The past beats inside me like a second heart
John Banville, The Sea
Why is this blog called In That Howling Infinite? It refers to Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, a magnificent study in mania and obsession:
“But as in landlessness alone resides highest truth, shoreless, indefinite as God – so better is it to perish in that howling infinite, than be ingloriously dashed upon the lee, even if that were safety!” Moby–Dick, Chapter 23
In a figurative sense, it speaks of the themes and schemes that are addressed in the thoughts, ideas, songs, poems and stories that feature in this blog. We are, as Bob Dylan sang, “condemned to drift or else be kept from drifting”. And we like to hope that, as the ancient Greek lyric poet Sappho said, “someone will remember us, I say, even in another time”
Here are the most recent articles in In That Howling Infinite.
Smyrna 1922 and the Ottoman endgame. The expulsion of the millennia long Greek presence in Anatolia was one of the last chapters in the extraordinarily violent disintegration of the Ottoman Empire.
Beside Strange Waters. The dark side of former Pink Floyd front man and currently, controversial political activist
Rasputin and the downfall of the Romanovs. To admirers he was a man of God; to his enemies, a charlatan, sexual predator, political manipulator and symbol of everything rotten within Russia’s last royal dynasty.
The featured picture at the head of this page is the interior of St George’s Greek Orthodox Church in Madaba, Jordan, home of the sixth century Madaba map, discussed in Maps, memory, and the myth of fingerprints
Sydney Sweeney has good jeans
Ten favourites:
A Short History of the Rise and Fall of the West. In one of the first essays published in In That Howling Infinite, we walked down what Welsh poet RS Thomas called ‘the long road of history”, beginning with the usual suspects: power and pride, greed, and aggrandisement, and as accessories after the fact, dolour, devastation, and death.
Blood and Brick … a world of walls. Hadrian’s Wall, the Theodosian Wall, the Berlin Wall, Northerm Ireland’s Peace Wall, Israel’s Separation Wall, George RR Martin’s Ice Wall, the wall you can see from space, and walls that most people have never heard of. If walls could talk, what take they woukd tell. While walls are destined to fall one day, people like them. They project a language of security – but they stem from a sense of insecurity, a fear of losing what you have.
One Land, Two Peoples: History, Memory, Continuity, and Inheritance. The history of Israel and Palestine does not yield to forensic neatness. This land holds layered attachment; Jewish longing and Palestinian dispossession; British imperial design and Arab nationalist pride; secular aspiration and religious revival; survival strategy and ideological fervour. None alone explains the whole. Together they form the sediment of a century.
The Twilight of the Equine Gods. An illuminating canter through the story of the “Centaurian Pact” between humans and horses. it is at once a ride and revelation. The horse, as German academic and cultural scientist Ulrich Raulff’s tells us, “has been man’s most important companion – forget cats and dogs – and the most durable of historical alliances – against which every other covenant into which we have entered has been fragile and ephemeral – not even our relationship with our gods has shown a comparable degree of stability”.
The Sport of Kings. CE Morgan’s “great American novel” is not a history book – nor is it an historical novel. But it is most certainly about history. And about identity. As Morgan puts it: “You would never escape the category of your birth”. It is also about memory and myth: “Repeated long enough, stories become memory and memory becomes fact”.
Blue remembered hills – a land of lost contentment. “Nostalgia”, literally the pain associated with the thought of home, or homesickness, is derived from the Greek “nostos” – a theme used in Ancient Greek literature most notably in the recently reimagined Odyssey, involving an epic hero returning home after a long time away. Nostalgia reveals the deep longing for a home that our younger selves took for granted, and bittersweet return to people and places that have changed forever. But it isn’t all it’s cracked out to be, and, indeed, can bring out the worst in us, becoming a millstone of bitterness and regret strung about the necks of discontented souls who drift off into a maze of memories, meanings and emotions.
A cowboy key – how the west was sung. My riding days are over, but I have been into westerns all my life, and the songs inspired by them – in films, musicals and popular song, from ghostly herds to outlaw chic, Frankie Laing to Leonard Cohen and Taylor Swift. And, as a onetime musician myself, I have, back in days gone by, penned songs in a cowboy key.
McGoohan’s Blues – sunbathing in the rain. How an eighteen minute digression from the concept if not the plot of an iconic if indecipherable ‘sixties’ television series made an indelible impression on an impressionable twenty year old who remains mightily impressed with this song by Britain’s high priest of angst.
The Boys of Wexford – memory and memoir. “Fast forwaranother century, and I was “on the Holy Ground once more” attending the wedding of an old pal held in an old pub in the heart of Ireland. Getting there, we’d done a whistle-stop tour of the south, including Inis Córthaid (my mother’s hometown), Wexford and Ross, the heartland of the ‘98 rebellion … I was best man at that wedding, and in a speech largely devoted to the groom and our mutual, lifelong appreciation of Bob Dylan, I was able to relate to guests young and old tales of my Irish childhood, taking us all “down the foggy ruins of time”, and sang extracts from songs I actually did learn at my mothers knee, the song-lines of my Celtic twilight.
About the creator of this blog
Paul Hemphill is a British-born Australian songwriter, poet, and blogger.
Once upon a time, he was an accountant by profession, a manager, mentor and mediator. A long-time resident of Sydney, he is now living in the middle of the forest on the mid north coast of New South Wales, Australia, where he spends much of his time in the great outdoors.
His interests include music, poetry, politics and history. He has had a lifelong passion for the history, politics and people of the Middle East. Over the years, through study and travel, he has acquired a working knowledge of standard and colloquial Arabic.
Listen to some of Paul’s songs on SoundCloud and YouTube. Search under Paul Hemphill or HuldreFolk (but ignore the Flemish death metal band of the same name). He has assembled seven volumes of poetry and verse, and these can be read on this blog.
History is rarely as tidy as the stories we tell about it. Places acquire names long before they acquire nations; peoples inherit memories they did not themselves create; languages, religions and identities change without ever quite erasing what came before. Palestine may be one of the world’s most conspicuous examples of this historical palimpsest, a place where ancient geography, successive civilisations and modern national identities have become so entangled that disentangling them can itself seem political.
That is partly why I have always valued William Dalrymple. He is a historian who understands that the past is inhabited by people, not merely populated by dates and events. His recent conversation about Palestine prompted me to revisit not only what he said, but what he left unsaid: the complicated process by which a population became a people, a geographical name acquired a modern national meaning, and history became memory – and memory, in turn, became identity.
It also led me back to a broader fascination of mine: the relationship between history, travel and place, and to writers who understand that landscapes are not backdrops to history but repositories of it.
The featured image at the head of this post? When last In Ramallah, de facto administrative “capital” of that part of the West Bank governed by the Palestinian Authority – Area A of the Oslo dispensation – we visited the cultural centre of Dar Zahran, a beautifully restored Ottoman house just south of the city. By fortunate serendipity, Dar Zahran was hosting a small exhibition of paintings by the late Palestinian artist Ismail Shammout. This large painting pictures the skyline of Jerusalem – Al Quds with its mosques and churches and the infinite variety of the Palestinian people, was front and centre. [In In That Howling Infinite, see Visualizing the Palestinian Return – the art of Ismail Shammout]
Talking about Palestine and Palestinians
There are some historians whose books I buy almost automatically. British historian William Dalrymple is one of them. I have read many of his works over the years, from his debut, In Xanadu, through From the Holy Mountain, The Last Mughal, Return of a King and The Anarchy (see, in In That Howling Infinite, Bad company – how Britain conquered India, the story of the rise and fall of the notoriously rapacious British East India Company).
Dalrymple is well-educated, well-read, and well-travelled, having had his boots on the ground and its dust on those boots. He is what we call a “popular” historian and not an academic in the narrow sense, writing with enthusiasm, empathy, and the authority of someone who has visited the places he describes. And, to borrow from Bob Dylan, he knows his song well before he starts singing. His aim, refreshingly, is to educate, not to inculcate.
What has always appealed to me is not simply the depth of his scholarship but his refusal to become anyone’s court historian. His admirers come from different directions, and his critics do too. The old Empire loyalists dislike him because he writes unflinchingly about the violence and arrogance of imperialism. Progressives often embrace him for precisely that reason, yet they, too, sometimes seem disappointed when he refuses to enlist in their causes. Dalrymple has always struck me as someone who hoes his own row. He follows the evidence where it leads rather than where his audience might wish it to go.
That quality was on full display in his recent interview with Palestinian journalist and British resident Ahmed Alnaouq on the chat show Palestine Deep Dive, discussing his forthcoming, and as yet unfinished, book on the Palestinians. I encourage reader to take the time to watch the video below before reading the detailed appraisal that follows; but the time poor may nevertheless find it of interest.
To anyone familiar with the history of the region, little of the story itself is unfamiliar. Nor, contrary to some popular assumptions, has this history been ignored by Israeli historians. Ilan Pappé’s A History of Modern Palestine remains one of the best examples of a history that restores Palestinians to the centre of their own story, particularly those who rarely appear in conventional political histories: the villagers who cultivated the land, often on estates owned by absentee urban families or tribal elites who harvested much of the wealth.
That, perhaps, is the real significance of Dalrymple’s project. It belongs not simply to Middle Eastern history but to the much broader revolution that historians call social history. For centuries history was largely the story of rulers, wars, dynasties and diplomacy. Ordinary people appeared only fleetingly. Their lives belonged, if anywhere, to anthropology or sociology. Only relatively recently have historians begun asking what history looked like from the fields rather than the palaces.
Yet there is another trap which Dalrymple carefully avoids.
It has become fashionable to speak of the inhabitants of Palestine as though they constituted an unchanged people stretching seamlessly from biblical times until today. That is no more convincing than similar claims made by almost any nation.
Palestine has always been one of the great crossroads of civilisation. Long before the Philistines and the Hebrews there were other peoples. Afterwards came Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Crusaders, Mamluks, Ottomans and countless others, accompanied not merely by armies but by settlers, merchants, pilgrims, labourers and refugees. Even in the late Ottoman and British Mandate periods, economic opportunity attracted migrants from throughout the Levant. The Suez Canal, the expansion of Haifa, the Hauran railway, and later British infrastructure projects all drew workers from neighbouring lands. Family names such as al-Misri, al-Shami, Homsi and Halabi quietly preserve those journeys.
And yet Dalrymple is equally correct when he points to the growing body of genetic evidence demonstrating profound continuities across the centuries. Human populations do not simply replace one another like changing tenants. They absorb, intermingle and endure. DNA reveals not racial purity but remarkable persistence.
One aspect of the interview that particularly caught my attention was Dalrymple’s discussion of religion – not as an immutable badge of identity but as another thread in the long weaving of Palestinian society. Conversion, he observed, was rarely a single dramatic event. More often it was gradual, pragmatic and deeply human. Families embraced Christianity under Byzantine rule, Islam under the Caliphates and the Ottomans, sometimes from conviction, sometimes because new rulers brought new opportunities, and often because children simply inherited the world into which they were born. Nor was the movement one way. Jews became Christians; Christians became Muslims; communities adapted over centuries rather than changing overnight.
Language followed much the same path. Arabic became not merely the language of religion but of administration, commerce, literature and everyday life. It gradually supplanted earlier tongues without erasing the peoples who spoke them. Identity, like language itself, accumulated layer upon layer.
His brief reference to Yossef Rapoport’s Becoming Arab particularly caught my attention because I suspect it offers an important clue to the intellectual architecture of the book he is writing Rapoport’s central thesis is that peoples are not born fully formed; they become. It exercised a profound influence on my own essay One Land, Two Peoples: History, Memory, Continuity, and Inheritance. See also, Becoming Arab … the myth of fingerprints
There is a quiet subversiveness in Becoming Arab because it quietly removes the ladder that every competing nationalism insists upon climbing. By demonstrating that Arab identity in medieval Palestine emerged through a long process of linguistic, cultural and social transformation rather than existing unchanged since antiquity, Rapoport undermines the comforting assumption that any modern national identity is primordial and immutable. The implication extends well beyond Palestinians. Jews, too, have continually reinvented themselves through exile, diaspora, return and statehood. Israelis and Palestinians alike remain peoples in the making.
Belonging, then, rests less upon ancient blood than upon lived continuity, accumulated memory and attachment to place. Rapoport gently redirects us away from the sterile question, “Who was here first?”, towards the infinitely richer question, “How do people come to belong?” It is an insight I have found equally illuminating when thinking about the British, the Americans, and even the tangled histories of Russians and Ukrainians. It also underpins what I have elsewhere called the “myth of fingerprints”: the mistaken belief that nations possess fixed and immutable identities when, in truth, every people is a palimpsest, written and rewritten over centuries without ever completely erasing what came before.
Dalrymple also highlighted the remarkable role of churches and monasteries across successive eras – Byzantine, Arab, Ottoman and British. They were far more than places of worship. They were centres of learning, repositories of manuscripts, guardians of memory and, eventually, pioneers of modern education. During the Mandate years, Christian schools became among the first institutions to embrace European models of education. It is therefore hardly surprising that Christian Arabs were disproportionately represented among the intellectual architects of both Arab nationalism and the emerging Palestinian national movement. This, too, complicates the modern tendency to reduce the story to a simple contest between Jews and Muslims. The reality, as always, is richer and more textured.
Dalrymple’s passing reference to George Antonius was equally telling. Antonius remains one of the most poignant figures of the Mandate years. Urbane, multilingual and deeply cultivated, he believed there remained a path towards accommodation between Arab and Jewish aspirations. Alongside moderates such as Musa Alami, he searched for political middle ground as extremism steadily crowded out compromise. Increasingly isolated, distrusted by radicals on both sides and ultimately ignored by the great powers, he watched the possibility of reconciliation slip away. He died in Jerusalem in 1942, disappointed and politically alone. There is something profoundly melancholy about his story. Men such as Antonius devoted their lives to preventing the catastrophe that would later be remembered as the Nakba. History tends to remember the militants, the revolutionaries and the generals; it is far less generous to the moderates who failed. Yet, with the benefit of hindsight, it is often those failed moderates who seem to have understood the coming tragedy most clearly. [See The first Intifada … Palestine 1936]
There is, however, a significant historical link missing from Dalrymple’s account.
To speak of Palestinians as a people with a distinctive heritage, history and culture is entirely legitimate, but it also raises the prior question of when and how that collective identity emerged. The people we now call Palestinians did not arrive in Palestine as a discrete nation from elsewhere; they emerged over centuries from the settled populations of the region, predominantly Arabic-speaking Muslims and Christians alongside smaller Jewish and other communities, whose identities under Ottoman rule were more likely to be local, familial, religious, Ottoman or broadly Arab than specifically Palestinian. A modern Palestinian national consciousness crystallised only in the late nineteenth and, more decisively, the first half of the twentieth century, amid the decline of the Ottoman Empire, the rise of Arab nationalism, British rule, Zionist immigration and the intensifying struggle over the land.
Nor should “Palestine” itself be confused with a Palestinian nation: the name is far older, deriving ultimately from Greek and Roman Palaestina and subsequently used in various forms by Roman, Byzantine, Islamic and European writers; under the Ottomans, the territory was not a sovereign province or nation-state called Palestine but was divided among administrative districts. None of this makes Palestinian identity artificial. Like most modern national identities, it is both modern and genuine, rooted in an older population and a deeply layered attachment to place.
Perhaps Dalrymple simply takes this history as read. More likely, it is unmentioned because the interviewer did not ask about it. He does write about it in a piece published in The Guardian in August 2025 (republished below). But his readers and particularly an audience hearing a relatively compressed interview – may not. When the process by which a people acquired a modern national identity is left unstated, audiences tend to fill the gap with their own assumptions: some hearing an ancient, continuous Palestinian nation, others an identity recently invented from nothing. Both are historical distortions. The point is not to diminish Palestinian peoplehood but to locate it accurately: between the much older history of the land and the modern political history that transformed its inhabitants into distinct national communities.
As with Israeli identity, Palestinian identity belongs to the modern age while drawing upon memories, attachments, communities and histories that are considerably older. That distinction is essential if the Palestinian story is to be understood rather than simply enlisted in one of the competing narratives of the conflict.
It was telling that, despite repeated invitations from his interviewer, Dalrymple steadfastly refused to enter the contemporary ideological battlefield. He would not be drawn into pronouncements about settler colonialism, the legitimacy of Israel or competing national claims. He remained a historian.
Dalrymple displayed the same intellectual discipline when discussion turned towards the future. His interviewer clearly hoped he would venture predictions. He declined. Historians, he observed, can tell us what happened; they are far less qualified to say what will happen. The future delights in making fools of prophets.
Anthony Eden supposedly reduced politics to three words: “Events, dear boy, events.” Orwell supplied the darker warning through the Ministry of Truth: “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” That remains one of the great cautions against allowing history to become merely another instrument of political mobilisation. Less bleakly, Robert Fisk – another writer I greatly admired – offered the wisest answer of all: “My crystal ball is broken.” Those who confidently predict the future almost invariably discover that history has other ideas. [See The Night of Power – Robert Fisk’s bitter epilogue ]
One curiosity remained with me after the interview. Dalrymple remarked upon young Israeli soldiers carrying rifles almost everywhere, yet the obvious question went unexplored: why? I have wondered about this myself ever since my first visit to Israel. I can still picture my late friend Avi’s rifle standing against the hallway wall in his parents’ home in Ramat Gan after he returned from reserve duty during the 1973 war. On my most recent visit I asked Israelis directly. Unless a weapon can be securely stored, soldiers are required to keep it with them. Our friend Shmuel’s son, serving as an army medic, once absent-mindedly left his rifle on a military bus after an exhausting exercise. His reward was several weeks in military prison. What appears to outsiders as a symbol of militarisation is, to many Israelis, simply one more expression of a society shaped by permanent insecurity.
Dalrymple also refers to the annual Jerusalem Day march, an event that commemorates the IDF’s capture of the Old City in June 1967 and the “unification” of the city. We happened to witness similar scenes ourselves near the Western Wall only days beforehand. They were ugly, confronting and impossible to dismiss as merely social media caricature.
I look forward to reading the finished book. Not because I expect it to settle the argument—history almost never does—but because the best historians enlarge rather than narrow our understanding. They remind us that identities are not fossils buried in the earth waiting to be excavated, but living things, fashioned over centuries by conquest and coexistence, faith and language, migration and memory. They leave us with fewer slogans and more questions; fewer certainties and greater humility. In an age increasingly addicted to binaries, that may be the most subversive act of all.
Travelers’ tales
There is a thread that runs through much of my writing, though I did not always recognise it at the time. It is a thread woven from history, travel, memory and place, and it connects figures as seemingly disparate as Jan Morris, Robert Fisk and William Dalrymple. They are very different writers, with different perspectives and different temperaments, but they share a quality that I have always valued: they do not simply describe places; they allow places to speak.
During my early encounters with the history and culture of the Middle East at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies – the “Madrasat al-Jawāsīs”, the “School of Spies”, as Arab friends would jokingly call it – I became fascinated by a trio of British writers whose books transported me into the worlds they described.described. Gertrude Bell, Freya Stark and Jan Morris each approached the region differently, yet all possessed that rare ability to convey not merely information but atmosphere: the smells of markets, the rhythms of streets, the weight of history embedded in landscapes.
Jan Morris was perhaps the greatest exponent of this art. Her genius was not merely as a chronicler of empire, nor simply as a travel writer, but as someone who understood that places possess personalities. She once wrote, “All my life I have felt in places, in landscapes as in cities, an allure that seems to me actually sexual, purer but no less exciting than the sexuality of the body.” It is a remarkable observation because it captures something that many travellers experience but few can articulate: that certain landscapes exert a pull beyond geography, that cities and countries can possess a kind of emotional and even sensual presence.
Bell, the archaeologist, traveller and administrator sometimes called the “Queen of the Desert”, was present at the creation of the modern Middle East after the First World War. Stark travelled through the region in the middle decades of the twentieth century, recording a world already beginning to disappear. James Morris, later Jan Morris, chronicled the rise and decline of British imperial confidence and the uncertain transition into a post-imperial age.
What makes Jan Morris such a fascinating figure is that her personal transformation occurred alongside the transformation of Britain itself. The end of Empire and the discovery of a new identity unfolded in parallel. The writer who chronicled the fading grandeur of British power was also undergoing a profound reimagining of self. Her Pax Britannica trilogy remains an extraordinary work, though it is also deeply complicated. Morris’s relationship with empire was neither a simple condemnation nor an uncomplicated celebration. She recognised its violence and arrogance, yet she was also fascinated by its energy, ambition and sense of adventure. Empire, in her telling, was a vast human drama: magnificent, destructive, creative and cruel.
The Suez Crisis of 1956 represented the moment when that imperial illusion finally collapsed. Morris described it as a kind of tombstone for British power and a crisis of British masculinity. The old confidence had disappeared. The imperial actor who had once imagined himself striding across the world stage was suddenly confronted with his own limitations. “Old forces were dying and new energies emerging,” she wrote. “Patterns that had seemed permanent were falling into chaos.” That insight resonates far beyond Britain. History repeatedly teaches us that identities and institutions which appear permanent are often temporary arrangements. Empires, nations and cultures are not fixed monuments but living things, constantly being reshaped by events.
This is why William Dalrymple’s work has always appealed to me. Like Morris, he understands that history is not simply about dates, battles and rulers. It is about people in places. His great strength is that he belongs to no faction. He follows the evidence, and he makes his own judgments. He resists the temptation to reduce history to contemporary political arguments. Instead, he explored the deeper processes by which societies and identities emerge.
As we have noted above, his observations intersect with Yossef Rapoport’s Becoming Arab, a work that has greatly influenced my own thinking. Rapoport challenges the assumption that national identities are ancient, fixed and immutable. Arab identity in Palestine, he argues, emerged through centuries of linguistic, cultural and social development. This does not diminish Palestinian identity; rather, it explains how all identities are formed.
The same applies elsewhere. Jewish identity has also evolved through exile, diaspora, return and statehood. British identity, American identity, Russian identity and Ukrainian identity are all products of history rather than timeless inheritances. Peoples are not fingerprints stamped permanently into existence. They are palimpsests, written and rewritten across generations, retaining traces of what came before while continually becoming something new.
This is also why Dalrymple’s observations about religion are significant. Faith, like language, is not simply inherited unchanged through the centuries. Communities converted, adapted and transformed. Jews became Christians, Christians became Muslims, and Arabic gradually became the dominant language of administration, commerce and culture. Churches and monasteries served not only as places of worship but as centres of learning and memory. During the British Mandate, as we have noted above, Christian schools were among the pioneers of modern education, and Christian Arabs played a disproportionately important role in the development of Arab nationalism and Palestinian political consciousness.
Again, the lesson is one of complexity. The history of Palestine cannot be reduced to simple categories. It is a story of migration and continuity, faith and adaptation, conflict and coexistence.
A personal coda
I make no comparison between my own experiences and those of writers such as Morris or Dalrymple, who devoted years of their lives to the places they studied. My own travels have been measured in days and weeks rather than prolonged residence, and I possess neither their linguistic gifts nor their local knowledge. Yet they have taught me some of the same lessons.
Over the years I have wandered through mosques and basilicas, monasteries and synagogues, castles and catacombs, museums and markets. I have traced the layers of history in weathered stones, walked streets that have changed little for centuries, and watched successive civilisations leave their marks upon the same landscape. Everywhere, the faces, languages and faiths have reminded me that history is one of mixture rather than purity, continuity rather than replacement. it is this extraordinary diversity that makes these lands so compelling.
Israel and Palestine affected me more deeply than almost anywhere else. I have read widely, but books can only take one so far. I have stood at checkpoints, seen the separation barrier close up and, witnessed the daily inconveniences, restrictions and humiliations that accompany life under occupation. Equally, I have spoken with Israelis and Palestinians whose lives have been shaped by generations of fear and insecurity, and come to understand, even if not always to agree with, the fears that underpin so many aspects of everyday life. By design, good fortune or simple caution, I have never witnessed the violence itself. But I have seen enough to understand that both peoples live with histories that cannot simply be dismissed.
Travel has not made me an idealist, nor has it turned me into a partisan. If anything, it has left me increasingly suspicious of certainties. The longer one spends amidst places where history is layered one civilisation upon another, the harder it becomes to accept simple stories about pure origins, immutable identities, uniquely righteous causes, and uncomplicated heroes and villains. Reality is almost always more complicated – and more human – than that.
Perhaps that is the enduring lesson of writers like Jan Morris, Robert Fisk and William Dalrymple. They remind us that landscapes have longer memories than nations, that stones often preserve truths that politics attempts to conceal, and that history is rarely a straight line. It is a conversation across centuries, written by countless hands.
In the forward to East – an Arab anthology, republished below, I wrote: “these are the lands of testament and prophecy, of sacrifice and sacrament, of seers and sages, of vision and vicissitude”. Their histories are “carved in stone, mysteries locked in stone”. And perhaps that is why they continue to draw us back: because beneath every empire, every ideology and every argument lie the enduring traces of ordinary human beings who lived, loved, fought, worshipped and dreamed in the same places we walk today.
Paul Hemphill and In That Howling Infinite, August 2026
In these troubled times, I look back on a part of the world that has captivated much of my intellectual life. I was drawn to the Middle East in another age, when it was the land of myth and magic, of dreamers and adventurers, of quixotic tilters at windmills, of pioneers who would make the deserts bloom, of dissemblers and deceivers bearing false promises. The ancient lands of the Bible, the fabled realm of A Thousand and One Nights, the restless quests of Richard Burton, Charles Doughty, and TE Lawrence; the pulp-fiction fantasies of Frank Herbert, James Michener, and Leon Uris; the celluloid myths of Peter O’Toole, Omar Sharif, and Paul Newman.
These are the lands of testament and prophecy, of sacrifice and sacrament, of seers and sages, of vision and vicissitude, of warriors and holy men. The spiritual and the temporal have melded here since time immemorial. We still see the remnants of ancient empires and the echoes of their faiths. We can chart their decline and fall in monuments and mausoleums, in the “tumbled towers and fallen stones, broken statues, empty tombs,” where “ghosts of commoners and kings walk the walls and catacombs of the castles and the shrines.” Histories carved in stone, mysteries locked in stone, as “canyons and castles pass ageless and ageing and captive in time.”
I first travelled through these lands when the gaze of our Western world was directed elsewhere. The big stories then were the Vietnam quagmire and the Cold War, words made flesh when Brezhnev’s Red Army euthanised the Prague Spring – much as Nikita Kruschev crushed Hungary’s short lived revolution a decade earlier. Then plucky little Israel – that’s how the world viewed the Jewish state back in the day – made its pre-emptive blitzkrieg against the braggadocio of Egypt, and the dubious martial prowess of Syria, Jordan, and Iraq, and put the Middle East back in the news again.
And there it has stayed, with hijackings, hostages, terrorism, the Oil Crisis and OPEC, civil war and invasion in Lebanon, Gulf Wars One, Two, and Three, the Twin Towers, the Wars of American Vengeance. And so to the present day, the brief Arab Spring giving way to a long and bloody Arab Winter, and the demolition of the Sykes-Picot dispensation with Daish’s redrawing of the map of the Middle East, the Abraham Accords with their promise of Arab-Israeli “normalisation” – an opaque and controversial word in this box canyon of false hopes – the fall of the Assad regime and the prospect of a revived Syria, and, in the endgame of many Israeli incursions into Hamas’ Gaza autocracy, the pogrom of October 7 and Israel’s biblical vengeance.
There is a place for dissertations on the state of the world and the tectonic movements that continue to reverberate and ricochet through these most antique of lands. And this is not one. But they have been the inspiration for much of my writing, and this volume is an anthology of those pieces. And unavoidably, they reflect and comment upon ideas and incidents, actions and accidents, memories and monuments.
I wear the weave of history like a second skin, as though each stone, each ruin, each sun-baked wadi, each vibrant soul has pressed itself into my being. As the Irish novelist John Banville wrote, “the past beats inside me like a second heart,” and in these lands, it beats with a particular resonance – ancient and immediate, mythic and human. The Middle East is not merely a subject of study or a theatre for politics; it is a history and geography I have walked through, a landscape I have viewed, a culture I have carried with me in the dust of its deserts, in the sounds and scents of its streets, in the quiet of its mosques, churches and synagogues, and its ruins.
My poems and songs have mirrored what I have carried in memory, and carry still. The cadence of markets and mosques, the call to prayer, the silence of the canyons. the desert wind, remind me that these lands live not only in history books but in lived, sung, remembered experience of all who have passed through They recall centuries of triumph and loss. The past is not distant; it rises in waves, song lines across stone and sand, linking the footsteps of pilgrims, soldiers, merchants, and wanderers with my own.
I know the Old Cities of Jerusalem and Damascus like my own neighbourhood. I’ve promenaded down the Street Called Straight and the Suq Al Hammadiyeh many times; shopped in the ancient Aleppo Souk – before it was destroyed; walked though the deserted Dead Cities of the North – which became later refuge for the homeless; climbed the Masada massif twice, once in the full heat of high summer, and again one time in predawn darkness to watch the sunrise over the Dead Sea and Moab; traveled overland through the Judean Desert to the old monastery of Mar Saba Stood; stood atop the battlements of Krak de Chevaliers; slept a ledge overlooking Petra, the Rose City and walked the Siq both ways three times; rode in a jeep through the canyons of Wadi Rum; traveled on the famous Nairn Express from Damascus to Baghdad, and an old bus through the Khyber Pass; stood by the Euphrates at Babylon, the Nile at Karnak, and the Ganges at burning ghat of Varenesi; visited Palmyra and watched the sunset atop Qala’at Fakhe al Din al Ma’ani.
All of these, now memories, carry the stories of centuries: the echo of prophets, conquerors, poets, and common folk whose lives have risen and fallen in patterns invisible yet inscribed in every wall, every minaret, every crumbling mosaic. The present weighs upon them as heavily as the past: geopolitics, ideology, oil, invasion, and resistance all leave their marks, mingling with the dust of empires long gone. Yet amid it all, the pulse of life persists—bright, stubborn, and singin – reminding me that beauty and despair coexist in ways the mind alone can scarcely contain.
These lands, as I first knew them, were the lands of story, legend, and lore; of pilgrims and explorers; of warriors and sages. And now, reading, writing and singing their echoes through books, prose and verse, I understand that memory, imagination, and presence are inseparable. One cannot approach the Middle East without the awareness that history is embodied, tactile, insistent: in the sun upon skin, the dust on boots, the voices of markets, mosques, and alleys, and in the pull of ruins that hold the ghosts of kings and commoners alike.
Writing about the Middle East, I am reminded that story, song, and memory intertwine. The poems and songs I carry are part of this landscape, as much as the stones and winds themselves, shaping how I see, feel, and reflect. Their cadence is my compass, their imagery my guide, the echoes, the pulse of lands that refuse abstraction. Here, history and the present are inseparable; the past is alive in the dust, the stone, the sun, and the song.
I wear its dust, I carry its past, I feel its presence. In prose and in song, in memory and in presence, I am tethered to these lands. And in this tethering, I find the resonance that drives the writing in this anthology: an awareness of the Middle East not as a distant object but as a living, breathing interlocutor, shaping thought, reflection, and imagination with the weight, warmth, and insistence of centuries.
“I’d like to think that perhaps it is something intrinsically part of my software – an ability to adapt, accept, empathize, and, as far as it is indeed possible for a stranger, to become one with the scenery and slip into the machinery, and, to put it bluntly, take it all at face value. As a “stranger in a strange land”, I accepted what I saw, observed, heard and learned, moved on – to quote American beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti – like “a mirror walking down a strange street’. For this is how I traveled in those roving years, leaving very little by way of words and pictures of my travelling. All I saw, heard, observed, felt and learned was mostly stashed away on my own, internal hard-drive to be accessed in latter years – waiting, perhaps, for the advent of social media, blogs and highly portable electronic devices”.
In October 2025, William Dalrymple wrote this fine piece on the long, entangled history of Gaza in The Guardian, publicizing a forthcoming multi-episode series on his excellent Empire podcast. He wrote of how the territory’s ancient heritage has too often been ignored. As we mourn incalculable human losses, learning about its past can help us better understand the present
As a ceasefire brings a measure of peace to the Dresden-like hellscape that Gaza has become, it is time to take stock of all that has been lost. The human cost of what the UN commission of inquiry recognises as a genocide is of course incalculable, but fewer are aware of how much rich history and archaeology has also been destroyed in these horrific months. This is bolstered by the widespread assumption that Gaza was little more than a huge refugee camp built on a recently settled portion of desert. That is quite wrong. In reality Gaza it is one of the oldest urban centres on the planet.
Golda Meir famously declared that “there was no such thing as Palestinians”, but the reality is very different. Palestine is actually one of humanity’s oldest toponyms, and records of a people named after it are as old as literacy itself. Palestine was an established name for the coast between Egypt and Phoenicia since at least the second millennium BCE: the ancient Egyptian texts refer to “Peleset” from about 1450BCE, Assyrians inscriptions to the “Palashtu” c800BCE, and Herodotus c480BCE to “Παλαιστίνη” (Palaistinē). This was all brought home to me as I worked, with my co-presenter Anita Anand, on a 12-part series on Gaza’s history for the Empire podcast.
Gaza was first referenced as a strategic prize in an Egyptian inscription of Thutmose III in the 15th century BCE, where it is referred to as Ghazzati. It is also one of the most fought-over and contested spaces: for more than 4,000 years this area has been an ethnically mixed crossroads, linking Africa with Asia, and the desert with the Mediterranean. It has also been a crucial strategic and economic hub: an often incredibly rich and prosperous port from which the spices, incense, perfumes and wines of western Asia were exported to Greece and Rome, the end of the caravan route from Arabia via Petra. As well as a fortress guarding the strategically crucial route leading from the eastern Mediterranean coastline to Egypt.
Travellers who visited Gaza over the centuries have often remarked on the fecundity of its vegetation and the diversity of its agriculture, both of which are the products of its underground waters and theMediterranean climate. It is this that enabled Gaza to grow the excellent grapes that for many centuries were made into a much celebrated sweet wine, the Château d’Yquem of the classical world. An exhibition of the salvaged antiquities of Gaza currently showing at the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris opens with a fabulous display of the distinctive “torpedo jars” in which the Gazans exported their wine. As late as the sixth century AD, these amphorae were reaching both Merovingian France and Anglo-Saxon England.
Each successive power in the Middle East has always wanted to own Gaza, and to conquer it, and over the centuries we hear of a succession of empires – first the Egyptians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks and Romans, and later the Umayyads, Mamluks, Turks and the British – coming through and fighting to seize it. More difficult to see in the chronicles of conquests and sieges are the locals who have always lived hereabouts, century after century, whose faith has slowly evolved from paganism to all three of the Abrahamic faiths, and whose dominant language has moved from Aramaic to Greek then from Greek to Arabic.
Archaeology shows that the DNA of the different peoples who lived here has remained fairly consistent throughout the centuries: the modern inhabitants of this land, both Jewish and Palestinian, share much the same mix of DNA groups as the peoples who lived here in the bronze age, and whose skeletons have been tested in contemporary labs. The small Samaritan and Palestinian Christian minorities, the latter descendants of the first Christians, exhibit genetic patterns that are especially close to those extracted from ancient skeletons.
Although the town remained a robust centre of paganism long after many other cities in the region, its beachfront was also the home to the earliest monasteries of Palestine, as followers of St Antony of Egypt migrated there bringing the monastic movement to the Levant; soon “the desert became a city” as monasteries sprang up across the region. In 406 the Empress Eudoxia provided the funds for a cathedral for Gaza, and by the end of the sixth century, the celebrated church of St Sergius was built.
The Arab conquest used to be considered a major turning point in the region’s history, but according to many historians and archaeologists who specialise in this period, the conquest is almost invisible archaeologically. Surviving documents from the period indicate that for many years after, Gaza continued as an administrative centre of the region, and Greek-speaking Christians continued to run the bureaucracy. The son and grandson of two of the early chancellors of the Ummayad Caliphs, St John of Damascus, ended his life in the monastery of Mar Saba not very far from Gaza in the Judean desert. In time, the inhabitants of Palestine accepted the language, government and religion of their new masters; but it was a gradual process of transition, over many centuries, not a sudden catastrophic end of civilisation. The Arab conquerors were a small military elite; the local people remained much the same.
The site of Saint Hilarion monastery, Deir al-Balah, June 8, 2022. Mahmud Hams/AFP/Getty
Gaza continued to flourish through the Crusader period, when it was given over to the Knights Templar to guard the frontier with Egypt; and even more so after the Mamluks expelled the Crusaders and filled Gaza with fine mosques and caravanserais. During the Ottoman period, Jaffa and Acre took over from Gaza as the most prosperous ports of the region, out of which Galilee cotton and Jaffa oranges were exported; but Gaza remained an important regional centre.
Gaza was the place where the Ottoman army made its stand against the British in the first world war. Here many of the same Ottoman troops who had defeated the British at Gallipoli again held their trenches against a mixed British, Indian and Anzac force, heading north from Egypt, armed with shells tipped with poison gas and the Middle East’s first tanks, shipped over from the Western Front in the hope of a breakthrough. It was only thanks to the flanking movement of the Anzac and Bikaner camel cavalry under General Allenby that Ottoman lines finally fell, at the third battle of Gaza at the beginning of November 1917. On 2 November, the Balfour Declaration was issued in London, changing the future of the territory for ever. By the end of 1948 Gaza was home to hundreds of thousands of Palestinians displaced by the Nakba.
