Commentator and counterinsurgency expert David Kilcullen is always worth reading – and below is his latest piece for The Australian. In my opinion, he is one of the most articulate and knowledgeable analysts of political and military affairs in the contemporary Middle East.
In the following analysis of Israel’s invasion of the Palestinian enclave of Gaza, in response to the Hamas’ murderous assault on October 7th last year, he argues that despite calls from the US and others to “fight a different war”, the realities on the ground and the torturous dynamics of Israeli and Palestinian politics – which few outside observers are aware of or are even interested – dictate that is that the present carnage and destruction is unavoidable when you conduct large-scale combat operations in a heavily populated city in which a committed and unscrupulous enemy has spent years and millions of dollars constructing an elaborate and powerful attack base within and below a crowded and built-up urban landscape unmindful of the human consequences of its actions. The Hamas and its Islamist allies have taken Mao Zedong’s dictum that “the guerrilla must move amongst the people as fish swim in the sea” to extreme lengths, not only embedded within civilian population, but denying it protection and shelter whilst exploiting its vulnerability.
UN and world opinion is demanding Israel cease its brutal operations, and the Arab street and western progressives, if not expressing support for the Hamas, are justifying its actions, including downplaying or even denying the atrocities of October 7. Israeli military planners are therefore in a moral and tactical quandary. With the Hamas and its Islamist allies and enablers posing a real and long-proclaimed existential threat to the Jewish state, what would a rational, reasonable person have Israel do to defend itself? If the current approach is inhumane, what is the alternative?
Kilcullen concludes that the only way Israel could have avoided the present outcome would have been to not go into Gaza at all – or for October 7 never to have happened. Short of a permanent ceasefire, which seems highly unlikely, or the Hamas surrenders and releases the remaining hostages living and dead, which also seems improbable – or a fundamental transformation of the conflict through direct intervention by Hezbollah in the north – “things seem set to continue as they are for the immediate future”.
“There is much discussion in the mainstream media about what comes next if the Hamas is destroyed or effectively neutered and Gaza is “liberated” from its thrall. Should the IDF reinstate the occupation it ended two decades ago? Should Israel hand the enclave over to the Palestinian Authority, to use a decidedly un-Muslim analogy, organize a piss up in a brewery? Or should the UN, or at a stretch, the Arab League, a club of autocrats and tyrants, assume military and political administration until it can be reincorporated into a reformed and workable Palestine? And even then, should any of these scenarios work out, would Israel be in the mood to make nice? The Hamas pogrom has not helped Palestinians in besieged Gaza, nor will it help those in the occupied West Bank who have been subjected to IDF incursions and vigilante violence by angry settlers. Nor will it encourage Israel to moderate its draconian policies and end the occupation”.
I concluded then, and believe still that “the whole thing is a bloody mess (literally and figuratively) and the implications for Israel, Palestine and others unpredictable”.
David Kilcullen, Weekend Australian March 24, 2024
Bulldozers deployed near the Gaza border. Menahem Kahana/AFP
You can tell a lot about a military force, and the conditions under which it operates, by watching how it prefers to fight. Americans, for example, prefer stand-off strikes with laser-guided bombs and long-range rockets: they seek the illusion of distance, precision and cleanness, avoiding the bloody, complex reality of ground combat. Russians, by contrast, are famous for massing enormous weights of artillery against a single point, then flinging “disposable infantry” into meat-grinder assaults.
A central tool of Israeli tactics is the armoured bulldozer: slow, implacable, destroying obstacle after obstacle as it grinds forward. Israel’s ground campaign in Gaza has relied heavily on these bulldozers, which weigh more than an Abrams tank and can demolish buildings, clear rubble, destroy strong points or build berms under heavy fire.
US criticism of Israel’s approach reflects the preference for precision. Council on Foreign Relations president emeritus Richard Haass, one of America’s most distinguished foreign policy thinkers, wrote recently that Israel could have fought a different war. Its approach, Haass wrote, “should have been more precise, giving priority to eliminating Hamas’s leadership and key fighters as intelligence allowed. Israel should have relied more on small-unit operations rather than aerial bombardment.”
Armoured bulldozer.Menahem Kahana/AFP
While acknowledging that this might have taken months or years, and “some Hamas fighters who embedded themselves in schools and hospitals would have escaped punishment”, he argued that “this would have been preferable to killing thousands of civilians, further radicalising the Palestinian population and alienating the region and the world”.
It might indeed have been preferable, but would it have been possible? Could Israel really have adopted a stand-off approach, using small-team raids and surgical strikes to target Hamas leadership, do minimal damage to Gaza and its population, and still achieve its objectives? Answering these questions starts by understanding why the armoured bulldozer has become so central to Israeli tactics in the first place.
We are talking here of what is, rather than what ought to be. In an ideal world, October 7 would not have happened, Israel would never have needed to mount a full-scale ground invasion of the Gaza Strip, and thousands of civilians – Israeli and Palestinian, men, women and children – would be alive and well today instead of dead, wounded or held hostage.
But those things did happen, and any attempt to make sense of the war needs to take that fact as its starting point.
Richard Haass. Alex Wong/Getty Images
For reasons we will explore, destruction of the urban environment itself, rather than merely defeating an opponent within it, has become a key part of how the Israel Defence Forces fight in cities.
This, in turn, reflects the reality that, in a multi-generational struggle for territorial and demographic dominance, across a tiny area – all of Israel is only about twice the size of Greater Melbourne – it’s often simply impossible to disentangle opponents such as Hamas from the populations and landscapes in which they hide. Under these conditions, military commanders sometimes see destroying an urban area outright (or flattening parts of it) as the only way to achieve their missions. Some analysts (including several Israelis) condemn this as “urbicide” – killing entire cities rather than just fighting within them – but many IDF commanders, tasked by Israeli politicians with clearing a deeply embedded enemy from a densely urbanised, heavily populated area, see few other options.
On the ground in Gaza, infantry and armour move together in integrated combat teams with dismounted troops, tanks and armoured personnel carriers co-operating to support the manoeuvre of bulldozers as they push forward, clearing rubble, destroying Hamas positions and knocking down houses. Demolition teams, equipped with explosives and moving on foot, systematically blow up structures that could pose a threat. Tunnels and bunkers are blown up or bulldozed, their entrances sealed, with explosions often caught on video and disseminated on social media by the troops themselves. These videos have prompted criticism and some were cited as evidence in the genocide case against Israel in the International Court of Justice. But the videos also encourage civilians to evacuate ahead of advancing troops, reinforcing official IDF calls for the population to leave, and arguably reducing their exposure to combat.
Palestinians flee after Israeli bombardment in central Gaza City. AFP
Much of the Gaza Strip is now not only uninhabitable but uninhabited. The IDF advance has pushed the population ahead of it, with civilians fleeing along evacuation corridors such as Salah al-Din Road, the main thoroughfare that runs down the middle of the strip and connects Gaza City with Khan Younis farther south. Both are depopulated, with 1.5 million civilians now crowded into Rafah in the far south. Only about 300,000 civilians now remain in northern Gaza. (Before the war, the entire strip had a population slightly less than 2.2 million people.)
As the advance pauses each evening, rather than withdraw and thereby cede territory that would then have to be recaptured, the bulldozers build berms and defensive positions for the assault troops, allowing them to encamp in the ruins and restart the advance after resting. Most camps are used for one or two nights, then abandoned as the advance moves on, but some are semi-permanent forward operating bases. Attack helicopters provide fire support and air cover.
By January, entire neighbourhoods in Gaza had been razed using these methods.
Israeli forces also are constructing a buffer zone along Gaza’s landward border. Described before the current war as the “world’s largest open-air prison”, Gaza already had a 300m-wide exclusion zone that separated residential areas from the border fence. Israeli observation posts covered that zone and could shoot anyone approaching the fence.
But October 7 showed that a determined enemy could cut the fence at numerous places, so bulldozers and combat engineers have been widening the buffer since. Israeli officials say this is a critical security measure to allow civilians to return to the settlements that Hamas attacked on October 7. IDF engineers also are bulldozing buildings to construct an east-west road across the northern third of the strip, cutting Gaza in two and creating a field of fire 300m wide.
IDF D9 Israeli bulldozer in Gaza. IDF Spokesperson’s Unit
The bulldozer (or perhaps the steamroller) is an apt metaphor for the campaign itself – the IDF is, in effect, bulldozing its way across Gaza, slowly but implacably pushing the population ahead of it, destroying Hamas as it goes, while removing much of the urban area itself. This represents a brutally terrain-centric approach to battle. But it also reflects the reality of deep entanglement among armed enemies, civilian populations and dense urban areas, in a zero-sum territorial conflict fought explicitly for control of living space. It embodies decades of tit-for-tat adaptation by both sides.
One battle – the Battle of Jenin, fought in a West Bank refugee camp in April 2002 – was an inflection point. The term refugee camp is technically accurate but gives the wrong impression: the Jenin camp was not a temporary collection of huts but a densely built-up area with multi-storey concrete structures. The IDF entered the camp to clear it of Hamas and other militants who were using it as a base for suicide bombings against Israeli civilians. Nine days into the battle, after severe losses in an ambush, the IDF pulled back, reorganised, then re-entered using new tactics based on small combined-arms combat teams centred on armoured bulldozers. The bulldozers cleared improvised explosive devices and booby traps, destroyed fighting positions, then flattened a 200m-by-200m area in the centre of the camp, which became an IDF base, effectively ending that round of fighting.
The IDF approach in Jenin was studied by US and Australian commanders during the Iraq war. They concluded its impact on civilians – and its physical destructiveness – made it a last resort at best. US forces tried (often unsuccessfully) to protect Iraqi civilians and avoid urban incursions. They built kilometres of concrete T-wall in Baghdad, for example, to keep hostile populations apart, separate them from insurgents and stop militants moving around the city, precisely so as to avoid destructive armoured forays into inhabited areas.
But Iraq – where the US-led coalition saw itself (and was seen by locals) as a purely temporary presence, trying to defeat an enemy with minimal damage, then stabilise things enough to leave – was far different from Israel, where both sides claim much of the same territory as their own. This is a demographic and territorial conflict between populations with irreconcilable claims to the same tiny area of land, a zero-sum contest where destruction of settlements and denial of access helps cement control at the expense of the adversary.
A more apt analogy for today’s fighting would be the battle against Islamic State in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul during 2016-17. This was an enormous battle, about the same size and duration as the current Gaza campaign. It did massive damage to Mosul, which before the battle had a population of 1.2 million people, and lasted nine months.
Islamic State had just over two years to put Mosul into a state of defence – from June 2014, when it captured the city, until October 2016, when the Iraqi-led offensive to retake it began. In that short period, Islamic State fighters developed dense belts of booby traps, dug deep defensive positions, and embedded themselves in the human and physical fabric of the city, thereby making it impossible for an opponent to attack them without also damaging the city and killing civilians.
Ultimately, Mosul soaked up more than 90,000 Iraqi troops and hundreds of foreign advisers, against 6000 to 12,000 Islamic State fighters. The battle displaced at least a million people, destroyed large parts of the city and may have killed as many as 40,000 civilians, according to the Asayish, the Kurdish Regional government’s intelligence service.
Hamas, by contrast, had almost two decades in complete control of Gaza (from 2006 to 2023). It used that time to develop a fearsome defensive complex, with numerous strong points and hundreds of kilometres of underground passages, embedding itself thoroughly into the physical environment of the strip and its population. The organisation had 30,000 fighters in total before the Gaza campaign began, far more than the Islamic State garrison defending Mosul.
Any ground invasion of Gaza was therefore bound to be bloody, protracted and destructive, on the scale of Mosul or larger. This is exactly what we are seeing, and what most military analysts expected.
Palestinians gather as humanitarian aid is airdropped: AFP
The notion of a clean, surgical, stand-off campaign, using precision strikes and small-team raids to destroy Hamas without damaging Gaza or harming civilians – as attractive as it sounds in theory – is simply not practicable, as our own recent history in places such as Mosul shows. Again, we are talking about what is rather than what ought to be. But reality is reality: the only way for Israel to avoid the kind of campaign that is happening now would have been not to go in at all, leaving Hamas in control of Gaza, which was politically unacceptable after October 7. To understand why that was so, we need to return briefly to Jenin.
Jenin was designated in the 1995 Oslo II Accord as part of “Area A”, putting it under the control of the Palestinian Authority, but the IDF repeatedly raided the camp before and after the 2002 battle.
From March 2022, incursions increased to an almost nightly tempo under Operation Breakwater, a counterterrorism effort targeting Jenin and the town of Nablus, 35km farther south.
The IDF said in mid-2023 that at least 50 attacks against Israeli civilians had originated from Jenin in the preceding two years. In late July, weeks before the October 7 attacks, Israeli tanks, bulldozers and infantry launched their largest incursion into Jenin since the 2002 battle. Since the IDF launched its full-scale ground invasion of Gaza, raids into Jenin, Nablus and other West Bank towns have continued.
This is what some Israelis call “mowing the grass” – repeated raids into an area to disrupt terrorist groups and reduce the threat.
IDF commanders historically knew that such incursions were only a temporary measure, doing little more than managing the threat until it inevitably regenerated. They recognised the destruction and enduring hatred that the raids caused among local populations but accepted that the intractable politics behind the conflict precluded any permanent solution.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Leo Correa/AFP
This attitude – resignedly mowing the grass, forever, with no hope of any permanent settlement given the underlying politics – changed radically for many Israelis on the morning of October 7. After that assault, public pressure for a final defeat of Hamas built up inexorably on the Netanyahu government, from a population stunned by the audacity, scale and suddenness of the attacks, infuriated by the intelligence failure that allowed them to happen, horrified at their brutality, and demanding Hamas be destroyed once and for all.
Mowing the grass was no longer acceptable.
Tactics are downstream from politics, and this fundamental change in the underlying politics of the conflict is why, despite escalating criticism from the Biden administration and a genocide accusation in The Hague, Israel’s campaign has unfolded in such an implacable, bulldozer-like manner.
Since October 7, opinion has hardened even further on both sides: in polls last month a large majority of Israeli respondents expressed opposition to a Palestinian state “under any circumstances” and opposed a ceasefire until all hostages are released. Likewise, in November last year, 59 per cent of Palestinians surveyed said they “extremely supported” the October 7 attacks, while 16 per cent “somewhat supported” them.
The IDF’s campaign, successful though it has been in achieving the goals laid down by Israeli political leaders, has reached the point where politicians themselves have to take it to the next stage. This is all that any military operation can deliver. But given the hardening of Israeli and Palestinian public opinion – and the fact Hamas still holds 130 hostages and has refused to guarantee their safety – it’s hard to see any space for a political solution.
The pre-October 7 political conditions, of uneasy coexistence and periodic mowing of the grass, have been overtaken by events, suggesting that the campaign (with or without a temporary ceasefire) will end only with a complete Israeli tactical victory in Gaza. Whether such a victory would meet Israel’s broader strategic goals – and whether the country could then rebuild relationships that have been tested by the conflict – is a more complex question.
Israeli soldiers near a roadblock of burning tires placed by Jewish settlers. Sven Nackstrand/AFP
The next military objective is Rafah, where vast numbers of civilians are now crowded, under horrific conditions, into one of the last remaining Hamas-controlled areas. The more the advance squeezes civilians into this southwestern corner of the strip, the greater the pressure on Israel for a ceasefire or evacuation of non-combatants. That pressure has been growing from the US congress and the Biden administration, with stop-start negotiations periodically raising hopes of a temporary ceasefire but offering little likelihood of an enduring end to the fighting.
But even as the campaign inside Gaza itself comes to a crisis, two other crises threaten to expand the conflict. Roughly 1900 km south of Gaza, in the Bab al-Mandab, the narrowest point of the Red Sea, forces loyal to Ansarallah – the so-called Houthi movement that controls much of Yemen – have mounted a successful campaign to interdict shipping, using drones and missiles, in support of Hamas and probably at the behest of Iran, which sponsors both the Houthis and Hamas.
Targeting Western and Israeli-connected ships, the Houthis have managed to reduce regional shipping by more than 90 per cent since last November. Perhaps more important, the cost to ship a 40-foot container from China to Europe has almost tripled since the start of December, putting significant pressure on global trade. This brings other players – including several European powers and, most important, China – into the equation. China’s approach has been characteristically cautious, but the Red Sea crisis is increasing pressure on Tel Aviv to end the conflict, even as the IDF nears its last major objective.
A second problem is Hezbollah, another Iranian proxy whose forces sit just across Israel’s northern border and are vastly more militarily capable than those of Hamas. Indeed, it is hard to overstate how much more powerful Hezbollah is than Hamas: it possesses an enormous inventory of rockets, drones and missiles, exercises functional control of Lebanon’s government, and has barely used its most capable assets since the start of the Gaza conflict. Hassan Nasrallah, head of Hezbollah, repeatedly has called for an end to the war, and Hezbollah is intensifying its artillery and rocket attacks against northern Israel but is yet to mount a ground offensive or unleash its full force. If it were to do so, Israel’s strategic position would worsen catastrophically, overnight.
All this is true, but also perhaps irrelevant. In war, military action is driven by political decisions, and political decisions are shaped by public opinion.
In Israel’s case, public pressure for a permanent defeat of Hamas is now overwhelming, and this in turn drives political decisions that have resulted in the Gaza ground campaign. In turn, the evolution of Israeli (and Hamas) tactics and tools over decades of conflict have shaped the way that campaign is being conducted. To imagine that Israel could or should have fought the campaign using a surgical, precision, stand-off, small-team approach would be a fundamental misunderstanding of urban warfare and of how the underlying politics driving the conflict have shifted since October 7.
While many Australians are rightly watching the Gaza war with horror, the harsh reality – as Mosul shows – is that this is what happens when you do large-scale combat operations in a heavily populated city. The only way to avoid this would have been for Israel not to go in at all or for October 7 never to have happened. Short of a ceasefire (which seems highly unlikely) or a fundamental transformation of the conflict via direct Hezbollah intervention, things seem set to continue as they are for the immediate future.
David Kilcullen served in the Australian Army from 1985 to 2007 and was a senior counter-insurgency adviser to General David Petraeus in 2007 and 2008, when he helped design and monitor the Iraq War troop surge. His 2015 essay Blood Year: Terror and the Islamic State won the 2015 Walkley award for long-form writing and was published as a full-length book in 2016 by Oxford University
“America is in a mess. We need someone to clean it up. And his name is …”
So run the opening titles of Tim Robbin’s’ 1992 satire Bob Roberts. In a dark case of life imitating art, the story of a Wall Street millionaire who begins his political career as a reactionary folk singer foreshadows the rise of a uniquely American autocrat who channels the pain and anger of millions who feel that they’ve been left behind. The eponymous Bob Roberts is portrayed as a rightwing Bob Dylan, right down to a parody of the famous Subterranean Homesick Blues story boards to the iconoclastic song Times are a’changin’ … Back. Read a 2020 retrospective of this prescient film HERE
False prophets and siren songs
The only path to a subversion of the republican system of the Country is, by flattering the prejudices of the people, and exciting their jealousies and apprehensions, to throw affairs into confusion, and bring on civil commotion,”When a man unprincipled in private life[,] desperate in his fortune, bold in his temper … is seen to mount the hobby horse of popularity … It may justly be suspected that his object is to throw things into confusion that he may ‘ride the storm and direct the whirlwind. Alexander Hamilton to George Washington in 1792.
One cannot and ought not underestimate the power and sheer durability of populism – a political style offering unworkably simple solutions to complex problems, an ebullient rejection of elite expertise in defense of homespun obscurantism. It is a particularly attractive to the many who cleave to populism, nativism, tribalism and atavism, and equate these with nationalism and patriotism – and feel that, nay believe that they’ve been ignored by the powers that be and left behind in life’s rat-race. Trust is in short supply, and indeed, people’s faith in democratic traditions and processes is shaking as populism and a taste for autocracy spreads throughout the ostensibly democratic world. And as the old epigram runs, “cometh the hour, cometh the man” …
We live, it feels, in a time of false prophets. A generation of different and dangerous populists now moves to centre stage. Some like Trump, are undisguised in their racial, sexist and selfish pitches. Trump knows the key to being a successful fraud is to be a grand fraud. He pledges “to make America great again” and wins wide applause. This is because he is an anti-politician, shaking the system, abusing the established politicians, trashing their ideas. He thrives on shock and extravagance in a culture drunk with mindless celebrity. He stands for economic nationalism, trade protectionism, xenophobic hostility, towards Muslims particularly and a US strategic withdrawal from the world and much of its alliance system. As a wannabe autocrat, he admires actual autocrats, whom, he believes get things done because they break the rules and brook no dissent or contradiction. Nor Americans too averse to the prospect of an American strongman. For decades, polls have suggested that many Americans prefer the smack of strong leadership, even at the cost of jettisoning democratic norms. Back in the mid-1990s, for example, one in 16 Americans thought that a military dictatorship would be a “good” or “very good” thing. By 2014, two years before Trump’s shock victory over Hillary Clinton, that figure had leapt to one in six.
Trump is the vessel through which vast numbers of angry Americans can channel their rage with the establishment. Back in March 2023, he told a Texas rally: “For those who have been wronged and betrayed … I am your retribution!” His ascent reflects not so much his political brilliance but the absolute contempt an increasing share of Americans have for the nation’s institutions. Hugh Hewitt, in an opinion piece in The Washington Post, wrote recently: “Trump’s fervent supporters continue to believe he is a noble Jean Valjean of American politics being pursued by a mob of Javerts”. Columnist Maureen Dowd is more blunt: “His hallucinatory worshippers admire him as a strongman, even when he’s shown to be liable for sexual assault and an aggrandising con man whose real estate empire was a Potemkin village”.
Irish writer Fintan O’Toole wrote in the New York Review of Book on January 19th how Trump “… exudes a dark energy. His is perhaps the most radical mainstream presidential candidacy in US history. He offers a program of organized revenge, telling his fans that “I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution.” He promises a transformation of democracy into authoritarianism. He envisages a war on all the “vermin” who have thwarted him. He plans, as The New York Times has reported, “to scour the country for unauthorized immigrants and deport people by the millions per year.” He wants to build giant camps to house those awaiting deportation and to vet would-be travelers to the US for political (and presumably also religious) purity: “US consular officials abroad will be directed to expand ideological screening of visa applicants to block people the Trump administration considers to have undesirable attitudes.” The relentlessness of this determination to reshape the US into an autocracy may be horrifying, but it has the vigor of grand ambition”.
Small wonder the US was recently named a “backsliding democracy” by a Swedish based think-tank, an assessment based on the attempted Capitol coup and restrictions on voting rights in Red states.
Trump could well win, against Biden or against another candidate. The issues he’s running on – illegal immigration, the cost of living, lawlessness and crime – are huge and real. Trump may defeat himself if he campaigns about the injustices done to him. If he campaigns on issues as the champion of ordinary Americans, he’s got a big chance. He is is both instinctively talented as a campaigner but also capable of grievous self harm through wildly undisciplined statements – as with NATO – and narcissistic self-absorption. Driven by grievance and will to power, and behaving, some say, like a mafia boss, he is in so many ways lawless and dangerous.
So dangerous indeed, that many pundits believe that individually, many of his positions and actions, actual and promised, pose existential threats to the United States and its institutions that are far more threatening than any concerns raised by Biden’s age. Some rush to remind Americans of the time when Benjamin Franklin, one of the original framers of the US Constitution, was walking out of Independence Hall after the Constitutional Convention in 1787, and someone shouted out, “Doctor, what have we got? A republic or a monarchy?” To which Franklin supposedly responded, with a rejoinder at once witty and ominous: “A republic, if you can keep it.”
If once elected, and at a second or third election outvoted by one or two votes, he will pretend false votes, foul play, hold possession of the reins of government, be supported by the States voting for him. Thomas Jefferson to James Madison in 1787
British writer and columnist Gerard Baker does not agree with these latter day Cassandras. I republish below an entertaining and informative article written by this self-ordained translator of Trumpspeak, who describes himself as a “right-wing curmudgeon, writer and media critic. Actually, he is quite Right, a Eurosceptic and according to some, a closet Trumpista. But his piece is quite perceptive.
“Parsing Donald Trump is a uniquely difficult linguistic task …There are multiple layers of challenge. First, you can never have more than 50 per cent confidence that what he is saying is true. Second, much of what he says is intended to entertain, rather than inform or inspire. Third, and most confoundingly, the meaning of what he says is often quite different from the actual content.
In what must be the only feature of Trump’s ministry on earth that is like that of Jesus Christ’s, the former president speaks in parables. Unlike Christ’s, Trump’s stories are primarily designed to showcase his own greatness but, crucially, like the Son of Man’s, they also convey an important larger message … in focusing just on the words – and frequently distorting them – to paint a picture of a deranged despot, they [his critics] miss the meaning, the meta-story, if you like. That is a problem because it means they miss a critical part of understanding what is happening in America.
The truth about Trump and his enduring appeal to so many Americans is that, beyond the unsettling mix of Borscht-belt schtick and Munich-beerhall menace, beyond the verbal minefields of untruths, half-truths and narcissistic bombast, is a serious message channeling the reasonable fears and doubts of at least half the country … Trump understands better than anyone the dissatisfaction of Americans, their weariness with burdens …Trump’s greatest political asset has always been an almost animal-like ability to sniff out public sentiment, and then, in hyperbolic manner, to articulate it; sentiments on immigration, crime or American self-identity that are unsayable, willfully ignored by the established political class”.
Trump flogging joggers at Sneaker Con, February 2024
Trumpspeak crazy but attuned to Americans’ dissatisfaction with their burdens
The Republican presidential hopeful at an event in Iowa in January. AFP
Parsing Donald Trump is a uniquely difficult linguistic task. There are multiple layers of challenge. First, you can never have more than 50 per cent confidence that what he is saying is true. Second, much of what he says is intended to entertain, rather than inform or inspire. Third, and most confoundingly, the meaning of what he says is often quite different from the actual content.
In what must be the only feature of Trump’s ministry on earth that is like that of Jesus Christ’s, the former president speaks in parables. Unlike Christ’s, Trump’s stories are primarily designed to showcase his own greatness but, crucially, like the Son of Man’s, they also convey an important larger message. The task of parsing this is so complicated that much of the media doesn’t even try. As with Pavlov’s dog, Trump rings their bell and away they go, barking like mad about some terrifying new thing the man is threatening.
“It is impacting the flow of support,” the NATO Secretary General said on Wednesday afternoon after a two-day meeting of defence ministers in Brussels. “To some extent, this can be compensated by increased support from… other allies. And European allies and Canada are stepping up, are doing more.
It’s understandable but in focusing just on the words – and frequently distorting them – to paint a picture of a deranged despot, they miss the meaning, the meta-story, if you like. That is a problem because it means they miss a critical part of understanding what is happening in America.
The truth about Trump and his enduring appeal to so many Americans is that, beyond the unsettling mix of Borscht-belt schtick and Munich-beerhall menace, beyond the verbal minefields of untruths, half-truths and narcissistic bombast, is a serious message channeling the reasonable fears and doubts of at least half the country.
So when the permanently unfinished Rubik’s cube of Trump’s mind last weekend produced another multisided Technicolor shocker of an outburst – this time on the subject of the US and NATO – the media as usual gave us the version they wanted us to hear: “Trump says he would encourage Russia to invade NATO countries who do not pay their bills,” says the headline on a story that is still on the BBC website. “I want Russia to invade Europe” in other words.
The first thing to point out is that Trump didn’t say this. He was instead recounting a story from his presidency – telling a campaign audience that when he was pressing European governments to spend more on their own defence, he was asked by a NATO country leader if the US would still protect them from Russian invasion if they didn’t pay up.
“No, I would not. In fact I would encourage them to do whatever they hell they wanted,” he said.
As your reliable translator of Trumpspeak, I’ll say there are three key takeaways from this. First, it didn’t happen. Don’t you think we might have heard about this some time in the past five years if it did?
