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.
History has a habit of turning up unexpectedly in everyday life.
Some fifteen years ago, a muso friend of ours told us about his family’s Greek origins in Ottoman Smyrna. We were in the Black Sheep wine bar in King Street, Newtown, sitting down with a Greek Australian who’d just finished a great set of blues and soul standards talking about events that occurred almost a century earlier. Nationality, language, religion and ancestry did not always fit the neat boxes into which the twentieth century subsequently tried to place them.
We visited Smyrna – now modern İzmir – in May 2014. We walked along the harbourside promenade, looked across the Aegean Sea, and took photographs that we sent them to our friend. They were ordinary holiday snaps, in one sense: the waterfront, the sea, the city behind us. But they carried something else with them. We were standing in a place from which his Greek forebears, had once looked towards the same water in circumstances unimaginably different from ours.
It is one of the peculiarities of history that the past can sometimes feel closer through a family anecdote or a photograph than through a library full of books. The old cliché about history leaving fingerprints is, perhaps, not entirely a cliché. Places retain traces of people who have gone, even when almost nothing visible remains of the communities that once inhabited them.
Smyrna is an especially powerful example.
It was once an Ancient Greek city located at a strategic point on the Aegean coast of Anatolia, and was actually two successive settlements: Old Smyrna, founded around the 11th century BC as an Aeolian settlement before being taken over and developed by the Ionians during the Archaic Period, and Smyrna proper, the new city founded from the 4th century BC onward, whose establishment is associated with Alexander the Great. Due to its advantageous port conditions, its ease of defence, and its good inland connections, Smyrna rose to prominence, reaching metropolitan proportions under the Roman Empire, with most of its surviving remains dating from that era, largely following reconstruction after a 2nd-century AD earthquake. Since 1930, the city’s official name has been İzmir.
Modern Izmir, May 2014
In September 1922, the city’s waterfront became the final refuge of tens of thousands of Greek and Armenian civilians as Turkish nationalist forces entered the city and violence and fire engulfed its Christian quarters. Within a few years, the overwhelmingly Greek character of one of the great cities of the eastern Mediterranean had largely disappeared. But Smyrna was not the beginning of this story. It was one of the last chapters in the extraordinarily violent disintegration of the Ottoman Empire.
The story reaches backwards through the Balkan Wars, the Ottoman-Russian conflicts, the massacres of Armenians in the 1890s, the First World War and the destruction of Armenian and Assyrian communities, and forwards through the Greek Turkish and War, the Treaty of Lausanne and the compulsory exchange of populations. It is a story of imperial collapse and national self-determination, but also of refugees, massacres, deportations, competing territorial claims and the brutal desire of emerging nation-states to make populations conform to political borders.
It is therefore tempting to reduce it to a morality tale. There is certainly no shortage of moral horror in the record. But moral judgement and historical explanation are not alternatives. The challenge is to understand how a multi-ethnic empire that had survived for centuries gave way, through war and revolution, to a collection of more nationally defined states — and why that transformation was accompanied by such extraordinary human suffering.
That is the longer story of Smyrna, and of the Ottoman endgame.
The leaving of Smyrna, September 2022
Smyrna and the Ottoman Endgame
In September 1922, the cosmopolitan city of Smyrna became the final, terrible act in a drama that had been unfolding for more than a decade. The city’s waterfront filled with Greek and Armenian refugees as Turkish nationalist forces entered the city and Christian neighbourhoods were engulfed by fire. Behind them lay the ruins of communities that had existed in Anatolia for centuries; ahead was the Aegean and, for many, an uncertain escape to Greece.
The familiar account of Smyrna begins here, with the fire, the refugees and the ships of the Allied powers lying offshore, apparently unable or unwilling to intervene in one of the final acts in a war that they had effectively lost. But history did not begin in Smyrna. Nor did the destruction of Anatolia’s Christian communities begin with Turkish commander Mustafa Kemal’s nationalist movement. To understand what happened in 1922, one has to go back through the Balkan Wars, the Ottoman defeat in the First World War and, before that, the increasingly violent crisis of the Ottoman state’s relations with its subject peoples.
This is the broader story told, with considerable geographical and archival range, by Sean McMeekin in The Ottoman Endgame. It is also the story exploredin In That Howling Infinite’s The fall of the Ottoman Empire and the birth of Türkiye : the dissolution of an empire was not a single event but a succession of wars, revolutions, occupations, expulsions and attempts at national reconstruction. The First World War was the central episode, but it was also part of a much longer Ottoman endgame.
The wars before the war
It is convenient to imagine Europe as peaceful until August 1914. It was not. The Ottoman Empire had already been fighting for its survival.
Italy went to war with the Ottomans in 1911, seizing Tripolitania and Cyrenaica, the territories that became Libya. Then came the Balkan Wars of 1912–13, in which the Ottoman Empire lost almost all its remaining European territories. Greece, Serbia, Bulgaria and Montenegro expanded at Ottoman expense, while Albania emerged as an independent state. Romania, often included rather casually in this account, was already an independent kingdom, although it acquired territory from Bulgaria after the Second Balkan War.
The Balkan Wars were particularly important because they demonstrated what the disintegration of a multinational empire could mean in an age of nationalism. Armies advanced, borders changed and populations moved. Christians were expelled from territories conquered by Muslim powers and Muslims were expelled from territories conquered by Christian states. Villages were destroyed, civilians massacred and refugees displaced on a large scale. The demographic transformation of the Balkans was already underway before the First World War began.
This matters because the later violence in Anatolia did not occur in a political vacuum. Ottoman Muslims, many of them themselves refugees from the Balkans and the Caucasus, had seen their homes and communities disappear. The Ottoman state increasingly came to regard the survival of its Muslim population as a matter of national security. At the same time, Christian minorities – particularly Armenians and Greeks – increasingly looked beyond the empire towards their own national movements and, in some cases, to foreign powers.
The result was a vicious feedback loop. Nationalism encouraged separatism; separatism encouraged repression; repression encouraged further separatism. War made the whole process considerably worse.
Armenians and the First World War
The Armenian catastrophe has to be treated separately from what happened to the Greeks and Assyrians, although there were connections between them.
The massacres of Armenians during the reign of Sultan Abdulhamid II in 1894–96 were already a warning of what could happen when imperial authority, Muslim majoritarian sentiment and fears of territorial disintegration collided. Hundreds of thousands of Armenians were killed in massacres and associated violence. The Young Turk revolution of 1908 initially raised hopes of a more constitutional and inclusive Ottoman order, but those hopes deteriorated rapidly as the empire suffered military defeat, territorial losses and political crisis.
When the Ottoman Empire entered the First World War in late 1914 on the side of Germany and the other Central Powers, the Armenian question acquired an altogether more dangerous dimension. Ottoman forces were fighting Russia in the Caucasus, and some Armenian organisations and volunteers did indeed cooperate with the Russians. Armenian soldiers fought in Russian formations, while armed Armenian groups operated behind Ottoman lines. Ottoman fears of an Armenian fifth column were therefore not entirely invented.
But this context does not explain what followed, still less justify it.
In 1915 the Committee of Union and Progress government – what we know as The Young Turks (now a common term to describe ambitious young upstarts) – began the systematic deportation of Ottoman Armenians. Armenian political and community leaders were arrested and killed. Men were separated from their families and frequently murdered. Women, children and the elderly were deported southwards, many towards the Syrian desert. Deportation became a mechanism of destruction.
The death toll remains debated in detail, as such figures inevitably are, but the broad historical conclusion is not seriously in doubt: hundreds of thousands, probably well over a million Armenians, died through massacre, deportation, starvation, disease, exposure and deliberate deprivation. Many women and children were forcibly converted or absorbed into Muslim households. Sexual assault was commonplace. Armenian property was confiscated. An ancient community was not merely displaced; its institutional, demographic and economic foundations were systematically dismantled.
The Ottoman government and its successors have contested the term genocide and have emphasised the extraordinary circumstances of wartime collapse, Armenian collaboration with Russia and the deaths of Muslim civilians. Those Muslim deaths were real and often horrific. But they do not negate the evidence for the organised deportation and destruction of the Armenians. Nor does acknowledging Armenian collaboration with Russia turn an entire ethnic population into a legitimate military target.
The same period brought massacres and deportations of Assyrian Christians in southeastern Anatolia and northern Mesopotamia. The historical record is less comprehensive than for the Armenians, but the destruction of Assyrian communities belongs to the same wider story of wartime demographic violence.
The Greek catastrophe was different – and connected
The fate of the Ottoman Greeks followed a somewhat different chronology.
Greeks had lived throughout the Ottoman domains for centuries. In Anatolia they were concentrated particularly along the Aegean and Black Sea “Pontic” coasts, but Greek communities were also found in the interior. They were not simply recent immigrants or colonial settlers. They were part of the social and economic fabric of the late Ottoman Empire.
During the First World War, some Greek communities were deported or otherwise subjected to coercion and violence. In the Pontic region of the Black Sea, Greek nationalists and armed groups also became involved in conflict with Ottoman authorities and later with Turkish nationalists. The question of Greek communities in Anatolia consequently became entangled with the wider struggle over what would replace the Ottoman Empire.
The decisive change came after the Ottoman defeat.
The Armistice of Mudros in October 1918 effectively ended Ottoman participation in the war. Allied forces occupied strategic parts of the empire, including Constantinople. The victorious powers then contemplated a drastic settlement of Ottoman territory. The Treaty of Sèvres in 1920 proposed a severely truncated Ottoman state and envisaged Greek control or influence over substantial parts of western Anatolia.
The Greek military landing at Smyrna in May 1919 was therefore not an isolated act of Greek aggression. It occurred within the post-war Allied occupation and with Allied approval. Greece, was encouraged by its wartime territorial ambitions and by the vision of the Megali (great) Idea, – a Greek nationalist and irredentist vision that emerged after Greek independence (1821–1829) that called for the revival of the Byzantine Empire by uniting all regions with significant Greek populations – including parts of the southern Balkans, Anatolia, and Cyprus – still under Ottoman rule into a single Greek state.
Greece believed that it had an opportunity to incorporate territories containing substantial Greek populations and places of enormous symbolic importance to Greek history. But the settlement soon collided with another nationalism: Mustafa Kemal and the Turkish counter-revolution
Mustafa Kemal Pasha, the Ottoman commander who had become famous at Gallipoli, emerged as the principal leader of the Turkish nationalist movement. The movement rejected the partition of Anatolia contemplated at Sèvres and sought to establish national sovereignty over the Turkish heartland.
Mustafa Kemal and other Ottoman officers at Gallipoli
This was not simply an Ottoman army fighting a foreign invader. The Ottoman government in Constantinople accepted the Allied settlement; the nationalist movement centred in Anatolia rejected it. Turkey therefore experienced something approaching a war of national liberation combined with civil conflict.
The Greek army advanced deep into Anatolia. For a time, it appeared that Greece might achieve a substantial territorial settlement. But Turkish resistance stiffened. The nationalists defeated the Greek advance and, in August–September 1922, launched the offensive that drove the Greek army back towards the Aegean.
The Greek retreat was accompanied by atrocities and destruction on both sides. Turkish nationalist forces and irregulars committed massacres and expulsions against Christian civilians; Greek forces and retreating troops were themselves responsible for atrocities against Muslim civilians during their occupation and withdrawal. None of this is usefully understood through a simple morality tale in which one side was innocent and the other intrinsically barbarous.
There was, however, an important asymmetry in the final outcome: the Turkish nationalist victory made possible the consolidation of a Turkish nation-state in Anatolia, while the Greek population of much of the region was about to disappear.
Smyrna, September 1922
The events at Smyrna remain among the most contested episodes of the war, particularly regarding responsibility for the city’s fire and the precise number of people killed. The broad outlines are clearer.
Turkish nationalist forces entered Smyrna on 9 September 1922. The Greek Orthodox metropolitan, Chrysostomos, was murdered. There followed widespread looting, violence and attacks on the city’s Christian population. On 13 September a fire began in the Armenian quarter and subsequently consumed large parts of the Greek and Armenian districts.
The city contained a large Muslim population as well as substantial Greek and Armenian communities, and the precise course of the fire remains disputed. What is not disputed is the appalling predicament of the refugees trapped along the waterfront. Tens of thousands, probably far more, sought escape by sea. Allied warships were present. Their crews could see the fire. Their governments were reluctant to intervene militarily in what had become a Turkish nationalist victory and were constrained by the political circumstances of the time. Some Allied personnel and ships did rescue refugees; the larger failure was that the international presence did not prevent the catastrophe.
Smyrna was therefore both an atrocity and a symbol. It marked the end of a substantial Greek and Armenian presence in one of the great cities of the eastern Mediterranean.
But it was not, strictly speaking, the moment when that population vanished. Much of the Greek population had already fled or been displaced during the preceding years, and the final settlement was still to come.
The leaving of Smyrna, September 2022
The population exchange
The Treaty of Lausanne in 1923 replaced Sèvres and internationally recognised the sovereignty of the new Turkish Republic over Anatolia and eastern Thrace. Mustafa Kemal, now Atatürk, had won the war.
Lausanne also gave international legitimacy to the compulsory exchange of populations between Greece and Turkey. Approximately 1.2 million Orthodox Christians were transferred from Turkey to Greece, while roughly 400,000 Muslims were transferred from Greece to Turkey, subject to various exemptions, including the Greek population of Constantinople and the Muslim population of western Thrace.
The exchange was presented as a solution to the problem of minorities. In reality, it was the formalisation of a demographic revolution already substantially achieved through war, massacre, deportation and flight.
It is important not to describe this simply as the expulsion of Christians from Anatolia. Muslims had also been expelled from territories lost by the Ottoman Empire during the Balkan Wars, and the compulsory exchange itself displaced Muslim as well as Christian populations. Nor was the exchange an exclusively Turkish initiative: Greece and Turkey agreed to it, and the victorious European powers incorporated it into the Lausanne settlement.
It was nevertheless an extraordinary admission of failure. The ideal of a multi-ethnic Ottoman political order had effectively given way to the principle that stability could be achieved by separating populations according to religion and, increasingly, nationality.
The irony was profound. The Ottoman Empire had survived for centuries precisely because it did not require everyone within its borders to be Turkish, Arab, Greek, Armenian, Serbian or Bulgarian. Its subjects belonged to overlapping religious, linguistic and local communities. The nineteenth and early twentieth centuries progressively replaced that imperial pluralism with nationalism. By the 1920s, population transfer had become one of the instruments by which the new states sought to make their populations conform to their national boundaries.
The longer Ottoman endgame
This is why I find McMeekin’s The Ottoman Endgame such a useful corrective to the conventional Western story of the First World War.
The war in the Ottoman world was not merely a sideshow to the trenches of France and Belgium. It stretched from Gallipoli to Gaza, Baghdad to Baku, the Caucasus to the Arabian Peninsula. Its consequences extended from the Balkans through Anatolia and the Levant to Mesopotamia. And it was intimately connected with the Russian war, the Russian revolutions and the subsequent Russian Civil War.
The Ottoman collapse also cannot be reduced to the familiar caricature of Britain and France simply carving up an otherwise coherent Middle East according to the lines of the Sykes–Picot Agreement. Sykes–Picot was real and consequential, but it was one of several competing wartime schemes for the disposition of Ottoman territory. Russia, too, had imperial ambitions. Constantinople had long been an object of Russian strategic and religious aspiration. France had its own ambitions in the Levant. Britain was concerned with India, Egypt, Mesopotamia, the Persian Gulf and the routes linking them.
And the Arabs, Armenians, Greeks, Kurds, Turks and other peoples of the empire were not merely passive pieces on a European chessboard. They had their own political ambitions, national movements and armed organisations.
The same complexity applies to Gallipoli. The campaign was certainly a military disaster, and Churchill was one of its principal advocates. But it was not simply Churchill’s personal folly, as the mythology subsequently suggested. It emerged from a much wider strategic debate about how best to defeat the Ottoman Empire and assist Russia. Its failure helped establish Mustafa Kemal as a military leader of consequence.