Though Gaza now dominates news bulletins for the worst reasons, it is a place about which we have traditionally learned remarkably little; we are not taught its story in movies or TV documentaries, let alone as part of formal education. Yet it is something we obviously badly need to know in order to grasp current events.
This month sees the publication of several new books addressing that absence. As well as the catalogue of the brilliant Paris exhibition, Trésors sauvés de Gaza: 5,000 ans d’histoire (Saved Treasures of Gaza: 5,000 Years of History) historian Anne Irfan has just produced an excellent primer, A Short History of the Gaza Strip, while Jean-Pierre Filiu has published a supplement to his wonderfulGaza: A History, called A Historian in Gaza. In it, he writes: “The Gaza I knew, and whose length and breadth I’ve travelled, has ceased to exist.”All three count as essential reading for those hungry to know more about this ancient territory so as to better understand the current, desperate chapter in its history.
A Short History of the Gaza Strip by Anne Irfan (Simon & Schuster, £18.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
A Historian in Gaza by Jean-Pierre Filiu (C Hurst & Co Publishers, £16.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
In Lucifer Descending … encounters with the morning star, In That Howling Infinite followed Lucifer’s long journey from Scripture into theology: from the elusive serpent of Genesis to the rebellious archangel of Christian tradition; from the Book of Job to Isaiah, Ezekiel, the New Testament and, ultimately, to Milton’s magnificent Paradise Lost. It was the story of how a comparatively shadowy biblical adversary gradually became the Prince of Darkness who has haunted the Western imagination for almost two millennia.
But stories, like their protagonists, seldom remain where we leave them. If Lucifer Descending explored how the Lucifer fell from Heaven, this essay asks what happened after he landed.
For Lucifer, it turns out, has enjoyed an extraordinarily successful afterlife. As religious belief has receded across much of the Western world, he has not disappeared. Rather, he has escaped the confines of theology and colonised almost every corner of our culture. He strides through literature, painting, opera, horror, fantasy, cinema, television, popular music and political rhetoric with undiminished confidence.
This is therefore not another essay about Satan as an object of faith. It is an exploration of Lucifer as one of Western civilisation’s most durable cultural archetypes. Why do we continue to invent Dark Lords long after many have ceased to believe in the Devil? Why do our stories seem unable to function without them? Why does the Wild Hunt still thunder across our imagination, why does Old Nick keep turning up in our songs, and why do successive generations remain fascinated by the glamour of the forbidden?
The answers reveal at least as much about ourselves as they do about the Devil.
For, as this essay gradually suggests, Lucifer’s greatest triumph may not have been persuading us that he exists. It may have been persuading us that evil always wears somebody else’s face.
Lucifer descending, Gustave Dore
The Devil Rises
I heard the snake was baffled by his sin He shed his scales to find the snake within But born again is born without a skin The poison enters into everything
Leonard Cohen, Treaty
There is a curious paradox at the heart of Western civilisation. For all the decline in church attendance, one suspects that Lucifer has never really been unemployed.
Heaven may have dismissed him long ago, but literature, painting, music, theatre and cinema hired him almost immediately. Theology gradually misplaced him; popular culture put him back on the payroll. Strip away the horns, the cloven hooves and the sulphurous odour, and he reappears century after century in fresh disguise: the Dark Lord, the Shadow, the Emperor, the Great Corrupter, the smiling tyrant, the master criminal, the “Big Bad”, the villain whose ambitions invariably exceed both his wisdom and his humanity.
In short, Lucifer never really went away. He simply changed costumes.
This is perhaps his greatest triumph. For while belief in a literal Devil has waned across much of the Western world, belief in evil personified has scarcely diminished at all. We remain incurable myth-makers. Every age invents a Prince of Darkness suited to its own anxieties. Medieval Europe imagined hornèd demons lurking in forests and crossroads. The nineteenth century preferred aristocratic vampires and criminal masterminds. The twentieth gave us dictators. The twenty-first has elevated cinematic super-villains into a kind of secular demonology. We may no longer fear Hell in quite the old-fashioned sense, but we still require someone – or something – to embody the darkness against which heroes define themselves.
It is hardly surprising. Stories require conflict. Heroes are admirable, but villains are memorable. The hero must remain consistently virtuous; the villain enjoys all the best speeches, the finest costumes and the greatest dramatic licence. Lucifer himself set the pattern. Even those who have never read Paradise Lost have absorbed Milton’s magnificent creation second-hand. William Blake famously quipped that the Puritan poet “was of the Devil’s party without knowing it,” and one understands precisely what he meant. God issues decrees. Satan delivers soliloquies and strikes power chords.
Milton’s Lucifer was not the grotesque beast of medieval mystery plays. He was intelligent, eloquent, magnificent even in defeat, ruined less by wickedness than by pride. “Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven” may be one of the most quoted lines in English literature precisely because it speaks to something recognisably human. Milton’s Devil is wrong, certainly, but never dull. Every great fictional Dark Lord since has borrowed something from him.
J.R.R. Tolkien would doubtless have resisted the comparison. As a devout Catholic he disliked allegory almost as much as C.S. Lewis embraced it. Yet Sauron stands unmistakably in the Miltonic tradition. He is no mere tyrant but a fallen power, less a personality than a malignant will bent entirely upon domination. Indeed, Sauron scarcely appears in The Lord of the Rings as a character at all. He is an absence, an all-seeing eye, a presence felt rather than seen. Evil has become abstract, bureaucratic almost, no longer dependent upon pitchforks and brimstone but upon surveillance, conquest and absolute control. Lucifer has evolved into totalitarianism.
Sauron’s lieutenant Saruman is perhaps closer to Milton’s original conception. Once wise, once good, corrupted not by appetite but by certainty. Like Lucifer himself, Saruman does not begin as evil. He begins by believing that the ends justify the means. Christopher Lee, who portrayed him so magnificently, understood these ambiguities better than most. There was something appropriate about the actor who had previously embodied Dracula and Rasputin eventually becoming Tolkien’s fallen wizard. Lee spent much of his career giving evil an aristocratic dignity that was infinitely more unsettling than any number of prosthetic horns.
George Lucas followed much the same path. Darth Vader may be the fallen angel, the once-noble knight seduced by power, but the true Lucifer of Star Wars is Emperor Palpatine. Smiling, patient, almost avuncular, he rarely forces anyone to do anything. Instead, he whispers. He flatters. He identifies weaknesses already present and quietly enlarges them. Like the serpent in Eden, he offers knowledge, certainty and power, while allowing his victims to imagine that every decision is entirely their own. Watching the prequel trilogy today, one is struck by how often democracy destroys itself voluntarily. Palpatine scarcely stages a coup. The Republic hands him the keys.
Marvel has travelled a similar road. Thanos does not regard himself as wicked. Quite the reverse. He considers himself the only rational adult in a sentimental universe. Half of all life must perish, he argues, so that the remainder may flourish. His is genocide expressed as arithmetic. That, perhaps, is modern evil in a nutshell. The old Devil tempted souls. Today’s Dark Lord arrives bearing graphs, statistics and PowerPoint slides.
Even Walt Disney understood that darkness is dramatically indispensable. Snow White has her Wicked Queen, Sleeping Beauty her horned Maleficent, and The Lion King its melancholy conspirator Scar, Shakespeare’s Richard III translated into feline form. Disney princes tend to blur into one another. Nobody forgets Cruella De Ville.
Nor is this confined to fairy tales.
Sherlock Holmes required Professor Moriarty, “the Napoleon of Crime”, a title that neatly transformed the “Corsican ogre” into a metaphor for criminal genius. Dracula became immortal not merely because he drank blood but because he represented temptation wrapped in elegance. Hannibal Lecter horrified audiences precisely because he was cultivated enough to discuss Bach and Bordeaux while contemplating cannibalism. Batman’s Joker delights in proving that civilisation itself is only a thin coat of paint over chaos. Voldemort, another heir to Sauron, seeks not merely power but immortality itself, the oldest Luciferian ambition of all.
James Bond, too, would have enjoyed a remarkably brief career had Ian Fleming contented himself with ordinary gangsters. Instead, he gave us Blofeld, Dr No, Goldfinger and a parade of megalomaniacs convinced that humanity’s principal problem was insufficient obedience. They possessed volcanic lairs, Persian cats, improbable weapons and ambitions bordering on the theological. Bond did not merely foil criminals; he repeatedly thwarted men aspiring to become secular gods.
One of the cleverest reinventions of the archetype came from the most unlikely quarter imaginable: a Californian-based television series ostensibly about teenage vampires.
Beneath the wisecracks and high-school melodrama, Buffy the Vampire Slayer was an entertainingly sophisticated theological exercise. Each season introduced a new “Big Bad”, the a term creator Joss Weedon coined for whatever apocalyptic menace Buffy happened to be facing. The expression was comic, yet psychologically astute. Stories seem to demand a supreme antagonist around whom lesser evils can organise themselves.
The setting was inspired. Sunnydale High School stood upon a Hellmouth, a literal gateway to infernal realms buried beneath the school library, and an eminently portable metaphor. Adolescence already feels like Hell; why not build the school directly over it? Evil, the series quietly suggested, is never somewhere else. It is not confined to Mordor or the underworld. It bubbles perpetually beneath ordinary life, beneath classrooms, shopping malls, suburban cul-de-sacs and parent-teacher evenings, requiring only the occasional crack in the pavement to emerge. “There’s this thing that happens here, over the hell mouth”, says Buffy, “where the way a thing feels – it kind of starts being that way for real. I’ve seen all these things before – just not all at once”.
Lucifer has hence become less a theological proposition than a dramatic necessity. Every mythology requires its dragon. Every dragon requires its Dark Lord. Every Dark Lord owes something to the Morning Star. And every hero requires a nemesis to defeat and destroy.
Nor do we confine these figures to fiction. Human beings have always displayed a remarkable talent for transforming history into morality plays. Every generation manufactures its own secular Satan. Adolf Hitler has become the universal benchmark against which evil itself is measured. His name no longer belongs solely to history but to mythology. Joseph Stalin joins him, pipe smoke curling above the Gulag like incense from some infernal liturgy. Mao Tse Tung presides over famines of almost biblical proportions. Pol Pot transformed Cambodia into a charnel house. Even the language betrays us. We do not merely describe such men as wicked. We speak of them as monsters, demons, incarnations of evil itself.
Earlier centuries found their Dark Lords elsewhere. Napoleon Bonaparte was the Corsican Ogre, riding across Europe like an Antichrist in cavalry boots. Medieval chroniclers regarded Genghis Khan as divine punishment erupting from the eastern steppe. Rome supplied a gallery of memorable villains – Nero, Caligula, Commodus and Elagabalus – whose reputations, embroidered though some undoubtedly are, have endured for two thousand years because every civilisation likes to imagine that somewhere in its past there strode an emperor who was not merely bad but diabolical.
Then there was Grigori Rasputin, whom we encountered in a recent essay. Mystic, mountebank, holy fool, healer, libertine, political manipulator and reluctant martyr, Rasputin somehow managed to become all things to all people. The beard, the hypnotic stare, the whispered scandals, the astonishing resilience in the face of poison, bullets and icy rivers – no wonder he stared in on of Hammer’s schlocky horror shows.
There is, however, a danger in all this. The more enthusiastically we invest evil in extraordinary individuals, the more confidently the rest of us absolve ourselves. If Hitler is Satan, then we need only reassure ourselves that we are not Hitler. If Sauron dwells in Mordor, then the Shire is safely innocent. It is an attractive proposition, comforting even, but one that both history and literature stubbornly refuse to endorse.
Milton knew better. So did Tolkien. So, in his own deceptively gentle way, did W.H. Auden, who, according to his biographer, Humphrey Carpenter, once startled a Sunday School class by asking, “Do you know what the Devil looks like? The Devil looks like me.”
That may be the most unsettling description of Lucifer ever written. For it suggests that the Dark Lord’s final disguise is not the hornèd demon, nor the tyrant, nor the vampire, nor the emperor. It is the ordinary human face reflected back at us from the mirror.
From there, as the old proverb reminds us, it is but a short ride before the Devil takes the reins.
Sauron, the all-seeing eye
The Devil Drives
And now the wheels of heaven stop, you feel the devil’s riding crop. Get ready for the future: it is murder.
Leonard Cohen, The Future
If the Dark Lord gives evil a face, the Devil gives it motion.
There is an old English proverb, first recorded by John Lydgate around 1420, that survives today in abbreviated form: Needs must when the Devil drives. We have largely forgotten the second half, retaining only the resigned “needs must”, yet the original is far richer. It conjures a vivid image of the unfortunate traveller compelled onward by an infernal coachman, driven not by choice but by necessity, passion, fear or circumstance. Shakespeare knew the saying well and put it into the mouth of Helena in All’s Well That Ends Well. Six centuries later it still captures something uncomfortable about the human condition. We like to think we are steering our own course. More often than not, someone – or something else – appears to have seized the reins. How often have we heard those righteous souls who have failed to resist carnal temptation plaintively cry “the devil made me do it!”
The Devil, in this tradition, is not so much a ruler as a driver.
American gospel music later turned the proverb into practical theology. “Don’t let the Devil ride,” warned one well-loved spiritual. The explanation followed immediately: “If you let him ride, he’ll want to drive.” It is a neat summary of temptation itself. Evil rarely demands complete surrender at the outset. It asks only for a lift, a compromise, a tiny concession, one small indulgence. Before long, you discover that you have been relegated to the passenger seat.
Author Dennis Wheatley understood the power of this ancient image when he published The Devil Rides Out in 1934. It remains one of the great classics of English supernatural fiction, written at a time when spiritualism, séances and occult societies flourished among polite society between the wars. Wheatley’s Satan is no medieval gargoyle lurking beneath cathedral gargoyles. He rides abroad, active in the world, recruiting disciples, pursuing souls and intruding into drawing rooms where cocktails are served with impeccable manners. Christopher Lee’s magnificent portrayal of the Duc de Richelieu in Hammer’s 1968 adaptation elevated what might otherwise have been Gothic melodrama into something almost Miltonic. Tall, patrician and entirely convincing, Lee battled infernal forces with learning, courage and Latin – unlike Buffy Somer’s high kicks and wisecracks. It may be the only horror film in which civilisation itself, embodied in good breeding and quiet erudition, proves the Devil’s most formidable opponent.
Yet Wheatley was drawing upon something immeasurably older than Christianity, for long before Lucifer acquired horns, antique Europe already knew that when the wind howled through winter forests and clouds raced across a full moon, riders were abroad on The Wild Hunt.
Every northern people seemed to possess its own version. In Scandinavia it thundered across the heavens under the command of Odin himself, one-eyed, cloaked and spear in hand, accompanied by ghostly warriors and spectral wolves. In England the leader became Herne the Hunter, antlers upon his brow, riding through Windsor Forest with baying hounds at his heels. Shakespeare gives him a memorable cameo in The Merry Wives of Windsor, where Falstaff disguises himself as the horned hunter beneath the great oak. Whether Herne was once a forgotten woodland god, an Anglo-Saxon spirit or merely local folklore hardly matters. By Elizabethan times everyone knew that one did not linger in the forest after dark when Herne was abroad.
Across the Severn in Wales the Hunt belonged to Gwyn ap Nudd, king of Annwn, the Otherworld, who rode with his fearsome Cŵn Annwn, the white hounds with crimson ears whose baying foretold death. In Brittany and northern France, it became the Mesnée d’Hellequin, the Host of Hellequin, whose mysterious leader eventually lent his name, by one of language’s curious transformations, to the comic Harlequin of the Italian stage. Germany knew the procession under other names; so too did the Low Countries.
The details varied. The essentials did not. A storm. A cavalcade. The dead riding with the living. And woe betide anyone who crossed their path. Sometimes those unfortunate enough to witness the Hunt were swept away forever. Sometimes they were compelled to join it. Sometimes they survived only to wake the following morning miles from home with no memory of the night’s journey. One can almost hear the old proverb whispering through these stories. Needs must when the Devil drives.
The great Norwegian painter Peter Nicolai Arbo captured the legend magnificently in his 1872 canvas Åsgårdsreien – usually rendered in English simply as The Wild Hunt of Odin. It is one of those paintings that appears almost to move before one’s eyes. Odin’s spectral company bursts from the darkness in an explosion of movement. Horses rear. Cloaks stream behind their riders. Women, warriors and phantom hounds tumble through the storm as though the sky itself has become a battlefield. Nothing in the picture is static. The Hunt is motion incarnate, a supernatural force impossible either to resist or escape. Looking upon it, one immediately understands why our ancestors barred their doors when winter winds began to howl.
Åsgårdsreien – The Wild Hunt
The Church, unsurprisingly, appropriated the legend rather than abolishing it. Odin quietly surrendered his command to darker powers. The spectral riders became demons. The horned Herne acquired a suspicious resemblance to the Devil himself. Pagan myth merged seamlessly into Christian cosmology. The Hunt still rode; only its commander had changed.
Or perhaps not. For there is something profoundly Luciferian about the Wild Hunt irrespective of who happens to lead it. It is the embodiment of restless movement, insatiable desire and ceaseless pursuit. The riders never arrive because they are never seeking a destination. They exist only to chase – like temptation itself.
The extraordinary thing is that the Hunt did not perish with the old beliefs. It emigrated. Like so much European folklore, it crossed the Atlantic in the baggage of settlers, adapting itself to new landscapes and fresh imaginations. Somewhere between the Black Forest and the Black Hills, between Sherwood Forest and the Sierra Nevada, the ghostly riders exchanged mail armour for denim, spears for lassos and wolves for cattle.
The Wild Hunt became the Wild West.
No one realised this more completely than Stan Jones. When the Arizona park ranger wrote Ghost Riders in the Sky in 1948, he almost certainly knew he was drawing upon old frontier tales of phantom cattle drives. Whether he realised that those tales themselves descended from a mythology already a thousand years old is another matter. Yet the genealogy is unmistakable. Jones’s doomed cowboys pursuing a phantom herd across thunderclouds are Odin’s riders in Stetsons. Their burning cattle replace the wolves of the north. Their endless pursuit echoes precisely the fate awaiting those medieval hunters unfortunate enough to be swept into the spectral cavalcade.
In That Howling Infinite has paid tribute to this extraordinary song in A cowboy key – how the west was sung, describing it as perhaps the greatest of all cowboy ballads. It deserves the accolade. For all its American trappings, it reaches back through frontier folklore to the Book of Revelation and beyond that to the ancient forests of Europe. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse gallop somewhere in the background, but so too does Herne beneath Windsor’s oak, Gwyn ap Nudd crossing the Welsh hills and Odin hurtling through Scandinavian skies.
It is one of those rare songs in which myth survives almost intact, merely changing hats.
Somewhere between Valhalla and the Rio Grande, the Wild Hunt learned to yodel. And the Devil, one suspects, thoroughly approved.
Their brands were still on fire and their hooves were made of steel Their horns were black and shiny and their hot breath he could feel A bolt of fear went through him as they thundered through the sky For he saw the riders coming hard and he heard their mournful cry
Stan Jones, Ghost Riders in the Sky
It has often been said, only half in jest, that the Devil gets all the best songs.
God, to be fair, has hardly been neglected. He has inspired Gregorian chant, Bach’s Passions, Handel’s Messiah, Haydn’s Creation, Verdi’s Requiem, the African-American spiritual, the Welsh hymn, the Gospel choir and enough Christmas carols to keep shopping centres in business from November onwards. Heaven has produced magnificent music.
But Hell swings.
There is something about Old Nick that seems to appeal irresistibly to musicians. He crops up in folk songs, murder ballads, spirituals, blues, country, jazz, rock and heavy metal with a persistence that borders upon the supernatural. One begins to suspect that if Lucifer really was once Heaven’s brightest angel, his expulsion may not have deprived him of music at all. It merely changed the repertoire.
it was not for nothing that Rock and roll was called “the devil’s music”. its driving rhythms, rebellious energy, and provocative dancing directly challenged conservative religious and social norms. Emerging from African American blues, the genre inherited a reputation for sinfulness due to its associations with marginalized spaces, nightlife, and earthy themes
Perhaps rebellion simply has a better rhythm.
The same bargain resurfaced centuries later at a lonely crossroads in Mississippi.
The oldest of these musical bargains belongs, naturally enough, to Doctor Faustus. Christopher Marlowe first dramatised the medieval legend of the ambitious scholar who traded his immortal soul for worldly knowledge and pleasure, Goethe transformed him into one of the great figures of European literature, and Charles Gounod clothed the story in glorious French Romantic opera. Yet in every version it is Mephistopheles who steals the show. Bass-baritones relish the role because villains invariably enjoy the better music. The Devil not only gets the best lines; he often gets the best arias as well.
Whether Robert Johnson actually met Satan one moonlit night sometime in the 1930s is almost entirely beside the point. Legends endure because they express truths that facts cannot. Johnson had been an unremarkable guitarist. He disappeared for a time and returned astonishingly accomplished. Rural gossip supplied the explanation. He had met the Devil at the crossroads and exchanged his soul for musical genius.
Thus, America reinvented Faust,
The crossroads itself is an ancient place of magic in European folklore, where roads – and destinies – the River of Song as the Mississippi has been called, where spirits linger and bargains are struck. The myth crossed the Atlantic with everything else, put on denim overalls, acquired a battered Gibson guitar and gave birth to the Delta Blues.
From there it was only a short journey to Georgia.
Charlie Daniels’ exuberant The Devil Went Down to Georgia is really another version of the old contest tales in which ordinary mortals outwit supernatural adversaries. The Devil, looking for “a soul to steal”, challenges a young fiddler to a musical duel and, for once, comes second. There is something wonderfully democratic about the story. Lucifer may be older than Creation itself, but he can still be shown up by a country boy with a fiddle and sufficient confidence in his own abilities.
English folk music had anticipated the idea centuries earlier in The False Knight Upon the Road. A mysterious stranger repeatedly attempts to intimidate a child with riddles and threats, only to be calmly answered at every turn until the False Knight – widely interpreted as the Devil himself – is finally driven away in defeat. The old stories were surprisingly optimistic. The Devil might be clever, but he was not unbeatable.
Nor, for that matter, was he always entirely sinister.
By the time we reach the twentieth century he has become positively urbane.
The Rolling Stones’ Sympathy for the Devil remains perhaps the most brilliant reinvention of Lucifer in popular music. Jagger’s narrator is no horned medieval monster but an impeccably dressed gentleman of “wealth and taste”, strolling through history with dry amusement as empires rise, revolutions unfold and humanity repeatedly demonstrates its extraordinary capacity for cruelty. The Devil scarcely claims responsibility for our crimes. He merely observes them with professional interest. It is a profoundly unsettling conceit because the song quietly suggests that mankind requires remarkably little assistance.
Gun’s hectic Race With the Devil, released in the same annus mirabilis of 1968, approaches the old fellow from a different angle altogether. Here the Devil is not the urbane observer but the relentless pursuer, forever hunting, forever closing the distance, echoing once again those ancient riders of the Wild Hunt thundering across medieval skies. The old folklore had merely acquired electric guitars.
Then there is Leonard Cohen.
No modern songwriter returned more often – or more thoughtfully % to biblical imagery. Yet Cohen’s Devil becomes progressively less external and more intimate. In Treaty, the serpent sheds his skin only to discover “the snake within”. Evil is no longer an adversary encountered in lonely wildernesses, but an inheritance carried beneath one’s own skin. In one of his final songs, with characteristic wit, Cohen quietly inverts centuries of iconography: now “the angel’s got a fiddle, the devil’s got a harp.” The celestial and infernal orchestras have exchanged instruments. Nothing, it seems, remains quite where tradition left it.
Freddie Mercury, never knowingly guilty of understatement, transformed Beelzebub into operatic theatre in Bohemian Rhapsody. The Devil appears only fleetingly amid Galileo, Scaramouche and heavenly choirs, yet somehow manages to dominate one of the most extraordinary six minutes in rock history. That, too, seems entirely appropriate. Old Nick has always had impeccable comic timing.
Tom Waits, all gravel and bourbon, frequently sounds as though he has spent an evening drinking with the Devil in some forgotten dockside bar. Nick Cave has made an entire career exploring the uneasy frontier where scripture, murder ballad and Southern Gothic overlap: “He’s a god, he’s a man, he’s a ghost, he’s a guru. They’re whispering his name through this disappearing land. But hidden in his coat is a red right hand”.
Even heavy metal, with its adolescent flirtations with pentagrams and infernal imagery, owes less to genuine Satanism than to the enduring theatrical appeal of Lucifer as the ultimate outsider. The Devil, one suspects, appreciates good publicity wherever he can find it.
Which brings us back to the Wild Hunt.
Stan Jones’s Ghost Riders in the Sky deserves to stand alongside these classics not because it mentions the Devil directly, and scarcely needs to, but because it preserves one of humanity’s oldest supernatural narratives in modern musical dress. Those spectral cowboys pursuing phantom cattle across storm clouds are descendants of Odin’s riders, Herne’s hunters and the Four Horsemen themselves. The song is medieval Europe galloping beneath the vast skies of Arizona. Like all the finest folk songs, it remembers far more than its author probably realised.
How the West Was Sung describes it as perhaps the finest of all cowboy ballads. It is as far removed from cheerful campfire songs of wandering dogies as Kansas is from the Land of Oz. Beneath its Western saddle leather beats the heart of an ancient myth.
And, if I may be forgiven a personal indulgence, somewhere among all these songs sits several of my own.
My first serious encounter with Lucifer in music came not through rock and roll but through Gordon Giltrap’s haunting instrumental Lucifer’s Cage. Introduced to me by an old friend in a London flat sometime in the early 1970s, its title lodged quietly in the imagination for years before eventually emerging, almost unbidden, in a song of my own song of that name. Dante contributed the pillar of ice. Marlowe lent his melancholy. Milton supplied the fallen archangel. The rest belonged to memory, dreams and the peculiar alchemy by which songs occasionally write themselves.
Lucifer appeared again years later in Devil’s Work, though by then he had become something rather different. Summoned before the bar of humanity to answer for every cruelty committed in his name, Satan calmly pleads not guilty. Men, he observes with devastating logic, have proved perfectly capable of atrocity without supernatural assistance. He does not deny admiring the results. He merely disputes authorship.
The old rogue may even have a case. Which perhaps explains why he continues to haunt our music.
Songs, after all, thrive on conflict. They delight in temptation, regret, betrayal, longing, rebellion and redemption – the very emotions that have always formed the Devil’s stock-in-trade. Heaven may provide perfection, but perfection is notoriously difficult to rhyme. Hell, by contrast, offers endless narrative possibilities.
Lucifer may have been expelled from the heavenly choir, but he appears to have landed squarely in the music business. And business, judging by the catalogue, has been remarkably good ever since.
The Devil’s trick
For his is the language of liars
And his is the honour of thieves
And he is the master of eloquence
As the last of the honest men leaves.
Paul Hemphill. Lucifer
The “pillar of ice”, by the wThe oldest image of evil is not always the monster at the gate or the tyrant upon the throne. More often, it is the quiet voice at the shoulder: the tempter, the whisperer, the insinuator who does not command but suggests; who does not force the hand but gently guides it. The devil’s greatest achievement is rarely the invention of falsehood. It is the art of making falsehood appear attractive, sophisticated, inevitable, even virtuous.
C.S. Lewis understood this ancient pattern with remarkable clarity. In The Screwtape Letters, the infernal bureaucracy does not operate through crude declarations of evil. The tempter’s craft is subtler. It lies in rearranging perceptions, encouraging vanity, disguising weakness as strength, and persuading people that they are acting from reason when they are often responding to pride, fashion, fear, or the desire to belong.
The danger, Lewis suggests, is not merely that people hold mistaken ideas. Human beings have always been capable of error. The deeper danger is when ideas become ornaments of identity rather than conclusions reached through reflection. A philosophy becomes attractive because it feels modern, daring, compassionate, rebellious, or intellectually fashionable. The question shifts from “Is this true?” to “What does believing this say about me?”
This is the realm of the whisperer. The whisperer does not need to overthrow reason; he merely needs to distract it. He surrounds the mind with fragments: a little fashionable theory here, a borrowed slogan there, a moral certainty imported from someone else. Contradictions can coexist comfortably because coherence is less important than belonging. The result is not always a carefully constructed worldview, but a collection of convictions assembled from the cultural atmosphere.
The genius of the tempter is that he rarely presents himself as the enemy. He arrives disguised as enlightenment, liberation, sophistication, or courage. He flatters rather than threatens. He tells people they are not merely correct, but among the few who truly understand. The oldest temptation is not simply to do wrong; it is to believe oneself too wise, too moral, or too enlightened to be mistaken.
This brings to mind another great literary figure of the whispering world: Lord Varys, the “Master of Whisperers” in Game of Thrones. Varys is not a demon, nor is he portrayed simply as a villain. His power lies in information, influence, and his ability to move unseen through the corridors of power. He understands that kingdoms are often shaped less by armies than by rumours, perceptions, and carefully planted ideas.. Varys understood the theatre of power; he understood that information itself was a weapon and that every ruler lives inside a carefully constructed reality. His web of informants becomes a metaphor for the invisible forces that govern human affairs
The “Master of Whisperers” is an old archetype. Behind the throne sits the counsellor, the adviser, the confidant who knows that shaping the mind of the ruler can be more powerful than commanding the ruler’s army. In that sense, Varys belongs to the same long tradition as the court intriguer, the Mephistophelean tempter, and the old folkloric figure who appears at the crossroads offering knowledge, power, or forbidden wisdom.
Perhaps that is why the archetype endures. From the serpent in Eden to Mephistopheles, from Shakespeare’s Iago to Varys, the whisperer represents a profound truth about human nature: we are not only creatures who seek truth; we are creatures who seek stories about ourselves. The most dangerous lies are often not those imposed upon us, but those we welcome because they confirm the person we wish to be.
The devil’s trick, then, is not simply deception. It is seduction. It is convincing us that the voice in the shadows is our own.
Satanic Majesties and the lure of the dark side …
Please allow me to introduce myself I’m a man of wealth and taste I’ve been around for a long, long year Stole many a man’s soul and faith
The Rolling Stones, Sympathy for the Devil (1968)
Which brings is tangentially to “devil worship”, whether in cosplay or for real, and why has had and continues to exert an attraction to folks of a certain “disposition”. Hence in pop culture, we have The Rolling Stones using the concept to distinguish themselves from the more saccharine (though brilliant) Sergeant Pepper, and the movies – particularly those dealing with the immanence of the Antichrist.
It is a fascinating tangent because “devil worship” has almost never been primarily about the Devil. More often, it is about rebellion, transgression, power, or the seduction of forbidden knowledge. Satan becomes a mirror in which each age sees the things it most fears—or secretly desires.
The attraction begins with the nature of Lucifer himself. Unlike the grotesque medieval devil of horns and pitchforks, Lucifer is the most compelling character in the Christian imagination after Christ. He is beautiful, intelligent, eloquent, proud, charismatic. 17th Century John Milton’s Paradise Lost transformed him into one of literature’s great antiheroes, whose defiant declaration, “Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven”, has echoed through centuries of political revolutionaries, Romantic poets, and rock musicians alike. William Blake famously remarked that Milton “was of the Devil’s party without knowing it.” Whether or not Blake was right, Milton unintentionally gave Satan much of the best dialogue.
That ambiguity proved irresistible to the Romantics. The poets Byron, Shelley, and later Baudelaire saw Lucifer not simply as the embodiment of evil but as the eternal rebel against authority. One need not approve of Satan to recognise the psychological appeal. Every adolescent has, at some point, imagined themselves misunderstood by a hypocritical world. Lucifer becomes the patron saint of alienation.
This is where “devil worship” divides into several distinct streams.
The first is largely theatrical. Heavy metal, gothic fashion, horror films, occult imagery, black clothing, inverted crosses, and pentagrams function less as professions of faith than as cultural shorthand for danger, independence, and shock. Alice Cooper, Black Sabbath, Iron Maiden, Ghost, and countless others have mined this aesthetic. Most participants have little interest in metaphysical evil; they are enjoying the iconography of rebellion.
The Rolling Stones understood this perfectly. In 1967, Their Satanic Majesties Request was less an endorsement of Satanism than a calculated provocation. It was impossible not to hear it as a response to the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Where the Beatles embraced colourful optimism and psychedelic innocence, the Stones offered something darker, more decadent, more dangerous. Their image became one of sex, drugs, excess and moral ambiguity.
The following year they released Sympathy for the Devil, perhaps the greatest popular song ever written from Satan’s perspective. Yet the song is not a hymn to evil. Jagger’s Lucifer is an urbane observer of human history, politely introducing himself while recounting the crimes of mankind. The genius lies in the reversal. The Devil scarcely needs to tempt us; humanity supplies ample atrocities of its own. As the refrain insists, “after all, it was you and me.” The devil becomes less the author of evil than its ironic narrator.
Then there is genuine religious Satanism, which is rarer than popular imagination assumes.
Anton LaVey’s Church of Satan, founded in 1966, was largely atheistic. Satan was treated as a symbol of individualism, rational self-interest, scepticism toward religious authority, and personal freedom rather than as a literal supernatural being. In many ways it inverted Christian morality without necessarily believing in Christian cosmology.
Far more obscure are small groups that genuinely venerate Satan as a real spiritual being. They exist, but their numbers have always been tiny. The “Satanic Panic” of the 1980s vastly exaggerated their influence, fuelled by moral panic, unreliable testimony, and sensationalist media.
More enduring has been the cinematic Satan.
Modern horror discovered that the Devil works best not as a monster but as an absence – an invisible intelligence corrupting ordinary life. Rosemary’s Baby (1968) suggested evil could inhabit respectable Manhattan apartments. The Exorcist (1973) brought demonic possession into a suburban family, terrifying audiences because faith itself seemed uncertain. The Omen (1976) imagined the Antichrist not as a horned beast but as an innocent-looking child quietly ascending to political power. The horror lay precisely in the inversion: evil wearing the face of innocence.
It seemed appropriate that The Devil’s address was 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. These films appeared during an era of collapsing confidence – in churches, governments, families, and institutions. Watergate, Vietnam, social upheaval, the sexual revolution: Western culture was asking whether the old moral certainties still held. The Antichrist became a metaphor for the fear that civilisation itself might contain the seeds of its own destruction.
The Omen (1976)
The fascination continues because Satan remains one of Western culture’s richest symbols. He can signify tyranny or liberation, temptation or freedom, narcissism or resistance, depending on the storyteller. Like Prometheus stealing fire from the gods, he embodies humanity’s perennial temptation to cross boundaries simply because they exist.
Psychology adds another layer. Carl Jung argued that every personality possesses a “shadow” – those impulses we deny or repress. Healthy people acknowledge their shadow rather than pretend it does not exist. Much popular engagement with Satanic imagery can be understood as an exploration of that shadow. Horror allows us to confront evil at a safe distance. Rock music permits us to flirt with darkness while remaining within the bounds of performance. It is ritualised transgression.
The danger, however, comes when performance ceases to be performance. Nietzsche warned that “he who fights with monsters should see to it that he himself does not become a monster.” Jung similarly cautioned that confronting the shadow is not the same as identifying with it. One may explore darkness without enthroning it.
Perhaps that is why the Devil remains culturally immortal. God asks for worship; Satan offers fascination. God commands obedience; Satan whispers autonomy. God speaks of redemption; Satan promises self-realisation without limits. Whether one believes in him literally or not, Lucifer continues to embody one of humanity’s oldest temptations: not simply to do evil, but to imagine ourselves beyond the distinction between good and evil.
There is an irony here that would not have been lost on the medieval theologians. Much of what passes for “Satanism” in modern culture is less a rejection of Christianity than a backhanded tribute to it. The Devil has meaning only in a civilisation shaped by the biblical story. As Christianity’s cultural influence has waned, Satan has often survived more successfully than the saints. He has become detached from theology and reborn as an endlessly adaptable icon—part Romantic rebel, part existential outsider, part Hollywood villain, part rock star.
For all the glamour, however, the traditional Christian understanding ends with an unexpectedly mundane observation. Satan’s greatest trick is not horns, black masses, or spectacular evil. It is persuading us that evil is glamorous, liberating, sophisticated, or somehow more interesting than goodness. The Devil, in this view, is the supreme salesman: he packages pride as freedom, selfishness as authenticity, and rebellion as wisdom. His marketing, one might say, has always been better than his product.
That may explain why, from Milton to Mick Jagger, from Rosemary’s Baby to The Omen, Lucifer continues to stride across our cultural stage. The costumes change with every generation, but the role remains the same: the eternal seducer, inviting us to peek over the edge – not always to push us off, but to persuade us that the view from the abyss is somehow more exciting than the long, ordinary climb toward the light.
