Politics

What’s new in In That Howling Infinite?

Paul Hemphill Leave a comment

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.

A historian talks about Palestine’s deep history. An interview with British historian William Dalrymple

Becoming Arab … the myth of fingerprints. A discussion regard Yossef Rapoport’s illuminating Becoming Arab: The Formation of Arab Identity in the Medieval Middle East

Lucifer ascending … the Dark Lord and the evil within. A free-flowing contemplation on the archetypical “big bad” of story and scripture. The sequel to Lucifer Descending … encounters with the morning star 

The Geography of Faith: America and the Gospel of Power. What happens when a nation with immense material power begins to clothe that power in sacred language?

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

Maps, memory, and the myth of fingerprints. Old maps are not title deeds and cannot be manifestos – the limits of cartography.

Alexander Dugin versus Sydney Sweeney. When a Russian philosopher and ideologue called “Putin’s brain” takes on a pulchritudinous film star.

Echo of the Steppes … history’s long shadow. History as we like it: the historian as storyteller, where landscapes become characters and the past refuses to remain buried.

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.

Check out In That Howling Infinite on FaceBook.

A historian talks about Palestine’s deep history

Paul Hemphill 1 Comment

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

For more on the Middle East in In That Howling Infinite see: A Middle East Miscellany and East – an Arab anthology; and, most recently: Maps, memory, and the myth of fingerprints.

Eastward, aye, he wandered

Forward to East – an Arab anthology  of poems by Paul Hemphill
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.
Decades later, I wrote about my early travels in Tanks for the memory – how Brezhnev changed my life.It encapsulates very much how I travelled in those gone days:

“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”.

For more about these journeys, see Song of the Road (2) – The Accidental Traveller

One of the oldest urban centres: Gaza’s rich history in ruins

The Guardian,17 Oct 2025

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 the Mediterranean 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.

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 wonderful Gaza: 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.

 

The Geography of Faith: America and the Gospel of Power

Paul Hemphill 1 Comment

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.

See also in In That Howling Infinite, A Political World – Thoughts and Themes, The Wrath to Come. Gone With the Wind and America’s Big Lie and My country, ‘tis of Thee – on matters American

My country, ’tis of thee – on matters American

 

 

 

 

Smyrna 1922 and the Ottoman endgame

Paul Hemphill 1 Comment

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 explored in 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.

But the fingerprints remain.

© Paul Hemphill, August 2026.

The old and the new in modern Izmir, May 2014

Also, in In That Howling Infinite, The fall of the Ottoman Empire and the birth of Türkiye; Ottoman Redux – an alternative history; Sailing to Byzantium; The Watchers of the Water; Cha-cha-cha-changes; People watching in Sultanahmet; and on displacement, Modern history is built upon exodus and displacement

For more on the Middle East, see A Middle East Miscellany

The Great Unravelling – modern history is built on exodus and displacement 

Beside Strange Waters

Paul Hemphill Leave a comment

I have admired Pink Floyd since the sixties. I still thrill to the memory of sitting in the darkness on Parliament Hill in the fall of 1968 as the  lights of the city sparkled below us and as jet planes roared overhead on their descent to Heathrow airport to the accompaniment of Interstellar Overdrive and Careful With That Axe, Eugene. The Dark Side of the Moon remains, in my view, one of the greatest albums ever recorded: musically adventurous, philosophically rich, endlessly rewarding. Like much of Floyd’s best work, it explores madness, alienation, mortality and power with extraordinary subtlety.

That subtlety is precisely what seems missing from co-founder Roger Waters’ contemporary activism. Flying inflatable pigs adorned with Stars of David or swastika imagery; describing Israel as uniquely evil; dismissing inconvenient evidence about the atrocities of October 7, 2026; and denouncing former colleagues as idiots. All this may generate headlines, but they lack the complexity of the art that made him and Pink Floyd famous.

Perhaps that is the enduring irony. David Gilmour rarely pretended to be a political philosopher. Waters plainly believes he is one. Yet the songs they created together endure precisely because they resisted simplistic moral binaries. The Dark Side of the Moon recognises that human beings are contradictory creatures, capable of love and cruelty, sanity and madness, empathy and tribalism. Waters’ current politics increasingly divide humanity into those who possess truth and those who have been brainwashed.

The Haaretz article republished below unintentionally illustrates another uncomfortable truth. In 2006 Waters was still embraced by most Israelis despite his criticisms. Today he is regarded by many not merely as a critic of Israel but as someone who has crossed into demonisation. Whether one agrees with that judgement or not, the shift is real. His critics see not an artist speaking truth to power but a man whose empathy has become radically selective.

The music, however, remains untouched. It is still magnificent. One can treasure the album while concluding that its principal lyricist has become, to borrow one of his own titles, rather more comfortably certain than comfortably numb. The  younger Roger Waters asked us to question authority. The contemporary Roger Waters often seems to demand that we accept his own. That is a curious destination for one of rock’s greatest sceptics.

The dark side of Roger Waters

This is a fascinating article, not because it settles anything – it manifestly does not – but because it captures Roger Waters almost in the raw.  Israeli music journalist Ben Shalev deserves credit for largely getting out of the way and letting his subject speak. The result is both revealing and, at times, deeply unsettling.

The article begins as a piece of rock-and-roll history. In 2006, Waters agreed to perform in Israel but, under pressure from the fledgling Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, cancelled the planned Tel Aviv concert and instead performed in Neve Shalom (Wahat al-Salam), the Jewish-Arab “Oasis of Peace” village near Latrun. The move required an extraordinary logistical effort: a chickpea field became a wheat field, then an amphitheatre for some 60,000 people. Traffic collapsed, helicopters ferried the wealthy, and the concert itself – a performance of The Dark Side of the Moon – became one of the largest and most memorable rock events Israel has ever hosted.

Around this entertaining backstage story swirl competing memories. Did Waters himself suggest Neve Shalom? Was it promoter Shuki Weiss? Did Waters witness armed Israeli soldiers at the separation barrier or not? Did security concerns prevent him attending a peace gathering, or did he simply go shopping? Almost every anecdote has two or three incompatible versions. Shalev wisely resists deciding who is right. Memory, ideology and self-mythologising have become inseparable.

The more interesting story is Waters’ own political evolution. He describes 2006 as the beginning of his radicalisation, crediting Qatari-Palestinian activist Omar Barghouti and the nascent BDS movement with opening his eyes to what he now regards as Zionism’s original sin. He claims his deceased father’s letters from British Mandatory Palestine anticipated these concerns decades earlier. Since then, he says, he has concluded not merely that Israeli governments have committed grave wrongs, but that Israel itself – and Zionism as such – is “a failed experiment.”

At that point the interview changes register entirely. It ceases to be about a concert and becomes a prolonged political jeremiad. Waters insists Israelis have been comprehensively brainwashed, dismisses Israeli society as morally corrupted, embraces armed struggle as historically necessary, rejects Nick Cave’s argument for cultural engagement, and repeats claims about October 7 that have been extensively challenged by independent investigations. His denial that Hamas committed rapes, despite substantial evidence collected by UN investigators, journalists and Israeli forensic teams, inevitably overwhelms everything else he says. Whether one is sympathetic to Palestinian suffering or highly critical of Israeli policy, this is where many readers simply stop listening.

That is perhaps the tragedy of Roger Waters. He undoubtedly possesses genuine moral passion. The anti-authoritarian themes running through Animals, The Wall and Dark Side of the Moon were always political, even when listeners preferred to hear only the music. But somewhere along the way, righteous anger seems to have hardened into absolute certainty. There is almost no room left for ambiguity, self-doubt or tragedy. Israelis become collectively brainwashed; Palestinians collectively embody resistance; every contradictory fact is assimilated into a single explanatory framework.

It is an oddly totalising worldview from a man who once warned us against “thought control.”

Postscript

On 4th September 2026, The Times of Israel Israel reported that Roger Waters, “a far-left conspiracist who has long been accused of antisemitism”, was scheduled to headline a New York City conference run by a group that raises conspiracies about the September 11, 2001 terror attack. “Waters and the group organizing the conference, the International Center for 9/11 Justice, have raised false allegations that Israel was involved in the al-Qaeda terror attacks”.

According to The Times, “The group identifies with the “truth movement” that raises alternative explanations for the attacks and calls the attacks an “inside job” orchestrated by the US government with assistance from Israel and other countries”. “9/11 was the first step in the plan for US-Israel hegemony in the Middle East,” the group said earlier this year.

The Times notes that Waters has endorsed conspiracy theories about the September 11, 2001, attacks, telling Tucker Carlson in July that the towers fell due to “controlled demolitions. “It fell down because it was demolished, and the question is, ‘Who placed the explosives in it? Who pressed the button?’” he said. He alleged Israelis had foreknowledge of the attacks, saying, “They were dancing around, sort of congratulating themselves”. He has also raised conspiracies or denied atrocities related to Hamas’s October 2023 invasion of Israel and has a history of anti-Jewish rhetoric.

Paul Hemphill, August 2026

For more on the Middle East in in That Howling Infinite, see A Middle East Miscellany.