That matters because the man who became the founder of modern Türkiye was not an outsider who suddenly appeared after the Ottoman collapse. He was an Ottoman officer, a product of the imperial military system and a veteran of the Balkan Wars, Libya and Gallipoli. The Turkish Republic was born not from a clean break with the Ottoman past but from its ruins.
A demographic revolution
There is a tendency, particularly in polemical accounts of this period, to describe the destruction of Anatolia’s Christian communities as a single uninterrupted campaign stretching from the Hamidian massacres through the Armenian genocide to Smyrna. The chronology is more complicated than that.
There were massacres under Abdulhamid II. There were the catastrophic deportation and destruction of the Armenians under the wartime Committee of Union and Progress. There were attacks on Assyrian communities. There were violence and displacement affecting Ottoman Greeks during and after the First World War. There were massacres of Muslims during the Balkan Wars and the Greek occupation and retreat in Anatolia. There was the Turkish nationalist war against Greece. There was Smyrna. Finally, there was the compulsory population exchange.
These events were not identical. Their perpetrators, political circumstances and immediate objectives differed. Nor should the existence of Muslim suffering be invoked to dilute the particular historical responsibility for the Armenian genocide.
But they belong to the same larger transformation: the violent passage from empire to nation-state.
What disappeared was not literally a civilisation that had remained unchanged for two thousand years. Anatolian Christianity itself had changed enormously over those centuries. Byzantine Christianity, Armenian Christianity, Syriac Christianity and Greek Orthodoxy had their own histories and communities. Ottoman society was neither a paradise of tolerance nor a permanent state of persecution. It was a hierarchical imperial order in which religious communities possessed considerable autonomy while remaining unequal before the state.
What disappeared in the early twentieth century was that plural Ottoman world.
By the middle of the 1920s, the Armenian presence in Anatolia had been largely destroyed; the great majority of Anatolian Greeks had gone; Assyrian communities had been devastated and dispersed; and millions of Muslims displaced from the Balkans and Caucasus had been absorbed into the Turkish heartland. The new Republic of Türkiye inherited an Anatolia that was considerably more homogeneous than the Ottoman Empire had been.
The transformation was accompanied by enormous human suffering and the appropriation of property on a vast scale. It also produced the demographic foundations of the modern Turkish state.
The wars of Ottoman succession
Seen from this distance, the Balkan Wars, the First World War and the Turkish War of Independence can be understood as parts of a longer sequence: the wars of Ottoman succession.
The Ottoman Empire had once encompassed much of southeastern Europe, the Middle East and North Africa. Its disappearance created a succession problem of extraordinary dimensions. Who would inherit its territories? Russia, Britain, France, Greece, Italy and the emerging Arab states all had answers. So did the Turks. The Balkan peoples had already answered the question in their own way before 1914.
The wars did not end neatly in 1918. The Ottoman defeat was followed by the Greek-Turkish war; the Russian Revolution and Civil War transformed the Caucasus; Britain and France established mandates in former Arab Ottoman territories; the Turkish Republic emerged from the nationalist victory; population exchanges attempted to impose demographic order upon territories in which communities had been intermingled for centuries.
That is one reason the consequences remain visible today.
The modern Middle East was not simply invented at a European conference after the First World War. Nor was it simply the inevitable product of ancient ethnic and religious hatreds. It emerged from the interaction of imperial collapse, nationalism, local political movements, European intervention, Russian expansion, war, revolution and demographic engineering.
Smyrna was therefore not the beginning of the story, and neither was it quite the end. It was one of the last great convulsions of the Ottoman endgame.
The ships in the harbour in September 1922 were looking at more than a burning city. They were looking at the consequences of a political order that had been collapsing for generations. Behind the flames lay the Balkan Wars, the deportations of 1915, the battles between Greeks and Turks, the Russian-Ottoman struggle in the Caucasus, the Allied occupation, Sèvres and the nationalist revolt led by Mustafa Kemal. Ahead lay Lausanne, the population exchange and the Republic of Türkiye.
The Ottoman Empire had gone. The Greek presence in Anatolia had largely gone with it. So too had the Armenian communities that had survived there for centuries.
But the story was not one of an ancient world simply disappearing beneath the flames. It was the much messier story of modern nationalism being born from the wreckage of empire.
And that is perhaps the more uncomfortable historical lesson. Empires can suppress national conflict without resolving it. When they collapse, the suppressed conflicts do not necessarily disappear. They can return in a more radical form, as competing peoples attempt to turn mixed imperial territories into national homelands. Borders are drawn; populations move; minorities become suspect; refugees become instruments of politics; and, in the worst circumstances, demographic homogenisation becomes a military objective.
The Ottoman Empire was not the only empire to discover this. The Habsburg, Romanov and German empires would suffer their own violent disintegration. Timothy Snyder’s later description of the lands between Germany and Russia as the “Bloodlands” has a broader resonance here. The territories left behind by the collapse of Europe’s great empires became some of the most violent political spaces of the twentieth century.
The Ottoman endgame was one of them. And it is still playing its echoes.
Izmir, May 2014
When we stood on the Izmir waterfront in 2014, there was little to suggest what had happened there ninety-two years earlier. The promenade was busy; the Aegean glittered beyond the harbour and modern İzmir was very much a Turkish city looking confidently towards its future. There was no visible boundary between the city that had been and the city that is.
Yet somewhere in the photographs I sent to our friend back home in Australia was a connection between those two worlds. His family’s roots lay in a city whose Greek population had once been large enough to constitute one of its defining communities. The people themselves had gone, their neighbourhoods transformed, their institutions dispersed, their descendants scattered across Greece and the wider diaspora. But the sea remained.
That is the strange persistence of history. People disappear; places survive. Names change, buildings are demolished, languages fall silent and populations are exchanged. Yet descendants carry fragments of the vanished world with them. Sometimes it is a family story, sometimes a photograph, sometimes a surname whose meaning has travelled further than its bearers ever imagined.
A Greek family descended from Smyrna and living in Sydney is itself a reminder of the untidy human geography of the Ottoman world. It tells us something that maps coloured in the clean shades of modern nation-states cannot: people moved, intermarried, converted, fled, were expelled and reinvented themselves. Their identities were rarely as tidy as the borders that eventually enclosed them.
The history of Smyrna is therefore not simply the story of one massacre or one burning city, terrible though those events were. It belongs to the much larger history of the collapse of empires and the rise of nationalism. The Balkan Wars, the First World War, the Armenian genocide, the destruction and displacement of Assyrian and Greek communities, the Greek advance into Anatolia, the Turkish nationalist victory and the compulsory population exchange were different episodes, with different actors and circumstances. Together, however, they transformed the demographic and political landscape of the eastern Mediterranean.
The Ottoman Empire had not been a harmonious multicultural paradise, and its dissolution did not produce violence from nowhere. But its disappearance removed an imperial framework within which different communities had lived, however unequally, alongside one another. The national states that replaced it promised sovereignty and security. Too often they sought both by making their populations more homogeneous.
That is the uncomfortable lesson of the Ottoman endgame. The twentieth century did not simply replace old empires with neat national democracies. It also produced refugees, minorities without homelands, homelands without their former minorities, and borders drawn through landscapes inhabited for generations by people who had never imagined themselves foreigners.
And yet history is not entirely erased by political transformation.
The harbour is still there.
In 1922, people crowded along that waterfront desperate to escape across the same Aegean. In 2014, an Australian friend of Greek Smyrna ancestry received photographs of that same waterfront from another traveller, standing there in very different circumstances. Between those two moments lies a century of catastrophe, migration and memory.
Perhaps that is what the old phrase about history leaving fingerprints really means. The fingerprints are not always found in monuments or memorials. Sometimes they survive in a surname, a family story, a photograph sent from a distant city — or in the simple recognition that, although the people have gone, you are standing where they once stood.
Roots and fruits.
The empire is gone. The city has changed. The people have dispersed.
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.
For our old friend and co-founder of HuldreFolk, the acclaimed bandurist Victor Mishalow, Ukrainian composer Hryhory Kytasty’s Echo of the Steppes (Гомін Степів) was much, much more than a piece of music; it was an evocation of a lost homeland.
It was Victor’s signature piece, and when introducing it in our concerts – an eclectic combination of stories, songs and music – he would describe the boundless Ukrainian steppe: waves of tall grass bending beneath an endless wind, and beneath it all the legendary black chernozem, among the richest soil on earth, so deep it seemed almost without end. In his telling, the bandura was “the soul of Ukraine”, its shimmering strings giving voice to the wind, the grasses, the little creatures that dwelt within them, and the immenseness of the plains.
The music also carried folk memory: of open frontiers where the Kozaks once found refuge from oppression, where freedom could still be breathed beneath an enormous sky, and where the landscape itself became part of the nation’s identity. Listening to Victor play, one did not simply hear an instrument; one heard the echo of the steppes – a vast, living landscape in which earth, wind, history and people were bound together in a single, resonant voice.
Fingerprints, ghosts and the long arm of History
In an illuminating essay in the e-zine Unherd, republished below, former war-correspondent Aris Roussinos begins an extensive and expansive review of Australian archeologist Warwick Ball’s The Eurasian Steppe with three mute stone figures – Cuman balbals – standing beside the road between Sloviansk and Bakhmut in Donetsk, watching the endless movement of armies across what is now Ukraine’s disputed and devastated Donbas. They are ancient witnesses in a landscape where Russians and Ukrainians now fight over ground that, for most of human history, belonged to neither, and yet, for countless people over millennia, became pasturelands and polities, battlefields and burial grounds.
This is history as I like it: the historian as storyteller, where landscapes become characters and the past refuses to remain buried.
Long before Slavic speech reached these plains, the steppe was the domain of nomadic peoples: Scythians, Sarmatians, Alans, Huns, Turks, Mongols and many others whose empires rose and vanished like storms over the grasslands. They left few cities and fewer written records, but their fingerprints are everywhere: in languages, military traditions, political institutions, myths and identities. The grass remembers what libraries often forget.
Roussinos’ central argument is that we have misunderstood Europe by looking too exclusively westward, towards Rome. The steppe was never merely a barbarian wilderness beyond civilisation, waiting to burst through the gates. It was one of the great engines of European history. Europe was shaped not only by the legacy of Rome and Christianity but also by repeated encounters with the peoples of Inner Asia. The old frontier between “Europe” and “Asia” dissolves under closer inspection. What appears on a modern atlas as a dividing line was, for centuries, a vast zone of movement, exchange, conquest and adaptation.
The present war in Ukraine unfolds across precisely this ancient geography. The early Russian thrust towards Kyiv moved through forests and marshes that belonged historically to the old Slavic world. The grinding war of attrition in the east is being fought across the open “Wild Fields”, the immense Eurasian grasslands where mounted nomads once travelled with astonishing speed and where empires repeatedly collided. Roussinos draws parallels with the mechanised battles of the twentieth century – Kursk, Kharkiv, Stalingrad – where tanks replaced horses, but the strategic significance of the landscape remained unchanged. Geography, as Napoleon is said to have observed, is often the most enduring ally in war.
It is an enticing argument because it encourages us to look beneath the familiar surface of European history. Perhaps Europe itself carries far more of the steppe within it than we usually acknowledge. Hungary and Bulgaria were founded by peoples of the steppe. The Polish nobility cultivated a proud Sarmatian ancestry. The Magyars’ memory of their eastern origins helped shape nineteenth-century nationalism. Even the nation state, so often presented as an entirely European invention, may owe something to political traditions carried westward across the grasslands by mounted confederations whose influence extended far beyond the horizon they inhabited.
There are historical echoes scattered throughout this story. The Sarmatians and Alans revolutionised warfare with armoured cavalry, heavy lances and mounted tactics that would eventually blossom into the chivalric traditions of medieval Europe. Even the Arthurian legend may preserve a distant resonance of the steppe in the enduring image of the sword planted in the earth, waiting for the rightful king to draw it forth.
Filmmakers, naturally, could not resist. The 2004 film King Arthur, for example, stitched together Romans, Celts, Sarmatians, Picts and enough historical liberties to make any medievalist wince. Clive Owen wandered through a fictional Northumbria Britain as a brooding half-Roman, half-Sarmatian Arthur, while Keira Knightley appeared as an improbably glamorous and scantily clad Guinevere whose Pictish origins seemed less convincing than her plummy English accent. It was glorious nonsense, but enjoyable, nonetheless. The Irish landscapes were striking, the horses magnificent, the ‘Knights’ (the picture at the head of this essay) with their “Rus! Rus!” war cry (and they actually do sit at a round table) improbably photogenic. A battle fought across a frozen lake owed as much to Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky as it did to any surviving historical source. Ridley Scott later recycled much the same visual conceit in his disappointing Napoleon. History often survives in cinema not because the facts are accurate but because certain images possess extraordinary emotional truth.
The Cossacks offer a far more convincing example of the cultural blending that characterised the frontier. They emerged not from ethnic purity but from mixture. Runaway serfs, adventurers, escaped peasants and soldiers settled the borderlands, adopting the customs, military practices and vocabulary of the Turkic peoples who had occupied the steppe before them. Even the word “Cossack” derives from a Turkic root meaning “to roam”. The frontier was never a wall separating civilisations. It was a workshop in which entirely new identities were forged.
It is here that Roussinos, following Warwick Ball, arrives at his most provocative claim. Muscovite Russia, he argues, cannot be understood without recognising the formative influence of the Mongol world. Moscow’s rise was anything but inevitable. The Golden Horde required dependable tributaries capable of collecting taxes, maintaining order and supplying troops. The princes of Moscow proved remarkably efficient servants of the khans and, in doing so, transformed what had once been a relatively insignificant Rus’ principality into the nucleus of a future empire. The irony is delicious. Mongol domination helped create the very Russian state that would eventually conquer the steppe itself.
The fingerprints remain visible today. Administrative practices, institutions of government, systems of taxation and even elements of the Russian language bear traces of Mongol influence. Yet fingerprints are curious things. They tell us that contact occurred; they do not tell us everything that followed.
That question lies at the heart not only of Ball’s thesis but also of historian Orlando Figes’ The Story of Russia, which, by happenstance, I am reading at the moment. It is one of those literary coincidences in which two writers, approaching the same landscape from different directions, find themselves asking precisely the same question. What made Russia, Russia?
Figes is, in many respects, the perfect companion to Roussinos because he shifts our attention from inheritance to interpretation. He readily acknowledges that the Mongol conquest of the Rus’ principalities in the thirteenth century was one of the defining ruptures in Russian history. It destroyed Kyiv’s political centrality, subordinated the northern principalities to the Golden Horde and created the circumstances in which Moscow could eventually emerge as the dominant power. Like Roussinos, he recognises the profound irony that Mongol domination did not simply interrupt Russian state formation but helped shape its eventual character.
Yet Figes is ultimately less interested in what Russia inherited than in what Russia chose to become. The Mongols bequeathed methods of rule: taxation, military organisation, communications and a conception of authority that differed markedly from Western feudalism. Russia’s imagination, however, was nourished elsewhere. Orthodox Christianity, Byzantine political theology, the doctrine of Moscow as the “Third Rome” and the almost mystical conception of the Tsar as God’s anointed gave Russia a vocabulary through which it understood itself. Its civilisation emerged not from a single source but from the convergence of many.
This distinction is important because it rescues history from determinism. Fingerprints reveal contact; they do not reveal intention. They cannot tell us why someone picked up the knife, wrote the letter or opened the door. Likewise, cultural inheritance explains possibilities, not inevitabilities.
Figes presents Russia as a civilisation assembled from multiple traditions: Slavic, Byzantine, Mongol, European and imperial. The country’s enduring paradox is that it has persistently imagined itself as both European and somehow apart from Europe. Peter the Great attempted to drag Russia westward, shaving beards, importing European science, founding St Petersburg (a German name, which was changed to Petrograd during World War I for the same reasons the British royal house changed its German name to Windsor) embracing Enlightenment ideas. Yet beneath these reforms older structures of autocracy survived. Later generations reversed the argument entirely. Slavophiles celebrated Russia’s uniqueness while Westernisers lamented its failure to become sufficiently European. The debate has never really ended. It merely changes its vocabulary.