Crossing the Threshold
It was in another lifetime, one of toil and blood When blackness was a virtue the road was full of mud I came in from the wilderness, a creature void of form “Come in, ” she said “I’ll give you shelter from the storm”
Bob Dylan
There is an old rule that appears again and again in the folklore of Europe. A vampire, however ancient or powerful, cannot cross the threshold of a home unless invited. It is a curious limitation for a creature that can command wolves, transform into mist, mesmerise its victims and seemingly defy death itself. Yet before the simplest cottage door, all that supernatural power comes to nothing. It must wait. It must ask. Someone within must choose to open the door.
The convention has endured from the pages of Bram Stoker’s Dracula to the worlds of Stephen King, Anne Rice and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. We accept it almost without question because, beneath the gothic trappings, it expresses something profoundly human. The threshold is more than wood and stone. It is the boundary between safety and danger, innocence and experience, trust and betrayal. To cross it without permission would be mere violence. To be invited across is something altogether more unsettling.
The ancient motif has not disappeared from contemporary storytelling. John Ajvide Lindqvist’s novel Let the Right One In, and the haunting 2008 Swedish film that followed, take the old vampire prohibition and transform it into a moral question. The issue is no longer simply whether we invite someone across the threshold, but whether we possess the wisdom to know whom we are inviting. Every act of welcome carries the possibility of grace or ruin. The threshold remains sacred because, once crossed, neither host nor guest is quite the same again.
Perhaps this explains why the Devil, in so many traditions, is less a conqueror than a seducer. Lucifer does not usually arrive with an army at his back. He comes with a question, a promise, a whispered doubt. In Eden, he offers knowledge. In the wilderness, he offers power. In Goethe’s Faust, he offers fulfilment. The bargain changes with the age, but the method rarely does. The invitation is always voluntary. The victim believes the choice is entirely his own.
John Milton understood this better than most. In Paradise Lost, Satan’s greatest victory is not won on the battlefield but in the imagination. He persuades others that rebellion is freedom, that pride is dignity, that disobedience is enlightenment. His triumph lies not in overpowering his enemies but in teaching them to mistake temptation for liberation.
This is one of the oldest insights of the Judeo-Christian tradition. Evil rarely appears wearing its own face. It arrives clothed in reason, justice, beauty, necessity or compassion. It flatters before it threatens. It persuades before it commands. It waits patiently upon the threshold until someone inside unlatches the door.
That ancient intuition has never really left us. Even in a largely secular age, our stories continue to insist that darkness cannot simply seize us. Dracula must be welcomed. The Ring must be claimed. The White Witch tempts Edmund with enchanted sweetness. Darth Vader invites Luke to join him. Hannibal Lecter enters Clarice Starling’s mind long before he ever escapes his cell. The forms change, but the pattern remains remarkably constant. The greatest victories of darkness are achieved not by force but by consent.
Perhaps this is why these stories continue to resonate. They are not really about vampires or devils at all. They are about us. We like to imagine that evil comes from somewhere beyond the horizon, an alien force that erupts into ordinary lives. Folklore suggests otherwise. It waits politely outside, asking only to be admitted. More often than we care to acknowledge, we are the ones who turn the handle.
It is a disturbing thought, for it shifts the battleground. The struggle between good and evil is no longer fought in distant heavens between angels and demons. It takes place at the threshold of every human heart. The decisive moment is not when the Dark Lord appears, but when we recognise the quiet voice that says, Just this once. No one will know. You deserve this. Come with me.
And that raises an even more uncomfortable possibility. If the Devil depends upon our invitation, if the darkness enters because we allow it to enter, then perhaps the most frightening encounter is not with some horned apparition lurking beyond the doorway.
The dark magic of Fairy Tales
And what hills, what hills are those, my love
Those hills so dark and low?
Those are the hills of hell, my love
Where you and I must go
House Carpenter (The Daemon Lover), Laurence Price (1657)
Perhaps this is why fairy tales have proved so enduring. Not the diminutive winged fairies of modern fantasy, nor the escapist worlds of contemporary fiction, but the old literary tales of Perrault, the Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen and the countless anonymous storytellers whose voices echo through the centuries. These were never merely stories for children. They were repositories of collective memory, preserving in symbolic form those hard truths about human nature that every generation must rediscover for itself.
Their lessons are remarkably consistent. Do not wander carelessly from the path. Beware the stranger whose charm conceals darker intentions. Be wary of gifts that appear too generous, bargains that seem too easy, promises that flatter your deepest desires. Little Red Riding Hood trusts the Wolf. Hansel and Gretel are tempted by sweetness. Bluebeard forbids the one door that curiosity cannot resist. Snow White accepts the poisoned apple from a smiling hand. Again and again, the stories remind us that evil rarely presents itself as evil. It arrives disguised as opportunity, pleasure, beauty, knowledge or kindness.
Yet alongside these literary fairy tales runs an older and stranger tradition, carried not in children’s books but in the folk songs and ballads of the Celtic lands. Here the threshold leads not to vampires or devils but to Faërie, that mysterious realm which is neither wholly benevolent nor wholly malign, but profoundly Other.
This is not the miniature world of charming sprites and decorative enchantment that later ages would create, but the older Faerie of folklore: a place of wonder and peril, beauty and terror, where the boundaries between the human world and the unknown become uncertain. It is the realm Tolkien described in On Fairy-Stories not as an escape into childish fantasy, but as an encounter with a deeper reality at the edge of the human imagination.
The old ballads return to this theme with remarkable persistence. In Tam Lin, Janet ventures into the haunted wood of Carterhaugh and confronts the Fairy Queen herself to reclaim the man she loves [There’s a wonderful recounting of the story here in this entertaining blog post. In Thomas the Rhymer, the poet follows the Queen of Elfland beneath the Eildon Hills, exchanging the familiar world for one where time and truth obey altogether different laws. What is it about Fairy Queens. Something to do with Lilith, who we introduced in Lucifer Descending? And in the haunting ballad of The House Carpenter, often known as The Daemon Lover, a mysterious stranger returns from the past, offering riches, adventure and escape from an ordinary life. The woman accepts his invitation, only to discover too late that she has embarked upon a voyage from which there will be no safe return. There is a fine version of House Capenter by Tim and Molly Obrien at the end of this article,
Whether these enigmatic, supernatural figures are fairies, spirits or the Devil himself is almost beside the point. They belong to that older landscape of myth where temptation rarely appears in monstrous form. It comes instead as beauty, longing, nostalgia or desire – the whispered promise that happiness lies just beyond the next horizon. The threshold is crossed willingly, the protagonist stepping beyond the known world into a place where the he or she returns changed, if they return at all; and the cost is understood only when, as in House Carpenter, the familiar shore has disappeared from sight.
Tam Lin and the Faery Host.Stephanie Pui-Mun Law
The danger is not always wickedness, but enchantment itself: the loss of home, identity, memory and the comforting certainties of ordinary life. The Fair Folk do not necessarily seek to destroy mortals; their peril lies in their indifference to human limits and human time. They belong to an older order of existence, one that fascinates precisely because it cannot be reduced to our categories of good and evil.
Like Lucifer, the Folk of Faerie seldom arrive as monsters. They are beautiful, alluring and irresistible. They invite rather than compel. The traveller accepts shelter for a night, follows a haunting melody into the greenwood, or rides with a mysterious stranger beneath the moon, only to awaken in a world where familiar landmarks have vanished and time itself has become unmoored. The old ballads understood, as surely as the theologians, that the most perilous journeys begin not with violence but with invitation.
It is a vision that would have been familiar to Tolkien, to Yeats and to the anonymous singers who carried these stories through generations: Faërie is not a place of escape from reality, but a place where reality is seen more clearly. It reminds us that mystery still exists, that wonder can be dangerous, and that every threshold crossed carries the possibility of transformation.
That is why these tales continue to speak to us long after we have ceased believing in enchanted forests, wicked witches, talking beasts or the hidden kingdoms beneath the hills. Their monsters and enchantments are symbols, and symbols possess a curious longevity. The Wolf is not simply a wolf; he is deception. The Witch is not merely an old woman in the woods; she is temptation. The Dragon is not just a beast to be slain; it is fear itself. The Fair Folk are not simply supernatural beings; they embody the irresistible allure of the unknown, the longing to escape the ordinary, and the price that is so often paid for crossing forbidden thresholds. Like Lucifer himself, they endure because they give form to forces that are otherwise difficult to describe.
The genius of these stories lies in their refusal to preach. They do not offer philosophical arguments or theological treatises. Instead, they invite us to recognise ourselves. They speak in the language of metaphor, where wisdom lingers long after the details have faded from memory. We remember the path through the forest, the forbidden door, the poisoned fruit, the moonlit crossroads and the welcoming hearth because they are landmarks within the landscape of our own lives.
Perhaps that is why humanity has never abandoned these tales. We do not return to them because we believe that vampires cannot cross a threshold uninvited, that wolves converse with little girls, or that the Queen of Elfland still rides abroad on Halloween. We return because they express, with unsettling clarity, something we know instinctively but are reluctant to admit: the greatest dangers seldom arrive by force. More often, they are welcomed. The oldest monsters ask permission before they enter, and the hand that lifts the latch is usually our own.
If that is true, then the threshold is not merely the doorway of a cottage, a castle or a haunted house. It is the boundary of the self. The decisive struggle is not between angels and demons in some distant heaven, but within every human heart. The Dark Lord may wait outside, but someone must always open the door.
And when we ask who it was that welcomed him in, we find ourselves confronted by the most disquieting image of all: a face in the mirror.
The Face in the Mirror
So where, finally, does all this leave Lucifer?
After all the centuries, all the sermons and theological arguments, all the paintings, sculptures, poems, novels, films and songs, we are left with a rather unsettling possibility: perhaps the Devil’s greatest achievement was not persuading humanity that he existed, but persuading humanity that evil always belonged somewhere else.
The enduring appeal of Lucifer lies partly in his usefulness. He gives us somewhere to place the things we find hardest to explain about ourselves. When the world becomes cruel, when individuals commit acts of extraordinary brutality, when societies descend into hatred and violence, we instinctively look for a monster. We want a face, a name, a single embodiment of wickedness upon whom we can project all that we fear and despise. The serpent in Eden, the horned tempter at the crossroads, the Dark Lord in his fortress, the tyrant in his palace: these figures offer a reassuring simplicity. Defeat the villain, destroy the source of corruption, restore the natural order, and the world is made whole again.
History, however, has rarely been so obliging.
The twentieth century, the most technologically advanced age humanity had yet created, also produced some of the most terrible examples of human cruelty. It did not require supernatural intervention. It manufactured its own infernos through ideology, bureaucracy and obedience. The great crimes of the modern age were not committed by demons emerging from the shadows, but by human beings who believed themselves to be serving higher purposes. The machinery of death was designed not only by fanatics but by administrators; not only by monsters but by ordinary men who convinced themselves that their actions were necessary, inevitable or even virtuous.
This was the disturbing insight behind Hannah Arendt’s famous reflections on Adolf Eichmann and the “banality of evil”. Evil did not always announce itself with theatrical menace. It did not always arrive wearing horns and carrying a pitchfork. Sometimes it appeared in a grey suit, spoke in measured tones and filled out forms. Sometimes it hid behind procedure, ideology and obedience. The most frightening villains are not always those who know they are evil, but those who have persuaded themselves that they are doing good.
The Devil, one suspects, would have appreciated the irony.
For centuries humanity has blamed him for our darkest impulses, yet he might reasonably argue that he has often been given rather more credit than he deserves. He has been accused of starting wars, corrupting rulers, tempting sinners and poisoning societies, but mankind has demonstrated a remarkable capacity for invention when it comes to cruelty. Lucifer may have whispered in the ear, but humanity has frequently supplied the imagination, the ambition and the machinery.
This is the argument at the heart of my own earlier song Devil’s Work, where I imagined Lucifer brought before the tribunal of humanity to answer for all that had been done in his name. His defence was not that he was innocent in any moral sense, but that mankind had misunderstood his role. He was the convenient explanation, the eternal scapegoat, the mythical culprit upon whom humanity could place the burden of its own failings. The tyrants, the torturers and the conquerors had not required his instruction. They had acted according to their own desires, their own fears and their own visions of power.
Lucifer’s argument, uncomfortable as it may be, contains a warning. If we imagine evil solely as something external, we risk ignoring the darker possibilities within ourselves. We are comforted by the idea that the Devil is someone else: the enemy, the stranger, the fanatic on the other side of the border, the person whose beliefs we find abhorrent. Yet history repeatedly demonstrates that the line between righteousness and cruelty is not always as clearly marked as we would like to believe.
The old proverb warns us, “Don’t let the Devil ride, for if he rides long enough, he will want to drive.” But perhaps the deeper lesson is that the Devil does not always need to seize the reins. Sometimes we hand them over willingly, convinced that we are travelling towards some noble destination.
This is why Milton’s Lucifer remains such a powerful creation. The genius of Paradise Lost was not that it gave us a monster, but that it gave us a personality. Milton’s Satan is seductive because he possesses qualities we recognise: intelligence, ambition, courage, eloquence and a fierce sense of grievance. His tragedy is not that he lacks greatness, but that greatness becomes corrupted by pride. The brightest of angels falls because he cannot accept that he is not the centre of the universe.
And perhaps that is why Lucifer continues to fascinate us. He is not merely the personification of evil. He is the personification of self-deception. He represents the dangerous human capacity to transform ambition into destiny, resentment into righteousness and cruelty into necessity. He is the voice that assures every Dark Lord, from Sauron “in the land Mordor where the shadows lie”, to the tyrants of history, that he is not the villain of his own story.
W.H. Auden understood this with characteristic precision. The story is told that, after his return to the Anglican faith in which he had been raised, he once asked a Sunday school class if they knew what the Devil looked like. The expected answer was probably some variation of the traditional image: horns, tail, pitchfork and sulphurous breath. Instead, Auden replied: “The Devil looks like me.”
Whether the anecdote is exact or embellished, its truth is unmistakable. It captures something that theologians, poets and philosophers have wrestled with for centuries. The Devil is frightening not because he is alien, but because he is familiar. He does not merely lurk in some distant infernal kingdom. He exists in the ordinary human capacity for vanity, cruelty, resentment and self-justification.
Which brings us back to Mick Jagger’s immortal introduction: “Please allow me to introduce myself.” The Devil who appears in Sympathy for the Devil is not a medieval demon but a sophisticated observer of history, a gentleman who has watched empires rise and fall, revolutions become tyrannies and ideals become excuses for violence. His greatest trick is not that he causes humanity’s crimes, but that he knows humanity is perfectly capable of committing them without his assistance.
Perhaps that is why Lucifer refuses to disappear.
Religions may change. Churches may empty. Old cosmologies may fade. Yet the questions that created Lucifer remain stubbornly alive. Why do human beings seek power? Why do we justify cruelty? Why do we convince ourselves that our own darkness is righteous? Why do we so often recognise evil most clearly in others while overlooking it within ourselves?
These are not merely theological questions. They are human questions.
Lucifer survives because he is more than a devil. He is a metaphor for the eternal struggle between our aspirations and our appetites, between the angels we imagine ourselves to be and the creatures we sometimes become.
He falls from Heaven in the old stories. He rises again in every generation’s imagination. He changes his name, his appearance and his costume. He becomes Satan, Mephistopheles, Sauron, Vader, Palpatine, the Joker, the Big Bad, the outlaw, the rebel, the rock star and the shadow at the edge of the road.
But perhaps his most enduring incarnation is the simplest: He has the potential to be face in the mirror.
René Magritte, Not to be Reproduced (1937)
Coda: The Devil’s Human Victims
One final reflection. For all the glamour that Lucifer has acquired in literature, music and popular culture, there is another story—far less entertaining and infinitely more tragic—that shadows his long ascent through the Western imagination.
If the Devil has inspired some of our greatest poetry, our darkest cinema and our most provocative rock music, belief in his earthly agents has also left a trail of blood.
The medieval world certainly knew religious persecution, but it was during the supposedly enlightened ages of the Renaissance and the Reformation that Europe’s obsession with Satan reached its murderous zenith. Between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries, tens of thousands of people—overwhelmingly women, though not exclusively—were executed as witches. Catholics and Protestants alike proved equally susceptible to the conviction that the Devil walked among them, recruiting servants through pacts, sabbaths and sorcery. Learned judges, theologians and magistrates, armed with books such as the infamous Malleus Maleficarum, lent intellectual respectability to fear, while torture transformed suspicion into confession. The Renaissance, which celebrated reason and rediscovered classical learning, was paradoxically also an age of extraordinary credulity.
Nor was Europe alone in projecting the image of the Devil onto those it neither understood nor trusted. Across the Middle East, minority faiths have long borne the burden of misunderstanding. The Yazidis, whose reverence for Melek Taus—the Peacock Angel—has repeatedly been misrepresented as “devil worship”, have endured centuries of persecution, culminating in the genocidal campaign waged by ISIS in 2014. The Druze, too, because of the esoteric nature of their beliefs, have often been regarded with suspicion and, at various times, suffered discrimination and violence at the hands of those who judged them through the lens of orthodoxy rather than understanding. Similar accusations have echoed through history against countless other minorities, where ignorance and fear have proved more potent than theology.
The pattern is painfully familiar. Societies under stress seek an enemy within. The Devil rarely appears in person; instead, he is said to wear the face of the outsider, the dissenter, the heretic, the foreigner, the eccentric woman living on the edge of the village, or the obscure community whose customs remain mysterious. To accuse another of serving Satan has often been less a statement of faith than a licence to persecute.
There is a profound irony here. In the biblical narrative, Satan is ha-satan—the Accuser. Yet throughout history it has been human beings who have most enthusiastically assumed that role. Convinced they were defending God against the Devil, they have inflicted upon one another torments that no demon could have devised more effectively.
Perhaps that is the final paradox of Lucifer Ascending. The Devil’s greatest triumph has never been to persuade people to worship him. Such cases have always been vanishingly rare. His more enduring legacy has been to persuade men and women that they alone possess absolute certainty about who serves the powers of darkness. Once that conviction takes hold, compassion yields to righteousness, neighbours become enemies, and persecution begins with the comforting belief that one is acting in the service of Good.
Milton gave Lucifer the finest speeches. The Romantics made him a hero. Hollywood turned him into an icon. Rock music made him fashionable. Yet history offers a quieter, sadder lesson. The true tragedy of the Devil is not found in black masses or satanic cults, but in the countless innocent lives destroyed by those who imagined they could see him reflected in the faces of others.
And so the story comes full circle. The mirror in which we thought we glimpsed the Prince of Darkness reveals, instead, ourselves, and what began, for me, as a literary diversion, a frolic through mythology, theology and popular culture, has ended somewhere altogether less comfortable.
I had imagined this essay as an exploration of one of Western civilisation’s most enduring characters: Lucifer as rebel, tempter, antihero and cultural icon; the Devil of Milton and Goethe, of Blake and Baudelaire, of The Rolling Stones, Hollywood and heavy metal. It was, at first, an exercise in intellectual curiosity – a walk through the darker galleries of our collective imagination. Yet, as so often happens, the journey led elsewhere.
For behind the poetry, the music and the mythology lay a far more sobering truth. The Devil’s greatest appearances have rarely been in cathedrals, black masses or horror films, but in history itself: in witch trials, inquisitions, pogroms, persecutions and genocides, wherever one group has become convinced that another is not merely mistaken, but evil incarnate.
The realisation is a melancholy one. Perhaps Lucifer’s most enduring triumph has never been to persuade humanity to believe in him, nor even to worship him, but to persuade us that we know precisely where evil resides – and that it is always somewhere else.
That is a comforting thought. It is also one of the most dangerous.
In the end, I have come to suspect that the enduring power of the Lucifer story lies not in what it tells us about the Devil, but in what it reveals about ourselves. Every generation recreates him in its own image. Every age discovers him in its chosen enemies. Every certainty carries within it the temptation to become accusation.
What began as a fancy has ended as a cautionary tale. And, perhaps, that was the story waiting to be told all along.
Lucifer, star of the morning Lucifer, prince of the night Lucifer falling through darkness Lucifer cast from the light.
Lucifer sits in his wasteland Trapped in the cage of his pride The sirens of importunate circumstance Reclining in ranks by his side Plots he has made, so ingenuous. Dangerous follies and schemes For he has stage-managed quite strenuous Drunken prophecies, libels and dreams.
Lucifer frets in the wasteland Locked in a pillar of ice We know of this only to well We have visited him there once or twice For his is the language of liars And his is the honour of thieves And he is the master of eloquence As the last of the honest men leaves.
Lucifer crawls from the wasteland No solace or peace or rest. For he has corrupted the wisest And he has co-opted the best. And all that is good has since vanished And with it, the fair and the true And the silences hurting his demon heart Are haunting, haunting you.
And the road that winds out of Meggido Is the path that leads to the pit For Lucifer prizes a web of disguises He merely selects one to fit. And the road that runs down to Jericho Is the path that leads him to you And the paradox searing his demon soul Is hunting, hunting you.
So make you no truce with Lucifer Lucifer of fiery breath For Lucifer is treachery And treachery is death.
Lucifer, star of the morning Lucifer, prince of the night Lucifer falling through darkness Lucifer cast from the light.
America is a country where you can drive from Damascus to Jerusalem via Jericho and Bethlehem without leaving the United States. Its map is littered with biblical names – geography of faith transplanted onto a new continent.
That was no accident. From the Puritans’ “city upon a hill” to Manifest Destiny and today’s Christian nationalism, Americans have repeatedly imagined their country as something more than a nation: a providential project, a New Jerusalem, a civilisation with a sacred inheritance.
But there is another America – the constitutional America, deliberately wary of the fusion of church and state; the pluralist America in which Christianity is one inheritance among many; and the America whose power is increasingly viewed abroad with scepticism.
This essay explores the curious convergence of a renewed intellectual interest in Christianity and Western civilisation, the muscular Christianity of the contemporary American Right, the crusader imagery of its warriors, the spectacle of the television evangelist, and the extraordinary political theology surrounding the Trump era.
At the heart of it is a simple question: what happens when a nation with immense material power begins to clothe that power in sacred language?
New Jerusalem
Look at a map of the United States and you can almost read the Bible in the place names. Bethlehem appears here, Jerusalem there; Jericho, Damascus, Nazareth, Salem, Shiloh, Zion, Hebron, Canaan, Goshen, Galilee, Gilead and Lebanon are scattered across the American landscape. Some are little more than dots on a map; others grew into substantial towns and cities. Together they form something more than a collection of quaint biblical echoes. They constitute a kind of geography of faith: a continent renamed, in part, through the vocabulary of Scripture.
America did not merely settle a new continent. It imagined itself within an ancient story.
The idea goes back to the earliest European settlers, particularly the Puritans, whose understanding of the New World was saturated with the language of Exodus, covenant, wilderness and the Promised Land. The voyage across the Atlantic could be imagined as an escape from bondage. The wilderness became a place of testing. The new settlement could become a covenanted community. America was not simply somewhere to live; it might become somewhere to begin again.
John Winthrop’s famous 1630 sermon, A Model of Christian Charity, gave the idea one of its enduring metaphors: the new community would be “as a city upon a hill”, watched by the world. The original meaning was less a declaration of American superiority than a warning about American responsibility. A people claiming a covenant with God would be judged by how it behaved.
Over time, however, the warning became a boast. The city upon the hill became the shining city upon the hill; the beacon became a claim to exceptionalism; and the American experiment acquired an increasingly providential character. The United States came to imagine itself not merely as a nation among nations but as a nation with a special mission.
This is one reason the idea of a New Jerusalem has such a deep resonance in the American imagination. The Book of Revelation promises a new heaven and a new earth, with the New Jerusalem descending from heaven. The old order passes away; the world is renewed; God dwells among humanity. It is the ultimate story of restoration.
America was, in a secular and political sense, another version of the same story: the old world left behind, a new world discovered, history apparently offering a second chance.
Europe had its cathedrals, dynasties, wars and accumulated centuries. America had the wilderness and the future.
And the wilderness was not empty.
That is where the mythology becomes more complicated. The promised land was already inhabited. The New Jerusalem was built through the displacement and dispossession of Native peoples. The language of Providence accompanied conquest. Manifest Destiny transformed territorial expansion into something that could be understood not simply as geopolitical ambition but as providential destiny.
The American frontier was therefore conquered with the Bible as much as the gun. The gun supplied the means; the Bible supplied, for many, the story.
This should not be reduced to cynical propaganda. Many of the people who settled the frontier genuinely believed that Providence was guiding them. They read their lives through Scripture. They named their settlements after biblical places. They understood victory and defeat, drought and harvest, migration and death within a scriptural framework. The preacher and the gunfighter could inhabit the same cultural universe.
The extraordinary thing is how durable that religious imagination has proved. The United States has repeatedly retold its national story in the language of fall, decline, threat, renewal and redemption. The names and metaphors change, but the narrative structure persists.
America sins; America suffers; America forgets itself; America is threatened; America awakens; America is restored.
It is almost a biblical narrative translated into political mythology.
From the city on the hill to muscular Christianity
This is the historical backdrop against which the contemporary revival of Christian language in American conservatism needs to be understood. It did not begin with Donald Trump, nor is it reducible to the phenomenon now labelled “Christian nationalism”. There has always been an American civil religion in which God, nation, freedom, sacrifice and destiny overlap.
What is new is the intensity with which some contemporary conservatives are seeking to recover Christianity not simply as private belief but as an explicit source of civilisational identity.
There has been, in parallel, an intellectual rediscovery of the Christian inheritance among thinkers who are not conventionally understood as theologians. British historian and co-host of the popular podcast The Rest is History, Tom Holland’s Dominion is perhaps the best-known example. His argument is essentially historical: many of the moral assumptions that modern secular Westerners regard as self-evidently universal – the dignity of the individual, the moral significance of the weak, equality before God, concern for the marginalised and suspicion of arbitrary power – were profoundly shaped by Christianity. See in In That Howling Infinite, Getting back to the garden – Tom Holland’s Dominion. The illustration at the head of this essay is taken from the cover of this thought-provoking book.
Historian Niall Ferguson and others have approached the question from somewhat different directions, examining the decline of Western confidence, the institutions and habits that made the West successful, and the possibility that societies can lose the cultural foundations that sustain them.
There is much to respect in this argument. Christianity did profoundly shape the moral and intellectual architecture of Western civilisation. To deny that is to indulge in a curious form of historical amnesia. But there is a distinction worth preserving between Christianity as an inheritance and Christianity as a political identity.
The West is Christian in its historical formation, but it is not only Christian. It is also Greek and Roman, Jewish and Islamic in important respects, Renaissance and Reformation, Enlightenment and scientific, liberal and socialist. Its civilisation emerged through argument as much as inheritance. Indeed, one of the defining characteristics of the West may be its capacity to argue with itself.
The danger begins when recognition of the Christian inheritance becomes a claim to Christian superiority, and when civilisational confidence becomes civilisational self-certainty.
For there is an awkward historical fact that every honest account of Western civilisation has to accommodate: the civilisation that produced the Sermon on the Mount also produced religious persecution, slavery, colonialism, racial theories, imperial conquest and industrialised warfare. It proclaimed universal human dignity while repeatedly deciding that some humans were more equal than others.
The West has produced some extraordinary moral ideals. It has also repeatedly failed to live up to them. That is not an argument against the ideals. Quite the reverse. It is an argument for taking them seriously.
JD Vance, Marco Rubio and the recovery of a sacred inheritance
The contemporary American conservative project – propagated by the current Us administration- therefore has an interesting intellectual spectrum.
At one end is the civilisational argument: the West has forgotten its inheritance and must recover confidence in the ideas and institutions that made it what it is. Christianity is not necessarily proposed as a state religion but as the moral and cultural foundation of Western civilisation.
The Catholic dimension is particularly interesting. The conversion of vice-president JD Vance, for example, has given his political thought an intellectual vocabulary that differs from the older Reaganite fusion of individual liberty, free markets and traditional morality. Catholic social thought permits a critique of atomised individualism and places greater emphasis upon family, community, solidarity, responsibility and the common good.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s formulation is similarly civilisational. His argument for Western renewal encompasses reindustrialisation, secure borders, a more restrained conception of the international order and, most importantly, recognition of what he describes as the Christian “sacred inheritance”.
This is not necessarily the same thing as theocracy. It is an argument that a civilisation requires more than institutions and material prosperity. It needs a moral vocabulary, a sense of purpose and some conception of the good.
That proposition is not absurd. Indeed, the secular West has been wrestling with precisely this problem for decades: What happens when a society loses the stories that once gave meaning to sacrifice, obligation, family, citizenship and responsibility?
But then comes the other end of the spectrum: muscular Christianity.
Come the Crusader
Here the intellectual argument becomes physical.
The language is martial. The imagery is martial. The body itself becomes part of the message: warrior tattoos, biblical inscriptions, fighter jets, missiles, military ceremony, prayer and the rhetoric of providence.
The Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth’s invocation of the Psalm, “Blessed be the Lord, my rock, who trains my hands for war and my fingers for battle”, is emblematic. Christianity is no longer merely being invoked as the moral inheritance of a civilisation. It is being placed beside the instruments of American military power.
There is a long tradition of Christian soldiers, Christian chaplains and religiously motivated warriors. Christianity has never been pacifist in any simple historical sense. The just-war tradition emerged precisely because Christians had to confront the moral problem of political violence.
But just-war thinking is an attempt to restrain power. It is not a licence to sanctify it. The distinction is crucial.
A soldier may quite properly pray before battle. A soldier may believe that God gives him courage. But when the institutions of the state begin to present military action in explicitly sacred terms, a different question arises: is God being invoked as a source of personal conscience, or as a source of political legitimacy?
The difference between “I believe this war is just” and “God has sanctioned this war” is enormous. The first is political conviction. The second approaches theological authority.
And once the military becomes wrapped in sacred language, the danger is that the moral uncertainty inherent in war disappears. The enemy is no longer merely an adversary whose motives and humanity must be understood. He becomes an obstacle in a providential drama.
That is where the crusader metaphor becomes more than colourful rhetoric. The crusader did not merely fight. He fought under a sacred sign.
Television evangelists and the politics of spectacle
There is another strand of American religious culture that belongs in this story: the television evangelist.
The old televangelists perfected a distinctive synthesis of faith and spectacle. Religion became mass entertainment, personal testimony became political mobilisation, the preacher became a celebrity and the audience became a constituency. The language was often intensely personal: belief, victory, persecution, redemption, prosperity, enemies and deliverance.
It is difficult not to see an echo of that culture in contemporary American politics.
President Donald Trump is not, in any conventional sense, an ideological theologian. He is transactional, improvisational and instinctively theatrical – and narcissistic, vindictive and profane to boot. His politics are based less upon a coherent doctrine than upon loyalty, grievance, performance, personal authority and the promise of restoration.
Yet he has proved extraordinarily compatible with the religious imagination of parts of the American Right. The convergence is almost anthropological. The televangelist says: You have been betrayed. The world is against you. I understand your grievance. Follow me and we can restore what has been lost. The populist politician says much the same thing, replacing salvation with national restoration.
There is consequently an uneasy resemblance between the culture of the television evangelist and the politics of Trumpism: personality, spectacle, grievance, loyalty, money, performance and the promise of redemption.
The difference, of course, is that the televangelist claims to speak for God while the politician claims to speak for the people. When those two claims begin to reinforce one another, however, politics acquires some of the characteristics of religion. It acquires saints and sinners, martyrs and enemies, rituals and sacred gatherings, heretics and converts, betrayal and redemption.
That phenomenon was visible in the extraordinary response to the murder and memorialisation of the charismatic, popular and divisive conservative activist Charlie Kirk. The point is not whether the grief manifested across the rightwing media-verse was sincere – it plainly was – nor whether the religious language was genuine. It was both. The more interesting observation is that the death of a political activist can be absorbed into a larger narrative of sacrifice, persecution, martyrdom and national renewal.
This is where political movements can begin to acquire a religious emotional architecture.
And it is worth being careful here. Political martyrdom is not uniquely Christian. Communists, fascists, nationalists, revolutionaries and liberation movements have all created martyrs. But Christianity supplies an especially powerful vocabulary of sacrifice, blood, witness, redemption and resurrection. The political temptation is obvious.
The American paradox
And yet all of this muscular Christianity, civilisational renewal and providential rhetoric is unfolding against a remarkable backdrop: America itself is deeply divided about what America is.
It is one of the most diverse societies on earth. It contains multiple religious traditions and enormous numbers of people who are secular or non-religious. Its politics have become intensely polarised. Its cultural conflicts are increasingly existential in tone.
Christian nationalism therefore confronts a paradox of its own making. It seeks to define a pluralistic country through one of its historical traditions. It can say, with considerable historical justification, that Christianity helped shape America. But it cannot simply turn that historical fact into a constitutional proposition that America belongs to Christians.
The American founding contains a deliberate tension here. Religion was important to the cultural environment in which the Republic developed, but the Constitution did not establish a Christian state. The genius – and perhaps the fragility – of the American experiment was that a profoundly religious society attempted to construct a political order in which different religions, and ultimately non-belief, could coexist.
The city upon the hill was never a single-denomination clubhouse.
That makes the contemporary rhetoric of Christian nationalism both understandable and problematic. It is partly a response to a genuine sense of cultural dislocation: secularisation, demographic change, immigration, declining institutional trust, economic insecurity, the collapse of older forms of community and the sense among many people that the country they knew has disappeared.
Grievances require ideology before they become political mobilisation. Christian nationalism can provide that ideology. It offers an explanation of what has gone wrong and a story about how it might be repaired. But the story can become dangerous when “America” and “Christianity” are treated as interchangeable terms. For then criticism of America can begin to sound like criticism of Christianity, and criticism of Christianity can be interpreted as hostility to America.
That is not a recipe for pluralism.
The constitutional counterweight
There is an important American corrective to all this biblical geography and civilisational rhetoric: the Constitution. America may have imagined itself as a chosen people building a city upon a hill, but the republic’s founders did not establish a Christian state. The First Amendment famously prohibited Congress from establishing a religion while protecting the free exercise of religion. That distinction was fundamental. Religion was not to be banished from public life; neither was the state to acquire a church.
This is one of the great American paradoxes. The country was profoundly shaped by Christianity, yet its constitutional architecture deliberately separated religious authority from governmental authority. The separation of church and state was not an act of hostility towards religion. It was, among other things, a recognition that a society of competing faiths could not remain free if the state became the arbiter of religious truth.
The distinction matters today because it separates two propositions that are increasingly liable to be conflated. The first is historical: Christianity profoundly influenced the formation of American institutions, habits and moral assumptions. The second is political: therefore, the American state should embody Christianity. The first is plainly defensible; the second is precisely the proposition against which the constitutional settlement was designed to provide some protection.
There is an irony here that reaches beyond America. The Christian tradition itself contains a long and complicated argument about the proper relationship between spiritual and temporal power. “Render unto Caesar” is not a complete constitutional theory, but it establishes a distinction that has proved remarkably fertile. Christianity may speak to the conscience of the citizen without becoming the official ideology of the state.
And perhaps this is where the larger philosophical movement: the extraordinary evolution of Western thought from an admiration for the mighty to an ethic increasingly concerned with the meek. The ancient world admired strength, glory, conquest and heroic virtue. Achilles is the archetype, particularly for the likes of Hegseth (absent, of course, the arguably homoerotic Patroclus undertone): muscled and magnificent, wrathful, proud and formidable. Christianity did something extraordinarily disruptive to that moral hierarchy. The mighty are sidelined, placing the weak, the poor, the humble and the suffering much closer to the centre of moral concern.
The Sermon on the Mount turned the conventional hierarchy upside down. Blessed are not necessarily the conquerors, the powerful and the triumphant, but the meek, the merciful and the peacemakers. Over centuries that moral inversion seeped, unevenly and imperfectly, into Western law, politics and social thought. It eventually became possible to imagine that the legitimacy of power should be measured not simply by what the powerful can accomplish, but by how they treat those without power.
That is a remarkable development in the history of political civilisation. And it provides an interesting test for contemporary muscular Christianity. The question is not whether Christianity can coexist with strength. Of course it can; Christianity has done so for two millennia. The more searching question is whether the Christian inheritance is being invoked to restrain power or to sanctify it.
That distinction brings us back to the Constitution. The American founders did not solve the problem of religion and power, but they constructed a political system in which neither church nor state was supposed to possess the whole truth. The republic was to remain secular in its institutions precisely so that its citizens could remain religious — or not religious — in their consciences.
The city upon the hill, in other words, was never meant to be a theocracy. It was an experiment in self-government.
And perhaps that is one of the more enduring contributions of the American experiment to the Western story: not the claim that America had discovered the New Jerusalem, but the much more modest proposition that people of different faiths could attempt to build a political community without first agreeing upon God.
What the rest of the world sees
There is also an international dimension that American civilisational rhetoric can easily overlook.
The United States remains the world’s pre-eminent military power, one of its largest economies and the centre of an extraordinary network of alliances and institutions. Its technology, universities, culture, financial system and military reach remain formidable.
But power and credibility are not the same thing. A hegemon can compel without inspiring.
And American power depends upon something more intangible than aircraft carriers and dollars: other countries must believe that American commitments mean something, that alliances are durable, that Washington understands the difference between interest and principle, and that its rhetoric about democracy, freedom and the rules-based order has some relationship to its conduct. That is where the present moment becomes particularly awkward.
