Seems like I been down this way before Is there any truth in that, señor? Bob Dylan, Señor (Tales of Yankee Power)
In That Howling Infinite’s recent interest in Venezuela is less about Venezuela itself than about a familiar American habit resurfacing in a new theatre. We have seen this pattern before – in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Libya – each intervention launched with confident rhetoric, elastic legal reasoning, and the quietly held belief that regimes, once struck, will obligingly collapse into something better. The names change; the logic does not. Venezuela now feels like the latest rehearsal space for a drama that has not yet finished running elsewhere.
This is where the US’ old Monroe Doctrine returns, not as doctrine so much as reflex. A Monroe Redux: stripped of 19th-century solemnity, repurposed for a world of drones, covert action, and press-conference deterrence. The Western Hemisphere is once again imagined as a special moral jurisdiction, even as the Middle East – long the cockpit of American intervention – appears exhausted, over-militarized, and politically unrewarding. Latin America, by contrast, offers proximity, asymmetry, and deniability. The geography has changed; the instincts have not.
This preoccupation also intersects with a longstanding fascination with the lessons of historian Barbara Tuchman’s acclaimed The March of Folly. Tuchman’s insight was not that governments lack information, but that they persist in policies demonstrably failing by their own stated objectives. Vietnam, later memorably described as “chaos without a compass,” remains the archetype: motion mistaken for strategy, escalation substituting for purpose. Iraq was folly recast as liberation; Afghanistan, folly prolonged as nation-building; Libya, folly laundered through humanitarian language. Iran hovers perpetually as folly-in-waiting, the regime-change itch that never quite gets scratched, yet never entirely disappears.
Viewed through this lens, Venezuela appears less as an isolated crisis than as a familiar historical rhyme. A little bombing here, a little bluster there; symbolic strikes presented as prudence, restraint marketed as strategy. It is not yet tragedy—history rarely announces itself so obligingly – but it carries the unmistakable scent of policies drifting, of a compass quietly returned to the drawer.
Tuchman’s opus is often misread as a study of stupidity. It is nothing of the sort. She was writing about persistence – about the peculiar ability of governments to continue down a path long after its internal logic has collapsed, armed with information but imprisoned by momentum. Vietnam was not born of ignorance but of escalation mistaken for purpose. Reading the accounts of Trump’s Venezuelan operation – no longer merely a “dock strike” but a full-blooded decapitation raid – one hears that same low, familiar hum: motion without destination, force without horizon.
A leap in the dark
Everyone knew something like this was coming. Few expected it to be so clean. A president seized, command structures stunned, Caracas rattled just enough to demonstrate omnipotence without visibly levelling the city. From a tactical standpoint, it was impressive – the sort of operation that flatters planners and tempts presidents into believing that history, this time, might behave itself. But history rarely does. Leadership can be removed; regimes, less so. Chavismo survived Chávez’s death and Maduro’s long decay. Movements, unlike men, do not collapse neatly when the head is severed. They mutate. They harden. They endure.
This is where the metaphor shifts and darkens. The United States now looks less like a chess grandmaster and more like the proverbial dog that finally caught the car – triumphant, panting, and unsure what to do next. Decapitation creates ownership. Once you have removed the figurehead, ambiguity evaporates. The question is no longer whether Washington is intervening, but what exactly it intends to build, sustain, or suppress in the vacuum it has helped create.
A week ago, US action might have been interpreted as calibrated escalation: signalling without war, pressure without conquest, violence as message rather than mission. That logic may have held when the strike was offshore, symbolic, plausibly deniable as a prelude rather than a crossing. It is harder to sustain once the president of a sovereign state has been bundled onto a ship and flown north in handcuffs. Symbolism has consequences. At some point, signalling becomes authorship.
The deeper assumption underlying both phases – the demonstrative strike and the decapitation raid – is the same one that has haunted American foreign policy for decades: that limited, spectacular violence produces rational political outcomes. That elites defect under pressure rather than close ranks. That populations blame their rulers rather than the foreign power violating their sovereignty. That humiliation weakens movements rather than mythologising them. This faith survived Iraq, limped through Afghanistan, and still stalks Washington like an unkillable ghost.
What reads in Washington as restraint reads elsewhere as undeclared war. What Beltway strategists describe as “calibrated” looks, from Caracas – or Beijing, Moscow, Tehran, each of whom have form – like arbitrariness dressed up as doctrine. In his most recent foreign policy forays, Trump has fired missiles into Nigeria and sent special forces into Venezuela. He cannot wield enough influence to get his way with major powers, so he targets smaller ones. The White House spins this as a demonstration of American strength, but those who rule in Moscow and Beijing will not be fooled. Nor should anyone else. Whilst ostensibly demonstrating American strength, it also highlights its weakness. Today it is Venezuela; tomorrow it might be somewhere else entirely. The pattern is not coherence but surprise. Power exercised as theatre.
Trump’s foreign policy has always oscillated between maximalist rhetoric and minimalist follow-through. He threatens fire and fury, then settles for a crater and a press conference. He speaks the language of conquest while practising the art of nuisance. Yet Venezuela marks a subtle shift. This is no longer nuisance alone. By removing Maduro, Trump has crossed from menace into management, whether he wants the responsibility or not. Chaos, once unleashed, has a habit of demanding supervision.
The international reaction follows a script so familiar it almost performs itself. International law is solemnly invoked by states that otherwise treat it as optional décor. Yanqui imperialism is dusted off and waved aloft. Blood for oil, regime change, darkest chapters, dangerous precedents – all the old tropes re-emerge, not because they are always wrong, but because they are always available. France, China, Russia, the EU condemn the breach while sidestepping the harder question: what is to be done now that a criminalised, hollowed-out regime has been removed not by its people, but by force?
Latin America splits along its habitual fault lines. Argentina’s Milei cheers liberty’s advance. Brazil’s Lula warns, with weary accuracy, that violence justified as justice tends to metastasise into instability. Neighbouring Colombia braces for refugees. Cuba mutters “state terrorism.” The region remembers – perhaps too well – that external interventions rarely end where their authors imagine.
What is most striking, though, is how little this seems to disturb the American political bloodstream. The legal basis for seizing a foreign head of state is treated as a technicality. Congressional war powers hover faintly in the background. The risk of retaliation, miscalculation, or long-term entanglement is acknowledged, then politely ignored. The old muscle memory of American power keeps flexing, long after the strategic rationale has atrophied.
And so Tuchman returns, not as a moralist but as a diagnostician. Folly is not recklessness; it is normalisation. It is the steady acceptance of contradiction as policy. Trump’s Venezuela adventure now embodies this perfectly: escalation without ownership, ownership without vision, action without explanation. Each move can be defended in isolation. Together, they form a strategy that cannot quite say what it is for.
Hovering over all of this – absurdly, yet tellingly – is the mirage of the Nobel Peace Prize so coveted by President Trump. The prize is not awarded for the mere absence of war, but for the construction of peace: treaties, frameworks, institutions that reduce violence rather than rebrand it. Bombing here, abducting there, tearing up agreements while demanding credit for not starting new wars is not peace-making; it is anti-diplomacy. Peace defined negatively, as something that has not yet collapsed.
One imagines the Nobel Committee reading this Venezuelan episode with a raised eyebrow: sovereignty breached as messaging, escalation choreographed like a reality-show arc, regime change gestured at but not owned. Peace prizes are not usually awarded for keeping one’s options open.
In the end, Trump’s Venezuelan jiggery-pokery is fascinating for the same reason Vietnam remains endlessly analysed. It shows how great powers drift — not because they are blind, but because they cannot quite decide what they are looking for. Chaos without a compass is not the absence of movement. It is movement mistaken for purpose. And history, as Tuchman patiently reminds us, is unforgiving toward those who confuse the two.
Wrong way, go back?
Soon after the American militarily impressive operation, The Atlantic published an cautionary opinion piece by staff writer Colin Friedersdorf arguing that Trump has effectively launched a regime-change war against Venezuela without constitutional authority, democratic consent, or a plausible plan for what comes next. The core charge is not primarily strategic incompetence but constitutional betrayal.
He contrasts Trump’s actions with past presidents who, whatever their later failures, at least sought congressional authorisation before waging major wars. Roosevelt after Pearl Harbor and George W. Bush before Afghanistan and Iraq are invoked not as moral exemplars but as constitutional ones: they recognised that the power to initiate war belongs to Congress, and that legitimacy flows—however imperfectly—from public consent. Trump, by contrast, has dispensed with permission altogether.
Friedersdorf dismisses the administration’s legal justifications as threadbare. Labeling Maduro a “narcoterrorist” or pointing to a US indictment does not, he argues, amount to lawful grounds for war against a sovereign state. These are prosecutorial claims masquerading as casus belli, not a substitute for authorisation under domestic or international law.
Strategically, the article warns that toppling Maduro would be the easy part. Venezuela is already riddled with armed groups, including Colombian militants who use its territory as a base for smuggling and mining. Removing the regime risks unleashing forces that would not “go quietly,” echoing Iraq and Libya more than any clean counter-narcotics success.
Friedersdorf argues that Trump is uniquely unfitted for a regime-change war for several interlocking reasons, combining personal disposition, governance style, and historical patterns of behaviour. Unlike previous presidents who sought congressional authorisation—Roosevelt after Pearl Harbor, George W. Bush before Afghanistan and Iraq – Trump bypassed the Constitution entirely. For Friedersdorf, this is not merely a procedural violation; it signals a reckless disregard for the legal and democratic frameworks that constrain American war-making, a disregard which has tangible consequences when planning complex military operations overseas.
Second, Trump’s track record of self-interest and transactional politics undermines confidence in his strategic judgment. Friedersdorf points to a “lifelong pattern” in which Trump has pursued personal, familial, or financial gain, sometimes at the expense of institutional norms or public welfare. A regime-change war in a resource-rich country like Venezuela, Friedersdorf suggests, is exactly the kind of environment in which such temptations could manifest: the conflation of national interest with personal enrichment. Unlike professional soldiers or presidents with experience in foreign policy and national security, Trump’s incentives are highly idiosyncratic, making the outcomes of a war unpredictable and potentially self-serving.
Third, Friedersdorf questions Trump’s capacity for sustained leadership and operational management in a conflict that, by its nature, requires patience, coordination, and political nuance. Toppling Maduro may be “easy” in the sense of a tactical strike, but the aftermath – stabilising Venezuela, managing humanitarian fallout, and navigating regional politics – requires sustained commitment. Friedersdorf doubts that Trump possesses the temperament, patience, or skill to oversee such a complex and prolonged effort. The concern is that he could declare victory prematurely, mismanage occupation or transition, or escalate in ways that deepen instability rather than resolve it.
Finally, Friedersdorf critiques the political myopia and disregard for public opinion in Trump’s approach. Polls reportedly showed a majority of Americans opposed to military intervention in Venezuela, yet Trump proceeded unilaterally. In Friedersdorf’s assessment, this combination—constitutional bypass, personal opportunism, lack of leadership discipline, and political insensitivity—makes Trump not just ill-prepared, but dangerously mismatched to the responsibilities of a regime-change war, with risks to both American legitimacy and Venezuelan stability.
In short, Friedersdorf sees Trump as uniquely unfit because the personal, constitutional, and strategic factors that would constrain a conventional president are either absent or inverted in him, making a complex foreign intervention unusually perilous. And, even if the intervention were to improve Venezuelans’ lives – a possibility Friedersdorf does not dismiss outright – it would still represent a violation of American democratic norms.
The concluding warning is blunt: by choosing war despite public opposition and without congressional approval, Trump has shown contempt for both the Constitution and the electorate. If Congress does not assert its authority now, Friedersdorf fears this episode will become precedent – another step toward endless wars of choice launched by executive whim, not collective decision.
In short, the article frames Venezuela not merely as a foreign-policy gamble, but as a constitutional crisis in miniature – one that exposes how fragile America’s war-making restraints have become when a president decides they are inconvenient.
What happens now?
Everyone knew something like this was coming; perhaps fewer expected it to be executed with such clinical speed. The pre-dawn abduction of Nicolás Maduro by US forces is less a surprise than a punctuation mark — a moment where long-signalled intent finally hardened into action. A foreign head of state removed in two hours. Mission theatrically accomplished. Endgame conspicuously absent.
It is challenging, but not impossible, for American forces to amass massive military hardware, materiel and personnel offshore, bombard a small neighbour and send special forces into its capital. It is much harder for an American president to control what happens in the aftermath. This explains why global leaders are so cautious about this operation. No major European leaders have endorsed the use of force to bring down the Venezuelan government.
The real test for Trump is what comes next. He has been rightly critical of the US invasion of Iraq, and his MAGA movement favours “America First” rather than “regime change” overseas, but now he pursues a regime change of his own, with only a vague assurance that he and his lieutenants will run Venezuela for an unspecified time. The objective has a strategic element, in trying to slow the flow of drugs into America, but most of it is nakedly commercial. While other presidents might not have said this out loud, Trump is direct: he wants US control of the Venezuelan oil fields, with US oil companies investing and making money, so that oil production will increase.
In an opinion piece published in the Sydney Morning Hearal on 5th June, Robert Muggah, co-founder of the Igarapé Institute think tank and a fellow at Princeton University, usefully lays out five post-Maduro scenarios, though what binds them is not optimism but ambiguity. The first – Trump declares victory and walks away – would be the most American of outcomes: maximum disruption, minimum follow-through. Chavismo, minus its latest avatar, shuffles on; Washington expends enormous leverage only to abandon it; the refugees keep coming. The dog catches the car, looks briefly triumphant, and then isn’t quite sure what to do next.
The second scenario – a popular uprising washing away Chavismo – flatters liberal intuition but ignores institutional rot. Venezuela’s civic muscle has atrophied after years of repression, criminalisation, and mass emigration. Armed colectivos remain invested in chaos. What sounds like democratic renewal risks becoming a weak interim regime, punctuated by violence, oil-sector infighting, and amnesty wars.
Scenario three is the familiar regime-change fantasy: escalate, sanction, manage an election, install a friendly opposition figure, promise reconstruction. The problem, as ever, is legitimacy. A government midwifed too visibly by Washington inherits the original sin of imperial sponsorship. Chavismo’s anti-imperial narrative – long threadbare – would suddenly acquire fresh oxygen, while external actors queue up to meddle by proxy. Another low-grade insurgency beckons.
The fourth option – US custodianship – is the one Trump has effectively name-checked: trusteeship without the label. Stabilise the bureaucracy, revive oil production, choreograph elections, dangle sanctions relief, keep troops nearby “just in case”. It is administratively coherent and politically radioactive. It risks converting a crisis of governance into a crisis of sovereignty, hardening nationalist resistance and validating the very mythology the intervention claims to dismantle.
Which leaves the fifth, and perhaps most honest, outcome: managed instability. No clean victory, no decisive collapse. A weakened Chavista elite, a divided opposition, fragmented security actors, and a US that calibrates pressure without appetite for occupation. A low-boil conflict, indefinitely deferred resolution, limbo as policy.
Hovering over all this is Monroe Doctrine 2.0 – a message not just to Caracas but to Havana, Managua, Bogotá, Panama, even further afield. This was less about Maduro than about signalling who gets to set terms in the hemisphere, and who doesn’t. A muscular reminder that alignment matters, and misalignment carries costs.
For Venezuelans themselves, the prognosis is bleakly familiar: another external intervention, another promise of order, another season of uncertainty. The screw tightens, the rhetoric soars, the moral justifications proliferate – and ordinary people remain suspended between liberation narratives and lived precarity.
