners see something else: a long game in which time, patience, and indirection offset conventional inferiority.
To reinsert Iran into the narrative is to complicate every analogy. Gallipoli assumes an opponent who will react predictably to a decisive blow; Iran’s history suggests otherwise. Crimea assumes mismanagement on one side; Iran’s experience reminds us that what appears as dysfunction externally may be met by coherence internally. Vietnam and Iraq warn of quagmires; Iran has, in many respects, built its strategy around drawing others into them.
In that sense, the question is not only which past war America risks refighting, but which past experiences Iran believes it is reliving – or avenging. The 1953 coup, the isolation of the 1980s, the long memory of foreign interference: these are not background details, but active ingredients in the present.
And so our frame subtly shifts. It is no longer simply about the hazards of analogy, or the repetition of strategic error, but about the collision of historical memories. One side reaches for Gallipoli, Crimea, Vietnam, Iraq- warnings drawn from its own past misjudgments. The other carries a different archive: intervention, resistance, survival.
Between those two archives lies the present conflict – less a replay of any single war than a convergence of many, each side reading from a different script, each convinced, in its own way, that history has already shown it how this story goes.
Conclusion
To refight old wars in the mind is, at one level, an act of prudence. It reminds us that others have stood at similar thresholds, armed with confidence, intelligence, and good intentions – and have nonetheless misjudged the terrain, the enemy, or themselves. But there is a fine line between learning from history and being governed by it. Analogy can clarify; it can also constrain. It can sharpen perception, or it can trap us in inherited scripts, seeing Gallipoli where the problem is administrative, or diagnosing Vietnam when the flaw lies in the opening wager.
The deeper unease running through these comparisons is not simply that wars go wrong, but that they linger – that they slip their boundaries and become conditions rather than episodes. From the mismanaged campaigns of Crimea to the failed gambles of Gallipoli, from the disorientation of Vietnam to the long aftermath of Iraq, one sees not repetition but recurrence: ambition outrunning understanding, institutions straining to keep pace, time eroding clarity. And beneath it all, especially in the Levant, the longer echo of an older, unanswered question – how to order a region where external power and internal fracture are perpetually entangled.
History does not offer a single, authoritative mirror. It offers a cabinet of them, each slightly warped, each catching a different angle of the present. The task is not to choose one reflection and mistake it for reality, but to recognise the distortions for what they are – and to ask, with some humility, whether we are illuminating the path ahead or merely retracing, with greater eloquence, the steps that led others into the same uncertain ground.
The Western cabinet of mirrors – Gallipoli, Crimea, Vietnam, Iraq – captures recurring pathologies: the overconfident opening stroke, the misaligned machinery, the war that lingers beyond its logic. Yet these are, inescapably, insider narratives. They describe how campaigns look from the bridge, the штаб, the situation room. They are diagnoses of our own errors.
What the Iranian story, set against the longer afterlife of the Eastern Question, forces back into view is the perspective from the other shore. The Young Turks, confronting encroachment and dismemberment, did not experience Gallipoli as a misjudged Allied gamble; they experienced it as a defence of survival. Ho Chi Minh and the North Vietnamese did not inhabit “chaos without a compass”; they pursued a coherent, if costly, struggle against a foreign presence. Iraqi insurgents, and later ISIS in its own brutal and aberrant way, did not parse the war as a case study in post-conflict planning; they resisted, adapted, endured, and exploited.
They did not conduct war games about us. They fought.
Iran belongs in that lineage – not as an analogue, but as an heir to a particular historical consciousness: one shaped by intervention, by imposed settlements, by long wars of attrition, and by the conviction that time can be turned into a weapon. From that vantage, what appears to Western observers as drift or dysfunction may look like opportunity; what is feared as quagmire may be cultivated as strategy.
And so the question shifts. It is no longer simply which past war America risks refighting, but whether the very act of choosing among Gallipoli, Crimea, Vietnam, and Iraq obscures the more important reality: that the other side is not reading from the same book – or as many commentators are reminding us today, “the enemy has a vote”. One side searches its history for warnings about overreach; the other draws from its own past a repertoire of resistance.