When the world’s most powerful democracy speaks in the language of Christian civilisation while its president behaves, to a sceptical foreign observer, like a transactional television personality – opportunistic, self-promoting, bullying and apparently indifferent to ideological consistency – the result can be a peculiar dissonance.
The United States says values. The world watches behaviour. America says leadership. Others see transaction. America invokes faith. Others wonder whether they should still have faith in America.
That word “faith” is not accidental. International relations has its own definition. Alliances depend upon confidence. Treaties depend upon credibility. Soft power depends upon the willingness of others to believe that the power being exercised is legitimate, or at least predictable. But once confidence begins to disappear, it is remarkably difficult to restore.
And this is where the Christian rhetoric can become counterproductive. If America presents itself not simply as a powerful state but as the guardian of Western civilisation and Christian values, it raises the moral expectations by which its conduct will be judged. If it invokes God, the world can ask whether its conduct reflects the qualities attributed to God. If it invokes civilisation, the world can ask whether its conduct is civilised. If it invokes the rules-based order, the world can ask whether the rules apply to Washington as well as to everybody else.
The higher the rhetoric, the greater the distance when behaviour falls short.
An American pontiff in Washington’s shadow
The election of an American pope adds an extraordinary complication.
Pope Leo XIV is, by definition, an American product of the culture, but he does not belong to America in the political sense. The Catholic Church is universal, and the papacy represents an authority that transcends national interest.
His evident reservations about aspects of the Trump administration, particularly its treatment of migrants and its harder-edged nationalism, are therefore significant. The Pope cannot simply be absorbed into the American civilisational project because Catholicism itself contains a competing conception of universality.
That is perhaps one reason the current “Catholic moment” is so interesting. American Catholicism is simultaneously being courted by the nationalist Right and reminded by its own universal tradition that Christianity is larger than the nation. The Pope’s position effectively asks a question that Christian nationalism finds difficult to answer: where does Christian allegiance end and national allegiance begin?
The answer cannot simply be “wherever America says it does” because the Christian faith, at least in its Catholic conception, does not stop at the border. Nor does the stranger cease to be a human being when he crosses it.
The return to faith – and a Mahatma moment
In the intellectual world, therefore, something genuinely important is happening beneath the politics.
A number of intellectually serious people are rediscovering Christianity because they have come to understand that the supposedly secular values of the modern West are not as self-explanatory as they once assumed. They are asking where ideas of human dignity, equality, compassion, sacrifice and moral obligation came from, and whether a civilisation can sustain them once it forgets their genealogy. This is a worthwhile conversation, but there is a danger in turning it into a story of Western vindication.
The West has an extraordinary inheritance. It also has an extraordinary record of failing to live up to it.
This is where an apocryphal quip by Mahatma Gandhi becomes unexpectedly useful. Asked what he thought of Western civilisation, Gandhi is supposed to have replied: “I think it would be a good idea.” He almost certainly did not say it. But the joke survives because it captures something profound.
The West has produced ideals of extraordinary moral power. It has also spent much of its history demonstrating how difficult those ideals are to practise. The point is not to discard the inheritance. Quite the opposite. It is to take it seriously enough to judge ourselves by it.
Perhaps the proper response to the rediscovery of Western civilisation is therefore neither triumphalism nor self-loathing, but gratitude without complacency – acknowledging the Christian foundations of much Western moral thought without pretending that Christianity has a monopoly on virtue. We can recognise the achievements of the West without denying the violence that accompanied them. We can defend liberal democracy without pretending that every Western action has been liberal or democratic.
And perhaps the deepest lesson of the Christian inheritance is that being “chosen” is not a certificate of moral superiority. The biblical prophets spent an extraordinary amount of time telling their own people that God’s favour did not exempt them from judgement.
Indeed, the Bible that gave America its language of Exodus, Promised Land and Manifest Destiny also gave it the prophets. And the prophets were not particularly polite to powerful people who believed themselves righteous. They asked who was being excluded, who was being oppressed, how the stranger was being treated, what happened to the poor, the widow and the orphan, and what became of justice when power convinced itself that it was acting in the name of God.
That is why the phrase “What would Jesus do?” has more bite than its sometimes saccharine popular usage suggests. It is not merely a question about personal kindness. Applied seriously to statecraft, war and national power, it becomes an interrogation of the entire project.
What would Jesus make of the stranger at the border? What would he make of the poor? What would he make of vengeance? What would he make of the worship of strength? What would he make of the powerful congratulating themselves on their righteousness? What would he make of the Sermon on the Mount?
And, most awkwardly for the muscular Christian, what would he make of: “Blessed are the peacemakers”?
The great American story may therefore not be that America is the New Jerusalem. It is that America has repeatedly imagined itself becoming one. The city upon the hill was an aspiration before it became a boast. The New Jerusalem is an eschatological promise, not a national certificate. Civilisation is something to be practised, not possessed.
Which brings us back to that wonderfully mischievous Gandhi line. “Western civilisation?” “It would be a good idea.”
Perhaps that is the most useful way of understanding the contemporary return to faith. Christianity may indeed be one of the great sources of the moral vocabulary by which the West understands itself. But the test of a civilisation is not the grandeur of its inheritance. It is what it does with it.
The Bible gave America a map, a mythology and a moral vocabulary. The gun helped conquer the continent. The Constitution tried to establish the rules by which its people might live together. The pulpit supplied the language of providence. The television evangelist transformed faith into spectacle. The politician discovered the mobilising power of grievance, identity and redemption. The soldier discovered that Scripture could be placed beside the missile.
And now the most powerful country on earth is once again asking the world to believe in its exceptional mission. The world, understandably, is watching what it does.
Perhaps that is the ultimate irony of the city upon the hill. The higher the hill, the more visible the conduct of those who live upon it. And if America wants to invoke the Bible as its civilisational inheritance, it inherits not only the stories of Exodus and conquest, but the uncomfortable questions of the prophets.
Or, to put it in the irreverent vernacular of an old, sceptical observer:
What would Jesus do?
Paul Hemphill and In That Howling Infinite, August 2026
This essay was written in conversation with books I’ve read, ideas formed and half-formed, and, more recently, in sustained dialogue with an AI language model, which contributed to drafting, phrasing, and conceptual articulation.What appears here is not unmediated thought, but considered thought: selected, tested, revised and revised again, and owned.
In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guildsu struck a Map of the Empire which size was that of the Empire, and coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.
Jorge Luis Borges, On Exactitude in Science (1946)
Forward: the limits of cartography
I have always had a weakness for maps. Occupying and inordinate amount of space on my bookshelf are Collins historical atlases* – heavy in both the literal and figurative sense. They are magnificent volumes, and over the years I have spent many hours tracing their pages, following the movement of armies, adventurers and archeologists, the rise and fall of empires, the migration of peoples and the shifting frontiers that have so often redrawn the world. They offer a visual way of understanding history: not simply what happened, but where it happened, how territories expanded and contracted, and how the political landscape changed beneath the feet of successive generations.
Yet maps have their limitations, and perhaps that is particularly worth remembering when maps become arguments. They can show movement and geography with remarkable clarity, but they cannot tell us everything about the people represented upon them. My Collins atlases cannot tell me a person’s ethnicity or DNA, their beliefs or ideology, their loyalties or aspirations, or what motivated them to move, conquer, settle, flee or remain. They show the where, and often the when, but not necessarily the why. A boundary drawn in ink may look definitive on a map while being porous, contested or meaningless to the people who lived on either side of it. That tension – between the map and the territory, between geography and human experience – lies behind what follows.
It is particularly relevant when looking at Palestine, a landscape whose names, boundaries and meanings have accumulated over centuries and whose maps are now routinely recruited into arguments about history, identity and belonging. We must be mindful that maps are historical artefacts before they are political weapons. They tell us how successive generations imagined and described a landscape, but they are not, by themselves, title deeds to it.
The temptation with historical cartography is to look backwards with twenty-first-century eyes and ask a map to settle questions that its maker never intended it to answer. Maps preserve layers of memory and geography. They can reveal what people called places, how they understood their surroundings and how their conception of territory changed. But they require interpretation, context and, above all, a little humility.
Perhaps that is why I remain fascinated by them. Those Collins atlases taught me to look at history spatially, to see events not as isolated episodes but as movements across landscapes. The older I become, however, the more conscious I am that the map is only the beginning of the story. Behind every line, colour, border and place name are human beings, with memories, identities, ambitions, fears and attachments that no cartographer can fully capture. To understand the history of a place, we must therefore learn to read both the map and the people who inhabit it.
Old maps are not title deeds – a contemplation of cartography
What we take from a book, a review or an opinion piece often tells us as much about ourselves as it does about the author. That is no criticism; it is simply the way reading works. Every reader arrives carrying luggage: political commitments, cultural assumptions, emotional investments, historical knowledge, blind spots and aspirations. Reviewers are no different. Nor, for that matter, am I. The aspiration to complete objectivity is a noble fiction. We are all interpreters before we are judges.
That was my instinctive reaction to British activist Tony Greenstein’s review in the leftwing ezine Mondoweiss, republished below, of British-based American author and researcher Thomas Suárez’s Palestine Mapped.
Even before reaching the conclusion, I suspected where the review was heading. Greenstein is an experienced anti-Zionist campaigner whose intellectual commitments are well established, and they inevitably shape what he finds most valuable in the book. The giveaway comes in the closing paragraphs. He praises what he calls the book’s “apolitical” opening almost as a tactical device, admires the middle section for preparing the reader culturally, but clearly regards the final political chapter as the destination towards which everything else has been travelling. The cartography becomes, in effect, a prelude to contemporary advocacy. That may well be Suárez’s intention too, but Greenstein’s enthusiasm reveals his own priorities every bit as much as the author’s – as is apparent when he describes Suarez’ previous publications about Israel and Palestine.
Yet I suspect the book itself may be richer than the review allows.
Suárez appears to be asking an intriguing question that extends well beyond Israel and Palestine: maps are not merely representations of territory; they are representations of thought. They encode assumptions about power, religion, legitimacy and belonging. Medieval Christian maps centred Jerusalem not because it was geographically central but because it occupied the spiritual centre of Christian cosmology. Islamic geographers such as al-Idrisi organised space differently because they inhabited a different intellectual universe. Renaissance maps reflected the explosion of European exploration, while Protestant biblical scholarship encouraged increasingly detailed attempts to reconcile scripture with physical geography. None of these maps simply described reality. Each reflected the worldview of its makers.
That, it seems to me, is the genuinely fascinating proposition. Cartography becomes a history of imagination as much as a history of measurement. Where I become more cautious is when historical maps are enlisted as political witnesses in twenty-first century arguments. Which is what Greenstein does.
One of Suárez’s most interesting observations, as reported by Greenstein, is actually directed against a habit found on both sides of the contemporary conflict. Zionists produce archaeological sites, biblical kingdoms and ancient place names as evidence of enduring Jewish sovereignty. Pro-Palestinian activists respond with Ottoman maps, Roman maps, medieval maps or British Mandate maps labelled “Palestine”. Suárez apparently argues that both are trapped within the same conceptual framework. They assume that an ancient geographical label somehow validates or invalidates modern political rights.
I would take it one step further.
For a long while, I have contemplated what I call the “myth of fingerprints”, the belief that if only we can place our finger on precisely the right point in history, identify the first inhabitants, recover the original map, establish the authentic name, isolate the pure ancestry or locate the primordial kingdom, then modern political legitimacy somehow reveals itself in a neat, straight line stretching from antiquity to today.
History almost never behaves so obligingly.
Old maps certainly tell us something important about the land. I treasure my own Collins historical atlases, those magnificent, oversized volumes that chart the migrations of peoples, the campaigns of armies, the rise and fall of empires, the routes of explorers and the shifting frontiers of kingdoms. They are among the finest visual tools historians possess. But they tell us remarkably little about the people themselves.
A coloured arrow sweeping westward across Europe labelled “Goths” tells us almost nothing about the genetic diversity within those groups, their languages, their changing identities or the beliefs they carried with them. A shaded region marked “Canaan”, “Judaea”, “Palestina”, “Syria”, “Ottoman Syria” or “Mandatory Palestine” identifies an administrative or geographical concept, not a homogeneous nation. Maps can identify where events occurred. They cannot fully explain who the participants were and what compelled them to remain or wander.
Ethnicity itself is a moving target. DNA reveals endless mixing rather than purity. Languages evolve, religions spread, populations intermarry, conquerors assimilate, migrants settle, identities are invented, forgotten and reinvented. The very categories with which we argue today would have puzzled many of the people who supposedly embodied them centuries ago.
This is one reason why I remain sceptical whenever someone reaches triumphantly for an ancient map as though it were a title deed.
The Romans renamed Judaea as Syria Palaestina. Does that settle anything? Of course not. The Byzantine Madaba mosaic depicts Palestine. Does that settle anything? Again, no. Medieval Christian maps centred on Jerusalem in sacred geography. Ottoman maps organised provinces differently. British Mandate surveys imposed modern administrative precision. Each map tells us something true about the intellectual world in which it was created. None provides a final moral verdict on contemporary sovereignty.
Indeed, Suárez’s own broader argument may unintentionally reinforce precisely this conclusion. If maps embody cultural assumptions, then every historical map deserves to be interpreted rather than worshipped.
Greenstein continually circles back to Zionism, Christian Zionism and Israel’s contemporary use of historical imagery. Those are undoubtedly important subjects, and Suárez appears to have assembled considerable evidence for the influence of biblical geography on Western understandings of Palestine. Certainly, Christian millenarianism, evangelical theology and nineteenth-century imperial romanticism all played significant roles in preparing Western audiences to view Palestine through biblical rather than contemporary political lenses. Theodore Herzl himself undoubtedly benefited from Christian Restorationist sympathies.
But there is a wider lesson here that transcends this particular conflict.
Every nation engages in historical cartography. Vladimir Putin’s Russia speaks of Novorossiya and Russkiy Mir not simply as geographical expressions but as historical claims carrying contemporary political force. Chinese maps in the South China Sea Chinese maps invoke imperial precedents, the Nine-Dash Line and ancient tributary systems. Serbian nationalism continually remembers Kosovo Polje – “the Field of Blackbirds”. Irish nationalists remember King James I’s plantations and the partition of 1922 as Irish republicanism and unionism each produce their own historical maps of belonging. America’s has exceptionalism long rested upon maps of westward expansion under Manifest Destiny, as though the movement of a frontier line itself conferred legitimacy, whilst Confederate memory endures still. Australian history has increasingly become a contest between colonial cadastral maps and Indigenous maps of Country, each representing profoundly different understandings of what land means.
Historical geography is always political because memory itself is political. The danger comes when maps cease to illuminate history and begin adjudicating morality.
Ultimately, maps are magnificent servants but poor judges. They reveal where rivers flowed, roads were built, towns and cities grew, frontiers shifted and kingdoms expanded. They help us visualise change across centuries. They expose forgotten worlds and vanished assumptions. But they cannot tell us who possesses superior historical virtue, nor can they determine which descendants inherit exclusive political rights today.
Perhaps that is the deepest weakness of that “myth of fingerprints”. It mistakes continuity for purity, geography for identity and nomenclature for legitimacy. Human history is untidy, layered and recursive. It resembles less a straight line than a palimpsest, where each generation writes over earlier inscriptions without entirely erasing them. The old text remains faintly visible beneath the new. Maps help us read those layers. They do not resolve them.
In that sense, whether one approaches Palestine Mapped as a work of cartographic history, a study of religious imagination or an intervention in the politics of Zionism, its greatest contribution may not lie in proving who was “there first”. Rather, it reminds us that every map is itself an historical artefact, reflecting the assumptions of those who drew it. The irony is that this applies not only to the maps reproduced in Suárez’s book, but also to the intellectual maps brought by its readers and reviewers. We all chart the landscape according to our own compass bearings. The challenge is not to pretend otherwise, but to remain aware that our own map, however detailed, is never quite the same thing as the territory itself.
Coda: maps cannot be manifestos
One of the limitations of reading about maps is that like maps themselves. they flatten experience.
I’ve visited the church of St. George at Madaba in Jordan and stood next to the sixth-century mosaic of the Holy Land (pictured at the head of this post). It is a thing of beauty, of history, and of humanity. One is struck not only by its artistry but by its humanity. It is not a political manifesto disguised as a map. It is an act of devotion. The craftsmen who laid those tesserae were not anticipating twenty-first century debates over sovereignty. They were trying to depict the sacred geography through which they understood God’s world. Their “facts on the ground”, to use a phrase now freighted with controversy, were the footprints of Jesus and his Apostles.
Our Jordanian guide is part of that story. A Palestinian Christian, proud of a Byzantine mosaic in modern Jordan, her job is to guide visitors through a landscape that has been Roman, Byzantine, Arab, Crusader, Mamluk, Ottoman and Hashemite. She herself embodies the layered history that the “myth of fingertips” tends to erase. Human beings are often palimpsests long before maps are.
As we have noted, there is habit of turning historical geography into moral geography. And yet, none of these are really arguments about geography – they are arguments about memory the stories nations and peoples tell themselves.
To borrow and invert the English poet John Donne, “no man (or map) is an island”. Maps are relational documents. They acquire meaning only through the people who draw them, use them and argue over them. Detached from those human stories, they become little more than coloured parchment. Attached to them, they become objects of extraordinary emotional power.
There is another irony lurking here – that prefigured in the quotation that opened this essay. In a short story, Argentinian author Jorge Luis Borges imagined an empire whose cartographers became so obsessed with accuracy that they eventually produced a map at the scale of one-to-one, covering the entire empire itself. The map became indistinguishable from the territory and therefore useless. Political history sometimes commits the opposite error: we mistake the map for the territory. We argue over symbols as though they were reality itself.
My Collins atlases, the Madaba mosaic, Ptolemy, Ordnance Survey maps, Google Earth – all are ways of seeing. None is the land itself. The land has always contained more languages, more memories, more ancestors and more contradictions than any map can accommodate.
“The myth of fingerprints” captures the seductive belief that somewhere, if only we point to precisely the right place on precisely the right map at precisely the right moment in history, all our moral and political arguments will dissolve into certainty.
History has never been that obliging. It is less a straight line than a palimpsest. The fingertips point confidently enough. It is the ground beneath them that refuses to stand still.
The Map on the Wall
It is an education to view an old map that was not so long ago a snapshot of the world as it was geographically: Bacon’s Standard Map of the World, dating from about 1930 and drawn on the old Mercator projection. It is, at first glance, merely an antique map. In fact, it is a portrait of a vanished world.
The first thing that strikes the modern eye is the colour. The great pink expanses are British; the green ones French. Empire is not something the map explains because, in 1930, it scarcely needed explaining. It just was! .
Africa is largely divided between European powers. India, Pakistan and Bangladesh are the Raj. China is a republic. Iran is Persia. The Baltic states are independent. Germany includes Konigsberg in East Prussia, now Kaliningrad. Lemburg is Lemburg, in Poland, rather than Lviv, in Ukraine. Even the names have become historical artefacts.
Palestine, Transjordan and Iraq are tiny pieces of the British imperial jigsaw. The map predates the State of Israel, Jordan, the Palestinian national struggle in its modern form and the territorial arrangements that emerged from the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the end of European empire. The great arguments that now seem immemorial were, when this map was printed, still largely unfinished arguments. New states have now appeared where old ones disappeared; boundaries that once seemed immutable are redrawn, sometimes peacefully and sometimes in blood.
That is one of the great lessons of cartography. We tend to mistake the map we inherit for the world itself. Borders acquire the appearance of permanence; names acquire the authority of fact; colours make political control look geographical and geography look natural.
Mercator himself was not attempting to deceive anyone. His projection was designed for navigation, where maintaining accurate bearings mattered more than preserving the relative size of continents. Yet every projection makes choices, and every map consequently tells only one version of the world. The Bacon map adds another layer: it colours the world according to the political realities of its time. Geography and power are superimposed upon one another.
The map is a kind of silent witness to the contingency of history. What appears to us as the settled political geography is, viewed from the perspective of 1930, only one moment in a much longer process of imperial collapse, national awakening, migration and territorial invention.
Perhaps that is why old maps are so strangely affecting. They show us not merely where the world was, but what people once imagined the world to be. And once we recognise that, the boundaries on our own maps begin to look a little less eternal.
Paul Hemphill and In That Howling Infinite, July 2026
Thomas Suárez is a New York–born author, historical researcher, lecturer, and accomplished concert violinist and composer, now based in London. He writes and speaks frequently on Palestine, and his critically acclaimed book Palestine Hijacked: How Zionism Forged an Apartheid State from River to Sea has been hailed by historian Ilan Pappé as “a tour de force”. His other works include Writings on the Wall: Palestinian Oral Histories and Palestine Mapped: From the River to the Sea in Early Geographic Thought.
The featured picture at the head of this blog post of the interior of St George’s Greek Orthodox Church in Madaba, Jordan, home of the sixth century Madaba map.
* A list of Collins abd Harper Collins historical atlases follows Greenstein’s review.
How the West’s earliest mapping of Palestine continues to shape its understanding of Zionism today
The World According to Ptolemy (2nd century), an Italian manuscript, 1460. (National Library of Naples, Library of Congress)
Palestine Mapped. From the River to the Sea in Early Geographic Thought
Thomas Suárez
Tom Suarez is one of the most meticulous and careful researchers on Palestine and Zionism although he is relatively unknown. His first book, which the Zionists did their best to prevent being publicized, disrupting his speaking tours, The State of Terror was a majestic tour de force of the Zionist terrorism that created the Israeli state and their strategies for the future ethnic cleansing of Palestine.
Suarez’s second book, ‘Palestine Hijacked – How Zionism Forged an Apartheid State from the River to the Sea’ was another tour de force. As Ilan Pappe wrote, Suarez showed how “The use of terror was deliberate and sustained, carried out or supported by the same leaders who then established and led the Israeli state. We are still living this history: The book proves that Israel’s regime of Apartheid against the Palestinians and the continued expropriation of their country are not the result of complex historical circumstances, but the intended, singular goal of Zionism since its beginning.
It is not surprising that Suarez’s latest book is in the tradition of his previous books even if it concentrates mainly on the visual rather than the verbal.
Palestine Mapped guides the reader through the Greek and Roman concepts of Palestine, the various medieval Mediterranean civilizations and the European Christian “Holy Land” mapping that has dominated since the Reformation and continues to inform modern political thought. This isn’t simply a book about cartography or map making but how notions of the ‘Holy Land’ and Palestine informed the maps and visual representations that were produced.
A beautifully illustrated book on the mapping of the river to the sea might seem a luxury disconnect given that Palestinians are being massacred daily. Suárez is very much aware of this. He explains in his Introduction why the ongoing genocide in fact makes the topic all the more relevant. Perhaps key to this is the subtitle’s final word, geographic thought.
Much of the West’s fanatical support for Israel is rooted in Evangelical messianism, the psychosis (to use the author’s word) that the Israeli state is the place in the Biblical Genesis, “placing it apart from the realm of all other earthly nations and securing wide Christian devotion.”
Suarez argues that this collective elite and religious mindset is powered by our own geographic wiring, and that the book is intended in part as an antidote to what he calls the “mapping of the Holy Land” narrative.
Al-Idrīsī, map of the Levant, mid-12th century (National Library of France; Image Library of Congress)
Since the book is organized roughly chronologically, its real-world relevancy is borne out mostly in the final chapter — though the Israeli state’s manipulation of ancient maps is already demonstrated with the sixth century ‘Madaba’ map.
The book begins with the earliest extant mapping of the Levant, that of the Greeks and Romans, then devotes two chapters to the medieval period. The first addresses mapping by Europeans in which Palestine is a focus: those from the distance of the Church, and that of on-the-scene pilgrims.
The interior of the Church of St. George, Madaba, Jordan, and the remains of a mid-6th century mosaic map of the Levant.
The second addresses mapping in which Palestine was not the focus, but through which the mapping — and Western perception — of Palestine nonetheless evolved: sea charts, advanced world maps, Ptolemy’s Geography, and what the author calls ‘Arabic’ mapping, a term used in place of the usual ‘Islamic’ mapping of academia, which he considers to be flawed terminology.
The book then arrives at what is described as the pivotal year of 1500. Three revolutions of the period are said to influence Palestine’s future: Europeans’ dramatically widened world view, the advent of printing, and above all, Lutheranism.
World map in the Fasciculus Temporum of the Carthusian monk, Werner Rolewink, 1484. Woodcut.
The future stage is set during that century, and Suárez gives short shrift to the years 1600-1800, other than to establish the rise of proto-Zionist ideology.
European mapping of Palestine during that period is said to be stuck in a time warp, Biblically oriented no matter the variety of renderings, in stark contrast to Europe’s mapping of the rest of the world, which was a quest for the latest, the most accurate. It is, however, here that today’s manipulation of geographic thought is first addressed, because a 1714 work of one Adriaan Reland is cited today to erase Palestinians (for which Reland is said to be blameless).
The final, long chapter begins at the year 1800, at which simmering Christian Zionist ideology takes active form with the confluence of Christian millennialism, Western imperialism, and advanced mapping techniques.
The end of the century brings of course Theodor Herzl and the advent of Political Zionism. Suárez cites both Herzl’s 1896 Der Judenstaat and a map from his 1897 newsletter, Die Welt, to argue that Herzl failed to understand the opportunity Christian Evangelicalism offered his project. I’m not so sure that this is true. One of his main supporters was William Hechler, the Chaplain at Britain’s Vienna Embassy, where Herzl was living.
Star of David with a map of the Eastern Mediterranean, on the heading of the weekly Die Welt, June 4, 1897.
Hechler believed firmly that the Jews must be enabled to resettle in Palestine in order to hasten the second coming of Christ. He was constantly looking forward to a fulfillment of Biblical prophecy along these lines. He presented a memorandum to Lord Salisbury, the British Prime Minister, urging him to take up the cause of the Jewish return to Palestine even before he had met Herzl or read the “Jewish State”.
Hechler had been a tutor to the Grand Duke of Baden, and he introduced Herzl to him and also to the ex-Kaiser Wilhelm II. He also accompanied Herzl to Palestine where he met Kaiser Wilhelm II in Jerusalem.
Herzl had an instructive meeting with the Grand Duke April 23 1896 in Karlsruhe and he noted in his diaries that Grand Duke
‘took my project for building a state with the utmost earnestness. His chief misgiving was that if he supported the cause, people might accuse him of anti-Semitism’.
As Francis Nicosia, the Raul Hilberg Professor of Holocaust Studies at Vermont University observed:
‘whereas today non-Jewish criticism of Zionism or the State of Israel is often dismissed as motivated by a deeper anti-Semitism, in Herzl’s day an opposite non-Jewish reaction, one of support for the Zionist idea, might have resulted in a similar reaction.’
With Herzl’s death, Zionism continued to receive the enthusiastic endorsement of Christian Zionism and its millenarian supporters. Prominent supporters included Arthur James Balfour who combined antisemitism and Zionism effortlessly.
The 1947 UN Partition map receives its due attention: the author deconstructs it as a scam intended to produce the opposite result.
Suarez analyses the manipulation of geographic thought employed by Israel’s propagandists and argues that the ‘pro-Palestine’ community defeats itself by engaging with this propaganda on its own terms.
Put in its crudest form, when Zionists say ‘there was never such a place as Palestine’, we respond with an old map in which the entire land is called ‘Palestine’, or other such ‘evidence’.
Suárez argues that this is a mistake, a trap, the result of cultural conditioning:
we are geographically hard-wired to accept [that] the ancient origins of a place-name has the power to grant or deny personhood today, to justify the expulsion of anyone to whom that geographic name is or is not attached.
This is a heavily cross-disciplinary work, and it is hard to imagine anyone with Suárez’s background in the Palestinian issue who is so experienced in the history of cartography. It strikes me that this might be a book that can bring the Palestinian issue to a wider audience: Everyone, it seems, loves old maps, and perhaps this book is the perfect Trojan Horse gift for acquaintances who believe they are fair-minded but can’t quite make the break from Israel.
The reader is disarmed by the earlier ‘apolitical’ part of the book, gradually drawn into cultural conditioning addressed in the middle part, and already long engrossed when encountering the final chapter. But it is also a cautionary work for those long active in the issue of Palestinian liberation, who, as with all aspects of the issue, often disempower themselves by responding to Israel’s propaganda on its own terms.
Tony Greenstein
Tony Greenstein is a longstanding Jewish anti-Zionist and an anti-fascist activist from Brighton. In 1982 he was a co-founder of Britain’s Palestine Solidarity Campaign. Tony was suspended from the Labour Party in 2016 and expelled in 2018 as a result of the antisemitism witch-hunt–the first Jewish person to be expelled. Tony is the author of The Fight Against Fascism in Brighton and the South Coast. He has written extensively on Palestine and Zionism for, amongst others, the Guardian’s Comment is Free, the Journal of Holy Land and Palestine Studies, Tribune and the Weekly Worker. Tony was the child of an Orthodox Jewish Rabbi and when young a member of the religious Zionist Bnei Akiva, now part of the Greater Israel movement.
Historical Atlases
My collection of Collins and Harper Collins historical falls into five broad groups:
General World History
Collins Atlas of World History – Geoffrey Barraclough, Collins
HarperCollins Atlas of World History – Geoffrey Barraclough, HarperCollins
History of the World in Maps: The Ultimate Cartographic Exploration of Our Past – Philip Parker, Collins
The Times Complete History of the World – The Times / Collins
Military, Political and European History
The Times Atlas of the Second World War
Atlas of the Crusades – edited by Jonathan Riley-Smith
Atlas of European History
Archaeology and Exploration
Past Worlds: The Times Atlas of Archaeology – also published as the HarperCollins Atlas of Archaeology
The Times Atlas of World Exploration
Biblical History and Geography
HarperCollins Atlas of Bible History – James B. Pritchard
HarperCollins Atlas of the Bible
HarperCollins Concise Atlas of the Bible
5. Biblical Geography – Evangelical Reference
NIV Atlas of the Bible – Zondervan / HarperCollins
There are 13 titles, although a couple represent different editions or titles of essentially the same work: The Collins Atlas of World History and the HarperCollins Atlas of World History are essentially the Barraclough atlas in different editions/imprints [Henry Barraclough was a renowned British historian, historiographer, and medievalist. I read his The Meaning of History back when I was in Sixth Form at Moseley Grammar School] Past Worlds and the HarperCollins Atlas of Archaeology anre alternative titles/editions of the archaeological atlas. The HarperCollins Atlas of the Bible and Concise Atlas of the Bible are related but distinct editions. The HarperCollins Atlas of Bible History is a separate, more specialised biblical-history work.
In chronological and subject breadth the collection isn’t simply a collection of history books with maps. It is almost a cartographic library of human history:
Prehistory → Archaeology → Ancient Near East → Biblical world → Greece and Rome → Christianity → Crusades → European kingdoms and empires → exploration → global history → the Second World War → the modern world.
And that perhaps explains why the physical atlases mattered to me in the first place. Their great virtue was not merely the information contained in them but the ability to see history spatially: peoples moving, empires expanding and contracting, frontiers shifting, trade and exploration routes opening, armies advancing and retreating, and religious and political worlds overlapping.
They are heavy both literally and figuratively, providing a way of understanding history that a conventional chronological narrative often cannot: history as movement across landscape and time.
The mass and majesty of this world, all That carries weight and always weighs the same Lay in the hands of others; they were small And could not hope for help and no help came: What their foes liked to do was done, their shame Was all the worst could wish; they lost their pride And died as men before their bodies died.
WH Auden, The Shield of Achilles
Among the many phrases that echo through modern Iranian history, few are as chilling – or as elastic – as the charge of “corruption on Earth” (mofsed-e-filarz). Rooted in Islamic jurisprudence but broadened by revolutionary courts into a political instrument, it has served as one of the Islamic Republic’s most powerful and feared accusations.
It was among the charges levelled against the eleven Kurdish prisoners executed at Sanandaj Airport in August 1979, their deaths immortalised in Jahangir Razmi’s Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph. In the years that followed, the same accusation would be invoked against Kurdish activists, political dissidents, monarchists, communists, members of the Mujahedin-e Khalq, protesters, and others deemed enemies of the revolutionary state. The charge’s very vagueness became its strength. To be declared “corrupt on Earth” was not merely to have broken a law; it was to be cast as a threat to the moral and political order itself.
Nearly half a century later, the phrase remains woven into the fabric of Iranian political life. It resurfaced during the prosecutions that followed the Woman, Life, Freedom protests of 2022–23, and again in the trials and executions that have followed subsequent unrest and acts of political violence, and particularly, in the wake of the demonstrations and subsequent massacres of January 2026 and the US-Israeli aerial assault the began a month later. Governments change their rhetoric, revolutions age, and generations pass, yet certain words endure. In Iran, “corruption on Earth” has become more than a legal charge. It is a window into how revolutionary states define legitimacy, identify enemies, and justify the use of ultimate power.
The story that follows is, in part, the story of that phrase – and of the people whose lives have been shaped, and often ended, by its invocation.
Iranian photographer Jahangir Razmi’s famous image, later known as “Firing Squad in Iran,” won the 1980 Pulitzer Prize for Spot News Photography. It remains the only Pulitzer awarded to an anonymous photographer. Razmi’s identity remained concealed for twenty-seven years before being publicly revealed in 2006 with his consent. The photograph endures as one of the defining visual records of the violence that accompanied the consolidation of the Islamic Republic.
The Revolution Devours Its Own
The Red–Green Alliance, Iranian Edition
In early June 1983, the Kurdish city of Mahabad awoke to grim news. Fifty-nine Kurdish prisoners had been executed by the Islamic Republic of Iran. Many were young. Some, according to Kurdish human-rights sources, were still school students. Their crime was not murder, terrorism or armed insurrection in any conventional sense. Their offence was opposition to the revolutionary order that had emerged from the upheavals of 1979.
Amnesty International later documented the executions as part of a wider campaign of repression that was sweeping across Iran. By then, the Islamic Republic had moved beyond the revolutionary euphoria of its founding years and into a phase familiar to students of revolutions throughout history: the consolidation of power. The idealism, pluralism and competing visions that had animated the overthrow of the Shah were being replaced by something far narrower and far less forgiving.
The executions in Mahabad were not an aberration. They were part of a pattern.
History offers many examples of revolutions that begin as broad coalitions and end as monopolies of power. The French Revolution consumed Girondins, Hébertists and Dantonists before eventually turning upon Robespierre himself. On the scaffold, Manon Roland is said to have exclaimed “O Liberté! O Liberté! que de crimes on commet en ton nom”. The Bolsheviks devoured Mensheviks, Socialist Revolutionaries and later their own Old Guard (see in In That Howling Infinite, Stalin’s Great Terror). Revolutions often unite disparate forces against a common enemy; once victory is achieved, the question becomes who will rule. At that point, yesterday’s allies can quickly become today’s enemies.
Iran followed a similar trajectory.
The revolution that overthrew Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi in 1979 brought together an unlikely alliance. Liberals sought constitutional government. Nationalists hoped for greater independence from foreign influence. Marxists and socialists imagined a future shaped by class struggle and social justice. Religious activists envisioned an Islamic state guided by clerical authority. What united these groups was opposition to the Shah, whose increasingly authoritarian rule, close alignment with the United States and powerful security apparatus had generated widespread resentment.
Yet while many revolutionary factions viewed the alliance as temporary, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and his followers possessed something their rivals lacked: a coherent vision of power and an organisational structure capable of seizing it. The mosques provided a nationwide network. The clergy enjoyed enormous social legitimacy. Religious symbolism offered a language that resonated far beyond university campuses and political cells.
Many on the secular left underestimated this advantage.
For some Marxists, political Islam appeared less as an ideological rival than as a useful partner in the struggle against imperialism and capitalism. The Shah was seen as a pillar of Western influence in the Middle East; therefore, any force capable of helping to overthrow him could be accommodated. The expectation, explicit or implicit, was that once the revolution succeeded, history would proceed along more familiar revolutionary lines. The clerics would either moderate, share power or eventually be superseded.
Events unfolded differently.
By 1980, universities were being purged and “Islamised” during what became known as the Cultural Revolution. Liberal and nationalist opponents were marginalised. Independent centres of authority were systematically dismantled. The Tudeh Party, Iran’s principal communist organisation and one that had initially supported the new regime, was outlawed. Its leaders were arrested, imprisoned and in some cases executed. Former revolutionary allies appeared on television delivering forced confessions. Political prisons filled. Revolutionary courts handed down death sentences with alarming speed.
The process was not unique to the Iranian left. Kurdish movements that had sought autonomy found themselves facing military campaigns. Women’s organisations that had supported the revolution discovered that many of their aspirations were incompatible with the state’s vision of Islamic governance. Student activists, secular intellectuals and minority groups encountered similar realities. The coalition that had overthrown the Shah steadily narrowed until meaningful opposition became impossible.
The Kurdish experience was particularly harsh. In regions such as Mahabad, Sanandaj and other Kurdish centres, resistance to central authority was met with military force and mass arrests. The executions of June 1983 were one episode in a larger struggle between the Islamic Republic and Kurdish political movements. For the families involved, ideological debates about revolution and anti-imperialism mattered little. The reality was imprisonment, exile and death.