Second, the point of the story is primarily to emphasise Trump’s own negotiating prowess. This has always been central to his bloated self-image. From casino construction to global security, it’s always about his unique ability to get the deal done. The irony is that the point of Trump’s story was precisely the opposite of what’s been said about it – instead of representing the end of NATO, it is about how (in his own mind) Trump saved the alliance with an act of bravado that forced Europeans to action.
But the most important truth in this fictional story is that Trump understands better than anyone the dissatisfaction of Americans, their weariness with burdens.
Trump’s greatest political asset has always been an almost animal-like ability to sniff out public sentiment, and then, in hyperbolic manner, to articulate it; sentiments on immigration, crime or American self-identity that are unsayable, wilfully ignored by the established political class.
One of these is the idea that the world Americans inhabit is dramatically changed. It is 75 years since the founding of NATO, more than 30 years since the end of the Cold War. It is remarkable how little the foreign policy establishment in the US, or America’s allies, understand the world as it appears to Americans themselves.
This is obviously true of the conspectus of global threats. In this century, first Islamist terrorism and then the rise of China have imposed themselves on the American consciousness. It’s true that NATO allies were reliable contributors to the war in Afghanistan. But that ended in disarray and disillusion – hardly an advertisement for the power of the alliance.
But more important than all that is Americans’ own, very new, sense of their own precariousness. This is not just about the changing global threats but their confidence in the success of their own country.
For more than two decades, with very brief exceptions, the vast majority of Americans have told pollsters they think their country is on the wrong track. For the first time in history most Americans think their children will be worse off than they are.
In these circumstances NATO is increasingly seen not as a critical part of America’s own security but as a costly obligation to others. The statistics – a US that contributes well beyond its economic resources – tell only half the story.
With a few exceptions, most European nations would be unable and even unwilling to stand up to an aggressor. Americans watch as Europeans have grown prosperous but dependent on US security and they resent the obligation, particularly from Europeans who seem to go out of their way to express disdain for America.
This isn’t 1930s isolationism, which reaped its own whirlwind in the 1940s. America then was an emerging superpower reluctant to get into another world war.
Today Americans see themselves as a nation in decline, under siege from global forces – uncontrolled immigration streaming across their southern border, terrorists pledging to murder them at home and abroad, a rising nuclear-armed superpower across the Pacific. And they don’t see where NATO fits in.
Trump’s words are typically extreme. Don’t let the crazy blind you to the deeper message.
A previous article In That Howling Infinite, Martin Sparrow’s Blues, wrote about historian Peter Cochrane’s excellent historical novel The Making of Martin Sparrow. It is an enthralling tale of adventure and more often than not, misadventure, set on the middle reaches of the Hawkesbury River, north of Windsor, NSW. and the treacherous terrain of the picturesque Colo Gorge. Taking my cue from Cochrane’s narrative, and the vibe of the late Robert Hughes’ iconic history of early white settlement in Australia,The Fatal Shore, I wrote:
“In the young colony, for free and unfree, men and women alike, life could be nasty, brutish and short, beset by hard labour, hard living and for many, hard liquor, cursed with casual violence, and kept in order by a draconian regime of civil and military justice. Particularly so for the felons, formerly of the convict transports, and only moderately less for free settlers and the expirees, former convicts endeavouring to make a living on hard-scrabble blocks on the outer fringes of the Sydney Basin, far from young and barely civilized Sydney Town”.
But, as author and journalist Luke Slattery has written in a brace of articles published six years apart in The Australian, whilst The Fatal Shore says many true things about early Australia, it leaves many true things unsaid.
“Three decades after its publication”, he writes, “The Fatal Shore remains the most influential work of popular Australian history written – certainly the most widely read. Yet it is, in a very fundamental sense, wrong about early Australia. The book’s flaws have their origins in the same common source: an imagination drawn to the infernal notes of the early Australian story and insufficiently attentive to the lighter tones, the grace notes. Hughes sets out to tell a harrowing tale of systematic oppression and abuse that has been aptly described as a “gallery of horrors”. The result is a ghoulish Goya-esque aquatint rather than a rounded picture of early Australian society”.
I republish both articles below. I do not do so to gild the white settlement lily. As we now acknowledge, Australia was not an empty land. It was a peopled landscape, a much revered, well-loved, and worked terrain, its inhabitants possessed of deep knowledge, wisdom and respect for “country”. I have written passionately and often about whatI have referred to as the darkness at the heart of our history, and what many historians refer to as “the great Australian silence”. The failure of our recent referendum on an Indigenous Voive to Parliament demonstrated that as a nation, we have still to come to terms with our past. Whilst acknowledging this clearly,, Slattery’s pieces, brief as they are, tell a fascinating story of how strangers in a strange land, transplanted from half a world away, struggled, survived and over time, prospered.
But first, some background …,
Farewell to Old England forever …
Now all my young Dookies and Dutchesses Take warning from what I’ve to say Mind all is your own as you toucheses Or you’ll find us in Botany Bay
Traditional folk song
Between 1788 and 1868, about 162,000 convicts were transported by the British government to various penal colonies in Australia. It had begun transporting convicts to the American colonies in the early 17th century, but the American Revolution had put an end to this. An alternative was required to relieve the overcrowding of British prisons and on the decommissioned warships, the hulks, that were used to house the overflow. In 1770, navigator Captain James Cookhad claimed possession of the east coast of Australia for Britain, and pre-empting French designs on Terra Australis, the Great Southern Land was selected as the site of a penal colony.
In 1787, the First Fleetof two Royal Navy vessels, three store ships and six convict transports. On 13 May 1787 the fleet under the command of Captain Arthur Phillip, with some 1400 people, mostly convicts with an additional number of marines, sailors, civil officers and free settlers – departed Portsmouth, England on a journey of over 24,000 kilometres (15,000 miles) and over 250 days to eventually arrive in what would become the first British settlement in Australia. On 20 January 1788 the fleet made landfall at Botany Bay, named by Cook for its abundant and unique flora and fauna. Phillip deemed it unsuited due to poor soil, the lack of secure anchorage and of reliable water source. Six days later, the fleet hove to in the natural harbour to its north landing not at wha became Sydney Cove in Port Jackson (or Sydney Harbour as it is known today). On 26th January, raising the British flag and formally claiming the land for King George III. The building for the settlement began on 27th January, and on Phillip officially declared the establishment of the colony of New South Wales on 7th February 1788, becoming its first Governor.
Other penal colonies were later established in Tasmania – Van Diemen’s Land– in 1803 and Queensland In 1824, whilst Western Australia, founded in 1829 as a free colony, received convicts from 1850. Penal transportation to Australia peaked in the 1830s and reduced significantly in succeeding decades. The last convict ship, Hougoumont, left Britain in 1867 and arrived in Western Australia on 10 January 1868. In all, about 164,000 convicts were transported to the Australian colonies from Britain and Ireland between 1788 and 1868 onboard 806 ships.
Convicts were transported primarily for petty crimes– serious crimes, like rape and murder, were punishable by death. But many were political prisoners, exiled for their participation in the Irish Rebellion of 1798 and the nascent trade union movement. Their terms served, most ex-convicts remained in Australia, and joining the free settlers, many rose to prominent positions in Australian society and commerce. Yet they and their heirs bore a social stigma – convict origins were for a long time a source of shame: “the convict stain”. Nowadays, more confident of our identity and our national story, many Australians regard a convict lineage as a cause for pride. A fifth of today’s Australians are believed to be descended from transported convicts.
Almost straight away, the new colony faced starvation. The first crops failed because of the lack of skilled farmers, spoilt seed brought from England, poor local soils, an unfamiliar climate and bad tools. Phillip insisted that food be shared between convicts and free settlers. The British Officers didn’t like this, nor the fact that Phillip gave land to trustworthy convicts. But both actions meant that the colony survived
In a brief but succinct summary, Britannica describes what came next: “Increasingly, the convict element was overshadowed by men and women who came to the colony as free people. The British government encouraged migrants who, it was hoped, could employ, discipline, and perhaps reform the convicts. Few arrived until after 1815, by which time the activities of John Macarthur and other pastoralists had shown that New South Wales was well suited to the production of meat and especially wool. During the 1820s the pastoral industry attracted men of capital in large numbers. They were joined in the 1830s and ’40s by some 120,000 men, women, and children who sought to escape the harsh conditions of industrial England. Their passages were in many cases paid from a fund resulting from the decision of the British government in 1831 to sell crown land in colonies instead of giving it away. Often, they were carefully selected to remedy imbalances perceived in colonial society, such as the young women – “God’s police” – whom the philanthropist Caroline Chisholm worked to settle in pastoral districts. These migrants brought skills rather than capital and added greatly to the workforce”.
“History – and indeed, our lives – have a way of echoing across the world and down the years. In 1804, Irish convicts in the far-away penal colony of New South Wales, raised the flag of rebellion against the British soldiery and the colonial masters they served. It was the only convict rising in Australia. Many of those convicts would have been involved in the ‘98 and transported to Botany Bay for their part in it. Their quixotic Intifada was crushed at a place they called Vinegar Hillafter the Wexford battle. In 1979, having migrated to Australia, I visited what is believed to be the site of the convicts’ revolt, the Castlebrook lawn cemetery on Windsor Road, Rouse Hill, where a monument commemorating the revolt was dedicated in 1988, Australia’s bicentennial year. Once open farmland, a place of market gardens and horse riding (back in the day, Adèle and I would canter across its gently rolling paddocks), it is now a suburban sprawl of McMansions”.
It was one of life’s ironies that in London, I married an Aussie and in April 1979, immigrated Down Under. There I remained, becoming an Australian citizen and learning more and more about Australia’s history, politics and culture. See Down Under.
In Birmingham, back in the day, all I knew about Australia came from Irish folk songs like The Wild Colonial Boy and The Black Velvet Band, and The Rolf Harris Show, with the now disgraced songster painting scenes of the Australian bush on a big canvass with a broad paintbrush. It was all kangaroos, koalas and aborigines, didgeridoo and wobble board, Sun Arise and Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport – with winsome long-legged ladies dancing about. Everyone know the chorus of Waltzing Matilda, of course, though few know about swagmen, billabong and coolabah trees (see Banjo’s Not So Jolly Swagman – Australia’s could’ve been anthem). Then there were The Dubliners, entering the Top Ten with their rousing version of The Black Velvet Band (they also recorded the famous Pub With No Beer, about a place that just happens to be quite near where we now live in rural New South Wales – although there are other claimants). At my favourite folk club, there was a Walsall chap called Barry Roberts who sang Australian folk songs – I won a copy of his EP in the raffle – whilst touring Aussie songster, the late Trevor Lucas, gave us Fair Brisbane Ladies. Trevor went on to join Fairport Convention, marry its lead singer Sandy Denny, and later, become a founding member of The Bushwhackers, Australia’s iconic bush band.
Writing this postscript, I resolved to find out more about Barry Roberts. I discovered that he was much much than a folkie. In his daytime job as a civil liberties campaigner, legal adviser and administrator, he worked prodigiously to improve the rights of Travelers, worked on the case to exonerate the Birmingham Six convicted wrongfully of the 1974 IRA Birmingham bombings, and later, after a stint in South Australia, worked on the campaign to redress victims of Britain’s atomic tests at Maralinga. Read an excellent obituary here: https://www.theguardian.com/news/2007/aug/27/obituaries.mainsection
The Battle of Vinegar Hill, Rouse Hill, New South Wales 1804
“It was, and remains, an eye-opener and a page-turner. All our past, present and future environmental hotspots are covered. Squatters and selectors,rabbits and real estate, hydro and homosexuals, uranium and aluminium, environmental degradation and deforestation, and the trials of our indigenous fellow-citizens who up until a referendum in 1967 were excluded from the census – and therefore not counted [The referendum of October 14th 2023, rejecting the Indigenous Voice to Parliament and the inclusion of our First Nations in the Australian constitution, demonstrates that we have yet to come to terms with our past. [See Silencing The Voice – the Anatomy of a No voter]
Behind many of the names that are attached to our suburbs, our highways, our rivers and our mountains are the names of dead white men who were aware of, even witnessed, and were often complicit in “dark deeds in a sunny land”. Perhaps I shall write more on this at a later date, but meanwhile, the following is what Lines has to say about our iconic wildlife, and particularly, our endangered koalas”.
Captain Cook, his chopsticks and his lunch. Whitby, Yorks
Lachlan Macquarie, Hyde Park, Sydney
Detail from the cover of The Fatal Shore
Hughes’s Fatal Shore unfairly shows early Australia as a Gulag
Augustus Earle’s A Government Jail Gang (1830).
A year before his 50th birthday, at the height of his protean literary powers, expatriate art critic Robert Hughes published his masterpiece: a long-arc history of early colonial Australia titled The Fatal Shore. Hughes’s account, written in his engagingly virile prose, would quickly vault to bestseller status.
Three decades after its publication The Fatal Shore remains the most influential work of popular Australian history written — certainly the most widely read. Yet it is, in a very fundamental sense, wrong about early Australia.
The book’s flaws have their origins in the same common source: an imagination drawn to the infernal notes of the early Australian story and insufficiently attentive to the lighter tones, the grace notes. Hughes sets out to tell a harrowing tale of systematic oppression and abuse that has been aptly described as a “gallery of horrors”. The result is a ghoulish Goya-esque aquatint rather than a rounded picture of early Australian society.
Time magazine, to which Hughes contributed his splendid art criticism, got this right when it awarded The Fatal Shore 47th place at in its all-time top 100 nonfiction titles, describing the book as the “shocking story” of Australia’s penal colony origins: a story that submerged readers in “the dark heart of the subject matter”.
Its title, taken from a convict ballad about conditions in Tasmania soon after white settlement, has become shorthand for the early Australian reality. It has never seemed to matter that the “fatal shore” refers to the sites of secondary correction, not the mother colony at Port Jackson. The latter quickly saw itself as a way station between its origins as a penal colony and its future as a branch of civilisation.
The interesting thing about early Australia — interesting socially, politically, philosophically — was how and why it rose from a state of base felonry to democracy and prosperity. But this is not the focus of Hughes’s lengthy narrative. He’s interested in the inner circles of this antipodean hell, the lower realms of the convict system, the heart of darkness.
By the time Charles Darwin visited the colony on the Beagle in 1836, the student of natural evolution was moved to report: “On the whole, as a place of punishment the object is scarcely gained, but as a means of making men outwardly honest — of converting vagabonds, most useless in one hemisphere, into active citizens in another, and thus giving birth to a new and splendid country — a grand Centre of Civilisation — it has succeeded to a degree perhaps unparalleled in history.” Hughes records Darwin’s visit, yet he ignores this sunny manifesto of the colony’s moral significance.
Hughes framed his narrative around a powerful and lasting image of colonial Australia as a precursor to the Soviet Gulag, or concentration camp, and secondarily as a Grand Guignol, or horror story. “In Australia,” he writes, “England drew the sketch for our own century’s vaster and more terrible fresco of repression, the Gulag.” In the conclusion he again describes it as an “ancestor” of the Gulag.
Conditions at Port Jackson may have been harsh, particularly in the early years before the soils of Rose Hill (Parramatta) and the Hawkesbury began to yield maize, wheat and barley, and the colony’s sheep and cattle began to multiply. But the convicts enjoyed basic freedoms such as protection from harsh treatment under the rule of law. Their masters were not permitted to flog them. Only a court could sentence an offender to corporal punishment.
The image of the roguish convict iron gang is preserved in popular memory thanks to Augustus Earle’s watercolour of a string of malefactors at their morning muster at Hyde Park Barracks. They have threadbare hats, simian stoops, sly grins and glints in their eyes; and they regard the viewer on something like equal terms. This may have been a reality for serious offenders, reoffenders and absconders who were clapped into irons and forced to undergo hard labour. But it was manifestly not the reality for most. Most of the men, in the early years, worked unfettered in the government lumberyards, dockyards and quarries; most of the women were assigned as servants.
“Go and provide lodgings where they can be found for the remainder of the day and come to work in the morning,” the principal supervisor is reported to have told the convicts after their first muster. Before the completion of the Hyde Park Barracks most convicts were lodged in huts under the care of a convict woman. They were expected to pay for their board and washing out of money earned from overtime work.
A 20-year-old marine officer, Watkin Tench, perhaps the most appealing of the early chroniclers, describes how the fledgling colony readied itself in its first autumn for the approach of winter. Barracks were erected for the soldiers and lodgings built for married couples.
“Nor were the convicts forgotten,” he writes, “and as leisure was frequently afforded them for the purpose, little edifices quickly multiplied on the ground allotted them (on the harbour’s western edge) to build upon.” The liberality of this arrangement is astounding in the light of the Gulag metaphor.
The convict system in Tasmania was a much better fit with the Gulag image. But even then recent research of a near complete sample of Tasmanian convicts shows that they lived an average of 10 years longer than their free counterparts back in Britain.
Beyond the hours of work — dawn to 3pm in summer with Saturday afternoons and Sundays off — the convict was permitted to sell his labour, though payment was more often than not in goods or spirits. Profit-sharing schemes were not unknown. James Ruse, the first convict to be granted land by a colonial governor, induced convicts to clear his land in their own time and paid them with a share of the first crop. As skilled labour was scarce it could be sold at a high price. A man who could fix a watch could make a small fortune, even while he was serving out his term.
Before long convicts assigned to settlers on the expanding frontier were earning a set £10 a year for regular overtime, and within the first 30 years of settlement this mutated into a standard £10 annual wage. Convicts working at difficult tasks, such as construction, could earn even more in indulgences such as cuts from the settler’s table, tobacco, tea, sugar and rum.
Before their sentences had expired, usually after four years for a seven-year term, though often earlier, many were given tickets of leave: forms, in effect, of early parole. Conditional and full pardons were also used as incentives to reformation of character and necessary measures to ensure specific projects, such as the road across the Blue Mountains, were completed on time. Following a pardon, the typical emancipist was granted 30 acres (12ha) and implored to go make his fortune.
Skilled convicts such as David Dickenson Mann quickly settled into a life of bondage without any great sense of confinement. Convicted of defrauding his master in 1798, the clerk was transported for life. Arriving in Sydney in 1799, he soon found work as a clerk in the colonial bureaucracy. Less than three years later he had received an absolute pardon.
A convict such as architect Francis Greenway more or less stepped off the transport and into government employment in his former profession.
In 1819 a French ship commanded by Louis de Freycinet entered Sydney Cove. On board was Freycinet’s wife Rose and an illustrator-writer named Jacques Arago. The latter’s account of his journey, published in 1822 as Narrative of a Voyage Round the World, describes Sydney Cove in tones that seem to anticipate Darwin.
“Spacious buildings assume the place of smoky huts; an active and intelligent population is now in motion, and eager in pursuit of pleasure, on the very spot where savages formerly engaged in bloody combats,” he writes. “Obscure paths become broad and level roads: a town arises — a colony is formed — Sydney becomes a flourishing city.”
Hughes ignores this paean to the convict revolution, just as he had ignored Darwin’s.
“Some Frenchmen — though not, as a rule, those who had actually been there — did admire the English penal settlement in Australia,” he writes
As a matter of fact most French witnesses — including both Freycinets, Francois Peron in 1802 and the splendidly named Hyacinthe de Bougainville (1825) — pondered the miracle of social and moral reformation: the convict revolution.
Early in his book Hughes avers that colonial Australia was “a more normal place than one might imagine”. In his conclusion, too, he acknowledges the powerful reforming impact of the assignment system. And at various points in the book he cites evidence about the convict labour system and convict society that undermines his own broad rhetoric.
Historian John Hirst, author of Convict Society and its Enemies (1983), understood Hughes’s narrative strategy with penetrating clarity. Hughes’s acknowledgment of normality, Hirst insisted, did nothing to disturb the “controlling image of the book: that one society determined on a sort of final solution for crime by shipping its ‘scum’ to the other side of the world”.
Thirty years after its first Australian publication, The Fatal Shore still astonishes with the seductive power of its writing — its rhetoric. And in his wonderful rococo sentences, Hughes gave his all: he shows flashes of lyricism and asperity; he varies the pace of his narrative, its syntax and rhythm.
The 600-page narrative is, above all else, a masterclass in the neglected craft of writing.
He may not make of the grace notes of his narrative what the full story of convict Australian demands, but he doesn’t ignore them.
He records, for example, that the first generations of the native-born currency lads and lasses “turned out to be the most law-abiding, morally conservative people in the country. Among them, the truly durable legacy of the convict system was not ‘criminality’ but the revulsion from it: the will to be as decent as possible, to sublimate and wipe out the convict stain, even at the cost — heavily paid for in later education — of historical amnesia.”
As Hughes winds towards his ambivalent conclusion, his deep target reveals itself: the sin of sublimation, the fog of forgetting. And the book’s great triumph is that it restores the horrors of the convict system to vivid — unforgettable — life.
The Fatal Shore says many true things about early Australia, but it leaves many true things unsaid.
Luke Slattery is a Sydney-based freelance writer
A unique story with a powerful contemporary resonance
The founding of modern Australia is much more than a tale of colonization.
Illustration, Eric Lobbecke.
The arrival of 743 British convicts at Port Jackson on January 26, 1788, is for many Australians an occasion for lamentation rather than celebration. That’s not, in itself, a bad thing. Controversy can focus the mind, and the more we debate the history of the country’s colonisation, the better. But our way of seeing these events, dominated as it is by the optic of post-colonialism and the prestige of identity politics, runs the risk of drowning out the voices of the 743 convicts who, in effect, laid the foundations for modern Australia.
It’s a historical story with a powerful contemporary resonance. How do contemporary societies, both developing and developed, find ways to improve and empower citizens trapped at the lower end of the social scale? It’s an intractable dynamic that, expressed as grievance, finds expression in Trumpism, nationalism, separatism – even terrorism. But colonial Australia found answers to the problem of social advancement when a criminal class was empowered to create a society defined by the idea of advancement and liberation. It was a social and economic revolution – a revolution without a proclamation. An accidental revolution. But a revolution nevertheless.
The chief obstacle to the dissemination of this story is the usual culprit: ignorance. To take one example: many Australians – and visitors to Australia – picture colonial Sydney and Hobart as vicious prison systems. They imagine convicts incarcerated, in leg irons, flogged for petty offences, subjected to cruel and arbitrary forms of torture.
The Founding of Australia by Captain Arthur Phillip R.N. Sydney Cove, January 26th 1788
Algernon Talmage R.A First Fleet, 1787-1788
At no stage were the run-of-the-mill convicts who went ashore at Port Jackson clapped in chains: that’s part folklore, part colonial Gothic cliche, part lazy assumption.
In 1822, the British government published the detailed report of a punctilious London lawyer named John Thomas Bigge – reputedly very small – who’d been sent to investigate the state of the convict system and suggest reforms. At their first muster the newly arrived convicts were, Bigge found, “told by the principal superintendent ‘to go and provide lodging where they could for the remainder of the day, and to come to their work in the morning’.” They weren’t chained. They weren’t imprisoned. They weren’t even confined – and they didn’t shuffle around town in leg irons.
After the hours of 3pm weekdays and on Saturdays, the convicts generally worked for themselves – fixing watches, building fences or furniture – and with their earnings they were expected to pay for their “weekly lodgings and their washing”, in Bigge’s words.
[Slattery’s account of Bigge’s inquiry does not mention that he and Governor Macquarie did not get on at all, and indeed were at loggerheads over political and bureaucratic seniority – see his entry in The Australian Dictionary of Biography]
The most remarkable thing about the convict colony at the end of the earth was its air of liberality, despite the harshness of the work and the climate. Convicts were formed into various work gangs. Only hardened criminals and repeat offenders were assigned to the chain gangs.
Commissioner Bigge observed that tradesmen were generally paid “a certain weekly sum, generally amounting to 10 shillings … In return for this payment, and so long as it is regularly made, the convict is allowed to be at large at Sydney, and elsewhere, and to be at his own disposal.”
A Tory and a snob with an unshakeable disdain for the convict classes, Bigge was determined to stamp out the payment of wages drawn from His Majesty’s coffers to felons who had subverted the British property system. As the Yale historian Peter Gay wrote in his groundbreaking study of the Enlightenment, British law in these years “grew more stringent, religiously safeguarding property – or, rather, safeguarding property as if it were a new religion”.
In 1810, more than 220 offences, most of them petty, incurred the death penalty.
Convicts in government service benefited from the shortage of skilled labour in the early years. Francis Greenway, the colony’s first architect – and a convicted forger – stepped straight from his transport into permanent employment. The most common gubernatorial indulgence was the ticket-of-leave – an early form of parole that gave the convict freedom, though not freedom to leave the colony. Between 1810 and 1816, some 50 per cent of male convicts who had been sentenced to seven-year terms were paroled in this fashion after they had served three years or less.
The trouble with Robert Hughes’ Fatal Shore myth of an antipodean gulag is that it’s not only an illusion, it’s an occlusion: it obscures the very real social, moral and political value in those features of the convict system that were in part a pragmatic response to economic need. We get a very different impression from the witness accounts of visitors to, and, in one rather special case, victims of the system.
The First Fleet in Sydney Cove. Picture: National Library of Australia
In 1802, a young Frenchman named Francois Peron arrived at Sydney Harbour as part of the French “scientific” expedition commanded by Nicholas Baudin. In his journals of that voyage, Peron explicitly, though fleetingly, uses the term “revolution” to describe the mechanism of social advancement he’d witnessed first-hand at the penal colony at the end of the earth.
The mechanism of this “revolution” was, in Peron’s view, rational self-interest. The emancipated convicts were generally given land grants and starter provisions from the government stores. They were concerned with “the maintenance of order and justice, for the purposes of preserving the property they have acquired”, Peron observed.
At the same time, they “behold themselves in the situation of husbands and fathers; they have … powerful motives for becoming good members of the community in which they exist”.
Peron’s account has an English equivalent in the witness account of the 26-year-old Charles Darwin, who arrived at Sydney Cove in 1836 aboard HMS Beagle. “On the whole, as a place of punishment the object is scarcely gained, but as a means of making men outwardly honest – of converting vagabonds, most useless in one hemisphere, into active citizens in another, and thus giving birth to a new and splendid country – a grand Centre of Civilisation – it has succeeded to a degree perhaps unparalleled in history,” Darwin wrote.
It was the French who seemed the most acutely attuned to the political and moral force of the social experiment at Sydney Cove. The writer and illustrator Jacques Arago arrived in Sydney in 1819 aboard a ship commanded by Louis de Freycinet, who had smuggled his spirited wife Rose on board in the disguise of a deckhand.
Arago, too, was keen to lay bare the mechanisms of social elevation. “A convict arrives, condemned to seven years’ transportation. If he be of any trade, he may procure employment at it as soon as he arrives: and if he be industrious and frugal, he is soon enabled to work on his own account, and to earn money enough to begin a little business.”
A convict in this condition – unable to leave the colony yet free to earn wages – “is given as an assistant, or servant” in the form of a convict whose term has recently finished or “has been granted an exemption”. The servant’s labours are “recompensed; and, if he be frugal when his time has expired, he in his turn, obtains the same advantages as his master, and, like him, receives servants, who assist him in clearing fresh lands. In this manner the labour, the trouble, and the reward have been equally distributed; and while the country is improved, the man becomes better, and society is benefited.”
The Governor’s rest house at Rooty Hill in 1918. Picture: State Library of NSW
We have another early colonial narrative of personal elevation, though one that lies outside this French tradition of looking on – somewhat admiringly as Voltaire had also done – to English society from without. It’s the narrative of Joseph Mason, a convict who arrived in the colony in 1831 and returned home after an early pardon. Far from being fettered or in any sense constrained, Mason was free to roam and explore the countryside. “I have traced the (Nepean) river its whole length through the mountain both alone and with company,” he boasted.
These witness accounts of early Sydney miss much detail, some supporting their vision of a benign social revolution, some challenging it. They fail, for example, to note the tensions in the colony between ex-convict emancipists, free settlers, convicts and the military; there is only a glancing mention of the fact that many convicts spend their earnings on grog, while others return to crime. And they fail by and large to see that the sunny social experiment was made possible by an act of colonial dispossession.