History, then, does not just offer competing analogies. It offers competing memories. And where those memories diverge – where one side analyses and the other endures – there lies the most persistent danger: not that we will repeat the past, but that we will misunderstand the present, even as we describe it with perfect historical fluency.
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.
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 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?
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.
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
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.
And we are here as on a darkling plain Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, Where ignorant armies clash by night.
Mathew Arnold, Dover Beach
We called 2024 a “year of everything, everywhere, all at once”, and it earned the name. Crises collided, news arrived faster than we could process it, and the world seemed to exist in a state of constant shock. 2025 did not bring relief. Instead, the chaos began to settle. Wars dragged on, political divides hardened, social tensions deepened, and technology reshaped how we saw and understood it all.
It was the year the world stopped exploding in real time and started being what it had already become: messy, uneven, morally complicated, and stubbornly persistent. A year, indeed, in a world of echoes, refrains and unfinished business. And we spent the year watching power bargain brazenly in plain sight, trying to describe what was happening while it unfolded around us.
From Gaza to Ukraine, Sudan to Syria, from America’s self-inflicted fracture to Australia’s sudden wake-up call on Bondi Bondi, 2025 forced a reckoning: the world did not pause, but it did sort itself – deciding what we would notice, what we would ignore, and what we would learn to live with. Alongside human crises came the continuing advance of AI and chatbots, and the dominion of the algorithms that now govern attention, proving that disruption can be structural as well as geopolitical.
Gaza: War, Then “Ceasefire”
The war in Gaza dominated the year internationally and here in Australia, even as attention ebbed and flowed. Military operations continued for months, followed eventually by a “ceasefire” – a word doing far more work than it should or even justified. Fighting paused, hostages living and dead were returned and prisoners released, but the devastation remained: tens of thousands dead, cities demolished, humanitarian catastrophe unresolved. And the causes of the consequences standing still amidst the ruins and the rubble.
Western governments continued to back Israel while expressing concern for civilians, a contradiction that grew harder to defend, while street protests and online anger seethed all across the world. At the same time, antisemitism surged globally, often hiding behind the language of anti-Zionism. Two realities existed together, and too many people insisted on choosing only one.
By the end of the year, the war had not been resolved – merely frozen. Trust in Western moral leadership had been badly damaged, and Israelis and Palestinians remain in bitter limbo.
Long-simmering tensions between Israel and Iran spilled into open conflict. What had once been indirect – proxies, cyberattacks, covert strikes – became visible. A brief but destructive war of missile exchanges ended with the United States asserting ordinance, deterrence and control.
The episode was brief but telling. It showed that America still reaches for its guns quickly, even as it struggles to define long-term goals. Another line was crossed, then quickly absorbed into the background of “normal” geopolitics.
Russia, Ukraine and Trump’s “Peace”
Ukraine entered 2025 mired in stalemate. Front lines barely moved. Casualties continued to mount. Western support held, but with clear signs of fatigue. And Donald Trump’s re-emergence reshaped the conversation. His promise to deliver instant “peace” reframed the war not as a question of justice or sovereignty, but of exhaustion. Peace was no longer about what Ukraine deserved, but about what the world was tired of sustaining and what the “art of the deal” could deliver.
The war didn’t end. It simply became something many wanted to stop thinking about. Not Ukraine and Russia, but. The carnage continues.
Donald Trump’s one-way crush on Vladimir gave us the one of the+most cringeworthy moments in global politics – Trump greeting the Russian president in Alaska: As the US president rolled out the red carpet for the world’s most dangerous autocrat, Russia’s attack on Ukraine accelerated. Trump got precisely nothing out of the meeting, except for the chance to hang out with a gangster he so obviously admires and of whom he is embarrassingly in awe.
Syria: Free, but stranded at the crossroads
A year after Assad’s fall, Syria remained unstable and unresolved. The regime was gone, but the future was unclear. Old sectarian tensions resurfaced, often in bloodshed, new power struggles emerged, powerful neighbours staked claims and justice for past crimes remained distant.
Syria in 2025 was neither a success story nor a collapse – but suspended between heaven and hell, a country trying to exist after catastrophe with the rest of the world largely moving on.