Maps have always encouraged these arguments. A glance at any atlas suggests that Russia occupies an almost impossible position: a European power that expanded across Asia until it became the largest contiguous empire on earth. The geography itself tempts us into historical mythology. Is Russia European? Asian? Eurasian? The answer has varied according to who was asking and what political purpose the answer was intended to serve. Geography creates opportunities, constraints and temptations. It does not dictate outcomes.
Figes’ also explores of recurring Russian archetypes: the Holy Tsar, the Holy Fool, the suffering nation, the belief that Russia possesses a unique historical destiny. These are not immutable characteristics embedded in some mystical national DNA. They are stories Russians have told about themselves across the centuries – including Vladimir Putin’s house ideologue, philosopher Aleksandr Dugin. Stories matter because people act upon them. Nations, no less than individuals, become attached to narratives that explain who they are and why they exist.
Juxtaposed against Ball, Roussinos and Figues is a comment on Roussinos’ essay by Alexander Morrison, a historian of Russian history at Oxford University. Every grand historical narrative requires its sceptic. Elegant theories are seductive precisely because they reduce complexity to a single organising principle. Morrison accepts much of Ball’s argument while quietly resisting its more deterministic conclusions. It is an exemplary piece of historical criticism because it neither dismisses nor genuflects. Instead, it refines.
He readily acknowledges that Muscovy inherited important administrative practices from the Mongol world and points out that Russia was far from unique. The Ottomans, Safavids, Mughals and Qing all incorporated Chinggisid or Timurid political traditions alongside older local institutions. Borrowing across Eurasia was commonplace. Civilisations have always learned from their neighbours, even while claiming absolute originality.
Where Morrison parts company with Ball is over the temptation to confuse influence with destiny. Muscovy borrowed bureaucratic structures connected with taxation, communications and administration. Indeed, the Russian language still preserves Mongol echoes in words such as kazna for treasury, den’gi for money and yam for the postal relay system. Yet the ideological foundations of the state remained overwhelmingly Byzantine and Orthodox. Ivan IV became Tsar by invoking the legacy of Caesar and the vision of Moscow as the Third Rome, not by presenting himself as the heir of Genghis Khan. Administrative inheritance did not erase cultural identity.
That distinction becomes even more important when considering the modern world. It is tempting to explain Putin’s Russia by reaching back to the Mongols, Ivan the Terrible or some timeless Russian soul. Such explanations possess an undeniable elegance because they transform political choices into historical inevitabilities. Morrison rejects this outright. Contemporary Russia, he argues, is shaped above all by decisions made by particular elites drawing upon nineteenth-century nationalism, memories of the Soviet collapse, selective readings of Russian history and modern political ideology. The past provides the vocabulary; it does not dictate the speech.
His discussion of Ukraine is equally persuasive. Southern and eastern Ukraine were settled comparatively recently by a remarkable mosaic of peoples: Ukrainians, Russians, Greeks, Jews, Armenians, Bulgarians and many others. The region’s history is therefore extraordinarily layered. Yet historical complexity does not undermine modern sovereignty. Ancient settlement patterns explain why memories remain contested, but they do not invalidate internationally recognised borders. History illuminates’ claims; it does not automatically legitimise them.
This strikes me as one of the most important lessons historians can offer our own age. We are living through a period in which politicians, nationalists and activists increasingly seek legitimacy by reaching deeper into the past. Ancient kingdoms, medieval battles, archaeological discoveries, linguistic survivals and genetic studies are all recruited into contemporary arguments about identity and territory. History becomes less an investigation than a courtroom brief.
Yet the past is a notoriously unreliable witness.
Landscapes accumulate memories without issuing verdicts. The Donbas bears the fingerprints of Scythians, Greeks, Sarmatians, Goths, Huns, Khazars, Mongols, Tatars, Cossacks, Russians, Ukrainians, Jews, Armenians and countless others. None of those fingerprints constitutes a title deed. They testify to presence, movement and encounter. They remind us that almost every place we imagine possessing an eternal identity has, in reality, been shaped by successive waves of migration, conquest, adaptation and coexistence.
Perhaps that is why I find Roussinos’ essay so compelling. Like the best historical writing, it restores movement to landscapes that modern maps often freeze into static national colours. It reminds us that frontiers have rarely been fixed and that civilisations have always been more entangled than their later myths would admit. Europe did not simply civilise the steppe. The steppe helped create Europe.
Equally, Morrison reminds us that historical explanation should never become historical imprisonment. Institutions endure, languages preserve old borrowings, myths outlive empires and landscapes retain astonishingly long memories. But people still make choices. Nations inherit the consequences of the past without becoming its captives.
The three weathered balbals still stand beside the road to Bakhmut. They have watched Scythians ride westward, Huns descend upon Europe, Mongol tumens disappear into the distance, Cossacks patrol the frontier, imperial armies march beneath Romanov eagles, Wehrmacht panzers advance across the wheatfields, Soviet tanks return in triumph and, today, drones circle silently above the same ground. Every generation has believed its struggle to be unique, its empire enduring, its victories permanent. The stones know otherwise.
History leaves fingerprints everywhere. It leaves them in words, in institutions, in ruined cities, in forgotten roads, in songs, in legends and in the memories of peoples who continue to argue about what happened centuries before they were born. Those fingerprints deserve to be studied because they tell us where we have come from and how our worlds were made. But fingerprints are not destiny. They record contact, not ownership; inheritance, not inevitability; memory, not command. The ghosts of the steppe still whisper across Eurasia, but they do not write the future. That task, as it always has been, belongs to the living.
Coda. The myth of fingerprints.
History leaves fingerprints.
That may seem an odd metaphor, but I have found myself returning to it again and again. Archaeologists brush them from shards of pottery, linguists discover them buried inside forgotten words, historians recognise them in institutions, laws, customs and myths. They are the traces left behind whenever peoples encounter one another, whenever empires rise and fall, whenever civilisations borrow, conquer, imitate or remember.
Fingerprints fascinate us because they appear to promise certainty. In a criminal investigation they identify who touched the weapon. Yet they tell us remarkably little about what actually happened. A fingerprint cannot reveal motive, explain intention or determine guilt. It records contact, not consequence.
History is much the same.
Every landscape is covered with fingerprints. They survive in place names and languages, in ruined cities and forgotten roads, in religions, legal systems, songs, frontiers and collective memory. The three ancient balbals still standing beside the road to Bakhmut are surrounded by them. For nearly a thousand years they have watched Scythians ride westward, Huns descend upon Europe, Mongol tumens disappear into the distance, Cossacks patrol the frontier, imperial armies march beneath Romanov eagles, Wehrmacht panzers cross the wheatfields, Soviet tanks return in triumph and, today, drones circle silently overhead. Every empire believed its moment would endure. Every generation imagined itself to be the culmination of history. The stones know otherwise.
And this is where I arrive at what I have come to think of as the Myth of Fingerprints.
The fingerprints themselves are not mythical. They are real. History leaves them everywhere. The myth begins when we misunderstand what they are telling us.
A fingerprint is evidence that someone was here. It cannot tell us why they came, whether they belonged, whether they acted justly or what rights their descendants may possess centuries later. In a court of law, a fingerprint may place someone at the scene; it cannot, by itself, decide the case. History works in much the same way. It explains how we arrived here, but it cannot by itself determine who ought to possess the future.
Too often we ask it to do precisely that.
Ancient maps become modern borders. Archaeological discoveries become political manifestos. Genetic inheritance becomes moral entitlement. Historical suffering becomes an enduring licence for vengeance. We confuse explanation with justification, inheritance with ownership, memory with legitimacy. That confusion – the transformation of historical evidence into historical entitlement—is what I mean by the Myth of Fingerprints.
It is a myth because it is one of the oldest stories nations tell themselves. Every people constructs narratives from the traces left by earlier generations. Sometimes those stories preserve genuine memory; sometimes they simplify; sometimes they become propaganda. But they all begin with the same temptation: to believe that because history explains the present, it therefore authorises it.
This question lies beneath far more than the current war in Ukraine. It echoes through the history of Palestine and Israel, through Australia’s History Wars, through debates over monuments, migration, frontiers and national identity. Again and again we encounter the same temptation: to search the past not for understanding, but for permission.
That is why Aris Roussinos’ essay on Warwick Ball’s The Eurasian Steppe struck me so forcefully. Ball demonstrates how profoundly the Eurasian steppe shaped Europe. Orlando Figes traces the inheritance of Byzantium, the Mongol world and the frontier in the making of Russia. Alexander Morrison reminds us that inheritances are never destinies. Together they illuminate a larger truth. Geography creates opportunities. Culture bequeaths inheritances. Myths provide meaning. Only human beings make choices.
The ghosts of the steppe still whisper across Eurasia, just as the ghosts of every civilisation whisper through the landscapes they once inhabited. Historians should listen carefully to those whispers, for they reveal how the world came to be. But they should resist the temptation to mistake echoes for commands. The past deserves understanding rather than obedience.
History leaves fingerprints everywhere. They are among our most valuable clues to the human story. They reveal connections, influences, migrations and memories that would otherwise be forgotten. Yet they are not title deeds, nor verdicts, nor chains binding the living to the ambitions of the dead. They explain inheritance without dictating destiny.
That is the real lesson of the Myth of Fingerprints.
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.
I highly recommend Ukrainian scholar Serhii Plokhy’s The Gates of Europe, a well told and fascinating story of the origins of Ukraine and Belarus, and how their histories were intertwined, and entwined with those of of Poland, Lithuania (which was a large and powerful state once) and Russia. Ukraine has historically been the border between the catholic west and the orthodox east, the division running virtually down the middle. The name Ukraine is Slav for border land. Its geopolitical location and natural resources have led to the land being inflicted by invaders, civil wars, man-made famine and repression. See, in In That Howling Infinite, Borderlands – Ukraine and the curse of mystical nationalism
And, finally, who or what were HuldreFolk? Named for the mythical and mystical ‘hidden people’ of Icelandic legend, for two years in the early nineteen eighties, they played throughout Australia. Their fame was short-lived; after two years they pursued their own paths and projects. But during the following decades, they would pop up in unexpected places, like their namesakes, in ones, twos, threes, and on occasions with guest HuldreFolkies. Their last outing as a trio was in October 2007 at the North By Northwest Poetry And Folk Club. Google the videos on YouTube. See also, Yuri The Storyteller … We’ll sure miss the old bastard!
Roussinos’ essay follows, and also, for readers with time on their hands, more on Figes’The Stiry of Russia and on Morrison’s critique.
The fate of Europe lies in the steppes Warwick Ball: ‘The Eurasian Steppe’
Aris Roussinos, Unherd 28 July 2022
Genghis has won (Dean Conger/Corbis via Getty
On the road between the frontline cities of Sloviansk and Bakhmut, in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region, three stone statues stand mutely by the side of the road, observing the coming and going of military traffic with impassive detachment. Known as balbals, they are funerary monuments erected by the Cuman Turks, known in Russian archaeology as the Polovtsians, who once ruled this vast sea of grass, long before Russian or Ukrainian speech was ever heard in this region.
For thousands of years, the empty, spreading steppe, stretching from Hungary to Mongolia, was the home of nomadic peoples, speakers of Iranic, Turkic and Mongolic languages, who drove their herds across the vast plains in search of fresh pastures. They founded great empires, which time and the steppe grasses would soon swallow up, leaving barely a trace. Their constant irruptions into Europe sounded the death knell in turn for other, settled civilisations, part of the endless cycle of growth, invasion and collapse that has shaped our continent’s history.
The war in Ukraine has taken place in two very different climatic and cultural zones: its initial phases saw Russian armour wend its way through the dark forests and marshes of northern Ukraine, the ancient homeland of the first Slavic peoples, to be destroyed in close fighting on the narrow wooded roads in a stunning and unexpected Ukrainian victory. Yet the gruelling war of attrition in the country’s east is taking part in a very different landscape, in the open steppe that was once the home of nomadic peoples.
The expansion of Slavic peoples, both Ukrainians and Russians, into the open steppe was a very recent historic event, broadly contemporaneous with the European settlement of the Americas, its fertile plains, now the breadbasket of the developing world, Europe’s equivalent of America’s Midwest. These open plains, the “Wild Fields” of local historiography have always been a contested space, where great empires wrestled for control: in the great Second World War battles of Kursk, Kharkiv and Stalingrad, Europe’s entire fate hinged on the battle between the two great tank armies wheeling and clashing like nomad hordes.
But then, as The Eurasian Steppeby the archaeologist Warwick Ball makes clear, rather than a semi-wild anteroom to the continent, “the history, languages, ideas, art forms, peoples, nations and identities of the steppe have shaped almost every aspect of the life of Europe”. Europeans from further west have for centuries been prone to viewing the steppe as the haunt of wild tribes, and the source of occasional, fearsome destruction.
But what if the Europe of today is in fact the product of steppe dynamics? As Ball argues, rather than being a product of 19th century nationalism, some historians trace the origin of Europe’s oldest nation states to the steppe, observing that “Peoples newly arriving from the east were also among the first to create nationally defined states, such as kingdoms of the Bulgars or Magyars”. “In some ways,” Ball argues, “the incipient idea of a nation state might have been stronger with the nomadic groups from the steppe, who were bound more closely by tribal loyalties” than among the polyglot peoples of the imperial Roman successor states they conquered.
Did the steppe peoples then create the fractious patchwork quilt of nationalities that we understand as Europe? Ball cites the archaeologist Hyun Jin Kim who claims that: “The political and cultural traditions of Inner Asia brought to Europe by Central Asian immigrants, the Huns and the Alans, were just as fundamental to the formation of western Europe as the rich legacy left behind by the Roman Empire. The political and cultural landscape of early medieval Europe was shaped by the fusion of Roman and Inner Asian influences.”
While Hungary and Bulgaria were directly founded by steppe nomads, the influence of steppe rulers also helped shape the political forms taken by Poland (whose szlachtanobles claimed Sarmatian descent well into the 19th century), Bohemia, Denmark and even, it is claimed, France. Even into the 19th century, as Ball notes, it was the Hungarian awareness of their steppe Magyar ancestry that helped bring about the rise of nationalism which shook apart the great Austro-Hungarian empire. “In the long evolution of the idea of the nation state,” then “from their beginnings in late-antique Europe to their emergence in the nineteenth century, we must look east as well as west”.
Viewed in this light, the war in Ukraine, a battle between a European nation-state and a vast Eurasian empire, is resonant with all manner of strange echoes of the steppe’s dimly-understood history. The colossal earthern ramparts of the “serpent walls” outside Kyiv, erected by early Slavic kingdoms to guard against invasion by steppe nomads from the Huns to the Mongols, fulfilled their ancient role admirably earlier this year when they prevented the movement of Russian armour towards the capital’s suburbs, corralling the latest wave of invaders into killing zones to be picked off at leisure by guided missiles.
The Cossack heritage both sides claim is the result of earlier Slavic peoples, runaway Ukrainian and Russian serfs, claiming the freedom of the open steppe and adopting the customs, lifestyle and much of the vocabulary of their nomadic Turkic predecessors. The very word Cossack, Ball notes, “derives from the Turk root qaz, ‘to roam’”, and is cognate with the ethnonym Kazakh further east, as the Cossacks “comprised mainly Russians — usually renegades, escaped serfs or criminals — but they also included Turks, Tatars and remnant Polovtsi.” Even now, Ukrainian is sprinkled with Turkic words, a legacy of the two cultures’ long history of interaction and competition. One Ukrainian commander I met went by the nom de guerre “Duman”, or fog, deriving from the Turkic word for smoke or mist. Even now, Ukrainians refer to Russians with the dismissive Turkic epithet Katsab, or butcher.