Roger Waters: ‘My Songs That Israelis Love Are About Truth and Love. Israel Is the Complete Opposite’

Twenty years after his performance in the Jewish-Arab village of Neve Shalom, Roger Waters recounts his version of what really happened there – and what has changed for him since. ‘They went from, ‘Waaaah! Roger, Pink Floyd, we love you’ – to ‘What the fuck is he talking about?”

June 18, 2026

Roger Waters: "Israel is a failed experiment."
Shortly after 10 P.M. on June 22, 2006, as Roger Waters’ concert in the Jewish-Arab Israeli village of Neve Shalom was in full swing, a member of the production team mistakenly believed that police were preparing to arrest the Pink Floyd legend.

The employee, a member of Israeli producer Shuki Weiss’ team, thought he had heard over the radio that Waters would be arrested on suspicion of damaging IDF property the moment he stepped offstage. He alerted Amir Feingold, who was in charge of security for the production.

Already under immense pressure as the concert drew to a close and 60,000 attendees prepared to leave, Feingold took the report seriously. “We called the Jerusalem District commander, who was at the site, and asked him to look into it,” he recalls.

“Listen, we know how easily the police arrest people. Look at what’s happening today with protest activists.”

That was in 2006. The minister responsible for the police was not Ben-Gvir.

“If there was the slightest chance something would go wrong, we wanted to make sure it didn’t happen. The district commander reassured us. He said, ‘I’m with you.’ At the same time, Shuki and I went to Waters’ manager and told him, ‘Listen, here’s the situation. There could be problems.’ As soon as Waters got off stage, we put him in a car, even before giving the order to turn on the lights in the facility. Shuki said a few words to the audience while the man was already on his way to Ben-Gurion International Airport, escorted by special police patrol unit vans.”

רוג'ר ווטרס גרפיטי
Rogers Waters spraying graffiti on the separation wall, 2006.  Credit: AP

The story about the complaint against Waters is an insignificant anecdote, but it illustrates how much Israeli reality has changed in the 20 years since that performance.

In 2006, Ben-Gvir was a serial offender who belonged to the lunatic, ostracized fringes of the far-right, far outside the bounds of public legitimacy. Today, he is the national security minister. Waters is the one who has moved far beyond the bounds of Israeli legitimacy in the past two decades. In 2006, he was still a huge cultural hero, unconditionally loved and admired. His arrival in the country was seen as a historic event.

Israelis’ attitude toward Waters has, as is well known, totally changed since then. First, he has been a vocal and tireless advocate for the cultural boycott against Israel, as part of the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement. Then, he denied the scale of the Hamas massacre on October 7.

Pink Floyd’s music is still very much loved in the country, but Waters himself is probably among the most hated people in Israel. The possibility of him setting foot in the country today is beyond imagination. This makes the memories of his performance here, exactly 20 years ago, particularly charged and interesting.

What does Waters himself remember from that visit to Israel and the performance in Neve Shalom? What is the most significant thing that stuck with him?

“Very, very comfortable, shabby chic white sofas arranged backstage. Not the most meaningful memory, but you said, how do you remember it? But the main memory, obviously, is the memory of when I made the little speech at the end where I said, you are the generation of young Israelis who must make peace with your neighbors and blah blah blah,” Waters says in a Zoom interview from his New York home.

He then mimics a screaming, fawning audience: “They went from, ‘Waaaah! Roger, Pink Floyd, we love you’ – to ‘What the fuck is he talking about?’ Wow. It was something of a surprise. I went back the next year and I learned a lot more about Israeli psychology. But that first year, it was still a bit of a surprise.”

Waters is not precise with the timing: He returned three years later, in 2009.

Was the change in audience reaction really that extreme?

“It went from ecstasy to silent horror in a split second. And I thought, whoa, that was by far the most important bit. The rest was just a gig, with an adoring audience.”

Israel is waiting for Roger

One need not accept Waters’ recollection. I asked several people who were there how they remembered that moment. Some didn’t recall Waters’ statement at all. Others said the audience reacted supportively. No one remembered a reserved response, certainly not “silent horror.”

A significant discrepancy between different accounts of the same events characterizes the entire story of Waters’ performance and his 2006 visit to Israel. Whose idea was it to move the concert from its original venue in Yarkon Park to Neve Shalom’s chickpea field? What did Waters see during his visit to the separation barrier? Why didn’t he attend the meeting organized for him with intellectuals and peace activists?

The answer to all these questions is: It depends on whom you ask. So we asked. To mark 20 years since the most complex and charged performance in the history of international rock concerts in Israel, we will try to tell its story in the most reliable and interesting way.

This story has two protagonists: Waters and producer Shuki Weiss. In the 1970s, before Weiss became one of the country’s biggest concert producers, he managed record stores in Tel Aviv and was one of those responsible for introducing Pink Floyd’s music to Israelis. Later, when he owned the Dan Cinema Club in Tel Aviv, he used to hold record listening evenings there. One time he played “The Wall.”

“People would come to listen,” he recalls. “Many people.”

In the early 1980s, Weiss and Miron Rechtman, the owner of the Betty Bam event equipment company, bought the sound system that Pink Floyd used on its “The Wall” tour. In the mid-1980s, Weiss tried in vain to bring David Gilmour, Pink Floyd’s guitarist, to Israel as a solo artist. Toward the end of the 1980s, after Waters had left the band, he negotiated to bring Pink Floyd to perform in the country in its trio lineup (Gilmour, keyboardist Rick Wright and drummer Nick Mason. But that attempt also failed.

The crowd waiting for Waters to perform. The concert caused a traffic nightmare.

The crowd waiting for Waters to perform. Credit: Oren Levin

“I stalked them, so to speak,” he says.

In early 2006, Weiss learned that Waters was planning a world tour based on the album “The Dark Side of the Moon.”

“I went to London, met his agent, and offered a huge sum, much more than he received anywhere else,” Weiss recalls. After the contract was signed and the planned performance in Yarkon Park was announced, he traveled to Paris for a brief meeting with Waters. “I told him that Israel was excited for him,” he says. “He was perfectly fine.” Weiss says ticket sales were excellent, with 35,000 sold three months before the show.

A couple of weeks later, Weiss was vacationing with his family in the Netherlands, when Waters’ manager, Mark Fenwick, called him. He told Weiss that pro-Palestinian activists were exerting heavy pressure on Waters. A few hours later, Fenwick called again to say that Waters had decided to cancel the performance.

“I got lots of emails from my brothers and sisters after the announcement of Hayarkon Park. But the important one was from Omar Barghouti,” Waters recalls about changing his mind, referring to one of the founders of the BDS movement. “We had a conversation, and then I eventually cancelled Hayarkon Park. Organizing this concert instead was a compromise with Omar and with the rest of the people who had just started the BDS movement, because obviously even doing Neve Shalom broke the boundaries of the cultural boycott.”

Waters describes that exchange as “a huge moment” in his political thinking.

“You know, in this song that Mona Miari and I have just released, a re-imagination of my song ‘Comfortably Numb,’ I sing, ‘We never knew about the Nakba. I was only 5 years old in ’48.’ And we didn’t,” he says. “And the lie that is Zionism had been spread all over the world since the Second World War. So I wasn’t alone. Very, very few people quite got it.”

Waters says that one of the few people who “got it” before the war was his father.

Shuki Weiss giving an interview ahead of the Rogers Water concert in 2006.
Shuki Weiss giving an interview ahead of the concert. Credit: Oren Levin

“My father taught at St. George’s School in Jerusalem from 1934 to 1936,” he says. “And he wrote letters home to my grandmother, which I have, saying how worried he was about the influx of American money, mainly, to buy up land, and about the establishment of the settlements that he saw going on, and how desperately worried and concerned he was,” he recounts, referring to the pre-state Jewish communities. “Of course, he was killed in the war, so I never got to talk to him about these things. but it’s a fascinating fact.”

Following the deepening of his awareness of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict due to the appeal of the BDS movement, Waters made his second visit in 2009. “My travels around the occupied territories … were deeply, deeply moving and very informative,” he says. “I’ve tried never to shut my mouth from that moment. And things have only got worse, obviously, except that it’s becoming clearer and clearer to the vast majority of people all over the world now that this is a failed experiment, and it should be stopped.”

What is the failed experiment?

“Israel is the failed experiment. Zionism is the failed experiment. and this is becoming increasingly a position taken up by a huge majority of human beings all over the world, because we witness and are appalled by the horrific policies of the state of Israel in its massacre of the indigenous people whose land it stole in order to create itself. And so it’s a terrible, terrible, terrible tragedy, and it remains to be seen: Will I see the end of the story in my lifetime? Probably not. I’m 82 years old.”

פותחת
Waters performing in Neve Shalom in 2006.  Credit: Assaf Evron

Field of wheat

In response to Waters’ decision to cancel the Yarkon Park concert, the most monumental improvisation in the history of performances in Israel occurred. Thanks to the move to Neve Shalom, Weiss says he was called “The King of the Chickpea Field” for years by people in the global music industry.