Women in Damascus celebrate the fall of the Assad regime
Sudan: what genocide actually looks like
Sudan’s civil war continued with little international attention. Mass killing, ethnic cleansing, famine, and displacement unfolded slowly and relentlessly. This was genocide without spectacle. No clear narrative. No sustained outrage. It showed how mass atrocity can now occur not in secrecy, but in plain sight – and still be ignored.
The United States spent 2025 deeply divided, with no sign of healing. Pew Research polling showed that seven out of ten republicans think that the opposite side is immoral while six of ten democrats thinks the same of their rivals.
Trump’s return to power sharpened those divisions. His administration governed aggressively: mass deportations, punitive tariffs, the dismantling of foreign aid, political retribution, and pressure on democratic institutions. The country looked inward and outward at the same time – less cooperative, more transactional, more openly nationalist. Democratic norms eroded not overnight, but through constant stress and disregard. With three years still to run and the tell-tale midterms approaching, allies and cronies are adjusting, bickering rivals are taking notes, and uncertainty has become the defining feature of American leadership. Meanwhile, #47 is slapping his name on everything he can christen, from bitcoins to battleships.
US foreign policy took on a blunt, old-fashioned tone. Pressure on Canada and Mexico increased. Talk of annexing Greenland resurfaced. Venezuela, caught in the maw of Yanqui bullying and bluster, waits nervously for Washington’s next move. The administration promised imminent land operations – and then bombed Nigeria! The revival of the old Monroe Doctrine felt, as baseball wizz Yogi Berra once remarked, like déjà vu all over again, not as strategy, but as instinct. Influence asserted, consultation discarded. The “ugly American” was back, and unapologetic.
Europe in 2025 didn’t collapse, as many pundits suggested it might, but it shifted. Far-right ideas gained ground even where far-right parties didn’t win and remained, for now, on the fringes albeit closer to electoral success. Borders tightened; policies hardened; street protests proliferated – against immigration and against Israel, Support for Ukraine continued, but cautiously. The continent stood at a crossroads: still committed to liberal values in theory, but increasingly selective in practice.
Uncle Sam’s cold-shoulder
Rumbling away in the background throughout year was the quiet but cumulative alienation of America’s allies. Not with a single rupture, but through a thousand small slights. transactional diplomacy dressed up as realism, alliances treated as invoices rather than covenants, multilateralism dismissed as weakness. Europe learned that security guarantees come with a mood swing; the Middle East heard policy announced via spectacle; Asia watched reassurance coexist uneasily with unpredictability.
The new dispensation was illustrated by the Trump National Security Strategy. It is at once candid and contradictory: it outlines a narrower, realist vision of American interests, emphasising sovereignty, burden-sharing, industrial renewal, and strategic clarity, yet it is riddled with silences, evasions, and tensions between rhetoric and likely action. Allies are scolded for weakness while the document avoids naming Russia’s aggression, underplays China, and projects American cultural anxieties onto Europe. These contradictions expose both strategic incoherence and the limits of paper doctrine against presidential temperament, leaving Europe facing an irreversible rupture in trust and revealing a strategy as much about America’s insecurities as its actual global posture.
The post-WW2 order has not so much been dismantled as shrugged at, and indeed, shrugged off. Trust eroded not because the United States has withdrawn from the world, but because it has remained present without being reliable, and presumed itself to be in charge. Power, exercised loudly but inconsistently, has discovered an old truth: allies can endure disagreement, but they struggle with contempt.
Australia in 2025 … high flight and crash landing
Though beset by a multitude of crises – the cost of living, housing, health and education services – the Albanese Labor government was returned comfortably in May, helped by a divided, incoherent, and seemingly out of touch opposition. For the rest the year, federal politics felt strangely frictionless with policy drift passing for stability. The Coalition remained locked in internal conflict, unable to present a credible alternative. The Greens, chastened by electoral defeat and in many formerly friendly quarters, ideological disillusionment, treaded water.