History suggests this is not an ending but a prologue. The question, as always, is whether anyone involved is genuinely prepared to live with the consequences of what they’ve just begun.
It is worth recalling, in this context, what ultimately happened to Muammar Gaddafi and Saddam Hussein – two leaders who, in different ways, became objects of Western fixation and regime-change temptation. Saddam was toppled by overwhelming force, hunted down, tried under a hastily constructed legal order, and hanged; the state he ruled collapsed with him, unleashing sectarian violence and regional instability that still reverberate. Gaddafi, having abandoned his weapons programmes in the hope of rehabilitation, was nevertheless pursued once the opportunity arose, cornered during a NATO-backed intervention, and killed by a mob in a Libyan drainage culvert. Libya followed him into fragmentation, militia rule, and proxy warfare.
In neither case did the removal of the strongman deliver the orderly political transformation that had been implicitly promised. What followed was not liberal democracy but vacuum – power without legitimacy, violence without direction. These episodes linger in the strategic memory not merely as moral tales but as practical ones: regime change is easy to threaten, harder to execute, and almost impossible to control once unleashed.
And we are here as on a darkling plain Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, Where ignorant armies clash by night.
Mathew Arnold, Dover Beach
We called 2024 a “year of everything, everywhere, all at once”, and it earned the name. Crises collided, news arrived faster than we could process it, and the world seemed to exist in a state of constant shock. 2025 did not bring relief. Instead, the chaos began to settle. Wars dragged on, political divides hardened, social tensions deepened, and technology reshaped how we saw and understood it all.
It was the year the world stopped exploding in real time and started being what it had already become: messy, uneven, morally complicated, and stubbornly persistent. A year, indeed, in a world of echoes, refrains and unfinished business. And we spent the year watching power bargain brazenly in plain sight, trying to describe what was happening while it unfolded around us.
From Gaza to Ukraine, Sudan to Syria, from America’s self-inflicted fracture to Australia’s sudden wake-up call on Bondi Bondi, 2025 forced a reckoning: the world did not pause, but it did sort itself – deciding what we would notice, what we would ignore, and what we would learn to live with. Alongside human crises came the continuing advance of AI and chatbots, and the dominion of the algorithms that now govern attention, proving that disruption can be structural as well as geopolitical.
Gaza: War, Then “Ceasefire”
The war in Gaza dominated the year internationally and here in Australia, even as attention ebbed and flowed. Military operations continued for months, followed eventually by a “ceasefire” – a word doing far more work than it should or even justified. Fighting paused, hostages living and dead were returned and prisoners released, but the devastation remained: tens of thousands dead, cities demolished, humanitarian catastrophe unresolved. And the causes of the consequences standing still amidst the ruins and the rubble.
Western governments continued to back Israel while expressing concern for civilians, a contradiction that grew harder to defend, while street protests and online anger seethed all across the world. At the same time, antisemitism surged globally, often hiding behind the language of anti-Zionism. Two realities existed together, and too many people insisted on choosing only one.
By the end of the year, the war had not been resolved – merely frozen. Trust in Western moral leadership had been badly damaged, and Israelis and Palestinians remain in bitter limbo.
Long-simmering tensions between Israel and Iran spilled into open conflict. What had once been indirect – proxies, cyberattacks, covert strikes – became visible. A brief but destructive war of missile exchanges ended with the United States asserting ordinance, deterrence and control.
The episode was brief but telling. It showed that America still reaches for its guns quickly, even as it struggles to define long-term goals. Another line was crossed, then quickly absorbed into the background of “normal” geopolitics.
Russia, Ukraine and Trump’s “Peace”
Ukraine entered 2025 mired in stalemate. Front lines barely moved. Casualties continued to mount. Western support held, but with clear signs of fatigue. And Donald Trump’s re-emergence reshaped the conversation. His promise to deliver instant “peace” reframed the war not as a question of justice or sovereignty, but of exhaustion. Peace was no longer about what Ukraine deserved, but about what the world was tired of sustaining and what the “art of the deal” could deliver.
The war didn’t end. It simply became something many wanted to stop thinking about. Not Ukraine and Russia, but. The carnage continues.
Donald Trump’s one-way crush on Vladimir gave us the one of the+most cringeworthy moments in global politics – Trump greeting the Russian president in Alaska: As the US president rolled out the red carpet for the world’s most dangerous autocrat, Russia’s attack on Ukraine accelerated. Trump got precisely nothing out of the meeting, except for the chance to hang out with a gangster he so obviously admires and of whom he is embarrassingly in awe.
Syria: Free, but stranded at the crossroads
A year after Assad’s fall, Syria remained unstable and unresolved. The regime was gone, but the future was unclear. Old sectarian tensions resurfaced, often in bloodshed, new power struggles emerged, powerful neighbours staked claims and justice for past crimes remained distant.
Syria in 2025 was neither a success story nor a collapse – but suspended between heaven and hell, a country trying to exist after catastrophe with the rest of the world largely moving on.
Women in Damascus celebrate the fall of the Assad regime
Sudan: what genocide actually looks like
Sudan’s civil war continued with little international attention. Mass killing, ethnic cleansing, famine, and displacement unfolded slowly and relentlessly. This was genocide without spectacle. No clear narrative. No sustained outrage. It showed how mass atrocity can now occur not in secrecy, but in plain sight – and still be ignored.
The United States spent 2025 deeply divided, with no sign of healing. Pew Research polling showed that seven out of ten republicans think that the opposite side is immoral while six of ten democrats thinks the same of their rivals.
Trump’s return to power sharpened those divisions. His administration governed aggressively: mass deportations, punitive tariffs, the dismantling of foreign aid, political retribution, and pressure on democratic institutions. The country looked inward and outward at the same time – less cooperative, more transactional, more openly nationalist. Democratic norms eroded not overnight, but through constant stress and disregard. With three years still to run and the tell-tale midterms approaching, allies and cronies are adjusting, bickering rivals are taking notes, and uncertainty has become the defining feature of American leadership. Meanwhile, #47 is slapping his name on everything he can christen, from bitcoins to battleships.
US foreign policy took on a blunt, old-fashioned tone. Pressure on Canada and Mexico increased. Talk of annexing Greenland resurfaced. Venezuela, caught in the maw of Yanqui bullying and bluster, waits nervously for Washington’s next move. The administration promised imminent land operations – and then bombed Nigeria! The revival of the old Monroe Doctrine felt, as baseball wizz Yogi Berra once remarked, like déjà vu all over again, not as strategy, but as instinct. Influence asserted, consultation discarded. The “ugly American” was back, and unapologetic.
Europe in 2025 didn’t collapse, as many pundits suggested it might, but it shifted. Far-right ideas gained ground even where far-right parties didn’t win and remained, for now, on the fringes albeit closer to electoral success. Borders tightened; policies hardened; street protests proliferated – against immigration and against Israel, Support for Ukraine continued, but cautiously. The continent stood at a crossroads: still committed to liberal values in theory, but increasingly selective in practice.
Uncle Sam’s cold-shoulder
Rumbling away in the background throughout year was the quiet but cumulative alienation of America’s allies. Not with a single rupture, but through a thousand small slights. transactional diplomacy dressed up as realism, alliances treated as invoices rather than covenants, multilateralism dismissed as weakness. Europe learned that security guarantees come with a mood swing; the Middle East heard policy announced via spectacle; Asia watched reassurance coexist uneasily with unpredictability.
The new dispensation was illustrated by the Trump National Security Strategy. It is at once candid and contradictory: it outlines a narrower, realist vision of American interests, emphasising sovereignty, burden-sharing, industrial renewal, and strategic clarity, yet it is riddled with silences, evasions, and tensions between rhetoric and likely action. Allies are scolded for weakness while the document avoids naming Russia’s aggression, underplays China, and projects American cultural anxieties onto Europe. These contradictions expose both strategic incoherence and the limits of paper doctrine against presidential temperament, leaving Europe facing an irreversible rupture in trust and revealing a strategy as much about America’s insecurities as its actual global posture.
The post-WW2 order has not so much been dismantled as shrugged at, and indeed, shrugged off. Trust eroded not because the United States has withdrawn from the world, but because it has remained present without being reliable, and presumed itself to be in charge. Power, exercised loudly but inconsistently, has discovered an old truth: allies can endure disagreement, but they struggle with contempt.
Australia in 2025 … high flight and crash landing
Though beset by a multitude of crises – the cost of living, housing, health and education services – the Albanese Labor government was returned comfortably in May, helped by a divided, incoherent, and seemingly out of touch opposition. For the rest the year, federal politics felt strangely frictionless with policy drift passing for stability. The Coalition remained locked in internal conflict, unable to present a credible alternative. The Greens, chastened by electoral defeat and in many formerly friendly quarters, ideological disillusionment, treaded water.
But beneath the surface, social cohesion frayed. Immigration debates sharpened. Antisemitism rose noticeably, no longer something Australians could pretend belonged elsewhere. Attacks on Jewish Australians forced a reckoning many had avoided and hoped would resolve once the tremors of the war in Gaza had ameliorated. Until 6.47pm on 7th December, a beautiful evening on Sydney’s iconic Bondi Beach. Sudden, brutal and in our summer playground, sectarian violence shattered the sense of distance Australians often feel from global disorder. At that moment, politics stopped feeling abstract. The world, with all its instability, barged in and brought the country down to earth.
Lifesavers on Bondi Beach, 20 December 2025. Edwina Pickles
Featured photograph and above:
A handful of bodies on Bondi Beach, and behind them, the howling infinite of expectation, obligation, and the careful rationing of human empathy. The smallness of the beach against the vastness of consequences. On December 20, 2025, Bondi’s iconic lifesavers formed a line stretching the entire length of the beach -silent, solemn, a nation visibly in mourning. Similar tributes unfolded from Perth to Byron Bay, gestures of unity in the face of a shock that touched the whole country.
The Year of the Chatbot: Promise, Power, and Risk
And now, a break from the doom and gloom …
2025 was the year when artificial intelligence became part of daily life. Chatbots ceased to be experimental and became integral, transforming from novelty to utility seemingly overnight. People used it to write, research, translate, plan, argue, comfort, and persuade; institutions and individuals adopted it instinctively. Setting tone as much as content, the ‘bots have lowered barriers to knowledge, sharpened thinking, and helped people articulate ideas they might otherwise struggle to express. Used well, they amplified curiosity rather than replace it.
The opportunities are obvious – but so are the risks. Systems that can clarify complexity can also flatten it. Chatbots sound confident even when wrong, smooth over disagreement, and made language cleaner, calmer, and more persuasive – but not necessarily truer. They reinforce confirmation bias, outrage, and tribal certainty, generating arguments instantly and flooding the zone with plausible-sounding text. As information has became faster, cheaper, and less reliable, Certainty has spread more easily than truth, so truth has to work much harder.
Dependence is subtler but real. Outsourcing thinking – summaries instead of reading, answers instead of wrestling – did not make humans stupid, but less patient. Nuance, doubt, and slow understanding became harder to justify in a world optimised for speed. Yet conversely, man people still seek context, history, and complexity. Used deliberately, AI could slow the pace, map contradictions, and hold multiple truths at once.
By the end of 2025, the question was no longer whether AI would shape public life – it already had. The real question is whether humans would use it as a shortcut, or as a discipline. The technology is neutral. The danger – and the promise – lies in how much thinking we are willing to give up, and how much responsibility we are prepared to keep.
Alongside the chatbot sat a quieter, more insidious force: the algorithm itself. By 2025 it no longer simply organised information – it governed attention. What people saw, felt, and argued about was shaped less by importance than by engagement. To borrow from 20th century philosopher and communication theorist and educator Marshall McLuhan, the meme had become the message. Complex realities were compressed into images, slogans, clips, and talking points designed not to inform but to travel. The algorithm rewarded speed over reflection, certainty over doubt, heat over light. Politics, war, and grief were all flattened into content, stripped of context, and ranked by performance. What mattered most was not what was true or necessary, but what disseminated.
Passion without Wisdom
I wrote during the year that we seemed “full of passionate intensity” – Yeats’ phrase still apt in the twenty first century- but increasingly short on wisdom and insight. 2025 confirmed it. Anger was everywhere, empathy highly selective, certainty worn like armour. People felt deeply but thought narrowly. Moral energy surged but rarely slowed into understanding. The problem was not indifference; it was excess – too much feeling, too little reflection. In that environment, nuance looked like weakness and patience like complicity. What was missing was not information, but judgement – the harder work of holding contradiction, of resisting instant conclusions, of allowing complexity to temper conviction. Passion was abundant. Insight, increasingly rare.
Looking Toward 2026
Looking back on 2025, it seems that there were no endings, neither happy or sad. Just a promise, it seems, of more of the same. The year didn’t solve anything. It clarified things. And if it clarified anything, it was that the world has grown adept at managing, ignoring, or absorbing what it cannot fix. It revealed a world adjusting to permanent instability. In this year of echoes, refrains, and unfinished sentences.
Passion, intensity, and outrage were abundant, but patience, wisdom, and insight remained scarce. Democracies strained under internal and external pressures. Wars lingered unresolved. Technology reshaped thought and attention.
Some argue that hope springs eternal, that yet, even amid the drift and the fractures, glimpses of understanding and resistance persisted, that although the world has settled into its chaos, we can be riders on the storm. But, I fear, 2026 arrives not as break, a failsafe, a safety valve, but as continuation. It looms as a test of endurance rather than transformation. In my somnolent frame of mind, I’ve reached again for my Yeats. “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, the blood-dimmed tide is loosed …”
After the chaos of 2024 and the hardening of 2025, the question is no longer what might go wrong. It’s what we’re prepared to live with.
And so we come to what In That Howling Infinite wrote in 2025.
What we wrote in 2025
It was a year that refused neat endings.
It began in a wasteland – Gaza as moral ground zero – and moved, restlessly, through revolutions real and imagined: Trump as symptom and accelerant, Putin as a man racing his own shadow, Syria forever at the crossroads where history idles and then accelerates without warning. Gaza returned, again and again, sunrise and false dawn, as spectacle and strategy; Sudan burned in near silence; Venezuela re-entered the frame as empire’s backyard as the US disinterred its Monrovian legacy. In That Howling Infinite featured pieces on each of these – several in many cases , twenty in all, plus a few of relevance to them, including an overview of journalist Robert Fisk’s last book (The Night of Power – Robert Fisk’s bitter epilogue). A broadranging historical piece written in the previous year and deferred, Modern history is built upon exodus and displacement, provided a corrective of sorts to the distorted narratives that have emerged in recent years due to a dearth of historical knowledge and the partisan weaponisation of words.
It was almost as light relief that we turned to other subjects. Of particular interest was AI. Approaching remorselessly yet almost unrecognised in recent years, it banged a loud gong and crept from curiosity to condition, from tool to weather system, quietly rewriting the newsroom, the internet, and the idea of authorship. ChatGPT and other chatbots appeared not as saviours but as promise and peril in equal measure. By year end, we were fretting about using ChatGPT too much and regarding it as something to moderate like alcohol or fatty foods. We published three pieces on the subject in what seemed like rapid succession, and then pestered out – sucked into the machinery, I fear.
What with so much else attracting our attention, we nevertheless managed to find time for some history – including a particularly enthralling and indeed iconoclastic book on the fall of the Ottoman Empire; the story of an Anzac brigade lost in Greece in 1942; “the Lucky Country” revisited after half a century; and a piece long in the pipeline on the iconic singer and activist Paul Robeson.