Contemporary Australians, and particularly the young, tend to view the early settlement solely through the prism of colonisation and dispossession. Many others have absorbed the gulag myth propagated by Hughes, who wilfully confused the harshness of the places of secondary punishment – such as Port Arthur, Norfolk Island and Moreton Bay – with conditions and practices in the main settlements.
The untold story of the Australian revolution carries its freight – moral, political, philosophical – into our century. It suggests that individuals, and entire societies, can be improved by improving their conditions; that work and purpose are, in fact, morally uplifting.
It illuminates some of the causes of social misery, as well as some of the cures. It’s an optimistic, and a badly needed, tale.
Peron, Arago and de Bougainville were convinced they’d witnessed something worthy of philosophical reflection. Their compatriot Jules (20,000 Leagues Beneath the Sea) Verne would later embellish Peron’s account in a non-fiction mash-up of famous maritime voyages. “A more worthy subject for the reflection of a philosopher or statesman never existed – no brighter example of the influence of social institutions can be imagined – than that afforded on the distant shores of which we are speaking,” wrote Verne.
But philosophers and statesmen were a little short on the ground at Sydney Cove.
Protesters at Frenchmans Bay, La Perouse for the First Fleet re-enactment carry banners “Australia Day = Invasion Day” , 1988. Picture: Michael Jones
This cheering vision of what has often been seen as an infernal colony, shouldn’t skew towards utopianism. In its broad outlines the convict experience was, as Darwin put it, about remaking, conversion and elevation. But it was, nevertheless, at heart, a form of extreme punishment for mostly petty offences. For many coveys the pursuit of freedom, despite the considerable risks, was preferable to the rigidities of indentured servitude. They escaped – even from the strictly supervised chain gangs – into the bush. Many perished there.
The reason, I think, that French observers were keen to stress the philosophical implications of the Australian revolution – the wonderfully named Hyacinthe de Bougainville also makes this point during his visit of 1825 – is that the French Revolution had been so heavily freighted with unrealised, or betrayed idealism. They were attuned to the sentiments of equality and fraternity. But they had lived through bloodshed, repression and, at the end of it all, the heady swell of Bonapartism and the restoration of a repressive monarchy. What they observed at Sydney Cove was the realisation of humane social ideas without any espousal of those ideals: a revolution without a Robespierre; a revolution without a guillotine.
It was not, of course, a revolution without bloodshed. Or violence, in the form of dispossession. Or murder, on both sides. But it would be facile to reduce the one story – the celebratory story with a powerful contemporary resonance – to the other. To reduce everything to black and white. Sophisticated cultures deal with complex origin stories of many strands.
Luke Slattery is the author of four works of non-fiction and one of fiction
Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (22 April 1870 – 21 January 1924), better known as Vladimir Lenin, was a Russian revolutionary, politician, and political theorist. He is widely considered one of the most significant and influential figures of the 20th century. Yet whilst his embalmed body still lies in Red Square, the real Lenin has been buried by decades of dictatorship and Cold War, and a century of sanctification and vilification.
Lenin speaking to a crowd in Moscow’s Sverdlov Square with Leon Trotsky and Lev Kamenev beside him, May 1920
In That Howling Infinite has written often about Russian history. So, we couldn’t resist commemorating the centennial of Lenin’s death.
I first became acquainted with him in the fall of 1968 whilst reading politics at Reading University under the tutorship of émigré academic and historian of Russian and Soviet politics Tibor Szamuely. For a while,
Back then, I was a political ingenue and a naïve communist sympathizer and fellow traveler, although my evolving perspectives were transforming and expanding. As my tutor, he advised me to study with an open mind and to put off juvenile thinking. He hadn’t been well when I knew him, and he died a year after I graduated. Under his tuition, I’d resolved to specialize in Soviet Studies – but events intervened, and I ended up in the Middle East (and that is another story. see: Tanks for the Memory – how Brezhnev changed my life). I nevertheless retained an active interest in the history and politics of Eastern Europe.
Szamuely would always impress upon me the historical and political continuity of what he called The Russian Tradition – the title of his one and only book, The Russian Tradition, published shortly before his death, and now, regrettably, out of print. I purchased a first edition when it was published and it is on my bookshelf still.
He believed that the bloodstained drama of the revolutions of 1917 – there were two, the social democratic one in the February, the Bolshevik one in November – and the years that followed, including civil war, the establishment of the USSR and Stalinism largely obscured the underlying consistency of Russian history. He did not live to see the decline and fall of the Soviet Union, and the advent of Putin and Russia Redux, but the basic pattern persists, circular and repetitive. The frequent turmoils that have overtaken this vast continent have in their various ways made changes that were essentially superficial, leading in the end to the intensification, under new forms, of the old authoritarian structure. See The Russian Tradition – Russia, Ukraine and Tibor Szamuely.
Studying Soviet politics, I read quite a few of Lenin’s writings – the mercifully short paperbacks like What Is To Be Done? Burning Questions of our Movement (1901), Imperialism, the highest state of Capitalism (1917), and The State and Revolution (1917), and Leftwing Communism, an Infantile Disorder (1920), the best title of them all. They cost very little at a Communist Bookshop, in Soho, I think – a source also, of posters from the Revolution and the Russian Civil War. In my Russian phase, I’d even bought a balalaika – though admittedly my purchase was inspired more by its use by Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull in a great concert in our hall of residence. I never did much with it and saw it last on the sideboard of my late mother’s house in Birmingham.
I still have those books, in addition to the panegyric 1942 edition of The Truth about Soviet Russia, by famous British socialists (and Stalinist apologists) Sydney and Beatrice Webb, which was everything but the truth, posing the rhetorical question “Is Soviet Communism a New Civilization based on the ethical principle of ‘From each man according to his faculty to each man according to his need’.
Better Read than Dead
Vladimir Lenin has a way of confounding Marxist and indeed other historians for he was that rare thing – an individual and singular instigator of historical change. A hundred years after his death, hagiographies and obloquies continue to pouring off printing presses as once did concrete to erect statues of Uncle Volodya. Even his most hostile critics would be churlish to dismiss his outsized role during the heady months leading to Red October.
The principal protagonist of the Bolshevik Revolution of November 1917 and the brutal and bloody civil war that followed, Lenin served as the first and founding head of government of Soviet Russia from 1917 to 1924 and of the Soviet Union from 1922 to 1924. Under his administration, Russia, and later the Soviet Union, became a one-party socialist state governed by the Communist Party. Ideologically a Marxist, his additions to the ideology earned their own title: Leninism.
There is near universal consensus that Lenin had no use for “liberalism” in any form, or democracy which he regarded as a bourgeois delusion. He closed down the elected Constituent Assembly, when elections to it rejected his party, at gunpoint. He then proceeded to ban all other parties. He instigated the Red Terror via setting up the Cheka, the prototype KGB and brought about the deaths of hundreds of thousands, establishing the apparatus and mechanisms of terror so definitively exploited by Stalin. His administration laid the framework for the system of government that ruled Russia and the USSR for seven decades and provided the model for later Communist-led states that came to cover a third of the inhabited world in the mid-20th century.
As a result, Lenin’s influence was global. A controversial figure, he remains both reviled and revered, a figure who has been both idolized and demonized. Even during his lifetime, Lenin “was loved and hated, admired and scorned” by the Russian people. This has extended into academic studies of Lenin and Leninism, which have often been polarized along political lines.
Back in the day, I admired him for the smooth operator that he was, though I was shocked by his cold-bloodedness. No matter what his sophisticated musings in exile or during 1917 told his readers, he conducted the civil way to àl’outrance. See: Red and white terror – the Russian revolution and civil war. Today, I come not to bury Vladimir nor to praise him – Wikipedia provides a good overview of his life and times, and his legacy. It’s a good source for further reading: HERE
Detail of Man, Controller of the Universe, a fresco by Diego Rivera in the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City
I republish below and interesting article from Unherd, my favourite e-zine, on the debatable influence of Lenin and the Bolshevik Revolution in British politics.
In the immediate wake of World War One, and the outbreak of civil war, Western Allies’ ideological perspective of the conflict was ambivalent. Many, politicians and military alike, were viscerally opposed to Bolshevism and what it stood for, and feared a Red contagion infecting their own countries, a fear that was not unfounded. After the Revolution, a concatenation of revolts detonated across the globe. Bolshevism spread westwards, from Vienna through Budapest and Sofia to Kiel. The Bavarian Soviet Republic was briefly established in April 1919, before the far-Right Freikorps did it in.
Britain wasn’t immune to the ferment. Between the February and October Revolutions, the Leeds Soviet did indeed appear to be the beginning of something, whilst strikes and demonstrations proliferated to be violently put down by the police and army. Winston Churchill alone of his cabinet colleagues wanted a full-on allied intervention and dreamed – some believed he was indeed dreaming but others claimed that he fantasized – of creating an effective White army and a borderlands alliance to defeat the Bolsheviks. But his aspirations were foiled by the imperialism of the White leadership and of White officers and the various national movements’ fear that that if the Whites prevailed, they would restore Russian rule. Britain’s rulers were reticent about shoring up and providing financial, material support and also, soldiers sailors and airmen to brutal to demonstrably homicidal Cossack brigades and revanchist and reactionary royalist autocrats.
The concern of His Majesty’s Government with the the Bolsheviks is the theme of series three of the superlative British crime saga Peaky Blinders. It is set in 1924, three years after the civil war, and not long after the fabricated Zionoviev Letter implicating the British communist party and by association, the Labour Party in a seditious plot, instigated a “Red Scare” that saw Britain’s first Labour Government defeated in a general election. Home Secretary Mr WS Churchill employs the services of Thomas Shelby and his Brummie brethren in a devious plot to fit-up and compromise the Soviet regime. The White Russian èmigrés, a cabal of revanchist aristocrats that Tommy has to do business with are an unsavory, unprincipled, bigoted and amoral crew.
The fear of this “Red contagion” after Revolution, saw conservative British governments preempt insurrection by mollifying, co-opting even, and caring for the workers and the disadvantaged. The interwar years saw major strides in universal education, healthcare, and insurance Post-war, all that was left for Labour to do was to extend it to one and all. Already covering some 80% of the population, welfare was brought to the remaining one-fifth of Britain by Clement Attlee and William Beveridge.
I qualify this by noting that the article ignores the trends that emerged in the UK during the 19th century, such as the Poor Law Amendment Act, the Factory Acts and the 1870 Education Act which were built upon during the 20th century.
Historian Anil Pratinav’s writes how paradoxically, Soviet communism unwittingly fortified British capitalism. The unintended upshot of Anglo-Marxism was to make the Establishment more heedful of working-class interests. The same went for the welfare state. Peace was preserved between the classes. Redistribution took the edge off class conflict. What’s more, an educated and healthy workforce proved good for business. Moderately progressive taxation was a tiny insurance premium to keep the workers in working condition and the barbarians at bay.
Lenin might’ve said there are decades when nothing happens; and there are weeks when decades happens – but “these days, barring a few libertarian crackpots, Tory radicals, nostalgics, and campus Marxists, nearly everyone is united in confirming the wisdom of this arrangement. The simple fact is that most Brits like their politics dull.
Vladimir Lenin has a way of confounding Marxist historians, many of whom generally — and with good reason — attach odium to Great Man History. For he was that rare thing: an individual instigator of historical change. A hundred years after his death, hagiographies and obloquies continue pouring off presses as once did concrete to erect statues of Uncle Volodya. But even his most hostile critics would be churlish to dismiss his outsized role during the heady months leading to Red October.
Yet there is another achievement that Lenin was inadvertently, indeed perversely, responsible for: the Western welfare state. That we rarely recognise this owes to a common misperception. Very many of us regrettably buy that Labour conceit, hawked by spin doctors and court historians, that celebrates Clement Attlee and William Beveridge as the co-fathers of our welfare jstate. But as the historian David Edgerton reminds us, it is in fact the Liberal-Tory coalition of David Lloyd George in the immediate aftermath of the First World War that we ought to be thanking. These were the years when the major strides in education, healthcare, and insurance were made. Post-war, all that was left for Labour to do was to extend it to one and all. Already covering some 80% of the population, welfare was brought to the remaining one-fifth of Britain by Beveridge.
More importantly, it was neither paternalism nor prodigality that prompted these early stirrings of dirigisme. Rather it was red contagion. In the wake of the Russian Revolution, a concatenation of revolts detonated across the globe. Bolshevism spread westwards, from Vienna through Budapest and Sofia to Kiel. The Bavarian Soviet Republic was briefly established in April 1919, before the far-Right Freikorps did it in. Britain wasn’t immune to the ferment. Between the February and October Revolutions, the Leeds Soviet did indeed appear to be the beginning of something. That nothing came of it was down to Lloyd George’s unsentimental pragmatism. Many of the workers’ demands were duly conceded, taking the sting out of union radicalism, even as many leaders were put behind bars.
Two years later, Lloyd George’s Bolshevik bugbear was to return with a vengeance, when shipbuilders stormed the Glasgow City Chambers. With hindsight, it is obvious that “Red Clydeside” was never, in any meaningful sense, a harbinger of “Red Britain”: the radicalism of Glaswegian trade unions on either side of the River Clyde was never going to spread to the rest of the country. Yet at the time, the red threat was all too real. “This country was nearer to Bolshevism that day than at any time since,” Lloyd George would later recall of the police and prison officers’ strike. London and Birmingham were spared, but Merseyside had rocked to the sound of rioting and looting. Violence was brought to a halt only when the army was brought in.
It is difficult for us to conceive what the “peace” after the armistice actually looked like. Yet Simon Webb’s 1919: Britain’s Year of Revolutions reconstructs a society teetering on the brink of collapse: soldiers roughing up workers; martial law in Luton; tanks cruising the streets of Liverpool. The Italians call the two years immediately following the war the biennio rosso, and it seems fair to speak of a red biennium in Britain as well. For one thing, it would be impossible to understand British domestic and foreign policy without reference to that singular neurosis of the interwar ruling class. While cavorting with the antisemitic Whites to crush the Reds in Russia, Westminster and Whitehall were at the same time crushing the unruly bolshies back at home. Churchill, then minister for war, put forward the government line with characteristic crassness: “kill the Bolshie, kiss the Hun.”
As it must in democracies, with the stick also came the carrot. Yes, the workers were brutally put down. But they hadn’t protested in vain. Gone were the Gladstonian days of cheese-paring Liberalism. Lloyd George’s Liberals were an altogether different beast: by turns technocratic, interventionist and ambitious. They were, no doubt, building on pre-war precedent, in particular the health and insurance schemes of 1911, and making good on wartime promises, but they were above all trying to make peace with the bad, mad and dangerous Brits on the streets.
To begin with, they gave a great many people a greater share in government, shepherding them from the barricades into polling stations. Universal male suffrage in 1918 enfranchised unpropertied men — that is, two in five men — as well as propertied women over 30. The same year, the Education Act, lobbied by Lancashire unionists, raised the school-leaving age from 12 to 14 to forestall cotton bosses from battening on benighted boys. And in 1919, the Housing and Town Planning Act put in motion the construction of what became that instantly recognisable feature of the British urban landscape: the council estate.
Bettered by Attlee and Harold Wilson, battered by Margaret Thatcher and David Cameron, the early interwar consensus around the welfare state survives to this day. Both under Labour and the Tories, truculent workers with ideas above their station have been shown their place: from Ramsay MacDonald’s disciplining of the “communistic” trade unions in 1924 through Thatcher’s thwarting of the miners in 1984 to Keir Starmer’s disavowal of organised labour in 2024. Likewise, since 1945, both parties have shown a general commitment to public spending around the 40% of GDP mark. Creaking, underfunded, “our NHS” continues nevertheless to be spoken of only in hallowed whispers.
Time and again, our rulers have let slip the real reason why welfare matters. Here’s Attlee in Margate in 1950: “our policy of democratic socialism is the only dynamic alternative to totalitarian communism.” Is it any surprise that two of the most robust welfare states across La Manche were created in societies that boasted a formidable communist presence? The Parti Communiste Français in 1946 counted some 800,000 members, and the Partito Comunista Italiano nearly two million. It is true that the Communist Party of Great Britain never had much to recommend it, but the strength of the post-war British Left — independent of Labour — is undeniable. It was the miners who brought down Edward Heath in 1974.
As with the British welfare state, so with British intellectual life. Our republic of letters would have been a dreary landscape of conformity were it not for the Russian Revolution, which fired three generations of Anglo-Marxists. The interwar years were a time when communists could rise to the very top of the cultural establishment. E.H. Carr, for example, became a leader writer and deputy editor of The Times, a perch from which he preached the gospel of collectivist planning and conciliation with Stalin. His monumental History of Soviet Russia — running to 7,000 pages and 14 volumes — remains the best account of the early years of the revolutionary regime.
Even such a sceptic of the state as George Bernard Shaw was swept away by Russomania. By 1931, with Britain reeling from the Depression, he was singing Stalin’s praises. Fabian gradualism, his old creed, wasn’t going to cut it in the 20th century. MacDonald’s Labour had evidently failed, he reflected in a new preface to Fabian Essays in Socialism. What was needed was “swift effectiveness” — Soviet-style. A trip to Moscow was written up in glowing terms in The Rationalisation of Russia.
In a manner of speaking, the remoter reaches of the ivory tower, too, succumbed to the Soviets. G.E.M. de Ste. Croix inaugurated what was by far the most arresting development in classical studies. A child of empire born in Macau, “Croicks” turned his back on his “thoroughly Right-wing upbringing” on the “lunatic fringe of Christianity” — as he later put it — in the Twenties. A romp across the Soviet Union in 1937 with Intourist, the Soviet travel agency, left him critical of Stalinism but committed to Marxism, on the strength of observing the peasants of the Caucasus. Thereafter, he became a “thoroughgoing Marxist”, tutoring a generation of students at New College, Oxford, who, in their own writings, were to remain alert to class in the classics. The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World appeared in 1981.
Such profiles can be indefinitely multiplied. Suffice it to say that most of the smartest minds of the interwar period were on the Left. This would soon change with the emigration of Eastern and Mitteleuropean conservatives to Britain — Friedrich Hayek, Karl Popper, Lewis Namier, Ernest Gellner — producing a more balanced intellectual division of labour. But before that, Left hegemony was unrivalled. John Strachey was undoubtedly among the most important political commentators of the Thirties. His father was the editor of The Spectator for nearly 40 years, and Strachey’s best man was Oswald Mosley, then still on the Left. When Mosley founded the British Union of Fascists, Strachey led some of the largest demonstrations against him.
As it was, the Marxist Strachey lost the battle of ideas to the Liberal John Maynard Keynes, who famously had no truck with communism: “How can I adopt a creed which, preferring the mud to the fish, exalts the boorish proletariat above the bourgeois and intelligentsia who, with all their faults, are the quality of life and surely carry the seeds of all human advancement?” Yet Keynes could do little to prevent one of his Cambridge protégés, Maurice Dobb, from taking up the cudgels for the boorish proletariat.
Communism gained a bridgehead in Cambridge thanks to Dobb, who edited The Plebs, a Marxist magazine, in the Twenties. He extolled Lenin as a “stern realist” blessed “with all the Jesuit’s sincerity and idealism”. By contrast, “non-Marxists” were “as silly as pre-Darwinian biologists”. He helped found the Communist Party Historians Group, and set up Kim Philby — of the Cambridge Five ring of spies — with the NKVD. Later students included Amartya Sen and Eric Hobsbawm, whose own Oxbridge appointments were blocked by Tory dons.
Paradoxically, then, Soviet communism unwittingly fortified British capitalism. The unintended upshot of Anglo-Marxism was to make the Establishment more heedful of working-class interests. The same went for the welfare state. Peace was preserved between the classes. Redistribution took the edge off class conflict. What’s more, an educated and healthy workforce proved good for business. Moderately progressive taxation was a tiny insurance premium to keep the workers in working condition and the barbarians at bay. These days, barring a few libertarian crackpots, Tory radicals, Bridesheady (Saltburny?) nostalgics, and campus Marxists, nearly everyone is united in confirming the wisdom of this arrangement. The simple fact is that most Brits like their politics dull.
Pratinav Anil is the author of two bleak assessments of 20th-century Indian history. He teaches at St Edmund Hall, Oxford.
I wrote on Facebook regarding his article Horrible Histories, a Marxist plot?,:
“I am a lifelong history tragic and I’ve degrees in history and politics. Now I’ve heard about horrible histories, I’ll have to look further. All history is, in a manner of speaking, storytelling, its validity and verification changing with the perspectives, perspicacity and prejudices of the storyteller. And on a potentially controversial tangent, all history is political – exhibit one is the proliferation of the culture wars and their corollary, the history wars.
If HHs can bring young folk to history and encourage them to learn more, so much the better. From what I read here, the histories are a more detailed and graphic version of that old, corny chestnut 1066 And All That. Which I still dip into now and then, for its perspective on what we’re owecievd back in the day as “good kings” and “good things”. Bad kings were more often than not the stuff of Shakespeare, whilst there were remarkably few bad things. I share the view of one commentator – that Deary is probably no Marxist, but was taught by a history teacher with Marxist leanings. History can and should be fun as well as serious, and not just the bailiwick of crusty academics and history snobs and culture warriors.
There’s a Canadian writer who tells similar stories about world history called Sweary History or The Day Shit Went Down – I’m sure you get the drift. By the way, I highly recommend Dominic Sandbrook and Tom Holland’s excellent podcast The Rest is History – a gift that keeps on giving. Solid and well researched stories from history’s back pages with bad impersonations , lots of friendly banter, and loads of humorous irreverence regarding assorted shibboleths and sacred cows”.
Call it moral relativism or “whataboutism” (or, like some conjuror’s trick, “don’t look here, look over there!) but it is not a matter of opinion, more a simple matter of observation, to point out that Muslims are in the main subdued when their fellow Muslims are killed by other Muslims.
The Syrian civil War has killed over half a million souls. 150,000 have did in Yemen. In Sudan, more than ten thousand people have perished in the latest civil war. ISIS killed tens of thousands. Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan. Muslims killed by Muslims. And millions displaced and enduring famine and disease.
In recent years Muslims have slain more Muslims than those killed by Israeli forces and settlers since 1948 (though we”ll never know how many – official and semiofficial figures cite casualties from the Independence War and al Nakba of 1948 to 2021, 63,543, including 31,227 fatalities, plus, of course, the ghastly toll of the current Gaza war, but this is probably massively understated).
There has been no significant unrest in the West over the hundreds of thousands of Muslims killed by fellow Muslims (apart from a visceral horror of the violence inflicted upon civilians and prisoners by the jihadis of the Islamic State. No public outcry or social media fury, no angry street protests by left-wing activists of vacuous members by armchair, value-signaling clicktavists.
Why this apparent indifference? Many left-wing impressions are coloured by a an antipathy for the policies of the United States, an antipathy that for many was born of the Vietnam War and was perpetuated by America’s interference in the affairs of nations large and small since then – and of course, America’s strong ideological and military support for Israel. Uncle Sam certainly does have a case to answer. There’s no denying the hundreds of thousands, millions maybe, of bodies of men, women and children that could be laid at the foot of Abe Lincoln’s huge statue in Washington DC.
And what of the rise in antisemitism around the world? After the blood Hamas pogrom of October 7, it took just 24 hours for anti-Israeli sentiment to turn into anti-Jewish sentiment. It was on full display throughout the West before the bodies of the men and women and children murdered had even been counted and identified, and the number of hostages revealed; and before Israel’s relentless and brutal retaliation again Gaza which has killed tens of thousands more innocents.
A charitable explanation would be a mix of political and historical ignorance and a dogmatic belief that renders Jews, whether Israeli or in the diaspora ‘white’, ‘colonial’ and ‘oppressors’, and Muslims ‘oppressed’, and encourages progressives to turn a blinkered or blind eye to some of the most hideous crimes on the planet. It is an ideological stance uninformed by knowledge and awareness of the nature of the Israeli and Palestinian entities, their peoples, and their cultures in the 21st Century.
But there is also reality that what we’ve been seeing in cities around the world is that antisemitism is the devil that never goes away.
I republish below an article that summarizes quite well the mathematics of Muslim on Muslim mortality. It is written by a rightwing author in a right-wing publication, and many of his observations thereon may be selective, subjective, controversial, and potentially exaggerated and inaccurate, but the underlying basic arguments is sound. Countries subject to interminable potentially intractable and often internecine conflict, rigid, authoritarian, and ofttimes theocratic conservative beliefs and social structures, and endemic political instability rarely prosper in our modern interconnected world and often end up serving as expendable pawns in more powerful players’ power games.
I also republish a recent article by The Australian’s foreign editor Greg Sheriden on how the rising antisemitism in the West is undoubtable fueled by the increasing numbers of migrants form conservative countries where antisemitism is encouraged and inculcated by the media, by educational systems and by socialization.
These communities often have an enormous political and cultural impact on their host countries. While the overwhelming majority of Muslims in Australia and other western countries are law-abiding, productive citizens, a small minority is attracted to some form of political violence or intimidation. And, if Australia’s Arab and North African Muslims are remotely similar to those in Europe and the US, they harbour serious anti-Semitic attitudes, plus other views that are anti-Western.
In 2014, the Jewish Anti-Defamation League conducted an immense survey that sampled the opinions of 53,000 people in numerous countries. It found that 74 per cent of Middle East and North African respondents (not necessarily all of them Muslim, though the overwhelming majorty would be) expressed anti-Semitic attitudes, which was measured by endorsing six or more of 11 common anti-Semitic stereotypes, such as Jews controlling world banking, or the US government, or being responsible for most of the world’s wars. This figure of 73 per cent was vastly in excess of any other regional or national group. Non-Jewish think tanks produce similar results. A survey conducted by the Henry Jackson Society in 2020 found nearly half of British Muslims hold anti-Semitic views.
The paradox of piety Observes no disconnect, Nor registers anxiety As the ship of fools is wrecked. So, leaders urge with eloquence, And martyrs die in consequence. We talk in past and present tense. As greed and fear persist. For reasons only dead men know, Few can resist the call to go. That is your fate, the wise man said, The good book in his fist!
From E Lucevan Le Stelle, Paul Hemphill
Journalists should not be duped into blaming Jews for the Middle East’s problems
Chris Mitchell, Australian Business Review, 17 December 2023
Syrians run for cover following government air strikes on the Eastern Ghouta rebel-held enclave of Douma, Damascus 2018. AFP
Why do so many journalists analysing the Middle East’s problems think the answers lie in a tiny country of 9.7 million people, seven million of whom are Jewish?
Israel has no natural resources while Arab countries surrounding it occupy 1000 times more land, dominate global oil production and have a combined population of more than 400 million?
Look at income distribution patterns and one thing becomes apparent. The Arab and Persian worlds are among the poorest areas on Earth, despite the vast wealth of their rulers. Israel, with ingenuity its only resource, has average income about the same as Australia’s, while most in the Middle East languish on lower wages than black South Africans or Brazilians.
Yet it’s not only the grinding daily poverty of the Arab street that the moralising Western left ignores. It’s also the violence done to ordinary Muslims across the Middle East and North Africa by other Muslims. Add the 48,000 Islamic terror attacks listed by the French think tank Fondapol between 1979 and 2021 and their 210,000 mostly Muslim victims.
Where is the left on the medieval Arab and Persian regimes that spread Islamist terror from the Middle East to Europe, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Indonesia?
This is not another call for a Muslim reformation, but for political and media honesty.
Yet the Islamic Middle East certainly needs modernisation. The left’s favourite French economist Thomas Piketty and fellow Paris School of Economics writers Facundo Alvaredo and Lydia Assouad in 2018 analysed income inequality in the Middle East. They found “the Middle East appears to be the most unequal region in the world with a top decile share as high as 64 per cent (of national wealth) compared with 37 per cent in Western Europe, 47 per cent in the US and 55 per cent in Brazil”.
Regular readers will know this writer has a daughter living in Tel Aviv and working in the tech sector. Previously, family members have lived and worked in Jordan. Comparisons between the two countries are fascinating given both were once part of British mandate Palestine.