But beneath the surface, social cohesion frayed. Immigration debates sharpened. Antisemitism rose noticeably, no longer something Australians could pretend belonged elsewhere. Attacks on Jewish Australians forced a reckoning many had avoided and hoped would resolve once the tremors of the war in Gaza had ameliorated. Until 6.47pm on 7th December, a beautiful evening on Sydney’s iconic Bondi Beach. Sudden, brutal and in our summer playground, sectarian violence shattered the sense of distance Australians often feel from global disorder. At that moment, politics stopped feeling abstract. The world, with all its instability, barged in and brought the country down to earth.
Lifesavers on Bondi Beach, 20 December 2025. Edwina Pickles
Featured photograph and above:
A handful of bodies on Bondi Beach, and behind them, the howling infinite of expectation, obligation, and the careful rationing of human empathy. The smallness of the beach against the vastness of consequences. On December 20, 2025, Bondi’s iconic lifesavers formed a line stretching the entire length of the beach -silent, solemn, a nation visibly in mourning. Similar tributes unfolded from Perth to Byron Bay, gestures of unity in the face of a shock that touched the whole country.
The Year of the Chatbot: Promise, Power, and Risk
And now, a break from the doom and gloom …
2025 was the year when artificial intelligence became part of daily life. Chatbots ceased to be experimental and became integral, transforming from novelty to utility seemingly overnight. People used it to write, research, translate, plan, argue, comfort, and persuade; institutions and individuals adopted it instinctively. Setting tone as much as content, the ‘bots have lowered barriers to knowledge, sharpened thinking, and helped people articulate ideas they might otherwise struggle to express. Used well, they amplified curiosity rather than replace it.
The opportunities are obvious – but so are the risks. Systems that can clarify complexity can also flatten it. Chatbots sound confident even when wrong, smooth over disagreement, and made language cleaner, calmer, and more persuasive – but not necessarily truer. They reinforce confirmation bias, outrage, and tribal certainty, generating arguments instantly and flooding the zone with plausible-sounding text. As information has became faster, cheaper, and less reliable, Certainty has spread more easily than truth, so truth has to work much harder.
Dependence is subtler but real. Outsourcing thinking – summaries instead of reading, answers instead of wrestling – did not make humans stupid, but less patient. Nuance, doubt, and slow understanding became harder to justify in a world optimised for speed. Yet conversely, man people still seek context, history, and complexity. Used deliberately, AI could slow the pace, map contradictions, and hold multiple truths at once.
By the end of 2025, the question was no longer whether AI would shape public life – it already had. The real question is whether humans would use it as a shortcut, or as a discipline. The technology is neutral. The danger – and the promise – lies in how much thinking we are willing to give up, and how much responsibility we are prepared to keep.
Alongside the chatbot sat a quieter, more insidious force: the algorithm itself. By 2025 it no longer simply organised information – it governed attention. What people saw, felt, and argued about was shaped less by importance than by engagement. To borrow from 20th century philosopher and communication theorist and educator Marshall McLuhan, the meme had become the message. Complex realities were compressed into images, slogans, clips, and talking points designed not to inform but to travel. The algorithm rewarded speed over reflection, certainty over doubt, heat over light. Politics, war, and grief were all flattened into content, stripped of context, and ranked by performance. What mattered most was not what was true or necessary, but what disseminated.
Passion without Wisdom
I wrote during the year that we seemed “full of passionate intensity” – Yeats’ phrase still apt in the twenty first century- but increasingly short on wisdom and insight. 2025 confirmed it. Anger was everywhere, empathy highly selective, certainty worn like armour. People felt deeply but thought narrowly. Moral energy surged but rarely slowed into understanding. The problem was not indifference; it was excess – too much feeling, too little reflection. In that environment, nuance looked like weakness and patience like complicity. What was missing was not information, but judgement – the harder work of holding contradiction, of resisting instant conclusions, of allowing complexity to temper conviction. Passion was abundant. Insight, increasingly rare.
Looking Toward 2026
Looking back on 2025, it seems that there were no endings, neither happy or sad. Just a promise, it seems, of more of the same. The year didn’t solve anything. It clarified things. And if it clarified anything, it was that the world has grown adept at managing, ignoring, or absorbing what it cannot fix. It revealed a world adjusting to permanent instability. In this year of echoes, refrains, and unfinished sentences.
Passion, intensity, and outrage were abundant, but patience, wisdom, and insight remained scarce. Democracies strained under internal and external pressures. Wars lingered unresolved. Technology reshaped thought and attention.