On the Russian side, the war effort has been marked by the use of steppe peoples as infantry, with many of the heaviest casualties borne — and apparently some of the worst war crimes committed by — the Buryat Mongols of the Russian steppe, along with the Kalmyks of the lower Volga, Europe’s only Buddhist nation, who once watered their horses as far west as Paris following the defeat of Napoleon. Similarly, among the many subject peoples of the Russian empire deployed to Ukraine are Ossetians from the Caucasus, a tiny Iranic-speaking nation who are all that remain of the Alans, who once fought the Romans across Central Europe, settling as far west as France and Spain: some of their descendants, now Magyarised, still live in Hungary as the Jasz people. Their Iranic speech is now heard in Ukraine’s steppe for the first time in a thousand years, dragged along into a war of European conquest by another great Eurasian empire.
The very concept of chivalry which defined Europe’s medieval history was the product of Iranian-speaking steppe peoples like the Sarmatians and the Alans, whose innovations in the use of cavalry — stirrups, lances and long chainmail coats — changed the face of late Roman warfare and set the stage for the knights of the High Middle Ages. Even our own medieval romances may owe something to their distant steppe traditions, after the border forts of what is now northern England became the garrison home of Sarmatian levies in Roman service. As Ball notes: “Sarmatian warrior worship of a sword fixed in the ground has been suggested as furnishing the origin of the Excalibur legend. This appears to have been a long steppe warrior tradition: Ibn Rusta in the tenth century, for example, describes how the Viking Rus ruler — whom he calls by the steppe title of Khagan or khāqān — would plant a naked sword in the earth pointing towards his newborn son.” Perhaps it is not mere coincidence, then, that the Azov Regiment’s torchlit ceremonies in the southern steppe city of Mariupol took place beneath three giant swords embedded in the ground, a striking symbol that has now become the group’s emblem.
Again and again, these strange resonances between the steppe’s ancient nomad past and its bloody present swim to the surface like long-forgotten memories. The great statue to Mother Russia, sword in hand, that rises above Stalingrad’s Hill 102, where tens of thousands of Soviet and German soldiers were ground into the soil by artillery possesses the grim grandeur of some ancient steppe monument. And indeed, Hill 102, the crucial position of the battle that decided the war’s outcome, is perhaps better viewed by its alternate name as the Mamayev Kurgan, the burial tumulus of a long-forgotten Tatar khagan. From the ancient past to now, Russia’s history was written on the steppe, and without the steppe Russia’s imperial past and present is simply impossible to understand. Indeed, as Ball observes, without the historic domination of steppe nomads, there would be no Russia as we understand it.
As Ball observes: “The future of Russian greatness was both a response to and a legacy of the Mongols… Indeed, to a large extent Muscovite power was a creation of the Golden Horde: the khans required a stable central authority as a client state which could be relied upon to raise auxiliaries for the khan’s armies and to collect and deliver taxes and tribute. Moscow fitted the bill, so the Golden Horde deliberately strengthened it against the other Russian cities and appointed its prince as their chief tax collector.” Without the Mongol-enforced primacy of Muscovy, the land that is now Russia may well have remained a series of disunited kingdoms and city states, just like medieval Italy or Germany: “The Mongols, in other words, brought about the emergence of Russia.”
Even the great king Sviatoslav of Kyivan Rus, whose legacy is claimed by both Ukraine and Russia, extended his rule across the steppe by defeating the great Jewish Khazar kingdom and in doing so, “adopted the techniques and warfare of the steppe nomad: in other words, Kievan Rus was at first simply another steppe nomad state, albeit with a Scandinavian element. Sviatoslav never decisively defeated the Pechenegs and was killed by them in 963, and his skull was made into a cup in steppe tradition.” Medieval Russia was, then, as much a steppe polity as a European state, perhaps more so. After all, “up until 1480 Muscovite coins still carried inscriptions in Arabic. As late as 1531 Vasili III of Moscow was still paying tribute to the successors of the Golden Horde: Crimea, Kazan and Astrakhan”, and the eternal symbol of Russian power, Moscow’s St Basil’s Cathedral, was modelled on Kazan’s Great Mosque, in thanks for the conquest of the great Tatar capital.
Tracing Muscovy’s traditions of governance, and then those of imperial Russia, to the Mongol and Tatar customs of the inner steppe, Ball observes that “Even by the fourteenth century the civil and military institutions of Muscovy ‘were overwhelmingly Mongol in origin’… Ivan IV, the first Russian to proclaim himself Tsar (in Russian the title is actually Tsezar), added Ulugh Khan, ‘Great Khan’, to his titles.” Though he dismisses the “Mongol Yoke” hypothesis of Russian historiography, Ball nevertheless traces Russia’s unique and terrible form of autocratic rule to steppe customs, deep into the modern period: “Ivan also adopted the Mongol policy of ‘collective guilt’ where all male relatives and retainers of a guilty man would be executed, a policy even extended to entire communities. Stalin’s similar policy was a continuation of this.” The steppe’s long influence stretches deep into the cultural DNA of our modern world: even such a giant 20th century figure as Lenin, destroyer of one great Eurasian empire and founder of another, was of part-Kalmyk descent, after all.
Imperial Russia’s second largest minority after the Ukrainians, whose post-independence relationship with their giant neighbour is today a source of such bloodshed, was the Muslim Tatars, from whose Russified nomad aristocracy some of the greatest names in Russian culture — Rachmaninoff, Turgenev, Nureyev and Akhmatova — claimed descent. “The list [of Tatar surnames] covers all walks of Russian life: artistic, religious, scientific, literary, military, political and royal. The list is virtually endless,” Ball notes, and even today “the descendants of the Mongol ‘hordes’ — the Tatars — are the second-largest minority in Russia after the Russians themselves, and the Republic of Tatarstan is the second-largest republic in European Russia.”
Written for a general audience, Ball’s book nevertheless synthesises the latest archaeological research and historical debate on the steppe’s ancient and modern peoples, archaeological research on the steppe’s history, delving back into the deepest mists of time. The burgeoning community of esoteric archaeology and anthropology posters on Twitter will surely appreciate his summarising of the latest research on the origins of the Indo-Europeans, the fate of the Khazars and the birth and decline of the great Scythian kingdoms, who’s exquisite goldwork was the highlight of the British Museum’s recent blockbuster exhibition.
Noting that St Petersburg’s great Hermitage Museum was founded primarily as a place to store the newfound Scythian treasures unearthed by Russian colonists in Crimea, Mariupol and the rest what is now Ukraine’s contested southern steppe, and alert to the theft of Scythian treasures from Ukrainian museums by their new-old Russian conquerors, we realise that the relentless cycle of history has brought a new relevance to Ball’s book, even since its publication last winter. Just as in the Middle Ages and in the bloodiest battles of the Second World War, the fate of Europe is once again being written on the endless, grassy steppe.
Aris Roussinos is an UnHerd columnist and a former war reporter.
Orlando Figes’ The Story of Russia
That is a very happy coincidence, because Roussinos’ essay and Figes’ The Story of Russia are really circling the same enormous question from different directions: what made Russia Russia?
Figes is, in many ways, the antidote to the more sweeping “fingerprints of the steppe” argument. He certainly does not deny the Mongol inheritance – quite the opposite. The Mongol conquest of the Rus principalities in the thirteenth century was one of the decisive ruptures in Russian history. It destroyed Kyiv’s old political centrality, subordinated the northern principalities to the Golden Horde, and created the conditions in which Moscow could eventually rise. The irony, as both Roussinos and Figes emphasise, is that the Mongols did not simply delay Russian state formation; they helped create the particular form of state that emerged.
But Figes is interested less in what Russia inherited than in what Russia made of those inheritances. The Mongols supplied mechanisms of rule – taxation, military organisation, hierarchy, a relationship between ruler and subject that was very different from Western feudalism. Yet Russia’s self-understanding was built around other ideas: Orthodox Christianity, Byzantium, the idea of Moscow as the “Third Rome”, and the notion that the Tsar was not merely a monarch but a sacred figure.
This is where it links beautifully with Morrison’s critique. The danger is that we see the Mongol “fingerprints” and assume they explain everything. But fingerprints do not tell you why the person picked up the knife, wrote the letter or opened the door. They tell you something about contact and inheritance; they do not reveal intention.
Figes’ Russia is a civilisation built from multiple inheritances: Byzantine, Slavic, steppe, European and imperial. The great Russian paradox is that it has often defined itself simultaneously as both European and apart from Europe. Peter the Great famously tried to drag Russia westward — shaving beards, building St Petersburg, importing European science and manners — yet the deeper structures of autocracy, hierarchy and imperial expansion remained. Later Slavophiles rejected the West and celebrated a distinct Russian path, while Westernisers argued that Russia’s tragedy was precisely its failure to become sufficiently European.
This also connects with our earlier discussion of maps and historical memory. Russia is, geographically, an extraordinary historical anomaly: a European state that expanded across Asia until it became a continental empire. The map itself creates the tension. Is Russia Europe? Asia? Eurasia? The answer has shifted depending on who was asking and what political argument they wanted to make.
One of the things I suspect you will appreciate in Figes is his attention to recurring Russian archetypes: the Holy Tsar, the Holy Fool, the tension between obedience and rebellion, the recurring belief that Russia has a unique destiny. These are not “genes” or immutable cultural DNA; they are traditions — stories Russians told about themselves. And stories matter enormously because people act upon them.
That brings us back to Roussinos’ evocative phrase, “the echo of the steppes”. Echoes are fascinating precisely because they are not the original sound. They are altered, refracted and carried forward. The Mongol conquest echoed through Muscovy; Byzantium echoed through the Tsars; Soviet power echoed through Putin’s Kremlin. But each generation chooses which echoes to amplify.
There is also a pleasing connection with your earlier fascination with maps and atlases. A physical map of Russia looks almost inevitable: the enormous landmass stretching from Europe to the Pacific. But Figes and Morrison both remind us that geography creates possibilities, not destinies. The Russian Empire was not simply “there” waiting to happen. It was built by choices — by princes, tsars, revolutionaries and commissars who made decisions within particular historical circumstances.
So perhaps the combined lesson of Figes, Roussinos and Morrison is this:
Russia is not merely a European country contaminated by Asia, nor an Asian empire wearing European clothes. It is a civilisation formed in the meeting place of worlds. The tragedy is not that it has a complicated past; all great civilisations do. The tragedy comes when a complicated past is reduced to a single myth of inevitable destiny.
Which, interestingly, brings us back to your recurring theme: the power – and danger – of maps. Every map is an argument about the past. Every empire is a story it tells about itself. And every story leaves fingerprints. The historian’s job is to work out which ones are real, which ones are imagined, and which ones have been deliberately placed there.
Alexander Morrison’s critique
Alexander Morrison, a historian of Russian history at Oxford University, specialising in the Russian conquest of Central Asia, commented on Roussinos’ essay in Unherd. Here it is in full.
Roussinos, seems to have made good use of Ball’s research. Some of these arguments are completely uncontroversial when applied to the Asian neighbours of the Eurasian steppe in the early modern period: the Ottomans, the Safavids of Iran and the Qing all made use of Chinggisid and TImurid political repertoires in building their states alongside other elements (Byzantine heritage for the Ottomans, the existing Chinese imperial tradition in the Qing case, Sufi religious charisma for the Safavids). The Mughals were of course actually of Timurid (and in the female line of Chinggisid) descent, and it was at the core of their dynastic ideology in India.
However the steppe political tradition seems to have produced ever larger polities in Asia, which makes it hard to explain why it would instead produce political fragmentation in western and Central Europe – I think that part of Ball’s argument is a bit overstretched.
The Muscovite example seems to fit the Asian pattern better, and Roussinos is spot on in saying that it was the willingness of the Princes of Moscow to act as particularly loyal and effective satraps and tax collectors for the Golden Horde that allowed what had previously been a minor Rus’ princedom to rise to pre-eminence.
However we need to be clear about what it was that Muscovy took from the Mongols: it was largely bureaucratic structures linked to taxation or communication. This why key Russian words such as kazna (treasury), den’gi (money) and yam (postal service) are of Mongol origin. On the cultural side the ruling ideologies of the state were all to do with Orthodox Christianity and the semi-mythical link to Byzantium (the ‘Third Rome’), which was what Ivan IV (the Terrible) was evoking when he took the title of Tsar (Caesar) – he may have added the title of khan for good measure but this was largely for the purposes of communication with steppe peoples.
Many Tatar nobles of Chinggisid descent did become incorporated into the Muscovite aristocracy after the fall of Kazan in 1552, but you need to be careful about 19th and 20th-century claims to this ancestry, which are often bogus (it was fashionable at the time). In the case of Akhmatova it was her nom de plume (she was born Anna Gorenko – in fact a Ukrainian name). In any case Chinggisid descent did not give you any kind of claim to the throne of Muscovy, which had its own dynastic legend in the Rurikids. A better guide to the relationship between Muscovy and the Mongols than Ball is Donald Ostrowski.
There is also a bit too much cultural determinism in all of this to my liking – it suggests that neither Russia nor Ukraine can ever shake off this bloody past etc. etc. Nowhere in the world is simply a prisoner of its past. What is happening now is a result of very specific political choices made by Vladimir Putin and Russia’s ruling elite. Their thinking is rooted partly in their reading of 19th-century Russian historians (who first came up with the idea that Russians and Ukrainians were the same people), vicious forms of anti-semitic Russian nationalism of the early 20th century and the emigration (the Black Hundreds, Ivan Il’in), a particular, tendentious interpretation of both Soviet history and their own memories of the Soviet collapse.
What is perhaps more relevant is that this steppe past means that most of southern and eastern Ukraine was only relatively recently settled – not just by Russians and Ukrainians, but by the whole range of peoples of the empire (Greeks, Jews, Bulgarians, Armenians…probably also some Ossetians). They are certainly not ‘ancient Russian lands’ as Putin has claimed, but they are part of Ukrainian territory under international law and the Budapest memorandum assuring the country’s territorial integrity which Russia signed.
A couple of other corrections – the Buryats are not a steppe people, they live East of Lake Baikal. I am a bit queasy about the implication that they and the Kalmyks are disproportionately represented in the ranks of the Russian army because of their ‘savage’ steppe nature – it is simply because these are some of the poorest parts of the Russian Federation, and because the Russian regime is very deliberately trying to avoid recruiting troops from metropolitan regions of European Russia whose families might cause political trouble or have ties to Ukraine.
The ethnic Russians who are fighting are also disproportionately from Siberia or the Altai. The regiment which committed the atrocities at Bucha was from Khabarovsk in the Russian Far East, and its commander appears to have been originally from Karakalpakstan. Most Ossetians speak Russian these days, and have long identified with Russian rule. A good piece though – not many outlets would allow as thorough and as thoughtful a review of a work on Eurasian History.
Morrison’s comment stands apart from most of the thread because it does what the best scholarly criticism should do: it accepts the broad thesis where the evidence supports it, corrects errors where necessary, and resists the temptation to replace one grand narrative with another.
The essence of Morrison’s critique is this:
He accepts the central proposition that Muscovy inherited important features from the Mongol world. Indeed, he strengthens it by pointing out that similar borrowing occurred across Eurasia. The Ottomans, Safavids, Mughals and Qing all incorporated Chinggisid or Timurid political traditions into their own states. Russia was therefore not unique in absorbing institutions from the steppe.
Where he parts company with Ball is over determinism. Ball appears to argue that steppe political culture explains not only Muscovy’s rise but much of Russia’s subsequent history and perhaps even Putin’s Russia today. Morrison thinks this stretches the evidence too far. Administrative institutions can endure for centuries; they do not imprison nations forever. Modern Russia, he argues, is the product of choices made by a particular elite, drawing on nineteenth-century nationalism, Soviet memories and contemporary ideology, rather than the inevitable flowering of Mongol political culture.