Thomas Piketty and colleagues analysed Middle East income inequality. Getty
Jordan has a slightly larger population of 11.3 million. With at least three million Palestinians according to the government, and perhaps many more if you follow the historical arguments, it occupies four times the land area of Israel.
Life expectancy for males in Israel is 81 years and 85 for females.
In Jordan the averages are 72 and 77.
Israel’s unemployment rate is 3.5 per cent, Jordan’s 17.9.
Average income in Israel is $80,000 and in Jordan $6,500.
Jordan is a good and safe place to visit but it is clear within hours that it is much poorer than Israel. Israel’s GDP of $783bn dwarfs Jordan’s of $72bn.
The wealth picture is less stark comparing Israel with the Middle East’s oil states. Saudi Arabia has 32 million people, GDP of $1.5 trillion and is the world’s No.18 economy. Its GDP per capita is $40,000, so half Israel’s. Saudi average wages are less than Israel’s, although Saudi prices can be cheaper.
Iranian GDP sits at $549bn but its wage levels are far below those in Saudi Arabia and Israel. Its legislated minimum wage this year sits at $1700 a month.
The Western left also ignores violence against Muslims by Muslims. Few demonstrators took to the streets of Western cities to protest during the Syrian civil war this past decade. The death toll as of last March stood at 613,000, dwarfing the casualties in Gaza the past two months.
Ditto the ongoing Yemen civil war that started in 2014 and in which 150,000 have died fighting and 227,000 have perished in famine.
The disastrous Somalian civil war has been going for 40 years. Genocide Watch last year said between 350,000 and one million mainly Muslims have been killed since 1991 and 3.5 million displaced Somalis, including 1.5 million children, face starvation. The country is 99 per cent Muslim.
Add the millions killed in the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s and the thousands killed by al-Qa’ida in Iraq after the US invasion in 2003.
To put the Israel story into perspective, between 1948 and 2021 total Palestinian deaths number 31,227. Total Israeli deaths in war excluding terrorism number 24,981. The 1948, 1967 and 1973 wars that cost Palestinians so much of their land followed invasions by Israel’s Arab neighbours.
Former farmer Habiba Osman Ahmed in Dollow refugee camp in southern Somalia. 2011. After Somalia’s 20-year civil war pushed the drought into famine she didn’t even have a pot to cook in, and had to share with another family.
Islam has also been waging war on black Africa for much of the past 100 years.
Tablet Magazine on December 12 said “the same Jihad that targeted Jews on October 7 has been targeting black Africans for decades”.
Tablet discusses the “hidden holocaust” from 1983 to 2005 when “northern Sudanese Arabs sought to subjugate and enslave the black Sudanese of the mostly Christian south. The onslaught cost the lives of perhaps 2.5 million black Sudanese. The Arab Muslim government’s jihad utilised kidnapping as its terror weapon of choice, not to mention casual gang rape and mutilation”.
Tablet cites Arab pogroms against black Africans in Nigeria, Mauritania and Sudan’s Western Darfur. Asking why the civil rights left ignores these, it says “on account of their ‘intersectional’ dogma – which makes Jews ‘white’ and Muslims ‘oppressed’ – the Western human rights industry, media and campus left activists are ideologically determined to mostly ignore some of the most hideous crimes on the planet”.
Trouble is, most journalists know nothing about Islam or Islamism. The Koran is not a peaceful book: it does encourage Jew hatred and other violent behaviours against non-believers. When large communities celebrate the martyrdom of their sons and daughters, the left needs to understand that fanatics mean and do what they say. They really do see Jihad as the road to paradise.
This religious outlook has served the interests of the Sunni princes who finance the spread of Wahabism and the Islamic boarding schools (Pesantren) that spread it to Pakistan and Indonesia. It serves Iran well to finance Hamas and Hezbollah.
Blaming Jews for the Middle East’s problems lets the mullahs and princes off the hook for what they don’t do for their own people. Journalists covering the Middle East should not be duped the way the Arab street is. Of course Palestinian lives matter but Islamism is the real “context”.
Matti Friedman
Back on August 26, 2014, after another Israeli-Gaza war, former AP Jerusalem bureau editor Matti Friedman published a fascinating account in Tablet explaining how much the Western media mis-reports what is really happening in Israel and Palestine. He says AP had more than 40 staff in Israel in 2011 but only a single stringer in Syria where tens of thousands were dying each week. Its Israel bureau was bigger than staff numbers in Russia, China or India. Why?
The answer then was the same as now: it’s about Western media assumptions about Jews, power and victimhood.
That combines with a complete media disregard for what real Palestinians think and want and what Islamists really believe.
Here’s a clue. Most Palestinians and Hamas do not support a two-state solution. They support the elimination of Israel, and at least some support the elimination of all Jews.
A poll last week by the Palestinian Centre for Policy and Survey Research found 72 per cent support across Gaza and the West Bank for Hamas’s murder of 1200 civilians on October 7. While 95 per cent thought Israel had committed war crimes since October 7, only 10 per cent believed Hamas had.
Chris Mitchell began his career in late 1973 in Brisbane on the afternoon daily, The Telegraph. He worked on the Townsville Daily Bulletin, the Daily Telegraph Sydney and the Australian Financial Review before joining The Australian in 1984. He was appointed editor of The Australian in 1992 and editor in chief of Queensland Newspapers in 1995. He returned to Sydney as editor in chief of The Australian in 2002 and held that position until his retirement in December 2015.
Muslim migrants and Western Left create new anti-Semitism crisis
Palestinian supporters demonstrate in Melbourne against the Israeli bombardment and invasionThe worldwide crisis in anti-Semitism, so much of it fuelled by Arab and North African anti-Semitism, now in a crude alliance with the anti-Semitism of the far left, points to a deeper malaise in Western democracies.
It raises again the compatibility of large Arab and North African populations with the traditions and culture of liberal democracy.
Consider. EU Home Affairs Commissioner Ylva Johansson declared Europe confronts a “huge risk of terrorist attacks” over Christmas because of the conflict between Israel and Hamas in Gaza.
In December a terrorist killed one tourist and injured others in Paris. In Dublin a knife attack allegedly by a Muslim asylum-seeker left children and adults severely wounded, though Irish police say they believe it was not terror related. In Germany, alleged terrorists were arrested preparing a bomb. In Brussels in October a Tunisian terrorist killed two Swedish football fans.
If Middle East conflict produces terrorism in Western democratic nations, it’s reasonable to ask how anyone living in a modern, free, democratic society views random murder as a constructive, purposeful, moral response.
Australian agencies believe there is an increased risk of politically or communally motivated violence here, too, but not to the point where they’ve formally altered the terror alert level.
We’ve also seen US President Joe Biden plead for the world, including Western feminists, to condemn the “horrific” sexual violence of the October 7 Hamas atrocities. The deliberate, premeditated Hamas attacks were the most depraved, sexualised sadism the world has seen. Yet Western feminists, deafening in their silence, practise #MeToo unless you’re a Jew.
In Australia, the authorities decided that Islamic clerics who welcomed the Hamas atrocities and urged all Muslim nations to spit on Israel so it would drown had no legal case to answer. Demonstrators filmed on the Sydney Opera House forecourt screaming “Kill the Jews! Gas the Jews! F..k the Jews!” – none of them has been arrested or charged either.
Imagine the shuddering national convulsions that would follow if some group of extremist Christian activists gathered a few hundred demonstrators to scream: “Kill the Muslims!” All society would be rightly outraged. The whole nation would denounce it. The counselling bill at the ABC alone would double the national debt.
But society seems never to react this way when the target group is Jewish, although NSW has moved to strengthen its laws.
The Albanese government has been mealy-mouthed, equivocal, all at sea on all of this. It can’t mention anti-Semitism without conjuring a spectral, matching Islamophobia. Let’s be clear. The global anti-Semitism crisis, a profound civilisational challenge, is not matched by an equal, opposite and morally equivalent phenomenon called Islamophobia.
Start with the numbers. There are perhaps 1.9 billion Muslims and about 16 million Jews. There are about 50 Muslim majority nations and one Jewish majority nation. In dozens of other nations, Muslims make up a big minority. Only in the US do Jews pass even 2 per cent. Within Australia there are about 100,000 Jews, perhaps a touch more, and almost 900,000 Muslims. The size of the Jewish population is static. The Muslim population will continue to grow rapidly. Its age profile is younger, it has a higher birthrate and continuing Muslim immigration.
Opposition foreign affairs spokesman Simon Birmingham will lead a bipartisan delegation to Israel in solidarity with the Jewish state. The Albanese government is terrified of being seen as too pro-Jewish or pro-Israel. No head of government solidarity visit from it. Instead, in response to Birmingham, the anonymous Tim Watts, Assistant Minister for Foreign Affairs, will call in on Israel as part of a Middle East Cook’s tour. Foreign Minister Penny Wong will visit Israel early next year as part of a wider Middle East tour. By then it’s certainly not a visit of solidarity but an old-fashioned Australian pretence of participating in Middle East diplomacy.
Jews are the most intensely targeted people in the world for terrorism and irrational hatred. It’s true there have been a small number of violent attacks on Muslims in the US by people it would be fair to call far-right terrorists. Such attacks are horrific and deserve absolute condemnation. Their number, thankfully, is very small.
The vast majority of Muslims who die in terrorism are killed by fellow Muslims. Hamas killed Israeli and foreign Muslims on October 7.
Pro-Palestinian rally in Sydney in October. CA NewsWire / Monique Harmer
The plague of anti-Semitism is a crime against Jewish people. It is the world’s oldest racial hatred. There are distinct anti-Semitic traditions in the West, but after the Holocaust, in which the Nazis murdered six million Jews, all of the old Western traditions of anti-Semitism have been repudiated.
The West has a new tradition of anti-Semitism in the West, on the far left, especially at universities.
This week, in US congressional testimony, Harvard University president Claudine Gay, Liz Magill of the University of Pennsylvania and Sally Kornbluth of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology all said anti-Semitism was a serious and growing problem at their institutions.
That is astonishing, and grotesquely illiberal, for 2023.
But it’s hooked up with an entirely different anti-Semitism too. For by far the most important dynamic of anti-Semitism, globally and within the West itself, is the age-old Arab and North African anti-Semitism.
Naturally, a concern for the suffering of innocent people in Gaza is not a sign of anti-Semitism. Every human being feels compassion for the people of Gaza. The moral responsibility for their suffering lies 100 per cent with Hamas.
Anti-Semitism has broadened and is now a deep, pervasive ideological, cultural and fanatical strain in contemporary Western life. Proceeding from the left’s identity politics ideology, which damns the entire Western project as intrinsically unjust, sexist, economically exploitative, colonialist, racist, hetero-normative, the left has, logically enough, arrived at a hatred of Jews, for the Jewish tradition is so central to the West. And because the left sees all Muslims as victims, it has allied with Islamic anti-Semitism.
But the cross-pollination of Islamic and Western anti-Semitism goes back a long way. It reached a height in the deep Nazi collaboration with both the Muslim Brotherhood and the mufti of Jerusalem. Arab anti-Semitism long predates either Nazis or the Muslim Brotherhood.
The earliest military victories of Muslims involved conquering and sometimes slaughtering Jewish communities. Christians and Jews were often allowed to live reasonably safely in Muslim kingdoms, but only as acknowledged inferiors, dhimmis. Frequently that status was abrogated.
Bernard Lewis, the legendary scholar of Islam, has written that “the golden age of equal rights (under Islam) was a myth”. In the ninth century Baghdad Jews were required to wear a yellow badge, echoed by the Nazis a millennium later. This happened in many Arab centres.
It’s important to note many Christian kingdoms practised similar or worse persecution of Jews. The facts about Arab history simply establish the obvious that a long and pervasive anti-Semitism flourished in Arab and North African culture. There are indeed some explicitly anti-Jewish passages in the Koran.
The contrast with Christianity is that all Christian denominations comprehensively repudiated their past anti-Semitism, which in any event was never uncontested. There has not been a similar Arabic repudiation of anti-Semitism. Some Arab states are liberalising a little, but it’s easy to over-estimate this.
Arab anti-Semitism also obviously long predates the modern state of Israel.
From the mid-1930s the Nazis strongly backed Arab anti-Semitism. They co-operated especially with Amin al-Husseini, the mufti of Jerusalem, who helped recruit Bosnian Muslims into Hitler’s SS.
Sayyid Qutb, the leading thinker of the Muslim Brotherhood, was notable for his hatred of the West. However, he also hated Jews, describing them as “the bitterest enemies of Islam” and urging Muslims: “Do not rest until your land is free of the Jews.”
Sayyid Qutb.
The Nazis provided money for the Muslim Brotherhood and translated some Islamist publications into German. The Nazis wanted to eradicate European Jews and also the Jews of the Middle East. For six years, the Nazis broadcast anti-Semitic material, in Arabic, on radio. In the 1930s and ’40s, radio was the one true mass medium.
The first most important rejection of the two-state solution, a Jewish Israel next to an independent Palestine, came when all of Israel’s neighbours and the local Palestinians refused to accept the UN partition of the territory and launched an all-out war against Israel.
Today there are probably 40 million Muslims in Western Europe and North America, though so much population movement is irregular and undocumented that it’s impossible to establish reliable figures. They are having an enormous political and cultural impact. They also have introduced into those nations a savage new burst of anti-Semitism. It is neither racist nor discriminatory to look at the beliefs and behaviours of potential and actual immigrant populations and question problematic features for a liberal democratic society.
It goes without saying, but must be said, that the overwhelming majority of Muslims in Australia are law-abiding, productive citizens. A small minority is attracted to some form of political violence or intimidation. And, if Australia’s Arab and North African Muslims are remotely similar to those in Europe and the US, they harbour serious anti-Semitic attitudes, plus other views that are anti-Western.
In 2014, the Jewish Anti-Defamation League conducted an immense survey that sampled the opinions of 53,000 people in numerous countries. It found that 74 per cent of Middle East and North African respondents (not necessarily all of them Muslim, though the overwhelming majorty would be) expressed anti-Semitic attitudes, which was measured by endorsing six or more of 11 common anti-Semitic stereotypes, such as Jews controlling world banking, or the US government, or being responsible for most of the world’s wars. This figure of 73 per cent was vastly in excess of any other regional or national group.
Non-Jewish think tanks produce similar results. A survey conducted by the Henry Jackson Society in 2020 found nearly half of British Muslims hold anti-Semitic views.
In 2015 German chancellor Angela Merkel admitted a million Muslim irregular immigrants to Germany. By 2017 she pronounced that German multiculturalism had “utterly failed”. By 2018 she said “refugees or people of Arabic background” had brought a new wave of anti-Semitism to Germany.
In 2020, the libertarian Cato Institute published a long essay, Freedom in the Muslim World, by Mustafa Akyol. This was a systematic comparison of human freedom across a range of dimensions among Muslim societies and against international averages.
Akyol found that Muslim societies were substantially less free than the global average, and much less free than Western Europe or North America. Of course, there was great variety among Muslim nations and some were relatively free. The least free of all were the Muslim nations of the Middle East and North Africa.
He also found, paradoxically, in numerous Muslim nations increasing democracy led to decreasing personal liberties. In other words, the curtailing of human freedom was often a popular move by Muslim governments.
I’ve spent some time in the past few years in Poland, Hungary and Greece. In Poland and Hungary I interviewed Jewish leaders who told me these were the safest countries for Jews in Europe. In every case the government and society had turned against traditional anti-Semitism. But, most important, there were very few Muslims, so little active, threatening anti-Semitism.
Greece does receive a lot of asylum-seekers but doesn’t give them much welfare and they quickly move on. In Thessaloniki in northern Greece recently I saw a hotel hosting a big international delegation and there was the Israeli flag flying proudly out the front with no sign, in the days I was there, of demonstrations or disturbance.
Australia, on the other hand, is subject to an Israeli travel warning; it’s not safe for identifiable Jews or Israelis.
Nobody wants a religiously or ethnically discriminatory immigration program. But countries and cultures with deep traditions of anti-Semitism and anti-Western sentiment pose a big challenge if they are a major source of immigration.
Consider three books.
The French Intifada, by Andrew Hussey, establishes an extraordinary degree of hostility towards France itself by its Muslims. Reflections on the Revolution in Europe by Christopher Caldwell establishes how attitudes have in some manner grown more radical through succeeding generations among Europe’s Muslims. He also establishes that European voters never wanted this huge influx. The Strange Death of Europe by Douglas Murray shows Europe being eaten up by hostile attitudes among its citizens, both some immigrants and the left establishment at universities, with no one to defend Europe’s traditional beliefs.
As we watched anti-Semitic demonstrations in London recently, an English colleague remarked: “Imagine what it’ll be like in 20 years, when the Muslim population is twice as big as now.”
In France, where Muslims may be nearly 10 per cent of the population, they are younger and have a higher birthrate than the host population. They could be 40 per cent of France by 2060.
Islam holds that its mission is to establish a political order in accordance with its teachings. Once the Islamic minority becomes big enough, that becomes a problem.
To settle immigrants successfully, a society should be self-confident, secure in its history, civic identity and ethical culture. Sound like the West at the moment? There are now types of self-loathing in our societies almost beyond parody. The Canadian Human Rights Commission recently argued that having public holidays for Christmas and Easter is discriminatory because other religions’ holiest days don’t have public holidays.
There’s plenty of equivalent nuttiness in Australia. When we hate our own traditions that much, how can we imagine migrants with contrary ideas will fall in love with our nation?
Greg Sheridan is The Australian’s foreign editor. His most recent book, Christians, the urgent case for Jesus in our world, became a best seller weeks after publication.
Let everyone debate the true reality
I’d rather see the world the way it used to be”
A little bit of freedom’s all we lack
So catch me if you can I’m goin’ back
Carole King and Gerry Goffin as sung by Dusty Springfield
Blue Remembered Hills
Into my heart an air that kills from yon far country blows:
What are those blue remembered hills,
What spires, what farms are those?
That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again
From The Shropshire Lad. AE Houseman
Houseman’s famous poem looks back at childhood as a “land of lost content”; when you are a child you are innocent, and you don’t have a care in the world. He says that childhood is a “happy highway where I went and cannot come again”, implying that they are the best years of your life but that you can never go back there. When the late British playwright Dennis Potter took the poem and turned it in to a play about a group of children on their school holidays in the Forest of Dean in Gloucester, he was asking if childhood is indeed such a land of lost content and are children really so innocent.
“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 Homer’s Odyssey – involving an epic hero returning home after a long time away, often by sea. In Ancient Greek society, it was deemed a high level of heroism or greatness for those who managed to return. The Greeks compared the feeling to the pain of an old wound, a twinge in the heart more potent than memory alone. The Odyssey reveals the deepest longings and tensions of the human soul and the fundamental structure of the journey of life: nostalgia for a home that our younger selves took for granted, and bittersweet return to people and places that have changed forever.
But nostalgia isn’t all it’s cracked out to be. And indeed, it 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.
In the seventeenth century, many considered it an illness that was curable, and could be treated with opium or with trip to the countryside. Other scholars of the phenomenon have noted that until the nineteenth century it was regarded as more a geographical longing than a temporal one, homesickness for a place rather than for an era. American author and essayist Thomas Mallon wrote in a review in New Yorker: “In the same seventeenth century that prescribed methods of relief for nostalgia, writers like the poet John Milton and Robert Burton, who actually wrote a book called The Anatomy of Melancholy. went hunting for twinges of wistfulness as if these were magic mushrooms. Through the centuries, it has been regarded sometimes a harmless solace and occasionally, as a dangerous indulgence, a mental quicksand in which we allow the past to drown the present”.
Nostalgia’s pain can be exquisite, and many of those susceptible to it have sought to cultivate rather than banish the condition. But even if we do not dive in and get lost in the past, it is nevertheless built into us consciously or subliminally. We practice it culturally all of the time. It is often more triggered by the elemental senses, smell and taste and touch, than the sights and sounds from which constant revivals of fashion and music are constructed. Which, I guess, is why folk still flock to ever recycled retreads of the musicals of Andrew Lloyd Webber.
The film Casablanca has probably inspired more feelings of nostalgia than any other movie, no matter that its famous song insists that “the fundamental things apply time goes by”. Likewise Yesterday, , the most covered song in history with well over two thousand iterations: “Yesterday, my troubles seemed so far away. Now it looks as though they’re here to stay. Oh, I believe in yesterday”. As Paul sings in the “outro”, “mmm-mmm-mmm-mmm, hmm-hmm”. I reckon he played us softies like a fiddle. “Oh, it makes you wonder”, exclaims Robert Plant in Stairway to Heaven, another opaquely nostalgic piece
Comedians have been know to lampoon nostalgia. Monty Python’s famous “Four Yorkshiremen” sketchis an absurdist riff on nostalgia itself, its quartet of old codgers wallowing in pseudo-memories of deprivation and competing for pride of place with the sheer awfulness of the pasts that they invent. Australian comic Rodney Rude went outrageously further. Go google.
And then there are “memberberries”. These featured in the long running American TV show South Park in 2016 as a purple sentient grape like-fruit that rots the brain with fake nostalgia. They evoke feelings of nostalgia in those who eat them, recalling pop culture icons that engender comforting feelings for the supposedly good times of the past. They almost constantly talk about things people remember fondly, particularly the original Star Wars trilogy. They always phrase their reminiscing as “member…?” They also make conservative comments, like recalling when marriage was only between a man and Ronald Reagan. “Member when there weren’t so many Mexicans?” They appear seem to be indestructible as one was seen burned by a torch and acid, and electrified with little to no effects, but, can be squished, eaten, and shot. Their exact origin remains unknown, but they are believed to date back to Ancient Rome.
But seriously, nostalgia is like a “pathology” that presents as an inability to move forward and accept change. As technology frog-marches us into the future, we keep a constant backward glance.
Personal genealogical research, German academic and cultural historian Tobias Becker reminds us in his recent Yesterday- A New History of Nostalgia that it is the third most common use of the internet after shopping and pornography. Some of those pursuing it, he notes, are just casually curious,. Others are taking what feels like refuge in an earlier time, or seeking a more solid sense of an ethnic identity that can shape their own outlooks and politics.
And this is where it can get dangerous because the word itself can be weaponised. People on the left often insist that people overtly inclined to nostalgia are really seeking a fig leaf for their own racism. Folk of the right cleave to the revival of glory days of old, whether they existed or not, which at its most extreme can be used as a battle cry in the “war against woke”, “replacement theory” and the likes of the MAGA movement, and even Brexit.
Thomas Mallon, quoted above, provides what I consider a fair explanation for this present day fascination, and to some, preoccupation, with our past. Nostalgia, he reckons, goes much deeper than just an idea or concept. So deep in fact “that one wonders if it isn’t a neurological condition, something fundamental and immune to the vagaries of history. As people begin living beyond their Biblical allotment of seventy years, they experience the first exaggerated panics over forgetting a name or a date, which is usually remedied by a Google search. But then comes the growing realization that short-term memory has nothing like the staying power of the long-term variety. Mentally, the seven ages of man speed up their full-circling, until the past’s sovereignty over the present is complete. The further along one gets, the more one understands that the past is indeed another country, and that, moreover, it is home. Long-term memory’s domination of short may be a hardwired consolation that nature and biology have mercifully installed in us”.
Margaret Thatcher, however, often she might have invoked her hardworking grocer father, generally regarded the past as a place where she wouldn’t be caught dead (she was happier sitting atop a bulldozer or a tank).
[For a broader, academic discussion of the topic see The Future of Nostalgia by the late American cultural theorist and artist Svetlana Boyd (Basic Books, New York 2001 or this précis http://monumenttotransformation.org/atlas-of-transformation/html/n/nostalgia/nostalgia-svetlana-boym.html She wrote about two kinds of nostalgia: restorative nostalgia, which is an attempt to restore the past, and reflective nostalgia, which focuses on longing, loss and the instability of memory. I don’t want to be 17 again – that starry-eyed slacker! – but neither would I wish that self away. Then there’s Bulgarian author and essayist Maria Popova’s analogy that we are all our ages “stacked within the current self like Russian nesting dolls, not to be outgrown but to be tenderly incorporated”.]
A warm inner glow
What happened to the boy I was? Why did he run away? And leave me old and thinking, like There’d be no yesterday?
Spike Milligan, Indian Boyhood
There’s nothing inherently or intrinsically wrong with nostalgia. Nostalgia is not just wanting to go back to something that no longer exists, but wanting to go back to something because it no longer exists. It’s not just that the past is another country, to borrow JP Hartley’s famous aphorism, where they did things differently, as did we, they perceived and thought things differently too. Whilst we rejoice in “the good old days” of our youth, like the parable of the blind wise men examining an elephant, our perspective is coloured by our experiences and our circumstances before, during and after, and the expectations and assumptions, prejudices and predilections that these engendered.
When we were younger, time appeared to move more slowly than in our later years. It is in our nature to imagine and indeed, re-imagine our salad days as the best of times and the worst of times. But looking back through our back pages, these years was perhaps no better or worse, no more significant or seminal than any era fore or aft. Like objects seen through the rear-view mirror, memories always seem a lot closer and bigger. When I’ve revisited roads and streets where I grew up, playing or sauntering or rolling home with a skinful in the pale moonlight, they are no way as wide, long or spacious as they are to the mind’s eye.
Vivid memories can distort time, making you feel that that weren’t that long ago. It’s not easy to let go of what you can’t forget, particularly if your imagine yourself in a perpetual winter of discontent in which everything passes and everything changes, and the pace, the degree and the contours of change are difficult to comprehend, leaving you feeling discombobulated, disassociated and maybe, even, a little disappointed. But we do, however, enhance our depth of perception and perspective and accordingly, our understanding.
Yet, memories are fallible at the best of times, and the way we narrate our own lives can often be partial versions of the truth. Whether our images of worse-but-better times are accurate, or just scrappy patchworks of meme, myth and memory, they are deeply ingrained.
But with most things, it’s all a matter of proportion.
call it memory, call it geography, call it the vast landscape of childhood or night—a thing disappearing—a country turning into a map. Stav Poleg, Memory and Geography
Sunbathing in Banalities
When we talk about the past, we always reveal something about the present. It is hard to imagine a more intriguing or overlooked body of evidence for assessing recent British social history than the Facebook groups that have proliferated in the last couple of decades as young folk have surrendered the Facebook social media space to us “boomers”. These nostalgia communities have flourished on Facebook as its user base has grown ever older in the past decade.
It may not be “representative” in any quantifiable way, but the sample size is vast, and the memes are a canvas for a whole range of contemporary insecurities and collective memories. History might be written by the winners, but anyone can share a post on Facebook. It has given us something like a more chaotic, 21st-century version of Mass Observation, that treasure trove of vox populi reportage from the ‘thirties onwards.
Though there is nothing generationally unique in the desire to bask in the banalities of our pasts, there are now many Facebook groups devoted to commemorating the same mundane aspects of life. They’re not necessarily rivals – many folk subscribe to several. British groups include The Yesteryears Revisited, Do You Remember This?, I Grew Up In The 1970s, The British Nostalgic Bible, and One Hundred and Ten Percent British. Together, these Facebook groups have close to 2 million members: more than the official pages for the Labour Party, the Conservatives and the Lib Dems combined. The baby boomer nostalgia industrial complex is thriving.
I am a member of several such groups. My favourites are Midland Memories, celebrating where I grew up in Birmingham and it’s environs; Swinging Sixties London, rejoicing in those generous times of music, colour and adventure; Yesterday’s Britain, It was a Better Britain, which i believe is now defunct, was long on nostalgia and short on tolerance for “the new “, but had wonderful pictures; and three fabulous Hippie Trail groups which are a kind of virtual “school reunion” for now superannuated former rovers like myself and many friends who journeyed overland to India and beyond in the sixties and seventies.