Some argue that hope springs eternal, that yet, even amid the drift and the fractures, glimpses of understanding and resistance persisted, that although the world has settled into its chaos, we can be riders on the storm. But, I fear, 2026 arrives not as break, a failsafe, a safety valve, but as continuation. It looms as a test of endurance rather than transformation. In my somnolent frame of mind, I’ve reached again for my Yeats. “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, the blood-dimmed tide is loosed …”
After the chaos of 2024 and the hardening of 2025, the question is no longer what might go wrong. It’s what we’re prepared to live with.
And so we come to what In That Howling Infinite wrote in 2025.
What we wrote in 2025
It was a year that refused neat endings.
It began in a wasteland – Gaza as moral ground zero – and moved, restlessly, through revolutions real and imagined: Trump as symptom and accelerant, Putin as a man racing his own shadow, Syria forever at the crossroads where history idles and then accelerates without warning. Gaza returned, again and again, sunrise and false dawn, as spectacle and strategy; Sudan burned in near silence; Venezuela re-entered the frame as empire’s backyard as the US disinterred its Monrovian legacy. In That Howling Infinite featured pieces on each of these – several in many cases , twenty in all, plus a few of relevance to them, including an overview of journalist Robert Fisk’s last book (The Night of Power – Robert Fisk’s bitter epilogue). A broadranging historical piece written in the previous year and deferred, Modern history is built upon exodus and displacement, provided a corrective of sorts to the distorted narratives that have emerged in recent years due to a dearth of historical knowledge and the partisan weaponisation of words.
It was almost as light relief that we turned to other subjects. Of particular interest was AI. Approaching remorselessly yet almost unrecognised in recent years, it banged a loud gong and crept from curiosity to condition, from tool to weather system, quietly rewriting the newsroom, the internet, and the idea of authorship. ChatGPT and other chatbots appeared not as saviours but as promise and peril in equal measure. By year end, we were fretting about using ChatGPT too much and regarding it as something to moderate like alcohol or fatty foods. We published three pieces on the subject in what seemed like rapid succession, and then pestered out – sucked into the machinery, I fear.
What with so much else attracting our attention, we nevertheless managed to find time for some history – including a particularly enthralling and indeed iconoclastic book on the fall of the Ottoman Empire; the story of an Anzac brigade lost in Greece in 1942; “the Lucky Country” revisited after half a century; and a piece long in the pipeline on the iconic singer and activist Paul Robeson.
In August, as on a whim, for light relief, we summoned up a nostalgic old Seekers’ song from the mid-sixties, a time when the world was on fire with war and rage much as it is today, but for us young folk back in the day, a time of hope and hedonism. For us, the carnival, clearly, is not over. The machinery is still whirring, the music still loud, and the lights still on. History is insisting on one more turn of the wheel, and the dawn, so often promised, so frequently invoked, has not yet broken.
January
The Gaza War … there are no winners in a wasteland
The way we were … reevaluating the Lucky Country
February
Let’s turn Gaza into Mar e Largo
Trump’s Second Coming … the new American Revolution
Cold Wind in Damascus … Syria at the crossroads
March
Trumps Revolution… he can destroy but he cannot create
Where have all the big books gone?
Putin’s War … an ageing autocrat seeks his place in history
April
The Trump Revolution … I run the country and the world
The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the birth of Türkiye
Let Stalk Strine .. a lexicon of Australian as it was spoken (maybe)
May
The phantom of liberty … the paradoxes of conservativism
Shadows in search of a name … requiem for a war
The continuing battle for Australia’s history
July
A mighty voice … the odyssey of Paul Robeson
August
109 years of Mein Kampf … the book that ravaged a continent
High above the dawn is breaking … the unlikely origin of a poo song
September
Gaza sunrise or false dawn? Trump’s peace plan
Gaza sunrise or false dawn? Spectacle or Strategy
Will there ever be a Palestinian state?