“When Waters’ manager informed me of the cancellation, I told him: ‘What if I move the show to a place for Jews and Arabs?’ I don’t know where that came from,” Weiss says. ‘I knew Neve Shalom. David Broza’s grandfather was one of the first residents there. I had done performances there many years before this show, events for peace. But nothing of this magnitude. Performances for a few thousand people. I had no idea if a huge concert could be held there. I left my family in the Netherlands and returned to Israel. That night, Waters’ manager called me back and said: ‘We checked what Neve Shalom is. If you can do it there, and if you invite Arabs to the show and arrange meetings with peace activists, we’re in.’ I told him: ‘Yes, yes, yes.”

Rayek Rizek, a Neve Shalom resident, offers a different version of the events that led to the Neve Shalom performance. “Sometime in late March 2006, I heard two employees in the community’s secretariat talking about Roger Waters,” recalls Rizek who was the community’s secretary general in 2006. “I’ve loved Pink Floyd since high school. I still listen to them today. When I was studying at university in the United States, around when “Animals” (the band’s 1977 album) came out, I missed a performance of theirs in Houston. By the time I managed to look for a ticket, everything was sold out. I was very sorry,” Rizek says as an aside.

“So when I heard the employees in the office talking about Waters, I asked what was going on. They said his manager had sent us an email. Waters was interested in Neve Shalom and was asking for information about the village,” he says. “As soon as I saw I had a direct connection with the manager, I sat down and wrote him a long email telling him about Neve Shalom and inviting him to hold the concert with us. I didn’t know about the pressure being exerted on him. Two days later, Shuki Weiss came to the village and told me, ‘This morning, Waters’ manager called me and asked about the possibility of moving the concert to Neve Shalom.’ I imagine the manager received my letter and understood that such a possibility existed.”

Rizek’s version doesn’t necessarily contradict Weiss’s entirely. Perhaps Weiss suggested the idea to Waters’ manager, and then the manager sent an email to Neve Shalom. But it’s also possible that the initial email to Neve Shalom was sent to explore the option of holding some separate activity in the community. In this scenario, when the Yarkon gig was canceled amid Rizek’s offer to hold a concert in Neve Shalom, Waters and his manager adopted the proposal. Rizek recounts that during one of the preliminary meetings with police officers at the event site, one of the commanders got annoyed over some details and asked, “‘Why are we even holding the concert here? Why didn’t it stay in Tel Aviv?'”

Rizek recalls: “Shuki looked at me and told the commander: ‘Blame him.’ As for me, all I did was send a letter.”

Waters himself doesn’t remember the history of the concert’s move to Neve Shalom. “Shuki Weiss, bless him, he’s just another promoter,” he says with a smile. “I don’t know him at all. I wouldn’t trust him as far as I can spit.”

On the other hand, he stresses, “I loved the idea of Neve Shalom, of this agricultural community.” He says fondly: “It’s like this is the dream that we have of how Palestine could go, could go back to being, where everybody lives together, and there’s no supremacists, there’s no racism. Whatever it may be that has caused this great catastrophe, there was none of that in Neve Shalom. I hope it’s still doing well.”

Flyers for the Roger Waters concert in Israel

Flyers for the Roger Waters concert in Israel Credit: Oren Levin

Weiss picked the new concert site’s location with Giora Porter, who designed the producer’s concert venues for many years. “There was only one area that came into consideration, with a certain slope, a kind of natural amphitheater,” Porter recalls. “It was a chickpea field owned by two brothers from one of the local moshavim. I located the field owners and said: ‘I want to buy your chickpeas.’ They said: ‘Okay, we’ll harvest in May.’ I said: ‘No, now.’ They understood they could make a killing off me. I bought the chickpea field, the crop they wouldn’t harvest, for $100,000. They were nice guys, but they knew how to bargain.”

“But there was a problem with the crappy soil in the Latrun area,” Porter says. “Exposed soil in June is all dust. It’s terrible. I suggested sowing grass, but the moshav resident said: ‘No, that will ruin my land.’ I said: ‘I can’t do a show on dirt.’ I think he was the one who suggested sowing wheat. He said: ‘It’ll sprout and be green like grass.’ So we went to see wheat sprouting elsewhere. I told him: ‘It’s terribly sparse.’ He said: ‘We’ll double sow it, increase the density.’ And that’s what he did. Shuki paid for it. And that entire huge area turned green within days. It was a miracle.”

Weiss and Porter recount that various state authorities created numerous difficulties for the show. The Israel Antiquities Authority remembered that salvage excavations needed to be carried out on the site and delayed the work. The Israel Land Authority charged several hundred thousand shekels to rezone the land for commercial use, even if only for one night. Meanwhile, the Health Ministry prohibited watering the compound with reclaimed water and forced Weiss to bring tankers. “It didn’t matter that we used reclaimed water at night, but I showed them we had tankers,” Weiss says.

“Quite cunning bodies,” Porter says of the authorities that created difficulties and collected payments. Weiss adds, laughing: “They know their job. That’s governance!”

Weiss and Amir Feingold, who was his security officer, have mostly praise for the police’s conduct. Some officers, Weiss says, were Pink Floyd fans. The event morphed into a kind of national project that the police wished to see succeed. There was, however, a dispute over the number of paid police officers the production was required to fund. The Jerusalem District commander demanded 1,000, including several dozen detectives to hunt for pot smokers among the crowd.

“We argued with them about it,” Feingold recalls. “I told the district commander: ‘In the end, it’s rock and roll. Are you bringing 80 detectives to arrest the pot smokers? Let them enjoy themselves.” The police, he says, complied and eased the demands.

Waters landed in Israel two days before the concert. The morning after his arrival, he visited the separation barrier near Bethlehem, where he protested against its construction with spray paint and words. Weiss says Waters gave interviews after his visit in which he said he was shocked to see “soldiers with drawn weapons” near the wall.

“A lie. There wasn’t a single soldier there, certainly not with drawn weapons,” Weiss says. Feingold, who accompanied Waters’ entourage on the trip to the wall, confirms no soldiers were present.

קהל אנשים צופים רוג'ר ווטרז ווטרס

Fans at the concert in 2006. Most did not arrive by helicopter: Assaf Evron

No-show in Neve Shalom

Waters laughs when he hears this claim. “So which story rings truer, Shuki Weiss’ story, no weapons, no soldiers, just a nice wall, or my story? I’ll tell you which one is true: my story,” he insists. “Shuki Weiss is a lying schmuck, obviously. I’m sure he’s very smiley, and he likes to make a lot of money. Good luck to him, but he’s just making stuff up.”

Another claim by Weiss concerns Waters’ non-attendance at an event organized in his honor in Neve Shalom. It was to be a meeting with intellectuals, peace activists, and village residents. Singer David Broza “helped me bring artists, writers, very serious people,” Weiss recalls. “They brought an olive tree for him to plant. There was a children’s orchestra. Tons of excitement. Everyone was already there, but he wasn’t. No Roger. They called him. He didn’t answer. His manager didn’t know where he was. In the end, David planted the tree in his place. Later it turned out he went to Kikar Hamedina to buy jewelry for his partner.”

Not only an olive tree was prepared for Waters, but also a sculpture of the famous prism from the cover of “The Dark Side of the Moon,” Rayek Rizek recounts. “I went to an artist in the Rehovot area, he told me 20,000 shekels ($4,500 in 2006). In the end, we made it from marble-coated concrete. It cost 4,000 shekels. Shuki paid,” Rizek says. “We waited and waited. In the end, someone on Waters’ behalf came and said he couldn’t come. There were too many people.”

Weiss says Waters was a no-show in Neve Shalom the day before the concert, but the event took place the afternoon of the show. “He was supposed to go to the community from the backstage area,” Feingold says. “His security guard came and looked around. I told him: ‘Tell me what you need. We’ll sort it out.’ He didn’t say a word and left. Later, he announced, ‘We’re not coming.’ I don’t know if he or Waters decided. He just said, ‘Security problems.’ What security problems? First-graders and 30 other people from the left. Where was the threat?”

Rogers says “of course” he didn’t come. “You don’t do anything on a gig day, except the gig,” he says. “I’m glad I’ve had this career and that I’ve been able to do multiple shows all over the world to fabulous audiences, but it’s very rare to do other things on show days.”

“And I’m absolutely, totally against the Nick Cave school of thought that, oh, we should all go and talk to people in meetings and that’ll do it,” he stresses, parodying hippie naivete. “No, it fucking won’t, you prick. No people has ever freed themselves without armed struggle, ever. It just doesn’t happen. It reminds me of the best interview that any of us have ever seen. (Palestinian writer) Ghassan Kanafani gave that fabulous interview where he talks about the conversation between the hatchet and the neck. What a wonderful writer.” He adds, referring to one of Kanafani’s books, “I can still remember almost every word in ‘Returning to Haifa.'”

A few weeks after the Neve Shalom concert, Waters wrote Rizek. “Dear Rayek, I’m deeply saddened that I was unable to plant the olive tree, but our efforts to reach the site were thwarted by the sheer numbers of people surrounding the vehicle in which I was travelling,” he wrote. “I know how upset you are that this did not take place and I hope that will not blight the memory of our visit to your land.” It sounds like something Waters would write, not his agent or manager.