On these blue remembered hills, there are no births, marriages or deaths, no wars, no world-historic events, no great men and women of history. There is no post asking “who remembers the Cuban missile crisis?” or “who remembers the sinking of the Belgrano?” Or even, given the recent broadcasting of deliciously subversive The Crown, “where were you when you heard that Prince Di had died?” Those questions are too remote from ordinary life. Instead, we have “Who remembers ….? … bin men, street cleaners, milkmen and coal men, dinky toys and chocolate bars, gramophones, Dixon of Dock Green and Listen With Mother. We truly are … The Village Green Preservation Society:
We are the Sherlock Holmes English Speaking Vernacular Help save Fu Manchu, Moriarty and Dracula We are the Office Block Persecution Affinity God save little shops, china cups and virginity We are the Skyscraper condemnation Affiliate God save Tudor houses, antique tables and billiards … Preserving the old ways from being abused Protecting the new ways for me and for you What more can we do?
Ray Davies, The Kinks
The “proper binmen” (the featured picture of this post) and like memes are popular to a degree that may feel initially baffling. They attract phenomenal interest and enthusiasm from older Britons on Facebook, where a whole constellation of meanings and memories are projected on to them: pride, anger, resentment, weariness, ennui and fond, at times very touching, personal recollection. They embody a lost postwar idyll – and often, in many people’s imaginations, point to a decline in the fortunes of a once-proud and powerful nation and its national character, as seen in what is perceived as the apparently appalling state of their modern-day counterparts, and indeed, society as a whole, which is rotten in spirit, character and service.
The gripes of wrath
There used to be trams Not very quick got you from place to place But now there’s just jams, half a mile thick Stay in the human race, I’m walking They’ve stuck parking meters outside our door to greet us No, Fings ain’t wot they used t’be Monkeys flying around the moon We’ll be up there wiv ’em soon Fings ain’t wot they used t’be Once our beer was froffy, but now its froffy coffee No fings ain’t wot they used t’be
Lionel Bart, as sung by Max Bygraves
This was actually the title song of a 1959 musical produced by British playwright Joan Littlewood with songs by Lionel Bart (of Oliver fame). It launched the career of “Carry On …” star Barbara Windsor. The Carry On films, featuring the cream of contemporary British comedy, were themselves an audiovisual time capsule of a simpler time with their contrived plot lines, slapstick humour and “nudge nudge wink wink” innuendo.
It is a revelation to observe how lovely snaps of the past and “the way we were” (yet another retroflective weepy) can so easily trigger the rantings of “grumpy old white folk” against “wokey snowflakes”. The past was not better or worse than the present. It was just different and we held different views, perceptions, prejudices and, as importantly, expectations. And maybe, it is disappointed expectations and the realities of ageing that engender a jaundiced view of today’s world. To quote American baseball ace Yogi Berra, “the future ain’t what it used to be”.
Those were days when boys were boys, girls were girls, and “when chips were chips”, not microchips, and preferably with lashings of salt and vinegar and wrapped up in newspaper. These, like so much else, were much better then.
“Everyone knew their place”, lament some aging nostalgists. One member of a “memories” group shared: “In those days we had capital punishment, homosexuals were jailed, and prison was not like a holiday camp. Hardly any illegal immigrants, most children were brought up in a family with two parents who were allowed to discipline their children if necessary. The woke brigade did not exist and snowflakes only fell from the sky in the winter” Another wrote of “a lack of discipline in all walks of society, therefore lack of respect. Too many immigrants from the 50s on, not heeding Mr Powell’s wise words. Glad I’m old and won’t be here in 20 years time; I feel sorry for generations to come. Certain areas are already like the lawless, drug-fuelled, murderous parts of the Caribbean. You can never bring back those wonderful early post war times portrayed in that picture”. And another: “No wokey snowflakes, no oil protesters, no green loonies, people being allowed to get on with their lives. Happy days!” Also, while we’re at it, let’s reclaim well-loved and once casually used words like “gay”, “queer” and “fag” and many others that mean something else, usually unpleasant, today. And we never did get an answer to Spike Milligan’s Goon Show query: “What’s become of that crispy bacon we had before the war, ey?
Back in those days, we were “a gentler, kinder more law abiding and respectful society”. There was respect, you read. “Men were men and women were women. Streets were cleaner, as was our language. Policemen were politer. There were no litter, no wogs, no tattoos”. There was no intrusive and onerous health and safety regulations, so kiddies could play on the spotless streets and on unfenced and cluttered bombsites without fear of accident and stranger danger, and almost ever face you’d see was white, and you could actually see those faces
The right wing has an advantage in appealing to dislocated and atomised people: It doesn’t have to provide a compelling view of the future. All it needs is a romantic conception of the past, to which it can offer the false promise of return. When people are scared and full of despair, “let’s go back to the way things were” is a potent message, especially for those with memories of happier times. Those were invariably remembered as socially cohesive – and white.
Ever since then, to quote another song, “It’s been a hard days night …”
Many folk comment about the absence of coloured faces, hijabs, etcetera in old photos, and rant about “the invasion”. They blame “the government” for introducing mass immigration. Hardly surprising when half the government are immigrants themselves”. Some add that politicians ought to to be indigenous – whatever that means as indigeneity is a murky subject. One states that any politician should be an indigenous person . “What idiot first allowed immigrants to take office. Us ordinary folk know they don’t give a hoot for their own people they are in it for themselves and power trip and I’m talking about our own indigenous MPs as for the others …Can you imagine Brits going to Asian countries and being elected to the three highest offices in their government?it just would not happen, but here is does. this is why were are the state we are in”.
When a group member declared “time take the country back!”, I cheekily replied “where to? 1950?”
“There was a time”, someone wrote, “a time when the Sceptred Isle [that came from the Bard of Avon] was full of proper born and bred British folk … who had been through two world wars … Fought for this country … got married had two lovely white children, a boy wearing boys’ things a girl wearing girls’ things … No doubt husband still slogging away twelve hours a day down some coal pit, not sunning himself on some Caribbean island … Showed respect to king and queen … Armed forces … Police and doctors … And discipline was enforced in school and home … There was conscription and hanging and children called out “mum and and dad, auntie and uncle” … A policeman, doctor, teacher were Sir or Miss or Mrs … church on Sunday .. Christening, Confirmation, Holy Matrimony. The priest was a Vicar for the CofE … Vicar was called “Father” there were no women vicars … Catholics were tolerated but the Irish were a problem … I could go on reminiscing but it’s time for my meds and an afternoon nap … GOD SAVE THE KING and GOD SAVE THIS SEPTIC ISLE …
At this point, I realized that this stream of unconsciousness was probably a wind-up. But it encapsulated perfectly a mindset of disconsolate misery. We are not only surrounded by the ghosts of Old Britain – and here in Australia by a comparable cohort – but also by its living dead, the remnants and survivals, the attitudes and assumptions, the fallacies and fears, the nostalgia and the neurosis. As American author William Faulkner wrote, “the past is never past. It is always with us”.
Glory days
I could tell you my adventures—beginning from this morning,” said Alice a little timidly; “but it’s no use going back to yesterday, because I was a different person then.
Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
And so, the past takes on the appearance of a mythical landscape, and escapist fantasy even, of the monoculture, the civility, the cleanliness of minds, hearts, and places, the abiding sense of order, the and the idea – or the lie, more like, that if things were better run nowadays, we can retreat to it.
The following comment to an article like this one in my favourite e-zine Unherd on 3rd October 2023 put it thus: “… as my generation has aged and the future hasn’t perhaps turned out as well as our parents would have hoped, we have created a slightly cartoonish overly sentimental narrative that harks back to ‘our’ glory days. But of course, they weren’t our glory days at all – they were the glory days of our parents”. WH Auden said it similarly in a sonnet of 1938:
Some could not like or change the young and mourn for
Some wounded myth that once made children good,
Some lost a world they never understood,
Some saw too clearly all that man was born for.
There were never any “good old days”, really. There was poverty, slum dwellings, inequality, intolerance, deference, corporal and capital punishment. Things might seem bad today, but social, medical and technological change and growing awareness and concern for others have made life better overall. The “freedom” of those “good old days” was an illusion. Step out of line, be you female, gay or Red, long-haired or “other”, and you were taunted, cold-shouldered, black-balled or bullied. Homosexuals were jailed. “It was hard”, one member once commented, “but respectful of community. To which I replied: “…yeah, but no, but … there was always an “other”. Irish, Catholics, travelers, beatniks, teddy boys, gays, West Indians
As for everyone “knowing their place”, my place would’ve been at the bottom if not for the social and political change, including free healthcare and education, that enabled working class children to grow up healthy and ambitious.
And what’s with the discipline thing? One group member commented that the banning of corporal punishment in schools was “the start of the rot”, whatever that meant to him (yes, it’s usually males who seem dig a bit of biffo against school children – you see it often on social media when schoolies walk out on climate strikes). I never relished the ruler, cane or gym pump (which I endured, infrequently, fortunately).
Corporal punishment was often administered by teachers who enjoyed meting it out – that it was a power thing, and arguably, at times psycho-sexual. In short, child abuse. I was caned and slippered on several occasions, not for indiscipline at all but for academic performance. The teachers inflicting it were known to be bullies but the powers that be tolerated it because such measures were for “our own good” and didn’t cause long term harm. The “it made a man of me” school are possibly retrofitting their childhood experience to suit their contemporary grumpiness.
The “this will hurt me more than it hurts you”, “it’s for your own good”, and “spare the rod …” etcetera, left me cold. Nor the likes of “manners maketh the man”. I can’t say that this made a “man” of me! That, I put down to the National Health Service, free public education right through to sixth form and scholarships to university – and public libraries.
[As an aside, Fintan O’Toole’s “personal” history of modern Ireland, We don’t know ourselves, describes the horrific abuse meted out on generations of Irish children by church run schools, children’s homes and reformatories – to which the authorities turned a blind eye, and which the public tacitly condoned with its silence. O’Toole is mostly definitely in the “corporal punishment is potentially sadism or sado-masochism” camp]
When it comes to modern devices and distractions, folk hark back with a “we didn’t have … and ….” and “we had to made do with …” To which I reply “we would’ve if we could’ve if it had been invented”. Which is probably the case as we boomers took enthusiastically to music cassettes and cds, Walkman and PCs, mobile phones and smart TVs. Odds are the group members are typing their griping on an iPad or iPhone or similar.
I get it that, for some folk, there is an atavistic, rueful longing for the good old days, a golden age when things were simpler albeit less comfortable, when folk were respectful and deferential, and appreciative of the achievements and sacrifices of their fellow countrymen and, at times, women. otherwise”. But, those “seasons in the sun” were, to quote Boz, “… the worst of times and the best of times”. They were then and now is now.
Think I’m going down to the well tonight And I’m going to drink ’til I get my fill And I hope when I get old, I don’t sit around thinking about it But I probably will Yeah, just sitting back Trying to recapture a little of the glory of Well, the time slips away Leaves you with nothing, mister, but boring stories of Glory days They’ll pass you by, glory days In the wink of a young girl’s eye, glory days
Bruce Springsteen
A glass half full
“So what? Yes, things change. I’ve noticed. Yes”, wrote British stand-up comic, satirist, writer, and broadcaster Simon Evans, in Quillette, 2nd March 2023. “The sands of time will run through the hourglass and the desert winds will blow away the dust of my bones and raze my vainglorious monuments to the ground. Big deal. I like change. New things replace the old and the world would be boring were it not so”.
Indeed! To riff once more on Charles Dickens, the past and the present are no better or worse, just different. Times change. Things change. We change. I was born in 1949, grew up in the fifties and came of age in the sixties. “Then” was good. It is now 2023, and “now” is good too. Back “then”, I could never have imagined today.
I’m a glass half full person, and also, a keen participant on social media nostalgie. Not because I’m embittered or regretful, but rather, I derive great enjoyment from basking in “les temps perdu”. Things change, for change they must – and not all change is for the best. To some changes, I am reconciled. Others sadden me, but I have accepted that it is less than politic and also quite pointless to complain.
The “good old days” narratives that “we might’ve been poor, but we were happy” and that simpler, slower-moving times were better than today’s fast-paced, economically and socially and culturally changing world, might be comforting, but may not be realistic ones. Yes, we recall that might’ve been happier, more contented even, as Houseman might’ve thought, and our world seemed bigger and brighter, like objects seen through the rear-view mirror, as noted above; but we were young and naïve and everything was new to us. We looked about ourselves with fresh and un-taught eyes and minds. Back then, we may have been young gods and goddesses, and the open road was laid out before us.
And yet, give me today any day for all its faults, challenges and complications – and its cultural and technological advances. In truth my wife and I would not be here now if not for modern medicine. And that might well be the problem when it comes to our present “civilization and its discontents” (that’s from my old friend Nietzsche). In olden days we’d’ve been dust by now and wouldn’t have had to go through this existential “vale of tears”.
If, like dear dead Dusty, my school boy crush, who opened this piece, I’d like think that if I could go back “to the things I learned so well in my youth, those days when I was young enough to know the truth”, I’d like to take with me my twenty first century septuagenarian sense and sensibility, sans the world-weary cynicism and physical inconveniences of my age and aging – and my iPad. Forget the phone!
And every day can be my magic carpet ride
On a personal note, back in those dear gone days, I was a Roman Catholic and my folks were paddies and went to a school that was secular with a very strong CofE ethos. Boy Scout, Senior Scout. Working class, obedient to a degree but never deferential to the powers that be, republican from an early age, socialist when I reached the age of independence, though with half-informed thinking, got into fabulous music, went to uni, had sex, did drugs, hitchhiked, travelled the hippy trail, dodged the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, and even worked for the MoD, emigrated to Australia, where, through hard yakka and a shitload of good fortune, I did quite well for myself. So I’ll admit that my up-beat perspective of today is to a very large degree due to my good fortune. Not that I’ve been especially astute, canny, and opportunistic, but rather, I’ve been lucky with the hands that have been dealt me throughout my life.
And that went right back to the beginning. As I have written often before, my brothers and I grew up in a a comfortable, happy home with loving parents and a great aunt, “with free medical treatment for all our ailments, and free optical and dental care. I still have crooked teeth – no fancy orthodontics on the NHS – but I have all my teeth still. And my eyesight. We were educated, for free. This came in during the war with the Butler Act. So, thanks to the Welfare State, we were housed and healthy enough to get to primary school and beyond. Once there, we had free books, free pens and paper, and compulsory sport, and doctors and nurses would turn up on a regular basis to check our vitals. When we came out the other side, we were free to make our own choices, and chart our own course through the reefs and shoals of life. And thus, we were able to reach the glorious ‘sixties ready to rock ‘n roll”.
My memories are my greatest riches From back in the days gone by ,,,… Time moves on like a melody, and I can hear those memories sing
Larkin Poe, Tears of Blue and Gold (2020)
Yes, my formative years were the sixties, and I wouldn’t have missed them for quids (not that I’d had anything to do with being born at the right time in the right place), when, if we wished, we were able to break free of the surly bonds of the past. I have written earlier:
“Cynics say that most people who remember the sixties were not there. Well, I was, and I remember it all so well. And was it as great as they say? Yes it was, to me at any rate. But in reality, the story of the ‘swinging sixties’ has grown with the telling. In the closing scene of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, the journalist says: “This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend”. And much of what has been remembered, written, and said about those years has followed that maxim.
This was indeed a decade of change and ferment. Values changed, morals changed, habits changed, clothes changed, music changed (the best music ever, many have argued). The way people looked at the world and thought about it. We often look back and remark that a supernova of creativity burst over the western world during those years, the likes of which was not seen before and has never been seen again. And nowhere more so than in decadent, decaying, depressing, old England, trapped in tradition, class, and prejudice.
And yet, this revolution road was walked by but a few. The greater proportion of the populace, young and old alike, carried on as if nothing untoward was happening. Following in their fathers’ footsteps, faithful to social and economic scripts written before their time, possessed of neither time, means, opportunity or inclination to indulge in the sensual, intellectual, artistic and political playground that was accessible to students and socialites of that generation. People were more affluent, no doubt, more comfortable in a maslovian sense, more socially mobile, better educated (a relative term, this), but overall, not overly adventurous. And truth be said, many of the social and political changes that are said to epitomize the ‘sixties, were well underway during the ‘fifties and even earlier or did not reach true fruition until the decades that followed.
But for we few, we happy few, in our own private Idahos, our little self-important backwaters of intellectual and cultural elitism, times were indeed a’changin”.
London was the “scene”, and then only the West End. The rest of the was still pretty drab and monochrome. But everywhere, clothes and music started to brighten things up.
With these metaphorical themes, so then did the threads unravel, so began a journey that is now drawing to a conclusion. These were the moments I occupied, looking out onto England, but imagining the wider world. And then, from the far side of the world, where the journey will most likely end, in the midst of an Australian forest. Here we are then, with the world literally at our fingertips, as we look out onto a world that is smaller, more knowledgeable, more prejudiced, less wise, more dangerous, more enthreatened, but as ever, beautiful, unfathomable, and magical. And at times like these, perhaps like Banjo, “I somehow fancy that I’d like to change with Clancy” as he “sees the vision splendid of the sunlit plains extended, and at night, the wondrous glory of the everlasting stars”. And hope that like the Bobster, we shall “dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free, silhouetted by the sea, circled by the circus sand, with all memory and fate driven deep beneath the waves”. But let’s leave the last words to AA Milne as we bid farewell forever to The House at Pooh Corner: “wherever they go, and whatever happens to them on the way, in that enchanted place on the top of the Forest, a little boy and his Bear will always be playing”.
When we reminisce about our “salad days”, they’re nothing more emotionally satisfying than the music we listened to; it is a portal to those times because there is nothing like songs and music from our past for unlocking memories. As the old crooner used to sing, those “magic moments” provided us with our very own soundtrack, a veritable code that even today, connects us to our contemporaries.
One constant nostalgist Facebook meme is the audio cassette tape. It inaugurated an era when it was possible to control one’s private soundscape, something we all take for granted now. It was cheap, portable, easy to use, and eminently shareable. It could live in the footwell of the a car or the bottom of a backpack. And was thrilling to those of us raised on vinyl. Suddenly, anyone with a cheap tape player could record music and share it. With its advent of the audio cassette, many of us took to compiling party tapes and car tapes of favourite songs to mark our passage from adolescence to adulthood, tapes that we would share with friends and also, with the objects of our young emotions and affections.
Nowadays, we have more ways to access music than at any time in history and a whole world of unfamiliar styles to explore, aided by instant access if we desire, to platforms like You Tube. And yet, there has been research to show that our willingness to explore new or unfamiliar music declines with age. It’s as if we believe, like American songwriter and musician Bob Seger: “today’s music ain’t got the same soul; like that old time rock ‘n’ roll”. There appears to be a consensus that people are highly likely to have their taste shaped by the music they first encounter in adolescence when our brains have developed to the point where we can fully process what we’re hearing, whilst the new experiences and heightened emotions of those years create strong and lasting bonds of memory based on pleasures past.
Donovan and Jenny Boyd wear the love like heaven
Farewell Middle Earth
I’ll leave my conclusion to American writer, artist and Druid (yes), Cerri Lee:
I suddenly realized it is a profound and overwhelming sense of loss for their world and mine that I feel as the Elves sail away from the Grey Havens. When the Elves leave, they take with them the enchantment from the land, something dies in it and I am left on the shores of Middle Earth amidst a fading beauty, as they sail on into the distance. The realization that now humans will have no restraints in their actions and will push forward the rise of mechanism, commerce on a global scale, and a discarding of anything that even looks like ‘fluffy’ thinking. My Middle Earth will never be the same again and I am constantly mourning its passing through this story. It leads me to wonder if some part of that feeling is what drove Tolkien to write his story.
As a fifty something woman I am starting to feel my age in the way I think. Occasionally I fall pray to the “In my day” ‘rose-tinted’ view of how things were ‘back in the day’. I don’t really think times were ever any better as such, no, definitely not better. But maybe the problems seemed more understandable, more bite sized and chewable. In truth they were not, but memory is a funny thing, as we all know, it can warp and change how we view the past.
I know that things on the global scale have always been complicated, difficult and a fine tightrope walk between warring factions, people in famine and glut, all striving for a peaceful coexistence. It is only the access to media coverage that bring the problems so close to home leaving me with the sense that I am standing before the Black Gates of Mordor, with the armies of the enemy massing on the other side and the Great Eye glaring down on me from his Tower.
A friend – a committed Christian – commented on this essay as follows.
“It’s how Tolkien converted Lewis to Christianity. What if myths were ultimately true, and the resurrection was the greatest myth of all?”
I asked Chat GPT to place this in its historical and philosophical context. it replied:
He is referring to a famous moment in intellectual history: Tolkien’s late-night conversations with C.S. Lewis in 1931 along Addison’s Walk at Oxford. Lewis loved myth but regarded Christianity as simply another beautiful mythology – emotionally powerful, morally resonant, but not literally true. Tolkien argued otherwise. His idea was that myths are not lies; they are fragmented reflections of deeper truths. Human beings create stories because we are “sub-creators”, made in the image of a Creator, and therefore our myths repeatedly circle around sacrifice, redemption, death and renewal because they are reaching toward something real.
Tolkien’s crucial move was his claim that Christianity was “the true myth”: mythic in structure – the dying and rising god, sacrifice and redemption – but also, he believed, historical. In his words, Christianity was a myth that “entered history and the primary world.” Lewis later described this as the point where his resistance began to crack.
It connects surprisingly well with the nostalgia essays because these are really about stories and memory as the architecture through which we understand ourselves. We do not live by facts alone. We live by narratives. The “good old days” often function as a kind of secular mythology: not necessarily false, but emotionally edited and carrying meanings larger than the events themselves.
There is also a gentle irony here. Tolkien was suspicious of nostalgia in some respects. The Lord of the Rings is saturated with longing and loss — the Elves sailing West, the fading of enchantment, the passing of an age – but the book ultimately refuses mere restoration. Middle-earth cannot be put back as it was. Frodo cannot simply return to the Shire unchanged. Time moves forward. Loss is real. Memory remains. The task is not to live in the past but to carry it into the future.
As for the line “the resurrection was the greatest myth of all,” Christians mean something very specific by that phrase. They do not usually mean “myth” as “fiction”; they mean myth as the deepest pattern of meaning. Non-believers may hear “myth” as “beautiful story”. Believers hear “myth become fact”.
The comment was in itself very Tolkien – my friend is also very much a Tolkien acolyte. JRR persuaded Lewis not by dismissing myth as fantasy, but by suggesting that myths may be humanity groping toward deeper truths. Whether one sees the Resurrection as history, metaphor, or “myth become fact”, it speaks to the same impulse I am exploring in this essay’: we are storytelling creatures. We remember, imagine, and long for lost Edens. The danger comes when we try to inhabit the story rather than learn from it. Even Tolkien’s Middle-earth reminds us that the Grey Havens are one-way traffic. We can carry enchantment forward, but we cannot sail back to yesterday.
If this article was not too long for you, you may be interested in as opinion piece published in The Australian in May 2026 which argued that in a sociological and cultural sense, nostalgia can serve a useful purpose.
What’s so wrong with the good old days? In defence of nostalgia
Frank Furedi, The Australian, 21 May 2026
Nostalgia isn’t a political insult. Populists and conservatives are condemned for attachment to the values associated with ‘the good old days’. Here’s why we need it.
In the Western world – particularly among the intelligentsia and the cultural elites – nostalgia has a bad press. As one study of how the use of this label is seen or used stated: “To have one’s ideas, program, policies or style labelled ‘nostalgic’ is to be on the end of one of the most enduring and non-negotiable insults in modern political discourse.” The accusation of nostalgia serves to delegitimate individuals and movements by associating it with outdated and irrelevant sentiments.
Nostalgia is continually affixed to ideological attacks on populism and conservatism. Typically, the coupling of nostalgia with conservatism and populism serves to signify the fear of facing up to the present and an irrational escape into a mythical past. Time and again the accusation of nostalgia is coupled with a denunciation of everything its practitioners value about the past.
Critics of nostalgia contend that the “good old days” never existed. They insist that those who idealise the world of intact families, stable communities and solid intergenerational bonds are living a lie. These critics assert that people who possess an affinity to the past do so because in the old days racial minorities knew their place, women were confined to the kitchen and the LGBTQ+ community had no visibility or voice. Writing in this vein, one critic stated “conservatism is just weaponised nostalgia”.
It is worth noting that anyone who voices a positive attitude towards Australia’s past is likely to be accused of the reactionary crime of nostalgia. So earlier this year, commentary broadcast on the ABC suggested that former prime minister John Howard’s legacy represented “nostalgia for a whiter, more conservative Australia”.
In the same vein, Tony Abbott’s book, Australia, is frequently denounced as the product of colonial nostalgia. Those labelled as members of the Nostalgia Right are regarded as irredeemable racists and xenophobes.
John Howard during Question Time, December 1999.
Critics of nostalgia do not merely caution people about the problem of living in the past: they also seek to delegitimate the values and customs that prevailed in yesteryear.
The aim of the political critique of nostalgia is to distance society morally from its history. Its goal is to undermine a nation’s sense of cultural continuity. Australian conservatives and populists are frequently attacked for invoking three nostalgic pasts: the social order and prosperity of the 1950s Menzies era; the celebration of the nation’s connection with the British monarchical past, and; the social solidarity that prevailed in pre-multicultural Australia.
Yet maintaining a sense of historical and cultural continuity with the past is essential if we are to know where we come from and who we are. So don’t get defensive when you are told off for being nostalgic.
Without falling into the trap of uncritically celebrating the “good old days”, it is vital to affirm the legacy of our past, especially the sense of solidarity and community we are at risk of losing.
Nostalgia assists the maintenance of cultural continuity.
The sense of historical continuity plays an important role in the constitution of the self. Understanding where we come from influences and strengthens individuals’ sense of who they are. A feeling of continuity with the experience of previous generations lends stability to a people’s identity.
Continuity across time is achieved through the intergenerational transmission of a community’s way of life and its ideals. It is difficult to develop a sturdy sense of community identity without a shared memory and a common attachment to conventions or customs that are rooted in the past.
The sense of continuity across time is, as psychologist Roy Baumeister stated, one of the defining criteria of identity. This point was echoed by American social psychologist Kenneth Keniston, when he stated “one of the chief tasks of identity formation is the creation of a sense of self that will link the past, the present and the future”.
The common ground on which people live requires a shared understanding of where members of a community come from. Learning about the past helps children to know their place in the world and develop their identity. German psychoanalyst Erik Erikson, who formulated the concept of an identity crisis, attached great importance to providing young people with a sense of cultural continuity. He noted that “true identity … depends on the support which the young individual receives from the collective sense of identity characterising the social groups significant to him: his class, his nation, his culture”.
Tea and army cake refreshed then-Prime Minister Robert Menzies on a visit to Seymour military camp back in 1939. Picture:News Corp
For socialisation to occur successfully, adults draw on the experience of previous generations to provide young people with a meaningful account of adulthood. Erikson remarked that the values with which children are trained “persist because the cultural ethos continues to consider them ‘natural’ and does not admit of alternatives”.
He observed: “They persist because they have become an essential part of the individual’s sense of identity, which he must preserve as a core of sanity and efficiency. But values do not persist unless they work, economically, psychologically and spiritually; and I argue that to this end they must continue to be anchored, generation after generation, in early child training; while child training, to remain consistent, must be embedded in a system of continued economic and cultural synthesis.”
Valuing the past
The socialisation of children is key to the transmission of this legacy of the past. It is integral to an intergenerational transaction whereby moral norms are communicated by authoritative adults to the young. Though this form of socialisation is likely to be perceived as impregnated with nostalgia by the technocratic-managerial elites, it is essential for providing the young with roots.
Once the moral status of the past is put into question, the achievement of a stable identity becomes fraught with uncertainty. The de-authorisation of the past renders the experiences of the older generations redundant and complicates the task of socialisation. Adulthood becomes compromised by its association with the past. Instead of being able to serve as a model to the young, it ceases to serve that role effectively.
Erikson’s reference to the “collective sense of identity” that adults communicate to young people has as its premise the capacity of the older generation to communicate a model of identity to their offspring. However, with the loss of the “sense of the past”, cultural continuity has become disrupted and the capacity of adults to serve as models to the young has diminished.