In August, as on a whim, for light relief, we summoned up a nostalgic old Seekers’ song from the mid-sixties, a time when the world was on fire with war and rage much as it is today, but for us young folk back in the day, a time of hope and hedonism. For us, the carnival, clearly, is not over. The machinery is still whirring, the music still loud, and the lights still on. History is insisting on one more turn of the wheel, and the dawn, so often promised, so frequently invoked, has not yet broken.
January
The Gaza War … there are no winners in a wasteland
The way we were … reevaluating the Lucky Country
February
Let’s turn Gaza into Mar e Largo
Trump’s Second Coming … the new American Revolution
Cold Wind in Damascus … Syria at the crossroads
March
Trumps Revolution… he can destroy but he cannot create
Where have all the big books gone?
Putin’s War … an ageing autocrat seeks his place in history
April
The Trump Revolution … I run the country and the world
The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the birth of Türkiye
Let Stalk Strine .. a lexicon of Australian as it was spoken (maybe)
May
The phantom of liberty … the paradoxes of conservativism
Shadows in search of a name … requiem for a war
The continuing battle for Australia’s history
July
A mighty voice … the odyssey of Paul Robeson
August
109 years of Mein Kampf … the book that ravaged a continent
High above the dawn is breaking … the unlikely origin of a poo song
September
Gaza sunrise or false dawn? Trump’s peace plan
Gaza sunrise or false dawn? Spectacle or Strategy
Will there ever be a Palestinian state?
Why Osana bin lost the battle but won the war
The Night of Power … Robert Fisks bitter epilogue
The promise and peril of ChatGPT
Who wrote this? The newsroom’s AI dilemma
October
AI and the future of the internet
Danger Angel … the ballad of Laura Loomer
November
A forgotten Anzac story in Greece’s bloody history
The most nihilistic war ever … Sudan’s waking nightmare
Answering the call … National Service in Britain 1945-1963
Tales of Yankee Power … at play in Americas backyard
December
Delo Kirova – the Kirov Case … a Soviet murder mystery
Between heaven and hell … Syria at the crossroads
This Is What It Looks Like
Tales of Yankee power … Why Venezuela, and why now?
Marco Rubio’s Venezuelan bargain
It is our custom to conclude our annual wrap with a particular song that caught our attention during the year. Last year, we chose Tears for Fears’ Mad World. It would be quite appropriate for 2025. But no repeats! so here is something very different. An outwardly melancholy song that is, in the most ineffable way quite uplifting. that’s what we reckon, anyway …
The Ticket Taker is on the surface a love song for the apocalypse; and it’s it’s one of the prettiest, most lyrically interesting songs I’ve heard in a long while. I could almost hear late-period Leonard Cohen and his choir of angels.
The apocalypse is both backdrop and metaphor. We’re not sure which. Is it really about a world ending, or just about the private ruin of a man left behind by love and fortune. The lyrics are opaque enough to evade final meaning, but resonant enough to keep circling back, like the ferry itself, between hope and futility. A love song, yes, but also a confession of entrapment: the gambler’s hope, the ark one cannot board.
The “Ticket Taker” song was written by Ben Miller and Jeff Prystowsky and is featured on The Low Anthem’s album Oh My God, Charlie Darwin. It features on Robert Plant’s latest foray into roots music – this time with English band Saving Grace. This flawless duet with Suzi Dian is mesmerising and magical.
Jeff will tell you that the song is “pure fiction,” that Ben “just made it up one day” – but fiction, as we know, has a way of smuggling deeper truths than fact dares admit.
Tonight’s the night when the waters rise
You’re groping in the dark
The ticket takers count the men who can afford the ark
The ticket takers will not board, for the ticket takers are tied
For five and change an hour, they will count the passers-by
They say the sky’s the limit, but the sky’s about to fall
Down come all them record books, cradle and all
They say before he bit it that the boxer felt no pain
But somewhere there’s a gambling man with a ticket in the rain
Mary Anne, I know I’m a long shot
But Mary Anne, what else have you got?
I am a ticket taker, many tickets have I torn
And I will be your ark, we will float above the storm
Many years have passed in this river town, I’ve sailed through many traps
I keep a stock of weapons should society collapse
I keep a stock of ammo, one of oil, and one of gold
I keep a place for Mary Anne, soon she will come home
Mary Anne, I know I’m a long shot
But Mary Anne, what else have you got?
I am a ticket taker, many tickets have I torn
And I will be your ark, we will float above the storm
Mary Anne, I know I’m a long shot
But Mary Anne, what else have you got?
I am a ticket taker, many tickets have I torn
And I will be your ark
People with only a passing acquaintance with Latin American history and politics have been asking, with genuine puzzlement, “why Venezuela? And why now?” The question is reasonable enough, but the coverage has been thin – particularly here in Australia – where Venezuela tends to appear only as a shorthand for failure or excess, rarely as a site of serious American political investment.
In That Howling Infinite recently provided several reasonably comprehensive explanations in Tales of Yankee power … Why Venezuela, and why now? But what has been largely absent from this and from other discussions is the role being played by former senator and now Secretary of State Marco Rubio. That absence, as we shall see below, is striking.
The Rubio connection surfaced explicitly in American author and commentator Fareed Zakaria’s latest Global Public Square broadcast on CNN, and once raised, it proved difficult to ignore. Rubio’s place in the MAGA-verse is, after all, an incongruous one. This is the same seasoned, disciplined, and electorally successful politician whom Donald Trump once ridiculed in the 2016 campaign as “Lil’ Marco,” a moment of theatrical humiliation that seemed, at the time, politically terminal. And yet here he is, back in the room and back at the table, standing stiffly beside Trump and self- styled “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth in press conferences, Oval Office set-pieces, and cabinet gatherings, his discomfort almost palpable.
Watching those scenes, it is hard not to suspect a transaction. Not in the crude sense of quid pro quo, but in the quieter, more human register of political survival: the price one pays to remain relevant, to retain influence, to draw at least one clear moral boundary in an administration otherwise defined by improvisation and loyalty tests. It was this that set me thinking that Venezuela – by way of Cuba – may be Rubio’s price. The policy domain where he is allowed conviction, where memory still outranks expediency, and where supporting Trump does not feel, at least to himself, like surrender.
Intrigued by Zakaria’s brief “take” on Marco Rubio and Venezuela, I asked Chat GPT to sift through reportage in American media and other sources and come up with a more detailed story. That story follows.
To understand Rubio’s Venezuela policy, it helps to stop thinking in terms of strategy alone and start thinking in terms of inheritance. This is not a story that begins in Caracas or Washington, but in Havana – or rather, in the Havana that survives only in memory: confiscated houses, interrupted childhoods, unfinished arguments passed down like heirlooms. Rubio speaks not just to voters, but to ghosts. And those ghosts have opinions.
For Rubio, socialism is not a theory, nor even a failed experiment. It is a family trauma, translated into politics. This matters because it explains both the intensity and the rigidity of his stance on Venezuela, and why compromise there feels not merely imprudent, but immoral. Venezuela matters because it looks like the past refusing to stay past.
The Cuban exile community in Miami has long provided American politics with a particular moral grammar: clarity over ambiguity, punishment over accommodation, endurance over negotiation. In this worldview, regimes do not soften; they calcify. Time is not neutral; it is the enemy. The lesson of Cuba is that hesitation becomes permanence. Rubio absorbed this lesson early, intuitively, and it has shaped his political ascent.
As Venezuela slid into authoritarian collapse in the 2010s, it became the perfect successor to Cuba as both warning and weapon. Unlike Havana, Caracas was still in motion. It had elections – imperfect, manipulable, but legible enough to serve as staging grounds for hope. It had oil, which meant leverage. And it had an opposition that could be imagined, at least briefly, as viable. Venezuela became Cuba-with-oil, a second chance to get history right.
Rubio seized that opportunity. He framed Venezuela not merely as a foreign policy challenge, but as Exhibit A in a broader moral argument about socialism, populism, and American decline. In doing so, he also performed a useful domestic alchemy: fusing Cuban-, Venezuelan-, and Nicaraguan-American experiences into a single narrative of victimhood and resistance. Florida’s exile communities became not distinct histories, but a shared cautionary tale.
This was not incidental to Rubio’s rise; it was central to it. Venezuela allowed him to marry personal biography to national rhetoric, foreign policy to electoral arithmetic. Hardline sanctions, regime-change language, and moral absolutism were not just positions – they were signals of fidelity to memory.
The Juan Guaidó episode in 2019 marked the high-water line of this approach. Rubio was among the loudest advocates of the belief that pressure, recognition, and a sufficiently confident declaration of inevitability would cause the Maduro regime to collapse. When it didn’t – when the military held, the opposition fractured, and the regime adapted – the failure did not soften conviction. It hardened it. In exile politics, failure is rarely read as miscalculation; more often it is read as insufficient resolve.
What has changed since is not Rubio’s worldview, but the world around it.
Venezuela has survived. Sanctions leaked. New patrons appeared. The regime learned how to manage scarcity and repression simultaneously. And the multipolar order – China, Russia, Iran – provided insulation that Cuba in the 1960s never had. The Cuban model, once a warning, began to look uncomfortably like a blueprint.
Enter Trump—again.
Rubio’s return to proximity with Trumpian power has been visibly uneasy. The discomfort is not theatrical; it is structural. Rubio is not a natural Trumpist. He believes in alliances, institutions, and the moral language of American leadership – however threadbare those concepts have become. Standing beside Trump and figures like Pete Hegseth in pressers and cabinet gatherings, Rubio often looks less like a disciple than a negotiated presence.
Which is why Venezuela matters now in a different way.
It is plausible – compelling, even – to read Rubio’s Venezuela focus as the price of admission. His moral compensation. The policy space he is allowed to dominate in exchange for supporting, or at least tolerating, other Trump policies that clearly sit uneasily with him. Give me Latin America, the bargain seems to say. Let me draw the line there.
Trump accepts this because it costs him little and gains him Florida. Rubio accepts it because Venezuela is the one issue where compromise feels like apostasy. It is his redemptive exception – the place where he can still be unbending, certain, and righteous, even as he swallows his discomfort elsewhere.
The result is a Venezuela policy overdetermined by symbolism. Sanctions become not just tools, but acts of remembrance. Engagement becomes not diplomacy, but forgetting. The ghosts hover constantly, reminding, accusing, insisting that this time must be different.
And yet the irony persists. Rubio’s politics of memory assumes that time favours pressure – that authoritarian regimes crack if held long enough. Venezuela suggests the opposite: that time favours adaptation. Survival is no longer failure; it is proof of concept. The past is not repeating itself exactly – it is mutating.
Which leaves Rubio caught between conviction and context. His stance is principled in its own terms, emotionally coherent, politically intelligible. But it struggles with a world in which pressure still matters, yet no longer decides outcomes.
Venezuela, in this telling, is not just a country. It is a memory test. A moral rehearsal. A stand-in for an argument with history that never quite concluded. Rubio stays in the room, visibly uneasy, because Venezuela allows him to believe that proximity to power has not dissolved purpose.
Whether that bargain helps Venezuela is uncertain. But as an explanation for Rubio himself – for his rigidity, his discomfort, his persistence – it is as close as politics gets to biography. And in exile politics, biography is destiny.
And here the circle closes.
Rubio believes Venezuela matters because it looks like the past refusing to stay past. But by treating it primarily as a moral inheritance rather than a living, adaptive system, he risks replaying the very tragedy exile politics warns against: mistaking endurance for fragility, and time for an ally.
So yes – read this as a bargain.
Rubio stays, visibly uneasy, because Venezuela is his line in the sand. His proof to himself that proximity to power has not dissolved conviction. It is the policy space where he can still speak to ghosts – and hear them answer back.
Whether that bargain produces better outcomes for Venezuela is another question entirely. But as a political arrangement, it is elegant, durable, and profoundly human.
Sources and References
Primary reporting & analysis
Fareed Zakaria, GPS / Global Public Square segments on Venezuela and US foreign policy (CNN, 2024–2025)
The New York Times, Marco Rubio and U.S. Venezuela Policy (various reports, 2019–2024)
The Washington Post, coverage of the Guaidó recognition and sanctions regime
Reuters, U.S. sanctions policy and Venezuela negotiations (ongoing reporting)
Cuba–Venezuela nexus
Julia E. Sweig, Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford University Press)
William LeoGrande & Peter Kornbluh, Back Channel to Cuba (University of North Carolina Press)
International Crisis Group reports on Venezuela–Cuba security cooperation
Exile politics & Florida
Javier Corrales & Michael Penfold, Dragon in the Tropics (Brookings Institution Press)
Pew Research Center, Cuban-American and Venezuelan-American political attitudes
Politico, Florida, Rubio, and Latin America policy analyses
Sanctions & authoritarian adaptation
Adam Tooze, essays on sanctions and multipolarity
Brookings Institution, Why sanctions fail (and sometimes work)
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Venezuela sanctions assessments
For two years the chant was rehearsed, circulated, aestheticised: “globalise the intifada!”. A resistance moment. A noble liberation struggle, cleansed of consequence. Now that it has arrived not as metaphor but as blood, the same people who normalised the rhetoric – progressive activists, influencers, podcasters, the Greens, the Labor left – present themselves as mourners. Today it is condolences, unity, and prayers.
But you do not get to globalise the intifada and then feign surprise when it turns up.
This did not erupt spontaneously. It was built – patiently, rhetorically – until violence no longer felt aberrant but earned. Shock, at this point, is not innocence; it is evasion.
The Prime Minister calls for unity and convenes the National Security Committee of Cabinet. Necessary, yes – but no longer enough. The problem he faces is credibility. For two years the response to antisemitism has been managerial rather than moral: statements instead of lines, calibration instead of resolve.
The record is plain. Within hours of the October 7 Hamas massacre, and before Israel inflicted its biblical rage upon Gaza, Jews were openly abused outside the Sydney Opera House. Synagogues and childcare centres were firebombed and homes and vehicles vandalised. Hate preachers operated freely. Jewish students and academics were harassed on campus. Jewish artists were doxed and frozen out of cultural life. Antisemitism was rhetorically dissolved by equating it with Islamophobia, converting a specific hatred into a moral blur.
Week after week, marches moved through our cities celebrating “resistance”, praising terrorism, calling for Israel’s elimination, and chanting explicitly for the globalisation of the intifada: violence against Jews, everywhere – for what else could that word mean?
The Second Intifada (2000–2005) was not a civil-rights uprising or a campaign of mass non-violent resistance. It was a sustained period of armed violence marked by suicide bombings, shootings, lynchings and rocket attacks against Israeli civilians—buses, cafés, nightclubs, markets—alongside heavy Israeli military responses, incursions, assassinations and widespread Palestinian casualties. Over 4,000 people were killed, the majority Palestinian but with a deliberate campaign of mass-casualty attacks on civilians at its core. It ended the Oslo peace process, entrenched mutual radicalisation, and normalised the targeting of civilians as political theatre.
So when activists chant “globalize the intifada,” they are not invoking protest or solidarity in the abstract. They are gesturing – whether knowingly or not – toward the export of that model: decentralised, ideologically justified violence against civilians, transposed from one conflict zone into the wider world. The slogan’s power lies precisely in its ambiguity; its danger lies in what history makes unambiguous.
Step by step, the chant has been normalised.