The broader lesson is not confined to Iran, nor is it simply a story about the mistakes of the political left. Rather, it is a warning about the dangers of defining political movements primarily by what they oppose rather than by what they seek to build.
Opposition to a monarchy did not tell Iranians what kind of state would emerge after the Shah. Opposition to Western influence did not answer questions about civil liberties, minority rights, women’s equality or democratic institutions. Those questions remained unresolved until power was won—and by then it was largely too late.
This is one reason why the history of the Iranian Revolution continues to resonate.
Across the political spectrum there remains a temptation to view movements through the lens of a single conflict. If a regime opposes one’s enemies, its internal character can seem less important. If it stands against a disliked power, its treatment of dissidents, minorities or political opponents may receive less scrutiny than it deserves. Such thinking is hardly confined to any one ideology. Throughout modern history, people of varying political persuasions have excused authoritarianism when it appeared to serve a larger strategic or ideological purpose.
Iran offers a cautionary example of where that logic can lead.
Many who helped create the revolution imagined themselves as partners in a broad project of national liberation. Some believed they could influence its direction. Others assumed that shared opposition to the Shah guaranteed a shared future. Instead, they discovered that revolutionary coalitions are often marriages of convenience rather than communities of principle.
The tragedy of Mahabad, and of countless similar episodes in revolutionary history, is that those who helped bring down one form of authoritarianism often found themselves confronting another.
The revolution had succeeded. Then it began to consume its own.
Every picture tells a story
The story of Jahangir Razmi’s photograph is worth including because it captures, in a single frame, the moment when revolutionary justice gave way to revolutionary terror.
On 27 August 1979, at Sanandaj Airport in Iranian Kurdistan, eleven prisoners—most of them Kurdish militants or activists—were brought before a revolutionary tribunal. The proceedings reportedly lasted little more than half an hour. The charges ranged from weapons trafficking and murder to inciting unrest against the new Islamic Republic. There was no meaningful due process, no opportunity for appeal and no delay between verdict and sentence. Convicted by the revolutionary court, the prisoners were taken directly to a dusty section of the airfield, blindfolded and lined up before a firing squad.
Jahangir Razmi, a young photographer working for the Iranian newspaper Ettela’at, was present. Managing to position himself slightly behind and to one side of the execution squad, he captured the exact instant the rifles fired. The resulting image is extraordinary and horrifying in equal measure. Some of the condemned are already collapsing; others remain momentarily upright, suspended between life and death. The executioners stand almost casually, performing what the revolution had already normalised as an administrative task. There is no drama in the cinematic sense. That is precisely what makes the photograph so unsettling. It records death not as a battlefield tragedy but as bureaucratic routine.
The image appeared in Ettela’at the following day without a photographer’s credit. The omission was deliberate. In the volatile atmosphere of post-revolutionary Iran, public association with such a photograph could have endangered Razmi’s life. The picture was subsequently distributed internationally through United Press International and quickly became one of the defining images of the revolution’s aftermath. In 1980 it was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Spot News Photography—the only Pulitzer ever granted to an anonymous photographer.
For more than a quarter of a century, the identity of the man behind the lens remained a secret known only to a handful of people. It was not until 2006 that Wall Street Journal reporter Joshua Prager traced the photograph’s origins and revealed, with Razmi’s consent, the identity of the photographer who had captured one of the twentieth century’s most haunting images.
Placed alongside the executions in Mahabad four years later, the photograph acquires an even deeper significance. It was taken not at the end of the Islamic Republic’s consolidation of power but near its beginning. The victims at Sanandaj were among the first casualties of a revolutionary process that would soon expand far beyond Kurdish militants to encompass liberals, communists, students, women’s activists, ethnic minorities and former revolutionary allies. In retrospect, the image serves as an early warning. The firing squad at Sanandaj was not an isolated excess. It was one of the first visible signs that the revolution had begun to devour its own.
As photographs go, it possesses the rare quality of becoming more disturbing the longer one studies it. It is not merely a record of eleven deaths on a Kurdish airfield. It is a glimpse into a larger historical pattern: the moment when a revolution, having seized power, turns from overthrowing its enemies to eliminating its competitors. The rifles are aimed at eleven men, but the photograph foreshadows the fate of thousands who would follow. In that sense, Razmi captured not just an execution but a prophecy.
Firing Squad in Iran. Jahangir Ramzi’s Pulitzer winning photo, 1980.
Death in the camera’s eye
The photo reminds me of Robert Capa’s The Falling Soldier (1936), the death of a republican soldier taken during the Spanish Civil War, and Eddie Adams’s photograph of a South Vietnamese general executing a Viet Cong prisoner on a during the1968; Offensive. [These pictures are not shown here so as not to detract from the immediacy and tragedy of Razmi’s photograph.
The comparison is a fascinating one because all three photographs have become shorthand for entire conflicts, yet each captures a very different relationship between photography, truth and death.
Robert Capa’s iconic photograph taken during the Spanish Civil War, purportedly shows the exact moment a Republican militiaman is struck by a bullet and collapses backwards. It became one of the most famous war photographs ever taken, embodying the courage and vulnerability of those fighting fascism. Yet for decades historians have debated whether the image was genuine, staged, or a reconstruction. The controversy has never been fully resolved. Ironically, the photograph’s power derives not only from what it may show, but from the uncertainty surrounding it. It sits on the uneasy border between journalism, art and myth.
Eddie Adams’s photograph of South Vietnamese General Nguyễn Ngọc Loan executing a Viet Cong prisoner on a Saigon street during the Tet Offensive in 1968 occupies the opposite end of the spectrum. There is no ambiguity about what happened. Adams captured the precise instant the bullet entered the prisoner’s head. The image is shocking because it is so immediate and undeniable. For millions of viewers, it crystallised the brutality of the Vietnam War. Yet Adams himself later lamented that the photograph reduced a complicated human story to a single frozen moment. The prisoner had allegedly participated in killings during the offensive; the general spent the rest of his life defined by one fraction of a second. “The general killed the Viet Cong,” Adams later wrote, “I killed the general with my camera.”
Jahangir Razmi’s photograph from Sanandaj belongs in the same company. Like Adams’s image, it records an actual execution rather than a symbolic representation of one. Like Capa’s photograph, it came to symbolise an entire conflict and a wider historical struggle. Yet there is something uniquely unsettling about Razmi’s image. Adams shows a single victim and a single executioner. Razmi shows eleven condemned men and a firing squad acting in concert. The killing is not spontaneous or personal. It is institutional. The state itself is pulling the trigger.
Viewed together, the three photographs almost form a visual history of modern political violence. Capa’s image represents the romantic age of ideological struggle, when young men went off to fight for causes larger than themselves. Adams’s photograph captures the moral chaos of Cold War counterinsurgency, where certainty dissolves into horror. Razmi’s image depicts something colder still: the machinery of revolutionary justice transforming human beings into categories—“counter-revolutionary,” “enemy of God,” “corrupt on Earth”—before extinguishing them.
All three photographs freeze the instant between life and death. But they also remind us of something else. Photographs rarely explain. They reveal, they shock, they haunt—but they do not provide context. Capa’s militiaman may or may not have been dying. Adams’s prisoner and general carried histories invisible to the camera lens. Razmi’s eleven Kurds had been reduced by the revolutionary court to a handful of accusations and a death sentence. The photograph records their end, but not the complexity of their lives.
And perhaps that is why such images endure. They force us to confront history in its most compressed form: a single irreversible moment, laden with all the arguments, ideologies, hopes and hatreds that brought it into being. The photograph captures the second. Understanding the story behind it can take a lifetime.
Twenty-six years ago, a picture of an execution in Iran won the Pulitzer Prize. But the man who took it remained anonymous. Until now.
December 6, 2006, The Wall Street Journal
TEHRAN — On Aug. 27, 1979, two parallel lines of 11 men formed on a field of dry dirt in Sanandaj, Iran. One group wore blindfolds. The other held rifles. The command came in Farsi to fire: “Atesh!” Behind the soldier farthest to the right, a 12th man also shot, his Nikon camera and Kodak film preserving in black and white a mass execution.
Within hours, the photo ran across six columns in Ettela’at, the oldest newspaper in Iran. Within days, it appeared on front pages around the world. Within weeks, the new Iranian government annexed the offending paper. Within months, the photo won the Pulitzer Prize.
Taken seven months after Islamic radicals overthrew the U.S.-backed Shah, the photo remains one of the most famous images of Iran. It is an icon of government terror, invoked in critiques of the regime from the 1979 poem “Screaming,” to the 1986 music video “Speak To Me From My Land, Iran” to the 1997 book “Kurdistan.” Davood and Davar Ghassemlouie, brothers who operate a photo shop in Los Angeles, say they have made tens of thousands of reprints for demonstrators, including 200 in late September when Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad visited the U.S.
Says Shahrokh Hatami, a pioneer of Iranian photojournalism: “It is the most revealing photograph of the beginning of the Iranian revolution.”
Ettela’at, however, didn’t print the photographer’s name, fearing his safety. The Pulitzer was officially awarded to “an unnamed photographer of United Press International,” the news service that distributed the photo in the U.S. It remains the only time the award has ever been given to an anonymous recipient.
In the years since, several people have falsely claimed to be “Anonymous.” When Iran’s most famous photographer died in 2003, his obituaries were filled with mentions of a Pulitzer some say he had insinuated winning. Last September, another prominent Iranian photographer living in France was quoted in Paris Match magazine claiming credit for the work.
In fact, nearly three decades after the epochal photograph first appeared, almost no one knows who took it.
Jahangir Razmi grew up in the industrial city of Arak, in central Iran, the first child of a housewife and military clerk. Governed by the Shah, the nation was at peace. The boy was shy and happiest in a local photo shop helping a cousin develop film and shoot portraits of brides and soldiers. In 1960, at the age of 12, he bought a Russian Lubitel-2 camera.
He quickly put it to use. When one day a boy shot a girl dead outside his studio, a reporter urged Jahangir to photograph the scene. He did, the skirt and shirt of a bloodied school uniform preserved in the newsprint of Ettela’at.
When his father died, Mr. Razmi says he found work in a Tehran photo shop. When he served in the army, he found reprieve from military drills in a darkroom on base. When he photographed a 20th birthday party, he found a wife. And when Ettela’at — Farsi for “Information” — hired him in 1973 to shoot breaking news, he found a career.
“Although we were colleagues and there was a competition, his pictures were better,” says Jafar Danyeli, then one of seven staff photographers. Razmi, as everyone called him, paid attention to composition and chiaroscuro, the interplay of light and shadow. He sat at the desk closest to the stairwell. “I was always the volunteer to go,” says Mr. Razmi, then 25. “I was quick. I was young. I was braver than anyone else.”
On Jan. 16, 1979, the Shah fled Iran following mass demonstrations protesting his rule. Sixteen days later, Ayatollah Khomeini, a radical Islamic cleric, returned from France and seized control. Mr. Razmi photographed Mr. Khomeini in his Qom headquarters so regularly that he came to greet the imam with a handshake. Using his favorite Nikon lens, a 28mm wide-angle lens with automatic exposure, Mr. Razmi chronicled the conversion of Iran to theocracy from autocracy.
By August, about 500 alleged counter-revolutionaries and officials of the former regime had been executed. The judiciary decreed it illegal to criticize Islam and Iran’s spiritual leaders. A holding company formed by the regime appropriated Kayhan, the only newspaper in Iran larger than Ettela’at. Journalists who pushed back at censorship under the Shah were petrified.
“Under Khomeini they would kill you,” says Amir Taheri, then editor of Kayhan and now a political analyst living in England. “It was a different ballgame.”
On Aug. 16, Mr. Khomeini called on Iranian troops to suppress restive Kurds hoping for autonomy. Thousands of soldiers headed 300 miles northwest to the Iranian province of Kurdistan. Mr. Razmi and Khalil Bahrami, an Ettela’at reporter, followed.
Ten days later, Mr. Bahrami received a tip that a judge he had befriended was set to try Kurds in an antechamber of the municipal airport at Sanandaj, the capital of Kurdistan. The reporter, then 37, had worked at Ettela’at for 22 years and was thankful he was paired with the young Mr. Razmi, whose father had lived in Sanandaj and had raised his son to admire the Kurds and their traditions. “He knew his responsibility,” says Mr. Bahrami, who lives in Iran and is retired. “And he was quicker than the others.”
At the airport, Mr. Razmi stood ready outside the makeshift courtroom as 10 handcuffed men filled a wooden bench before the judge, a black-bearded Shiite cleric named Sadegh Khalkhali. An injured 11th prisoner lay on a stretcher beside the door.
The judge removed his turban, Mr. Bahrami recalls. He removed his shoes. He put his feet on a chair. Scanning the prisoners through thick eyeglasses, he asked their names. Officers of the court told of the defendants’ alleged crimes — of trafficking arms, inciting riots and murder. The prisoners, some with leftward or nationalist leanings, denied the accusations.
No evidence was presented, Mr. Bahrami says. “It was pure speculation.” After roughly 30 minutes, Mr. Khalkhali declared the 11 men “corrupt on earth” — mofsedin fel arz — the Koranic phrase he cited before issuing a sentence of death. A few of the men cried.
Mr. Bahrami summoned his colleague Mr. Razmi. “It was Razmi’s luck that day that he was with me,” the reporter says.
Mr. Razmi withdrew from his green canvas shoulder bag a 35-80mm lens and attached the zoom to his Nikon FE. The handcuffed men were blindfolded. Each put his hand on the shoulder of the man before him and together they walked single-file through the airport’s concrete lobby, through a metal doorframe and toward an open airfield. Mr. Razmi darted ahead and shot, untroubled by security forces: “I was totally free,” he says. Unbeknownst to Mr. Razmi, a soldier present also was taking pictures, which were never published.
The caravan passed roughly 30 airport workers, both men say. Up front walked Mr. Razmi. In the rear, both men say, was Ali Karimi, one of the judge’s bodyguards, wearing white shoes, white pants, white shirt, sunglasses and twin hip holsters. After about 100 yards, an officer halted the condemned on a plain of dry dirt. All but one of the executioners tied about their own heads Iranian shawls called chafiyehs. Both the faces of the Shiites and the eyes of the Kurds were now concealed.
Mr. Karimi asked the prisoners if they had last words, the two journalists recall. The men didn’t, all silent save a man Mr. Bahrami later reported to be Essa Pirvali, who wept aloud. A sandwich maker, he belonged to no political party but possessed a handgun and had been accused of murder. “He was scared,” Mr. Razmi says. “He wouldn’t stand.” The soldiers instructed a fellow prisoner to hold him.
An afternoon sun shone behind the prisoners and Mr. Razmi reached for his 28mm lens. He sidled in behind members of the firing squad, who stood in brown leather boots laced to the calf. He thought, he says, only about “speed and angle.” The prisoners stood in plainclothes. The firing squad crouched in camouflage.
“Afrad mosallah!,” yelled the commanding officer, calling his troops to attention. His charges aimed their G3 rifles at the midsections of the men standing little more than a body’s length away.
Standing farthest to the right, Naser Salimi, an employee of the Sanandaj health department, raised his right hand to his chest. It was bandaged, injured in a street fight that had led to his sentencing, according to contemporary newspaper reports. Opposite him, the only soldier who wore no chafiyeh raised his rifle.
Mr. Razmi stood a few feet behind this unmasked gunman. He raised his camera. At 4:30 p.m., the command came to fire: “Atesh!” Eleven guns discharged. Eleven bodies dropped. “When they fell, it was dusty,” Mr. Razmi says. The photographer lowered his camera.
The soldiers eyed Mr. Karimi, the judge’s bodyguard, lifting a pistol off his right hip. Not all of the men were dead, the photographer recalls. The bodyguard leaned over Ahsan Nahid, the injured prisoner on the stretcher, and fired one bullet into his head. Mr. Razmi snapped his Nikon. Mr. Karimi stepped to the next man and shot him, too. He proceeded along — one bullet per body, both journalists say. (Recent efforts to locate Mr. Karimi were unsuccessful.)
WITHIN MINUTES, ambulances ferried away the 11 bodies, airport workers returned to work, the huddle of soldiers thinned and Mr. Razmi stowed his two rolls of Kodak 400 film in a pocket of his canvas bag. After a helicopter flight landed the pair too late to cover a second execution, Mr. Razmi left his colleague, flagged a passing minibus and returned to the airport in Sanandaj, where at 8 a.m. the only daily flight to Tehran departed.
The photographer fell asleep. He was awakened at a checkpoint by shouts from airport officers, the same men who had shared their lunch with him the previous afternoon as they awaited the Kurdish prisoners. “It’s me!” yelled Mr. Razmi. “Jahangir!” The men held their fire. Mr. Razmi told them he had film and an article that had to get back to Tehran. “I put it in an envelope and gave it to the flight attendant,” he says, needing to continue his work in the region.
Mr. Razmi called Ettela’at, which dispatched a courier to the airport. The man picked up the white envelope from Tehran airport and delivered it to the newspaper. Ali Akbar Moradi, head of the paper’s darkroom, says he knew the 70 exposures were taken by Mr. Razmi and that he turned them into two contact sheets with the help of a technician. An office runner gave them to the photo editor, the late Fereydoun Ebrahimzadeh, who marked the frames he wished turned into prints and delivered them to Mohammed Heydari, the chief Ettela’at editor, Mr. Heydari says.
Mr. Heydari was examining the layout of that day’s front page and flipped through the stills. At about noon, he says, he stopped, overwhelmed by a single image of the moment when some of the squadron had fired and some hadn’t. Bodies fell. Dust rose.
Mr. Heydari, then 35, had little time to think — the afternoon paper was about to go to print. He says he told himself that the country was conflicted over the killing of the Kurds and angry over censorship. He decided to publish the photograph, although not in the edition distributed in the Kurdistan province, where it would be tantamount to a call to arms. “Considering the political climate, I knew I could get away with it,” Mr. Heydari says.
The Ettela’at editor made another snap decision. The photograph would run with no credit. “I was aware that if I published his name, he would be in danger,” Mr. Heydari says. “I wanted to protect Razmi.”
By 2 p.m., newsstands across Tehran trumpeted word of the Kurdish executions. The banner headline read: “Forty People Executed in Sanandaj, Marivan and Saqqez.” The accompanying photograph was a sensation, the seven months of Iranian firing squads distilled to one image.
Copies of Ettela’at sold out and representatives of international news agencies hustled to Khayam Street to buy prints. The photo editor, Mr. Ebrahimzadeh, “sold it to everyone like he was selling French fries,” says Alfred Yaghobzadeh, 47, then a photographer for the Associated Press, now a photojournalist based in France.
The first to arrive at Ettela’at was Sajid Rizvi of United Press International. Mr. Rizvi, then 30, had seen the newspaper at his home, ordered a copy by phone and sped off in the company’s pistachio-colored sedan. He picked up the photo roughly 15 minutes later inside the Ettela’at newsroom.
“It was almost wet when I took it,” says Mr. Rizvi, now editor of an arts publishing house in London. “I don’t think I have ever seen a picture as moving as that,” he says. “It is a picture between life and death.”
Mr. Rizvi asked who had snapped it. “They said, ‘better not to give out the name of the photographer.’ ” Once home, he walked into the bathroom he had converted into a darkroom, dried the photo with a hairdryer, composed a caption on his yellow Olympus typewriter, phoned the UPI desk in Brussels and transmitted the print.
Genghis Seren, a photo editor in Brussels, sat transfixed beside the company UniFax. “The drama of that machine was that the picture took 15 minutes to complete,” recalls Mr. Seren, then 25 years old and in his first year at UPI. “It came a 10th of an inch after a 10th of an inch…. It was something!” Mr. Seren forwarded the photo to UPI bureaus in Africa, Europe and the Middle East, and to company headquarters in Manhattan.
“It was transmitted to us with no name,” says Larry DeSantis, the UPI managing editor who received the photo 11 stories above 42nd Street. “Not knowing who made it interested me.”
At about 3 p.m., several armed agents from the Islamic Revolutionary Council arrived at Ettela’at, ascended four flights and entered the office of the editor, Mr. Heydari. They asked for the negative of the photo and asked to speak with the photo editor, Mr. Heydari recalls.
Mr. Heydari refused. “I said, ‘No. I am the editor. I take full responsibility.’ ” Mr. Heydari says he told the men: “If I am arrested, the negative consequences will outweigh the effect of this photo.”
The chief agent backed off. Both men telephoned government and religious officials, and the judge who ordered the executions radioed the agent seated beside Mr. Heydari, the editor says.
Mr. Khalkhali, the judge, declared the photo a fabrication and told the agent to arrest the editor, Mr. Heydari says. He says he responded by offering to show the negatives to the agent “as long as you agree not to use force to confiscate them.”
The agent agreed and viewed the negatives with two fellow officials. “They were astonished,” recalls Mr. Heydari. The agent made another call and told Iran’s attorney general that “the newspaper has been considerate to only publish this one,” Mr. Heydari remembers. The agents left with one proviso: Upon their return from Kurdistan, Messrs. Bahrami and Razmi should come in for questioning.
THAT SAME DAY, Mr. DeSantis, the UPI editor, had prints of the photo distributed by motorcycle to the New York papers and by telephoto machine to thousands of papers across the country. On Aug. 29, the New York Times, Washington Post, Der Tagesspiegel in Berlin and the Daily Telegraph in London were among the many newspapers to run it. Nearly all credited UPI.
“Our play was fabulous,” exults Mr. DeSantis, now retired. “It was a once in a lifetime…. Like it was a movie set. One guy kneeling, aiming. One guy falling. A mass execution.”
Mr. Razmi remained in Kurdistan, where at a Sanandaj newsstand he came across a copy of Ettela’at featuring one of his other photos showing the blindfolded men standing in wait. He understood why his more incendiary photographs were unprinted but nonetheless was disappointed. “I expected my name to be published,” he says.
Two days later, reporter and photographer returned to the Ettela’at office in Sanandaj. The office manager lifted from his desk the Tehran edition of the paper that had reported the execution, they recall. He said copies brought to Kurdistan were selling for more than double the cover price. The manager was a Kurd and Mr. Razmi recalls him saying: ” ‘We have to build a statue of gold of you.’ And because of what he told me, I understood that this photo was dangerous.”
Close readers of Ettela’at could have surmised Mr. Razmi was the photographer. On Aug. 26, the day before the execution, the newspaper named him as one of three employees it had sent “to the Western portion of the country.” An Aug. 29, the day after the photo ran, the paper reported on its front page that he and Mr. Bahrami had been “sent to Kurdistan.”
Home in Tehran, after a long shower, Mr. Razmi spoke about the execution to his wife and again the next morning to curious colleagues in the newsroom. He says he asked Mr. Heydari why his photo had carried no credit and didn’t object when the editor explained his worry. “I told him jokingly that you would have also been executed in Kurdistan on the spot,” Mr. Heydari says.
Mr. Razmi walked to the newspaper darkroom and saw for the first time what had been the 18th exposure of his first roll of film. “There I realized what I had taken,” he says. Turning on the red safelights in the studio, the photographer made prints of eight stills and preserved on a contact sheet 27 of his 70 photographs.
Mr. Razmi asked the darkroom supervisor for his negatives and locked them in the middle of his three metal drawers together with his other prints. A few days later, he slipped the contact sheet and stills into the fold of a newspaper and hid them in his home, “somewhere no one would have noticed,” he says. The next morning, he returned to Kurdistan.
On Sept. 9, the Islamic Revolutionary Council published a notice in the Islamic Revolution newspaper: “we hereby draw your attention to the picture which was published on the front page of [Ettela’at] on 6/6/1358 and was objected to harshly by the public.” It continued: “If this occurs again, serious decisions will be made.”
A serious decision already had been made. The day before, the Foundation for the Disinherited — the holding company that in August had swallowed Kayhan, Iran’s largest paper — also seized Ettela’at. Overnight, the paper, privately held since 1920, became state-owned.
The image continued to spread. Reza Deghati, then 27, a free-lance Iranian photographer, had seen the photo. It is “the most stirring execution picture in the history of photojournalism, of the human being,” he says. Mr. Deghati says he procured five additional photos of the execution from an Ettela’at employee and mailed them to SIPA, the Paris agency that had been publishing his own photos since the revolution.
Goksin Sipahioglu says he received the prints from Mr. Deghati at his agency on Paris’s Rue Roquepine. Even though UPI had already published one, Michele Sola, photo editor of Paris Match magazine, paid 14,000 French francs (about $10,000 today) for the additional prints. Mr. Sipahioglu forwarded half that sum to Mr. Deghati in Tehran.
The magazine went on sale in Paris days before its Sept. 21, 1979, cover date. About 2,600 miles east, readers in Iran turned to page 66. Titled “Les Kurdes, sous les balles d’Allah” (“The Kurds, under Allah’s bullets”), the photos spread rapidly. People paid 20 times the cover price for the magazine, and dozens of Iranians tacked the photos about town.
No one, however, neither Mr. Razmi nor the Iranian brain trust, seemed to notice the magazine’s erroneous credit — “Reza (Sipa)” — printed in the lower left corner of the index page. “When someone sends a picture to us,” explains Mr. Sipahioglu, “we always credit him.”
Mr. Deghati says he sent SIPA a letter saying he didn’t take the photos and that SIPA sent out a news release via the AP retracting his name. Representatives at SIPA, Paris Match and the AP don’t recall Mr. Deghati clarifying the matter and didn’t find such a release in their archives.
Mr. Razmi returned from Kurdistan in late September and Mr. Ebrahimzadeh approached him at his desk. The photo editor asked for the negatives of the 70 photos and extended his hand. “I couldn’t protest,” Mr. Razmi says. “It belonged to him.” He unlocked his metal drawer. Mr. Ebrahimzadeh told the photographer the police wished to speak to him in Tehran’s Evin prison, Mr. Razmi recalls.
Mr. Razmi says he arrived at the prison with Mr. Bahrami and two Ettela’at editors, and quickly found himself alone with the late Asadollah Lajevardi, a future warden of the prison already notorious for torturing inmates. As part of his newspaper duties, Mr. Razmi had often photographed men housed in Evin whom the state would soon execute. “I had a right to be nervous,” he says.
Mr. Lajevardi asked him who had photographed the Sanandaj execution, Mr. Razmi says. When Mr. Razmi said he had, the guard asked why he had hidden his negatives in the drawer. “So that no one would take them,” Mr. Razmi recalls answering.
He told Mr. Lajevardi that he had permission from the judge to shoot the scene and that he hadn’t sent the pictures overseas. The interrogation was soft, and it became apparent to Mr. Razmi that he wouldn’t be harmed. Mr. Razmi returned to the paper, and a few weeks later was consumed with work when, on Nov. 4, Iranian students took hostages inside the U.S. Embassy.
The next month, UPI managing editor Mr. DeSantis sat down to submit his newswire’s best work of the year for awards. At the top of his list was the execution photo. “I was a very good picture editor,” Mr. DeSantis says, “but on this one you could be a dumb dog and pick this out.”
That neither he nor anyone at UPI knew who took the photo was of little concern. The agency had been the first to provide it to the press and presented it as the work of an unnamed UPI photographer, which, says Mr. DeSantis, he assumed it was. “It came on the UPI wire,” he explains.
“Because of the present unrest in Iran,” wrote the editor to the Pulitzer committee, “the name of the photographer cannot be revealed at this time.”
Mr. Razmi didn’t know his photograph had been nominated for the Pulitzer. He didn’t know the jury nominating finalists for Spot News Photography was overwhelmed by the entry UPI titled, “Firing Squad in Iran.” Robert Duffy, then an editor at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and chairman of the jury, says he informally lobbied a member of the Pulitzer Board that spring to pick the photo. “We were hell-bent on giving the prize to ‘Anonymous,’ ” he says.
On April 14, 1980, seven days after the U.S. severed diplomatic relations with Iran, ‘Anonymous’ won the Pulitzer Prize. Mr. Heydari told Mr. Razmi the news. But the same people who, in effect, had ordered the execution now owned his employer. Mr. Heydari says he was fired two months later. Representatives of the paper cancelled an August 2005 appointment at their Tehran head office and declined to be interviewed for this article.
Ettela’at didn’t report news of its prize-winning employee. Mr. Razmi says he “didn’t have the guts to celebrate.”
UPI did. The newswire flew its Tehran bureau chief Mr. Rizvi to the U.S. and had him speak to subscribers. “They were trying to show me off,” he says. Asked about the anonymous photographer, Mr. Rizvi recalls answering: “Eventually it will be revealed.”
IN THE SPRING, Ettela’at promoted Mr. Razmi, then 32, to photo editor. Iraq attacked Iran in September and Mr. Razmi covered the war. A mortar deafened his right ear in 1987. When months later Ettela’at asked him to work in Iraq, he decided he was tired of war. He quit his employer of 15 years, sold the home he had built by himself in a leafy neighborhood of northern Tehran, bought an apartment and opened a photography studio.
Forty years old, the photographer had come full circle, developing film and shooting portraits as he had as a boy. Says Mr. Razmi: “I was looking for a peaceful life.”
Mr. Razmi called the studio “Abgineh,” the Farsi word for glassware, which he says connoted for him the clarity of water. He didn’t advertise the studio. Still, six days a week, brides in gowns flocked to the shop, looked at Mr. Razmi and smiled.
Mr. Razmi thought often of Sanandaj. In his shop, he hung a large portrait of a boy wearing a Kurdish shawl and sash. Every summer, during the month of Shahrivar, he locked himself in his bedroom and looked at the execution photographs he had hidden.
On Aug. 3, 1997, three weeks before Shahrivar, Mohammad Khatami took office as president of Iran and hired Hashem Taleb to head his public relations. Mr. Razmi had met Mr. Taleb years before and saw a business opportunity. He drove to the office of the president, pronounced the headshots of Iranian officials unbefitting their rank and “suggested I take photographs of the president and the cabinet,” he recalls. Mr. Taleb hired him.
Days later, Mr. Razmi, the first “Official Photographer of the President and his Cabinet,” set up his flash umbrellas inside the Iranian presidential residence at the intersection of Palestine and Pasteur streets. He shot pictures of the new government. He developed the color portraits. Before mailing the prints to the president’s office, he stamped his name on the back of each.
The name Jahangir Razmi, however, remained unconnected to his most famous photograph. Monir Nahid, mother of two of the executed men, who has since settled in Los Angeles, says over time, “10, 20 people came to me and said, ‘I took the picture.’ ”
Among them, say Mrs. Nahid and her daughter, was Mr. Deghati, the stringer who in 1979 sent the photo to Paris Match. Mr. Deghati, who left Iran in 1981 and today lives in France working for Webistan Photo Agency, says he has never met the Nahids. Last September, Paris Match magazine quoted him saying he took the photo, adding in French that Mr. Khomeini “was furious.” Mr. Deghati says he knows Mr. Razmi took the photo, and that the magazine misquoted him.
Mr. Razmi says he first learned about a decade ago that others were claiming his work. Kaveh Golestan, Iran’s best-known photographer, reported to him that Mr. Deghati had said as much at a European photo exhibit. Mr. Razmi didn’t know that Mr. Golestan also had taken credit for the photo in classes he taught, according to several of his photojournalism students at Tehran University.
When Mr. Golestan died in 2003, after stepping on a landmine in Iraq, newspapers around the world reported that he had won a Pulitzer Prize. His widow, Hengameh Golestan, says her late husband never took credit for the photo and that the obituaries were mistaken. Mrs. Golestan says she knows Mr. Razmi took the photo.
On the fourth floor of a cement apartment building in northern Tehran, Mr. Razmi sat on a dimpled leather couch. His living room walls were barren of his work. Beside him on his couch, his son Ali sat rapt, tamping down a pinch of Cavendish tobacco in his father’s pipe. Mr. Razmi struck a match and puffed.
“My sons have told me a lot of times that I should go and prove that I am the photographer,” Mr. Razmi said, his voice soft and his eyes cast down. “I said, ‘No. Better not.’ ”
It is understandable why he feared claiming credit for such a public indictment of the Islamic Revolution. The hardline Mr. Ahmadinejad, elected in June 2005, shuttered Shargh, the country’s last large reformist newspaper, three months ago. Mr. Razmi also was still the official government photographer and returned the next morning to the presidential residence to shoot Mr. Ahmadinejad’s cabinet, including the defense minister who in 1979 helped quell the Kurds.
But Mr. Razmi, who is now 58, said part of him always wanted to step forward. He was disappointed when he first saw that his photo didn’t carry his name. He was irked when others took credit, people who “never feel the danger,” he said. And all the time, he was weighted by his secret, that of an ordinary man witness to extraordinary events. “Without this picture,” he said, “I wouldn’t be anything.”
Emboldened by time and dismayed by the opportunism of his fellow photographers, Mr. Razmi decided the moment was right to tell his tale after this newspaper approached him. “My name should be there,” he said.
Minced lamb and baghali polo — a dish of green rice and beans — awaited Mr. Razmi at home, and he sat down to eat with his wife and sons, his sister, two nephews and his father-in-law. They talked about Mr. Razmi identifying himself, for the first time, as the anonymous photographer.
Mr. Razmi had done nothing wrong, they reasoned. He photographed the execution with the permission of the judge. He turned over his negatives to the photo editor. He described his work to the prison guard. He wasn’t the one who sent the six images abroad. He didn’t earn a single rial or credit from his photo, the rights to which had passed from UPI to the Bettmann Archive to Corbis Corp.
The family approved of his decision to come forward. Voicing hope that it wouldn’t harm Mr. Razmi, eight people around the table spoke as one: “Inshallah,” if Allah wills it.
Past midnight, Mr. Razmi retreated to a bedroom closet and lifted his canvas camera bag by the faded strap that had hung over his shoulder during the 1979 revolution. Here in pale black ink on the inside flap of a pocket was written in Farsi, “Jahangir Razmi, Ettela’at, 328 331” — the newsroom number to phone in the event of his death.
Mr. Razmi returned to his living room. He had unearthed his contact sheet and stills for his annual look back at the execution. “I have pictures that have never been published,” he said.
The photographer held in his right hand a sheaf of black-and-white photographs, 27 images that were 26 years, five days old. He withdrew from a plastic sleeve a furling photo of the sandwich maker who cried as he waited to be shot.
Mr. Razmi thrust it forward. “Who has this picture?” he asked, his voice rising. “Nobody.” He thrust forward a photo of the dust that rose over 11 fallen men. “Who has this picture?” he asked. “Nobody.” He thrust forward a photo of the bodyguard surveying the men he had shot. “Who has this picture?” he asked. “Nobody.”
Mr. Razmi returned the photos to the sleeve that had held them since 1979. And for the first time since he had secreted them home in a folded newspaper, he put them in a Samsonite briefcase he had long used to store chosen photos from his career.
Forward. The Gravest Crime – and selective conscience
On March 25, the UN General Assembly declared the transatlantic slave trade the “gravest crime against humanity.” 123 countries voted in favour, three against, and 52 abstained – including the UK, all 27 EU member states and Australia.
The moral core is unobjectionable. The slave trade was monstrous, its consequences did not end with abolition, and saying so plainly is not theatre – it is history. But UN resolutions are not history lectures. They are political instruments.
This one was carefully engineered. Its most controversial element was the recognition of slavery as a violation of jus cogens – peremptory norms of international law binding on all states. Not a historical observation, but a legal foundation for future liability claims. The EU noted the resolution’s “unbalanced interpretation of historical events” and legal references inconsistent with international law, including retroactive application of rules that simply did not exist at the time.
The 123 who voted yes include states with active, present-tense records of forced labour and ethnic persecution. Their zeal for condemning 18th-century European slave traders carries a faint whiff of convenience. And the Western abstentions were the diplomatic equivalent of leaving before the bill arrives – not endorsement, but not courage either.
Slavery was real. The suffering was immense. But a resolution shaped by reparations politics and the arithmetic of bloc voting is not the act of collective moral reckoning it claims to be. It is politics, dressed, as so much UN business is, in the language of justice.
Whitewashing slavery’s deep and dark history
Slavery sits in the human story like a dark, deep river that refuses to keep to its banks. It runs from the Assyrian deportations and Roman estates, mines and galleys, through the markets of old Baghdad and the longships on the rivers of Keven Rus, down into the Atlantic crossings from Africa to the Americas and thence to Europe. and out again into the contract-labour regimes and hidden rooms of the present. Names change – thrall, concubine, slave, servant, “sponsored worker” – but the underlying grammar is stubborn: power converting vulnerability into utility, often with a theory to justify it and a market to sustain it.
Into this long, uneasy history steps the modern urge to judge it – to apportion blame, to rank crimes, to extract from the past a usable morality for the present. The UN resolution is one such attempt: part commemoration, part indictment, part politics by other means. A counter-brief insists that this particular ledger has been selectively drawn, that some entries are inked in heavily while others are left in the margin or omitted altogether. Between them lies not a settled account but a contested one, in which the Atlantic system with its Islamic trades, and African agency, “King Cotton” and John Brown, and modern forms of coercion all jostle for place and proportion.
The following essay does not endeavour to tidy that argument into a single verdict. It widens the frame without dissolving the particulars; to hold in view both the universality of slavery and the distinctiveness of its forms; to recognise the rarity of abolition without mistaking it for completion. History, in this register, is less a courtroom than a map – dense, overlapping, and resistant to clean lines.