He also introduces some valuable nuance. Muscovy borrowed bureaucratic techniques—taxation, communications, administration – from the Golden Horde, but its ideological heart remained Orthodox and Byzantine. Ivan IV’s claim to be Tsar rested on the idea of Moscow as the “Third Rome”, not the successor of Genghis Khan. Even the Russian language preserves this administrative inheritance in words such as kazna (also in Arabic,treasury), den’gi (money) and yam (postal relay), all of Mongol origin, illustrating that institutional borrowing need not imply cultural subordination.
Morrison is equally careful about ethnicity. He rejects romanticised claims of Chinggisid ancestry, notes that many were fashionable nineteenth-century inventions, and cautions against portraying Buryats or Kalmyks as somehow naturally warlike. Their prominence in today’s Russian army is explained far more convincingly by economics and recruitment policy than by any inherited “steppe mentality”. That is a useful reminder that socio-economic factors often explain what cultural stereotypes merely decorate.
His discussion of Ukraine is similarly restrained. Southern and eastern Ukraine were indeed settled comparatively recently by a mosaic of peoples across the imperial period, making simplistic claims of ancient ethnic ownership difficult to sustain. Yet that historical complexity does not undermine Ukraine’s internationally recognised borders or Russia’s commitments under the Budapest Memorandum. History explains; it does not necessarily justify.
Finally, Morrison performs the historian’s essential task of distinguishing influence from destiny. States inherit institutions, myths and habits, but they are not condemned to repeat them. This is perhaps his strongest point. It is tempting to explain Putin’s Russia by reaching back to the Mongols, Ivan the Terrible or the “Russian soul”, just as earlier generations invoked “ancient Balkan hatreds” to explain Yugoslavia. Such narratives are elegant because they reduce contingency to inevitability. Historians, however, are generally suspicious of elegant explanations.
His recommendation of Donald Ostrowski is also telling. Ostrowski’s work has long argued that Muscovy’s relationship with the Mongol world was one of selective adaptation rather than wholesale inheritance. That is a subtler – and probably more persuasive – account than one that sees Russia as simply Europe’s most successful steppe empire.
In short, Morrison doesn’t demolish Ball’s thesis. He refines it. He accepts that the steppe mattered enormously, but insists that institutions are not destiny, that cultures borrow selectively, and that political choices remain more important than historical determinism. It is precisely the kind of intervention that lifts an online discussion from polemic into genuine historical
What Unherd Readers had to say about Roussinos’ essay
The comments divide into several broad themes rather than converging on a single interpretation, and in many ways become a debate about contemporary Russia as much as about history.
Many readers found the article fascinating and praised it for opening an unfamiliar chapter of Eurasian history. Several immediately ordered Christopher Ball’s book, while others supplemented the discussion with examples ranging from the Kalmyks’ influence on Austrian costume to the chess capital of Elista, the legacy of the Mongols in Central Europe, and the wider political traditions of the Eurasian steppe. A number of contributors recommended additional works, notably Peter Frankopan’s The Silk Roads and Donald Ostrowski’s scholarship on Muscovy.
A second group challenged aspects of the historical argument. Critics argued that the article overstated the influence of steppe culture on later European political development, confused mythology with history in discussing Poland and Hungary, and oversimplified the origins of the Cossacks and the Azov Regiment’s symbolism. Others objected to what they saw as cultural determinism: the suggestion that Russia’s present behaviour is somehow an inevitable product of its Mongol inheritance. Several historians in the discussion -Morrison particularly, stressed that Muscovy certainly inherited administrative and fiscal practices from the Golden Horde, but that its religious ideology and dynastic legitimacy remained fundamentally Byzantine and Orthodox. They argued that modern Russian policy reflects political choices by Vladimir Putin and his circle, not an inescapable historical destiny.
As often happens, the historical discussion quickly became a proxy for arguments over the war in Ukraine. One camp maintained that Ukraine is an artificial state whose disputed regions deserve internationally supervised referendums, criticising NATO expansion and Western military support while advocating diplomacy. The opposing view rejected these claims as Russian propaganda, pointing to Ukraine’s overwhelming vote for independence in 1991, insisting that no genuine referendum is possible under military occupation, and arguing that Russian aggression – not Western policy – is the central issue. A more extreme minority advanced familiar pro-Kremlin narratives, portraying NATO as the true aggressor and Russia as a defensive victim, provoking vigorous rebuttals from other commenters.
There was also a meta-debate about free speech. An inflammatory remark describing Russians in derogatory terms prompted accusations of hate speech and counter-accusations of “crybullying”, illustrating how discussions of Russia often slide into arguments over acceptable language as readily as they do over history.
The most substantial contribution came from historian Alexander Morrison, whose lengthy critique was widely praised by other readers. Morrison broadly accepted the article’s central insight – that Muscovy’s rise owed much to its role within the Mongol imperial system – but argued that the thesis was pushed too far. He emphasised the distinction between administrative inheritance and cultural identity, corrected numerous historical inaccuracies, warned against deterministic readings of history, and reminded readers that modern events stem from contemporary political decisions rather than immutable civilisational characteristics. His intervention effectively became the intellectual centre of the comment thread, with several readers declaring that it improved upon the article itself.
Overall, the discussion reveals both the appeal and the risks of grand historical narratives. Most readers accepted that the Eurasian steppe profoundly shaped Russia’s development. Where they diverged was over the extent to which that past explains the present, and whether history should be read as a story of enduring civilisational patterns or of contingent political choices. The resulting debate ranges from thoughtful historiography to contemporary geopolitics, with occasional excursions into conspiracy theory and internet polemics.
As a longtime student of русские вещи (russkiye veshchi or things Russian) – I have written about Russia long and often in In that Howling Infinite. And I have only seen Sydney Sweeney in her controversial jeans ad and in the new series Americana (she’s gorgeous). But I found this article by English journalist Richard Godwin in the British e-zine Unherd, republished below, an absolute hoot.
This witty article about a Russian philosopher raging over a pulchritudinous American actress becomes an exploration of the deeper currents shaping Putin’s Russia. Beneath the absurdity lies an old and dangerous idea: that Russia is not simply a nation, but a sacred civilisation with a providential mission, locked in a metaphysical struggle against a decadent West.
The result is a reflection on mystical nationalism, the enduring patterns of Russian history, and why understanding Putin requires more than headlines about geopolitics. As Dostoevsky recognised, the West’s excesses are real enough – but Russia’s historical answers have too often been empire, repression and violence.
Sometimes a pair of blue jeans can reveal more about competing visions of civilisation than a thousand diplomatic communiqués.
Godwin’s piece is, in one sense, a very English performance: clever, arch, amused by its own wit, delighted that Alexander Dugin – apostle of Eurasian apocalypse, prophet of the “Third Rome”, self-styled metaphysician of Russian destiny, often referred to as Russian president Vladimir Putin’s philosophy – can be reduced to a furious old man rage-posting about a pneumatic American in denim.
The article toggles between HBO, geopolitics, and philosophical anthropology. The juxtaposition itself is the joke. Dugin, who dreams of civilisations finds himself triggered by Euphoria, a very popular television series – which I have not watched.
And yet, Godwin actually stumbles onto something real, something many Western commentators still fail to grasp about Russia, and especially about the ideological ecosystem around Putin. Namely: that this is not merely nationalism in the ordinary sense. It is eschatological nationalism. Mystical nationalism. A civilisation-sized grievance narrative infused with theology, imperial memory, humiliation, and metaphysical longing.
Godwin traces the intellectual genealogy well. Dugin is presented not simply as “Putin’s brain” (a lazy cliché Western journalism loves) but as a mutant synthesis of older Russian currents: Slavophilism, Eurasianism, Orthodoxy, anti-liberalism, anti-modernism, and what my old tutor Tibor Szamuely long ago identified as the Russian tendency to transmute suffering into destiny. Russia, in this worldview, is never merely a country. It is always a mission. A vessel. A redemptive civilisation standing athwart decadence and chaos.
Which brings us to Sydney.
Sydney Sweeney has good jeans
But first, that advertisement.
The image captures why even before Dugin weighed in has become such a cultural Rorschach test. A fashion advertisement featuring a conventionally attractive blonde woman wearing denim. The campaign’s wordplay – great jeans”- was intended as a marketing pun. But for critics, the combination of the pun with a blonde, blue-eyed model evoked older ideas about beauty, heredity, and genetic desirability. Some argued that, whether intentionally or not, it echoed themes historically associated with eugenics and racial hierarchy.
Supporters of the campaign saw the backlash as wildly overblown – an ordinary denim ad, using a common advertising trope (attractive people selling clothes), while critics read ideological meaning into something fundamentally mundane. The controversy therefore became less about the advertisement itself than about competing assumptions. One side asked, “How could a ‘great genes’ slogan attached to this image not carry historical baggage?” The other asked, “How could anyone look at a jeans ad and immediately see eugenics?”
In that sense, the image is indeed the controversy in a nutshell: a glamorous denim advertisement that some people see as completely ordinary and others see as freighted with cultural and historical symbolism. The argument is not really about the jeans. It is about what people bring with them when they look at the picture.
Back to Dugin and Euphoria.
As Godwin puts it (I cannot comment) it is not just television. It is civilisational evidence. The series – with its atomised sexuality, fluid identities, drug culture, commodified intimacy, and aestheticised despair – appears to him not as critique but confession: the West displaying its own spiritual decomposition in public. Hence his fury. Hence the almost medieval language of pollution, nihilism, perversion, and annihilation.
What Godwin understands is that Dugin’s horror is not primarily racial, though race lurks around the edges of his rhetoric, nor merely political. It is metaphysical. Liberal modernity itself is the enemy. The autonomous individual severed from church, nation, family, hierarchy, and historical continuity is the enemy. The “postmodern West” becomes, in Dugin’s imagination, a civilisation of non-being.
In That Howling Infinite been circling precisely this terrain for years: the strange fusion of Russian spiritual grandeur and Russian historical trauma. The sense that Russia oscillates eternally between monastery and prison camp, icon and tank, Dostoevskian compassion and Ivan-the-Terrible brutality.
Godwin captures fragments of this, but we approach it from a deeper historical melancholy rather than fashionable bemusement. Putin’s worldview is not Soviet nostalgia in the simplistic Western sense. He is not trying to resurrect Marxism-Leninism. If anything, he sees the Soviet Union as one historical vessel of Russian power among many – Tsarist, Soviet, Orthodox-imperial, Eurasian. The constant is not communism but empire, sacred geography, and strategic depth.
Hence Kyiv.
Kievan Rus is not merely history to Russian nationalists; it is sacred ancestry. The baptism of Vladimir in 988 functions almost like a Russian civilisational nativity story. Which is why Ukraine’s independent identity is experienced by men like Putin not merely as geopolitics but as metaphysical amputation. If Kyiv is “the mother of Russian cities”, then Ukrainian sovereignty becomes, in this fevered imagination, an ontological rebellion against history itself.
This is where Dugin becomes useful to Putin – not because Putin is his puppet (that has always been overstated), but because Dugin articulates, in exaggerated mythic form, impulses already embedded deep within Russian political culture: the siege mentality, the cult of suffering, the suspicion of liberalism, the idea of Russia as spiritually unique and perpetually humiliated by the West.
To Godwin, the irony is that Dugin himself is a creature of the very decadent global culture he condemns. He doom-scrolls X. He watches HBO. He rants about Marvel films. Like many reactionaries, he is parasitic upon the civilisation he despises. He requires Western decadence as both enemy and spectacle. One suspects, Godwin infers, that he consumes Euphoria with the same horrified fascination medieval monks reserved for demons in illuminated manuscripts.
And here the article becomes unexpectedly revealing about the West too.
Because Godwin is right that Americans, especially, often underestimate the degree to which Russia possesses its own universalist narrative. Americans assume universalism belongs to liberal democracy. But Russia has long imagined itself as universal in a completely different register: not the end of history, but the resistance to history’s dissolution. Not liberal pluralism, but sacred continuity. Not the autonomous self, but sobornost – the mystical organic unity of the people.
That tradition runs from the Slavophiles through Dostoevsky to Solzhenitsyn and into Putinism, albeit increasingly vulgarised.
But there is another irony here – one Dostoevsky himself understood better than Dugin. The Russian critique of Western atomisation is not entirely wrong.
Walk through parts of Los Angeles, London, or indeed Sydney – the loneliness, the commodification, the performative identities, the endless monetisation of the self – and one can understand why Russian conservatives see pathology. The Crystal Palace frightened Dostoevsky for a reason. He sensed modernity’s capacity to flatten the soul into consumer mechanism long before algorithms and influencer culture existed.
The problem is that Russia’s answer to this crisis has historically involved autocracy, censorship, mystical nationalism, and redemptive violence. The village commune too easily becomes the mass grave. The sacred empire becomes the Donbas. The organic unity becomes enforced conformity.
As Tibor Szamuely emphasised and elaborated in his posthumous opus The Russian Tradition, in Russia there was indeed nothing new under the sun. The forms change – Tsars, commissars, oligarchs, Eurasianists – but the pattern recurs: humiliation transmuted into destiny; suffering elevated into proof of moral superiority; expansion justified as spiritual necessity.
Which brings us back, absurdly enough, to Sydney Sweeney in jeans: the philosopher of a nuclear-armed civilisation denouncing HBO actresses as emblems of the Antichrist while simultaneously inhabiting the digital architecture of the global capitalism he claims to despise. One can imagine those iconic Russian authors smiling grimly somewhere in the background.
Yet beneath the farce lies something dangerous and deeply old: the conviction that liberal civilisation is spiritually illegitimate and therefore expendable. That history itself is a holy war between “being” and “non-being”. Once politics becomes metaphysics, compromise becomes heresy.
And that, other essays in In That Howling Infinite repeatedly suggest, is where mystical nationalism ceases to be merely eccentric – and becomes lethal.
Paul Hemphill, In That Howling Infinite, and an AI language model, May 2026
Sydney Sweeney has upset a lot of people in her short career. Since rising to fame playing “crazy Cassie” in the edgy Gen Z drama, Euphoria, the 28-year-old American actor has been variously accused of degrading the morals of a generation (passim), spreading Nazi propaganda (she appeared in a jeans commercial), supporting genocide (she wore a dress by an Israeli designer) and worst of all, disrespecting Taylor Swift (she was briefly involved with pop uber-villain, Scooter Braun).
Now, should the worst come to pass – should Western civilisation be erased from the face of the earth – then those of us who make it to the fallout shelter will be able to add another crime to the list. Annihilation will also be Sydney Sweeney’s fault. A culture that can produce a scene like the one in Euphoria season three — in which Sweeney’s character performs sex-cam work while dressed as a baby — apparently deserves all the hydrogen bombs coming to it.The HBO drama appears to have been the final straw for the influential ultra-nationalist Russian “philosopher” Alexander Dugin, who earlier this month launched into an extraordinary rant on X, apparently inspired by his late-night TV viewing. “Look: is there at least one argument why the US shouldn’t be erased from the face of the earth?” he asked.To those who might respond: “Sydney Sweeney in American Eagle jeans”, Dugin offered short shrift. Sweeney may be a MAGA darling — she is, after all, blonde haired and blue-eyed and comes from a Republican-coded family — but to a committed Russian nationalist, this is irrelevant. “You are not the people,” he wrote. “You are stupid slaves on the Epstein’s menu of cruel cannibal elites. You are eaten, your brains are. It is why you watch Euphoria. Because all of you are perverts. Disgusting civilization. No reason to exist. Please, die.”Thanks – we’ll take that on board. It’s not too hard to see why Euphoria — with its interracial, intersex, into-absolutely-anything cast — would be a particular trigger for the Kremlin’s on-off court philosopher. Born in the Khrushchev era, Dugin spent his youth vaguely agitating against communism before the break-up of the Soviet Union deeply wounded his national pride. Like every fascist before and since, he became obsessed with the idea of humiliation. He co-founded the National Bolshevik Party — the “Natbols” — with Eduard Limonov in the Nineties. The party’s flag was a Nazi-style white circle on a red background — only instead of a swastika, it had a black hammer and sickle. Russians aren’t generally fans of the Nazis; Dugin admired both the Nazis and the Bolsheviks for their Nietzschean will to power. It was the liberal West, with its dangerous ideas like human rights and free speech, that he regarded as the true evil. A hairy ogre of a man, Dugin conveyed his ideas with charisma and force. He was a hard drinker and a rich storyteller with a deep resonant voice in which he delivered mesmerising monologues about the destiny of Russia to the eager young jackbooted Natbols.