The year ends with an Islamist terrorist attack at Bondi Beach – an ordinary, intimate place, place many of us walk, eat, linger. We were in Sydney last weekend, and had we stayed another night, we would very likely have been there ourselves, walking the promenade and then taking refreshment, as is our custom, at the North Bondi RSL, just across the road from the park where the atrocity occurred. Authorities had warned such an incident was probable. They were not speculating; they were reading the climate.
Antisemitism in Australia has risen to levels unseen in living memory – even in small country towns like the one we live near and in Byron Bay, meccas of alternative lifestyles and long-styled as havens of inclusion and wellness. Alongside this rise sits another failure: the government’s inability to confront antisemitism with clarity and force, preferring symbolic gestures and offshore moral posturing while hatred hardened at home.
Now, suddenly, our leaders discover grief. Social media is more revealing. Facebook fills with empathetic words and memes from politicians, public figures and keyboard activists who spent the past two years condemning Israel in ways that blurred – and often erased – the distinction between Israeli policy and Jewish existence, creating at best, indifference to Jewish fear and, at worst, a permissive climate of hostility toward Jews as such. Today it is all tolerance, inclusivity and unity – and an air of regret and reverence that reeks of guilt.
But not all. Social media has fractured along familiar lines. At one extreme are conspiracy theories — false flags, invented victims, claims the attackers were Israeli soldiers. At the other is denial: what antisemitism? Between them sits a more revealing response. There is genuine shock and horror, even remorse – but also a careful foregrounding of the Syrian-Australian man who intervened, coupled with a quiet erasure of the victims’ Jewishness; a reflexive turn to whataboutism; and a refusal, even now, to relinquish the slogans and moral habits of the past two years. If antisemitism is acknowledged at all, it is ultimately laid at the feet of Benjamin Netanyahu.
Why this reticence, this resistance to reassessment after the Bondi attack? Perhaps it lies less in ideology than in psychology. For some, there is a simple inability to relinquish prior convictions- positions publicly held, repeatedly performed, and now too entangled with identity to abandon without cost. For others, perhaps a deeper reluctance to acknowledge having been misinformed or misdirected, an admission that would require not just intellectual correction but moral self-reckoning. Empathy, too, has become selective: extending it fully to Jewish victims would require suspending, even briefly, a framework that collapses Jewish identity into the actions of the Israeli state. And finally, many are no longer reasoning freely at all, but are caught inside the machinery – the rhythms of platforms, slogans, group loyalties and algorithmic reinforcement – where reconsideration feels like betrayal and pause feels like capitulation.
So the question must be asked plainly: can many on the left side of politics, no matter how well-intentioned (and ill-formed) honestly say that nothing they have posted over the past two years contributed, even indirectly, to prejudice against Jewish people? Nothing that helped turn anxiety and empathy into hostility, criticism into contempt?
Australian Jews warned that today’s chant would become tomorrow’s attack. They were told they were exaggerating, weaponising history, crying wolf. Yet despite inquiries, legislation, and repeated arson and vandalism, the ecosystem of hate was allowed to deepen. Two years of weekly protests chanting “From the river to the sea”, “Globalise the intifada” and “Death to the IDF” – calling for the eradication of a nation state and its people – were treated as politics, not incitement.
In July 2024 the government appointed Jillian Segal, a lawyer and businesswoman, as Australia’s first Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism (followed soon afterwards by the appointment of Aftab Malik as Special Envoy to Combat Islamophobia). Her report, released a year later, was unambiguous: antisemitism had become “ingrained and normalised” across universities, schools, media and cultural institutions. She called for curriculum reform, university accountability, migration screening, and a serious national effort to explain what antisemitism is and why it corrodes societies.
Five months on, the government is still considering it. It has been under heavy pressure from many quarters to hasten slowly, including from within its own ranks: there were calls from the Labor left, including motions from branches and petitions, for Segal to be sacked and her report shredded.
Mere days after Bondi, the pushback has already begun. Pro-Palestinian platforms – and even some Labor branches and members – have denounced Jillian Segal, her report, and Prime Minister Albanese’s intention to implement its recommendations as an assault on democratic institutions and civil liberties. So, argue that that the Australian government is using the atrocity as a pretext to accelerate its repression of the Palestine movement, and, even, to protect and defend Australia’s complicity in what is viewed as the Gaza genocide. What this framing conspicuously avoids is any reckoning with the antisemitism the report documents- or with the immediate, practical questions now facing authorities. Among these are the potential for copycat attacks, and what duty of care is owed to the Syrian-Australian man who intervened to stop the attack? Hamas and sections of Middle Eastern media have already branded him a traitor. In this moral economy, even heroism is conditional – and quickly becomes a liability.
The partisan responses have been opportunistically predictable. The Murdoch media accused the government of weakness. The Liberal Party, led by Opposition Leader Sussan Ley, accused Labor of neglect. Pauline Hanson followed, reliably. None of it alters the central fact identified by historian Simon Sebag Montefiore: the taboo on antisemitism has collapsed. Perhaps because Jewish identity is lazily collapsed into Israel. Perhaps because the world’s oldest hatred never disappears; it waits for permission. That permission was granted – gradually, rhetorically, respectably. And antisemitism does not arrive announcing itself. It seeps. It jokes. It chants. It flatters those who believe they are on the right side of history, until history arrives and asks what they tolerated in its name.
This did not come out of nowhere. It arrived exactly as advertised, and this is what it looks like.
And shock, now, is not a moral position.
Lifesavers line Bondi Beach, 19 December 2026, Oscar Colman
Postscript … just saying …
The following is a précis of an opinion piece in the Sydney Morning Herald on 20 December 2025 by satirist and presenter Josh Szeps entitled “What kind of Australia do we want to be? Let’s stop dodging the hard questions”. It encapsulates succinctly the questions we must ask ourselves. It is no satire:
In the aftermath of Bondi, everyone has an explanation and a slogan. Blame is flung in all directions – Israel, its critics, Muslims, the prime minister, “the world’s oldest hatred” – and consensus collapses into a hollow refrain: say no to hate. Comforting, yes; clarifying, no. Meanwhile, Jewish Australians now fear public gathering, and Muslim and Palestinian Australians brace for backlash of their own. This is the brittle edge of multiculturalism when the shared glue has weakened.
That glue once went by a plain name: liberal universalism – free speech, equality before the law, scepticism toward dogma, the right to criticise ideas without condemning people. Over the past decade it has been displaced by a politics of identity, grievance management, and performative outrage, leaving us unwilling to ask hard but necessary questions: how to integrate insular communities, how to criticise religious fanaticism without collapsing into bigotry, how to balance pluralism with a shared civic culture. Into that vacuum rush provocateurs, algorithms, and foreign actors only too happy to inflame old hatreds. The weekly Gaza marches exposed this failure. Slogans like “globalise the intifada” or “from the river to the sea” may sound abstract or benign to some, but to many Jews they carry a very concrete historical threat – especially after October 7. That most marchers may not have grasped the implications is precisely the problem. Chanting borrowed slogans in mass, without curiosity or restraint, is not moral seriousness. Nor is pretending that theocratic, homophobic, antisemitic religious doctrines are merely “cultural differences” compatible with the values that made Australia attractive in the first place.
Multiculturalism survives only if it demands something of everyone: discomfort and openness from the majority; reciprocity, restraint and abandonment of imported feuds from minorities. If liberals won’t defend universal values — plainly, without euphemism or ritual throat-clearing — others, far less liberal, will step in and do it for them.
Here are three particularly resonant paragraphs:
“Week after week, chunks of our cities were overtaken by protesters carrying signs that had nothing to do with Israeli policies, such as “globalise the intifada” and “by any means necessary”. The ubiquitous “from the river to the sea”, benign-sounding to bystanders, proposes that an Arab state ought to sit on top of all the land of Israel – that Jewish people should live at the pleasure of rulers whose theocratic education would make Australia’s most radical imam look like a Jew-loving hippy. Is such a sentiment just innocent political speech? Or, in the wake of the jihadism on October 7, 2023, could it be understood as a threat to conquer the world’s only Jewish safe space?
… if you found yourself marching across the Sydney Harbour Bridge chanting slogans you didn’t write, about a complex issue you’re not really across, surrounded by crowds chanting the same thing, which others found intimidating … you may, in fact, not have been elevating the discourse. “Intifada” technically means “uprising”, but in the context of Palestinian resistance it implies exploding buses, drive-by shootings and suicide bombers in cafes. (See: “Second Intifada” in Wikipedia, kids). Presumably, most of the protesters didn’t know this. After last weekend, they do. The Intifada has been globalised …
It’s up to all of us to refresh multiculturalism by tethering it to universal values and admitting that it demands sacrifices all around. It demands that people in the majority make themselves uncomfortable, around unfamiliar languages, faiths, customs and food. And it demands that people in the minority give up dogmatism, grudges and cultural feuds”.
There are moments in the Middle East when history suddenly shift gears and takes us all by surprise. Lenin knew the cadence: there are decades, he wrote, where nothing happens; and then, weeks in which decades happen. A year ago, Syria – trapped in the vortex of its civil war for almost fourteen years and virtually ignored by the rest of the world since October 7 2023 – suddenly leapt into one of those crazy weeks, leaving allies, enemies, and analysts alike blinking in the dust. Even now, a year after the astonishing fall of Damascus, the country sits like Kipling’s Tomlinson at the gates of judgement: not quite damned, not fully redeemed, suspended between heaven and hell.
Sleepers awake …
For years, as The Independent’s Bel Trew observed last December (see Syria. Illusion, delusion and the fall of tyrants) the world forgot about Syria – notwithstanding the courageous efforts of western and Syrian reporters and humanitarian workers who strove in perilous circumstances to bear witness. The civil war had become the background hum of the region, a grim drone many had learned to tune out as Ukraine and Gaza dominated the world stage. The regime of Hafez al Assad, brutal and immovable, bolstered by Russia, Iran and Hezbollah, looked set to endure indefinitely. The jihadi rebel enclave in Idlib, though supported by Türkiye, was dismissed as a besieged hold-out. Even those who professed expertise couldn’t reliably tell you whether the war was still ongoing, who was fighting whom, or what stage the conflict had reached. It was as if the wheels of war had stopped spinning.
Then, over the space of days – eleven, to be precise – the wheels spun again. Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham’s fighters burst from their confined redoubt with a momentum no one expected (including, it seems, themselves), sweeping through Aleppo and racing down the highway to the capital. Analysts reached instinctively for historical parallels: Havana 1959, Saigon 1975, Kabul 2021. Analyst David Kilcullen pointed instead to Timur Kuran’s theory of the “preference cascade”: the sudden collapse of a regime that had mistaken silence for loyalty and compliance for consent. Assad’s security apparatus – omnipresent, omniscient, yet somehow oblivious – realised too late that its soldiers had no stomach left for the fight. The all-powerful giant had feet of clay.
It didn’t help that Iran, Assad’s indispensable patron, had stumbled into the most grievous strategic miscalculation of its post-1979 history. Flush with revolutionary zeal, Tehran had kicked the hornet’s nest in Lebanon, prompting Israel to pivot from Gaza to Hezbollah with stunning force. Suddenly Iran’s expeditionary assets were exhausted, its proxies over-extended, and its clerical leadership exposed as both ageing and isolated. Even the Ayatollah’s conspiratorial refrain – that the fall of Damascus was all a plot by the Great Satan, the Little Satan, and the Sultan in Ankara – couldn’t mask the fact that this was less Zionist cunning than simple imperial overreach. When the rebels came, neither Iran nor Hezbollah, nor Russia, entangled in its Ukrainian quagmire, could ride to the rescue.
But the rebels, too, were surprised. Their mandate from Ankara was modest – expand the borders of their statelet a little, test the regime’s nerve. Instead, they found themselves virtually unopposed on the road to Damascus. In an Informative article in E-zine Unherd republished below, British writer and investigative journalist Tam Hussein writes how many of the fighters interpreted the victory as divine intervention – not jihadi zealotry, but a sincere theological attempt to explain the inexplicable. The suddenness of Damascus’s collapse felt, to them, like an echo of Muhammad’s bloodless conquest of Mecca. And in a land where the eschatological imagination has always saturated politics, it didn’t take long before social media brimmed with end-times speculation. Ahmed al Shara’a – formerly Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, with a $10 million American bounty on his head – was seen by some as “the one”, and the precursor of the Mahdi and the foretold end of days.
Yet as Hussein rightly notes, miracles make poor policy. The survival of the new Syrian administration will depend not on prophecy but on governance, and on whether Shara’a, interim president and ex-jihadi turned statesman, can transform a miraculous seizure into a sustainable state.
To his credit, he has avoided the catastrophic purges that helped destroy post-invasion Iraq. He has kept the civil service intact, flirted audaciously with Western diplomacy, and allowed at least the theatrical semblance of elections. He has restored the embassy in London, opened channels to Washington, even visiting the White House and played the charm-game with Gulf capitals that only recently readmitted Assad into their fold. As Hussein writes, he has shown political finesse: keeping the constitution, appointing seventy parliamentarians himself, and balancing piety with pragmatism.
But the tightrope is frayed. Sectarian wounds – Druze, Alawite, Sunni, Christian – remain raw and unstitched, with the Latakia massacres now entering their fraught judicial phase, and Israel stirring the Druze pot. Kurdish anxieties simmer: the old “Arab-first” chauvinism must be abandoned if Syria’s patchwork is ever to become a tapestry again. Foreign fighters, once lionised, now loiter between hero and hazard, implicated in sectarian atrocities. Kurds clash with Syrian forces; Turkish troops press deeper into Rojava; Israel remains the unpredictable neighbour bestride the Golan; and Iran, though weakened, is never entirely out of the game. It is not inconceivable that the forces that helped topple Assad could yet turn their sights toward Jerusalem in the belief that prophecy demands it.
And there are darker portents too – those flickering shadows that hint the wind of freedom may be blowing from the wrong quarter. The new government’s early gestures toward Islamisation – the hair-covering admonition, the curriculum purge, the dismissal of women from key posts, the torching of a Christmas tree in Hama – suggest that pro-Russia and anti-western platforms like RT and Mint may have a point when they warn that the leopard has not fully changed its theological spots. Shara’a’s declaration that elections may be four years away, the dissolution of the old constitution, and the folding of all rebel factions into state structures recall less a liberal transition than a consolidation of revolutionary power.
Meanwhile, the country remains a mosaic of mini-wars. In the north, Turkish proxies grind against Kurdish forces in Rojava. In the south, local militias continue to resist HTS’s claim to national authority. In the west, Alawite formations cling to their shrinking redoubts. To the east, Islamic State survivors eye the chaos, waiting for the prison gates to break. And overhead, as ever, the Americans and Israelis fly their competing deterrents, ensuring the war never quite ends.
So: Syria stands at the crossroads. Will Syria’s future be heaven, hell, or merely another circle of the inferno?
Optimism is possible – cautiously so. If the West can avoid its habitual fatalism, if, when sanctions are lifted, investment flows, if Turkey and Israel can be coaxed into tolerable coexistence, if Kurdish autonomy is honoured, if sectarian grievances are handled with equity and not vengeance — then Syria could, in time, become a conservatively stable hub. Shara’a’s Idlib experiment shows he can build an economy under duress.