The deep and dark river
That UN resolution formally condemned slavery as a universal crime – indeed, the “gravest crime”. But, in practice it narrows its indictment to the transatlantic trade of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, presenting it as a distinctively Western, racialised, and capitalist enterprise.
It is precise, almost prosecutorial, assigning blame, embedding the trade in a narrative of structural injustice that echoes into the present. Yet it grows evasive when confronting the forces that ended slavery: the Enlightenment, abolitionist movements, legal reforms – reduced to a kind of historical afterthought.
More significantly, as economist and commentator Henry Ergas argues in an article in The Australian, republished below, the resolution omits the long and substantial history of slavery in the Islamic world – trans-Saharan, Red Sea, Indian Ocean – systems that endured for centuries, moved millions, and in many places persisted well into the modern era. Unlike in the West, he contends, there was no sustained, institutionalised moral revolt against slavery at scale; abolition came late, often under external pressure, and in some cases remains incomplete in practice.
He pushes further. By declaring the slave trade “the greatest” crime against humanity, the resolution risks collapsing distinctions – most notably between exploitation and extermination – thereby, in his reading, relativising the Holocaust. And finally, he notes the political choreography: strong support from authoritarian states and those with troubling contemporary records, contrasted with the hesitant abstention of many Western democracies.
That is his case – straightforward, and cleanly drawn – perhaps a little too cleanly. Because once we widen the frame, the lines begin to blur in ways that resist both the UN’s moral staging and Ergas’s counter-brief.
Slavery is not an aberration of one civilisation but a near-constant of many; and it spans millenia. The Assyrians and Persians deported whole populations as instruments of empire. Sennacherib and other potentates would empty a conquered land of its indigenous peoples and replace them with deportees from another conquest. The Romans built an economy on servile labour whilst the Byzantines continued the practice. Muslim caliphates and emirates, including the Abbasids and Ayyubids, Mamluks and Ottomans, sustained vast networks of concubinage and domestic and military slavery.
The Vikings – often reduced in popular memory to picturesque if violent raiders – operated something closer to a transcontinental syndicate. The river systems of the Rus, threading south through the Volga and Dnieper, connected the Baltic to the Black Sea and Baghdad. Silver flowed north; human beings flowed south. This was not episodic plunder but a business model – structured, repeatable, and profitable. And conducted across astonishing distances. Baghdad and York sat at the far ends of a human supply chain. [The illustration at the head of this article is that of a young Slavic woman being sold into slavery by Vikings to a Persian merchant (Image: Tom Lovell / National Geographic)]
So, in short. Salvery has existed in some form in almost every known civilisation. In the ancient world, captives were routinely taken, bought, sold, and traded. Greek city-states enslaved defeated populations; Rome built much of its economy on slave labour; raiding societies from the Eurasian steppe to the Atlantic world, and across the ocean, among the First Nations people of the Americas, treated slavery as part of warfare and survival. For most of human history, slavery was seen less as a moral evil than as an accepted social institution, however tragic it might be for those caught within it.
It is necessary therefore to resist any account that isolates the Atlantic trade as if it emerged sui generis from European wickedness. The Islamic world sustained large-scale slave systems over a long durée; and African polities were not merely passive victims but active participants in capture and sale; Arab traders were integral intermediaries. The Atlantic system, or “the Middle Passage” and “Triangular Trade” as it was euphemistically described, depended in its operation on a web of local agency as well as European demand. To acknowledge that is not to dilute culpability but to complicate it – uncomfortably, but necessarily.
And yet – here the counterweight – the Atlantic system was not merely one more iteration of an ancient practice. In the Americas – north and south – fused race, heredity, and commerce into something peculiarly rigid and self-reproducing. Slavery became not just a condition but a caste, encoded in law and biology, and scaled through plantation economies that fed a global market. Cotton, sugar, coffee and tobacco were not marginal commodities but engines of early modern capitalism. The system’s brutality was not incidental; it was structural.
It is here that the North American story assumes its central, paradoxical role. Chattel slavery became both foundational and explosive – so deeply embedded in the economy that its removal threatened the entire edifice, and yet so morally corrosive that it generated its own opposition. The American Civil War was among many things, the moment when that contradiction could no longer be managed rhetorically or regionally; it was settled, instead, in blood. Abolition here was not simply argued into being; it was fought into being.
Slavery was America’s original sin, and its malign influence ricochets still through its politics and society. [See American historian Sarah Churchwell’s.chilling account of darkest Dixie in In That Howling Infinite’s The Wrath to Come. Gone With the Wind and America’s Big Lie]
Which brings us to what may be the most historically unusual feature in all of this: not slavery itself, but the sustained movement to abolish it. The West generated, from the 17th century onward, a mounting moral and political challenge to slaver, in legal cases, religious agitation, popular campaigns – that eventually dismantled it – significant help from the Royal Navy. Comparable, system-wide movements were less evident in the Islamic world, where dissent existed but did not crystallise into mass abolitionism with similar force or effect.
The distinction matters. Saying it did not happen is a statement of fact; suggesting it could not have happened, or that its absence reflects some deeper civilisational failing, goes beyond the evidence. The divergence likely owes as much to political economy, state structure, and the contingencies of modernity as to theology alone. Which is where English historian and The Rest is History podcaster Tom Holland’s excellent doorstop of a book Dominion hovers, suggestively, over the argument [See In That Howling Infinite’s Getting back to the garden – Tom Holland’s Dominion
Holland’s claim – broadly put – is that the moral vocabulary underpinning abolition in the West owes much to a Christian inheritance: the elevation of the weak, the insistence on the equal worth of souls, the suspicion of unrestrained power. Even as the Enlightenment secularises these ideas, it carries their imprint. One need not follow him into every chapel of that argument to see the outline: abolition is historically anomalous, and anomalies tend to have genealogies. The West did not simply stumble into anti-slavery; it argued its way there, drawing on intellectual and moral resources that had been accumulating, often ambivalently, for centuries.
One must exercise caution here. Moral discomfort with slavery existed elsewhere and earlier, even if it did not produce mass abolitionist movements in the same way as in the West. Nor does the existence of Western abolition somehow erase the brutality or scale of European colonial slavery, particularly the Atlantic slave trade and plantation economies. The West occupies both roles in history: architect of the largest racialised slave system in modern history, and birthplace of the most influential abolitionist movements against it.
History is often untidy like that.
Old poison, new bottles
The story end in the 19th century however much resolutions might prefer it to. The Gulf states remind us that abolition in law does not always mean abolition in practice. The kafala system – sponsorship, contract labour – operates in a grey zone where dependence can harden into coercion. Passports withheld, mobility constrained, recourse limited: not chattel slavery, but an echo, or perhaps a mutation. History rarely repeats itself verbatim; it adapts, keeping the structure while altering the terminology.
And then there are the moments when the past returns not as echo but as revival. ISIS, with its enslavement of Yazidi women, did not merely exploit chaos; it articulated a doctrine. Slavery, and most particularly, sexual slavery, was justified, systematised, and bureaucratised with price lists, allocations, and rules, and even, trans-national trafficking: one captive ended up in Gaza where she was eventually rescued from a war zone. It was, in the grimmest sense, a reactivation of an old logic under modern conditions. Old poison in new bottles. If abolition was an anomaly, here was the reminder that anomalies can be reversed.
Governments and citizens of ostensibly westernized states should look to their self-awarded laurels. We should be wary of treating coercion as something that happens “over there.” The exploitation of domestic workers – underpaid, over- controlled , sometimes effectively trapped – appears not only in the Gulf but in Lebanon, Israel, and also parts of Western Europe and North America, where immigration status and private households create shadows the law struggles to reach. And closer still, in our own economies, sweatshop labour, debt bondagea and various forms of servitude persist at the margins, along with physical violence and sexual exploitation – which is precisely why regulation, inspection, and enforcement remain not moral luxuries but necessities.
Against this broader canvas, the UN resolution begins to look less like a statement of history than a negotiation, negation, even – of memory. Its selectivity – foregrounding Western guilt, backgrounding Western abolition, omitting other systems – is not unusual in such documents; it is, in some sense, as we have often seen, their defining feature. They are less concerned with completeness than with consensus, less with analysis than with alignment. Countries with difficult presents often find it convenient to condemn curated pasts.
Ergas is justified in objecting to that selectivity. Where he overreaches is in answering it with a counter-selectivity of his own – one that risks understating the distinctiveness of the Atlantic system and overstating the clarity of civilisational contrasts. History, inconveniently, refuses to stay within either brief.
On the question of the Holocaust, however, his warning lands. To rank atrocities – to declare one “the greatest” – is to turn history into a macabre competition. More importantly, it obscures differences of intent. Most slave systems, however brutal, were premised on exploitation; the Holocaust was premised on annihilation. That distinction is not a matter of moral bookkeeping but of historical substance.
And so we arrive, circuitously, at a position that satisfies no one entirely – which is probably how one knows it is closer to the truth.
Slavery is not the property of any one civilisation; it is a recurrent human institution, appearing wherever power, profit, and permission align. The Atlantic trade is distinctive but not unique; Islamic and African systems are substantial but not singular; modern forms persist under altered names and legal veneers. What is genuinely unusual is the emergence of sustained, organised movements that declare slavery illegitimate and succeed – partially, unevenly – in abolishing it.
Between the UN’s moral narrowing and Ergas’s corrective widening lies a more uncomfortable landscape: one in which culpability is diffuse, agency is shared, and progress, where it occur, is contingent, fragile, and slow. The past does not arrange itself into neat indictments or tidy vindications. It lingers, instead, as habit and warning.
And, if one is honest, as a question still not fully answered.
On the Holocaust comparison, Ergas is on firmer ground. Collapsing all historical crimes into a single ranked category – the greatest” – is less analysis than moral theatre. The distinction between exploitation and extermination is not pedantic; it goes to intent. The Nazi project was annihilatory in a way most slave systems, however cruel, were not. History flattens at our peril.
And then there is the politics of the thing. UN resolutions are not monographs; they are negotiated texts, shaped by blocs, interests, and the quiet arithmetic of votes. Selectivity is almost baked in – as is prejudice. Countries with uncomfortable presents often find safety in condemning selective pasts. Western abstentions, too, are rarely acts of intellectual surrender; more often they are the diplomacy of not quite wanting to pick a fight that cannot be cleanly won.
Unfinished business
So we end where we began, with a familiar tension. Yes, slavery is a near-universal inheritance, and any telling that singles out one civilisation to the exclusion of others is suspect. But neither does the universality of the crime dissolve its particular forms. The Atlantic system, the Islamic trades, ancient chattel systems – they rhyme, but they are not identical verses.
And there remains a broader, less comfortable truth: the story of slavery is not a morality play with a single villain, but a long human habit, periodically challenged, never entirely extinguished, and always ready, given the right circumstances and excuses, to return.
History, in other words, refuses both the courtroom brief and the absolution. It is messier than Ergas allows, but also less conveniently moralised than the resolution he criticises.
It leaves us not ranking guilt, but paying closer attention. The Atlantic system was distinctive; the Islamic and other trades were vast and enduring; African rulers and Arab merchants were participants as well as intermediaries; the West generated powerful abolitionist movements even as it profited from what it eventually condemned. None of these claims cancels the others. Together they form a picture that is, at once, more accurate and less flattering than any single narrative allows.
And the present refuses to sit quietly beneath the verdicts we pass on the past. The exploitation of domestic workers in the Gulf, Lebanon, Israel, and parts of Western Europe; the persistence of sweatshop labour, debt bondage, and coerced work within Western economies themselves – these are not historical footnotes but contemporary reminders. Laws and conventions matter, but so do inspection, enforcement, and the unglamorous work of closing the gap between principle and practice.
Which is why the most suspect posture, at the end of such an inquiry, is self-congratulation. There is no stable ground here for laurel wreaths, no civilisational vantage point from which to survey a completed moral victory. At best there is a difference in degree – of scrutiny, of institutional capacity, of willingness to act. And even that requires constant renewal.
Slavery, in its older forms, has been dismantled in many places; in its newer guises, it adapts. The question is less who was worst than who is still looking, and still prepared to do something about what they find.
Postscript: Etymology
The history lingers, as it often does, in the words. They carry within themselves their own freight.
“Slave” in English carries within it a map of early medieval Europe. The term is widely traced to the Latin sclavus, itself derived from Sclavus – “Slav” – a reflection of the large numbers of Slavic peoples captured and sold through the trading networks that ran from the Baltic down the great river systems to Byzantium and the Islamic world. What began as an ethnonym hardened into a condition. By the High Middle Ages the word had shed its geographic specificity and settled into general use- esclave, schiavo, esclavo, slave – the person eclipsed by the status, the origin story buried in the syllable. The modern word is not, in itself, a slur; but its lineage is a reminder of how readily a name can be stripped of personhood and repurposed as a category of subjection.
Arabic offers a parallel, though not an identical one. The root ʿabd (عبد) denotes a servant or slave, but in its primary register it is theological: ʿabd Allāh, servant of God – a posture of submission before the divine rather than a description of worldly bondage. Yet the plural ʿabīd (عبيد) – once a straightforward term for slaves – acquired, over time and in certain contexts, a sharper edge, used for Black slaves and, by extension, Black people more generally. In modern usage it can carry derogatory force, depending on context and intent, illustrating how a neutral descriptor can drift into insult as it absorbs the hierarchies of the societies that use it.
In both cases, language records a quiet transformation. A people becomes a condition; a condition gathers associations; those associations harden into overtones that may wound long after their origins are forgotten. The vocabulary survives the systems that shaped it, carrying their traces forward – compressed, half-visible, but still there for those inclined to listen.
Afterword: Thraldom, it’s unwinding and its afterlives
A final turn of the lens, back to northern Europe, where the language and the practice briefly align – and then, tellingly, reappear in altered guises.
In Anglo-Saxon England, þræl – thrall – named a condition within a broader spectrum of unfreedom. These were the captured, the indebted, the born into it: men and women who laboured in households and on estates, who could be bought and sold, though not yet within the fully racialised, hereditary system that would later define Atlantic chattel slavery. The boundaries were hard but not always impermeable. Manumission occurred; over generations, absorption was possible. It was a system of subjection, but not yet a totalising one.
The British port of Bristol stands as a reminder of how visible and organised that system could be. It became wealthy with the transatlantic slave trade. But in the 11th century it also functioned as a significant slaving port, exporting captives – often from Wales and the Welsh borderlands – into Irish and wider networks. This was not an anomaly but a node in a broader medieval traffic in human beings, linking the British Isles to circuits that extended, directly and indirectly, toward the Mediterranean and beyond.
Nor was England unique. Across medieval Europe, slavery persisted in varied forms: Italian city-states drew on Black Sea supplies; Iberian polities, both Muslim and Christian, trafficked in captives amid the long wars of the Reconquista; eastern Europe fed human cargo into Byzantine and Islamic markets. The word “slave” itself, with its Slavic root, is a linguistic fossil of that traffic (see below)..
And yet, in England at least, something shifted – and the Norman Conquest appears to have hastened it. On the eve of 1066, Domesday would soon record servi in significant numbers, perhaps around a tenth of the population. By the 12th century, however, chattel slavery had largely withered. The causes were less a single decree than a convergence. The Norman regime imported a more continental feudal logic, in which labour was bound to land rather than owned outright; a villein, fixed, dues-paying, and reproductively stable, was often more useful than a saleable slave. The Church, already critical of slave trading – Wulfstan of Worcester’s condemnation of the Bristol trade is emblematic. – found firmer footing in the new order, aligning moral pressure with institutional power. Trade patterns shifted too, as England’s orientation tilted across the Channel, loosening older Irish Sea networks that had sustained export markets.
None of this amounted to abolition in the modern sense. What replaced slavery was serfdom: a different architecture of dependence, less overtly transactional but hardly free. The change was real, but it was also a translation—from one form of unfreedom into another, quieter one.
And, as if to underline the point, elements of the older logic resurfaced later under new names. In the 17th and 18th centuries, Britain exported large numbers of indentured labourers – many English, but also Scots and Irish, including prisoners of war and political rebels after uprisings – to the American colonies and the Caribbean. Bound by contract rather than owned outright, they nonetheless occupied a coercive world of limited rights, harsh discipline, and restricted movement. The loss of the American colonies in 1783 did not end this habit of displacement; it redirected it. Transportation – of convicts and dissidents – to Australia became the next imperial outlet for managing surplus and troublesome populations, a system different in law but recognisably akin in its logic of removal and compelled labour [see in In That Howling Infinite, Farewell to Old England forever … reappraising The Fatal Shore
Meanwhile, further east, a different trajectory prevailed. In eastern Europe and Russia, serfdom did not wither but intensified. From the late medieval period into the early modern era, landlords consolidated control over peasant populations, binding them ever more tightly to the land and to service. In Russia, this culminated in a system that, by the 18th century, bore striking resemblances to slavery in practice, if not always in name – serfs bought, sold, and mortgaged along with estates, their mobility sharply curtailed, their obligations exacting. Emancipation would come late: 1861 in Russia, and even then imperfectly, leaving behind structures of dependency that proved stubbornly durable.
Which is, perhaps, the thread worth keeping in hand. Systems of coercion rarely disappear cleanly; they evolve, recur and rephrase. From thrall to serf, from market to manor, from indenture to transportation, from eastern estate to western plantation. The names change; the grammar does not. Waiting, as ever, for the conditions that allow it to harden once again. waiting, as ever, for the conditions that allow it to harden once again.
In that Howling Infinite, May Day 2026
This essay was written in conversation with an AI language model, which contributed to researching, drafting, phrasing, and conceptual articulation.What appears here is not unmediated thought, but considered thought: directed and selected, revised and revised again, and owned.
When this essay was published on Facebook, it elicited several comments that amounted to a polemical defense of the West that began with a legitimate historical observation – slavery was historically near-universal and abolitionism emerged most powerfully from Enlightenment Europe – but then overextended the claim into a triumphalist narrative about Western moral uniqueness and non-Western incapacity for self-criticism. Its tone is combative, culturally chauvinistic, and marked by sweeping generalisations about “the Third World,” Islamic societies, Arabs, and Asian civilisations.
Intellectually, they mixed valid historical points with selective history, rhetorical exaggeration, and resentment politics. They treated “the West” as unusually self-critical and morally generative, while caricaturing other societies as conformist or authoritarian. The result is less a sober historical analysis than a reaction against contemporary anti-Western discourse, expressed through broad-brush civilisational language.
A more balanced critique might read as follows:
Slavery has existed in some form in almost every known civilisation. In the ancient world, captives were routinely taken, bought, sold, and traded. Greek city-states enslaved defeated populations; Rome built much of its economy on slave labour; raiding societies from the Eurasian steppe to the Atlantic world treated slavery as part of warfare and survival. For most of human history, slavery was seen less as a moral evil than as an accepted social institution, however tragic it might be for those caught within it.
One of the major intellectual shifts of the Enlightenment era was the emergence, particularly in Western Europe and North America, of the idea that slavery itself was morally illegitimate. Philosophical ideas about natural rights, combined with religious and humanitarian movements, helped give rise to organised abolitionism. Britain, France, and the United States were deeply implicated in the Atlantic slave trade, yet they also produced influential movements that eventually challenged and dismantled it. Modern international norms against slavery owe much to these developments.
At the same time, slavery was not uniquely Western, nor was opposition to injustice confined solely to the West. Different forms of servitude and human bondage existed across Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and the Americas, and criticism of oppression has emerged within many cultures and traditions. The historical record is complex: societies can simultaneously perpetrate injustice and generate the ideas that challenge it.
Contemporary debates about slavery and colonialism sometimes oversimplify history by treating Europe and the West as uniquely culpable, while overlooking the broader global history of slavery. But responding to that simplification with sweeping condemnations of non-Western societies is equally reductive. A more useful approach is to recognise both the universality of slavery in human history and the particular historical significance of the abolitionist movements that emerged during the Enlightenment and after.
UN resolution on slavery falsifies history by ignoring Islamic world’s role
Henry Ergas, The Australian, 1 May 2026
The UN resolution sparks debate over historical interpretation: Getty Images
Henry Ergas, The Australian, 1 May 2026
That the African slave trade was a monstrosity, inflicting unspeakable cruelty on millions of innocent victims, is beyond dispute. But the resolution the UN General Assembly passed two weeks ago, marking the trade’s commemoration, is nothing less than an appalling falsification of history.
Formally, the resolution condemns the African slave trade as a whole. Substantively, every concrete reference targets the transatlantic trade, fixating on a “racialised capitalist system” and its purported Western antecedents. The cumulative effect is unmistakeable: to brand the trade a distinctively Western crime. To sustain that impression, the resolution parades a sequence of decrees, starting with the papal bulls of 1452 and 1455, which it casts as the founding charters of the enslavement and “structural racism” that still unjustly impoverishes Africa, thereby grounding a claim to substantial reparations.
Yet, having been forensically specific about blame, the text turns conspicuously evasive when it confronts the forces that brought the Atlantic trade to an end. The Enlightenment, the abolitionist movements, and the Western legal and political campaigns that culminated in the trade’s eventual demise are, it appears, unmentionable.
While the offending decrees are named, dated and indicted, the tide of opposition to slavery, which gathered momentum in the 17th century, is dismissed as “certain legal challenges and judicial developments in the 18th century” that “questioned the legality and morality of chattel enslavement”.
That descent into vagueness reflects a deliberate strategy: to particularise the guilt while diluting the credit. Merely cataloguing the misrepresentations, confusions and factual errors this strategy produces would require far more space than is available here. What is especially striking, however, are the omissions.
It is, for example, intellectually dishonest to invoke the papal bulls of 1452 and 1455 while ignoring Pope Paul III’s bull of 1537, which denounced as an invention of the devil the idea that native peoples “should be treated as dumb brutes created for our service”, and affirmed “that they may and should, freely and legitimately, enjoy their liberty”.
Paul III’s exhortations had limited immediate effect; so too did Cartwright’s Case (1569), which declared that England’s air was “too pure for slaves to dwell in”. What matters is what they reveal: an unceasing moral interrogation of slavery within the West itself – an interrogation that gave abolitionism the bedrock on which to build.
Here, too, the resolution’s selectivity is purposeful. It allows it to avoid an obvious and crucial comparator: the long history of slavery under Islamic rule, which it ignores altogether. From the Arab conquests to the early 20th century, some 14 million black slaves were transported into the lands of Islam via the trans-Saharan, Red Sea and Indian Ocean routes, with nearly a million more carried beyond the East African coast. Add to these more than a million white slaves, and the total comfortably exceeds the 10 million to 12 million who landed in the Americas.
Yet the numbers are not what is most significant. The salient fact is the absence of any sustained doctrinal or institutional challenge to the morality and legality of the slave trade within the Islamic world – even where it starkly contradicted the Koranic prohibition on enslaving Muslims. As Bruce Hall shows in his study of Saharan and Sahelian slavery, by the 19th century – when the West was vigorously suppressing chattel slavery – the operative presumption among Maliki jurists was that black Africans, routinely described as “savages”, were enslavable by default, whatever their faith.
There were individuals who objected strenuously to chattel slavery, such as Syrian reformer Abd al-Rahman al-Kawakibi (1855-1902); but no Muslim opponent of slavery ever forged those concerns into a mass movement. Bernard Lewis’s verdict that “even the most radical Muslim modernists” fell well short of matching the fervour and effectiveness of Western abolitionists retains all its force.
It is therefore unsurprising that Islam’s leading theologians, far from championing abolition, actively resisted it – beginning with the infamous 1855 fatwa, issued with the full authority of Mecca’s Shaykh Jamal, which declared any prohibition of the slave trade “contrary to the holy law of Islam” and any official who attempted to enforce it “lawful to kill”.
Nor is it surprising that Saudi Arabia and Yemen abolished slavery only in 1962, the United Arab Emirates in 1964, Oman in 1970, and Mauritania – after repeated ineffectual measures – in 2007. Moreover, even where slavery was formally abolished, forms of vassalage have remained firmly in place: of the 10 countries with the highest incidence of “modern slavery”, eight are majority-Muslim.
But the resolution does not merely distort history by pretending Islamic slavery didn’t exist. It declares the slave trade “the greatest” crime against humanity ever committed. Although not explicitly stated, a central purpose of this travesty – which converts the horrors of the past into a “suffering Olympics” – is again transparent: to relativise the Holocaust.
It is frankly obscene to degrade moral evaluation into a body count, with medals of ignominy awarded by a show of hands. Yet even in so repulsive a spectacle, realities should have been allowed to intrude. Those realities are well known. Death rates in the Holocaust – whose unrelenting aim was the complete extermination of Jews – were close to or above 90 per cent. So complete was the indifference to fatalities that the German railways were paid whether the Jews being shipped by them lived or died during their transport – and the few who survived the journeys were killed, on average, within days of arrival.
In contrast, as investor Thomas Starke wrote to Captain James Westmore in 1700, “the whole benefit of the voyage lyes in your care of preserving negroes’ lives”. As a result, strenuous efforts were made to ensure slaves remained alive and saleable, including by granting handsome bonuses to captains for high survival rates and imposing stiff penalties for excess mortality.
Although those efforts hardly eliminated the trade’s horrors, they did mean that by the late 18th century, death rates for black slaves on the “middle passage” had declined dramatically, to the point where they were only marginally greater than those for crews. To pretend otherwise is to erase the distinction between exploitation and extermination: for there was nothing in the slave trade even remotely comparable to the systematic mass murder at the heart of the Holocaust.
But to acknowledge those facts – which flatly contradict the assault on the standing of the Holocaust – might have eroded the overwhelming support the resolution secured. And the composition of that support says everything one needs to know about the resolution.
Thus, every one of the 20 countries that have the highest incidence of modern slavery and forced labour cynically voted in its favour; so did all the authoritarian states that participated in the vote, with the exception of Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan; and, again with the exception of Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, it received the active backing of every Muslim-majority country.
Yet that is not the real tragedy. Rather, it is that only three Western countries – the US, Israel and Argentina – had the decency to vote against the falsification of history, instead of abstaining, as Australia and the European Union did. Those three were willing to oppose this charade. Why weren’t we?
And the words that are used for to get the ship confused Will not be understood as they’re spoken
Bob Dylan, When the Ship Comes in
When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty tells Alice, with the serene arrogance of the ideologue, “it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.”
Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
State governments weigh the prohibition of potentially inflammatory phrases; lawyers parse syllables; activists insist that what is heard is not what is meant, and what is meant is not what is said. The words hover, untethered from consequence, yet curiously heavy with it. And this is where Lewis Carroll, with his disarming Edwardian whimsy, begins to feel less like a children’s author and more like a diagnostician. Alice, still tethered to an older moral physics, asks the only sensible question: whether words can, in fact, be made to mean so many different things. The answer – never quite resolved in Wonderland is being tested here and now on our streets, in own legislatures, and on our social media feeds. For if words can be made infinitely flexible, then meaning itself becomes negotiable; and if meaning is negotiable, then so too are responsibility and harm.
More than words can say …
We like to imagine that words live quietly in dictionaries, disciplined by etymology and tamed by definition. But they do not live there. They live in history. And history leaves fingerprints.
So, what’s in a word? A root, yes. A history. A memory. A strategy. Sometimes a slur. Sometimes a lament. Often, a rhetorical shortcut. Occasionally a doorway into understanding. We pretend words are neutral. They are not. They are histories. They are wounds. They are strategies. They are prayers. They are threats. They are pleas.
What’s in a word? Enough to start a war. Enough to end a conversation. Enough, if handled carefully, to begin one. The question is not simply what a word means. It is what it does. Does it illuminate complexity, or obscure it? Does it invite argument, or pre-empt it? Does it name suffering without erasing another’s?
Words are fall differentially upon the tongue and the ears; words which some see only as incitement and which the others see only resistance. And yet, these words did not come out of nothing. They arose from lived experience. Palestinians do experience dispossession. Israelis do experience existential threat. Jews carry a historical memory of annihilation that makes the word genocide resonate differently in their ears. Palestinians carry a memory of erasure that makes Nakba less metaphor than inheritance. Each community carries memory as identity. To police to and sanction vocabulary without acknowledging origin and memory is to misunderstand both.
To study a language is to develop a kind of double hearing. You recognise when metaphor shades into innuendo—and when it darkens further into menace.
To study a language is to learn when freedom names a horizon – and when it licenses the powerful to act without restraint. To notice when peace is an aspiration – and when it is a performance designed to defer justice. To recognise when security protects life – and when it expands to govern it; when it names legitimate protection – and when it justifies suffocating control. To feel when homeland gathers memory and when it redraws the map to exclude others. To understand when return is a longing—and when it becomes an argument that displaces those already there.
To study a language is to hear when muqamawwa – resistance – signals dignity – and when it becomes a script that traps a people inside permanent defiance. To know that sumud – steadfastness—can describe dignified endurance and also calcify into the romanticisation of endless struggle. To detect when tadhāmon solidarity – binds people together—and when it flattens complexity into slogan. To recognise when itishhad – martyrdom – honours loss – and when it recruits the living into the service of the dead. To hear when terror names violence—and when it is stretched to delegitimise any form of opposition.
To study a language is to hear when history explains—and when it is curated to absolve.
For years I have studied Arabic – and its roots and patterns: how three consonants generate a constellation of meanings. And I have studied Middle Eastern history with more than academic curiosity – not as spectator sport but with what I would called metaphorical “skin in the game.” Words like jihad, intifada, nakba, aliyah, ‘awda, sumud, words that now ricochet across social media feeds and protest placards, are not abstractions or exotic imports to me. They are layered. Sedimented. They carry centuries in their syntax and sentiment. They are lived terms, argued over, felt in the mouth. And so when someone asks “What’s in a word?” I cannot pretend the answer is neutral.
Intifada. From nafada – to shake off, to shake free. Dust from a cloak. Subjugation from a people. The metaphor is physical, almost domestic. Yet in common Arabic usage, it implies resistance and uprising, and neither are peaceful or passive. In Israeli memory the word is fused to sirens, shrapnel, blown-out windows. It is impossible to hear it without recalling the Second Intifada’s exploding buses and cafés, bloody streets and scattered body parts. So when someone chants “globalise the intifada,” they may imagine solidarity with resistance; others hear a call that premises funerals. The dictionary definition is technically correct. It is also profoundly incomplete. It does not arrive alone; it brings its dead with it.
Or alNakba. In ordinary Arabic, a misfortune. A bad year. But in Palestinian consciousness it has fossilised into 1948 – villages depopulated, olive groves left untended, families scattered, deeds and keys preserved like heirlooms. It is no longer a generic calamity; it is The Catastrophe. Say it in Ramallah and you evoke dispossession. Say it in western Jerusalem and you may hear, in reply, the memory of a war launched to strangle a newborn state. 1967 is referred to as al Naksa, the setback.
And then there is jihad — perhaps the most mistranslated word in modern political discourse. Its root, jahada, means to strive, to exert oneself. Classical Islamic thought distinguishes between inner moral striving and outward struggle that can be intellectual, and yes, armed defence under defined conditions. Yet modern movements – from anti-colonial insurgencies to nihilistic terror groups – have narrowed and weaponised it. The word has travelled. It has acquired passengers it did not originally carry. To deny that is to be naïve. To reduce it solely to “holy war” is equally ignorant.
Al ‘Awda – the return – carries a weight for Palestinians comparable to the resonance of intifada or nakba. It is not a mere political slogan; it is a moral, legal, and emotional claim bound up with exile, memory, and inheritance and the enduring hope, however fraught, of returning to one’s ancestral land. For Israelis, the concept often triggers apprehension, a fear that the abstract ideal of return could translate into demographic and existential challenge, potentially threatening the state itself. Like intifada or nakba, the word carries histories and futures simultaneously: one side sees longing and justice, the other sees danger.
Hebrew political vocabulary is no less charged. Aliyah – ascent – frames immigration as spiritual elevation. Ge’ulah -redemption – maps theology onto statehood. Am Yisrael Chai – Let Israel Live – evokes covenant, not population. Political vocabulary hums with biblical resonance. It is impossible to excise theology from nationalism in a land where scripture is mapped onto soil.
The power of these words lies not in dictionary meaning, but in the lived and imagined consequences each community projects onto them. So when commentators insist that “intifada just means struggle,” or that “Zionism just means Jewish self-determination,” they are not wrong linguistically. They are incomplete historically. Words do not live in morphology alone. They live in memory.
Let’s cast our etymological web wider and delve deeper in our dictionary and examine words that ricochet across the howling internet in these troubled times. Genocide. Ethnic cleaning. Apartheid. Settler-colonialist. Terrorist. Resistance. Each carries not only denotation but detonation and accusation. Each holds an argument inside a noun. Each is more than description; but also a moral verdict disguised as vocabulary. The German historian Reinhart Koselleck called such terms Kampfbegriffe – battle-words. Words of iron forged in particular historical furnaces, hardened by trauma, and redeployed not merely to describe reality but to shape it.
The same dynamic now saturates discussion of Israel–Palestine. Let’s not pretend that careful language will resolve a conflict this old, this layered, this saturated with grief. But careless language can only make things worse.
Call Israel a “settler-colonial state or an apartheid state” and you situate it in the moral lineage of Algeria, Rhodesia and Pretoria. Call Hamas’ October 7 assault “resistance” and you shift the frame from massacre – to revolt, or to shift the timeframe, to pogrom, the Russian word for destruction, now interpreted as referring to the organised massacres of a particular ethnic group – which, ironically, precipitated the first settlement of European Jews in what was to become Palestine. Call Gaza “genocide” and you summon Auschwitz – whether you intend to or not. Call protesters “terror sympathisers” and you evacuate the possibility of grief motivating them at all. Each move does moral work before the evidence is even considered.
It is here, amid the discourse of colonialism and statehood, that the word genocide warrants careful attention. Unlike settler-colonial or apartheid, which describe systems of domination and segregation, genocide describes intent – the deliberate aim to destroy a people as such. It is not simply a scale of death; it is a moral calculus applied to the machinery of annihilation. To deploy it is to summon not only bodies but histories, to conjure not only numbers but the moral shadow cast by deliberate erasure. In debates over land, displacement, and occupation, it is tempting to apply the term as an ethical accelerant, to compress outrage into a noun. Yet to do so responsibly requires rigor: assessment of intent, systematic targeting, and legal definition. Without that, the word risks inflation, becoming a rhetorical hammer rather than a precise lens. Each word narrows the moral aperture.
And yet, Genocide” now circulates online as hashtag and chant. It trends. It compresses argument into a single, morally incandescent noun. For many who use it in the Gaza context, it is less a legal claim than an expression of horror at the scale of devastation. It is a cry. But cries, once repeated often enough, harden into verdicts.
In Australia, we are hardly innocent of this. We live in a country still wrestling with its own founding vocabulary: terra nullius, invasion, genocide, reconciliation, Voice. These are still contested. We know – or should know – that words can both clarify and inflame. To call Australia “founded on genocide” may be defensible within certain scholarly frameworks; it is also rhetorically maximalist. It shocks the moral nerve. That shock may awaken conscience – or entrench defensiveness. Language is never inert. Words do not merely describe history; they frame it. They allocate blame. They assign virtue. They shape identity.
In That Howling Infinite has spent months untangling these labels. Is Israel a settler-colonial state? Does apartheid apply, and if so, where? Does genocide cross the threshold from metaphor into actionable accusation? Each term compresses arguments into a noun. It performs moral work before the debate even begins.
That compression is seductive. We prefer our tragedies simple: one culprit, one origin story, one clean fingerprint. Words that arrive pre-loaded with moral clarity spare us the labour of nuance. They allow passion and empathy to outrun reason and understanding – which, in an age of instant reaction, they reliably do.
Historical illiteracy compounds the problem. The conflict is older than most of its loudest commentators. Its history is layered with Ottoman legacies, British mandates, partition plans, UN resolutions, wars declared and undeclared, refugees, intifadas, failed peace processes, withdrawals, rockets, settlement blocs, religious revivals, and fractured leaderships on both sides. Yet online discourse flattens this into memes, and to pretend this can be reduced to a meme is historical illiteracy A map. A slogan. A 30-second clip untethered from context. Algorithms reward the sharpest edges. The most incendiary noun travels furthest. Nuance, by contrast, is penalised. It does not trend. It does not fit neatly into a caption. I worry about the generational shift in how these debates unfold. Previous eras had gatekeepers – flawed, certainly – but also editors who demanded sourcing, historians who insisted on chronology. Now discourse is democratised and accelerated. A meme outruns a monograph. A slogan outruns a syllabus.
The language used evolves accordingly. Rhetorical shortcuts proliferate. “From the river to the sea.” “Open-air prison.” “Terror state.” “Colonial entity.” “Death cult.” These phrases are not random; they are engineered for virality. Each word comes preloaded, historical analogies that compress decades into chantable cadences. But chants and slogans compress complexity. They must; that is their function. And that compression distorts: two national movements, two historical traumas, two competing narratives of return and belonging, reduced to a rhyme shouted through a megaphone.