“It’s not too hard to see why Euphoria – with its interracial, intersex, into-absolutely-anything cast — would be a particular trigger for the Kremlin’s on-off court philosopher.”
For all his mad array of influences – Hitler, Stalin, Guy Debord, Terminator, Lao Tzu, Mishima, Rosa Luxemburg, René Guénon — and his fondness for terms like “rhizomatic” and “hermeneutic circle”, Dugin’s philosophy is actually pretty simple. In Foundations of Geopolitics (1997), he argues that Russia must reverse the humiliation of the Soviet collapse by rebuilding itself as the core of a new Eurasian empire that is destined to challenge and ultimately dismantle Western (i.e. American) hegemony. America and the EU in this vision are not merely political rivals like China, India or Iran, say — but decadent forces, intent on dissolving Russia’s identity and historical purpose. Beneath the book’s strategic language lies a messianic strain: a wounded civilisation is redeemed through expansion, action, spiritual renewal and permanent struggle. Only Russia, with its spiritual depth, its powers of endurance, its capacity for hard action, is capable of saving the world from the liberal antichrist. The book has become a set text for Russian military leaders and seems to have guided Vladimir Putin’s strategy in Ukraine. Asked what policy Russia should take towards its Western neighbour as early as 2014, Dugin’s response was: “Kill! Kill! Kill! There can be no other discussion.”
Dugin’s pronouncements became more deranged following the assassination of his daughter Darya in a car bomb in 2022, and his targets have become a little more scattergun. He has a particular hatred of the popular Russian cartoon character, Cheburashka, for example — “the concentrated expression of that very feeblemindedness against which I have battled my whole life” — and frequently rails against Marvel movies, McDonalds, and various other symbols of American cultural power.
But Euphoria — in which literally every character is performing sex work to support their crystal meth addiction and/or gender reassignment surgery — would strike Dugin as a representation of everything evil and degrading in Western culture. And the fact that America permits this depiction of itself— indeed, that Euphoria has launched the careers of some of its most lauded stars, including Sweeney, Jacob Elordi and Zendaya — is further evidence of the moral degeneracy of a culture. In his fawning interview with that useful American idiot, Tucker Carlson, Dugin declared that the dystopian futures depicted in Hollywood movies like The Matrix and Terminator were not warnings, but actual visions of where the West was heading. Why do American filmmakers never depict happy families or thriving communities in their future visions, he asked. It’s because Americans are willing on this apocalypse. Thus Euphoria’s self-loathing, atomised, narcotic, nihilistic, multi-racial hell is basically a warning — this is what America would impose on the rest of the world, a staging post on the way to Skynet.
What’s interesting about all this — and what Russocurious American conservatives like Carlson often seem to miss — is the strain of messianism in Russian thought. Americans are so accustomed to thinking of their culture as the envy of the world and their eccentric conception of “freedom” as the universal absolute that the idea Russia might have its own global vision seems not to have occurred to them. They are more comfortable patronising Russia as a backward, violent, pitiful place — much of which goes back to those images of Russians in the Eighties queuing for Big Macs in Red Square and going crazy for Levis (which clearly made Dugin furious). Thus Carlson could tour a Moscow supermarket in 2024, simply amazed that they have affordable groceries. But this cultural complacency frequently leads non-Russians to miss Russian critiques of the West (say, of American racism) and to underestimate the very real strain of messianism in Russian thought — that is, Russia’s own mission to save the world.
So as ludicrous as Dugin often appears, there is a coherent set of ideas behind his philosophy — and in any case, recent history tells us that it is the ludicrous people we need to take most seriously. To understand where Dugin is coming from you need to understand the Eurasianist tradition of which he is a mutant 21st-century outgrowth, as well as Russia’s dual conception as both an Asiatic and Christian civilisation. There are many ways this dichotomy manifests. You can see it in the rivalry between the two capitals: St Petersburg, constructed by Peter the Great as a “window onto Europe”, and Moscow, the older Slavic centre of Orthodoxy and imperial memory. But there are two key moments in Russian history that the Eurasianists have drawn upon to lend grandeur to their vision.
The first is the Battle of Kulikovo in 1380, when the forces of the Russian principalities defeated the Tatar army of the Golden Horde and began to free their lands from their Mongol oppressors. In the Russian cultural memory, this event has mythic significance: the point at which Russia begins to define itself through resistance to, and absorption of, the steppe world. “Our path runs through the steppe – and boundless anguish / Your anguish, O Russia!” wrote the symbolist poet Aleksandr Blok in his cycle On the Field of Kulikovo(1908), which conjures a “holy banner” and the “Khan’s sabre” rising against a blood-red horizon. The idea this animates is Russia as a land formed of Mongol violence and Christian redemption — with a destiny of, hurrah, “boundless anguish”.
The influential Central Asian scholar (and virulent antisemite) Lev Gumilev — son of the appallingly persecuted poets Anna Akhmatova and Nikolai Gumilev, both acquaintances of Blok — built an entire civilisational theory from this image. He argued that the Mongol period had not merely been an occupation but a formative synthesis. Rather than seeing Tatar horseman rampaging through Russian villages, raping Russian women, burning Russian crops as a catastrophe, he reframed it as a creative ethnogenesis. The Russian “ethnos”, in Gumilev’s formulation, emerges from a fusion of Slavic and Turkic elements, formed through long cycles of what he calls “passionarity” — a kind of heroic fusing of land, soul and idea. Gumilev developed an entire theory around this “ethnos”, arguing that this was no mere abstract theory but a “biophysical reality”.
From here comes the notion that it is actually the liberalising, secularising, Enlightenment Europeans who are actually the dangerous ones — since they want to flatten out all ethnoi into one rainbow coalition of consumerism. Or as Dugin had it in his rant on X: “Whites? They are destroyed the world and themselves. To be white means to be nihilist. It is self hatred race. It caused so meany troubles to others and to itself. It lost the right to be something. No arguments to support their existence.” (He is said to speak 15 languages, and you have to wonder if his grammar is as bad in the others.)
The second foundational moment was the fall of Byzantium in 1453, when Constantinople was conquered by the Ottoman Turks. From this rupture emerges one of the most consequential ideas in Russian political theology — of Moscow as the “Third Rome”. As Philotheus of Pskov argued in the 16th century: “Two Romes have fallen, but the third stands, and there will be no fourth.” Rome itself had fallen into heresy (i.e. Catholicism), Constantinople to conquest, which meant that Moscow remained as the final guardian of true Orthodoxy. This notion would guide Russia’s self-conception not only as a state, but as a providential civilisation — the nation destined to preserve and ultimately redeem Christendom itself and, certainly, its near neighbours like Ukraine and Georgia. So, Russia is no mere country but a vessel of sacred history, a restraining force against chaos — a katechon holding back dissolution; the dissolution of Sydney Sweeney, Zendaya, Jacob Elordi and friends.
This is the deeper ideological field upon which later debates about Russia’s destiny take place. Whenever “Westernisers” have argued that Russia should reform itself along liberal, democratic, secular lines (Dugin would say “white” lines), there are always “Slavophiles” to argue that this is not the Russian way. In the 19th century, Slavophile philosophers like Aleksey Khomyakov and Ivan Kireevsky argued passionately against European modernity, insisting instead that Russia’s strength lay precisely in what Europe had lost: Orthodoxy, communal life, and a form of spiritual wholeness they called sobornost — a notion of organic unity in which truth emerges not from isolated individuals but from a living moral community.
There are traces of this in many of the great 19th-century Russian novels. Fyodor Dostoevsky, indeed, had his own Euphoria moment when he visited London in 1862 and was appalled by what he saw. “Everyone is drunk, but drunk joylessly,” he wrote. “Everyone is in a hurry to drink himself into insensibility…” But what unsettled him most was not vice but order — or rather, the promise of a new kind of world order. He was one of millions of international visitors to the Great Exhibition in Hyde Park, which featured 28,000 exhibitors from dozens of nations showcasing steam engines, telegraphs, leech barometers, machine tools, Japanese prints, American cocktails — the whole world assembled in one glass pyramid. Forever after, the “Crystal Palace” recurred in Dostoevsky’s work as a horrifying hallucination of mankind forced into rational order through science, commerce and industrial progress. Where Western visitors might have seen a vision of global harmony, Dostoevsky saw spiritual erasure: atomisation, loneliness, the reduction of human beings to interchangeable units in a vast rational machine. If you have ever toured the shopping malls of Los Angeles or Dubai, you may have experienced a similar shudder.
“All Europeans try to attain one and the same goal,” Dostoevsky later wrote — that is, “the universally human ideal”. But in striving toward this abstraction they dissolve the very cultures that give human life meaning. Only Russia, he concluded, had the spiritual vigour to withstand such a fate. Russia possessed “a distinct peculiarity of its own” — a “talent for universal reconciliation, universal humanity”. This is the essence of sobornost: a paradoxical unity that preserves difference within a shared spiritual whole. This idea is the great theme of Dostoevsky’s Pushkin speech of 1880, where he presents the Russian national character as uniquely capable of absorbing and reconciling all cultures while remaining spiritually intact. It is also a theme Dugin resumes in his X commentary: “To be on the side of Russia, of Iran, of China, of multipolarity is to be on the side of the being against the non-being. The (post)modern West is the citadel of the non-being, of nihilism.” Liberalism, in his reading, is a project to liberate the individual from any form of collective identity — be it Church, family, nation, empire, even gender (trans-related scare stories are a particular source of horror).
So Russia’s mission is to save the world from all this — and especially its near neighbours in the so-called Russkiy Mir, a telling phrase. Mir in Russian means “world” and also “peace” — but it also has a connotation of a peasant village community (as opposed to svet, which means “light” but also high society). So when Putin appeals to the Russkiy Mir he is not merely referring to the Russian-adjacent peoples of Belarus, Georgia, Kazakhstan, etc — but harking to an idea of organic peasant communal life. Come back to the village-empire! (Mir is, of course, also what Russians call the International Space Station. The progenitors of the Soviet space program often referred to the idea that the USSR, owing to its enormous spiritual depth, was the most suitable nation to represent Earth in the cosmos.)
All of this would be wonderful if Russian peasant life were not famously brutish, miserable and subject to ultraviolence from on high. In Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, Alyosha recounts the story of an eight-year-old peasant boy who accidentally injures his master’s favourite hunting dog while throwing stones. The landowner orders the child to be stripped naked and spend the night in a miserable hovel. In the morning, he is torn apart by hunting dogs in front of his mother and the whole village. For Alyosha the story represents the failure of any kind of system — Christian, political, philosophical — to account for human suffering: “If the sufferings of children go to swell the sum of sufferings which was necessary to pay for truth, then I protest that the truth is not worth such a price. I don’t want the mother to embrace the oppressor who threw her son to the dogs! She dare not forgive him!” In other words, any system or theory that tries to justify or excuse the suffering of the innocent is obscene. The realism of Dostoevsky’s depiction of this horrific event — and the social hierarchy that permits it — serves as a convincing repudiation of any argument that could be used to justify it.
Indeed, it is never entirely clear what the Russian Utopia actually looks like — beyond “eternal anguish”, that is. Nor have I ever seen any of these thinkers truly spell out what those in the Russkiy Mir are supposed to get from their spiritual communion; the millions of Kazakhs who starved during collectivisation, for example, or the Siberian tribes slaughtered as the Russian Empire marched eastward; or for that matter the more than 350,000 young men (predominantly from the Muslim-dominated monotowns of the South) who have died fighting to impose brotherhood on the disobedient Ukrainians. A vision of nationhood that promises redemption through suffering is quite useful when you want to explain away millions of dead. The hardest pill to swallow for many following the Soviet collapse was the idea that all of that suffering meant nothing — hence the ever-escalating need to put all the famines, all the wars, all the purges and sieges and atrocities into the service of some higher ideal.
Still, rather like the oligarchs of America who romanticise honest blue-collar work but have no idea what it actually consists of, the great romantics of ordinary Russian life tended to be from the svet as opposed to the mir. Most of the Slavophiles were serf-owning aristocrats. Putin’s legitimacy, such as it is, is largely predicated on his ability to provide shopping malls and farmers’ markets for a Moscow elite who are quite happy to shuttle back and forth to their villas in Dubai, Zurich, London, Nice and Cyprus when it suits them. Dugin himself seems to spend an awful lot of his time watching HBO and scanning social media — and, I would suggest, not enough time reading Dostoevsky.
It seems outside of Dugin’s philosophy that Euphoria might itself be a critique of precisely the kind of societal atomisation that capitalism produces — and that this capacity of Western democracies to critique themselves might indeed be a source of strength. Putin has been careful to provide modern capitalist comforts to Russian elites, but he has meanwhile cranked up the state censorship machinery to pre-Glasnost levels, so any Russian who attempts anything like an honest depiction of Russian life will soon be censored, banned, banished, imprisoned, or voluntarily exiled, like the recent Cannes Grand Prix winner, Andrei Zvyagintsev. It’s not as if Russian youths are all happily singing patriotic songs as they march towards the drones of the Donbas.
Meanwhile, the third season of Euphoria does gesture towards redemption. After she winds up in the home of a family of Texan true believers, the character of Rue (played by Zendaya) experiences a growing religious obsession — culminating in an epiphanic vision of God and a hint that there is, in fact, a higher meaning, beyond lonely pleasure-seeking. As Dostoevsky wrote: “Love is such a priceless treasure that you can redeem the whole world by it, and expiate not only your own sins but the sins of others.”
… theprotagonists of 1914 were sleepwalkers, watchful but unseeing, haunted by dreams, yet blind to the reality of the horror they were about to bring into the world
Christopher Clark, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914
The mystique of the mesmerising muzhik
For readers unfamiliar with him, Grigori Rasputin was a Siberian peasant, self-styled holy man and wandering mystic who somehow found his way into the innermost circle of the last Russian imperial family. Born in 1869 in the remote village of Pokrovskoye, he possessed no formal religious training yet acquired a reputation as a healer and spiritual adviser. His influence grew largely because Tsarita Alexandra became convinced that he could alleviate the suffering of her hemophiliac son, Tsarevich Alexei, whose illness threatened both the family and the succession itself. From that point onward, Rasputin became a lightning rod for public anger, rumour and scandal. To his admirers he was a man of God; to his enemies a charlatan, sexual predator, political manipulator and symbol of everything rotten within the late Romanov regime.
History has rarely been kind to him. The very name “Rasputin” conjures images of dark-eyed depravity, hypnotic influence and imperial decadence, making him one of those figures who seem destined to play the villain in the historical imagination.
My own first encounter with him came not through history but through Hammer Horror’s gloriously lurid Rasputin: The Mad Monk (1966), in which Christopher Lee – already such a vampire icon that he’d earned the epithet “Draculee”. He played Rasputin with such operatic menace that it was not difficult to assume he must have personally engineered the fall of the Romanov dynasty between bouts of hypnotism, partying and priapic indulgence. The reality, as is so often the case, was both less theatrical and considerably more complicated. Like Boney M’s disco hit a decade later (more on that at the end if this essay), it was great entertainment, if not necessarily great history. [In later life, Christopher Lee played a suitably malevolent Saruman in Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings, resembling very much what Rasputin might have looked like had he reached old age. Lee really wanted to play Gandalf, but he was doomed to be typecast]
The mystical muzhik
Which brings us to acclaimed British historian Anthony Beevor’s latest book Rasputin and the Downfall of the Romanovs.