But the inverse is equally imaginable: a Lebanon-style implosion, a Yugoslav-style partition, or a Gaza-style fortress of permanent mobilisation. As Isreali commentator and contributor to Haaretz Zvi Bar’el wrote a year ago, writes, the warm international “envelope” around Damascus is generous but tentative. Nobody quite knows where Shara’a is heading. They simply assume anyone is better than Assad – the same mistake Syrians once made about the old Ba’athi patriarch Hafez al-Assad himself.
Right now, the future’s not ours to see. Something’s happening, but we don’t know what it is, and anyone with a deep knowledge of the Middle East knows that one must expected the unexpected. The old regional wars – Gaza, Lebanon, the Red Sea, Iran’s Axis of Resistance – though seemingly on hold, have not paused to let Syria breathe. The war in Ukraine grinds into winter, the bizarre Gaza peace plan shuffles on, and there are constant political shifts in Washington. Each of these could rewrite the geopolitical chess board yet again.
Still, as Robert Fisk wrote in the final line of the final book he never lived to promote: all wars come to an end, and that’s where history restarts. Syria is restarting now – painfully, precariously, imprecisely – but restarting nonetheless.
Whether Syria walks toward heaven or hell remains to be seen. The choice – as ever in the Levant – will not be its alone.
Syria Today: Walking Through the Wreckage
A year after the Assads fell, Syria still moves through its own ruins – startled by its freedom, and half-afraid of it. The dynasty’s collapse ended the nightmare but did not usher in a dream; it simply exposed, in unforgiving daylight, the damage done over half a century of dictatorship and more than a decade of war. The smashed cities are visible to any passer-by; the deeper wreckage – the traumas, resentments, and debts of blood – is harder to map and harder still to mend.
Sednaya prison’s opened gates remain the sharpest indictment. The men who stumbled out were not just survivors but witnesses, their bodies forcing the nation to acknowledge what many had whispered and few had dared investigate. Yet even this reckoning has not united the country. Sectarian reprisals and atrocities on the coast, more atrocity and calls for Druze autonomy demands in Sweida, tribal restlessness in the south and northwest, Kurdish self-rule in the north, and Alawite fear of collective punishment keep the national psyche taut and divided. Bitterness circulates like a second economy.
The economy, meanwhile, balances on a fraying tightrope. Western aid and investment have brought cranes, reopened highways, and a flicker of commerce, but also inflation that is hollowing out households. Reconstruction glimmers like a desert mirage: real enough to chase, never close enough to touch. Corruption accompanying nepotism and patronage has survived the revolution, and many returnees discover that rebuilding a home now costs more than earning one.
Politically, the country sits in an improvised equilibrium. Al Shara’a rules as both liberator and question mark – trusted by some, tolerated by others, watched by all. His pivot toward Washington, his quiet coordination with US forces, and his break with former comrades offer a new direction, but also a gamble. Around him, sovereignty is nibbled at the edges: Israel digs deeper into Quneitra province; Türkiye tightens its grip in the Kurdish north. Liberation has shifted the map without fully restoring control over it.
So Syria stands on the threshold, like Tomlinson, neither damned nor redeemed, simply called to account. The war is over, but its aftershocks and tremors linger in regional loyalties, local vendettas and regional manoeuvres. The people are free, yet unsure of that freedom’s limits and what it asks of them. And the vast machinery of the state still creaks with old habits and temptation.
And yet – a small, highly qualified yet – Syrians are imagining a future again. Not the predetermined script of dictatorship, nor the fatalism of war, but something open, negotiable, theirs’. For a people long told that nothing changes, the mere possibility of change is its own quiet revolution. Hope is not guaranteed; neither is stability. But the impossible has already happened once, and that alone shifts the horizon.
Postscript: the strange, messianic weather of revolutions
Among the HTS fighters Tam Hussein describes, the astonishingly swift and almost bloodless collapse of Damascus could never be reduced to battlefield arithmetic. After over a decade of stalemate and slaughter, the conquest of Damascus and the fall of Assad felt too abrupt, too neat, too historically implausible to be merely human. And so they reached, perhaps instinctively, for the vocabulary of prophecy that has long circulated in the Levant: the old stories of tyrants toppled in the final days, of a just ruler rising at history’s eleventh hour, of a brief season of peace before a climactic confrontation with “the Romans,” a term that in popular imagination now stretches elastically to include Israel, America, or the West at large.
In this folk-level cosmology – not the carefully parsed doctrine of scholars, but the lived, emotional scripture of men who have lived too long fear, death and loss loss – the victory in Damascus reads like a prophetic epic ballad. When a fighter told Hussein that Syria would enjoy “ten years of peace before the war with Israel,” he was drawing from a hazy amalgam of hadith traditions and battlefield folklore to make sense if the improbable: the idea of a lull before the storm, a breathing space before the world tilts into its final reckoning. It is vernacular eschatology, shaped as much by trauma and longing as by text.
Within that register, the murmurs that Shara’a/Jolani might be “the one” carry an unmistakable Mahdist echo. No fatwas or proclamations like when Da’ish leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi famously declared the caliphate from the minbar of Mosul’s al-Nuri Mosque in 2014; but the emotional charge behind the phrase is unmistakabl: an intuitive reach for a Mahdi-shaped idea of the righteous restorer, the unifier, the man who appears when everything has fallen apart. It’s not that anyone literally thinks Jolani is the Mahdi; it’s that the mood of the moment makes such thoughts feel briefly within arm’s length. A silhouette on the horizon, nothing more.
And here, Syria is not unique. Revolutionary periods everywhere – the Protestant Reformation, the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution and Civil War, the Arab Spring even, have their magical phase — those jittery days when people begin to speak as if the world has cracked open, meaning is pouring through the seams, and events blur into myth. When a regime that seemed immovable collapses in a fortnight, people fall back on stories larger than themselves. Sudden upheaval, long suffering, and the ascent of a charismatic figure combine to crack open the ordinary world. Prophecy offers a narrative frame when history seems to be behaving like fable.
So the eschatological edge in these fighters’ conversations tells us less about doctrine and more about psychology. It’s a very human response: a form of magical thinking that arises when reality becomes too strange to process, a way of giving shape to chaos, of telling themselves that their suffering fits into a larger story. A coping mechanism, if you like – a mythic vocabulary for a moment when Damascus fell, and the ordinary rules stopped making sense and the earth seemed briefly to tilt on its axis.
A few months ago in Damascus, I discovered a medieval hospital. The door had been left slightly ajar, and I wandered in with my companion Hassan Idlibi — a rebel fighter and old friend. He hadn’t been in the Old City since the fall of Syria’s capital, exactly a year ago today. “When Damascus fell,” he told me, “we were at our lowest ebb. Even the attack on Aleppo was our last gasp. We wanted to break the stalemate. And then we just pushed and pushed, and we ended up sleeping inside the Umayyad Mosque. It was a miracle.”Idlibi, like many Syrians, did not interpret the taking of Damascus through geopolitics — but as divine intervention. This wasn’t because he was a mindless zealot. Far from it. He is one of the most well-read men I know. But, to his mind, the fall of Damascus was so sudden, so unexpected, that only the miraculous could explain it. The victory, he noted, had been achieved by those who had been motivated by Islam. Help had come from foreign fighters, the mujahideen, who travelled from across the globe to aid their co-religionists. And the campaign had been led by a former jihadi, Ahmed al-Sharaa, now the interim president of Syria. At the time, the old al-Qaeda operative, then known by his nom de guerre, Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, had a $10 million American bounty on his head.
After more than a decade of slaughter, no one had expected the capital to collapse. Assad, then president, had seemed like a stubborn wart: unpleasant but immovable. Jolani’s rebel enclave in the northern city of Idlib looked too small, too besieged, to pose a serious threat — though in fact it was performing better economically than inflation-ravaged Damascus, helped along by a reliable flow of Turkish hard currency. I myself expected the rebels to negotiate. What leverage did they have? Yet this rebel government, roughly the size of Croydon, took over the instruments of state, and since then has avoided stumbling into a new civil war.
The unexpected and largely peaceful victory was attributed to piety, prophecy, steadfastness. Some have even compared the final conquest of Damascus to Muhammad’s bloodless conquest of Mecca in 630. The idea of a “miracle”, here, is not mere rhetoric — it shapes political expectations. Some Syrians, at least based on my social media, think all this makes Sharaa “the one”, with my Facebook messages and WhatsApp chats awash with prophetic readings of the present. One believed Syria would now enjoy 10 years of peace before the war with Israel begins. Perhaps, he suggested, this was the prelude to the end of times. After all, so-called “Greater Syria” — encompassing much of the Levant — plays an important role in the Syrian and indeed Muslim sacral imagination. It is where prophets walked and is the place where many of the end of times narratives will play themselves out.
Yet if the fall of Damascus seemed miraculous to many Syrians, the survival of the new administration will depend less on providence than on governance. Despite his past, Sharaa has so far demonstrated an unexpected level of political finesse. He has kept the constitution, held elections — albeit with 70 seats appointed by himself — and all the while has acted the statesman. He is savvy enough to not mind having President Trump spray his latest fragrance on him in the Oval Office, or Syrian Jewish rabbis blessing him.
Sharaa has made some promising early decisions. By keeping the civil service intact, he has avoided the catastrophic purge that helped destroy post-invasion Iraq. He should continue recruiting highly-educated young Syrians from the diaspora — people familiar with Western administrations and political norms. Even so, the administration still has a tendency to fear scrutiny and behaves as if under siege. It should welcome a regulated free press, which would expose blind spots, not undermine authority. The British press has reported that Jonathan Powell’s Inter Mediate is working with the new government. This should be welcomed rather than criticised — not only for reasons of conflict resolution and soft power, but for its value in statecraft and building institutional capacity.
Sharaa’s priorities for the coming year are clear. The country remains immensely fragile, caught in a regional tug-of-war between Israel and its neighbours, and divided along ethnic and sectarian lines. The situation could easily drift into a reprise of Lebanon’s civil war. Sharaa’s first task is therefore to mend Syria’s sectarian and ethnic fractures with a sense of equity. The trials that began this month over the coastal massacres in Latakia will be an important test of how the country intends to move forward. The Druze and Alawite communities — already bruised by conflict and mistrust — require justice delivered without the language of sectarianism.
Meanwhile, Kurdish anxieties must be addressed by ending the Arab-first ideology of the old regime. Syria has never been a purely Arab country: even its favourite son, Saladin, the builder of that hospital I visited and whose grave in Damascus still draws multitudes, was a Kurd. Last year’s tentative permission for Kurdish new year celebrations (Newroz) suggests that a more pluralist future is possible. Yet it remains unclear how far Kurdish cultural expression will be allowed to develop. Already this month, exchanges of fire between Syrian government forces and Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) units under Kurdish command show how fragile the situation is.
Perhaps the most difficult balancing act involves the foreign fighters who fought on Sharaa’s side. They carry immense symbolic weight in Syrian society — and are the cause of immense fear in the West. Many are ready to resume normal life, but others still see themselves as Islam’s warriors. Recent clashes in the Idlib countryside involving French foreign fighters reflect anxieties that any rapprochement with the West might see them handed over to their home governments. The image of Sharaa standing beside Trump, receiving a symbolic “anointing” of his new fragrance, alarms them even if such engagement is politically necessary.
Granting these fighters legal status, regularising their papers, integrating some into the national army or demobilising them with stipends and educational opportunities — not unlike the GI Bill for US veterans — could go a long way toward neutralising one of Syria’s most volatile pressures.
Then there is the conundrum of Israel. On this, Sharaa has cultivated deliberate ambiguity. At the United Nations, Syria has repeatedly noted its restraint regarding Israel’s illegal strikes on Syrian territory, yet Sharaa has resisted pressure to join Trump’s flagship Abraham Accords. Signing them now would be political suicide. But ambiguity buys him room to manoeuvre — and time to consolidate the state. The question is how long this can last.
For its part, the West has worked to prevent Syria from sliding into another civil war — one that would inevitably spill over into Europe, potentially replaying the exodus of 2015. With regional partners like Saudi Arabia and Turkey, Western governments have effectively restrained Israeli escalation, aware that renewed instability would eventually reach Jerusalem’s door. It’s not impossible to imagine rebels, having overthrown a “pro-Western stooge” like Sharaa and aided by foreign fighters, actually marching toward Israel, convinced that “the infidels” will never allow them to determine their own future. As they did in Damascus, so too — in their imagination — must they do in Jerusalem.
Thus far Sharaa has governed with surprising openness. He has welcomed Britain’s foreign secretary David Lammy, met American diplomats and General David Petraeus, played basketball with US soldiers, and cooperated in counter-terrorism operations. He has also restored relations with London, with foreign minister Asaad al-Shaibani reopening the Syrian embassy.
If Western governments refuse to work with him because of his Islamist roots, they will share responsibility should Syria fracture again. Sharaa’s past is not erased; he may remain an uncomfortable partner. But what is the alternative? That he be excluded from political life and drift into a Castro- or Maduro-like role on the sidelines? If the Saudi Crown Prince can be brought in from the cold after the Khashoggi murder, then almost anything is possible.
Here I recall a meeting with former Saudi spy chief Turki al-Faisal in his South Kensington apartment after the release of his memoir. Faisal lamented how his advice went unheeded after the Afghan-Soviet war. He had urged the international community to launch something akin to a Marshall Plan — an investment programme to stabilise Afghanistan. Had that happened, the region might not have unravelled. Instead, the country collapsed into years of civil war.
Likewise, fully lifting sanctions on Syria and providing a major investment programme, coupled with training and cultural exchange, could restrain the country’s more radical elements. Reining in Israeli escalation, de-escalating the Druze conflict, and mediating between the SDF and Damascus would all help prevent new wars. On this, the West could also spare itself a future security headache by helping Damascus regularise or demobilise foreign fighters rather than leaving them to drift. This would all help to displace messianism.
What, then, would such investment bring the West, beyond avoiding another gaping wound on its eastern flank? For sure, it will not turn Damascus into another Beirut, a place for foreign journalists to party, nor into a Deano-friendly Dubai. Syria will likely remain socially conservative, more like Muscat in Oman. Given time, however, it could become a commercial hub with a distinct cultural life, just as it has been for much of its epic history. This isn’t mere optimism: Sharaa turned Idlib, once a distant town, into a magnet for Damascenes seeking commercial opportunity. Investment now would bring the West a friendly partner, business prospects and political influence. The choice is stark. With support, Syria could become a kind of West Germany: rebuilt, integrated, and stable. Without it, the country risks becoming a new Jerusalem — a battleground charged with fire and prophecy.
Tam Hussein is an award winning investigative journalist and writer. His work has been recognised by the Royal Television Society Awards.
A king sate on the rocky brow Which looks o’er sea-born Salamis; And ships, by thousands, lay below, And men in nations—all were his! He counted them at break of day – And when the sun set, where were they?
Lord Byron, Don Juan
Christopher Allen, The Australian’s art critic, writes of how Greece’s antiquity presses in on the present. It is a lightweight piece, surveying as it does three millennia of history, from the days of the Greeks, Alexander, the Great and the Romans to those of the Ottomans and their successor states – but it is elucidating nonetheless.
It is a brief reminder of the veracity of the phrase “history is always with us”, and of how the past continues to shape the present through its influence on culture, human nature, and ongoing events – a constant guide, providing both cautionary tales and inspiration for the future, as we carry our history with us in our identities, cultures, societies and recurring patterns of behaviour. As author and activist James Baldwin is attributed to have said, “History is not the past. It is the present. We carry our history with us. We are our history”.