And then there are the slurs: the truncations and code-words. For example, “Zio.” A syllable masquerading as political shorthand yet unmistakably functioning as ethnic hostility. Its power lies partly in deniability. It skirts the boundary of explicit antisemitism while retaining its charge. Deniable enough to evade sanction, sharp enough to wound. But we should be intellectually honest: this phenomenon is not one-directional. The same phenomenon occurs in reverse when “Islamist” becomes a catch-all smear for Muslim political expression, or when “pro-Palestinian” is lazily equated with antisemitic intent. The grammar of dehumanisation is bipartisan: collapsing an entire spectrum of political and religious identity into a caricature designed to foreclose engagement.
So, what, finally, is in a word?
Not merely meaning, but momentum. Not simply definition, but direction. Words do not sit still; they lean. They incline us toward certain conclusions before we have done the work of thinking. They smuggle history into the present tense and call it common sense. They arrive already freighted—with grief, with fear, with memory, with accusation—and we, often unwittingly, become their couriers.
The temptation, always, is to choose the word that does the most work for us—the one that collapses ambiguity, that secures the moral high ground in a single utterance. But that is precisely where language becomes most dangerous: when it relieves us of the burden of holding two truths at once; when it permits us to name one suffering in a way that erases another; when it transforms description into verdict before evidence has even entered the room.
What we do when we misuse words is not trivial. We erode precision. We inflame passions. We collapse law into slogan. We substitute moral theatre for argument. And perhaps most dangerously, we teach ourselves that the loudest noun is the truest one.
History suggests otherwise. It is rarely the loudest words that endure, but the most exacting; not the most incendiary, but the most honest about complexity. The archive is not kind to slogans. It remembers, instead, where language clarified—and where it concealed.
To speak about Israel and Palestine—indeed, to speak about any conflict so saturated with history—is to enter a linguistic minefield in which every term has a past and every past has its partisans. There is no neutral vocabulary here. Only more or less careful usage. Only degrees of awareness. Only the choice, conscious or otherwise, between illumination and incitement.
The task, then, is not to purify language—that is impossible—but to discipline ourselves in its use. To resist the seduction of the Kampfbegriff when it outpaces our understanding. To ask, each time we reach for a word: what history does it carry? What work is it doing? What—and who—does it leave out?
Because if words can start wars, they can also foreclose the possibility of ending them. And if they are capable, at their best, of opening a space for understanding, then that space is narrow, fragile, and easily collapsed by carelessness.
Language will not resolve this conflict. But without care in language, we will not even be able to speak about it honestly.
Coda
To study a language, in the end, is not simply to acquire vocabulary. It is to acquire conscience. It is to hear the echo behind the utterance—the ghost in the grammar. To recognise that every word, especially here, is a small archive: of exile and return, of fear and defiance, of prayer and propaganda. To speak, then, is to handle those archives with a certain humility, aware that one is always, in some sense, trespassing on someone else’s memory.
History suggests otherwise than our instincts: the loudest noun is rarely the truest one. The archive keeps its own counsel. It remembers where language clarified – and where it concealed.
Between the idea And the reality Between the motion And the act Falls the shadow.
Between the conception And the creation Between the emotion And the response Falls the Shadow
And in that shadow – linguistic, historical, human – words do their quiet, consequential work.
Postscript
While writing this essay – contemplating the slipperiness of words and widening the lens to the long weather system that has carried them into our mouths – I found myself returning to a simple, disquieting observation: it is no coincidence that so many of the words we have been parsing are Arabic.
It is not that Arabic words per se have become uniquely prone to distortion, nor that there is anything intrinsic to the language that invites what might loosely be called “gaslighting.” What I was circling, rather, is something more historically contingent – and more revealing.
Many of the most contested political ideas of the present moment – intifada, shahid, muqawama, even place-bound words and phrases that travel into English unchanged – are being transmitted untranslated, or only half-translated, into Western discourse. They arrive carrying dense, layered meanings shaped by decades (sometimes centuries) of conflict, theology, nationalism, and lived experience. And then, almost immediately, they are flattened, reframed, or strategically reinterpreted within a different moral and political vocabulary.
In other words, the instability I am sensing is not linguistic but translational – and beyond that, political.
There is, of course, a history to this. One thinks of how words like jihad were narrowed in Western usage to mean “holy war,” their broader theological and ethical dimensions quietly stripped away; or conversely, how certain terms are defended as benign by appeal to their most anodyne, etymological meanings, while bracketing how they are actually heard in context. The same word may present itself as metaphor, slogan, prayer, or threat – depending on who is speaking, who is listening, and what work the word is being made to do.
It is here that the instinct about Wonderland clicks back into place. The move is not uniquely Arabic; it is Humpty Dumpty’s move: control the meaning, and you control the moral frame. But the reason Arabic terms are so prominent in this moment is that the conflicts which have globalised our discourse – Israel–Palestine above all, but also Iraq, Syria, and the wider post-9/11 landscape – have carried those words into English without fully carrying their context with them. They become, in effect, linguistic migrants: visible, charged, and often unmoored.
So yes, it does say something about the modern world. Not that Arabic is uniquely problematic, but that we are living in an age where conflicts travel faster than comprehension, and where words – lifted from one history and dropped into another – become sites of struggle in their own right.
These words have crossed worlds. And in crossing, they have become unmoored enough to be contested, claimed, and weaponised. That unmooring creates opportunity: for some, to soften; for others, to sharpen; for many, to obscure.
It says something, too, about our times – about the way the Middle East has not merely intruded upon but come to dominate political, and indeed social, discourse for more than half a century; at least for as long as I have been paying attention, which is to say, for as long as I have been trying to make sense of the world and finding the same landscape returning, again and again, like a half-remembered refrain.
Let us take June 1967 as a point of departure. For a few brief weeks, the world’s gaze lifted from the humid, grinding quagmire of Indochina and fixed instead upon the sudden, almost biblical drama unfolding in the not-so-Holy Land – a war measured in days but reverberating in decades. Territory shifted, certainly; but something else shifted too: attention, imagination, the sense that this small, overburdened strip of earth had become a stage upon which the modern world would repeatedly rehearse its anxieties.
The focus has waxed and waned since, but it has never truly moved on. 1973 Oil Crisis and the realisation that the region’s tremors could rattle the global economy. The long, theatre-of-the-absurd years of hijackings and televised terror. Camp David’s fragile choreography. The Iranian Revolution, bending time backward and forward at once. The Soviet misadventure in Afghanistan. Lebanon’s fracturing. The attritional horror of the Iran–Iraq War. Kuwait and the return of great-power spectacle. Oslo’s brief, luminous promise. Then 9/11, collapsing distance altogether, followed by Afghanistan again, Iraq again – the sense of recursion, of history caught in a tightening loop.
Then the Arab Spring – hope flickering, briefly, before giving way to Syria’s abyss, to ISIS and its grotesque theatre, to the multiplication rather than the resolution of fault lines. And through it all – before it, beneath it, after it – Israel and Palestine remain: a permanent fixture in the taxonomy of torment, sans pareil, the conflict that resists conclusion, that absorbs language and returns it sharpened, refracted, or hollowed out.
It is from this long saturation – this decades-long immersion in images, slogans, translations, and retranslations – that our present arguments about words emerge. They are not sudden. They are sedimentary. Each phrase we now parse carries within it the residue of these moments, these crises, these unfinished stories.
Which is to say: when we argue about what a word means, we are never only arguing about language. We are arguing about history – compressed, contested, and still very much alive.
(words that travel intact, and arrive with their weather still clinging to them)
What follows is not a neutral glossary – if such a thing were even possible here – but a kind of field manual for words that arrive already aflame, freighted with history, sharpened by use, carrying within them entire arguments about the world. They are not merely descriptive; they are performative. To utter them is to place a piece on the board, to tilt the frame, to summon histories that do not politely remain in the past.
Some are legal terms that have slipped their moorings and now drift through polemic. Some are borrowed intact from Arabic or Hebrew, carrying their original cadence like an echo that translation cannot quite still. Others are modern coinages – hybrids, sometimes ungainly – that try to compress entire arguments into a single, breathless label. And a few are names – of places, of movements – that have become arguments simply by being spoken.
What unites them is not agreement but charge. They are contested, elastic, often weaponised. They do not just describe reality; they compete to define it. They do not behave like ordinary vocabulary. They travel across languages without quite translating; they narrow, expand, harden, or blur as they move. They do not simply describe events; they encode perspectives on those events. To use them is not merely to speak—it is to situate oneself, however unconsciously, within a contested moral and historical landscape.
I. Catastrophe & Historical Singularity
Nakba (النكبة) – literally “catastrophe.” In Arabic it could name any disaster; in English it has hardened into the disaster—1948—fixed, immovable, dense with exile and keys kept as heirlooms. It no longer describes; it declares.
Naksa (النكسة) – “the setback,” 1967. A softer word for a different kind of loss—diminution rather than rupture. Its retention signals an internal Arab chronology, slightly askew from the familiar “Six-Day War.”
Shoah (שואה) – “catastrophe” or “destruction,” used specifically for the Holocaust. Left untranslated in part to preserve reverence, in part to resist the easy metaphorisation that “Holocaust” sometimes invites.
Holocaust – from the Greek “burnt offering” to the Nazi genocide of the Jews, and then outward into broader usage. Its expansion has given it reach—and thinned its edges.
Pogrom (погром) – a Russian word meaning violent devastation, carried into English with the memory of anti-Jewish attacks in Tsarist lands. “Riot” feels too incidental; pogrom carries its own geography.
II. Legal Terms, Moral Weapons
Genocide – a word forged in law (Lemkin, 1944), precise in definition—intent to destroy a group. In public discourse, however, it often arrives as accusation before judgment, its moral force outrunning its legal threshold.
Ethnic Cleansing – deliberately imprecise, emerging particularly from the Balkan Wars of the Nineties, but predating that in Türkiye after WWI, Eastern Europe at the end of WWII, and I dia and Pakistan in 1948. Its vagueness is its power: suggestive, elastic, difficult to refute without seeming to concede.
Apartheid – Afrikaans for “apartness,” rooted in South Africa but now globally mobile. Once invoked, it frames the system under discussion—analogy and indictment in a single stroke.
Colonialism / Settler-Colonialism – analytic frameworks that, once applied, tend to fix the narrative: indigenous and invader, permanence and removal. Illuminating, but often closing off alternative readings.
III. Resistance, Struggle, Sanctification
Intifada (انتفاضة) – “shaking off,” like dust from a sleeve. In English it is no longer generic; it points almost unavoidably to the Palestinian uprisings of 1987 and 2000. The word carries images—stones, tyres, and checkpoints—and a moral ambiguity that shifts with the speaker.
Muqāwama (مقاومة) – “resistance,” yet left untranslated to avoid the bland universality of the English. Muqāwama signals a particular ideological and regional framing—Hezbollah, Hamas, dignity under pressure.
Ṣumūd (صمود) – “steadfastness,” though the translation feels thin. Not an event but a posture: staying, enduring, tending olive trees under threat. Translate it, and it risks becoming sentiment; leave it, and it remains an ethic.
Jihad (جهاد) – “struggle,” spanning the inner and the outer. In English, that range has narrowed sharply; the word arrives intact, its semantic field diminished, sharpened toward violence.
Shahid (شهيد) – “witness” or “martyr.” It does not merely describe death; it consecrates it. In English, its retention often signals an attempt to preserve that sacred charge.
IV. Faith, Doctrine, and Internal Tensions
Kāfir (كافر) – “unbeliever,” literally one who “covers” truth. A theological category that, in polemical use, hardens into insult—a boundary drawn sharply between inside and out.
Fitna (فتنة) – “discord,” “trial,” “temptation.” Historically tied to early Islamic civil strife, it carries a deep anxiety about internal fracture. To invoke it is often to warn: this way lies chaos.
Taqiyya (تقية) – a specific Shi’a doctrine allowing concealment of belief under threat. In English polemic, however, it has been stretched well beyond its doctrinal bounds—transformed into a generalised suspicion of deception.
Hudna (هدنة) – “truce.” Yet when retained in Arabic, it often implies something tactical, provisional—a pause rather than a peace.
Fatwa (فتوى) – a legal opinion within Islamic jurisprudence, part of everyday religious life. In English, especially post-Rushdie, it has narrowed into something darker—almost synonymous with a death sentence.
V. Identity, Ideology, and the Politics of Naming
Zionism – a 19th-century movement for Jewish self-determination. In English today, it rarely sits neutrally: liberation for some, colonialism for others. The word refracts entirely different histories.
Zionist – once descriptive, now often accusatory. Its meaning depends less on definition than on tone.
“Zio” – a clipped, abrasive form that has shed any descriptive function. It lands as insult, not argument.
Aliyah (עלייה) – “ascent.” More than immigration; a movement upward, spiritually and historically. The English equivalent feels earthbound by comparison.
Al-‘Awda (العودة) – “the return.” In ordinary Arabic, a simple going back; in Palestinian discourse, the Right of Return—dense with memory, law, and longing. It sits beside the mafteah (مفتاح, the key), object turned symbol, continuity held in the hand.
Settler – on its face neutral; in contested زمین, it hardens into accusation. Biography collapses into ideology.
Hilltop Youth – a specific Israeli subculture that has become shorthand for a certain strain of ideological extremity and violence – detail turned symbol.
VI. Totalising Labels & Historical Echoes
Nazi – historically precise, rhetorically promiscuous. Now shorthand for absolute evil, its overuse both amplifying and diluting its meaning.
Fascist – from Mussolini’s doctrine to a generalised insult; elasticity has eroded precision.
“Islamo-fascist” – a hybrid, polemical term attempting to map European categories onto Islamist movements. It says as much about the speaker’s framework as the subject.
VII. Organisations as Symbols
Hamas (حماس) – “zeal,” and acronym for Ḥarakat al-Muqāwama al-Islāmiyya. In English, it does not settle: government, militia, resistance, terrorism – meanings shift with the voice that utters it.
Hezbollah (حزب الله) – “Party of God.” Political party, armed movement, regional proxy; the name itself already contains a claim to divine alignment.
Da’ish (داعش) – acronym for al-Dawla al-Islāmiyya fī al-‘Irāq wa al-Shām (Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant). Its use, rather than “ISIS,” often signals rejection; the group dislikes the term, so naming becomes a small act of defiance.
VIII. Circulating & Mediated Words
Fawda (فوضى) – “chaos,” but after its journey through Hebrew and global television (Fauda), it now carries a particular aesthetic: kinetic, morally ambiguous, intelligence-driven disorder. Chaos, but stylised.
Blitz – from Blitzkrieg, lightning war. In English, softened into metaphor—“media blitz”—yet still faintly haunted by sirens over London.
IX. Place as Argument
Al-Aqsa (الأقصى) – “the farthest.” Rarely translated, because the Arabic name carries sanctity, geography, and sovereignty in one breath.
Al-Quds (القدس) – “the holy,” the Arabic name for Jerusalem. Its use signals perspective: a city not just inhabited, but claimed, sanctified, contested.
Gaza (غزة) – a place-name that has become a metonym: war, siege, suffering, المقاومة. Geography turned symbol.
Sabra and Shatila (صبرا وشاتيلا) – no longer merely locations; the names themselves are the event. To say them is to accuse.
Coda: The Grammar of Conflict
What began as a request to a Chat GPT – to gather, sort, define – ends, rather predictably, in something the machine cannot quite resolve. Because the instability is not in the definitions; it is in us. In the way we reach for these words, load them, deploy them, defend them. In the way a term like genocide or Zionist or shahid can close down conversation as quickly as it opens it.
These are not just words. They are positions. Each one carries a shadow text: a history remembered, a grievance asserted, a legitimacy claimed or denied. They compress time, flatten complexity, and yet—paradoxically—expand into entire moral universes the moment they are spoken.
And so the lexicon does not settle the argument; it reveals its terrain.
Between the word and the world, as ever, falls the shadow. And it is in that shadow—where meaning slips, hardens, fractures, reforms—that these battle words continue to do their work, long after they have left the mouth that uttered them.
Lay these words out like this and a pattern emerges. Some words narrow as they travel (jihad, intifada). Some harden into proper nouns (Nakba, Shoah). Some expand until they blur (fascist, genocide). Some are left untranslated to preserve their charge (ṣumūd, muqāwama, al-‘awda).MNone of them are innocent.
They do not simply describe the world; they position the speaker within it. Each word a small act of alignment, a quiet declaration of where one stands. Between what a word once held, and what it is now made to carry, between language as description, and language as argument, there falls that same, shifting shadow. And it is there, in that narrow space, that these words continue to live, and to do their work.
These words do not behave like ordinary vocabulary. They are anchored in place but mobile in use, precise in origin but elastic in deployment. They compress centuries into syllables, turning speech into stance.
To speak them is rarely innocent. Each carries a shadow text- unspoken assumptions, moral alignments, historical claims. They do not simply describe reality; they compete to author it.
And so the disturbance lies here: between what a word once meant, what it now does, and what we need it to prove. In that gap – narrow, shifting, and charged – language itself becomes a kind of battleground, where meaning is not fixed but fought over, again and again.
In That Howling Infinite, March 2026
The following is an essay published in The Australian by economist and commentator Henry Ergas, whom we have republished often in In That Howling Infinite.
Henry Ergas’s essay is essentially an argument about language, memory, and the way slogans prepare the emotional ground for violence long before violence itself occurs. His central claim is that chanting “Globalise the intifada” cannot be dismissed as harmless political speech or reduced to a neutral dictionary definition of intifada as merely “struggle” or “shaking off”. Words, he argues, accumulate historical meaning, and by now intifada is inseparable in the public imagination from the Palestinian uprisings associated with suicide bombings, bus attacks, café massacres, and the Second Intifada’s civilian bloodshed.
Many charged words once had ordinary meanings — holocaust once referred to a burnt offering, pogrom to devastation, nakba to catastrophe. But history hardens language. Certain events become so dominant that they permanently colonise a word’s emotional and moral resonance. Linguists call this “prototype entrenchment”: when people hear “Holocaust”, they do not think of ritual sacrifice; when they hear “intifada”, they do not think of generic resistance. They think of televised violence, bombings, and dead civilians. To insist otherwise is effectively to demand that language forget history.
From there he moves into the philosophy of slogans. A slogan, he argues, is not a precise sentence but a compressed moral universe: heroes, enemies, threats, permissions, identities. He argues that slogans often function through deliberate ambiguity. Their literal wording provides plausible deniability, while their implied meaning carries the emotional force. “Globalise the intifada” can be defended in polite settings as meaning “internationalise the Palestinian struggle”, yet in the street — shouted rhythmically in crowds — it evokes something far darker. The deniability is not a flaw in the slogan; it is part of its design.
The essay’s second movement is about repetition and crowds. Here Ergas draws heavily on Victor Klemperer, the Jewish diarist and philologist who documented how Nazi language gradually normalised extremism. Repetition, he argues, changes moral atmosphere. The first time a slogan shocks; the hundredth time it becomes ordinary. What was once unsayable becomes ambient, then accepted, then difficult to challenge without seeming hysterical or repressive. Language shifts incrementally until society adjusts itself around ideas it would once have recoiled from.
He then turns to crowd psychology, arguing that chants synchronise people emotionally and suppress individual hesitation. In a crowd, slogans cease merely to communicate ideas; they generate collective identity and emotional fusion. The chant creates an “us” and a “them”, and in doing so hardens moral boundaries. Chants such as “Globalise the intifada” are therefore not simply political expressions but mechanisms for creating an atmosphere in which violence becomes imaginable, permissible, even inevitable.
The essay culminates in the claim that the historical relationship between inflammatory slogans and violence is not accidental. Once a society becomes accustomed to rhetoric associated with past massacres, the gap between speech and action narrows. Ergas is careful not to claim that chanting directly causes violence in a mechanical sense; rather, he argues that it conditions people emotionally and morally to accept or rationalise it when it arrives.
Underlying the piece is a broader warning against what Ergas sees as liberal complacency about language — the comforting belief that “they’re only words”. He rejects that entirely. Words, especially ritualised and repeated words, shape moral perception. They define enemies, normalise hostility, and gradually acclimatise societies to what once seemed intolerable. His conclusion is that pretending not to hear the violent historical echoes within “Globalise the intifada” is not tolerance or sophistication, but a dangerous refusal to confront what language is doing in public life.
Chanting ‘intifada’ is a dangerous act that shortens the distance to violence
It took scarcely a moment, once “Globalise the intifada” began to be chanted on our streets and campuses, for its champions to insist the phrase meant nothing of the sort. Intifada, they patiently explained, simply meant struggle; the slogan was no more than a plea to “internationalise the cause”. According to the Palestine Action Group and its Islamist allies, who rallied in Sydney earlier this week, to claim otherwise is to misread the Arabic.
The defence is not merely intellectually dishonest; it reveals why “it is only words” is among the most dangerous sentences people permit themselves to believe.
As an Arabic noun, intifada does indeed possess an old, generic sense: a shaking, a dusting off. That is hardly unusual: holocaust once meant nothing more than a burnt offering; pogrom, in Russian, mere devastation; nakba, in Arabic, a misfortune ranging from mishap to calamity.
Words such as these begin life as ordinary common nouns. But each was claimed by a particular event: from 1945, the Holocaust; from 1987, the intifada. After that, the generic sense survives only in the dictionaries. It does not survive in the public mind.
Linguists call the process “prototype entrenchment”. The mind, hearing a word, reaches for the most vivid, most repeated, most emotionally charged instance and treats that as what the word stands for. Once the historical event has acquired that role, the bare definition recorded in the dictionary can no longer be peeled away from the moral, emotional and political charge the word has come to convey. To hear “Globalise the Holocaust” in 2026 and think “proliferate the supply of burnt offerings” is to misunderstand spoken English.
Asking language to forget history
Exactly the same is true with intifada. Its prototype, in the global imagination, is not struggle in the abstract: it is two uprisings whose iconography, indelibly embedded by the violence that broke out in September 2000, includes suicide bombings of buses, restaurants and a Passover Seder. That is what the word now carries, not at its margins but as its core. The defender of “Globalise the intifada” is in effect asking language itself to forget history. But human communication does not work that way.
The point is more general: a slogan is not a sentence, and the test of whether one has understood it is not whether one can render it in a dictionary gloss. It compresses an entire moral world – heroes, villains, demands, threats – into a phrase made for chanting and succeeds by being two things at once: precise enough to be grasped, ambiguous enough to be denied.
Paul Grice, one of the 20th century’s most important linguistic philosophers, gave the manoeuvre its name: implicature, the part of communication that travels not by what one says but by what one obviously means. To remark “I am not going to call him corrupt” is to inform the room that he is corrupt.
The structure is double-jointed: tested under cross-examination, the speaker retreats to what was literally uttered and accuses the critic of putting words in his mouth. The implicature does the work; the deniability provides the shelter. “Globalise the intifada” provides a textbook case.
A public forum, called “Why it’s right to say: globalise the intifada”, at a park in the Sydney suburb of Redfern, after City of Sydney lord mayor Clover Moore announced council had revoked the organisers’ booking of City of Sydney-owned venue.
Pressed in a courtroom, the chant is glossed away as “internationalise the struggle”. Chanted from a stage on a Saturday afternoon, it means burnt buses, bombed cafes, murdered children.
The audiences who hear it – on both sides – hear that second meaning with perfect clarity. A slogan that everyone really took to mean only “internationalise the struggle” would hardly stir emotions; what does the stirring is precisely the violent imagery the speaker can also deny.
The genuinely dangerous moment, however, is not the slogan in isolation; it comes once the slogan begins to repeat.
The genuinely dangerous moment, however, is not the slogan in isolation; it comes once the slogan begins to repeat.
Repetition is normalisation
Victor Klemperer, the Jewish philologist who retained his sanity during the Third Reich by recording its language in his diary, observed that the regime’s most powerful instrument was its vocabulary, not its decrees: a handful of words, drilled into daily life, did more to remake ordinary Germans than any speech. “Fanatisch”, once unambiguously pejorative, became under repetition a term of praise. “Aktion” became the bureaucratic veil behind which mass shootings disappeared – to incite an aktion was to incite the slaughter of millions of Jews, without actually saying so. Those shifts required no argument, only iteration.
Repetition is, in short, normalisation: hear a phrase once and it can shock; hear it for the 200th time and it has become part of the air we breathe. The extreme becomes ambient; the ambient, obvious; the obvious, embarrassing to question. Thus, each repetition of “Globalise the intifada” wears the menace in rather than out. The cost of saying it falls while the cost of objecting rises. What was once unsayable becomes ever easier to say.
Repetition does its most lethal work, however, not on the solitary newspaper reader but on bodies in a crowd. Slogans are designed not to be murmured but to be chanted rhythmically in unison. Once a phrase enters a crowd, it ceases to function as communication and begins to function as synchronisation. Voices align, breath aligns, sometimes feet align. Individuals shed the small frictions of doubt and hesitation that, in private, would have given them pause.
Anti-zionism group protest at Town Hall with a sign reading “Globalise the Intifada”.
Sociologists call this “collective effervescence” and anyone who has been in a stadium at the right moment has felt it. What was an idea in a single skull becomes a felt fact across thousands. Disagreement is not refuted; in the passion of the moment it simply ceases to be available.
The tool that drills the hatred
This is what the pioneering scholars of mass behaviour – Gustave Le Bon, Gabriel Tarde, Emile Durkheim, Sigmund Freud, Elias Canetti – meant by a crowd “having a kind of mind”. Not a mind in the literal sense but something far more dangerous: a temporarily uniform attention, a uniform emotion and – crucially – a uniform sense of who is “us” and who is “them”. Slogans are the instrument that does the tuning: and they are, as Canetti observed in the rise of Nazi antisemitism, the tool that drills in the hatred.
Put these mechanisms together and the result is not innocent speech but the manufacture of an atmosphere. A word historically captured by a violent prototype, dressed up in a deniable paraphrase and chanted by bodies whose private hesitations have been switched off – that is the recipe by which a society talks itself into permission.
It tells one group who it is by telling it who its mortal enemy is. And it tells “the other” – nowadays “the Zios” – that they are no longer part of the moral community. It hardens the shouters against dialogue and compromise. And it thickens the air with the sense that violence, when it comes, will have been only the natural conclusion of what everyone already knew.
The historical record is unambiguous: where crowds are taught to chant a word that already names a massacre, the distance between word and violence, speech and act, never grows it shortens.
The claim that slogans are innocent has always been a flattering one because it relieves us of the duty to attend to what is being said. It allows us to continue repeating comforting platitudes about freedom of expression. But words are not inert, and chanted words least of all.
Whatever else “Globalise the intifada” may mean in the dictionary, what it means in the street is what we must be willing to hear. Pretending otherwise is not tolerance. It is how societies learn, slowly and without noticing, to live with the unforgivable.
Ali Hosseini Khamenei (born 19 April 1939, Mashhad, Iran, died 28 February 2026, Teheran) was the second and longest-serving Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran, holding office since 1989 (the yet the Berlin Wall fell and tanks rolled into Tiananmen Square). A cleric shaped by the Shi’a seminaries of Mashhad and Qom, he was active in opposition to Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and was arrested and exiled several times before the 1979 Islamic Revolution. After the revolution, he rose steadily through the new political order: survived an assassination attempt in 1981 that left his right arm partially paralyzed, and later that year became President of Iran, serving two terms (1981–1989) during the Iran–Iraq War. Following the death of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in 1989, the Assembly of Experts selected him as Supreme Leader. In that role, he exercised ultimate authority over Iran’s armed forces, judiciary, state broadcasting, and key strategic decisions, shaping the country’s domestic governance, regional policy, and contentious nuclear program for more than three decades. His tenure was marked by consolidation of clerical authority, periodic internal unrest and brutal repressions, international sanctions, economic collapse, and enduring tensions with the United States and its regional rivals. He is reported to have perished in the rubble of his sprawling presidential compound.
In an eloquent article in The Atlantic, Karim Sadjadpour, American policy analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, casts him as custodian of a mausoleum, spokesman for a ghost, while Orwell hovers like a specter over the scene, reminding us that the dead impose upon the living a worldview and a way of life long after the society beneath it has shifted, urbanised, digitised, globalised. Under Khamenei, the Islamic Republic became precisely that: liturgical slogans, policing of women’s bodies, the hijab both banner and boundary. And yet revolutions, like stubborn shadows, rarely die when their architects do.
For the Islamic Republic was never a single body; it was, Sadjapour writes, an ecosystem, vascular and sprawling: clerical networks, the Revolutionary Guard, the Basij, foundations controlling vast swathes of the economy, a security apparatus honed by decades of sanctions, war, assassination, and unrest. Khamenei may have been the last of the first generation, the final living ligament to 1979—but institutions outlive men. The IRGC, less ghost than organism, adaptive, entrepreneurial, entwined in Iran’s political economy and regional projection of power, had already evolved into a praetorian creature, more barracks than seminary. The revolution had become its own bureaucracy; the fervour was folded into files, the ecstatic theology into choreography. Khomeini was revelation; Khamenei was preservation. And that may yet be his most enduring achievement: he turned prophecy into paperwork, charisma into system, and systems, unlike prophets, require only control, not belief.
Makes no mistake. The regime and its security apparatus and military industrial complex is lodged in the Iranian throat. It will take more than a gargle of American mouthwash to dislodge it! This stark image encapsulates decades of entrenchment, ideology, and bureaucracy, with a sly nod to futility.
So what now? The hinge has turned, though the door may swing in any direction. Three paths suggest themselves. Consolidation: a successor, deliberately colourless, rises, the Guard tightens its grip, ideology becomes theatre while power migrates behind the curtain, the revolution persists because it can control, not because it inspires. Managed mutation: flexibility, the Islamic Republic’s paradoxical talent; controlled elections, tactical moderation, negotiation where expedient. Rhetoric may soften, “resistance” may become nationalist rather than theological, the ghost changes costume but remains on stage. Fracture: succession is a stress test unlike any other; elite rivalries, public impatience, economic exhaustion, and the memory of Mahsa Amini could conspire to splinter the coercive apparatus. The moral centre of Iranian society has shifted far from the revolution’s founding certainties; the dead can govern only so long as the living consent, or are compelled, to remember in the prescribed way.
Sadjadpour warns that Khamenei’s life’s work was to preserve a revolution “heading for the ash heap.” Perhaps. But ash heaps are treacherous metaphors: they imply finality, neatness, closure. Iran’s modern history – constitutionalism, coups, revolution, reformist surges, Green Movement, uprisings—reveals something less linear and more cyclical: endings that seed beginnings, collapses that mutate, institutions that sediment while eras blur. The Islamic Republic may yet prove more durable than its critics predict, or more brittle than its guardians admit; revolutions, like empires, seldom die cleanly—they fade, calcify, mutate, or fall when no one quite expects it.
Obituaries are tidy things. They suggest closure, a soft percussion of earth on coffin lid, the moral summation of man and era alike. But Khamenei’s political body was never contained within his frame. It was diffused: in barracks, seminaries, intelligence files, oil contracts, prison walls, procurement networks, and the muscle memory of repression. You cannot bury that with a single spade. What makes this moment feel epochal is generational: he was the last living ligament to 1979. The revolution has passed from incandescent revelation to bureaucratic inheritance, from the explosive charisma of Khomeini to the methodical, suspicious choreography of Khamenei, and inheritance is always more fragile than creation. One can die for a revolution; it is harder to live bureaucratically for one.
So: exaggerated? If one means the man, no. If one means the era, perhaps—but eras rarely end cleanly. They blur, overlap, leave sediment, rearrange furniture before the house collapses. The hinge has turned. One can almost hear the machinery shifting—the faint metallic groan of succession in closed systems. Whether the door closes, swings wider, or jams halfway remains uncertain. Perhaps the true exaggeration lies not in the reports of death but in the certainty with which commentators predict what follows.
For now, the obituary hovers between elegy and warning. Something has ended. What replaces it may look familiar, at least at first glance, but history delights in surprising both mourners and celebrants alike. And if one must borrow Wilde properly: it is not the death that is exaggerated—it is our confidence about the afterlife.
This short epitaph is a précis of the article by Karim Sadjadpour in the Atlantic in 1March 2026 written by an AI language model
Commentator and journalist Graeme Wood’s article in The Atlantic “Why Khamenei Is Dead” is a meditation on the paradoxes of power, the vulnerabilities of authoritarian leadership, and the way human frailty can undermine even the most fortified regimes. At its core, the article is not simply about the death of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, killed by Israel on March 1, 2026, but about the systemic weaknesses that made such an outcome possible. For nearly four decades, Khamenei cultivated an aura of invincibility. His public persona was carefully theatrical: he issued “Death to America” and “Death to Israel” chants with a casual ease, almost as if greeting the world, performing ideological menace as ritual. Wood recalls seeing him in 2004 at Tehran University, leaving Friday prayers in a polished armored sedan mere seconds after ending a sermon with these death slogans. The memory emphasizes the performative nature of his power—imposing, ritualized, and calculated—but also, ironically, transient: he was physically close, yet untouchable, a man whose presence inspired awe and terror simultaneously.
Yet Wood emphasizes that Khamenei’s public projection of omnipotence masked a deep vulnerability. Iran’s regime has historically proven resilient in many domains: its institutions function, its missile programs act as deterrents, and its military units, particularly the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), have maintained cohesion. In the past two years, during heightened conflict with Israel and the United States, the regime’s structural defenses held. There were no defections, no breakdowns of command, no collapse of the bureaucratic apparatus. On the surface, Iran remained formidable.
However, the story of Khamenei’s demise is not one of institutional failure but of leadership failure. Wood stresses that leadership—especially at the top—is qualitatively different from structural power. While Iran possessed instruments of coercion and deterrence, the people entrusted to wield them, Khamenei and his inner circle, repeatedly demonstrated incompetence, indecision, and mismanagement. Their missteps—both strategic and operational—rendered what should have been a robust defense porous and vulnerable. No amount of missile silos, armored convoys, or loyal subordinates can compensate for leaders who are themselves the weak link. In Wood’s framing, Khamenei’s death is emblematic of a broader truth: even regimes that appear impregnable crumble when their leadership is flawed or unprepared.
Wood also situates this vulnerability within a moral and psychological frame. He acknowledges that celebrating the death of another, even a reviled autocrat, is morally problematic, yet he simultaneously captures the visceral human desire for retribution. Millions across Iran, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, and even Ukraine—regions caught in the crossfire of Khamenei’s ideological ambitions—wished for the opportunity to confront him directly. This duality—the ethical imperative against rejoicing in death versus the natural, almost primal, human desire for vindication—underscores the complex emotional landscape that surrounds acts of political violence. Khamenei, in his own way, was both a global enemy and a personal antagonist for countless individuals.
Beyond morality, Wood’s essay examines the theatricality of power itself. Khamenei’s authority depended on ritualized displays, carefully choreographed public appearances, and ideological performance. Threats and slogans—his “Death to…” chants—functioned less as immediate policy instruments than as a projection of dominance meant to cement fear, loyalty, and perception. Yet this performative power could not substitute for the substance of strategic competence. When leadership faltered—through misjudgment, hesitation, or betrayal—the façade crumbled. The most elaborate defenses cannot shield leaders from the consequences of their own failings.
Geopolitically, the implications are profound. Khamenei’s death is likely to intensify internal debates about succession and strategy within Tehran, potentially destabilizing decision-making in the short term. It may embolden regional adversaries, recalibrate the balance of deterrence with Israel, and force external powers, including the United States, to reassess policy toward Iran. Wood’s piece suggests that this event is not merely symbolic but materially consequential: it exposes the fragility of authority in systems where power is concentrated yet humanly fallible, and where ideological zeal does not automatically translate into operational effectiveness.
Ultimately, Wood’s argument is as much about leadership theory as it is about Iranian politics. Authoritarian regimes often appear indestructible because of their institutions, militias, and propaganda apparatus, yet history shows repeatedly that the personal competence—or incompetence—of those at the very top is decisive. Khamenei’s death, in Wood’s telling, is the product not solely of external force but of internal vulnerability: a leader whose fearsome reputation, ideological fervor, and theatrical command could not mask the shambolic reality of governance. In other words, he was both the architect of Iran’s defiance and the source of its strategic fragility.
In its deepest sense, the essay is a reflection on the human dimension of power: no matter how formidable the structures, the rhetoric, or the image, authority is inseparable from the judgment, courage, and competence of those who wield it. Khamenei’s life—and death—serve as a cautionary tale, reminding us that performance, fear, and loyalty are insufficient substitutes for effective leadership. Wood’s narrative combines historical observation, moral reflection, and personal anecdote to show that authoritarian theater can impress and intimidate, but when push comes to shove, it is the human element that determines survival or downfall. Khamenei’s fall, therefore, is at once historical, psychological, and deeply human: a story of power, spectacle, and the vulnerability at the heart of even the most seemingly impregnable regimes.
This short epitaph is a précis of the article by Graeme Wood in the Atlantic in 1March 2026 written by an AI language model
The following is a brief analysis of what happened on 28 February 2026 when March was about to “roar in like a lion” – which, indeed, was the name given by the Israeli Defence Force to its second aerial assault in Iran in eight months.
The Second American Iranian War – Reckoning Without a Map
On 1 March 2026, following the initiation of U.S. and Israeli air strikes on the Islamic Republic of Iran, The Atlantic published analyses by Anne Applebaum, Graeme Wood, and Tom Nichols, each offering distinct yet complementary perspectives on the unfolding crisis. Collectively, their essays examine not only the immediate military events but the deeper political, ideological, and strategic dynamics that underpin the confrontation.