As happens often In That Howling Infinite, what begins as a review ultimately becomes something larger than that. The book is the point of departure, but the essay then widens into a meditation on Russia itself and on historical continuity; and in this case, on the recurring problem of elites mistaking symptoms for causes, and on the peculiar human inability to recognise catastrophe even when its scent is already in the air.
I have read most of Anthony Beevor’s books and, on the whole, found them riveting, informative and refreshingly free of sensationalism. Stalingrad, Berlin, The Ardennes, Arnhem, Russia: Revolution and Civil War. Beevor is one of those rare historians who combines scholarship with narrative flair, making vast and complicated events accessible without sacrificing seriousness. Which is why I came to Rasputin with high expectations, and why I finished it feeling vaguely disappointed.
Not because it is a bad book. It is not. It is readable, entertaining, meticulously researched and full of fascinating material. But compared with Beevor’s finest work, it feels curiously slight: overextended and underdeveloped at the same time. There is enough material here for a long magazine essay, a television documentary; but not quite enough analytical depth to sustain a truly great work of history.
The title itself is slightly misleading. This is not really a biography of Rasputin. The so-called Mad Monk looms over the narrative like a spectral presence, but remains oddly elusive. Readers expecting a deep exploration of his Siberian origins, religious beliefs, charisma, psychology, sexuality, or the mythology that has accumulated around him often come away unsatisfied. Rasputin functions less as a subject than as a lens through which Beevor examines the final years of the Romanov court. What the book actually delivers is the story of imperial collapse between 1914 and 1917.
And what a royal court it was. Beevor presents a world populated by sycophants, grifters, mystics, opportunists, flatterers, courtiers and assorted aristocratic parasites orbiting an increasingly dysfunctional monarchy. Ministers come and go with bewildering speed. Rumours swirl through Petrograd salons. Schemes flourish and collapse. Rasputin dispenses advice, Tsarita Alexandra dispenses influence, Tsar Nicholas retreats ever further into passivity, and meanwhile the empire bleeds. All of this makes for compelling reading. Yet one gradually begins to suspect that the court is being asked to carry more explanatory weight than it can reasonably bear.
Certainly Nicholas II was an inadequate ruler and often dominated by his spouse. Certainly Alexandra was politically naïve – though that didn’t deter her from meddling: “Lovey”, she wrote to him in August 1915 while he away with his army, “I am your wall in the rear. I am here, don’t laugh at old wifey, but she has ‘trousers’ on unseen.” And both were catastrophically dependent upon Rasputin.
Certainly, the dynasty had become detached from the realities of modern Russia. But the Russian Revolution was not simply the consequence of a dysfunctional royal family making poor decisions in a palace. Russia’s problems ran far deeper than the imperial nursery. By 1917 the empire faced enormous peasant land hunger, rapid but uneven industrialisation, militant labour unrest, revolutionary traditions stretching back decades, ethnic tensions across a vast multi-national state, a fragile constitutional settlement after the failed revolution of 1905, catastrophic military losses on what we call the Eastern Front to distinguish it from the brutal stalemate on the Western one, economic breakdown, logistical paralysis and food shortages. Above all, it faced the immense pressures of total war. Even a far more capable monarch would have struggled. The Romanovs were undoubtedly part of the problem. They were not the whole problem.
Indeed, one of the ironies of Beevor’s narrative is that the closer he gets to Nicholas and Alexandra, the less convincing they become as the sole explanation for the catastrophe unfolding around them. The real story increasingly lies beyond the palace walls.
And then there is the nursery talk. The surviving correspondence between Nicholas and Alexandra is authentic, and Beevor quotes it extensively – perhaps too much. Endless references to “Sunny,” “Hubby,” “Wifey,” “baby” (the sickly heir apparent), pet names, sentimental endearments and emotional dependency reveal a couple inhabiting a private emotional universe increasingly disconnected from the realities of the empire they ruled. The first few examples are illuminating. The next fifty plus merely reinforce the point. One understands quickly enough what Beevor wishes to demonstrate: that the Tsar and Tsarina had retreated into a cocoon of domestic intimacy and religious certainty while the state around them was disintegrating. Yet repetition eventually diminishes rather than strengthens the effect.
I found myself feeling less contempt than pity, particularly for Alexandra. Beevor’s portrait is harsh, and not without justification. She was deeply unpopular even before the arrival of Rasputin. Her German origins became politically disastrous during wartime. Her interventions in ministerial appointments were often disastrous. Her faith in Rasputin was politically suicidal. Yet behind the political incompetence stood a tragic figure: a woman consumed by anxiety over a hemophiliac son whose death seemed perpetually imminent, a husband she believed had been divinely appointed, and a political system she scarcely understood. Her mistakes were enormous. Her burdens were equally profound.
The children, meanwhile, are perhaps the saddest figures in the entire story. OTMA, the Grand Duchesses Olga, Tatiana, Maria and Anastasia. The family acronym itself has become strangely poignant, a small domestic joke preserved in history. Throughout the narrative I wondered how much they understood. Did they recognise that the dynasty was already doomed? Did they understand that the empire around them was beginning to crack apart? Olga especially emerges as a fascinating figure. Many contemporaries remarked upon her intelligence and seriousness. She often appears more politically aware than either parent. Had Russia permitted female succession, might she have made a better sovereign than Nicholas? It is impossible to know, but it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that several members of the younger generation among a myriad of dukes and duchesses possessed more common sense than the adults steering the ship of state.
As for Alexei, history has wrapped him in the melancholy glow reserved for doomed children. Understandably so. Yet had he survived to inherit the throne, one suspects he would have faced the same impossible contradictions that destroyed his father: autocracy confronting modernity, privilege confronting reform, dynasty confronting history itself.
The last of the Romanovs – Tsar Nicholas and his family, murdered by the Bolsheviks in July 1918
The road to Ekaterinburg
Let papa (Nicholas II) not plan war. It will be the end of Russia and
all of us. We shall be destroyed to the last man
Grigori Rasputin July 30, 1914
But if there is a deeper weakness in Beevor’s account, it lies not with the Romanovs, but with what overshadows them. The giant elephant in the room is the First World War. Without the war, Rasputin remains an eccentric holy man from Siberia. Alexandra remains unpopular. Nicholas remains mediocre. The Romanov dynasty perhaps limps on for another decade or two. With the war, every weakness becomes fatal.
Russia entered the conflict militarily, economically, politically and socially ill-equipped for the demands of modern industrial warfare. It possessed manpower but lacked organisation. It could mobilise millions of peasants but struggled to arm, supply and transport them. Railways buckled. Food shortages worsened. Casualties mounted on a staggering scale. Most importantly, the largely peasant army itself became fertile ground for revolution. The officer corps remained socially distant from the rank-and-file. Military disasters shattered confidence. Discipline deteriorated. Radical ideas spread. By 1917 the army was not merely losing battles. It was losing faith in the system it served. When revolution finally arrived that February, not with a bang but a slow-mo disintegration, it was little wonder that, encouraged by agitators in its ranks, the Russian Army did what we like to imagine most soldiers would like to do: lay down their arms and head for home – often first shooting their officers.
This, surely, was the real story. The gossip in Petrograd salons and restaurants drawing mattered. But millions of armed peasants questioning the legitimacy of the state mattered rather more. One occasionally wishes Beevor had spent less time recounting the latest court scandal and more time examining the immense structural forces pulling the empire apart.
Because by 1916 some observers could already smell danger. The writer Mikhail Lemke, serving at Stavka, the army headquarters, captured the mood perfectly: “Oh, the holy stupidity of the Romanovs. We are moving at full speed towards some terrible abyss, a dreadful end that is not clear to anyone but is inevitable… It is clear that the finale is going to be terrifying and in its haphazard nature.” It is a remarkable observation insofar as it captures something larger than the Romanovs themselves.
History is full of such moments. Barbara Tuchman encountered them repeatedly. Christopher Clark found them among the sleepwalkers of 1914. One finds them before the collapse of Austria-Hungary, before the fall of the Ottoman Empire, before Yugoslavia’s descent into war. People sense that disaster is approaching. The clouds gather, the pressure changes, the atmosphere becomes electric, even if the precise lightning strike remains unseen.
Beevor quotes Russian poet Alexander Blok expressing something similar when he wrote of the “peculiar merry horror that sits in the Russian soul.” It is one of those observations that sounds simultaneously profound, unfair, insightful and impossible to verify. Yet it evokes a Russia that appears repeatedly in its literature and history: exuberant and despairing, mystical and brutal, comic and tragic, capable of extraordinary creativity and extraordinary destruction, often simultaneously.
Reading these passages, I found myself thinking not only of Beevor but of my university tutor Tibor Szamuely who has featured often in In That Howling Infinite. Szamuely believed that Russia punished simplification. Its history moved in circles rather than straight lines. Revolutions proclaimed liberation only to rediscover autocracy in new forms. The Romanovs fell; the Bolsheviks inherited the imperial reflexes. The Soviet Union collapsed; empire returned draped in Orthodoxy, nationalism and Eurasian destiny. Beneath the turbulence remained what he called The Russian Tradition – the title of his one and only book, now out of print: centralised power, messianic consciousness, siege mentality and the recurring sanctification of suffering.
Szamuely believed that the bloodstained drama of 1917 and beyond – the February Revolution, the Bolshevik seizure of power in November, the Civil War, the creation of the USSR and Stalinism – often obscured the deeper continuities of Russian history. He did not live to see the collapse of the Soviet Union, the rise of Vladimir Putin or the war in Ukraine, but his argument remains strikingly relevant. The frequent upheavals that have overtaken this vast continent have often produced changes that were, at bottom, superficial, leading ultimately to the intensification of old authoritarian structures under new names.
One of the more revealing moments in Beevor’s narrative comes when Alexandra writes to Nicholas on December 14, 1916: “Be firm. Russia loves to feel the whip – it’s their nature – tender love and then the iron hand to punish and guide”. The observation is deeply revealing. It suggests a view of governance fundamentally at odds with constitutional politics. Whether one accepts Szamuely’s thesis or not, one cannot help noticing the irony. The Romanovs fell. Liberal democracy survived only briefly. The whip did not disappear. It merely changed hands. Lenin’s whip proved heavier. Stalin’s heavier still. Perhaps Alexandra was disastrously wrong about her own era and yet, in some darker sense, glimpsed something enduring about Russia’s future.
And that reminded me, oddly enough, of Deadwood. One of the reasons David Milch’s masterpiece remains such extraordinary television is that it understands something many historians understand and many politicians do not: catastrophe is usually visible before it arrives. Not in its precise form, certainly. Nobody sees the exact bullet, the exact revolution, the exact market crash. But the atmosphere changes. The clouds gather. The animals become restless. And somebody, somewhere, notices. Viewers who are paying attention notice too because the background music becomes jangly and minor key.
In the episode ominously titled Suffer the Little Children, world-weary Madame Joanie Stubbs asks the young opportunist Flora a simple question: “Can you smell danger?” Joanie, from experience, can. The fey and feckless Flora cannot. She sees only opportunity and the immediate game she is playing and fails to recognise the larger forces closing around her. The result is one of the most violent conclusions in a series notorious for its displays of wanton brutality.
The same pattern appears repeatedly in history. People like Lemke could smell danger. Alexander Blok could smell danger. Many officers, politicians, intellectuals and ordinary Russians could smell danger. But did Nicholas and Alexandra? The evidence suggests not. Or perhaps they did but convinced themselves otherwise. In that sense they resemble the tragic Flora. Not wicked. Not entirely foolish. Simply trapped within assumptions that prevented them from recognising reality. Every warning became another irritation. Every crisis was temporary. Every setback could somehow be managed through faith, loyalty and persistence. Meanwhile the empire was bleeding to death.
The Romanovs spent years mistaking symptoms for causes. Rasputin was a symptom. Ministerial instability was a symptom. Court gossip and innuendo was a symptom. The disease lay much deeper: a political system incapable of reforming itself, a society under immense strain, and a war exposing every weakness simultaneously. By 1916 the smell of danger was everywhere. The tragedy is that those best placed to act either could not smell it or convinced themselves that the storm would somehow pass.
Tsar Nicholas in captivity
Which brings us to where Beevor’s book ends. Rasputin is assassinated by nobles determined to save the dynasty itself – treating a symptom, not the disease (see below); the Tsar abdicates in March 1917; and the last of the Romanovs and his family disappear down the melancholy railway line to Ekaterinburg and death. The curtain falls. The reader must supply the rest. And the rest matters enormously. For all their failings, Nicholas and Alexandra were not succeeded by enlightened constitutional reformers. They were succeeded by the Bolsheviks. The road that began with Rasputin’s influence at court led through revolution, civil war, famine, terror, collectivisation, purges and the Gulag.
One leaves the book with an uncomfortable thought. The Romanovs were unquestionably part of the problem. But history’s eventual solution proved vastly more destructive.
Perhaps that is the most haunting aspect of the entire story. The downfall of the Romanovs solved one set of problems and unleashed others on an unimaginable scale. The train that Lemke saw hurtling toward the abyss did indeed reach its destination. But beyond the bend in the track lay not merely revolution, but decades of violence, repression and suffering.
In the end, Rasputin and the Downfall of the Romanovs is worth reading. The story itself remains compelling. Yet it is a lesser Beevor work: repetitive where his best books are incisive, narrowly focused where his best books are panoramic, occasionally so absorbed by court intrigue that it loses sight of the immense forces gathering beyond the palace gates. Like the dynasty it describes, it becomes most interesting when viewed as part of a larger story.
And perhaps that is the final irony. Rasputin, Nicholas, Alexandra, the four princesses, poor Alexei, the plotting dukes, ambitious ministers and aristocratic parasites all occupy centre stage for a time. Yet beyond them looms the true protagonist of the drama: Russia itself – vast, restless, wounded, contradictory, moving, as it has so often moved, between reform and reaction, idealism and coercion, hope and catastrophe.
The revolution was coming regardless. The tragedy of the Romanovs was not merely that they failed to stop it. It was that, like Flora ignoring Joanie Stubbs’ warning, they scarcely seemed to understand it was happening at all. The smell of danger was everywhere. The locomotive was already gathering speed. And somewhere ahead, beyond the next bend in the track, lay Ekaterinburg, the Civil War, Stalin, the Gulag, the Soviet century and perhaps even the long shadows that still stretch across Russia today.
The passengers continued gossiping, plotting, arguing and reassuring one another. A few looked nervously out the windows. A few could smell the storm. But by then it was already too late.
Bolshevik recruiting poster 1917
Explaining Rasputin’s power – Russia’s peasant complex
Rasputin arrived in St Petersburg trailing not merely Siberian mud on his boots but centuries of Russian argument about the peasantry.
For much of the nineteenth century, Russia’s educated classes had romanticised “the people” from a respectful distance. The peasant was imagined as the keeper of Holy Russia’s soul: patient, devout, long-suffering, close to the land and somehow morally superior to the fashionable, French-speaking aristocracy that governed him. Tolstoy found wisdom amongst peasants. Dostoevsky found redemption there. Intellectuals went “to the people” in search of authenticity, only to discover that actual peasants could be suspicious, conservative, superstitious and decidedly unimpressed by visiting idealists from St Petersburg.
Out of this tension emerged the Narodniks, the great “to the people” movement of the later nineteenth century. Young idealists abandoned universities and cities and went into the countryside to live amongst the peasants, educate them, organise them and, in some cases, save them. The peasants frequently responded by assuming they were spies and reporting them to the police.
Russia has always possessed an unusual talent for disappointing its romantics
Rasputin landed squarely in this contradiction. To admirers, he was the authentic Russia that the salons had spent generations searching for: a wandering pilgrim, a holy fool, a man of the soil with the smell of birch forests and woodsmoke still clinging to him. To his enemies, he represented everything that modern Russia was supposed to leave behind: ignorance, mysticism, obscurantism and the triumph of superstition over reason.