Greece has always lived a double life. To the casual visitor, it is a sun-splashed idyll of sea and sky, but its history tells a darker story – a long, hard ledger of heroes and horrors, and the stubborn will to survive wedged between warring empires. The last two and a half millennia have been less a tranquil Mediterranean tableau than a parade of conquerors, liberators, and the occasional poet-adventurer.
Over time, Greece has drawn to its shores soldiers and adventurers, poets and dreamers – and naive youths like myself. I hitch-hiked down from what was then Yugoslav in the summer of 1970, a young man with a second-hand rucksack and followed the looping Adriatic highway from Thessaloniki and Athens. I knew enough history to feel the charge of passing near Thermopylae, where Spartans once made their famous last stand against the might of Xerxes. But I wasn’t to learn until over half a century later that an army of ANZACs battled overwhelming odds just a valley away.
The past, in Greece, as in the Middle East, always stands just offstage, awaiting its cue and refusing to stay politely within its own century. It is not merely one of the world’s most benevolent postcards; it is a crossroads of empires, a battleground of ambitions, a cavalcade of famous names and places, where East and West have met, mingled, clashed, and sometimes embraced in the long swirl of history, where the mythic and the modern travel together.
One particular reference also reminds me of how history sends out roots, twigs and branches throughout the settled and hence recorded world.
Tempe, on Sydney’s Cooks River, wears its classical inheritance more openly than most Sydney suburbs. When Alexander Brodie Spark built Tempe House in the 1830s, he christened the estate after the Vale of Tempe in northern Greece – a narrow, ten-kilometre gorge carved by the Pineiós River as it threads between Olympus and Ossa. The poets imagined Poseidon’s trident had cleft the mountains to make it; Apollo and the Muses strolled beneath its laurels; sacred branches were cut there for Delphi. Spark, standing between his own modest “Mount Olympus” and the river, saw a faint echo of the Greek idyll and gave the place its name.
But the Vale of Tempe was never entirely pastoral. Armies have squeezed through that narrow defile for millennia. The Persians marched through it on their way south – Tempe lies just north of the iconic pass of Thermopylae, part of the same chain of passes that determined so much of Greek military history. And in the twentieth century it would again become a stage for outsiders in uniform.
In April 1941 Australian and New Zealand troops, together with British units, were thrown into Greece as Lustre Force – outnumbered, outgunned, and facing a German army with air superiority and modern communications. One of the hardest-fought delaying actions took place – inevitably, given the geography – at Tempe Gorge on 18 April (the featured image of this post, from the collection of the Australian War Museum). The Australian brigade was commanded by Brigadier A.S. Allen, who had formed the first battalion of the new AIF. His “Anzac Force” (apparently the last operational use of that designation) held the gorge long enough to impede the German advance and allow wider Allied withdrawals. The serene valley Spark had sentimentalised became, for a few violent hours, an Anzac bottleneck: those same narrow walls that once sheltered shrines now channelling rifle fire and Stuka attacks. Many of those men would soon find themselves on Crete, resisting the first large-scale parachute assault in military history.
And then – because Australia never resists a touch of Mediterranean whimsy—the Hellenic (and Hellenistic) echoes continue in our own neighbourhood on the Midnorth Coast. Halfway along the road from Bellingen to Coffs Harbour lies the township of Toormina, home to our closest shopping centre and to the Toormi pub. Its name began its life on the slopes of Mount Tauro in Sicily, in the ancient town of Taormina, the site of a famous amphitheater. In the 1980s local Italian residents of who were clients of developer Patrick Hargraves (the late father of a good friend of ours) suggested the name “Taormina” for the new subdivision. He liked the idea but clipped the opening “a” to make it more easily pronounceable- and Toormina entered the Gregory’s and thelocal vernacular.
So in our small corner of New South Wales, Greek myth, Persian marches, Anzac rearguards, and Sicilian nostalgia all whisper from the signposts. Tempe and Toormina: unlikely twins, proof that even the quietest suburb can carry the long shadows of the ancient world.
Uncovering a forgotten Anzac story in Greece’s bloody history
From ancient battles to World War II, a visit to Athens’ War Museum exposes the dramatic military history that shaped modern Greece. Christopher Allen’s deeply personal connection unravelled in the process.
Christopher Allen, The Australian, 21 November 2025
James Stuart, View of the Erechtheion, Athens, October 1787. Royal Academy of Arts, London. Photographer. Prudence Cuming Associates Limited.
A little over 200 years ago, the Greeks began their war of independence from the Ottoman Empire, which had conquered most of the Byzantine world in the 15th century; the renaissance in Western Europe thus coincided with the beginning of a new dark age for the Greeks under Turkish oppression. Some islands held out for longer: Rhodes, home of the Knights of St John, was taken in 1522, forcing them to withdraw to Malta; Cyprus, ruled by the French Lusignan dynasty from the time of the Crusades and then by Venice, was brutally conquered in 1571, and Crete, held by Venice since 1205, finally fell after a generation-long siege in 1669.
The Ottoman Empire reached the apogee of its power in the early 18th century, but then began a slow decline, one of whose incidental effects was to make the Greek world more accessible to Western travellers: James Stuart and Nicholas Revett spent time in Athens from 1751 and published their Antiquities of Athens in several volumes in 1762. By the early 19th century, Greece had become part of the itinerary of the Grand Tour; by 1816, the Parthenon Frieze was in the British Museum and profoundly transformed modern understanding of Ancient Greek art.
Meanwhile the Greek War of Independence began with revolts in the Peloponnese in 1821 and a Declaration of Independence in 1822, eliciting a savage response from the Turks and sympathy from intellectuals and the educated public in Western European countries. The slaughter of the population of the island of Chios in 1822 led Eugène Delacroix to paint his famous Massacre at Chios, exhibited in the Salon of 1824 and purchased in the same year for the national collection; it is today in the Louvre. In 1823, the most famous poet of his day, Lord Byron, who had already demonstrated his sympathy for Armenian culture and independence from the Ottomans, went to Greece to help in the fight, both personally and financially.
This 1813 portrait by Phillips depicts Lord Byron in traditional Albanian attire. Alamy
Byron’s death in 1824 at Missolonghi only attracted more attention and sympathy to the cause of Greek freedom, and the great powers – Britain, France and Russia – warned the Turks about further repression, even though they were also committed, for different reasons, to maintaining the integrity of the crumbling Ottoman Empire. In 1827, at the Battle of Navarino, an international fleet led by the British and commanded by Sir Edward Codrington destroyed the Turkish and Egyptian navies. After further interventions on land by Russian and French forces, the Ottoman Empire was compelled, by the Treaty of Constantinople in 1832, to accept the independence of mainland Greece, although initially only as far north as the so-called Arta-Volos Line. The north, including Thessaly, Macedonia and Thrace, remained in Ottoman hands and Mustafa Kemal Ataturk was born in the former Byzantine city of Salonika in 1881.
Instability in the Balkan provinces of the Ottoman Empire in the 1870s gave the new Greek nation the opportunity to annex the central region of Thessaly in 1881 (while Britain incidentally acquired Cyprus in 1878). Further important gains were made during the two Balkan Wars (1912-13): much of Epirus in the northwest as well as Salonika and most of southern Macedonia, most of the Aegean Islands and Crete; the British had already ceded the Ionian Islands in 1863 and the Italians would relinquish the Dodecanese after World War II in 1947. Meanwhile, in the aftermath of World War I, Greece had briefly seized eastern Thrace and territories in Anatolia, soon to be retaken by the Turks with immense loss of life in the Great Fire of Smyrna in 1922.
Model of Byzantine warship from the War Museum
This is of course a very much simplified version of the extraordinarily complicated story of Balkan politics from the mid-19th century, which forms such an important part of the lead-up to World War I. All of these events were accompanied not only by terrible military casualties on all sides, but by massive disruption to the population of lands where people of different ethnicities and faiths had lived side-by-side for centuries as part of a multiethnic empire, including war crimes and atrocities against civilians and non-combatants. And Greeks who had previously enjoyed political and economic prominence throughout the Ottoman world, including the Phanariots of Constantinople, were first stripped of their privileges, then persecuted and finally expelled in the tragic population exchange of 1923.
All of these events and many more are covered in the exhibits at the Athens War Museum, which I had never visited until a few weeks ago, but which gives a vivid idea of the almost continuous warfare that has been carried on over the past couple of centuries in a land most tourists imagine as a paradise of sea, sun and waterside taverns. The events of the war of liberation, especially as we pass through so many bicentenaries in the current decade, are naturally well represented: there is, for example, a new and interactive display devoted to the sea battle of Navarino and events surrounding this decisive moment in the war.
There are portraits of the many famous leaders of the independence movement in their picturesque costumes, as well as dramatic reimaginings of heroic battles, and of course weapons and equipment of the time. The resonance of the Greek struggle in Western Europe is recalled in a copy of Delacroix’s Massacre at Chios, as well as a version of Thomas Phillips’s portrait of Lord Byron in exotic Albanian costume (1813), of which the original hangs in the British embassy at Athens; another replica by the artist himself, but only of the head and shoulders, is in the National Portrait Gallery in London.
Eugène Delacroix, The Massacre at Chios
But there is much more about the history of Greece in Antiquity, and the chronological arrangement of the displays makes this an effective way to follow the sequence of events, especially the main episodes of the Persian Wars – with the great battles of Marathon in 490BC and Salamis in 480 – as well as the subsequent conflict between Athens and her quasi-subject states on one side and Sparta and her Peloponnesian allies on the other, known as the Peloponnesian War.
This disastrous war (431-404 BC) was followed in the second half of the fourth century by the rise of Philip of Macedon to hegemony, for the first time, over almost all of mainland Greece. After his assassination in 336, his young son, who became Alexander the Great, embarked on a spectacular campaign that led to the conquest of the whole of the vast Persian empire, from Egypt to what are now Afghanistan and Pakistan. Alexander’s conquests led to the extension of Greek language and civilisation deep into Asia, creating the international culture of the Hellenistic period, characterised among other things by a rich and complex exchange of ideas and forms between East and West.
He left an indelible impression on all the lands he conquered and is, for example, the first historical figure in the Persian national epic, the Shahname. By the time of Ferdowsi, who composed this masterpiece a millennium ago, the Persians had forgotten about the Achaemenid dynasty that first created the Persian empire in the sixth century BC; even the great site of Persepolis was and still is called Takht-e Jamshid, the throne of Jamshid, one of the mythical rulers from the great epic.
Each of Alexander’s battles – he is one of the handful of great generals never to have been defeated – is illustrated in clear diagrams, but they are also recalled in later images, in this case particularly in a series of 17th-century engravings whose story is probably unknown to almost all visitors to the museum. These are reproductions of gigantic paintings made as cartoons for tapestries commissioned by the young Louis XIV in the 1660s from Charles Le Brun, who was to become his court painter and who was later responsible for the decorations at Versailles, including the Hall of Mirrors. The series illustrates the valour but also the magnanimity of Alexander, as is clear from the moralising inscriptions attached in the engraved versions. For a long time, the huge canvases were not displayed at the Louvre, but for the last few decades have had their own room upstairs in the Sully wing.
Following the chronological sequence from antiquity we eventually get back to the war of independence and its sequels already mentioned above; but the story continues, after what the Greeks call the Asia Minor Catastrophe of the early 1920s, with a new calamity two decades later. For Mussolini invaded Greece in October 1940 expecting, like Putin in Ukraine, to achieve an easy victory and utterly underestimating the strength and resolve of the Greek army. By the following spring, it was clear that he was getting nowhere, and Hitler decided to come to his rescue by invading Greece in April 1941.
A. Bormans, engraving after Charles Le Brun Alexander and King Porus
An Allied army, mostly consisting of Australian and New Zealand troops as well as some British units, was hastily put together and sent from Egypt to Greece as Lustre Force. It was heavily outnumbered by the Germans, who were also massively better equipped and had the benefit of air cover and wireless radio communication. Nonetheless, the Allied army put up a determined resistance in a series of battles including one notable action on April 18, 1941 at Tempe Gorge commanded by my grandfather, then Brigadier AS Allen, who had formed the first battalion of the new AIF and taken our first troops to World War II. The brigade he commanded at Tempe was known as “Anzac Force”, apparently the last use of the term, after the designation Anzac Corps for the whole Australian and NZ component of Lustre Force.
After the evacuation of mainland Greece, my grandfather was sent to fight the Vichy French in Syria, but many of our troops were taken to Crete, where in May 1941 they were faced with the first and only large-scale parachute assault in military history, in which the Germans suffered appalling casualties but ultimately prevailed. Next year will be the 85th anniversary of these dramatic events in Greece and Crete, and among other things will be commemorated by an exhibition of Australian and NZ artists whom I accompanied on a two-week tour of these battlefields in the second half of October.
It was a moving experience to visit what are today the peaceful sites of such desperate battles almost three generations ago, aware at the same time of the long history of warfare in the same lands: the Persians marched through Tempe, which is just north of Thermopylae; Caesar defeated Pompey at Pharsalus (now Farasala), which you pass on the train from Athens to Salonika (now Thessaloniki), and; Cassius and Brutus died at Philippi in Macedonia, defeated by the Caesarian forces of Octavian and Mark Antony.
Christopher Allen is the national art critic for Culture and has been writing in The Australian since 2008. He is an art historian and educator, teaching classical Greek and Latin. He has written an edited several books including Art in Australia and believes that the history of art in this country is often underestimated.
A man said to the universe: “Sir, I exist!” “However,” replied the universe, “The fact has not created in me A sense of obligation.”
American poet and author Stephen Crane, 1899
Statistics are sometimes used to express the scale of the destruction in Sudan. About 14 million people have been displaced by years of fighting, more than in Ukraine and Gaza combined. Some 4 million of them have fled across borders, many to arid, impoverished places—Chad, Ethiopia, South Sudan—where there are few resources to support them. At least 150,000 people have died in the conflict, but that’s likely a significant undercounting. Half the population, nearly 25 million people, is expected to go hungry this year. Hundreds of thousands of people are directly threatened with starvation. More than 17 million children, out of 19 million, are not in school. A cholera epidemic rages. Malaria is endemic.
But no statistics can express the sense of pointlessness, of meaninglessness, that the war has left behind alongside the physical destruction.
In what can only be described as a melancholy case of selective blindness, the gaze of western mainstream and social media, distracted by other conflicts and causes has been turned away. The global conscience has appeared unmoved. The numbers are obscene, the silence more so.
El Fasher, in Sudan’s far western province of Darfur, is once again the world’s unacknowledged abyss. The UN warns of genocide; videos show unarmed men executed in cold blood, hospitals shelled, aid workers vanished, women violated, and civilians starved into submission. The Rapid Support Forces – the Janjaweed (colloquial Arabic for “devil riders”) in new fatigues – are methodically annihilating ethnic groups such as the Masalit. El Fasher was the Sudanese army’s last holdout in Darfur and its capture marks a milestone in the two yea long civil war, giving the RSF de facto control of more than a quarter of the territory.
Why the silence?
Because Sudan resists the narrative template that powers modern activism. There is no imperial villain, no clear coloniser or colonised, no simple choreography of oppression and resistance. The slaughter of black Africans does not fit the anti-Western moral geometry upon which contemporary protest movements are built. Sudanese bodies fall outside the moral lens of the global North even as they fall in their thousands.