“You see, Ben? I’m not just evil,” Waters comments.

The wheat field that replaced the chickpea field near Neve Shalom, 2006.
The wheat field that replaced the chickpea field near Neve Shalom, Oren Levin

When I sent him an email a few weeks ago asking if he would agree to be interviewed for this article, I didn’t expect a positive answer. But it was positive and even cordial. When I told him during the Zoom call that I was pleasantly surprised, and that the conventional wisdom here is that he has no desire for dialogue with Israelis, certainly not after October 7, he responded: “Yes, I am. I’m just having one with you now.”

However, some things he said were difficult to hear and didn’t seem very open-minded.

“You, as a country, Israeli people have been brainwashed, and consequently you are now subjects, nationals of the most evil thing that has happened in the world since the Nazis and the Second World War. And you can’t seem to grasp it, and that is so sad,” he said.

“You used the two magic words: Gideon and Levy,” he continued, referring to my email mentioning Gideon Levy as my Haaretz colleague. “It’s only these words that got you the ability to get to me, and even Gideon got the whole October 7th thing wrong. We almost fell out over it, because he was so brainwashed. He believed all that crap about burning babies and raping women and stuff, and it’s all complete nonsense, and everybody knows it’s complete and utter nonsense. There was no rape by Hamas on October the 7th. However, there have been documented multiple rapes by the IDF, of men and women and children.”

After pushing back that I did believe these things happened, I asked Waters to change the subject. It was unbearable to hear him say these things. I knew that any attempt to continue responding to him would blow up the interview. But he continued.

“Your position is indefensible, and no amount of talking intelligently to any of you is going to change any of this. You’ve been Ben-Gvir’d until you can’t accept any reason,” he retorted. “Your state, Israel, is psychotic, psychopathic, criminally insane, and the only way out of it is for you to re-establish connection with the rest of the human race. Stop thinking that you are superior in some way and should rule the world, and join in with the community of the part of the world you’re living in. Until you do that, you are doomed, but you may well drag the rest of the world down with you. You know, it wouldn’t surprise me at all if suddenly some lunatic was to drop a nuclear bomb on Iran or something, and that’s the end of the world. You, Israel, and the United States, the U.K., France and Germany, and all the people in that cabal are dragging the whole globe towards its extinction, extinction of all life on the planet. And that’s what I complain about. It’s not weird to complain about that.”

Aviv Geffen arrives by chopper

Back to the concert, enormous traffic jams formed on the way to Neve Shalom in the afternoon and evening, and on the way from it that night. “The biggest traffic jam of 2006, perhaps of the entire decade,” Feingold asserts.

“A massive transportation failure. To this day, people are still stuck there trying to get out,” Porter laughs. Still, he acknowledges the huge traffic jams were unavoidable. “That’s the geography. We invested a lot in finding access roads, dirt roads,” he says. “We rented entire fields from nearby kibbutzim and leveled them for parking. And still, in the end, everything converged on one turn off the main road. Like everyone coming to Tel Aviv in the morning. It’s an unmanageable rush hour.”

דיויד גילמור

David Gilmour. “He’s dumb as shit.” Credit: Gregorio Borgia/AP

So, did you bear responsibility for the failure, or did you say “it couldn’t be prevented”?

“Both,” Porter says.

Those who didn’t suffer from the traffic jams were the affluent who could afford 3,000 shekels for helicopter transport to the concert venue. A special helicopter line operated from Sde Dov airport in Tel Aviv. “Rani Rahav rented two helicopters for himself and the group that came with him,” Weiss says, referring to the PR consultant. “Aviv Geffen also arrived by helicopter. They told me afterward: ‘You don’t understand what a sight unfolded before us from above. It was worth every shekel.”

As for the concert, the quadraphonic sound was excellent. The superb backing band, which included acclaimed guitarists Snowy White and Dave Kilminster, was flawless. Waters occasionally used playback or excellent backing vocalists. It wasn’t a spontaneous or surprising performance, but it was clearly going to be that way. For the fortunate few who had the luck to see Pink Floyd perform, it was necessarily a diluted version. (Weiss is one of them, saying, “It was a poor man’s Pink Floyd. It wasn’t the real thing.”). But a straw poll I took last week among people who were there suggests that the enjoyment was complete, overwhelming and enthusiastic.

Musician Oded Tamsoot came to the concert from Ma’ale Gamla in the Golan Heights. “The entire event, the performance itself, was an amazing experience, beyond imagination,” he says. A year later, he formed the Pink Floyd tribute band Ummagumma.

Yael Ori, a former teacher and kindergarten teacher from Jerusalem, says Pink Floyd’s messages, which deeply influenced her as a teenager, inspired her to choose the teaching profession. “My high school was a nightmare,” she says. “I decided I wanted to be a teacher so my children wouldn’t suffer what I suffered.” Singing “We don’t need no education” with Waters and the masses was a wonderful experience, she says.

Dvir Zhorno from Jerusalem was 16. “The concert’s timing was perfect for me. It was shortly after I discovered Pink Floyd and started delving into their music,” says Zhorno, now a finance professional. “After the show, I heard critiques that he performed the songs exactly as they were on the albums, but that style suited me. That’s what I wanted to hear. ‘The Great Gig in the Sky’ live, exactly like on the album – it was awesome.”

David Broza at the tree planting ceremony at Neve Shalom. He was the default replacement for Waters.
David Broza at the tree planting ceremony at Neve Shalom. Credit: Oren Levin

Truth and love, lies and hate

Toward the end of the interview, I asked Waters what he thought about the enormous, unbridgeable gap between the deep love hundreds of thousands of Israelis feel for Pink Floyd’s music and the extreme hatred most Israelis feel toward him, his views and his statements.

“This is their problem,” he sighs. “All my work, all that work that they love, all those songs I wrote for Pink Floyd – “Shine On You Crazy Diamond,” “Comfortably Numb,” “Wish You Were Here,” – are all about truth and love. And all of my work that I do now is about truth and love. The State of Israel and what the children of Israel are taught to believe from the minute they’re grown up is the exact opposite. You’ve been brought up to believe the lies about October 7th. That’s not true. That’s just pure evil lies. And you’ve been taught to hate Arabs and Palestinians. That’s the opposite of love. So you live in a world that’s built on lies and hatred. … My music is built on love and truth, and that’s why there’s a dichotomy – oh, we love his music, but we hate him.

“I’m so sorry that even talking to you, I can see that you have been brainwashed, my brother Ben, completely. And I know you’re laughing at me now, but it’s really not funny. It’s sad. Israel is the saddest thing on earth, with the possible exception of the Trump White House. It’s sad because human beings are better than this. There is a capacity within every human soul for an attachment to love and truth. So for us to be persuaded that lies and hatred are a better alternative is why I go on working and expressing myself in my great songs.

“You think that ‘Dark Side of the Moon’ and ‘The Wall’ and ‘Animals’ weren’t political? Are you fucking stupid? Yes, they are stupid. If they don’t get that, they’re very, very stupid. You can’t really blame them. There were people in the band who don’t get it. David Gilmour doesn’t get it. He’s dumb as shit. He never understood a single bit of any of it. … That’s why he was miserable. And he was miserable with the band, because he never understood what I was doing.”

Waters started to say another sentence but then stopped and said: “Well, no, I’m not gonna [there]. Good luck with getting them to print any of this.”

Thank you very much.

“You’re welcome. Thank you for still having a smile on your face at the end of this conversation.”

Maps, memory, and the myth of fingerprints

Paul Hemphill 3 Comments

The world according to Ptolemy (2nd century), an Italian manuscript of ca. 1460. (National Library of Naples, image Library of Congress)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, this copy c1250. (National Library of France; image Library of Congress)

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. Part of the floor is the remains of a mid-6th century mosaic map of the Levant.

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.

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.
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

  1. Collins Atlas of World History – Geoffrey Barraclough, Collins
  2. HarperCollins Atlas of World History – Geoffrey Barraclough, HarperCollins
  3. History of the World in Maps: The Ultimate Cartographic Exploration of Our Past – Philip Parker, Collins
  4. The Times Complete History of the World – The Times / Collins

Military, Political and European History

  1. The Times Atlas of the Second World War
  2. Atlas of the Crusades – edited by Jonathan Riley-Smith
  3. Atlas of European History

Archaeology and Exploration

  1. Past Worlds: The Times Atlas of Archaeology – also published as the HarperCollins Atlas of Archaeology
  2. The Times Atlas of World Exploration

Biblical History and Geography

  1. HarperCollins Atlas of Bible History – James B. Pritchard
  2. HarperCollins Atlas of the Bible
  3. HarperCollins Concise Atlas of the Bible

5. Biblical Geography  – Evangelical Reference

  1. 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.

Echo of the Steppes … history’s long shadow

Paul Hemphill 1 Comment

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.

The concept of the Myth of Fingerprints originated in a long essay with regard to what is probably the most intractable conflict in modern times: One Land, Two Peoples: History, Memory, Continuity, and Inheritance. In That Howling Infinite has published many articles regarding the historical movement of peoples. For example: Modern history is built upon exodus and displacement. 