Nostalgia can be understood as the cultural antithesis to the loss of a sense of the past. As sociologist Fred Davis noted, nostalgia “leads us to search among remembrances of persons and places of our past in an effort to bestow meaning upon persons and places of our present”. From the anti-populist standpoint, the very search for meaning in tradition and the experience of the past is likely to encourage opposition to the value system of the defenders of the cultural status quo.
A yearning for home
Instead of responding to the critics of nostalgia by dismissing the charge of being drawn towards it, it is preferable to embrace it. Nostalgia refers to a yearning for home. It expresses an understandable and genuine sense of cultural loss underwritten by the belief that values that had once provided the unity of social relations and personal experience have become marginalised.
Populists and conservatives are on solid ground when they seek to reconnect with the legacy of their nation’s past. Those who possess a positive orientation towards the past should not be seen as emotionally illiterate, naive simpletons. Through their nostalgic orientation, they attempt to retrieve and develop sources of identity, agency or community.
Tony Abbott’s book, Australia, is frequently denounced as the product of colonial nostalgia. Picture: Jane Dempster / The Australian
The attempt to forge a sense of historical continuity is a prerequisite for providing the present with the sturdy foundation needed to face the future. Those who have become detached from the past inevitably become obsessed with inventing an identity to the point that they become detached from the project of facing the future. Call it what you will, but the attempt to forge a consciousness of historical continuity makes an indispensable contribution to the creation of a bridge between the past and the present, and the present and the future. It is an effective way of cultivating a genuine sensibility of belonging.
Nostalgia is not only good for society but also for the wellbeing of individuals. Studies suggest that those who “reminisce are more likely to keep friends and expand social networks”, and are able to forge closer and more durable relations than those who are indifferent to their past. Common sense suggests that the individual’s attempt to forge and maintain a sense of continuity with the past assists the development of an individual’s identity and feeds the soul of society.
In the 21st century, the main distinguishing feature of movements labelled as populist is their tendency to challenge the cultural values espoused by the political establishment. Often, the challenge posed by populist movements to elite values is expressed through their reluctance to abandon customs and traditions that elites have discarded: sentiments described by the use of that confusing term “nostalgia”.
Yet without a close connection with the past, we become prisoners of fate. Why? Because we can only truly understand what humanity has achieved so far and acquire insight into what it can achieve in the future by evaluating the experience of our forebears. The legacy of the past provides the moral and intellectual resources for developing a 21st-century narrative of what solidarity and community looks like. Very importantly, it also provides the foundation for freedom.
Once society becomes de-historicised, it will become lost in a timeless wasteland. Those with an impoverished historical imagination are doomed to embark on an eternal quest for meaning because we become connected and situated in time through cultivating an empathetic relationship with the past as members of a community. Without such an attachment, we struggle to intuit where we have come from and are constantly in search of an identity. Navigating our way into the future is harder when we are deprived of a means to assimilate the experience of our ancestors. Put simply, to determine where to go, we need to know where we came from.
It’s an Australia that did exist
In Australia, hostility towards nostalgia is motivated by a venomous hatred towards the nation’s past. Take the hatred directed at former opposition leader Peter Dutton. According to the National Indigenous Times, his “path to the party leadership has been defined not by nation-building, nor a vision for Australia’s future, but through obstruction and division, wedded with a nostalgia for an Australia that never truly existed”.
Peter Dutton . Peled /Getty Images
The reference to an “Australia that never truly existed” is frequently invoked by critics of nostalgia. Implicit in this statement is the dispossession of Australia’s historical legacy of any positive features.
Populist conservatives do not want to go back to a golden age, but nor do they want their communities to be dispossessed of the customs and ways of being that made them who they are.
Keeping alive the traditions, customs and rituals that have inspired their communities over the generations provides populism with the cultural power to motivate millions of people. It provides the foundation for the kind of cultural security that allows people to face the future.
— Frank Furedi is a sociologist, author and former professor of sociology at the University of Kent. This is an edited extract from his new book, In Defence of Populism (Polity Press), which will be published on May 22 in Australia.
They’re lining up the prisoners And the guards are taking aim I struggle with some demons They were middle-class and tame I didn’t know I had permission To murder and to maim
Leonard Cohen, You want it darker?
There is no decent place to stand in a massacre”.
Leonard Cohen, The Captain
The events of the past four weeks in Israel should make us all question our previous assessments and assumptions. One assumption is that antisemitism is no longer a major threat to Diaspora Jews, and that much of the talk about it was an obsession and distraction from much weightier issues that Jews should be focusing on.
The Hamas’ assault was almost perfect act of Taqiyyah, deception and dissimulation in an ostensibly Islamic cause. The term تقیة taqiyyah is derived from the trilateral root wāw-qāf-yā, literally denoting caution, fear, prudence, guarding against a danger), carefulness and wariness. It used unprecedented intelligence tactics to mislead Israel over past last months, by giving a public impression that it was not willing to go into a fight or confrontation with Israel while preparing for this massive operation. As part of its subterfuge over the past two years, Hamas refrained from military operations against Israel even as another Gaza-based armed group known as Islamic Jihad launched a series of its own assaults or rocket attacks.
One of the reasons Israel was caught unaware was because its security apparatus believed Hamas had changed its ways. Contrary to all the evidence afforded by a long history and a painful present, a belief emerged that its leaders are at least somewhat “like us” – they want the same things, they act the same way. Israel watched Hamas train for October 7 believing that the training for the real thing was itself the deception. All of the country’s formidable military technology meant nothing for the simple reason that — despite decades filled with thousands upon thousands of Hamas-directed attacks and kidnappings — they believed there was nothing on the other side of that fence to be overly alert to.
The audacity and brutality of the attack were as astonishing as its secrecy. The images of fear and bloodletting, of ecstatic attack and capture, guarantee that October 7, 2023, will become an indelible tragedy in Jewish history. Hamas probably succeeded beyond their expectation. Now they are having to deal with an Israel determined to decimate them
Since the Simhat Torah massacre, which mirrored in so many ways the pogroms inflicted upon Jewish communities in Eastern Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, what we’ve been seeing in cities around the world is that antisemitism is the devil that never goes away. One could also ask whether anti-Zionism is but an old hatred clad in new clothes. One phenomenon of anti-Semitism is its ability to mutate over history: from religious hatred to ethnic hatred to hatred of Israel in any form. If the marchers want a two-state solution, a pathway to peace, they do not say so. They chant “From the river to the sea”, which is a call for ethnic cleansing at best, and genocide at worst, though many do not know the name of the river, or the name of the sea.
Hamas recorded and broadcast the images of its atrocities on October 7 to make sure Israel and the world knew exactly what it had done. Israel has struck back hard on Gaza, killing many civilians in the densely populated region to reach Hamas targets. The Palestinian authorities say over 10,000 civilians have been killed, over a third of them children, and about two-thirds of Gaza’s 2.3 million people have been made homeless, unable to escape the territory. As tens of thousands flee and the bodies pile up, the brief moment of sympathy for Israel has receded and a tide of anti-Jewish sentiment is rising around the world.
International political theorist Arta Moeini wrote in Unherd on 4th November: “The moment Hamas carried out its heinous terror attacks against Israel, the war in Gaza was instantly globalised, reverberating in the hearts and minds of people oceans away who were neither Israeli nor Gazan. Millions on social media picked a side, proudly displaying their solidarity flags and condemning their opponents as either evil terrorists or genocidal oppressors. Both foreign states and populations assumed reflexive positions, railing against antisemitism or settler-colonialism and identifying with the “victims” in a Manichaean struggle that cares little for historical context, nuance or open debate. They became virtual participants in the conflict, as if their own lives and futures depended on it, cancelling and dehumanizing their opposition other just as the most extreme Hamasi Islamist or Israeli Zionist would do”.
In western, Liberal-democratic countries with some of the largest Jewish communities there are mass marches with open calls to kill Jews; there is the defacement and removal of posters of hostages being held in Gaza; and Israel is being held responsible by mainstream politicians and media figures for war crimes committed by Hamas; and there’s a flood of antisemitic poison on social media. It appears to have given permission for progressive activists to clothe antisemitism as anti-colonialism, and indeed, an alibi to say the most racist of things, and yet to retain all innocence in their own minds. And the more morally certain people are that they are right, the easier it is for them to miss their own complicity.
Rare is the criticism of the less savoury aspects of Muslim religion and society, like its patriarchal authoritarianism, its latent misogyny, and its antisemitism and homophobia. The intersectional narrative inhaled by activists, giving comfort to the “oppressed” legitimizes unspeakable cruelty against the “oppressor”. Hence, we have the sublimation of antisemitism into support and justification for the atrocities of the Hamas. [Pogrom, by the way, is a Russian-Yiddish word derived from “to destroy by violence]
Many people, particularly on the left, have forgotten or just ignore what triggered the latest bloody episode in the long running bloody saga. If you deliberately target civilians, regardless of your ideology, religion or ethnicity, you have lost all moral authority whatsoever. There are no excuses, no mitigations and no explanations. You have become the very thing you purport to hate.
For sure, an almost sixty year long occupation of the West Bank and the ongoing blockade of Gaza are criminal, and Israel’s behaviour thereby, is inexcusable. We can argue forever whether it is justifiable or necessary. But remember that in Gaza, the Hamas is a quasi-government, and a reactionary, exclusivist outfit with a “post-Israel” vision that will produce an ethnically cleansed theocratic dictatorship. And when it launched its troops on the kibbutzs of the Negev twith orders to behave like Da’ish, murdering kids at a music festival killing, raping, mutilating, and abducting unarmed men, women, children and babies, the opprobrium inevitably and unfortunately attaches to all Palestinians.
It is not helped when in the West Bank and elsewhere, such “bravery” is celebrated with sweets, ululation and “happy shots”, when people in a crowd in the forecourt of the iconic Sydney Opera House chant from the river to the sea” and “gas the Jews”, and social media is awash with memes that display but limited knowledge of the history and politics of the Middle East.
The Hamas now holds some 250 Israeli men, women and children captive in Gaza, adding to over two million Palestinians that are serving as human shields against what it knew would be inevitable Israeli vengeance. It has reportedly three months of supplies in its tunnels whilst above them, the Gazans run out of gas, food and water and medical facilities are brought to a standstill. Hundreds of thousands of civilians are now caught in a crossfire of Hamas’ making. There are reports that the Hamas is preventing Gazans from leaving, determined to use them as human shields, and has actually fired on fleeing convoys. They need to be protected, but how? We need to seek justice for Palestinians without glorifying unspeakable violence.
Luxury beliefs and historical illiteracy
The term “luxury beliefs” was coined to describe how privileged progressives like to traffic in a kind of unhinged extremist rhetoric. Partly, it’s a byproduct of their insulation from ever having to experience the practical impact of what they advocate. When people in Australia chant “from the river to the sea”, and “gas the Jews”, relatively few are saying this because they have a material interest in obliterating the real Israel and rendering the land “Judenfrei” (remember that word!) More have no particular animus toward Jewish people – they just don’t care about them. But most are moved by a desire to weaken what Israel symbolizes: the US.
Many left-wing impressions are coloured by a an antipathy for the policies of the United States, an antipathy that for many was born of the Vietnam War and was perpetuated by America’s interference in the affairs of nations large and small since then – and of course, America’s strong ideological and military support for Israel. Uncle Sam certainly does have a case to answer. There’s no denying the hundreds of thousands, millions maybe, of bodies of men, women and children that could be laid at the foot of Abe Lincoln’s huge statue in Washington DC. But giving aid and comfort to a regime that is antithetical to your beliefs and also your lifestyle does not compute. It is an ideological stance uninformed by knowledge and awareness of the nature of the Israeli and Palestinian entities, their peoples, and their cultures in the 21st Century. None of these are what they were in the nineteen seventies and eighties.
Writing in The Australian on 29th October, commentator Gemma Tognini wrote: “As I watched mainly white, middle-class privileged (in the truest sense of that word, not the co-opted, cheapened version) people parade themselves around as soft apologists for a declared terror organization, I felt despair. How? How did we get here? … What’s been on display on university campuses since October 7 has been terrifying in its historical illiteracy, lack of humanity and ideological zealotry”.
It’s worthwhile quoting what else she had to say about such “luxury beliefs”:
“… This is the soft generation. Their grandparents fought type 2 diabetes, not Nazism. It was reported that (perhaps unsurprisingly) the University of Sydney Student Representative Council urged students to “stand against oppression … until Palestine is free”. Let me tell you one thing I’m willing to bet on. Not one of them would volunteer to go help the cause. Not one of them would give up their Uber eats, days at the pub and total freedom to go live in a place where being gay is an offence punishable by death, fewer than 20 per cent of women are allowed to work and more than 20 per cent of women are married under the age of 17. Good luck wearing a bikini or your active wear in downtown Gaza.
And then, there’s a punchline: “… this conflict in the Middle East, this visceral, existential attack on Israel, and on Jewish people the world over, seems to have ripped something open to reveal an ideological hatred that I don’t understand. It’s a good impetus to raise the voting age, to be honest. If your response to the fact that the Arab states are refusing to take refugees, that Egypt won’t open its northern border for the same reason, is “Israel’s committing genocide”, then sorry, you’re not intellectually agile enough to be in the conversation … If it were 1400 young people barbarically slaughtered anywhere else in the world, if it were any other ethnic cohort, these same junior cowards, and the universities they attend, would be condemning the act and the actors”
I couldn’t say it better, particularly her allusion to “historical illiteracy, lack of humanity and ideological zealotry”. Many people out there in the world of university politics, social media, and reflex virtue signalling, have, for a variety of reasons a limited, even cursory knowledge of the roots and fruits of intractable conflicts that originated decades, centuries, millennia ago. As the late Israeli Amos Oz explained in his excellent book, How to Cure a Fanatic, Arabs and Jews typically understand each other far better than westerners understand either of them. Cost-free wisdom from western liberals is so often pathetically ill-informed and bathing in self-righteousness.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine did not originate in 2022 or 2014 or even 1991 when Ukraine departed the defunct Soviet Union. The wars of the Yugoslav secession did not begin when Serbia attacked the newly independent states of Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo from 1991. The seeds of the Syrian civil war were sown well before 2011. So too with the story of Israel and Palestine, one of the world’s most intractable conflicts, did not begin on October 7th.
A war of words
Understanding is not enhanced when a conflict morphs into a battle of words as well as weapons, the words invariably loaded with emotional and ideological weight. Enter the old adage “one person’s terrorist in another’s freedom fighter. The Hamas calls itself almuqawamah, resistance – it’s the “m” in its acronymic name – see below) as also does Hezbollah, which means literally Party of God (though the deity him/herself has no say in the matter). Türkiye’s opportunistic president calls Hamas fighters mujahidin, holy warriors, a name that recalls Afghanistan resistance to Russia’s invasion in the eighties. Whilst some refer to a terrorist attack, many pro-Palestinian groups have called it an intifada, as have memes and posters put up by “progressives” recalling the two earlier risings against the occupation, implying that it was the work of freedom fighters resisting colonialism. Some have even called for a “global intifada”, though against what and whom is unclear.
Then there’s the sad semantics around other descriptors, each loaded with partisanship and emotion. Self-defense. Proportionate or disproportionate response. Collective punishment. Moral equivalence. Human shields. Hostages. Refugees. Collateral damage. Just war. War crimes. Genocide. Justice, Revenge. Warriors. Executioners. Shahidiin (or martyrs). Thugs. Pick a side, pick your vocabulary to suit. It makes you wish for the now depleted ammo of syntax like “shock and awe” and “war on terror” – though we’re getting plenty of both right now as “we sit back and watch while the death count gets higher”.
Only two things are certain: antisemitism is the devil that has never gone away, and everything is broken.
As Leonard Cohen sang, “There is no decent place to stand in a massacre”.
Meanwhile, in the corridors of power
On 24th October, Antonio Gutierrez, the perennially exasperated and disappointed secretary general of the United Nations, told the Security Council that “it is important to also recognize the attacks by Hamas did not happen in a vacuum. The Palestinian people have been subjected to 56 years of suffocating occupation. They have seen their land steadily devoured by settlements and plagued by violence; their economy stifled; their people displaced, and their homes demolished.
Truth be told, it has indeed been the past that has brought us to this. Lost in the miasma of violence is the fact that Israel has occupied the West Bank for 56 years and, along with Egypt, maintained a cordon sanitaire around the Gaza Strip. Prominent features of life for Palestinians in these areas are violence, dispossession, and dehumanization. Under these circumstances, there are few Palestinians who regard resistance as illegitimate. The ‘Hamas attack was a reaction to many things, including settler attacks on and evictions of Palestinians in the West Bank; attacks on Muslim and Christian holy sites by Israeli extremists; and Israel’s normalization with Arab countries, that is seen as an attempt by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to “liquidate” Palestinian rights and the Palestinian cause.
“But” as Guterres then stressed, “the grievances of the Palestinian people cannot justify the appalling attacks by Hamas. And those appalling attacks cannot justify the collective punishment of the Palestinian people”. Their hopes for a political solution to their plight have been vanishing”.
Israel’s delegate was predictably enraged. But Guterres’ statement at least condemned the Hamas – unlike a UN General Assembly resolution a few days later which condemned Israel for its collective punishment of defenseless Gazans whilst completely ignoring the direct causus bellum. Making no reference to the barbarous attack by the Hamas was an absurdist denial of reality, as if Israel had decided to bomb Gaza on a whim, unprovoked.
Like Guterres, politicians across the western world endeavour to straddle the barbed wire fence, calling almost out of habit for the elusive “two state solution” as a panacea for the Palestinians’ plight. But in reality, there can be no two-state solution when an immovable and irredentist Hamas remains as a powerful if beleaguered “third state”. As Australian prime minister Anthony Albanese stated, “we have picked a side against Hamas. And we did that very clearly and unequivocally because the actions of Hamas are against the interests of both the Israeli population, clearly, but also against the interests of Palestinians”.
Calls for a ceasefire by world leaders and humanitarian organization’s go unheeded in the stark reality that a ceasefire would effectively give the Hamas the justification to declare victory whist permitting the mortal threat it poses to Israel to continue. Israel knows that if its response to the terrorists is unconvincing, the attacks on it on all sides will redouble. The sharp rise in global antisemitism reminds Jewish people that they may never be truly safe anywhere., and this intensifies, rather than weakens, the desire for a defendable homeland.
The Hamas and together with the ineffectual, corrupt and discredited Palestinian Authority which ostensibly governs the West Bank, and Hezbollah, the Lebanese paramilitary force on Israel’s northern border, most Arab states, Iran, and their western and southern sympathizers blame the situation on the historical behaviour and present policies of Israel and the US, implying that really, Israel had it coming.
There is much discussion in the mainstream media about what comes next if the Hamas is destroyed or effectively neutered and Gaza is “liberated” from its thrall. Should the IDF reinstate the occupation it ended two decades ago? Should Israel hand the enclave over to the Palestinian Authority, to use a decidedly un-Muslim analogy, organize a piss up in a brewery? Or should the UN, or at a stretch, the Arab League, a club of autocrats and tyrants, assume military and political administration until it can be reincorporated into a reformed and workable Palestine?
And even then, should any of these scenarios work out, would Israel be in the mood to make nice? The Hamas pogrom has not helped Palestinians in besieged Gaza, nor will it help those in the occupied West Bank who have been subjected to IDF incursions and vigilante violence by angry settlers. Nor will it encourage Israel to moderate its draconian policies and end the occupation.
Little mention has been made, both before and after outbreak of war of what may have been going on in the PA’s domain. The old, ineffectual and rejected Mahmoud Abbas, “emir” of Palestine, in the eighteenth year of his four-year term, is ill and probably dying, so there is a power struggle already underway in what are in fact three Palestines, Gaza, the West Bank, and the Diaspora (principally Syria, Lebanon and Jordan) over the succession. Meanwhile, Iran and its proxy, Hezbollah are stirring the pot, whilst even the Yemeni Houthis, who you’d think were busy with their own nasty civil war, the third strand, with Hezbollah and the Hamas of Iran’s “Axis of Resistance”, are lobbying missiles Israel’s way up the Red Sea.
The whole thing is a bloody mess (literally and figuratively) and the implications for Israel, Palestine and others unpredictable. The violence reminded me of the Lebanese civil war, and particularly, of Maronite Christian militia’s massacre of Palestinians in Sabra and Chatila (ironically, with Israeli connivance) in 1982. I am reminded also of Chaim Nachman Bialik’s poem, Al haShehita (On the Slaughter), about the Kishinev Pogrom in present day Moldova in the spring of 1903:
And cursèd be he that saith: avenge this! Such vengeance for blood of babe and maiden Hath yet to be wrought by Satan.
Whosoever sows the wind reaps the whirlwind.
Rafah, Gaza
From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free
It is much more than a snappy chant. The Hamas’ stated goal is the “liberation” of what is presently Israel and the expulsion annihilation of its people, and it pays little heed for the suffering of the people of Gaza – Hamas leader Moussa Abu Marzouk, for example, in a recent interview on Russia Today’s Arabic channel, told an interviewer that his movement had not built bomb shelters in Gaza for its population because it was the job of the UN and the “occupation” – that is, Israel – to look after the civilians of the Strip.
In an interview on October 24, 2 on Lebanon’s LBC TV. Ghazi Hamad of the Hamas political bureau declared that the Hamas, was prepared to repeat the October 7 “Al-Aqsa Flood” Operation time and again until Israel is annihilated. He added that Palestinians are willing to pay the price and that they are “proud to sacrifice martyrs.” He said that Palestinians are the victims of the occupation, therefore no one should blame them for the events of October 7 or anything else, adding: “Everything we do is justified.”
Some extracts:
“We must teach Israel a lesson, and we will do this again and again. The Al-Aqsa Flood is just the first time, and there will be a second, a third, a fourth, because we have the determination, the resolve, and the capabilities to fight. Will we have to pay a price? Yes, and we are ready to pay it. We are called a nation of martyrs, and we are proud to sacrifice martyrs”.
“We did not want to harm civilians, but there were complications on the ground, and there was a party in the area, with [civilian] population … It was a large area, across 40 kilometres”.
“The existence of Israel is illogical. The existence of Israel is what causes all that pain, blood, and tears. It is Israel, not us. We are the victims of the occupation. Period. Therefore, nobody should blame us for the things we do. On October 7, October 10, October the millionth – everything we do is justified”.
Hamad: “The occupation must come to an end … I am talking about all the Palestinian lands”
News anchor: “Does that mean the annihilation of Israel?”
Hamad: “Yes, of course”.
If the Arabs put down their weapons today, there would be no more violence. If the Jews put down their weapons today, there would be no more Israel.
Golda Meir, Israeli prime minister, 1973
Note: al Hamas is the Arabic word for ‘zeal’ and also, an acronym for Ḥarakah al-Muqāwamah al-ʾIslāmiyyah, the “Islamic Resistance Movement”; Hezbollah means ‘Party of God’.
Why are Americans tearing down posters of children held hostage by Hamas?
Linda Dayan wrote in Haaretz on 26th October:
Those removing flyers may not be ready to look into the eyes of ‘the other side’ and acknowledge that they are people. But the consequences of this lack of introspection go far beyond posters
If you’re a Jew on Instagram, you’ve probably seen a particular genre of video going around: a shaky phone camera follows a person, either in a big city or on a college campus, as they tear down posters bearing the names and faces of Israeli civilians kidnapped by Hamas.
Sometimes they’re smiling, sometimes they’re defiant, sometimes they hide their faces from the person filming them. In one, the person says “kalba” (the Arabic word for bitch) while tearing down a flyer. In another, a man holding a wad of posters says he is doing so because “Jews in Israel – I mean, the Israeli government – are bombing Gaza.” When the cameraman asks, in a thick Israeli accent, why Hamas killed babies and even pets, he responds: “I can’t explain what people filled with rage do.”
Channel 12’s Yuna Leibzon tweeted photos from New York of posters that had been defaced – instead of “kidnapped,” they now read “occupier.” (If the person who did this is not Algonquian, I have unfortunate news for them about their own status.)
It is clear that the posters rouse discomfort in these people, and not in the “this could have been me” way that many Jews view them. Some, like the aforementioned man, look into the faces of abducted children and see the airstrikes that followed. Others have mentally transformed them into human embodiments of the occupation. A few accounts state that the people tearing down the posters do not believe that Hamas took hostages at all.
The people kidnapped by Hamas, much like the October 7 atrocities, represent a kink in a very clear narrative thread. The people holding tight to this thread might not be ready to face the realization that not all acts are justified so long as they bear the banner of “resistance.” They might not be ready to hold the idea that it’s okay to say out loud that the occupation is wrong, but so is holding an infant hostage. They might not be ready to look into the eyes of “the other side,” and acknowledge that they are people.
But the consequences of this lack of introspection go far beyond posters and posing. After a silent vigil in which they held photos of the kidnapping victims, Jewish students at the Cooper Union had to barricade themselves into the library as anti-Israel protesters stormed the building. The Anti-Defamation League reported 193 antisemitic incidents since October 7 – a 21 percent spike in the United States. A University of California, Davis, professor posted online against “all these Zionist journalists who spread propaganda and misinformation,” and noted that their children are vulnerable.
It is good, correct and just to stand up for Palestinians, to make the plight of Gazan civilians known, to mourn for the innocent lives lost. None of that demands erasing the reality of Hamas’ campaign of kidnapping and murder. And none of that demands harassing, threatening and attacking Jewish institutions and individuals, wherever they may be.
Of course, this may not be about Palestinians at all: Alawi and Shi’ite students in America did not have to barricade themselves in after Bashar Assad’s airstrikes on the Yarmouk Palestinian refugee camp. And in that case, perhaps these people can leave the Palestinians out of such campaigns, and be open about the narratives and ideologies that drive them to erase the faces of our children.
A defaced poster depicting a woman held captive by Hamas is seen as people attend a pro-Palestinian rally as part of a walkout by New York University students
Authors Note
Whenever In That Howling Infinite posts commentaries such as this, people ask why I rarely forward my own opinion on the issues I am presenting or discussing. On the contrary, I would argue that my views are fairly transparent in in the subjects I chose to engage with, the words I use, and the vein in which I use them.
The following is an updated version of a postscript I wrote six years ago after I’d last visited Israel. It does not mention in detail the events since then, including the Israel’s rapprochement with its autocratic neighbours, the political paralysis that has afflicted Israeli politics for several years, and the war now being wages in the besieged enclave of Gaza. The rest still holds true.
With respect to my numerous posts about Israel and Palestine, and the Middle East in general, I come to my conclusions from a political science and sociology perspective – that’s where my academic experience came from – and a background in conflict resolution, supported by study and travel. If I do on occasions display any particular bias, it originates in my longtime interest, understanding and affection for the history, politics, and culture of the region, of its geography and archeology, and of its people of all faiths and nationalities.
I believe that the systematic dispossession of almost a million Palestinians and the destruction of half of their towns and villages in 1948 is Israel’s original sin. It is the primal stain that colours and corrupts all that followed. And yet, if not for the actions, often daring, often brave, often questionable, and often deplorable, of the politicians and soldiers of 1948 – and of the generations that followed – Israel would not exist today. This paradox is addressed sympathetically by Avi Shalit In My Promised Land, referred to above, and scathingly by ‘new history’ scholar Ilan Pappe in TheEthnic Cleansing of Palestine.
The Occupation, fifty-six years old this year, which grew out of the unexpectedly total victory of June 1967, has taken on strategic, ideological and indeed messianic dimensions by many in the Israeli government and political elite. It compounded the original sin, deepened the primal stain, released the demons of messianic fervour, and wounded Israel’s soul. The settlements locked the nation into the colonialist project. With the close call of the Yom Kippur War, the violence and murder of the first and second Intifadat, and present Palestinian jacquerie, Israel’s heart has not just hardened, it has become sclerotic.
I admit that I have always been sympathetic towards Israel – from my first visit in 1972. I’ve travelled its length and breadth and also visited the major Palestinian cities of the West Bank. But mine is not a blinkered viewpoint. I am deeply critical of Israeli politics and policies and have no respect for many of its leaders. Yet there are hundreds of thousands of Israelis who oppose the present government and long for justice and peace. And if – a very big “if” – Arab Israelis and the Israeli left could work together, they could obtain a majority in the Knesset and change Israel’s politics.