This is not to rank suffering but to note the selectivity of empathy. Sudan’s tragedy lacks the aesthetic of victimhood that flatters Western guilt. The WHO pleads for hospitals; journalists beg for their detained colleagues. It all sounds chillingly familiar – yet no outrage follows. Perhaps because Sudan offers no convenient villain, no redemption arc, no social currency.
At the heart of the moral selectivity of the globalised conscience lies outrage as performance, empathy as branding. Sudan exposes the performative element of protest: empathy contingent on narrative utility. Its tragedy has no liturgy, no public ritual of belonging. It shows what our age truly worships: not justice, but self-expression masquerading as it. And in El Fasher’s unmarked graves lies the measure of this hypocrisy – a mute testimony to the moral vanity of a world that rages for Palestine, hashtags for Ukraine, and sleeps through Sudan.
In That Howling Infinite has touched on this dissonance before in The calculus of carnage – the mathematics of Muslim on Muslim mortality We wrote back then, in December 2023, when the Sudanese civil war has been raging for the best part of a year: “Call it moral relativism or “whataboutism” (or, like some conjuror’s trick, “don’t look here, look over there!) but it is not a matter of opinion, more a simple matter of observation, to point out that Muslims are in the main subdued when their fellow Muslims are killed by other Muslims … There has been no significant unrest in the West over the hundreds of thousands of Muslims killed by fellow Muslims (apart from a visceral horror of the violence inflicted upon civilians and prisoners by the jihadis of the Islamic State. No public outcry or social media fury, no angry street protests by left-wing activists of vacuous members by armchair, value-signaling clicktavists”.
Journey to an civil war
American journalist Anne Applebaum wrote very long essay the August edition of The Atlantic: Sudan … the most nihilistic war ever. She believes that Sudan’s devastating civil war shows what will replace the liberal order: anarchy and greed. Her essay reads like a missive from a civilisation already past the point of rescue. The country she describes is less a state than a geography of ruin — a landscape where the coordinates of morality, nationhood, and even information itself have come apart. The title is no exaggeration; it is diagnosis and prognosis both. Sudan, she argues, is not an aberration but a preview — the shape of the world when the liberal order finally collapses, when wars are fought not for gods or ideas but for bullion and bodies.
Sudan’s civil war began, at least formally, as a contest between two men: General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, commander of the regular army, and Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemedti, who rose from the Janjaweed militias to command the Rapid Support Forces. Both were products of the same regime; both were once partners in repression. When they turned upon each other in 2023, the result was not ideological conflict but a kind of mutual devouring. Each accused the other of betrayal; each proceeded to loot, starve, and bomb the very population he claimed to protect.
Applebaum’s Sudan is not one country but many — an archipelago of fiefdoms and frontiers, each governed by whoever holds the nearest airstrip or gold mine. And gold, indeed, is the keyword: the new oil of an old desert. Sudan possesses vast deposits of it, and with them a vast invitation to corruption. Wagner mercenaries mine and smuggle it northward to fund Russia’s war in Ukraine. The United Arab Emirates bankrolls Hemedti’s RSF in exchange for access and influence. Egypt and Chad manoeuvre for position; Iran quietly re-enters the game. The Sudanese warlords themselves fight not to win the nation but to control the veins of the earth — the alluvial goldfields of Darfur and the Nile Basin that glitter beneath the dust like a curse.
Western governments, overstretched and inward-turned, offer gestures in place of policy. Applebaum notes that the world’s great democracies — once self-appointed custodians of human rights — now behave like distracted landlords. There is a knock at the door, another tenant murdered in the basement, but the owner is on the phone about something else.
In this sense, Sudan is less an anomaly than a mirror. It shows us what happens when international law becomes theatre, when moral outrage is rationed by proximity and profit. It is not merely a humanitarian disaster but a philosophical one: a demonstration that without belief — in justice, in shared reality, in the notion that human suffering still obliges response — politics decays into predation.
Applebaum’s prose, always measured, carries a note of exhausted mourning. The old ideological world — that twentieth-century drama of fascism, communism, and liberal democracy — at least believed in something, even if those beliefs destroyed millions. Today’s warlords believe in nothing at all. They are not even tyrants in the grand style; they are contractors of chaos, CEOs of slaughter, men who weaponise hunger for leverage and sell access to ruins.
What makes her essay so haunting is that Sudan’s nihilism feels contagious. The war may be geographically distant, but morally it is next door. The same disintegration of purpose infects the international response — the shrugging cynicism, the moral fatigue, the slow erosion of empathy. Applebaum’s Sudan is what remains when the “rules-based order” becomes a slogan muttered by people who no longer believe it themselves.
Coda: A Mirror in the Sand
The desert, Applebaum implies, has turned into a mirror of the world’s soul — reflecting its avarice, its indifference, its slow retreat from meaning.
What lingers after Applebaum’s account is not simply pity for Sudan, though that would be reason enough, but unease — the feeling that the world’s moral compass has slipped its pole and is spinning uselessly in our hands. Sudan is not the exception; it is the precedent. It is the world without illusion: borders drawn in dust, governments as rackets, truth dissolved into overlapping transparencies.
Once, wars were waged for empire, for creed, for revolution — each claiming, however falsely, to serve a higher cause. Now they are fought for metal, for markets, for motion itself. The soldiers are mercenaries, the civilians collateral, the nations staging grounds for someone else’s ledger. Applebaum’s overlapping maps are more than an image of Sudan’s confusion; they are an x-ray of a civilisation that no longer shares a moral reference point. We are all now drawing our own maps, colouring the world according to our comfort zones, overlaying them until the truth beneath is invisible.
And so Sudan becomes both tragedy and parable. Its gold mines glitter like tombs of the old order — the liberal dream of rules, rights, and reason — while above them drones and scavengers circle. A century ago, Conrad called it the horror; today it is merely another tab on a newsfeed. The anarchy is not confined to Khartoum or Darfur. It is spreading quietly through the arteries of global indifference, through our own fatigue, our own appetite for distraction.
Postscript: selective empathy in a world of sorrow
Comparing the international outcry over Gaza to the silence on Sudan has been condemned as intellectual dishonesty. One comment on this post ran this:
“The mainstream media can stir outrage on any topic when its political masters and financial backers want it to. Why has it not done so in this instance? Follow the money is one rule of thumb. I assume it suits the powers that be to let the slaughter continue. I hope more people are inspired to become activists against this dreadful situation, but public opinion tends to follow the narrative manufactured by the media more than impel it. When it comes to pro-Palestinian activism it is the story of a long hard grind of dedicated protestors to get any traction at all against the powerful political and media interests which have supported the Israeli narrative and manufactured global consent for the genocide of Palestinians over many years. And still, although the tide is gradually turning, the West supports Israel to the hilt and crushes dissent. Using the silence in the media and in the streets over the slaughter in Sudan as an excuse to try and invalidate pro-Palestinian activism is a low blow and intellectually dishonest”.
This particular response is articulate and impassioned, but it also illustrates precisely the reflexive narrowing of moral vision that the comparison between Gaza and Sudan was meant to illuminate. The argument hinges on a familiar syllogism: that Western media outrage is never organic but always orchestrated (“follow the money”), that silence on Sudan therefore reflects elite indifference rather than public apathy, and that to highlight that silence is somehow to attack or “invalidate” the legitimacy of pro-Palestinian activism. It is a neat, closed circuit—morally reassuring, rhetorically watertight, but intellectually fragile.
For one thing, the claim that outrage over Gaza is a product of “a long hard grind” of dissenters battling pro-Israel hegemony may be partly true, but it fails to account for the asymmetry of moral attention. Why, if media outrage can be manufactured at will, does it attach so selectively? Why is one tragedy magnified until it becomes the world’s moral touchstone, while another, numerically and humanly no less immense, barely registers? This is not to invalidate solidarity with Gaza—it is to interrogate the mechanisms by which empathy itself is distributed, channelled, and constrained.
The “follow the money” thesis also misses something subtler and more disturbing. Western silence on Sudan is not an act of conspiracy but of exhaustion: no villains clearly marked, no sides easily named, no tidy narrative of good and evil to moralise upon. Sudan’s war—fragmented, internecine, post-ideological—does not lend itself to hashtags or flags on Instagram profiles. It is a horror too complex to package and too distant to own. By contrast, Gaza offers clarity, identity, and the reassuring architecture of blame: victims and oppressors, martyrs and monsters, the colonial morality play in perfect focus.
Thus, when critics accuse those who draw this comparison of “intellectual dishonesty,” they mistake the argument. To juxtapose Gaza and Sudan is not to weigh one body count against another, or to diminish Palestinian suffering. It is to expose the limits of our moral imagination – how empathy becomes performative when it is contingent on narrative simplicity or political fashion.
In Sudan, the gold glitters under the rubble. Warlords, mercenaries, and foreign patrons all claw for it while millions starve. In Gaza, the ruins are televised, moralised, and weaponised. Both are human catastrophes, but only one has an audience.
The point, then, is not that activists for Gaza are wrong—it is that they are lonely. If their struggle truly seeks a universal human justice, it must be capacious enough to include Darfur, Khartoum, El Fasher—to grieve what the cameras do not show. Otherwise, our compassion becomes another form of exceptionalism: the selective virtue of those who need their tragedies to fit the script.
In truth, to compare Gaza and Sudan is not to rank suffering or diminish solidarity, but to expose the limits of our moral bandwidth. Gaza compels because its story is legible—villains, victims, a script the world knows by heart. Sudan confounds because it is too fractured, too many nations within one, too little meaning to hold. There is no clear narrative, only greed, hunger, and gold buried beneath the ruins.
The real dishonesty is not in caring for Gaza, but in mistaking selective empathy for universal conscience. If our outrage depends on simplicity, we risk turning compassion into performance – mourning only what the cameras show, and averting our eyes from what they cannot.
And I guess that’s why they call it the blues Time on my hands could be time spent with you
Elton John
My sweetheart is a soldier as handsome as can be But suddenly they sent him away across the sea So patiently I waited until his leave was due Then wrote and said, my darling, I’ll tell you what to do: Come to the station, jump from the train March at the double down lover’s lane Then in the glen where the roses entwine Lay down your arms And surrender to mine
Geoff Downes, John Payne and Gregory Hart
“Right-wingers … have a disreputable history of picking on that particular cohort. The young, and not just those of Muslim persuasion, are more likely to question the conventional mores of the time than the middle-aged, which is why they make a lot of conservatives uneasy. Maybe national service will get them to shape up. This is really quite a smart idea from a Tory standpoint, since many of the values which young people in Britain are wary of are military in origin … they are cultural traits rather than basic moral values. Loyalty, team-spirit, toughness, honour, character, valour, austerity, self-discipline, leadership, physical prowess: the nation divides between those like the present monarch who consider these values utterly vital, and those who think they have their origin in a tiny, unrepresentative sector of society (the officer class, public schools, Boy Scouts and so on), and stem ultimately from Britain’s repressive colonial history”.
Sunak’s call triggered some sympathetic martial bugles here DownUnder. There were letters to the editor aplenty in Australian newspapers, including our own Coffs Harbour News of the Area (an actual printed newspaper too). I couldn’t resist writing a response – and it was actually published:
“There’s been a couple of letters recently suggesting that national service would be a suitable panacea for the problems of delinquent youth, and another by Bellingen’s Warren Tindall (an old pal of mine, by the bye) on the “perils of national service”, reminding us that whingeing about the younger generation is timeless and generational. The notion appears to appeal to folk of a certain age who lament the lack of respect, discipline and Australian values (whatever that means) amongst Australian youth – the “knock some sense into them” law and order types who would like disorderly young folk to be “out of sight and out of mind”, and effectively, someone else’s problem. They naively believe that the induction of potentially underage and recalcitrant youths would somehow contribute to our defense manpower shortfalls and bolster our military preparedness. On the contrary, the conscription of unwilling and probably unfit recruits, and the time, effort and money needed to render them of use in any military capacity is are the last things a proficient defense force needs.
In countries culturally and politically unaccustomed to national service, conscription has historically been considered a burden on the forces. In western countries with national service – most notably the Scandinavian and Baltics, and Israel – young people grow up with the expectation of service and the national duty that implies, and are culturally and temperamentally prepared for it by the time they come of age. It is not a military trainer’s job or even skill set to “instil a sense of purpose”, teach “physical and mental coping skills” or “positive career paths” or “train responsible human beings”, whilst “reducing our prison population” seems like something like Vladimir Putin would do”.
All this brings me to British author Richard Vinen’s enthralling book National Service in Britain 1945-1963. It charts the institution’s origins, administration, and social consequences, painting a vivid picture of postwar Britain negotiating the uneasy transition from empire to welfare state, revealing how conscription shaped not only military efficiency but the habits, ambitions, and identities of an entire generation – a cultural imprint whose echoes still surface in debates about civic duty, and national identity.
Reading it a while back, I recalled the promotional video for the Elton John song quoted above with its nostalgic visual narrative of young lovers separated by a call to duty, including footage of young army conscripts and of the early British rock ‘n roll era. I also recalled the BBC serial Lipstick on Your Collar – a particular favourite of mine; A romantic pop song Lay down your arms featured in its finale. [More on Potter’s story below] Both dramatise a decade and more of British social history that few recall today when over two million young men were conscripted to serve in the armed forces for up to two years, and sometimes more, at a critical time in their social, intellectual and emotional development.
We republish below a comprehensive overview by Davenport-Hines But first, here are a some of my own recollections, and themes explored by Vinen that are not covered therein.
A grave new world
After the Second World War (1939-45), the young men of Britain were called upon to meet new challenges facing the country in a rapidly changing world – the Cold War between the USA and its European allies, and the Soviet Union.
The post-war world was a tenuous time for the old empires. Whilst old King Canute demonstrated his inability to control the tides, when Britain faced emergent and powerful nationalist movements, it sought to reassert its control in de facto colonies as far-flung as Egypt and Palestine, Cyprus and Kenya; and together with France and the Netherlands, actually fought to reclaim and hold on to their “possessions” (a term that reflected a mindset as much as political reality) that had fallen to the Japanese. Portugal, Spain and Belgium likewise fought to prevent their subject peoples breaking loose. Few outposts of empire endure today.
The decision to repurpose wartime conscription in 1947 was a response to these challenges and also to the threats presented by the Soviet Union and a multitude of communist-inspired and Soviet-nourished national liberation movements. And yet, only a very small proportion of conscripts served overseas – and most who did were stationed in what was then West Germany and isolated and divided Berlin.
To meet the military manpower needs of this grave new world, the National Service, a standardised form of peacetime conscription, was introduced in 1947 for all able-bodied men between the ages of 18 and 21. Nowadays, when all sorts of evasion, dodges, and exceptions are common in society at large, it is hard to imagine a nationwide system in which all were actually deemed eligible, lord or landless, toff or tough, brains or bozo, had to serve. endured and was endured for over a decade; its abolition was announced in 1957 but continued until 1960, and the last conscripts were not demobbed until 1963. Every fortnight some 6,000 youths were conscripted, with a total of 2,301,000 called up over the sixteen years.
And then it was over, not with a bang but with a series of whimpers, stuttering indecisively to a close, leaving few traces on the cultural topography of late twentieth century Britain. Whilst many soon to be famous authors, playwrights, producers and musicians served, only a few wrote of their experiences. Nor did many other conscripts, although Woodfield Publishing carries a range of memoirs by ordinary men who resolved to record their experiences for posterity. The most important films and television programs about National service were comedies. Carry on Sergeant, which appeared in 1958 was the first and the most innocent of the long “carry on“ series. It was filmed at a real army camp.