For more on Russia, Ukraine and the Soviet Union, see Russky Mir – Russian history’s long shadow. 

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

The fate of Europe lies in the steppes

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 Steppe by 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.

Alexander Dugin versus Sydney Sweeney

Paul Hemphill 1 Comment

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

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

Alexander Dugin versus Sydney Sweeney

Putin’s philosopher despises Western decadence

Richard Godwin, Unherd, 27 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.”

Rasputin and the downfall of the Romanovs

Paul Hemphill 1 Comment

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

The mystique of the mesmerising muzhik

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

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

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

The mystical muzhik

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The road to Ekaterinburg

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tsar Nicholas in captivity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bolshevik recruiting poster 1917

Explaining Rasputin’s power – Russia’s peasant complex

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

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

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

Russia has always possessed an unusual talent for disappointing its romantics

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

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

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

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

Rather like Rasputin himself.

The resurrection of the Romanovs

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

Russia provides perhaps the most spectacular examples.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The death of Rasputin

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

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

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

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

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

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


The book of the film?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When Josef met Vladimir

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ra- ra-ra Rasputin

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

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

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

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

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

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

Paul Hemphill, June 2025

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

Rasputin, Bony M (1978)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oh, those Russians

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

Afterword

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

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

Certainty and the independent mind

Paul Hemphill Leave a comment

Time, time again, it is said
We will hear, we will see
See it all-in his wisdom-hear
His truth will abound the land
This truth will abound the land
This state of independence shall be
Evanghelos Papathanassiou & Jon Anderson

We live in a time of anxiety – yet we long for certainty.

Not certainty born of wisdom, experience or careful reflection, but certainty manufactured and amplified by technologies, institutions and cultures that reward simplicity over complexity, outrage over understanding, and tribal loyalty over independent thought. Never before have we had access to so much information, yet rarely has there seemed so little patience for ambiguity. Every issue arrives pre-packaged with approved opinions. Every controversy demands allegiance. Every debate is framed as a struggle between competing moral absolutes.

The pressure to choose a side is relentless.

Whether the issue is climate change, immigration, Indigenous recognition, Israel and Palestine, Donald Trump, nationalism, globalisation, identity politics or any number of the controversies that dominate contemporary discourse, citizens in countries like ours are increasingly expected to sort themselves into camps and remain there. To question one’s own side is often viewed as disloyalty. To acknowledge complexity is mistaken for weakness. To recognise competing truths can invite accusations of moral cowardice. Nuance, once regarded as evidence of maturity, is frequently condemned as equivocation.

Yet there is a deeper paradox at work. We often confuse certainty with conviction and conviction with wisdom. We mistake confidence for competence, consistency for truth and, increasingly, certainty for authenticity itself. In an age of institutional distrust and social fragmentation, those who sound most certain are often assumed to be the most honest. The politician who never wavers appears authentic; the citizen who hesitates appears weak. Doubt becomes suspect. Reflection begins to look like indecision.

At the centre of this lies a curious development. The word independent has itself become strangely contested.

Traditionally, independence implied a particular intellectual virtue. It suggested someone who weighed evidence, resisted fashion, distrusted slogans and arrived at conclusions through reflection rather than tribal loyalty. The independent thinker might be right or wrong, but their independence lay in their willingness to examine competing arguments, question prevailing orthodoxies and tolerate ambiguity. Independence was not a destination but a habit of mind.

Today, however, independence is viewed through very different lenses.

For some, it has become shorthand for conspiracy, contrarianism or the performative scepticism of the “do your own research” cohort. The independent thinker is recast as someone marinating in YouTube rabbit holes, Facebook memes and endless distrust of expertise. Independence becomes less a mark of judgement than a rejection of established knowledge.

For others, independence has become suspect for an entirely different reason. In an age defined by existential moral struggles – Trumpism, Gaza, Ukraine, climate change, racism, antisemitism, Islamophobia, democratic decline and a host of other causes that demand urgent attention – the person who refuses to choose a side can appear not thoughtful but evasive. Independence comes to look less like intellectual courage than moral cowardice, a refusal to commit when commitment is required.

Yet both assumptions are flawed. The first mistakes independence for reflexive distrust. The second mistakes uncertainty for indifference.

There is a profound difference between refusing to think and refusing to join a tribe. There is an equally important difference between acknowledging complexity and lacking conviction. The independent mind is neither conspiratorial nor apathetic. It is not defined by permanent scepticism, nor by a determination to stand in the middle of every argument. Rather, it is characterised by a willingness to follow evidence wherever it leads, to question assumptions – one’s own particularly- and to resist the comforting certainties offered by political, ideological and cultural tribes.

The tragedy of our age is that such independence is increasingly difficult to sustain. The incentives run in the opposite direction. Algorithms reward outrage. Social media rewards certainty. Activist movements reward loyalty. Political parties reward conformity. Every institution, it seems, encourages us to choose a side and remain there. The space for doubt, reflection and intellectual humility narrows a little more each year.

Yet life rarely conforms to such neat divisions.

History certainly does not. Human beings are complicated creatures. Nations are complicated creations. Political problems are rarely solved by slogans and almost never by certainties. The ability to hold two truths in tension at the same time – to recognise that a cause may be just yet imperfect, that opponents may sometimes be right, that allies may sometimes be wrong, and that competing moral claims can coexist- is becoming one of the most valuable and least celebrated civic virtues.

This essay is, in part, a reflection on that disappearing virtue. It draws upon a lifetime spent marching, protesting, arguing, campaigning, reading, writing and observing. It traces a journey from the certainties of youth to a greater appreciation of complexity; from the exhilaration of causes to a deeper awareness of unintended consequences; from the satisfactions of belonging to the more demanding discipline of independent judgement. Along the way it explores the distinction between moral clarity and moral certainty, the phenomenon of moral capture, the seductive appeal of authenticity, the dangers of passionate intensity, and the democratic necessity of intellectual honesty.

Above all, it is a defence of the independent mind – not as a posture of detachment or superiority, but as a commitment to judgement, humility and the difficult task of remaining intellectually free in an age that increasingly rewards certainty and punishes doubt.

Certainty, conviction and the curse of complexity

One of the curiosities of life is discovering that certainty becomes less attractive just as complexity becomes more apparent. When I was young, certainty seemed abundant. The world appeared neatly divided into camps. There were causes to join, banners to carry, songs to sing, villains to oppose, journeys to be made and futures to build. The moral landscape looked reasonably well ordered. There was right and wrong, justice and injustice, progress and reaction. The task, it seemed, was simply to determine which side one was on and then commit oneself accordingly. It was an age of grand narratives and great causes, and like many of my generation I threw myself into them with enthusiasm.

I marched against the Hydrogen Bomb and I marched against America’s war in Vietnam. I sat down, occupied buildings, disrupted meetings and occasionally found myself caught up in the odd mêlée when passions overflowed into something more physical. Later in life, I marched for East Timor and Bougainville and against French nuclear testing in the Pacific. I marched for forests, gun laws and airport noise. I confronted politicians, ambushed ministers and once helped surprise a Prime Minister at an election campaign launch. Looking back, I regret very little of it. There is something admirable about citizens who care enough to leave the comfort of their homes and enter the public square. Democracies require dissent. They need people willing to challenge power, question orthodoxies and occasionally make nuisances of themselves.

What I have learned, however, is that participation and wisdom are not the same thing.

That may sound obvious, but it is a lesson often forgotten. One of the enduring pleasures of activism is the feeling that one is participating in history. There is camaraderie in a march, solidarity in a crowd, a sense of shared purpose that can be intoxicating. One feels part of something larger than oneself. There is also a certain vicarious satisfaction in having “done something”, a sense of moral exoneration that comes simply from having turned up. If the cause succeeds, one can share in the triumph. If it fails, one can at least claim to have been on the right side.

Yet causes and solutions are often very different things. It is relatively easy to identify a grievance. It is much harder to resolve it. It is relatively easy to denounce injustice. It is much harder to construct a better alternative. It is relatively easy to carry a placard demanding perfection. It is much harder to govern a society of imperfect human beings.

This is not cynicism. It is simply an observation born of watching decades of politics unfold.

In recent years I have often found myself asking a question that rarely receives much attention. When people tell us that Australia is a racist country, that we live on stolen land, that our prosperity was built on dispossession and suffering, what exactly follows from that? If those propositions are accepted, what practical obligations arise from them? What policies should be adopted? What institutions reformed? What outcomes are being sought? Likewise, when people demand sanctions against one country, boycotts against another, the cancellation of this person or that organisation, do they imagine governments can simply comply? Do they believe that governments, with all their responsibilities, alliances, competing obligations and access to information unavailable to the rest of us, can simply act on moral impulse alone?

These are not dismissive questions. They are political questions. Indeed, they are the questions politics exists to answer.