Meanwhile, Binyamin Netanyahu and his nationalist coalition allies call all the shots, the Israelis continue to control and exploit the land, its people, and its resources, whilst varying degrees of annexation are on the cards. The settlements are an abomination, as are the policies and practices of the state and its occupying army. There’s no escaping these facts.
But I am likewise critical of Palestinian governance, politics and politicians. The Hamas and the PA are on the nose in their respective fiefdoms, and if a moderate “third force” were to arise – and survive, because sure as hell, they would risk being murdered – Palestinians who just want a quiet, normal life, adequate services, and opportunities for their children, and Israelis who want likewise, might – just might – reject their extremist, dogmatic, entrenched leaders and reach some form of modus vivendi.
Palestinians themselves have to take control of their own lives, kick out their corrupt leaders, cease inculcating their children with hatred and jihadism, and use all that international good will and dollars to build a viable economy that can provide jobs, opportunities, and security, economic and physical to the people. Only this way will they be inoculated against cronyism, corruption and extremism. And yet, the dead hand of a moribund, patriarchal, conservative and ethnocentric culture holds them back – but that is the subject of another, future discussion for In That Howling Infinite.
Today, the ‘powers that be’, defenders and beneficiaries of a status quo that looks more like a cul de sac, predominate over a dispiriting array of competing, clamouring factions, left, right, nationalist, secular, tribal, Haredi, and Islamist alike. New, young, brace, local voices in both Israel and Palestine, are not heard.
So what happens next?
I get that question too. And I am perennially reluctant to venture an answer beyond one that runs like “on the one hand…but then on the other”. I inevitably fall back on Robert Fisk’s response to the same question with regard to the calamitous freezing over of the Arab Spring and the fall and rise again of the same old autocrats and tyrants: “my crystal ball is broken”. It’s a cop out, really, but just as cogent as that famous line in that UK spy drama Spooks: “What’s going to happen to me?” “Bad things!”
One thing is for sure: as songwriter Warren Zevon sang, “the hurt gets worse, and the heart get harder”.
October 8th, 2017, and 6th November 2023
The new anti-Semitism looks a lot like the old hatred
The current wave of anti-Jewish hostility did not originate with the Gaza war, and its horrors. It has been building for decades.
Anti-Israel signs are held at a Palestine rally in Melbourne’s CBD. Picture: NCA NewsWire / David Crosling
Since the Hamas mass terrorist attack on October 7 and Israel’s military response, we have witnessed an explosion of anti-Jewish hatred. It is frequently mixed in with legitimate expressions of support for Palestinian civilians suffering the terrible violence of a protracted conflict. The Netanyahu government’s conduct of the war is certainly a reasonable target for trenchant criticism, including by Israel’s own citizens.
The combination of these themes makes the public response to the Gaza war complex and difficult to process. For most Jews it is nothing short of a continuing nightmare.
Deep anti-Semitism has been on vivid display in certain parts of the movement leading the anti-Israel protests. This has been explicit in celebrations of Hamas and its terrorist massacre of Israeli civilians as a heroic act of resistance, together with calls for such attacks to be repeated. This has been paired with simultaneous insistence, in some quarters, that no atrocities were committed. The dual response is reminiscent of a certain type of Holocaust denial. On one hand the mass violence that the Nazis committed against European Jewry is justified as a response to the odious behaviour of the Jews, and the threat that they posed to their host societies. On the other the historical reality of the Nazi genocide is questioned, or it is denied entirely.
Shalom Lappin.
The New Antisemitism by Shalom Lappin
Some anti-Israel demonstrations have skidded into violent assaults on local Jewish communities, and harassment of Jewish students on campuses around the world. Boycotts, exclusions, and “political” acceptability tests in the academic, publishing and entertainment worlds are now common phenomena. They recall darker periods of Jewish history. No other diaspora ethnic group associated with a country run by a widely censured regime is subject to this sort of marginalisation.
When racists target Muslims, or other immigrant groups after terrorist attacks, or the misdeeds of a foreign government, broad segments of public opinion, particularly on the liberal left, defend the victims of prejudice, precisely as they should. By contrast, attacks on Jews are explained away as possibly misguided expressions of fully comprehensible outrage at Israel’s egregious behaviour.
The current wave of anti-Jewish hostility did not originate with the Gaza war, and its horrors. It has been building for decades, as indicated by the steady annual increase in anti-Semitic incidents across the globe, at least since 2000. This has now become a flood. It is the result of deeper economic and political forces that have undermined the social contract that once defined the post-war era. A sharp rise in economic inequality within countries across the world is a major factor driving the unravelling of the post-war era. The unconstrained globalisation of financial markets and trade has been largely responsible for the skewed within-country (as opposed to between-country) distribution of wealth. It is creating a cleavage of populations into a comparatively small group of wealthy beneficiaries of economic growth, and increasingly large groups of people who endure a declining standard of living and jarring social dislocation. This disaffection has provided the basis for a variety of extremist anti-globalisation movements that exploit identity politics as the focus of their reaction to the chaos and instability that is attending the collapse of the post-war order.
A pro-Palestine activist in New York. Picture: AFP
These movements thrive on the sense of powerlessness among electorates. This is feeding a breakdown of mainstream political institutions, which are increasingly perceived as unable to respond effectively to the pressing problems that people are contending with in their daily lives. Polarisation between far-right and far-left anti-globalisation movements has now become a defining feature in the political life of many countries, with traditional centrist parties fading into irrelevance in a variety of places. The alliance of much of the far left with radical Islamist movements (also a form of anti-globalist, identity-focused reaction) has accentuated this clash. The nature of the alliance has come sharply into view in the course of the ongoing anti-Israel protests over the past 10 months.
The far-right threat has emerged in recent European elections, in Trump’s current presidential campaign, and in the current riots sweeping the UK. It is also apparent in the authoritarian regimes that control Russia, Hungary and Turkey, as well as in Modi’s Hindu nationalist government.
Anti-Semitism is a central feature of the anti-globalisation movements of the far right, the far left and radical Islamism. This is due to the fact that it is deeply entrenched within both Western and Middle Eastern cultures. It encodes myths of power and conspiracy that provide simple, satisfying answers to complex problems in times of severe crisis. It turns on the notion that the Jews are an illicit collectivity whose continued existence as a group obstructs the realisation of the respective (and mutually incompatible) utopian programs to which each of these movements is dedicated.
Anti-Semitism was marginalised in the West during the post-war period. It has now flooded back into mainstream discourse as a potent factor in mobilising support for totalising ideologies across the political spectrum. In its capacity to cross political boundaries from right to left, anti-Semitism is a unique form of racism. To identify it properly, it is necessary to understand its history throughout the millennia that it has plagued the societies where it has taken root. It is essential to recognise its very specific expression as a reaction to the current political and social crisis. It is also important to combat it in its current manifestation, rather than through the backward-looking ideologies of the past.
For the most part the gate keepers of liberal opinion and the custodians of public discourse have simply stepped aside while anti-Jewish campaigns, often packaged as “anti-Zionism”, have been raging in their institutions. They issue pious incantations of their commitment to banishing racism, gender discrimination, anti-Semitism and Islamophobia, while doing nothing to implement this commitment in the current crisis. They take strong action against assaults on other embattled ethnic minorities and gender groups, as ought to be the case. They assume the role of neutral moderators when such attacks are launched against Jews. They frequently sanitise these attacks as an exercise of the right to free speech, even when this speech crosses into active incitement to hatred and violence.
The current wave of anti-Jewish racism is not only a threat to Jews. It is a challenge to the survival of democracy and the viability of liberal values. Political leaders are singularly failing to address this threat, and the forces that have produced it. They are largely content to step back and allow the manifestations of anti-Semitism to multiply, as long as the appearance of public peace is maintained. In fact, this peace is increasingly frayed. The extremist movements that converge on the Jews as the source of their problems have much larger agendas. They seek to transform the social order in their own image, overturning the foundations of liberal democracy.
In treating anti-Semitism as a parochial development, threatening only Jews, current political and cultural leaders are allowing large swathes of public life to be taken over by movements that are determined to overturn democracy. Recent history is littered with precedents that warn of the dangers involved in ignoring the larger threat that anti-Semitism presages. By failing to address these movements, and the deeper causes of the crisis that generated them, political and cultural leaders in the West risk repeating past historical errors that have led to disastrous consequences. It is long past time to address this issue honestly and effectively. To start to do so requires that we acknowledge the extent of the problem, and that we describe it accurately. Most people who shape mainstream opinion in the West have yet to take this initial step.
Shalom Lappin’s The New Antisemitism (Polity Books, 1 September) investigates the upsurge of anti-Jewish racism now manifest across the world
It is generally acknowledged that we in Australia, as elsewhere on Earth, are facing an extinction crisis brought on by climate change and environmental destruction. We see in our own little part of the planet the crisis in microcosm, with accelerated clear fell logging operations in the state forests immediately adjacent to our towns and villages, and in close proximity to our rivers and flood plains with most of the timber extracted from these forests destined for chipping on the wharfs of Port Brisbane for shipping to Asia, or to feed the ostensibly “green” bio-mass power plant at Broadwater, near Byron Bay.
Such harvesting is highly aggressive. It is clear-fell by highly sophisticated and costly harvesters rather than selectively harvest by chains saws as in the past, followed by burning of what cannot be sold off in windrows or in power stations, and ground-spraying of the naked land with a cocktail of toxic chemicals. There is then plantation re-establishment with highly flammable eucalyptus monoculture. All this on moist forest escarpments and lowlands bordering large rivers, where, with heavy rains and frequent flooding, everything – soil, ash, and poison, flows downhill. Ongoing clear-felling in the state forest plantations closely rounding Bellingen and its peri-urban areas adds to the cumulative impact of similarly aggressive harvesting operations in other forests in the Coffs Harbour and Bellingen region in recent years.
Here in Bellingen Shire, people report refugee koalas, many sick, injured and starving, koalas on roadways, in backyards, and on bush properties like our own that border the logging areas. And it is not just our iconic koalas who are threatened by what is in all but name a highly mechanised and relatively unregulated extractive industry. For residents close to and adjacent to these areas, it is equivalent to living next to a open-cut coal mine.
Sitting on the edge of the wilderness An injured koala beside the clearfell
There are many other protected and endangered species living in the understory and old habitat trees in plantations that are “waiting for the chop”. These include koalas, quolls, sooty and powerful owls, great barred frogs, and fruit doves where forty years of native forest ingrowth and state plantation neglect have ensured the development of a biodiverse ecosystem. But the fragmentation of forest, logging in both state and private forests is destroying the connectivity of healthy koala populations, and koalas are increasingly forced forced to survive on the fringes of the state forests in private landholdings.
So, what can we who live on these borderlands do?
As habitats come increasingly under threat, and as reform and remediation take time, private landholders must do all they can for themselves and for the environment. One option available to them is a legally binding agreement between the landholder and the Biodiversity Conservation Trust under the NSW Biodiversity Conservation Act of 2016
Local Land Services NSW also offers partnerships concentrating specifically on the protection of koalas. It has successfully delivered a koala project, funded by the Australian Government, that focused on recovery actions that protect, enhance and restore Koala habitat on private land in four key Areas of Regional Koala Significance (ARKS) between Port Macquarie and Coffs Harbour. Below is a short video presented by LLS officer Asheley Goodwills about the project, focussing on Bellingen Shire.
LLS’ website notes:
“Koalas are uniquely Australian. They are one of our most loved and iconic animals and people come from all over the world to see them. Koalas, like all native animals, are culturally significant to the Indigenous People of the lands in which they live. Unfortunately, koala populations are more and more at risk of decline for a variety of reasons.
A growing human population, particularly in areas along Australia’s east coast, has led to large-scale clearing of better-quality koala habitats with many koala populations struggling within smaller, fragmented patches of poorer quality habitat. Other threats, such as drought, fire, climate change, disease, vehicle strike and dog attack are further impacting koala populations.
Creating ‘habitat refuges’ in areas remote from, and resilient to, such threats is extremely important for long-term koala persistence”.
What are Conservation Agreements?
They are designed and financed by NSW government’s department of environment and heritage, it is available to landholders who demonstrate that their property or part of has conservation value in flora or fauna or both and who wish to preserve its environmental integrity and biodiversity through an agreement creating a Wildlife Refuge or a Conservation Area.
What do they mean?
• The landholder establishes legal protection over a specific part of their property, effectively safeguarding it from logging and from development that might compromise its ecological integrity.
• Conservation agreements are entered on the property’s certificate of title.
• There are a range of options through the BCT or also private covenants that can be on title. Some conservation agreements are in perpetuity; others can be terminated by a future owner.
• In return for preserving part of the property, the landholder can obtain practical and financial help to preserve, protect and enhance its biodiversity.
What are the drawbacks to a conservation agreement?
• Landholders may be worried about an affectation on title and may therefore be reticent about entering into an agreement for perpetuity.
• Prospective buyers may also be reluctant to undertake the obligations under the agreement.
• But times are a’changin’ and increasingly, landholders and potential purchasers of properties in areas of ecological value are interested in conserving and enhancing our natural environment and are willing to do play their own part.
• Real estate agents, valuers and banks are becoming more and more accustomed to dealing with properties containing Wildlife Refuges and Conservation Areas.
What are the landholder’s obligations?
• To maintain the property and keep it in good order.
• To take practical steps to improve its conservation values and prevent harm to its biodiversity.
• To carrying out work where necessary to protect flora and fauna and soil and drainage, and to control invasive weeds and feral animals.
• To permit inspections by BCT to ensure compliance, review work, and undertake surveys and research.
What are the benefits to the landholder?
• The individual landholder can make an important contribution to the long-term conservation of biodiversity in NSW.
• An important incentive of the Conservation Partners Programme is that owners can apply for a conservation partner’s grant. Grants available for Conservation Areas are larger than those available for Wildlife Refuges. They are utilized to maintain and enhance the ecological integrity and biodiversity of the land.
• They can be applied to a range of activities, e.g. revegetation, weed and feral animal control, and infrastructural repairs and maintenance, including access trails, drainage and fencing.
• BCT provides advice and guidance throughout the process, including how to complete the application, recommending contractors, and assessing their quotations.
What is the agreement process?
• The landholder contacts BCT and submits an “expression of interest” in making an agreement. BCT arranges a site visit to explain the process and undertake a preliminary inspection.
• The landholder decides whether the agreement is for a Wildlife Refuge or a Conservation Area.
•An application is submitted providing property details, the area/areas proposed to be conserved, and the landholder’s assessment of the ecological values.
• BCT engages a professional ecologist to provide an expert opinion, make an assessment, draft supporting maps, and recommend whether an agreement should proceed after which BCT decides to make the agreement and commences its preparation.
• The landholder provides supplementary information and schedules, including maps showing what areas are included and which are excluded, e.g. buildings and infrastructure.
• You can also reach out to North Coast Local Land Services about natural resource management and funding opportunities. Call 1300 795 299 or emailadmin.northcoast@lls.nsw.gov.au”
What are we doing in our Conservation Area?
• We are in year one of a three-year grant cycle with a grant of $15000 a year. and have engaged an experienced local regenerator recommended by BCT.
• The team is engaged in extensive vine and weed control (particularly lantana which may attract invasive bell myna).
• We are very pleased with its work, particularly as it provided good feedback on species present and has identified rare flora that we had not expected to find.
• BCT has been fabulous throughout the process, providing advice and encouragement.
We have encountered two koalas on our property over the last two years, including a breeding female with a joey, and we’ve had the good fortune to have been assisted by Canines for Wildlife.
Here is a lovely film of the detection dogs in action made by our friend Sarah George. They also feature in the LLS film featured above.
Scat hunting on our conservation area
Scats of a female koala and it’s joey found by Canines for Wildlife in our conservation area
Our latest koala high up in a tallowood
Author’s note
We live in heart of the Tarkeeth Forest, some ten kilometers from the seaside town of Urunga on the mid north coast of New South Wales.
The forest rises on Fernmount Range from the Bellinger River to the north and Kalang River to the south forming a watershed and providing a vital connecting forested corridor for koalas between the habitats of the hinterland and coastal lowlands. Above and between the two rivers, the forest is an important rain-harvesting, filtration, and stabilization ecosystem vital to the wetlands and rivers. The lower estuary is formed where the two rivers converge, creating a large and dynamic system which flows into the Pacific Ocean at Urunga.
It is an important habitat for bird, reptilian, mammalian and marsupial wildlife, including koalas, quolls. wallabies, echidnas, goannas, owls, fruit doves, and cockatoos.
The east-west Fernmount Range Trail is an ancient highway from the plains to Urunga, known to the Gumbaynggirr nation as a “place of plenty”. The forest contains areas of significant indigenous culture, recalling song lines and stories of the Dreamtime, places of ceremony, of birth and burial, and of atrocity.
This land was rainforest once. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, much of it was cleared manually and laboriously for dairy farming, and in the late sixties, most of the landowners sold their farms to Australian Pulp Mills. APM cleared the farmland and established the flooded gum plantation that is now Tarkeeth State Forest to supply a paper mill that was to be built just south of Coffs Harbour. This never happened – the project’s planners had inexplicably overlooked the lack of a massive water supply. Eventually, the plantations were sold to the government-owned Forestry Commission of New South Wales – now Forestry Corporation NSW. The plantation has now been harvested – clear felled, actually, burned, sprayed, and replanted with a highly flammable eucalyptus monoculture. – a matter of considerable concern to us forest neighbours and to many in the Shire.
There’s a whisper in our souls – the world has suffered long. Beneath these skies have rolled two thousand years of wrong.
Bless This Day, Paul Hemphill
(after Edward Sears’ carol It Came Upon A Midnight Clear)
There’s a memorable scene towards the end of Martin Scorsese’s masterful adaptation of Nikos Kazantzakis’ historical novel The Last Temptation of Christ (he also wrote Zorba the Greek) in which the peregrinating proselytizer Saint Paul meets a raised and reluctant Jesus who has sought domestic anonymity in contented cohabitation with reformed hooker Mary Magdalene – or so we are led to believe, for there is more than meets the eye in this iconoclastic film (the soundtrack alone, Passion, by Peter Gabriel, is more than worth the price of admission). “I am so glad that I’ve met you”, says the pompously dismissive Paul, “and now, I can forget you”.
I thought of this scene often whilst reading British historian Tom Holland’s revelatory and wide-ranging Dominion (2019), recounting the origins and the transformative and disruptive influence of the world’s biggest faith. Saint Paul, a central character in the drama, has a lot to answer for – though the Persians, Greeks, Romans, Jews and Muslims are significant supporting actors.
Tom Holland is an erudite British historian, specializing in classical and early medieval history. I’ve read many of his books. His Roman trilogy, Rubicon, Dynasty and his recent Pax read like thrillers, as does In the Shadow of the Sword which chronicles the rise of Islam. He’s also written on Greek and Persian classical history. Together with fellow historian Dominic Sandbrook,, he writes and broadcasts The Rest is History, an excellent podcast [Sandbrook is an informative and entertaining authority on postwar British history and society, and his quad of books on the fifties to the early eighties are wide-ranging and highly entertaining and informative – particularly so as I actually grew from boy to man in these dynamic decades.
In an earlier book, Dynasty, the saga of the Augustan caesars, Holland wrote: “The age was a rotten one: diseased, debased and degraded”. But to us, two thousand years on, it seems like it was always thus. He doesn’t shy away from criticism. All over Europe and the New World, Holland writes, “in church after church, we encounter the same fascinating admixture of the salacious, the sexual, the sadistic, and the sacred”.
We of the western world are heirs to a civilization that has for two millennia endeavoured to get back to the garden – in a continual cycle of striving for perfection and falling into to evil ways.
Holland argues that all “western” moral and social norms are the product of what he defines as the Christian revolution, a revolution that continues to shape the modern world. Even if churches across the West continue to empty, Christian values continue to define who we are and the battles we choose to fight. In a recent interview in The Australian occasioned by the imminent arrival DownUnder of The Rest is History podcast’s roadshow, Holland refers to instincts and muscle memories that derive from 2000 years of Christianity.
Though Christianity’s spiritual roots go deeper than year one of the Christian era, it had to actually begin as it did – with believers. As American author EC Morgan wrote in her magnificent Deep South epic The Sport of Kings,“Our stories about life and death are meaningless if they aren’t shared. Community is what religious faith is all about. Believers are persistent. They refuse to forget. Without believers, the sacrifice of Jesus Christ would have been forgotten, a lost relic of history, just the story of a wandering radical with a vision for a new kingdom. It was only the witness of a community through storytelling that transformed Jesus’ tragic death into God’s ultimate sacrifice. In their rebelling, he was no longer a political dissident put to death by the state, but a hero”.
Holland is not a nostalgic Christian who reads history. At the time of Dominion’s publication, he confessed to being an atheist. Like atheists, including myself, he sways to the rhythm of a spiritual drum. He is, rather, a historian observing the influence of Christianity without making moral judgments. He says large swathes of Western modernity are having arguments within a Christian framework, often without realising it.
Even those who reject religion – those who hold to atheism, humanism, scientism, secularism, egalitarianism, feminism, and many other ‘isms, find their beliefs ineradicably shaped by Christian preconceptions, prejudices, and, indeed, superstitions. Holland writes that Christianity continues to infuse people’s morals and presumptions “so utterly that many failed even to detect their presence. Like dust particles so fine as to be invisible to the naked eye, they were breathed in equally by everyone: believers, atheists and those who never paused so much as to think about religion … perhaps the most compelling point is the way Christianity defines even its opponents. Even as the woke generation condemns Christian history as oppressive, patriarchal, racist and all the other now-standard derelictions, the standards of justice and equality by which they judge these shortcomings remain ineradicably Christian. In that sense, Holland concludes, Christendom will remain with us a while yet”.
Our conservatism, our fear of change, our contempt for “the other”, our atavistic hopes and fears, our yearning for renewal and revolution, and in the contemporary argot, our political correctness and value signaling, even – our love for our neighbour and our intolerance of his and her resistance and reticence, doubt and difference, our hostility and our hubris, our ethnocentrism and our ecumenism, all spring from the same source: that lowly stable in a satellite suburb of Jerusalem, in the Roman colony of Judea two millennia ago. O Little Town of Bethlehem, how still we see thee lie…
In his interview with The Australian, Holland said that at the centre of social movements of the ’60s and onwards, from civil and gay rights to the more recent Black Lives Matters and #MeToo is “Christ’s great promise that the last should be first”.
“The 1960s will come to be seen as a decade as significant for Christendom as the 1520s. We are living through a process of moral and ethical and, indeed, theological change comparable to the Reformation in the 16th century. And the idea of reformation, the idea of casting off superstition, idols, opening yourself to the spirit. You get that in the 1520s, and you get that in the 1960s. The difference in the 1960s is that what is being cast off is essentially what you might call a conservative Christian understanding of how society should function, going to church, experiencing liturgies, Sunday schools, familiarity with the Bible.”
There is, he continues, “a kind of Christ-shaped hole in our public culture. And George Floyd kind of filled that gap for that summer of 2020 … Two thousand years of Christian sexual morality had resulted in men and women widely taking this for granted. Had it not, then #MeToo would have had no force”.
Again, Holland makes no judgment about this. He is simply observing that Christianity explains “wokeism”, whatever that portmanteau word might mean to the mind of the beholder. Not to mention our polarized and argumentative modernity.
Whatever Holland’s own spiritual beliefs – in Dominion he is quite discreet – there is a curious dualism, disconnect even, in the manner in which Dominion has been presented to its prospective readership. On the one hand, it is offered as an essentially humanistic tract linking the rise and rise of Christianity with humankind’s eternal striving for perfection of a sort. When I bought the book, it this aspect that drew me to it after reading the reviews I republish below. And yet, as illustrated by its two distinctively different covers, it has also been deliberately targeting a Christian market. here they are, the opaquely secular and the transparently sacred.
But, back to Dominion.
The reviews below provide an excellent overview of the scale and achievement of Holland’s project. I see no reason to compete with them. but I must add that I was mightily impressed by the literal cast of thousands he assembled to tell his story. There are many surprising and entertaining but always pertinent segues, from Adam to Zarathustra (of Nietzsche fame), with cameo appearances from a long-dead famous white men, iconic persons of colour like Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu, some most impressive women, and contemporaries as diverse as Harvey Weinstein, Margaret Atwood and Angela Merkel. There is a cornucopia of texts from Job’s tears to John Lennon’s Imagine, a connecting of movements and zeitgeists from crusaders to slavery abolitionists to #MeToo, from the protestant reformation to revolutions political and social, and a globetrotting, time-shifting odyssey from Megiddo to Mordor, the Crucifixion to California Dreaming.
Surprisingly, the Bard of Avon doesn’t earn a guernsey. You won’t find him in the glossary. It was after all he who held up a mirror to our humanity, and who is in his turn held most highly in the canon of our Anglosphere. Is it because there was no room at the inn? Because that rundown inn in that little town of Bethlehem, is the alpha and omega, the hopes and fears all our years, and they abide with us still.
And by us, I also include myself. My father was an Orangeman from Ulster, and my mother, a Catholic from County Wexford. I was born in Birmingham, England, baptized as a Catholic, and raised as a Catholic. I was educated in the British cultural milieu, with Roman Catholic teaching and thinking, but received prodigious input from a British upbringing and an education in an English grammar school grounded in the Church of England and replete with the history of invasions, civil wars, reformation, revolution and empire.
All these laid the bedrock of my spiritual and cultural identity. Much of this was inherited from “priest-ridden Ireland” and its centuries of resistance to the Sassenach (Saxon, that is) overlord, from whence I acquired most of my DNA and to which I ascribe to myself (a subjective thing and not for others to judge) a Celtic soul and a rebel heart.
“Once a Catholic, always a Catholic” they used to say to me when I’d declare that I’d given up practicing when I was good enough. That was not long after my confirmation by the Archbishop of Birmingham in St Chad’s Cathedral. There was no great epiphany. No revelation from the sea of unknowing. I remained in a Catholic scout troop and participated in church parades and attended mass of a Sunday to pleased my mother. I just kind of slip slided away, and then came the sixties with its Marx and music, and all the rest: the sights, sounds, sensibilities and substances of that generous decade …
But, as my songs and stories and politics attest, like Holland, I’ve not ventured all that far from the mother ship.
As a parting disclaimer, I am named not for Saint Paul but for the acclaimed American socialist and singer Paul Robeson.
Lord of the starfields Ancient of Days Universe Maker Here’s a song in your praise
Bruce Cockburn
We are stardust
Billion year old carbon
We are golden
Caught in the devil’s bargain
And we’ve got to get ourselves
Back to the garden
Joni Mitchell, Woodstock
Featured picture: Dale Farm – The Battle of Basildon 2011
By 2025, Tom Holland has openly returned to the Christian fold, as have many prominent intellectuals, including historian Niall Ferguson, or converted like and his wife, activist and author Ayaan Hirsi Ali who was formerly a Muslim. The reasons why such thinkers seek the transcendent in their later years is beyond the remit of this review, though Holland admits to having been wrong about Christianity, that his spiritual quest led him to Dominion. now come to see Christianity as the story of power willingly spent on behalf of the vulnerable; strength deployed to protect the weak, power that is used to take the vulnerable off of crosses, rather than put them there. https://theopolisinstitute.com/tom-holland-and-the-liberating-power-of-christianity/
As for myself, I still hear the thrum of that spiritual drum, but even though I head for that inevitable final exit and the “great unknown”, I do not hear the call of the numinous. I was unexpectedly presented with an opportunity to contemplate this recently when old friend of my own age shared with me the story of how he’d taken the hallucinatory drug mescaline for the first time in a bucolic Welsh setting in 1972:
“I had an experience of enlightenment, of self-discovery, that transformed my understanding of the world. I realised that all is one, and that this One is what ‘I’ am – an unborn, undying, eternal, formless Reality – that is all that exists and all that has ever existed – and that this world of form that we perceive is nothing other than this formless Reality. This experience led me down the path of spiritual search from that moment on. Scriptural writings like the Upanishads which had previously seemed obscure and impenetrable suddenly became dazzlingly clear to me as I realised that their writers were describing the experience I had just had myself. I found numerous teachers who were describing the same experience and showing a path to discover it. I felt a particular affinity for the teaching of the South Indian guru Ramana Maharshi, but also found my experience reflected in the teachings of the Sufis and the Zen masters”.