The aristocracy had always liked peasants rather in the way that modern urbanites like farmers’ markets — as long as the mud remained somebody else’s problem. Then one of them walked into the Winter Palace and sat down with the Tsarita.
Even popular culture recognised the type. At one point, Christopher Lee’s wonderfully excessive and inebriated Rasputin, breaks into an exuberant Russian dance to Stenka Razin, the great folk lament about the rebel Cossack who throws his Persian princess into the Volga to prove his loyalty to his comrades. Watching it as a teenager, I remember thinking not of Cossacks and river pirates but: “Hang on! That’s The Carnival Is Over.”
One of the enduring ironies of Russian history – and indeed of history generally- is how often “all that is old is new again.” Revolutions announce themselves as clean breaks with the past, yet the past has a habit of returning through side doors and forgotten corridors. The symbols change, the slogans change, the uniforms change, but old habits, assumptions and institutions frequently re-emerge in unexpected forms.
Russia provides perhaps the most spectacular examples.
Much attention is paid to the persistence of the autocratic state: the succession from Tsarist secret police to Cheka, NKVD, KGB and FSB; the recurring preference for centralised authority over pluralism; the enduring suspicion of foreign influence; the tendency to frame political life as an existential struggle between order and chaos. These continuities are real enough.
Yet the return of older Russia extends well beyond the machinery of coercion. One of the most remarkable developments of the post-Soviet era has been the resurrection of the Russian Orthodox Church. The institution that survived persecution, marginalisation and attempted eradication under Soviet rule has re-emerged as one of the central pillars of contemporary Russian identity. Cathedrals demolished by the Bolsheviks have been rebuilt. Religious symbolism once dismissed as superstition now appears alongside state ceremonies and military rituals. Patriarchs once monitored by the Party have become influential public figures. Patriarch Kyril , the current head of the Russian Orthodox Church is a close political and ideological ally of Putin. Orthodoxy, once pushed to the margins, has returned to the centre of Russian public life.
And with Orthodoxy has come a reconsideration of the Romanovs, murdered along with their servants (and pet dogs) by bullet and bayonet by local Bolsheviks, on Lenin’s orders it is claimed, on the night of 16th and 17th July 1918 – ostensibly to prevent their rescue by Kolchak’s White forces who were closing in on Ekaterinburg. Many of their family and friends were executed in the days and months afterwards.
For much of the Soviet period, Nicholas II occupied a relatively simple role in the official story: a weak ruler whose incompetence justified the Revolution that swept him away. Post-Soviet Russia complicated that narrative. The Romanovs gradually ceased to be merely the defeated rulers of a vanished age and became, for many Russians, symbols of national martyrdom. Nicholas and Alexandra, together with their children, were canonised as Passion Bearers. Pilgrimages developed around sites associated with their imprisonment and murder. Their deaths came to be viewed not simply as a political execution but as a spiritual tragedy and a national wound.
The process was aided by the gradual revelation of what actually happened in the cellar of the Ipatiev House in Ekaterinburg. Soviet accounts had long been evasive. The fuller story proved profoundly unsettling. The murder of Nicholas and Alexandra is one thing. The murder of Olga, Tatiana, Maria, Anastasia and the sickly Alexei is quite another. Whatever one’s judgement of the Romanov regime, if the witness statements gathered after the slaughter are reliable, it is difficult not to recoil from the sheer brutality of what occurred that night. The image of frightened young women surviving the first fusillade because jewels sewn into their clothing deflected bullets, only to be finished off with bayonets and revolvers in a chaotic mess of panic and gun-smoke possesses a dreadful power.
That sympathy has done much to reshape public memory. The Romanovs who emerge in popular imagination are often not the rulers of a vast empire but a doomed family. The focus shifts from Nicholas the inadequate monarch to Nicholas the husband and father; from Alexandra the politically disastrous empress to Alexandra the anxious mother. Martyrdom eclipses governance.
There was to be, however, no martyr’s crown for Grigori Rasputin, whom we had lost sight of when we widened the scope of our review of Beevor’s historical pot-boiler.
The death of Rasputin
To borrow from the Bard of Avon (Macbeth, that is), “nothing in his life became him like the leaving it”. Rasputin’s demise has passed into legend largely because it seems to belong less to history than to black comedy.
In December 1916 a group of aristocratic conspirators, led by Prince Felix Yusupov and Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich, decided that the self-styled holy man had become a mortal threat to the monarchy and must be removed. What followed has often been retold as a Gothic horror story in which Rasputin was poisoned, shot, beaten, drowned and somehow kept coming back for more.
Beevor, however, strips away much of the mythology and reveals something closer to a tragic farce. The conspirators were astonishingly amateurish, repeatedly losing control of events, contradicting one another, panicking and improvising as their carefully laid plan unravelled. Reading Beevor’s account, one is reminded less of a sinister political assassination than of a darkly comic Ealing caper performed by nervous aristocrats hopelessly out of their depth. Yet the absurdity only heightens the symbolism. Here was the Russian elite, convinced it was saving the Empire, bungling even a murder. Rasputin’s chaotic end became a grotesque metaphor for the regime itself: confused, incompetent, riddled with fantasy, and staggering towards disaster while imagining it was still in control.
No wonder it provided such irresistible material for a shonky Hammer Horror melodrama. Rasputin’s life already contained all the necessary ingredients: a mysterious peasant mystic, aristocratic decadence, rumours of hypnotic powers, political intrigue, sexual scandal and a violent death wrapped in myth and exaggeration. His assassination only added to the legend. Poison that apparently failed to work, bullets that seemed unable to stop him, panicked noblemen stumbling through a murder plot and a corpse eventually dumped into the icy Neva – it all reads less like sober history than a fever dream concocted by a screenwriter after too many vodkas.
Hammer simply leaned into the absurdity. With Christopher Lee glowering, glaring and generally chewing the scenery as only Christopher Lee could, Rasputin became less a historical figure than a gothic supervillain, somewhere between Dracula and a mad prophet. The remarkable thing is that the real story, stripped of its embellishments, remains almost as bizarre as the cinematic version. Indeed, one suspects that if a screenwriter had invented the entire affair from scratch, critics would have dismissed it as implausibly over-the-top.
History, as usual, had other ideas. And therein lies the enduring fascination of Rasputin: not merely the man himself, but the way his life and death seem perpetually suspended between fact and folklore, political history and popular mythology.
The book of the film?
Whilst reading Beevor’s account, I wondered if he had recently watched the 1971 British film Nicholas and Alexandra. It is an appealing fancy, and not an entirely implausible one.
Anthony Beevor is a serious historian, of course, and his account of the Romanovs, Rasputin, and the revolutionary years rests on decades of scholarship rather than any cinematic influence. Yet historians are also human beings, and good historians often have a keen sense of narrative, character, and scene. Reading some passages in Russia: Revolution and Civil War, one occasionally gets the feeling that Beevor can see the events unfolding before him in almost cinematic fashion.
The 1971 film Nicholas and Alexandra remains one of the most ambitious attempts ever made to dramatise the collapse of Imperial Russia. Although it was something of a commercial disappointment, it assembled a remarkable cast of British acting royalty. Michael Jayston’s Nicholas II and Janet Suzman’s Alexandra are perhaps best remembered, but the supporting cast reads like a roll-call of twentieth-century British theatre and film: Laurence Olivier as Count Witte, Michael Redgrave as Sazonov, Jack Hawkins, Harry Andrews, Timothy West, Ian Holm, and a young Brian Cox in one of his earliest screen appearances as Leon Trotsky.
Then there is Tom Baker as Rasputin: wild-eyed, bearded, charismatic, unsettling, simultaneously ridiculous and strangely compelling. It remains one of the screen’s most memorable Rasputins, capturing something of the paradox that has fascinated generations- the peasant mystic who became confidant to an empress, faith healer, political liability, and eventually a figure of near-mythic notoriety. [Tom Baker reincarnated in 1974 as the Fourth Doctor, to become the longest serving time lord in that venerable television series, and, to hark back to our opening paragraphs, like Christopher Lee, he also pitched unsuccessfully to play Gandalf in The Lord of The Rings]
As for Ian Holm, His role is actually an interesting footnote. In Nicholas and Alexandra, he played Vasily Yakovlev, the Bolshevik commander who supervised the execution of the imperial family in Ekaterinburg in July 1918. Yakovlev survived the civil war and perished during Stalin’s Great Terrorin 1938 while Holm morphed into the devious cyborg Ash in Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979).
Whether Beevor recently watched the film is impossible to know. But if one were writing about the twilight of the Romanovs, it would be hard not to have the film somewhere in the back of one’s mind. For all its historical simplifications, it remains one of those grand old epics that lodged themselves in the cultural imagination.
And perhaps that is one reason the movie endures despite its reputation as a flop. It was not merely recounting history. It was staging the last act of an entire civilisation – the chandeliers still glittering, the uniforms still immaculate, the orchestra still playing, even as the floorboards beneath the Russian Empire were already beginning to crack.
When Josef met Vladimir
There is a scene in Nicholas and Alexandra that takes us down one of history’s intriguing rabbit holes where fact, folklore and political mythology sit together at the same table – perhaps even, over a pint.
It depicts the First Conference of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in Tampere (then part of the Grand Duchy of Finland) in December 1905. That conference is generally accepted by historians as the first documented meeting between Lenin and Stalin. Stalin himself later recalled it as their first encounter, describing how the younger Georgian revolutionary was somewhat disappointed to discover that the legendary Lenin was not the towering, commanding figure he had imagined, but rather a relatively ordinary-looking man who blended easily into the crowd.
And yet, according to a London tradition, the two had met earlier at the Crown Tavern on Clerkenwell Green, a pub situated opposite what became the headquarters of the Twentieth Century Press, where Lenin worked while editing Iskra during his London exile. The tale has enormous appeal. One can easily picture the scene: two future dictators of the twentieth century sharing a beer in a smoky London pub while discussing the fate of the Russian Empire, utterly unknown to the drinkers around them.
The problem, though, is evidence. Lenin certainly spent considerable time in Clerkenwell. Stalin certainly visited London in 1907 for the Fifth Congress of the RSDLP. Both men undoubtedly walked the same streets. The Crown Tavern proudly embraces the connection. Yet hard documentary proof that they actually sat down together there before the 1905 Finnish conference is elusive. Soviet historians, who were often eager to document Lenin’s revolutionary activities in minute detail, generally treated the Tampere meeting as the first confirmed encounter. Modern historians tend to do the same.
That does not necessarily make the pub story false. Revolutionary underground movements were not renowned for maintaining meticulous attendance records. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. But it does leave the tale in that charming grey zone occupied by so much historical folklore.
There is also a delicious irony in the setting. Clerkenwell Green was one of the great centres of radical politics in Victorian and Edwardian London – a place where exiles, anarchists, socialists, trade unionists and political dreamers gathered. The British Empire, then at the height of its power, provided refuge to revolutionaries who were plotting the overthrow of other empires. London was simultaneously the capital of global capitalism and a sanctuary for those dedicated to its destruction.
If Lenin and Stalin really did share a pint at the Crown Tavern, neither man could have known that within two decades one would have created the Soviet state and the other would inherit it. Nor could the Londoners around them have guessed that two obscure Russian exiles would become among the most consequential figures of the twentieth century.
That, perhaps, is why the story survives. Whether true or not, it captures the peculiar magic of history: the possibility that world-changing events sometimes begin not in palaces, parliaments or battlefields, but in an ordinary corner pub on an ordinary London afternoon.
And, finally, from the surreal to the ridiculous …When it comes to exuberant absurdity, one cannot match that of German reggae, funk and disco group Boney M.
Ra- ra-ra Rasputin
For an entire generation, Boney M’s 1978 disco hit Rasputin probably did more to shape popular perceptions of the man than any serious work of history.
It is, of course, ridiculously inaccurate. Rasputin was not literally the “lover of the Russian Queen”; there is no credible evidence that he and Alexandra were lovers, despite endless rumours at the time. Nor did he “rule the Russian land and never mind the Tsar.” Even at the height of his influence he remained more symbolic than omnipotent, a trusted adviser whose access to the imperial family far exceeded his actual political competence.
Yet the song captures something important about how Rasputin entered popular mythology. He became less a historical figure than a larger-than-life archetype: part holy man, part conman, part libertine, part political puppet-master, wrapped in an aura of sex, mystery and impending catastrophe.
It compresses a complicated story into a memorable caricature. The real Rasputin was almost certainly less powerful, less sinister and less glamorous than legend suggests. But legends endure because they tell us something about the fears and fantasies of their age. To Russians watching their empire stagger towards collapse, Rasputin became a convenient embodiment of everything that seemed wrong with the Romanov regime. To the wider world, he became the bearded mystic with hypnotic eyes, impossible appetites and nine lives.
Boney M simply took that mythology, added a disco beat with a Russian flavour, Euro-pop chorus and a dash of Cold War exoticism, and produced one of the strangest historical stories ever to hit the dance floor.
Indeed, there is a curious progression in the way many of us first encountered Rasputin. First came Christopher Lee’s wild-eyed Hammer Horror incarnation in the 1960s; then Boney M’s improbable disco supervillain in 1978; and only much later the actual historical figure lurking behind both performances. By that stage, poor old Grigori scarcely stood a chance. History had already handed him over to popular culture, where villains, mystics and monsters invariably enjoy a much longer shelf life than ordinary men.
There lived a certain man in Russia long ago
He was big and strong, in his eyes a flaming glow
Most people look at him with terror and with fear
But to Moscow chicks, he was such a lovely dear
He could preach the Bible like a preacher
Full of ecstasy and fire
But he also was the kind of teacher
Women would desire
Ra-Ra-Rasputin, lover of the Russian Queen
There was a cat that really was gone
Ra-Ra-Rasputin, Russia′s greatest love machine
It was a shame how he carried on
He ruled the Russian land and never mind the Tsar
But the kazachok, he danced really wunderbar
In all affairs of state, he was the man to please
But he was real great when he had a girl to squeeze
For the Queen, he was no wheeler-dealer
Though she’d heard the things he′d done
She believed he was a holy healer
Who would heal her son
Ra-Ra-Rasputin, lover of the Russian Queen
There was a cat that really was gone
Ra-Ra-Rasputin, Russia’s greatest love machine
It was a shame how he carried on
But when his drinking, and lusting and his hunger for power
Became known to more and more people
The demands to do something about this outrageous man became louder and louder
“This man’s just gotta go,” declared his enemies
But the ladies begged, “Don′t you try to do it, please”
No doubt this Rasputin had lots of hidden charms
Though he was a brute, they just fell into his arms
Then one night some men of higher standing
Set a trap, they′re not to blame
“Come to visit us,” they kept demanding
And he really came
Ra-Ra-Rasputin, lover of the Russian Queen
They put some poison into his wine
Ra-Ra-Rasputin, Russia’s greatest love machine
He drank it all, and he said, “I feel fine”
Ra-Ra-Rasputin, lover of the Russian Queen
They didn′t quit, they wanted his head
Ra-Ra-Rasputin, Russia’s greatest love machine
And so they shot him ′til he was dead
Oh, those Russians
Writer(s): Frank Farian, Fred Jay, George Reyam
Afterword
Being a longtime student of the Middle East, and having visited Jerusalem many times, whilst assembling this essay, I was surprised to discover a direct connection between the murdered Romanovs and the Holy City. Tsarita Alexandra’s sister, the Grand Duchess Elisabeth, who was executed along with other nobility on the sane night as The Tsar and his family, and later, interred in the incongruous and ostentatiously Muscovite Church of Saint Mary Magdalene in the Garden of Gethsemane on Mount Olive – which she and her husband had helped build – and in 1982, canonised as “new martyr” of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia.
The Church of St. Mary Magdalene, viewed from the walls of Jerusalem. P.Hemphill, May 2014
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.
The World According to Ptolemy (2nd century), an Italian manuscript, 1460. (National Library of Naples, Library of Congress)
In That Howling Infinite 