There is often a significant gap between diagnosis and prescription. Many activists are extremely good at identifying injustices, hypocrisies and failures. Sometimes they perform a valuable service in doing so. Every society needs its critics. Every society needs people willing to point at uncomfortable truths that others would rather ignore. Yet identifying a problem is only the beginning. The harder question is what comes next. What is the proposed destination? How do we get there from here? What are the costs, the risks and the unintended consequences? These are the questions that confront governments every day. The activist’s role is often to pull society’s attention towards an issue. The government’s role is to balance competing goods, competing interests and competing risks. The activist can demand the impossible. The government must live with the consequences.

It is here that I find myself increasingly preoccupied by the distinction between moral clarity and moral certainty. The two are frequently confused, but they are not the same thing. Moral clarity involves recognising that some things are plainly wrong. The deliberate murder of civilians is wrong. Racism is wrong. Antisemitism is wrong. Corruption is wrong. Authoritarianism is wrong. Human suffering matters regardless of who experiences it. These are moral judgements that do not require ideological membership cards. They do not depend on tribal affiliation.

Moral certainty is something different. It is the conviction that one’s own side possesses not merely some truth but all of it. It is the belief that complexity is merely an inconvenience, that ambiguity is weakness and that every disagreement can be explained by malice, ignorance or bad faith. Moral certainty seeks to simplify the world into a contest between heroes and villains. It transforms politics into a morality play. It demands allegiance. It leaves little room for contradiction.

The difficulty is that reality is full of contradictions.

One of the most important lessons I have learned is that citizenship requires the ability to hold two truths in tension simultaneously. This is becoming increasingly difficult in a culture that rewards certainty and punishes complexity. Yet many of the most contentious issues of our age demand precisely this capacity. It is possible to believe that October 7 was an atrocity and that Gaza has suffered terribly. It is possible to oppose antisemitism while criticising aspects of Israeli government policy. It is possible to support Palestinian self-determination while condemning Hamas. It is possible to acknowledge the dispossession of Indigenous Australians while also recognising the achievements of modern Australia. It is possible to support immigration while discussing its challenges. It is possible to care deeply about the environment while recognising economic realities. None of these positions should be controversial. Yet increasingly they are treated as evidence of indecision, weakness or insufficient commitment.

The pressure today is not merely to possess moral clarity but to display moral certainty.

The photograph at the head of this essay and those below are of the 1966 Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament Aldermaston March reaching central London. The writer was somewhere in its ranks.

Moral capture and the discomfort of doubt

This pressure is reinforced by a phenomenon I have come to think of as moral capture. Moral capture occurs when a cause becomes so central to a person’s identity that every question must be filtered through it. Facts cease to be facts in their own right. Instead they become assets, liabilities, weapons or threats depending on whether they support the cause. The question is no longer whether something is true. The question becomes whether acknowledging it helps or hinders the narrative.

At that point intellectual honesty begins to erode.

Intellectual honesty is one of the most demanding virtues because it requires us to acknowledge facts we would rather avoid. It requires us to recognise when our opponents are correct and when our allies are mistaken. It demands that we apply the same standards to friends and enemies alike. It obliges us to distinguish between evidence and preference, between analysis and advocacy. Most importantly, it requires us to accept that reality does not rearrange itself to accommodate our politics.

This is remarkably difficult. Human beings are tribal creatures. We enjoy belonging. We like certainty. We prefer the comfort of the crowd to the discomfort of doubt. The tribe offers affirmation. The slogan offers simplicity. The crowd offers solidarity. Complexity offers none of these things. Complexity is untidy. It frustrates neat conclusions. It introduces caveats where certainty seeks absolutes.

Modern technology has made this problem worse. The algorithms that increasingly shape our information environment are not designed to cultivate wisdom. They are designed to cultivate engagement. Outrage is engaging. Certainty is engaging. Nuance is not. A meme travels further than a history lesson. A slogan spreads faster than an argument. A false analogy often possesses more emotional power than a careful comparison. Every issue is compressed into a binary choice. Every debate becomes a loyalty test. The first question is no longer whether a statement is true but which side it helps.

The result is a culture increasingly dominated by assumptions, preconceptions and caricatures.

I think back sometimes to those old marches through London in the 1960s. As we walked along singing earnest and often dreadful protest songs, members of the public would call out from the footpaths. “Get a haircut!” they would shout. “Have a wash!” “Get a job!” The implication was always the same. Protesters were outsiders. Troublemakers. Layabouts. Dreamers disconnected from reality.

Years later, in Australia, at that Liberal Party campaign launch I mentioned above, a young Liberal supporter deployed exactly the same line. “Get a job!” she called to me. I reached into my pocket and handed her my business card – back then, I was chief accountant with a small “c” conservative publishing firm. The look on her face was priceless. For a brief moment the stereotype collapsed as an assumption collided with reality. The protester turned out not to be the caricature she had imagined.

The incident was trivial, but the lesson was not. Much of political discourse today consists of people arguing with caricatures rather than engaging with reality. We sort one another into categories and then proceed as though the categories explain everything. Activist. Conservative. Progressive. Populist. Elite. Nationalist. Globalist. Zionist. Anti-Zionist. The labels become substitutes for thought. The person disappears behind the category.

Yet reality stubbornly refuses to cooperate. Human beings are more complicated than their labels. Nations are more complicated than their histories. Political problems are more complicated than their slogans.

The perils of passionate intensity

As I reread these reflections, I find myself returning to two observations that have echoed through much of my adult life. The first is Yeats’s famous warning from The Second Coming: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” Like many celebrated quotations, it is often invoked more than it is examined. It is frequently used to lament the supposed timidity of moderates or to argue that our age requires more conviction, more certainty and greater willingness to fight for what we believe. Yet that was not Yeats’ point. He was not celebrating passionate intensity. He was warning about it.

Writing amid the upheavals of the early twentieth century, Yeats was observing a world in which restraint, balance and judgement appeared to be collapsing while fanaticism, absolutism and ideological fervour were on the rise. The “passionate intensity” belonged not to wise statesmen or thoughtful citizens but to those who possessed an unshakeable belief in their own righteousness. It was a description of certainty untethered from humility.

History would soon provide abundant examples.

The twentieth century was not a century that suffered from a shortage of conviction. Fascists possessed conviction. Communists possessed conviction. Religious extremists possessed conviction. Nationalists, revolutionaries and racial supremacists possessed conviction. None lacked certainty about the correctness of their cause. None doubted that history, morality or destiny stood firmly on their side.

The problem was never too little certainty. The problem was too much of it.

That is why Yeats’ warning speaks so powerfully to our own age. We live once again in a time of passionate intensity. Political tribes, activist movements, media ecosystems and online communities all encourage us to embrace certainty. The incentives are obvious. Certainty is emotionally satisfying. It creates solidarity. It simplifies complexity. It identifies heroes and villains. It provides meaning, belonging and purpose. Above all, it relieves us of the burden of doubt.

Yet doubt, properly understood, is not a weakness. It is one of the disciplines that protects us from ourselves.

The second observation, one we have touched upon above, comes from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s essay collection, The Crack-Up, who wrote that “the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” Whether Fitzgerald consistently met his own standard is perhaps beside the point. The insight itself remains profound.

One might see Fitzgerald’s observation as a kind of antidote to Yeats’ warning. Where Yeats alerts us to the dangers of passionate intensity, Fitzgerald reminds us of the intellectual discipline required to resist it. The capacity to hold competing truths in tension, to acknowledge complexity without succumbing to paralysis, to recognise ambiguity without abandoning judgement—these are among the most important habits of mind a democratic citizen can possess.

Indeed, the independent mind is simply the refusal to surrender that capacity.

Not because all sides are equally right. Not because truth is unknowable. Not because every question has two equally valid answers. But because reality is usually larger, stranger and more contradictory than our tribes permit. Human beings are complicated. Nations are complicated. History is complicated. The slogans painted on our banners and the memes shared across our screens rarely capture more than a fragment of the truth.

Certainty and the attraction of  authenticity

One of the reasons certainty remains such a powerful force in politics is that people often confuse it with authenticity.

A recent observation about populist Australian politician Pauline Hanson captured something important. Her views have not substantially changed in thirty years, and that certainty about what she stands for forms part of her appeal to voters who feel alienated, anxious or ignored. Whether one agrees with Hanson or not is almost beside the point. The observation reveals something larger about the political culture in which we now live.

In times of uncertainty, certainty itself becomes politically valuable.

When people are struggling with rising costs, housing pressures, declining trust in institutions, geopolitical instability and the bewildering complexity of modern life, they are naturally drawn towards voices that appear confident and consistent. Human beings have always preferred clarity to ambiguity and confidence to hesitation. We are pattern-seeking creatures. Faced with confusion, we look for certainty. Faced with complexity, we look for simplicity.

The attraction is understandable.

What is often misunderstood, however, is that certainty and wisdom are not the same thing. Nor are certainty and conviction.

A politician may possess strong convictions while remaining open to evidence, criticism and changing circumstances. Indeed, that is probably what we should hope for in a democratic leader. Conviction involves knowing what one believes and being prepared to defend it. Certainty goes a step further. It is the belief that one cannot be wrong. Conviction allows room for learning. Certainty often does not.

Yet from a distance the two can look remarkably similar.