Though I too had taken mescaline and acid in the late sixties, I did not travel down such paths. “For whatever reasons”, I wrote him back, “nature, nurture or narcotics, I’ve never experienced anything like what you describe, nor, for good or ill, have I sought it. Transcendence is something I read about but have never encountered, although I might’ve got a hint of it momentarily in the Taj Mahal when I was high on speed (to keep me awake on overnight train Indian journeys). Maybe that might explain my perspective on history, politics, society and culture, and life, even. Matter of fact. Hard-boiled. Blunt. Brutal even. Quizzical, yes. Cynical, certainly. Your favourite song of the seventies is probably John Lennon’s Imagine. Mine is more like David Bowie’s Life on Mars”.
Barney Zwartz, Sydney Morning Herald November 15, 2019
Caravaggio’s The Crowning with Thorns.
This huge and sweeping account of the past 2500 years has a similarly large-scale ambition: “to explore how we in the West came to be what we are and to think the way that we do.” And his argument is compelling: even those who reject religion – those who hold to atheism, humanism, scientism, secularism – find their beliefs ineradicably shaped by Christian presuppositions.
Holland writes that Christianity continues to infuse people’s morals and presumptions “so utterly that many failed even to detect their presence. Like dust particles so fine as to be invisible to the naked eye, they were breathed in equally by everyone: believers, atheists and those who never paused so much as to think about religion.”
Holland manages to traverse Western history from the Persian invasion of Greece in 480BC to Donald Trump by the technique of taking some often-obscure figure or event and expanding from that to social transformation. So he leaps from the Apostle Paul, herald of a new beginning, to church fathers Irenaeus and the development of the canon, Origen and the invention of theology, the council of Nicaea, Martin of Tours and the exaltation of poverty, and Bede and a calendar based on the birth of Christ.
Perhaps Holland’s most important contribution is to lay waste the secularist founding myth that reason, empiricism, evidence, humanism and the like emerged in the Enlightenment fully formed like Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus, not only owing nothing to the preceding centuries but indeed in contrast to them.
Holland, an atheist, is no apologist for Christianity but is honest enough to acknowledge that his values and world view emerged from Christianity rather than pagan antiquity.
Take human rights, a key concept in modern law and ethics. Rights are by no means self-evident or inalienable, as the US Declaration of Independence states, and would have attracted contempt in pre-Christian societies such as ancient Rome or China.
Rights’ essential precondition is the Genesis teaching of humans made in God’s image, and therefore endowed with dignity and worth. It led Gregory of Nyssa in the fourth century to rail against slavery and abandoning unwanted infants on rubbish heaps and was made explicit by 11th-century canon lawyer Gratian, who pronounced that everyone was equal in the sight of God. Anything in the legal system obstructing this idea had to go.
“Much flowed from this formulation that earlier ages would have struggled to comprehend. Age-old presumptions were being decisively overturned: that custom was the ultimate authority; that the great were owed a different justice from the humble; that inequality was something natural, to be taken for granted,” Holland writes. In 1550 Bartolome de las Casas demanded justice for South American Indians, using the term “derechos humanos”, human rights. The genius of the authors of the US Constitution 200 years later was to garb in the robes of the Enlightenment the radical Protestantism that shaped the fledgling nation.
Darwin, in contrast, pointed out how unnatural such a concept is in the light of evolution, observing that “philanthropy and care for the poor must be highly injurious to the race of man”.
And today the insistence of the United Nations and others on the antiquity and broad acceptance of human rights is a fiction to allow it to be a global rather than merely a Western understanding. Secularism, in an identical manner, depended on the care with which it covered its tracks, Holland says.
The idea of the secular, contrasted with the religious, is an important theme of the great fourth-century theologian Augustine, in The City of God, and reaches fulfilment in the humiliation of Henry IV before Pope Gregory in 1076, which divided the religious and secular realms (giving the Church great power in both).
So embedded is it that nearly a millennium later German chancellor Angela Merkel appealed to it in 2014 to claim that Islam belongs as much as Christianity in modern Germany. So it may, but not because traditional Islam admits the idea of the secular, a notion born purely from Christian history. To Islam, it is an artificial divide. But, as Holland notes, the West has become skilled in repackaging Christian concepts for non-Christian audiences.
The idea that science needed to set itself free of dogma and superstition, possible only in the Enlightenment, is another fiction that can be believed only by those ignorant of history. Holland turns to Abelard – the ill-fated lover of Heloise – who devoted his post-castration life to promoting the idea that God’s order was rational and governed by rules that humans could seek to comprehend. His conviction that identifying the laws that governed nature would honour the God who made them led to the founding of universities in the 12th century.
Similarly, humanism has smuggled in Christian assumptions unacknowledged. Without the biblical story of creation in God’s image, the reverence of humanists for their own species “risks seeming mawkish and shallow”. Indeed, philosophers such as Peter Singer have attacked such notions as “speciesism”.
And the claim in the Humanist Manifesto that morals can be developed from science is another fantasy. “The primary dogma of humanism – that morality is an intrinsic part of human nature based on understanding and a concern for others – found no more corroboration in science than did the dogma of the Nazis that anyone not fit for life should be exterminated,” Holland writes. “The wellspring of humanist values lay not in reason, not in evidence-based thinking, but in history.”
An interesting thesis is that those who most truly understood Christianity’s radical role were those who most despised it, and here Holland cites Nietzsche, the Marquis de Sade, Thomas Huxley and Heinrich Himmler. Nietzsche thought Christianity a slave morality, a way for the weak to bind the strong, but also recognized its values could not survive without the God who sanctioned them. Himmler, who had a 50-year plan to eradicate Christianity, believed the strong had both a duty and obligation to eliminate the weak.
Holland acknowledges that the course of Christianity has been a mixed blessing. Christians have indeed been oppressors and exploiters, although the backlash against that has also been Christian. He details many embarrassing aspects, from crusades to corruption, and especially the totalitarian idea of truth that justifies persecuting those who differ. The heresy hunters of the inquisition survive today in the self-righteous “woke” fanatics, who no longer have the power to burn people at the stake but try to end careers, ruin reputations and close down discussions.
This is an astounding book, not only for its scope – cultural, political, social, intellectual, historical – and its originality, but for its masterly writing. Holland has a knack for the colourful twist. Writing of the summer of love, 1967, he notes: “Preachers, seen through the marijuana haze of a squat in San Francisco, had the look of bigots. Where was the love in short-haired men jabbing their fingers and going puce?”
He also has an eye for fascinating detail. For example, we owe capital letters and question marks to the abbot Alcuin of Tours, adviser to Charlemagne in the eighth century, who did a vast amount to popularize the Bible as a single source of revelation.
But sometimes Holland is a bit too graphic to be comfortable. His detailed discussion of death by crucifixion is stomach-churning; still more so the Persian punishment of the scaphe, in which the victim is trapped inside a log but for his extremities, covered in honey, and devoured over days by insects and maggots from within. Believe me, Holland’s account is horrifically more detailed.
In an enterprise as vast as Dominion, there are inevitably lacunae. Critics have observed that Holland underplays the role of Eastern Orthodox Christianity and the rise of trade, but the book is already nearly 600 pages. Another occasional weakness is that Holland’s narrative style means that he may pass over contested aspects of history to stick with his main line, though footnotes can redeem him.
For me, perhaps the most compelling point is the way Christianity defines even its opponents. Even as the woke generation condemns Christian history as oppressive, patriarchal, racist and all the other now-standard derelictions, the standards of justice and equality by which they judge these shortcomings remain ineradicably Christian. In that sense, Holland concludes, Christendom will remain with us a while yet.
Barney Zwartz is a Senior Fellow of the Centre for Public Christianity.
The legacy of Christianity
An absorbing survey of Christianity’s subversive origins and enduring influence is filled with vivid portraits, gruesome deaths and moral debates
Holland might also have pointed out that the ancient Romans reserved crucifixion mostly for political rebels. Jesus may not have been a Lenin, but it might have suited the Jewish leaders to persuade Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor, that he was. He would certainly have knocked around with Zealots, the anticolonial revolutionaries of the day. A few of his disciples were probably paid-up members of the group, as (probably) were the two so-called thieves between whom he hung on the cross. Pilate wouldn’t have needed much convincing to reach for the hammer and nails. Contrary to the gospels’ portrait of him as a kind of Guardian-reading liberal, reluctant to use his power and bemusedly in search of truth, the historical Pilate was a moral monster who would have crucified his own grandmother, and who was finally dismissed from the imperial service for corruption.
Despite these omissions, Dominion packs an astonishing amount of stuff into its 500 pages on Christianity’s enduring influence. Holland has all the talents of an accomplished novelist: a gift for narrative, a lively sense of drama and a fine ear for the rhythm of a sentence. He also has an intense, sometimes rather grisly feel for the physical: the book is resonant with the cracking of bones, flaying of flesh and shrieks of small children tossed into fires. Some of this was inflicted on Christians, and some of it inflicted by them.
Rather than unpack complex theological debates, the book gives us a series of vivid portraits of some key figures in Christian history: St Paul, St Augustine, Peter Abelard, Catherine of Siena, a former playboy known as Francis of Assisi and a host of more modern luminaries. Yet this is not just a galaxy of Christian superstars. They are all embedded in their historical contexts, as the book moves from Caesar Augustus to the #MeToo movement. There is even a medieval forerunner of feminism in the figure of the Milanese noblewoman Guglielma, who announced that she was the Holy Spirit made flesh for the redemption of women, and with engaging modesty baptised them in the name of the Father, the Son and herself.
Other intriguing details abound. When Notre Dame was being built in medieval Paris, a collective of prostitutes offered to pay for one of its windows and dedicate it to the Virgin Mary. Followers of Satan around the same time were obliged to suck on the tongue of a giant toad and lick the anus of a black cat. Galileo had a craving for celebrity and was an inveterate social climber. Yet, though the book is full of such titbits, there is a seriousness at its heart. Holland argues that all “western” moral and social norms are the product of the Christian revolution. He is haunted by St Paul’s claim that God chose the weak and foolish things of the world to shame the strong, and to drive the point home he might have looked at the beginning of Luke’s gospel. We encounter there an obscure young Jewish woman called Mary who is pregnant with Jesus, and Luke puts into her mouth a cry of praise that some scholars believe is a Zealot chant. It speaks of how you will know who God is when you see the poor coming to power and the rich sent empty away. It is this which must be weighed in the balance against the killing fields of Christendom.
Louis IX en route to Egypt, leading the Seventh Crusade. Photograph: Alamy
So, too, must the notion of love. This book is full of saints and martyrs selflessly devoted to others. Yet what distinguishes the Judeo-Christian idea of love from the romantic, erotic, touchy-feely sense it has acquired in modern times is that it has nothing to do with feeling. Love for the New Testament is a social practice, not a sentiment. How you feel about the person whose place you take in the queue for the gas chambers is neither here nor there. You don’t even have to know him. Only a love of this ruthlessly impersonal kind, which couldn’t care less about the gender, rank, skin colour or personality of whoever needs your help, could prove equal to what St John darkly calls the powers of this world: Trump, Putin, Bolsonaro and their lackeys.
These men are nationalist bigots, which suggests another sense in which Christianity can be subversive. Holland remarks that the early Christians’ refusal to identify themselves with a homeland was a cause of scandal. They were branded as rootless vagrants who delighted in being alien, and thus made a boast out of what should have been a source of shame. Christianity started life as an eastern, not western phenomenon, but rapidly left its birthplace behind. What held it together was faith, not territory. One was no longer to grovel before the idols of state, tribe, nation and household. And as for household, almost every reference to the family in the New Testament is deeply hostile. Kinship and blood ties no longer matter, and Jesus’s treatment of his mother is by no means always that of a good Jewish boy.
You can, however, make a fetish or idol out of anything, as Freud instructs us. Such false gods fill every chapter of this illuminating study. Yet Holland is surely right to argue that when we condemn the moral obscenities committed in the name of Christ, it is hard to do so without implicitly invoking his own teaching.
Terry Eagleton is a literary critic, writer and chair in English literature in Lancaster University’s department of English and creative writing. His latest book is The Event of Literature
… the past is always trickling under the soil, a slow leak you can’t trace. Often meaning is only revealed retrospectively. Hilary Mantel, The Mirror and the Light
You think that you can forget the past; you can’t. The past is a living thing, you own it, owe it.”Montrose’s letter to Atticus, Lovecraft Country
The past is never dead. It is not even past. William Faulkner
Remembering …comes in flashbacks and echoes. Taylor Swift’s Red
The past beats inside me like a second heart. John Banville, The Sea
We watch history, we make history, and then one day, we become it. Kendall Roy, Succession
I have little affection for News Corp commentator Janet Albrechtsen – a right wing culture warrior who cloaks her predictable positions with a patina of legal erudition (she does have a legal background, but a barrister friend who once worked with her described her as less clever than she thought she was). But I recently discovered that she and I actually have one thing in common. We are both big fans of The Rest is History, an excellent podcast created and broadcast by British historians Dominic Sandbrook and Tom Holland. And so, for the first, and probably the last time, I not only enjoyed one of her opinions pieces, but I am actually republishing it here in In That Howling Infinite.
Tom Holland specializes in classical and early medieval history, and Dominic Sandbrook is an informative and entertaining chronicler of postwar British history and society. I’ve read many of their books. Holland’s Roman trilogy, Rubicon, Dynasty and his recent Pax read like thrillers, and he’s also written on Persian and Islamic history. Sandbrook’s quad of books on Britain are wide-ranging and highly entertaining, covering the social and political history from the fifties though to the the early eighties.
The Rest is History is both highly entertaining and illuminating with this unlikely but erudite dynamic duo presentng wide-ranging and well-researched stories from history’s back pages served up with bad accents and impersonations and humorous irreverence regarding assorted shibboleths and sacred cows. They have fun with history and at each other’s expense – though more often it is Dom taking the piss out of Tom.
Since the first episode on Greatness aired in October 2020 during Britain’s draconian Covid lockdown, there have now been almost four hundred more – about important events and personalities, cities and countries, political and cultural movements, and wars and revolutions metaphorical and actual. There’s counterfactuals, predictions and projections, culture wars and conspiracy theories. Some multi-episode podcasts are particularly enthralling. The story of Irish independence is one. The rise of British Fascism is another. The two part British Fashion in the Sixties is a hoot. Stand-alone episodes on JRR Tolkien, Rider Haggard and JK Rowling are likewise entertaining whilst others, like the sad story of Lady Jane Grey, “the Nine Day Queen”, are tragic. The Rest is History is a gift that keeps on giving.
Whilst Tom and Dom are certainly small “c” conservatives, I’m glad that they do not go all out partisan for the “anti-woke” brigade – there are lots of jibes at readers of The Guardian. They do, however, have no time for history and culture wars nor identity politics. We have to take our history, the good and the bad, as it comes. Many of the things we learnt at school or in our national narratives have retrospectively proven false or distorted.
When telling their tales, be they long, tall or small, they demonstrate that not all history has to be important so long as it is interesting. It’s the stories that enthrall children when they are first taught history – that is how I became passionate about it and remain so.
In the early sixties, we were introduced to the romantic, exciting, and often sugar-coated basics, and only later on did we learn that the Boer War and the Indian Mutiny for example were not that noble and glorious at all but nasty scraps with atrocities committed on all sides. Recall that corny old chestnut 1066 And All That, which I read as a lad and still dip into now and then for its perspective on what we were taught back in the day as “good kings” and “good things”. “Bad kings” were more often than not the stuff of Shakespeare, whilst there were remarkably few “bad things”, and if there were, it’s wasn’t us wot did it. As a nipper, I came across the ‘He Went With …’ books of American author Louse Andrews Kent in which a young lad (always a chap) accompanied famous explorers on their journeying. Columbus, Magellan and Vasco de Gama got a gig, as did landlubbers Champlain and Marco Polo. Ladybird Books introduced starry-eyed youngsters to those intrepid Brits Captains Cook and Scott, Drake and Raleigh. Back then, of course, we were not to know what came next: the European mission civilatrice.
In time, like St Paul, “I put off childish things”, but believe still that history can and should be fun as well as serious, and not just the bailiwick of crusty academics, history snobs and culture warriors. There’s a Canadian writer who tells stories from world history called “Sweary History” or The Day Shit Went Down – I’m sure you get the drift.
I don’t regard myself as a “historian” but rather as a longtime and eternal student, and have been thus since. I’ve degrees in history and politics. I’ve been studying history since first form, back in 1960. I’ve been filling in the gaps ever since, learning new things every day from books, journals, television, and media both mainstream and social. Today, I read history books more than any other books and always have a few on the go. I’ll never made history, not will I make it in the time I have left on this fascinating planet, but I write about history and endeavour to increase other’s interest in and awareness of history and its importance to us all. Just like The Rest is History, indeed.
Albrechtsen’s piece coincides with the pair’s imminent visit to Australia and New Zealand to “perform” The Rest is History live. Doubtlessly, they will give us their narrative on Australian history. I look forward to hearing what they have to say about our British inheritance, the colonial legacy, and our very own history wars. Sandbrook tells her:
“Seeing history as a mirror for our own concerns patronizes the past because it turns the past into a plaything for our own prejudices and predilections. People do get bored of these things. History, including our own of British colonialism, is more complicated, more capacious, more interesting than a black-and-white morality tale. The story of the British Empire, of Australia, they’re really complicated stories involving generations of very different people who had different motives.”
Says Holland: “Captain Cook – a goodie, or a baddie? I’m opposed to that view of history because I don’t think it’s history. It could be philosophy, it could be theology … it could be all kinds of disciplines,” but he says it is not the role of historians to make moral judgments about the past. “We’re The Rest is History, we are not The Rest is Morality”.
Sandbrook is asked what on earth he could say that would get them cancelled in Australia. “Maybe the big mistake was for the British to give any degree of self-government to Australia at all.” He’s joking.
How often do you think about the Roman Empire? It turns out lots of men do, and often. Or at least many say they do.
Last month, this random question began circulating on social media, with women doing the asking. The similarity of the responses made headlines around the world in the same week I was speaking with British historian Tom Holland. Surely Holland would think a lot about the ancient world?
I try out the question over pizza and wine with a group of four men on a sunny spring day on the Mornington Peninsula. One asks if Rome is code for sex. No, fellas, I mean Rome as in Augustus, bloodshed, the Colosseum, concrete, the Julian calendar and all that stuff.
All four men say, one way or another, that they think about ancient Rome most days. Seriously? The closest I come to musing regularly about ancient history is Brad Pitt circa AD2004 as Achilles. Yes, he’s a Greek, not real. Whatever.
Holland and fellow Brit Dominic Sandbrook have become superstars of history. Their podcast, The Rest is History, attracted a cult following after the first episode, released in London during the Covid lockdown in 2020. Its popularity has soared, along with the profiles of its hosts. Today the show attracts more than 10 million downloads a month, half by people under 35.
It’s not hard to see why. The two popular historians bring something different and remarkable to the telling of history. Holland, who hails from Broad Chalke near Salisbury in southern England, taught himself Greek to write a new translation of Herodotus’s The Histories. Sandbrook, from the West Midlands, is a modern historian and author of numerous books on Britain from the 1960s to the ’80s, including Who Dares Wins and a host of history books for children.
Holland immerses us in ancient stories – all magnificently foreign, rousing and grisly. As he explores the lives of Nero and eunuchs, Theodora, the Empress of Byzantium, Thermopylae and Salamis and everything else about ancient Rome or Greece, it’s thrilling.
His latest book, Pax, the third in a series, covers Roman power under emperors such as Vespasian, Titus, Domitian and Hadrian. On the last page, Holland records a scrawl of graffiti on a rock face in the wilds beyond Palestine: “The Romans always win.”
To be honest, his excitement about the subject is so palpable I wasn’t game enough to ask how often he thinks about ancient Rome. It really would have been the equivalent of asking a man how often he thinks about sex.
When I catch up with his colleague Sandbrook a week later, he teases that “the imbalance in how often Tom thinks about those two things is very, very unhealthy”.
Such is the elation in Sandbrook’s voice during his podcasts on Watergate, could it be that he thinks about Richard Nixon as often as Holland thinks about Rome? Sandbrook taught a twice-weekly year-long course on Nixon at Sheffield University. That’s a lot of Nixon. He tells me that by the end of the course many of his students empathised with the awkward, flawed man who struggled with the fact he could never be as cool as the Kennedys. But who is?
The absence of politics in their telling of history is a tonic in this exhaustingly moralising era. Those who want to corral history to suit their politics by expunging bits or rewriting parts will get a fright: neither man will have a bar of this modern obsession to overlay the past with modern filters of sex, gender, race and so on.
During Pride Week in Britain, the pair released a podcast on the intriguing story of Hadrian and his lover Antinous. Holland points out that though the alluring Antinous has become a modern-day gay icon, calling the young Greek gay doesn’t capture the time; it’s like saying Julius Caesar conquered France. The correct word is Gaul.
Similarly, in writing Pax, Holland is trying to see that world through Roman eyes. “I deliberately say in my introduction that I’m not going to judge the Romans by our standards,” he tells Inquirer from his home in London.
Though we might regard some of the actions of the Romans as unspeakable crimes, let’s try to understand why they didn’t see them as crimes, he says. This is the study of history.
Sandbrook predicts a younger generation will kick out the po-faced cultural curators of the aching wokeness that has imbued history. Or it will burn itself out.
“Seeing history as a mirror for our own concerns … patronises the past because it turns the past into a plaything for our own prejudices and predilections,” Sandbrook says. “People do get bored of these things.” History, including our own of British colonialism, is more complicated, more capacious, more interesting than a black-and-white morality tale.
“The story of the British Empire, of Australia, they’re really complicated stories involving generations of very different people who had different motives.”
Holland agrees. “Captain Cook – a goodie, or a baddie? I’m opposed to that view of history because I don’t think it’s history. It could be philosophy, it could be theology … it could be all kinds of disciplines,” but he says it is not the role of historians to make moral judgments about the past. “We’re The Rest is History, we are not The Rest is Morality,” he says.
If society is applying modern filters of sex, gender and race to the past, that tells us something about our own time; it says nothing about that period in history.
“One of the things that has happened since the ’60s with the collapse of the traditional biblical narratives that sustained our cultural and intellectual discourses is that people need new stories. History has come to serve people as a quarry for moral stories, it’s come to replace religious studies,” Holland says.
Speaking from his home in Chipping Norton in West Oxfordshire, Sandbrook says the worst kind of history is “the history that makes you feel smug about yourself … It smacks of smug narcissism about our own virtue.”
History should give us a sense of our own “cosmic insignificance” and an understanding that what we believe is contingent on our circumstances. “You read about all these people who lived before, who had lives of such tremendous richness and colour, and they’re all gone. And one day that will be us.
“Just as people before us believed lots of things that we now think are demented, the things that we value so highly may seem unreasonable to our successors. What history should give us is a sense of humility.”
In a similar vein, Holland says history has left him with a “nagging sense of nihilism, a sense that perhaps there is no absolute morality”.
“People across the world and throughout time have believed an incredible array of things about how you should behave, what it is to be good, what sexuality morality should be, how you should treat your fellow human beings, all kinds of things, what gender relations should be. There is no absolute right way of structuring your society. If I’d grown up as a Spartan or an Assyrian, would I believe in human rights? I would not.”
That brings us to Dominion, Holland’s 2019 book about how the Christian revolution continues to shape the modern world. Even if churches across the West continue to empty, Christian values continue to define who we are and the battles we choose to fight.
Holland tells Inquirer that at the centre of social movements of the ’60s, from civil and gay rights to the more recent Black Lives Matters, is “Christ’s great promise that the last should be first”.
“The 1960s will come to be seen as a decade as significant for Christendom as the 1520s. We are living through a process of moral and ethical and, indeed, theological change comparable to the Reformation in the 16th century. And the idea of reformation, the idea of casting off superstition, idols, opening yourself to the spirit. You get that in the 1520s, and you get that in the 1960s.
“The difference in the 1960s is that what is being cast off is essentially what you might call a conservative Christian understanding of how society should function, going to church, experiencing liturgies, Sunday schools, familiarity with the Bible.”
What remains, says Holland, are instincts and muscle memories that derive from 2000 years of Christianity. Why, he asks, did the killing of an innocent man – George Floyd – by the security apparatus of an imperial power have the impact that it did across the world? It seems odd, he says, until you remember that the foundational figure of Christ was an innocent man put to death by the security apparatus of an earlier imperial power.
There is “a kind of Christ-shaped hole in our public culture. And George Floyd kind of filled that gap for that summer of 2020.”
Holland is not a nostalgic Christian who reads history. He is a historian observing the influence of Christianity without making moral judgments. He says large swaths of Western modernity are having arguments within a Christian framework, often without realising it. Should sodomy be condemned, or monogamy be encouraged with same-sex marriage? These are Christian values, and people, by the democratic process in many countries, have settled on the latter.
Holland says the #MeToo movement is an extension of the Christian value that “the human body is not an object, not a commodity to be used by the rich and powerful as and when they pleased”.
“Two thousand years of Christian sexual morality had resulted in men and women widely taking this for granted. Had it not, then #MeToo would have had no force,” Holland writes in Dominion. He says the same “last shall be first” kind of “hyper-Protestantism push” also has infused the trans movement. With no formal church framework to arbitrate arguments, it has become “a free-for-all” where everyone is understandably trying to do it for themselves.
He adds that often these debates – not just about trans issues – become vitriolic because there is a modern revulsion against the doctrine of original sin – a tremendously democratising idea.
Once you reject that even the greatest saint is a sinner then some people will see themselves as perfect. They will be more prone to casting out those they see as not perfect. Without original sin, there is a peculiar virtue in being last, in being a victim, and there is less room for redemption as people set down their own unyielding boundaries about who is good and who is bad.
Again, Holland makes no judgment about this; he is simply observing that Christianity explains wokeism. Not to mention our polarised modernity.
Sandbrook, the modern historian, is concerned that the “hysterical polarisation of American politics” is turning the US into a dysfunctional society as the tectonic plates of power are shifting towards a dominant Asia. It is, he says, a return to the older pattern of geopolitical rivalries involving China, India, Turkey, Iran. “These would have seemed very familiar to people 2000 years ago.” And this is happening when the centre ground of politics is disappearing in the US.
‘He says once you treat your domestic political enemies as a genuine threat to the republic, when you say they are not merely wrong, they are treacherous, and we must do everything we can to stop them, then “it’s really difficult to see how you turn back without some major crisis”.
The two historians will be in Australia in late November, performing their Rest is History live show soon after the referendum about changing our Constitution has been decided. That’s right. History sells tickets at the box office, too. So how will these historians answer questions about British colonialism?
“Tom is so jittery,” says Sandbrook. “He said to me, ‘Please don’t say anything that will get us cancelled in Australia. Also, don’t tell the journalist that I told you this.’ ”
That Sandbrook wants me to print this tells you that the dynamic between these two men is as vibrant as the content of their podcasts. They have fun with history and at each other’s expense. Though more often it is Sandbrook taking the piss out of Holland.
I ask Sandbrook what on earth he could say that would get them cancelled in Australia. “Maybe the big mistake was for the British to give any degree of self-government to Australia at all.” He’s joking.
On a more serious note, the pair will delve into Australian history late next month when they release two episodes on Captain James Cook.
Neither Holland nor Sandbrook knew in 2020 how successful their podcast would become. Sandbrook recounts that Holland wanted the “worst title ever” for their new venture: Podpast. “It was such a terrible title,” he says, laughing. They settled on The Rest is History. And, well, the rest is history.
Though it’s also possible that a lame title would not have stopped these men becoming rock stars of history
Bulldozers deployed near the Gaza border. Menahem Kahana/AFP
In That Howling Infinite 
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