Anne Applebaum emphasizes the ideological nature of the Islamic Republic. From her perspective, Iran is not merely a state defending territorial or security interests; it is a revolutionary regime whose worldview drives both domestic repression and regional aggression. Applebaum’s central concern is process and planning: the strikes were launched without public explanation, congressional authorization, or international consensus, and no coherent strategy has been articulated for post-strike governance. Without a plan for legitimate political transition, she argues, military action risks chaos, nationalist backlash, and the strengthening of hardliners rather than meaningful reform.
Graeme Wood focuses on the operational and geopolitical consequences of the strikes. He highlights the recent escalation in which Iran targeted Gulf Arab monarchies—including Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, and the UAE—marking a dramatic shift from shadow conflict to overt regional confrontation. Wood argues that these attacks may inadvertently unify Tehran’s adversaries, closing off avenues for containment and amplifying the risk of a broader Middle Eastern war. In his analysis, the strikes are not simply tactical military events; they are catalysts that reshape regional political calculations and threaten to escalate a localized conflict into a multi-front crisis.
Tom Nichols frames the strikes in terms of U.S. strategic coherence and the historical perils of regime-change operations. He stresses that regime change is not a discrete military objective but a complex political project, one requiring alignment of domestic unrest, fractures in security forces, and credible alternatives capable of governance. Nichols warns that absent such conditions, air strikes—even if tactically successful—may produce more instability than progress, mirroring cautionary lessons from Iraq and Libya.
Taken together, these three perspectives converge on a central thesis: while Iran is a hostile actor with a history of regional destabilization, military action alone cannot achieve sustainable political outcomes. Applebaum foregrounds ideological complexity and the necessity of post-strike planning; Wood highlights the regional and geopolitical repercussions of escalation; Nichols underscores the asymmetric risks inherent in regime-change gambits. Their combined insights frame the March 2026 strikes as a high-stakes venture, one in which tactical gains may be easily overshadowed by strategic uncertainty and unintended consequences.
The Bombs Without a Blueprint
Applebaum is particularly critical of process. The strikes were carried out without explanation to the American public, without congressional authorization, and without securing international consensus—a procedural void that mirrors a deeper strategic void. U.S. policy, she argues, has long oscillated between pressure and engagement, alternating sanctions with diplomacy, threats with negotiation, but rarely confronting the ideological core of the Islamic Republic. Bombing nuclear facilities or military infrastructure might degrade capabilities, yet it does nothing to dismantle the regime’s revolutionary worldview or empower a credible alternative political force. In the absence of a plan for governance after the strikes, the result is more likely to be chaos, intensified repression, or nationalist backlash rather than democratic transition.
Nichols similarly emphasizes that regime change is a political project, not a military objective. Even successful strikes do not guarantee that the regime will collapse, that protests will coalesce, or that security forces will fracture. The historical record—from Iraq to Libya—underscores the difficulty of building a functioning political order once a government is weakened or removed. The upside—a rapid emergence of a moderate or reformist government—is narrow; the downside—regional war, prolonged instability, economic shocks, and emboldened hardliners—is broad and asymmetric.
Wood complements these arguments by situating the crisis in the regional context. Iran’s missile strikes against Gulf Arab monarchies, including Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, and the UAE, mark a dramatic escalation beyond shadow conflict with Israel or the United States. By attacking states that had previously attempted neutrality, Tehran risks unifying its regional adversaries, erasing remaining arguments for coexistence or containment. Gulf monarchies that had long debated restraint versus confrontation may now lean decisively toward the latter, viewing the Iranian regime as an existential threat that must be confronted. In Wood’s analysis, these strikes have not only military but profound political consequences: they reshape regional alliances, heighten the likelihood of broader war, and create a cascade of strategic uncertainty for both Iran and the United States.
Strategic Whiplash
Applebaum and Nichols also highlight the confusion in U.S. messaging preceding the strikes. During domestic unrest in Iran earlier this year, President Trump encouraged citizens to “take over their institutions,” implying support for revolution. Yet senior officials soon suggested accommodation, framing U.S. interests narrowly around nuclear non-proliferation. This whiplash—between fomenting revolution and hinting at negotiation—reveals a lack of clarity about ultimate objectives, and the strikes themselves appear more a gamble than a coherent strategy.
The risks of this approach are manifold. Iran could retaliate asymmetrically through Hezbollah, Iraqi militias, Houthis, cyberattacks, or strikes on Gulf oil infrastructure, pulling the United States into a wider regional conflict. American forces in the region could become exposed, and global energy markets destabilized. Domestically, hardliners may consolidate power, justifying repression in the name of national survival. The very elements Washington hopes to weaken could be strengthened. Applebaum, Wood, and Nichols each stress that these asymmetric risks are more numerous and plausible than the narrow upside of regime collapse.
Regional Ramifications
Perhaps the most immediate consequence of the March 2026 strikes is the escalation of the conflict beyond Iran’s borders. Wood notes that Iran’s targeting of Gulf monarchies represents a strategic miscalculation of historic proportions. For decades, Tehran benefited from the hesitation, rivalry, and caution of its regional adversaries. By striking countries that had attempted neutrality, Iran may have inadvertently unified the Gulf against it. Saudi Arabia and its allies, long cautious about provoking Tehran, may now view confrontation as inevitable. The calculus of containment and cautious coexistence may be irreversibly replaced by an era of escalation, where Iranian aggression is met with coordinated regional response, potentially with U.S. support.
This shift also reframes the nature of war in the Middle East. What had been a shadow conflict—missile exchanges, proxy skirmishes, and calibrated threats—has become overt. Sovereign states are now active targets, and the implications for regional security, energy stability, and global geopolitics are immediate and profound. The Gulf, long a buffer zone of uneasy coexistence, may now become the front line of a broader confrontation, with consequences that extend far beyond Tehran, Riyadh, or Washington.
Conclusion: Strategy Without a Map
The analyses of Applebaum, Wood, and Nichols converge on a stark assessment: the U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iran, however tactically precise, are untethered from a coherent political strategy. Applebaum warns that ideological complexity cannot be solved with bombs; Nichols reminds us that regime change is a political transformation, not a military objective; and Wood highlights the unintended regional consequences that may escalate the conflict far beyond initial calculations.
Together, they suggest that the March 2026 strikes represent a high-stakes gamble. The narrow upside—rapid collapse of the Iranian regime and the emergence of a moderate government—is contingent on unlikely alignments of internal political and social forces. The downside—regional war, economic disruption, entrenchment of hardliners, and prolonged instability—is broad, asymmetric, and more probable. By acting without a clearly articulated post-strike plan, the United States and Israel have entered a perilous chapter in Middle Eastern geopolitics, one in which the consequences will unfold unpredictably, and in which success cannot be measured merely by the destruction of targets, but by the construction of a viable political order in Tehran and a durable regional equilibrium.
The lesson, as Applebaum, Wood, and Nichols collectively insist, is clear: military action without strategy is a leap into uncertainty. The map may be blank, but the stakes are real, and the cost of miscalculation could echo for decades.
Addendum
We have republished below two articles about the January protests by British historian, author, and journalist Christopher de Bellaigue, who he married to Bita Ghezelayagh, an Iranian artist and architect, in Tehran. They provide a well-written backstory to the above written by one with lived experience of the Islam Republic. From these, once may surmise that Ali Khamanei had only one possible exit.
The Islamic Republic’s bloody endgame
Credit. Carlos Jasso/AFP/Getty
Iran’s fanatics dream of martyrdom
Christopher de Bellaigue, Unherd, 4 February 2026
As America’s advanced warplanes and ships arrive within striking distance of Iran, Donald Trump has promised attacks “far worse” than those of last June, when Iran’s nuclear sites and air defences were attacked and several of its military leaders assassinated. In response, the Islamic Republic has signalled readiness to return to the negotiations that Trump’s 12-day war with Israel against Iran had interrupted. Parley between Steve Witkoff, the American envoy, and Abbas Araghchi, the Iranian foreign minister, is to resume on Friday in Istanbul. It is unlikely, however, that Iran will accept Israel’s demands that it relinquish uranium-enrichment, dismantle its ballistic missile programme and desist from reconstituting its network of regional proxies: effectively, the unconditional surrender that the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has consistently refused to entertain. His inflexibility has come at the price of an unremitting Western hostility that has, along with endemic corruption and mismanagement, crashed the economy and provoked the huge protests, revolutionary in character, which erupted across the country last month. The most plausible explanation for Khamenei’s preparedness to talk, then, is that he is playing for time and hoping that, if the worst comes to the worst, he will be saved by Trump’s aversion to wars which last more than a few hours. On 1 February, the Supreme Leader warned that American aggression would precipitate a “regional” war, by which he meant Iranian attacks on tankers in the Persian Gulf and civilians in Israel. A few days earlier, Admiral Ali Shamkhani, an adviser of the Supreme Leader — who had a narrow escape when his apartment was targeted by an Israeli airstrike last summer — promised an “immediate, comprehensive, and unprecedented” response, “directed at the aggressor, at the heart of Tel Aviv, and at all who support the aggressor”. But Iran, we now know, is a spent military force and cannot carry out such threats.
Some 1,200 Iranians were killed in the 12-day war, compared with 28 Israelis and not a single American, while enemy aircraft bossed Iranian airspace. Around 90% of the missiles that Iran fired in response towards Israel were intercepted; a mere handful of its 500 or so drones made it into Israeli territory, the rest meeting a similar fate to that of the Iranian drone that flew close to the US aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln on Tuesday, and was shot down by one of the carrier’s jets. For all Iran’s bluster, the imbalance between a belt-and-braces autarky and the world’s most advanced militaries is as stark as that between the Mahdist army and the British at the Battle of Omdurman in 1898, when thousands of Sudanese tribesmen were mowed down by Maxim guns to the loss of 47 British lives; or between the Mamluks and Napoleon’s Armée d’Orient a century earlier, when a medieval cavalry was put to flight by modern infantry squares spitting grapeshot. No, it isn’t chaos in the Gulf nor brimstone over Tel Aviv that need concern us should the negotiations fail. It is the possibility of mass slaughter of unarmed civilians in the Islamic Republic itself.
For an ominous pattern of botched outside intervention and the implacable exercise of monopolised force, look no further than last month’s unrest and its suppression. Having begun as street protests by an “army of the hungry”, in the words of Hatam Ghaderi, perhaps Iran’s most perceptive political analyst, the movement took on a radical character after Reza Pahlavi, the exiled son of the last Shah, asked ordinary Iranians to go out and topple the regime on 9 January. The millions heeding his call were further galvanised by Trump’s promise, made a few days earlier, that if Iran “violently kills peaceful protesters… the United States of America will come to their rescue”.
In the event, thousands were mown down, Omdurman-style, on the streets of Tehran and dozens of other cities by Revolutionary Guardsmen firing Dushkas and AK-47s. We don’t yet know exactly how many people died, though the death toll certainly exceeds by thousands the nugatory figure of 2,985 conceded by the government — dwarfing also the 3,164 people killed by the Shah’s forces over the 16 years of sporadic revolutionary activity culminating in the monarch’s flight in 1979. As for the help promised by Trump, it never came.
The bloodiest episode of civil strife that Iran has seen for at least two centuries could have been avoided had the 86-year-old Khamenei bowed to longstanding demands and stepped aside. This would have paved the way for elections to an assembly to draw up a new constitution — a relatively bloodless transition, involving members of the current regime untainted by the worst excesses of corruption and cruelty, might have been possible. By refusing such a transition and turning his stormtroopers on mostly unarmed crowds — amid reports of the Revolutionary Guards’ snipers shooting bystanders in the head and of knife thrusts aimed deliberately at the genitals — Khamenei has cleared the field of potential unifiers, in the process condemning the Islamic Republic and its internal opponents to a fight to the finish.
“Khamenei has condemned the Islamic Republic and its internal opponents to a fight to the finish”
A former British official with close connections to Western policy-makers told me this week that the thinking among Western countries, including Britain, is that the regime is out of puff and that a collapse as rapid and as straightforward as that of Syria’s Bashar al-Assad is likely. But in 30 years of reporting on the Middle East, I have learned never to be surprised by the ignorance and complacency of our policymakers. Iran resists such a reassuring prognosis; a messier denouement awaits.
Do not be fooled by the worldliness of Iran’s artistic and literary culture or the prosperity and accomplishments of its diaspora. For much of its post-Islamic history, Iran has contained a minority of fanatics; the difference is that today’s fanatics have guns in their hands and their backs to the wall. This is what Hatam Ghaderi refers to as the revolutionary “hard core” which has gathered around Khamenei, and is composed of Revolutionary Guardsmen, hardline clerics and members of the Basij militia.
They learned their trade fighting small, dirty wars in Iraq, Syria and Yemen; their worldview formed in prayer halls and barracks where a hatred of the godless West is propagated alongside a deep yearning for the return of the 12th Shia imam, who disappeared from view 10 centuries ago and will emerge to inaugurate an epoch of justice and peace. Religious meetings are conducted by men who sing of martyrdom and purity; they regard the killing of godless “rioters” acting at the behest of Israel as a virtuous act. With blood already on their hands, they have no way back into general acceptability, and nowhere to go but further and further into their own fantasies of martyrdom, all the while nurturing fond expectations of divine intervention. There is no reason to exclude Ali Khamenei from their number.
Whatever happens in Istanbul on Friday, and during the weeks to come, the Islamic Republic is unlikely to survive. Its people hate it too much. But its fall will not be the simple event that is seemingly contemplated in Washington and Jerusalem. The correct analogy is not with the kleptocracy that melted away with the fall of Assad but with those members of the Waffen-SS who carried on fighting even after Hitler’s death in 1945, exhibiting the same unappeasable contempt for death and hatred of their enemies that they did when he was alive.
When Reza Pahlavi was asked whether he took responsibility for the slaughter on the streets of his homeland, he replied coldly, “this is a war, and war has casualties”. That words have consequences means something tangible in a world of bullets and flesh and the destiny of a people. Many Iranians have entered a war with their regime that must end with the elimination of one or the other. Trump should think hard before he next promises Iranians his help, and mean it if he does, or he too will have blood on his hands.
The Ayatollah will fight to the death
He could unleash a killing machine
Christopher de Bellaigue, 12 January 2026
Ever since he became Iran’s Supreme Leader in 1989, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s approach to domestic unrest has been defined by three assumptions. The first is that protesters can be discredited through accusations of collusion with the country’s Western foes. The second is that, having engineered the 1979 revolution that brought the mullahs to power in the first place — and suffered the consequences — Iranians will do anything to avoid another upheaval, the poor letting themselves be seduced by government handouts while judicious shows of force dissuade the middle class from taking to the streets. The third is that Iranians are incapable of uniting around a single opposition figure: whether a disaffected insider like Mir Hossein Mousavi, or Reza Pahlavi, exiled son of the deposed last Shah, easily caricatured as a creature of the Virginia suburbs and who hasn’t seen his homeland in almost half a century. Such assumptions have seen Khamenei and his acolytes in the Revolutionary Guard, the clerical establishment and the Basij militia ride out crisis after crisis, starting with the Green Movement led by Mousavi in 2009, extending through the Woman, Life, Freedom movement of 2022-3 and climaxing in the battering that the country received last summer at the hands of Israeli and US aircraft. Then, calls by Benjamin Netanyahu and Pahlavi himself for ordinary citizens to take advantage of the regime’s military disarray, by going out and toppling it, went conspicuously unanswered. Now all has changed. Initially sparked by economic collapse, two weeks of protests have coalesced into a national movement, one whose aim is nothing less than the destruction of the Islamic Republic. Along the way, the regime’s tenaciously-held assumptions have become obsolete. The authorities have been caught unawares, and seem unable or unwilling to change course. On the contrary, the Islamic Republic remains fatally wedded to the old assumptions while the country enters an unpredictable and explosive new phase. The scene was set by a summer of chronic water shortages and electricity outages. In December, the riyal collapsed and inflation touched 50%, the consequence of mismanagement, corruption and sanctions that the revolutionary oligarchy has knowingly courted and in some cases profited from. Tellingly, the initial protests, on 28 December, were staged not by the hijab-discarding young women, the sort who spearheaded the Woman, Life, Freedom movement. Rather, the discontent was sparked by the revolution’s traditional supporters: grizzled, pious traders in the bazaar. They were soon joined by youthful members of the country’s dispossessed middle class: nouveaux pauvres with a Jacobin rage in their hearts and supportive compatriots by their side.
The solidarity that is currently being shown between Iranians of different ages, classes and ethnicities is a far cry from the scenes I observed during the 2009 agitation, when bystanders watched with studied neutrality as protesters were dragged away to police torture chambers. Gone, too, is the inviolability of public property. These days, bystanders wade in with fists and kicks to save protesters from the security forces, while police stations and police cars are torched and — according to the semi-official Tasnim news agency — officers are killed. From the province of Kurdistan in the west to Baluchistan in the east and as far south as the refinery town of Abadan, no part of Iran is untouched. At least one small town, in the western province of Kermanshah, has been seized by rebels.
The regime has responded by killing dozens of protesters before cutting the internet on Thursday night. Behind the blackout, as is clear from video and audio files that continue to trickle out, more protesters are dying, more public buildings are being attacked and more hospitals are becoming war zones as parents smash down mortuary doors and remove the bodies of their dead children before the authorities can surreptitiously bury them. Such confrontations are a throwback to the 1979 revolution, which advanced to the rhythm of Shia mourning ceremonies, each funeral being a magnet for more protests and more deaths.
Only a few government services — notably regime propaganda conducted through social media — have been exempted from the blackout. Card transactions, on which the economy depends, have not. With shops shuttered, the protests seem to be growing. In one video clip of a huge nocturnal gathering, a voice is heard: “They say they are going to come and kill us. Let them try to kill this crowd!”
“They say they are going to come and kill us. Let them try to kill this crowd!”
On Friday, the Revolutionary Guard’s intelligence wing warned against “any refusal to act” on the part of other organs of the state, a rare public admission of concern on the subject of regime cohesion. The following day the regular army, which usually takes no role in maintaining law and order, announced that it would safeguard strategic infrastructure and public property, also urging Iranians to thwart “enemy plots”.
But such warnings, and Khamenei’s own denunciation of the protesters as “rioters” whose motivation is to curry favour with Donald Trump, derive from the old reasoning that equates any call by Iranians for foreign intervention with unpatriotic betrayal. The country has a long history of such interventions, not least the 1953 coup in which MI6 and the CIA overthrew Mohammad Mosaddegh, Iran’s legitimate prime minister. Yet judging by the protesters’ cheerful calls for further attacks by the US and Israel, it is clear that they have rejected their parents’ squeamishness. According to the logic on the streets, another Western aerial campaign would be welcome if it advances the goal of toppling the Islamic Republic.
The main political beneficiary of the growing appetite for outside action is Pahlavi, who on Friday exhorted Trump to “be prepared to intervene to help the people of Iran”. And, for the first time, the self-styled crown prince is regarded as a serious contender for leadership of a new regime whose main attribute would be its good relations with Tel Aviv and Washington.
It is a remarkable transformation for the diffident 65-year-old who left Iran for Lubbock, Texas as an air force cadet in 1978, and was for years dismissed by liberal and Leftist opponents of the regime as an embarrassing reminder of his father’s corrupt and authoritarian rule. Pahlavi’s support for the joint Israeli-US attack on Iran this summer, furthermore, in which more than 1,000 Iranians were killed, appeared to put him at odds with his compatriots. No longer. On the burning streets of Tehran calls of “Long live the Shah!” ring insistently while Pahlavi’s former Leftist critics, in the words of one veteran Iranian analyst, “have started treating him with respect”.
Pahlavi rises, Khamenei falls. As recently as three years ago, the Supreme Leader’s will was unchallenged and his authority total; since then, the so-called “Axis of Resistance” he had built up across the Middle East has been obliterated by Israel, with his own intelligence services clearly compromised. Most significant, the bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities last summer removed any possibility of an Iranian bomb, in the short term at least.
“Rat Ali”, as Khamenei has been known since his scurrying departure for an underground bunker during the war last summer, looks every day of his 86 years. His death, preferably violent and painful, is being loudly petitioned. No one knows what conversations are going on between the Supreme Leader and his inner circle, which includes his son Mojtaba, for some time seen as a possible successor. But it is utterly implausible that Khamenei would, as The Times recently claimed, “flee to Moscow” if the regime looks close to falling.
Khamenei lost the use of an arm when he was blown up early in the revolution. He is not a quitter but a quietly stolid fanatic who will leave the Islamic Republic horizontally or not at all. And he has yet to turn the full force of his killing machine on the protesters. Observing all this, and fanning his tail feathers after his exfiltration of Nicolás Maduro from Venezuela, is the US president — who, by immediately reimposing his policy of “maximum pressure” on the Islamic Republic following his election last year, has, it is now clear, helped bring the Islamic Republic to its knees. “If they start killing people like they have in the past,” Trump declared on Saturday, “we’ll be hitting them very hard where it hurts.” By that time, of course, the slaughter of protesters was well underway.
Trump has so far avoided meeting Pahlavi, perhaps judging that the regime remains a long way from collapse, or because, if the time comes, he favours a Venezuela-style decapitation and Khamenei’s replacement from within the current set-up. Hassan Rouhani, a former president known both for his moderation and his toughness, might be a candidate.
As if by providential design, the ousting of Maduro lends an aura of inevitability to the demise of the Islamic Republic. And yet regimes are not toppled by auras. They are not toppled because Dara Khosrowshahi, the CEO of Uber, who was born into a good family in Iran in 1969, says that he is looking forward to “investing aggressively” in his homeland in the “first 100 days” after liberation. They are toppled because the men with guns are killed or lose their stomach for the fight. And of that, so far as we know, there is no sign.
A lot has happened since the summer. Iranians have got over their horror of foreign interventions and have adopted the closest figurehead to hand. A people out of time, they are fighting for a liberal democracy, or — quainter still — a constitutional monarchy, just as the brand seems defunct. Behind the penumbra of the communications blackout, a country of 90 million, an ancient culture dishonoured by its leaders, goes to work on itself.
This is not a comprehensive history of Ireland. It is, rather, an explainer – a guide for the interested reader to understand how the late twentieth-century conflict, known in euphemistic understatement as The Troubles, began, endured, and proved so intractable. Though the guns and bombs have for the most part fallen silent, memories endure. In some quarters, the bitterness remains, the venom lingers, and the need to keep fighting – at least in memory, at least in ritual – has not entirely faded. As the old rebel song goes, “No surrender is the war cry of the Belfast Brigade”. Its notes echo still across streets, walls, and the ever-present consciousness of a place where the past is never far from the present. Though the hatchet may be buried, many remember where they buried it.
The Troubles did not begin in 1969 when civil rights marchers were viciously ambushed by Protestant gangs. They erupted then. Their deeper roots stretched back to the early seventeenth century, when the English Crown undertook the Plantation of Ulster after the defeat of Gaelic lords in the Nine Years’ War (1594–1603). After the Flight of the Earls in 1607, when those lords fled to continental Europe, James VI of Scotland – now also James I of England – set about remaking Ulster. Confiscated land – taken from Irish Catholic chieftains – was granted to “undertakers” from England and, crucially, from lowland Scotland. This was not mere migration; it was a state project of demographic engineering, designed to pacify and anglicise a rebellious province.
The Plantation was not simply an English imposition; it was profoundly Scottish. Tens of thousands of Presbyterian Scots crossed the narrow North Channel. The geography made it almost inevitable: on a clear day you can see Scotland from Antrim. What had once been a porous Irish sea became, in effect, a corridor of Protestant settlement.
These were not aristocrats alone. Many were farmers, tradesmen, smallholders – industrious, Calvinist, wary of episcopal hierarchy and religious certainly wary of Rome. They brought with them kirk discipline, covenant theology, and a hard-earned suspicion of both Catholic rebellion and Anglican condescension. In the seventeenth century they were themselves dissenters within the British confessional order – not the establishment, though they would become it locally. From that moment, land, religion, and political loyalty fused. Ownership mapped onto confession. Power mapped onto identity.
So when we speak of “settlers,” it is not an abstraction. It is families. It is surnames. It is my own father’s ancestors crossing from Ayrshire or Galloway into Antrim or Down, carving farms from confiscated land, building kirks, speaking Scots-inflected English, marrying within their community, and slowly – almost without noticing – becoming native to a place that had been politically engineered for them. Over generations, the settler becomes the local. The memory of arrival fades; the memory of threat remains.
The seventeenth century hardened the divide. The 1641 Irish Rebellion, with massacres of Protestant settlers, entered Protestant folk memory as proof of Catholic barbarity; Cromwell’s subsequent campaign (1649–53), with its sieges and land seizures, entered Catholic memory as atrocity and dispossession. The Williamite War (1689–91), culminating in the Battle of the Boyne, sealed Protestant ascendancy. In Ulster especially, victory became ritualised memory – parades, commemorations, banners – history as annual rehearsal.
That is one of the deep paradoxes of Ulster: both communities can claim indigeneity and grievance simultaneously. Catholic memory looks back to dispossession; Protestant memory looks back to siege – 1641, the Boyne, 1798. One narrative emphasises loss of land; the other, survival against massacre. Each contains truth. Each edits.
The eighteenth century formalised Protestant dominance through the Penal Laws, which marginalised Catholics politically, economically, and educationally. Landownership remained overwhelmingly Protestant. Catholics were not exterminated; they were subordinated. Resentment, therefore, did not burn out. It banked.
The nineteenth century complicated everything. The Act of Union (1801) abolished the Irish Parliament and bound Ireland directly to Westminster. Catholic Emancipation (1829) removed many legal disabilities, but not structural inequities. An Gorta Mór (The Great Hunger) (1845–52) devastated the island demographically and psychologically; in Ulster, its effects were uneven, reinforcing regional distinctions. Meanwhile, industrialisation made Belfast a Protestant-majority, shipbuilding powerhouse – economically dynamic, culturally British, and deeply anxious about being subsumed into a Catholic-majority Ireland.
By the nineteenth century, the descendants of those Scottish Presbyterians were no longer temporary colonists but industrial citizens of Belfast — shipbuilders, linen magnates, skilled labourers — economically confident, culturally British, and deeply anxious about being subsumed into a Catholic-majority Ireland. As Irish nationalism (increasingly Catholic in composition, though not exclusively) pressed for Home Rule — limited self-government within the United Kingdom. Ulster unionists resisted fiercely. “Home Rule is Rome Rule” was not merely a slogan; it was an inherited reflex. Paramilitary formations appeared before the twentieth century: the Ulster Volunteer Force (1912) to oppose Home Rule; the Irish Volunteers (1913) to advance it. Guns were imported on both sides. The pattern was set.
The First World War postponed the crisis but did not dissolve it. The Easter Rising (1916), the War of Independence (1919–21), and the Anglo-Irish Treaty (1921) partitioned the island. Six counties of Ulster -with a built-in Protestant majority – became Northern Ireland, remaining within the United Kingdom. Partition did not resolve identity; it institutionalised it.
Northern Ireland’s new parliament at Stormont operated, for decades, as a Protestant-dominated state. Catholics faced systemic discrimination in housing allocation, employment, and electoral boundaries. This was not apartheid in the South African sense, but it was structured inequality, visible and resented.
By the 1960s, inspired partly by global civil rights movements, Northern Irish Catholics began peaceful campaigns for equal voting rights, fair housing, and an end to discriminatory practices. The response from elements within the Protestant community and the security apparatus was defensive, sometimes violent. Marches were attacked. The police (RUC), largely Protestant, were perceived as partisan. In 1969, serious sectarian rioting broke out; the British Army was deployed initially as peacekeeper. Very quickly, it became another protagonist.
From there, the Troubles crystallised: Provisional IRA campaigns against British presence and unionist authority; loyalist paramilitary violence against Catholics; tit-for-tat bombings, assassinations, internment without trial, Bloody Sunday (1972), hunger strikes (1981), urban segregation hardening into peace walls and psychological walls alike. Roughly 3,500 people died between the late 1960s and the Good Friday Agreement in 1998. That number, in global terms, is small. Its density in a small place was immense.
Which is why the Troubles cannot be reduced to simple binaries of coloniser and colonised, though that language has its place. The Ulster story is more entangled. Plantation created a settler community; centuries created a rooted one.
The Good Friday Agreement did not erase those centuries. It acknowledged them obliquely: consent as the principle of sovereignty; power-sharing between unionist and nationalist parties; recognition that identity in Northern Ireland could be British, Irish, or both. It was less a solution than a framework for managing disagreement without bloodshed.
And that, perhaps, is the long arc: from plantation to partition to power-sharing. Land engineered into loyalty. Religion hardened into political identity. Memory ritualised into grievance. Grievance institutionalised into governance. Governance resisted into violence. Violence exhausted into compromise.
History hardens. Families blur.
Memory, and the theatre of symbols
If history is the argument, memory is the costume in which it appears on stage.
In Ireland — and perhaps nowhere more intensely than in the North — the past does not lie quietly in archives. It walks. It marches. It drums. Specifically, the Lambeg drum is a large traditionally orange-painted drum, beaten with curved malacca canes brought out for Unionist and the Orange Order’s street parades. Along with the bagpipes, it is one of the loudest acoustic instruments in the world, frequently reaching over 120 dB. Named for the village of Lambeg it is commonly believed to have come to Ulster with the English settlers orvekse with the army of William of Orange during the Williamite war. Having its roots in 17th-century European military instruments, it was originally smaller. Traditionally it was accompanied by the shrill fife, a small transverse flute similar to the piccolo – and sometimes irreverently referred to as the Audi Orange Flute.
Oliver Cromwell is not merely a seventeenth-century general and dictator; he is a moral shorthand. For Catholics, his name condenses siege, massacre, confiscation – Drogheda and Wexford becoming synecdoche for atrocity itself. “To Hell or to Connacht” may not survive scholarly cross-examination as a verbatim decree, but as memory it requires no footnote. It signals dispossession. It names a wound. Invoke Cromwell and one need not rehearse the details; the symbol carries the freight.
William of Orange – King William III – King Billy – performs a parallel function on the other side of the ledger. Astride his white horse at the Boyne, he is less a Dutch Protestant prince than a guarantor of survival. The Battle of the Boyne (1690) was, in European terms, a minor theatre in a wider war. In Ulster, it became sacrament. Each Twelfth of July, sashes are worn, drums beaten, banners unfurled – if through or adjacent to Catholic areas, so much the better – not to refight the battle but to rehearse belonging and dominion.The Orange Lodge is both fraternal society and mnemonic device. Its rituals keep memory warm. Its parades trace routes that are never neutral, geography turned into catechism.
Thus Oliver Cromwell and King Billy face each other across centuries like bookends of grievance – one representing conquest, the other deliverance – though each is also more complicated than the emblem allows.
Move forward, and symbolism thickens.
The War of Independence (1919–21) and the Civil War (1922–23) fractured Irish nationalism itself. Partition in 1922 was not only a constitutional arrangement; it was an emotional amputation. For nationalists in the North, the new border confirmed abandonment and unfinished struggle. For unionists, it secured a state in which they would not be submerged. The same act – partition – functioned simultaneously as betrayal and salvation.
Martyrs followed. The executed leaders of 1916. The hunger strikers of 1981, their faces rendered in mural form, eyes large and unsurrendered. Martyrdom, in Ireland, has rarely required embellishment; death itself supplies the poetry. Funerals render it local – masked men in military dress fire shots into the damp airship air. Graves become pilgrimage sites. Names become incantation. Commemoration ceremonies bind past sacrifice to present purpose, as if history were an unfinished sentence demanding completion.
And always, the Protestant marches. The Twelfth of July. Apprentice Boys in Londonderry – a name that changes with one’s allegiance. Even the name of the city is a declaration. The ancient Derry” gestures toward Gaelic continuity; “Londonderry” toward plantation charter and imperial connection. To choose a word is to choose a side. Language itself becomes boundary wall.
In 1969, the Bogside in Derry turned symbolic geography into lived confrontation. “You Are Now Entering Free Derry” was not merely graffiti; it was a claim to moral and territorial autonomy. The walls and wire that later cut through Belfast – peace walls, they are called, with a certain exhausted irony – materialised distrust in concrete and corrugated steel. They were defensive architecture, but also mnemonic devices. Every barrier says: remember.
And then the murals.
On the Falls Road and the Shankill, gable walls became galleries of memory. Masked volunteers with rifles. King Billy crossing the Boyne. Bobby Sands’ thin, resolute face. The Red Hand of Ulster. Palestinian flags in nationalist districts; Israeli flags in loyalist ones – global conflicts borrowed to refract local identity. These images are not random decoration. They are narrative shorthand, pedagogy in paint. Children grow up under them. They learn who they are by the stories on the wall.
Symbolism, of course, simplifies. It flattens ambiguities into heroes and villains, saints and tyrants. Cromwell the monster. King Billy the saviour. The hunger striker the pure martyr. The volunteer the defender of the realm. Real history is messier: Cromwell was brutal and also a product of his century’s ferocities; William’s victory secured Protestant liberties while entrenching Catholic subordination; the independence struggle produced both liberation and internecine slaughter. But symbols do not trade in nuance. They trade in clarity.
Yet the Good Friday Agreement, too, is a symbol – though a quieter one. No horse. No musket. No mural of triumphant death. Its symbolism is procedural: consent, parity of esteem, power-sharing. It offers not a martyr but a mechanism. Its genius is almost anti-theatrical. It asks people to live with ambiguity rather than resolve it in blood.
And so Northern Ireland today remains a place where the past is both curated and contested. Bonfires blaze each July; wreaths are laid each Easter; murals are repainted; walls still stand, though some have gates that open by day. Memory has not faded. It has been domesticated, partially, into ritual rather than riot.
Perhaps that is the final paradox. Symbols once mobilised for war now coexist within a fragile peace. The same banners flutter, but fewer guns answer them. The same songs are sung, but often as heritage rather than summons.
History argues. Memory performs.
And in Ulster – and in the bloodlines that carry it beyond Ulster — the stage is never entirely dismantled.
What have I now?” said the fine old woman “What have I now?” this proud old woman did say “I have four green fields, one of them’s in bondage In stranger’s hands, that tried to take it from me But my sons have sons, as brave as were their fathers My fourth green field will bloom once again” said she
Tommy Makem
Personal Reflection
For me, this is not abstract history. My own lineage embodies that braid: Scottish Protestant migration on one side, Irish Catholic inheritance on the other – far from Belfast or Derry, those threads met in my family; I grew up carrying both memories, the power of both histories.
When I watch film footage or view pictures of Orange parades and civil rights marches, of explosions, street riots and military manoeuvres, of walls and murals, I am not a casual onlooker viewing a “quarrel in a far-away country between people of whom we know nothing”, to borrow Neville Chamberlain’s fateful words. I feel weight of dual inheritance. Scottish Presbyterian settlers on one side, Irish Catholic dispossessed on the other – both lineages threading through my own family, colliding and entwining in Birmingham, far from the streets of Belfast or Derry.
I grew up knowing these histories not as abstractions but as intimations, as stories that shaped who I was. Though vicariously, I feel the pull of both pasts – the grievance and the survival, the displacement and the rootedness. Perhaps that is the quiet hope: that memory, with all its violence and ritual, can also be inherited as empathy, that symbols can teach not just fear, but recognition; that families, however braided by history, can live in the space between suffering and reconciliation.
This short history of The Troubles was largely written by an AI language model as an explainer first and foremost, and not as an opinion piece.
Dreaming in the night, I saw a land where no man had to fight Waking in your dawn, I saw you crying in the morning light Lying where the Falcons fly, they twist and turn all in you e’er blue sky Living on your western shore, saw summer sunsets asked for more I stood by your Atlantic sea and I sang a song for Ireland
June and Phil McLough
In Belfast, the capital of Northern Ireland, there are imposing walls that have actually stood longer than that in Berlin. Now called the the Peace Walls, they were first erected by the British army in 1969. They were temporary affairs of corrugated iron, as the inter-community conflict solidified and ossified, they were soon extended and upgraded to bricks, steel and concrete. The walls separated predominantly Protestant loyalist and Catholic nationalist enclaves throughout The Troubles, the three decades of bombings, murders, riots and civil-rights protests.
Though not all linked, 38 kilometres of walls still slice through the city, outliving the conflict that engendered them. Only some short sections have been removed – partly they’ve become a tourist attraction, while the communities that live closest to them say they still provide a sense of security – though tensions may have eased, people are easily divided and it’s much harder to bring them together again. In the Shankill and Falls roads area of western Belfast, which were particularly notorious during The Troubles, the wall is splattered with political messaging, which makes it easy to know which side you’re on. One side has portraits of British soldiers and the queen and kerbs are painted red, white and blue. On the other the colours of the Irish flag predominate, framing portraits of Republican heroes and hunger-strike martyrs.
The World According to Ptolemy (2nd century), an Italian manuscript, 1460. (National Library of Naples, Library of Congress)
In That Howling Infinite 
That the African slave trade was a monstrosity, inflicting unspeakable cruelty on millions of innocent victims, is beyond dispute. But the resolution the UN General Assembly passed two weeks ago, marking the trade’s commemoration, is nothing less than an appalling falsification of history.