This is particularly true in an era when so much mainstream politics appears managerial, cautious and focus-grouped. Many contemporary politicians sound as though every sentence has been tested, refined and stripped of anything resembling genuine belief. They speak in carefully calibrated formulations designed not to offend any particular constituency. Such caution may be politically prudent, but it often creates an impression of evasiveness. Voters may not always agree with a politician who speaks plainly, but they often appreciate knowing where that politician stands.

People forgive a surprising amount in leaders they regard as authentic. What they struggle to forgive is the suspicion that their leaders believe one thing and say another.

This helps explain why figures as different as Pauline Hanson, Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders and Nigel Farage have attracted passionate followings. Their supporters frequently describe them not as wise, sophisticated or nuanced, but as “authentic”. What supporters often mean by authenticity is consistency. They know what these figures believe. The message may be right or wrong, attractive or repellent, but it is recognisable.

That consistency becomes especially attractive when the political centre appears uncertain of itself.

The irony is that certainty often flourishes precisely when trust is declining. When institutions command confidence, when living standards are improving and when mainstream parties appear competent, certainty on the political fringes tends to have less appeal. When trust collapses, however, certainty becomes a scarce commodity. Voters begin searching for leaders who seem sure of themselves, even if the proposed solutions are simplistic or unrealistic.

This is where the independent mind must exercise caution.

The temptation is to mistake certainty for competence, confidence for wisdom and consistency for truth. History repeatedly warns against such assumptions. The twentieth century did not suffer from a shortage of certainty. Some of its greatest disasters were fuelled by people who were utterly convinced of their own righteousness. Fanatics are rarely troubled by doubt. Ideologues seldom lack confidence.

Yet there is an equal danger in the opposite direction. A politics devoid of conviction quickly descends into managerial drift. Citizens want leaders who possess principles. They want to know where their leaders stand. They want evidence that there is something beneath the polling, the slogans and the spin.

The challenge, therefore, is not to choose between conviction and uncertainty, but to distinguish conviction from certainty. Conviction says, “This is what I believe, based on the evidence and experience available to me.” Certainty says, “This is what I believe, and no evidence could persuade me otherwise.”

The difference may seem subtle, but it is profound.

After decades of marching, arguing, protesting, campaigning and often, tilting at windmills, I have not lost faith in causes. Nor have I become indifferent to injustice. If anything, experience has reinforced the importance of civic engagement and public participation. Democracies need citizens who care. They need people willing to stand up, speak out and occasionally make nuisances of themselves.

What experience has changed is my relationship with certainty.

I have become more wary of movements that claim exclusive possession of truth. More alert to false analogies, seductive slogans and the temptations of moral capture. More conscious of unintended consequences. More appreciative of intellectual honesty, especially when honesty requires acknowledging facts that complicate one’s preferred narrative. More willing to question my own side as rigorously as I question its opponents.

In short, I have become less impressed by passionate intensity and more interested in judgement.

The challenge of democratic citizenship is not to choose between conviction and doubt. It is to possess enough conviction to act and enough doubt to remain honest. It is to seek moral clarity without succumbing to moral certainty. It is to care deeply about injustice while resisting the temptation to reduce every issue to a morality play. It is to recognise that one’s opponents may occasionally possess a fragment of truth and that one’s allies may occasionally be mistaken.

That is not fence-sitting. It is not moral relativism. It is not indifference.

It is the difficult and often uncomfortable work of remaining intellectually free.

And perhaps that is the final lesson. The independent mind is not characterised by the absence of belief but by the refusal to surrender judgement. It is not a rejection of commitment but a resistance to dogma. It is conviction disciplined by humility, passion tempered by experience, and certainty held in check by the recognition that the world is almost always more complicated than it first appears.

A healthy democracy requires leaders with convictions strong enough to act and citizens thoughtful enough to question them. It requires moral clarity without moral absolutism, confidence without arrogance, and principle without dogma. Above all, it requires the capacity to recognise that knowing what one stands for is a virtue, but believing that one possesses all the answers is not.

That distinction lies at the heart of the independent mind. It is not an argument against commitment. It is an argument against the seductive comfort of certainty. For while certainty may be politically attractive, judgement remains the rarer and more valuable quality. Yeats warned us about passionate intensity. Fitzgerald reminded us of the discipline required to resist it. Between them lies a space that democratic societies desperately need to preserve: a place where conviction and humility coexist, where competing truths can be held in tension, where citizens remain free to think for themselves, and where wisdom begins not with certainty but with the humility to recognise that reality is usually far more complicated than the slogans painted on our banners. In an age increasingly defined by certainty, that may be the most radical act of all.

Judgement and the Limits of Certainty

At this point an obvious question arises. If certainty is so dangerous, why place such faith in judgement? Are we not equally vulnerable to error there as well?

After all, our judgement is shaped by the very things that make us human. It is influenced by our experiences, upbringing, education, culture, temperament, loyalties, fears, aspirations and prejudices. None of us approaches the world as a detached observer. We all carry assumptions into every argument. We all inhabit particular histories. We all see some things more clearly than other.

A former refugee may view immigration differently from someone whose family has lived in the same town for generations. A soldier may understand war differently from a pacifist. An Indigenous Australian may experience Australian history differently from a recent migrant. A Jew may hear echoes in antisemitism that others fail to recognise. A Palestinian may understand displacement in ways others cannot. These perspectives do not necessarily cancel one another out. Nor does any single perspective possess a monopoly on truth. Each illuminates part of the landscape while leaving other parts in shadow.

The independent mind does not somehow escape these influences. It merely becomes conscious of them.

Indeed, one of the defining characteristics of intellectual maturity is recognising that our own perspective is necessarily incomplete. We are all standing somewhere. We are all looking from a particular vantage point. The challenge is not to eliminate subjectivity – an impossible task – but to understand its influence upon us.

This is why judgement differs from certainty.

Certainty assumes that because we have reached a conclusion, the matter is settled. Judgement recognises that conclusions are always provisional, always vulnerable to new evidence, new experiences and new insights. Certainty seeks finality. Judgement remains open to revision.

In this sense, judgement is less about arriving at the right answer than about cultivating habits that reduce the likelihood of arriving at the wrong one. It requires a willingness to ask uncomfortable questions of ourselves. Why do I believe this? What assumptions am I bringing to the issue? What evidence would change my mind? Am I applying the same standards to friends and enemies alike? What facts am I tempted to ignore because they complicate my preferred narrative?

These questions rarely provide certainty. They do, however, encourage honesty.

That honesty is particularly important because many of the most important questions confronting democratic societies involve genuine tensions rather than simple choices. Liberty and equality, security and freedom, justice and mercy, order and compassion, national interest and universal values – these are not problems to be solved once and for all. They are competing goods that must be balanced, negotiated and continually reassessed.

Politics, at its best, is not the elimination of such tensions but the management of them.

History offers countless reminders of the dangers of forgetting this. Time and again, the greatest political disasters have emerged not from excessive doubt but from excessive certainty. The fanatic, the ideologue and the zealot are rarely troubled by ambiguity. They know exactly where they stand. They possess answers for everything. They are convinced that history, morality and truth march in step behind them.

Yet history is littered with the wreckage left by people who were absolutely certain they were right.

This is where the independent mind returns to the insights of Yeats and Fitzgerald.

Yeats warned of those who are “full of passionate intensity,” not because conviction itself is dangerous, but because conviction unrestrained by humility can become fanaticism. Fitzgerald, meanwhile, celebrated the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. Between those two observations lies a profound truth. Mature judgement is not confidence in one’s own infallibility. It is awareness of one’s own limitations.

The paradox is that the people with the best judgement are often those most conscious of how easily judgement can fail.

The more one learns about history, politics and human nature, the harder it becomes to believe that complex questions have simple answers. Good intentions can produce disastrous outcomes. Bad policies can emerge from noble motives. Opponents can occasionally be right. Allies can occasionally be wrong. Causes that deserve support can still produce unintended consequences. Human affairs are untidy in ways that slogans rarely acknowledge.

Yet none of this absolves us of responsibility. Citizens must still make choices. Governments must still govern. Voters must still vote. We cannot escape the necessity of judgement simply because certainty is unattainable.

The alternative to imperfect judgement is not objectivity. It is paralysis.

The challenge, therefore, is not to become certain of our judgement but to hold it provisionally: firmly enough to act, yet lightly enough to revise. To possess convictions without becoming imprisoned by them. To care deeply without succumbing to moral capture. To remain committed to principles while accepting that our understanding of them may always be incomplete.

Perhaps that is the most difficult discipline of all. Certainty says, “I know.” Judgement says, “This is my conclusion based upon the evidence and experience available to me, but I remain open to the possibility that I have missed something.”

The difference may appear subtle, yet it is immense. Certainty seeks closure. Judgement remains in conversation with reality.

And reality, unlike ideology, always has the last word.

In conclusion

Perhaps the independent mind has become one of the last unfashionable virtues.