Why Osana bin lost the battle but won the war
The Night of Power … Robert Fisks bitter epilogue
The promise and peril of ChatGPT
Who wrote this? The newsroom’s AI dilemma
October
AI and the future of the internet
Danger Angel … the ballad of Laura Loomer
November
A forgotten Anzac story in Greece’s bloody history
The most nihilistic war ever … Sudan’s waking nightmare
Answering the call … National Service in Britain 1945-1963
Tales of Yankee Power … at play in Americas backyard
December
Delo Kirova – the Kirov Case … a Soviet murder mystery
Between heaven and hell … Syria at the crossroads
This Is What It Looks Like
Tales of Yankee power … Why Venezuela, and why now?
Marco Rubio’s Venezuelan bargain
It is our custom to conclude our annual wrap with a particular song that caught our attention during the year. Last year, we chose Tears for Fears’ Mad World. It would be quite appropriate for 2025. But no repeats! so here is something very different. An outwardly melancholy song that is, in the most ineffable way quite uplifting. that’s what we reckon, anyway …
The Ticket Taker is on the surface a love song for the apocalypse; and it’s it’s one of the prettiest, most lyrically interesting songs I’ve heard in a long while. I could almost hear late-period Leonard Cohen and his choir of angels.
The apocalypse is both backdrop and metaphor. We’re not sure which. Is it really about a world ending, or just about the private ruin of a man left behind by love and fortune. The lyrics are opaque enough to evade final meaning, but resonant enough to keep circling back, like the ferry itself, between hope and futility. A love song, yes, but also a confession of entrapment: the gambler’s hope, the ark one cannot board.
The “Ticket Taker” song was written by Ben Miller and Jeff Prystowsky and is featured on The Low Anthem’s album Oh My God, Charlie Darwin. It features on Robert Plant’s latest foray into roots music – this time with English band Saving Grace. This flawless duet with Suzi Dian is mesmerising and magical.
Jeff will tell you that the song is “pure fiction,” that Ben “just made it up one day” – but fiction, as we know, has a way of smuggling deeper truths than fact dares admit.
Tonight’s the night when the waters rise
You’re groping in the dark
The ticket takers count the men who can afford the ark
The ticket takers will not board, for the ticket takers are tied
For five and change an hour, they will count the passers-by
They say the sky’s the limit, but the sky’s about to fall
Down come all them record books, cradle and all
They say before he bit it that the boxer felt no pain
But somewhere there’s a gambling man with a ticket in the rain
Mary Anne, I know I’m a long shot
But Mary Anne, what else have you got?
I am a ticket taker, many tickets have I torn
And I will be your ark, we will float above the storm
Many years have passed in this river town, I’ve sailed through many traps
I keep a stock of weapons should society collapse
I keep a stock of ammo, one of oil, and one of gold
I keep a place for Mary Anne, soon she will come home
Mary Anne, I know I’m a long shot
But Mary Anne, what else have you got?
I am a ticket taker, many tickets have I torn
And I will be your ark, we will float above the storm
Mary Anne, I know I’m a long shot
But Mary Anne, what else have you got?
I am a ticket taker, many tickets have I torn
And I will be your ark
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.
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. 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 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
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
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.
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
“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
“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.
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
For those who did not enjoy the experience, it must have felt like the Second World War had not truly ended.
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.
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.
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
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
Sir Henry Cooper (left) is seen on a training jog with other recruits during his National Service
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
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 are seen marching at a depot in Kingston upon Thames
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 , November 1955
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
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
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
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 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
Cold War & immediate post‑war security environment — NATO, Warsaw Pact, and decolonisation shaped demand for mass armies in 1940s–1960s.
Colonial wars and conscription politics — France (Indochina/Algeria) and Britain (Malayan Emergency, Suez, later emergencies) faced public controversy and political consequences.
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.
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).
Conscientious objection & alternatives — Growth of legal alternatives, tribunals, civilian service provisions from the 1950s–1980s onward.
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.
Gender & conscription — Mostly male‑only until the 21st century; some states (e.g., Norway) expanded to gender‑neutral service in recent years.
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)
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
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.
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.
Colonial/operational effects: Colonial wars (France, Britain) made conscription politically salient; in contrast, Moscow used conscripts for garrisoning client states.
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.
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.
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.
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 …
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 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.
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
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.
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
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.
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
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.
In That Howling Infinite 
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.