It lacks the emotional satisfactions of certainty, the camaraderie of tribal belonging and the reassuring simplicity of slogans. It offers no guarantee of popularity and few opportunities for self-righteousness. More often than not, it leaves its advocate stranded between opposing camps, criticised by all sides for refusing to embrace the approved orthodoxy of any one of them. Yet it remains indispensable to the health of a democratic society because it asks something increasingly rare of us: that we think before we choose, question before we condemn, and understand before we judge.

A lifetime of political engagement has convinced me that neither protest nor power possesses a monopoly on wisdom. Activists can identify genuine injustices while proposing unworkable solutions; governments can understand practical realities while losing sight of moral obligations. Both require scrutiny. Both require criticism. Both require citizens willing to think beyond inherited narratives, ideological loyalties and partisan certainties. But this is not really an essay about protest, nor is it ultimately about independents in the electoral sense. It is about a disposition of mind: the determination to remain intellectually free in a culture that increasingly rewards conformity.

When we are young, we often imagine that the opposite of commitment is apathy. We assume that doubt is the enemy of conviction and that certainty is evidence of moral seriousness. Yet a lifetime of politics, protests, campaigns, victories, defeats, enthusiasms and disillusionments suggests something rather different. The real opposite of commitment is not apathy but dogma.

It is entirely possible to care passionately about injustice while resisting moral capture. It is possible to hold strong convictions while remaining open to evidence, criticism and changing circumstances. It is possible to stand for something without believing that one’s own side possesses a monopoly on virtue, wisdom or truth. Indeed, that may be what genuine conviction looks like. Conviction says, “This is what I believe.” Certainty says, “Nothing could persuade me otherwise.” The person who never questions themselves has ceased to serve a cause and has instead begun to worship it.

That, ultimately, is the thread running through this essay: a defence of judgement over certainty.

The phrase that recurs most often in my mind – and has featured prominently in this essay – is that notion of holding two truths at once. It sounds simple enough, yet it runs directly against the grain of contemporary political culture. Our public life increasingly rewards simplification. Algorithms prefer one truth. Activists often prefer one truth. Partisans almost always prefer one truth. The pressure is constant: choose a side, embrace a narrative, identify the villains and remain loyal to the script. Yet reality stubbornly resists such neat arrangements. Mature citizenship frequently requires us to live with competing realities, overlapping truths and unresolved tensions.

It is possible for a nation to be both admirable and flawed, for a people to be both victims and agents of their own history, for a cause to be just and yet produce harmful consequences, for an opponent to be right about one thing and wrong about another. As we have written, it is possible to condemn the atrocities of October 7 and mourn the suffering of Gaza. It is possible to oppose antisemitism while criticising Israeli policy, to support Palestinian aspirations while rejecting Hamas, to acknowledge the dispossession of Indigenous Australians while recognising the achievements of modern Australia. These are not contradictions to be eliminated but tensions to be navigated. They require judgement rather than certainty, humility rather than righteousness.

I find myself returning, too, to WB Yeats and Scott F Fitzgerald, writers who have hovered over these reflections. Between them lies the intellectual territory occupied by the independent mind: conviction tempered by doubt, clarity balanced by complexity, belief disciplined by self-examination.

This is not because all sides are equally right, nor because truth is unknowable, nor because every argument lies somewhere in a comfortable middle ground. Rather, it is because reality is usually larger, stranger and more contradictory than our tribes permit. Human affairs do not fit neatly into ideological categories. History rarely conforms to our preferred narratives. Good intentions do not guarantee good outcomes. Sincerity does not confer correctness. Authenticity does not guarantee wisdom. The world is full of competing goals, unintended consequences and moral ambiguities that cannot be resolved by slogans alone.

Perhaps that is the final irony. After decades of marching, arguing, protesting, campaigning, reading, writing and, more than occasionally, tilting at windmills, one does not necessarily end up believing in fewer causes. One does not become indifferent to injustice, retreat from public life or cease caring about the future. Rather, one becomes more wary of certainty, more conscious of unintended consequences, more alert to false analogies and seductive slogans, and more appreciative of the rare virtue of intellectual honesty.

One becomes more aware of the distinction between the high moral ground and the low moral ground disguised as the high moral ground. One becomes more sensitive to the dangers of moral capture, more sceptical of movements that demand conformity of thought, and more willing to question one’s own assumptions as rigorously as those of one’s opponents.

That is not a retreat from conviction. It is conviction disciplined by humility. It is passion tempered by experience. And experience, unlike ideology, has a habit of teaching modesty about what we know and caution about what we merely think we know.

In the end, that may be the independent mind’s greatest contribution to a democratic society. Not certainty, but judgement; not tribal loyalty, but intellectual honesty; not the comforting illusion of possessing all the answers, but the willingness to ask difficult questions, follow evidence wherever it leads, and hold competing truths in tension without surrendering either one’s principles or one’s capacity for doubt.

There is, however, one final irony. A defence of judgement over certainty should not be mistaken for confidence in one’s own judgement. We are all prisoners, to some degree, of our experiences, our histories, our loyalties and our blind spots. None of us sees the whole landscape. The independent mind is not distinguished by superior wisdom so much as by an awareness of its own limitations. It understands that every perspective illuminates some truths while obscuring others. Its task is therefore not to eliminate doubt but to live productively with it; not to achieve perfect objectivity but to remain open to correction. If certainty begins with the belief that one cannot be wrong, judgement begins with the recognition that one might be.

It is in that uneasy space between certainty and cynicism, between conviction and humility, between passion and judgement, that citizenship is at its most demanding and, perhaps, at its most valuable. Democracy ultimately depends not upon the certainty of its partisans but upon the wisdom of its citizens. Wisdom begins with the recognition that reality is usually more complicated than our slogans, larger than our causes, and far too important to be entrusted to those who claim to possess all the answers. In an age that increasingly rewards certainty, the independent mind remains one of the few places where freedom, judgement and humility can still coexist.

In That Howling Infinite, June 2026

This essay was written in conversation 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.

See also in In That Howling Infinite, A Political World – Thoughts and Themes, including: Moral capture, conditional empathy and the failure of shock, Standing on the high moral ground is hard work and Shaping facts to feelings – debating intellectual dishonesty

Author’s Note

The essays published in In That Howling Infinite reflect a lifelong engagement with politics, history, culture and public affairs. They are not intended as manifestos, nor do they seek to recruit readers to a particular ideological camp. Rather, they represent an ongoing attempt to understand a complex world while resisting the temptations of certainty, tribalism and intellectual complacency.

The views expressed in this essay are not therefore confined to these pages. Rather, they form part of a broader body of work that range from Australian history and politic, the Middle East,  and Russian history to contemporary activism, political discourse, identity, memory and public morality. They are connected by a number of recurring themes.

Among these is the belief that genuine understanding requires intellectual honesty: the willingness to follow evidence even when it challenges our assumptions, complicates our preferred narratives or discomforts our own side. Another is the conviction that moral clarity and moral certainty are not the same thing. One may recognise injustice, condemn cruelty and defend human dignity without imagining that any individual, movement or ideology possesses a monopoly on truth.

These essays also reflect a persistent concern with what I have elsewhere called moral capture: the process by which a cause becomes so central to personal identity that facts are no longer evaluated on their merits but according to whether they support or undermine the cause itself. Closely related is the phenomenon of conditional empathy, where compassion is extended selectively—depending on the identity of victims or perpetrators—rather than consistently across human suffering. Both tendencies, I would argue, diminish our capacity for honest inquiry and weaken our ability to navigate complex moral questions.

Readers familiar with One Land, Two Peoples: History, Memory, Continuity, and Inheritance will recognise another recurring principle: the necessity of holding two truths in tension at the same time. The Israeli–Palestinian conflict is perhaps one of the clearest examples of a subject that resists simplistic narratives, demanding that we acknowledge competing histories, competing grievances and competing aspirations without reducing either side to caricature. Yet the same principle applies far beyond the Middle East. It applies equally to debates about national identity, immigration, colonial history, religion, social justice, populism and democratic governance.

Throughout these essays runs a scepticism towards slogans, false analogies and the seductive simplicity of binary thinking. The modern information environment rewards certainty, outrage and performative moral confidence. It is less hospitable to ambiguity, nuance and self-questioning. Yet history repeatedly suggests that the greatest errors are often committed not by those troubled by doubt but by those convinced they possess exclusive access to truth.

For that reason, the essays collected in In That Howling Infinite should be read not as declarations of certainty but as exercises in inquiry. They are attempts to ask difficult questions rather than provide final answers; to explore tensions rather than dissolve them; and to defend the increasingly unfashionable proposition that intellectual independence remains both possible and necessary.

If there is a single thread connecting them all, it is the belief that democratic citizenship requires more than passion and more than conviction. It requires judgement. It requires humility. It requires the capacity to hold competing truths in tension without surrendering either one’s principles or one’s willingness to question them.

In an age increasingly organised around tribes, narratives and certainties, that may be one of the most important responsibilities a citizen can undertake. The essays are offered in that spirit. They do not ask the reader to agree with every conclusion. They ask only that the questions remain open, the evidence be examined honestly, and the conversation continue. After all, the purpose of independent thought is not to win arguments, but to understand the world a little better than we did before.