There was no tangible ‘outcome’ to National service. There was no single conflict that ended in victory or defeat. There were none of the collective events – bonfires, parties, mutinies – that marked the end of the two world wars. It was ‘ending’ almost soon as it began because individual men were demobilized every two weeks. They went back to work – in the tight labor market of 1950s some of them started jobs on the Monday after they were demobilized – and to marriage and families in the dour but brightening fifties. It was not until they retired in the 1990s that most of the former servicemen had much time to reflect on their youth – which is why national service was so little discussed in the three decades after it ended.
Setting a date for the end of conscription was awkward. No one wanted to be the last conscript. There was a danger that the whole system might come to an end in “a most ragged and unsatisfactory manner” if men knew the precise day on which was ceased to operate, especially since as officials recognized, they would not have the resources to track down and prosecute evaders once the machinery of National service had been put into mothballs.
Though the last years of national service were uncomfortable for many conscripts, in someways, they were even worse for regulars particular, particularly for regular officers in the army. The tone of civil-military relations changed. when the first peace time conscripts had been called up, the army still had some of the prestige that went with victory in the second world war and with the military traditions of the Empire …
Those who regarded themselves as defenders of the interest of the army, had implied that peace time. conscription was a burden for the forces and look forward to the day when a well trained well paid and dedicated professionals were combined comprise a lean flexible and hard, hitting army. At least, in the short term this did not happen, and the end of conscription went with an undignified period when middle-aged officers scrambled to hold onto their jobs.
In one sense conscription was just one aspect of a British illusion of great power status, an illusion few people outside Britain, and perhaps a few people outside the British governing classes, believed or cared about
As Vinen reminds us in his enthralling story, the public’s historical memory of the institution imperceptibly faded from the national consciousness once it had ended, once parents no longer fretted about their sons being called up and once young men no longer needed to be anxious about interrupting or postponing careers and higher education. High rates of employment, rising incomes and standards of living during the fifties and early sixties, the attractions of consumerism and new forms of mass entertainment, and the lowering of Cold War tensions with the death of Josef Stalin, gave rise to fresh and less war-like circumstances and expectations.
The end of national service coincided with the beginning of the cultural era now known as the sixties (which actually lasted from about 1963 until about 1973). Changes in British society in the 1960s would have made it increasingly difficult to call men up even if the government wished to do so. It was a time remembered for self-consciously irreverent attitudes towards the British establishment, the class system, the almost casual racism of the past, and indeed history itself. It manifested the in theatrical reviews of the early sixties like Beyond the Fringe and the scatological and iconoclastic Private Eye magazine, and also the so-called youth culture which revolved about fashion and pop music.
In 1964, a year after National Service finally ended, a British band called the Barron Knights recorded an awful parody medley called Call Up The Groups which imagined many popular British groups being conscripted. It was hammy and cringeworthy then and it has not aged well, but when listened to sixty years on, it seems like an irreverent dated relic of Britain’s stuttering “farewell to arms”.
The very last line of Vinen’s book says it all: the culture in which national service existed belongs to a different age. To repurpose LP Hartley’s well used line, the past was another country where people thought and did things differently.
Descent from Glory
As noted in our introduction, present day advocates of conscription – or “national service”, which soothes the sting of compulsion – argue that it would encourage young people to “shape up”, to inculcate in them those treasured values that many of a certain age believe have been lost in the tide of modernity – to reiterate, like patriotism, loyalty, respect, honour, character, valour, leadership, toughness, self-discipline and physical prowess. And yet, the society that existed in those postwar years, and the values it espoused and revered, are long gone. The historical, political, social and cultural conditions that rendered national service universally acceptable no longer exist.
The British Empire had created a political culture that took greatness for granted and victory in the Second World War had reinforced this, even as it eroded the resources with which great power might be supported. The leaders of both political parties shared this culture as did most of the officials who advised them; and during the early years of National Service, most people of all classes accepted the shared obligation to serve, and with the memory of the war years still fresh and the Soviet and communist “threat” manifest, the populace as a whole were onboard with what could be described as official patriotism.
Most national servicemen had grown up in a period when there were no great ideological divisions in Britain. At least they were mostly young and the forces provided them with little in the way of political education. Of the small number who were actually posted overseas, many went without having much idea of what they were being sent to defend, and rarely understood what they were doing. In farflung outposts like Cyprus and Palestine, Kenya and the Far East, they were fighting people with whom they were not at war and often, as in Korea and later, in Egypt, countries that were not British possessions. The army didn’t get down to the politics what it was all about, and some national servicemen appear to have thought about the political significance of their actions at Suez, or in Malaya only years after the event.
Regular Army officers introducing themselves to conscripts would advise to tell them that the British preferred the term national service to conscription, because, to quote Vinen, “that is what it is “a service to the nation, each national serviceman contributes towards giving the nation, strong and efficient army”. Judged on an international perspective, however, the most striking thing about national service is, that was not actually very national
And yet, the military authorities never tried to instill patriotism.
Often, particularly in new states many ethnicities and religious affiliations and little social cohesion, military service is regarded as a “school of nation” inculcating presumptive national loyalty, values, interests. This was not the intent of the designers of national service. It was not intended to inculcate patriotic feelings. Nor was it really designed to foster manly martial virtues. Service for most conscripts was monotonous and seemingly pointless, whilst stories of bullying and mistreatment were common. One serviceman, Peter Burns, noted in a memoir years later: “In the old phrase, I went in a boy and came out a man, but not a very nice man”. He did not elaborate further.
It was manpower first and foremost, “boots on the ground” and potentially, on the battlefield – though technological innovation was rendering “serried ranks” redundant. Military authorities, determined to make things easier for themselves, were reluctant to call up, as a War Office report put it “a social group that is poorly integrated in the nation. For example, barrow boys, gypsies, the racing community, Liverpool Irish, foreign communities in London, the Glasgow community from which the gangs are recruited, etcetera … “. Indeed, the forces were probably glad to be rid of some of their potential and actual delinquent conscripts.
Conscription was never applied in the part of the United Kingdom where the largest number of people was likely not to feel themselves British: Northern Ireland. In Scotland and Wales, there was a small amount of overtly nationalist opposition to fighting for a ‘foreign’ government. more important was the general sense that conscription did not fit with the social structure of either Wales or Scotland. The Welsh dislike of the armed forces, rooted in chapel going respectability, was very different from the antipathy to army discipline that was associated with some working-class Scotsman. Sometimes the single word that aroused most terror in the war office was Glasgow”.
National service did not create a more homogenous and disciplined society – on the contrary, it worked partly because Britain, mainland Britain at least, was already homogenous and disciplined.
But there were the outliers. As Vinen writes: “Would that substantial group of men of Irish origin living in mainland Britain have been called up during the northern Irish troubles? What would the forces have done about non-white immigrants? Black Britons were not excluded from national service, but given how rare such men were, it is significant that they were quite common amongst those that officers regarded as ‘difficult’. The British army recruited 2000 West Indians in 1960, partly to make the shortfall that sprang from the imminent end of national service. However, the authorities decided that coloured soldiers should not make up more than 2% of the strength of any corps”.
Lipstick on your collar … national service through Potter’s prism
Lipstick on Your Collar is a 1993 British TV serial written by the late socialist playwright Dennis Potter, acclaimed for his television dramas The Singing Detective, Karaoke and Cold Lazarus. He also wrote the brilliant screenplay for the film adaption of Martin Cruz-Smith’s most excellent novel Gorky Park, itself, in my opinion, one of the best ever film adaptations of a novel.
Potter was a national service conscript along with many soon to be well-known British politicians, sportsmen, authors, poets, playwrights and performing artists – including Rolling Stones bass player, former RAF private, Bill Wyman, iconic actor and national treasure Michael Caine, late actors Sean Connery and Michael Gambon, onetime Conservative Party firebrand Michael Heseltine, and the ‘Angry Young Men’ of letters Allan Sillitoe, John Braine, Arnold Wesker and Joe Orton.
The story is for the most part set in a British Military Intelligence Office in Whitehall during 1956. A small group of foreign affairs analysts find their quiet existence is disrupted by the Suez Crisis. A young conscript is completing his national service as a translator of Russian documents, but bored with his job, he passes time in fantasy daydreams in which his very straight colleagues break into contemporary hit songs. The character is portrayed by a young Ewan McGregor went on to movie fame in Star Wars and other major films. His fellow language clerk is a clumsy Welsh intellectual and admirer Russian poets and playwrights – Pushkin and Chekov in particular- whose academic career has been interrupted by his call up. collar.
The subtext is the conflict between the old order, as represented by the middle-aged and-patriotic regular army officers, the conscripted ‘other ranks’ as portrayed by the two privates, and the new ‘rock ‘n roll’ generation, illustrated her by dance halls, coffee bars, and ‘fifties American popular music.
Denis Potter studied at Ministry of Defence’s Russian Language School. Apparently, those few conscripts who graduated as interpreters and translators were regarded as the crême de la crême of conscripts. Often, trainees would put on concerts of Russian songs and plays for their own amusement. A natural linguist, he’d learned Russian whilst undergoing compulsory national service in the fifties. One such graduate was Tom Springfield, the elder brother of diva Dusty Springfield. He borrowed the melody of The Seeker’s timeless song The Carnival is Over from Stenka Razin a traditional Russian folk tune that told the tale of a drunken seventeenth century Cossack rebel who threw his Persian bride of one night over the side of his boat into the Volga River when his men accused him of going soft. Tom changed the story entirely though he retained a nautical riff and cast the star-crossed lovers as the theatre characters Pierrot and Columbine rather than casting them overboard. See “High above the dawn is waiting” … the unlikely origin of a pop song
“And what a year that was! With peacetime restored, the British electorate immediately voted out its esteemed and beloved war leader, Winston Churchill, and bought Labour’s promise of a democratic socialism. In his excellent documentary The Spirit of ‘45, film maker Ken Loach describes the nationalisation of public services and industries and their subsequent privatization three decades later. His interviewees provide poignant anecdotes about the poverty of the 1930s, the dangerous and exploitative working conditions, poor housing, and abysmal health care, and the renewed sense of purpose and optimism a the end of the war and Labour’s landslide victory. He recounts the subsequent expansion of the welfare state, with its free to all medical service and the nationalization of significant parts of the British economy, most notably, electricity, the railways, and the mines. The Attlee government was elected due to a general belief that nothing would or could be as it had been before. Britain had pulled together to win the war; now, it would transform the peace.
But for ordinary folk, life in the immediate postwar years wasn’t that rosy. Britain emerged from the war victorious and though brave, physically battered and financially broke, its towns and factories in disrepair, and it’s people coming to terms with a not so brave new world of disappointed expectations and ongoing privation. Rationing, introduced early in the war on most foodstuffs and consumer items, remained in place and was only gradually lifted until its end in 1954.”
If we’re born in forties and early fifties, and look back, to our childhoods or to contemporary photographs and films, there is a patina of austerity and drabness. It was mirrored in how people dressed and in the fashions of the time. During the conflict and long after, clothing and colour were rationed due to the shortage of fabrics and of dyes as industry and manufacturing were directed to “essential industries” contributing to the war effort. This is why images of the time look so monochrome, or when colourized all blacks, browns and greys. Until the technicolor explosion that is now synonymous with the “swinging sixties”, enabled by the invention of new, often synthetic fabrics and an insurrectionist generation of designers, artists, and entrepreneurs.
I was born at the right time in the right place. I missed the Second World War, and arrived to be blessed with the benefits of the National Health Service – launched by Labour health minister Aneurin Bevan on 5th July 1948 – which had had at its heart three core principles: that it met the needs of everyone, that it be free at the point of delivery, and that it be based on clinical need, not ability to pay – and The Education Act , or ‘Butler Act’, of 1944 which promised and then delivered ‘secondary education for all’. I was too young to do National Service in the fifties, and caught the wondrous wave of the sixties in all its freewheeling, rumbustious glory, whilst Harold Wilson kept us potentially eligible conscripts out of America’s Asian war in Vietnam.
When I was a nipper, the Second World War was tangible. I born less than four years after the fighting finished. It was nearer than Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and even Northern Ireland are today. We just called it “The War”. We had family, friends and relations who had lived through it, fought in it, and died in it, as had many of the schoolmasters who taught us. Many wore scars and infirmities from the war, and some bore invisible wounds.
We played war-games on bombed-out “wasteland”. Rationing continued into the fifties, so it constrained our lifestyles. War stories were ubiquitous, on the screen and in print; James Bond had served in the war, as had George Smiley. In the boys’ comics, gallant British Tommies invariably overcame superior numbers of Germans, who were portrayed as mindless automatons and referred to contemptuously as ‘Krauts’ or ‘Jerries’. In the sixties, we built Airfix warplanes, battleships and fighting vehicles.
Conscription was reintroduced in 1948 to maintain what remained of Britain’s imperial dream; young men in uniform were always around whilst older cousins and friends’ big brothers had to do their national service. Little wonder that the war’s echoes reverberated through our imaginations, pastimes and preoccupations.
My own memories of National Service are are just fleeting images of young relatives in army uniforms and of school pals mentioning that their brothers or uncles were doing their bit. To us children, it was relatively unobtrusive and taken for granted. I commenced grammar school in September 1960 at a time when many grammar schools imitated the practise of public schools with a military training outfit called the CCF or Combined Cadet Force. Once a week, toy soldiers would strut about school in khaki attire. Prefects, another practise borrowed from public schools (along with the term “fags” for first and second formers – though none the servile duties immortalised in that fabulous movie If) were naturally officer-cadets. And they would march up and down the square with real guns! No ammo, but. I was already a Boy Scout by then and that was enough of matters martial and patriotic for me. And my Irish folks said “No!”
Whether by design or coincidence, by 1963, conscription and our school CCF were no more. And I did not notice the passing of either.
We were taught and accepted the narrative that wartime prime minister Winston Churchill had promulgated: that the period after the fall of France, when Britain had stood alone against the Axis powers, had been our finest hour and that the eventual defeat of Nazi Germany made all the sacrifices worthwhile. We also accepted His word for his pivotal role in it. “History will be kind to me”, he famously wrote, “for I shall write it”. And we were inculcated with the values that he fostered and indeed, personified: courage, duty, obedience, self-denial, reticence, restraint – the qualities that had won the war, or at least had enabled Britons to survive it. This is what being a man meant, then.
The are not values that resonate today. By the beginning of the sixties, “the times were a’changin’”, slowly but surely. Changes in British society in the 1960s would have made it increasingly difficult to call men up even if the government wished to do so. Rising levels of education, and also, of affluence wrought changes in attitudes and ambitions. The fifties gave rise to the phenomenon of “the teenager”, an American concept that took off in drab Britain as rationing came gradually to an end and as life in general took on more colour and excitement – young people were less accepting of authority, discipline, and ageing and anachronistic concepts of Queen and Country – and as the songs at the head if this post illustrate, love was always in the air …
Rather than keeping a stiff upper lip, we are encouraged to show our emotions; rather than keeping it in, we are supposed to let it all out. Like most of us today, I share these modern, peacetime values; yet I retain a respect for the men of my father’s generation. Without them, our lives would have been very different.
The world was much smaller then
In those days, young people did not travel too much, and accordingly, did not move far from their economic and social circles. Vinen notes that schools and later, universities, were for many, the most important gatehouses on the social frontiers. Until then, few folk got close enough to see the middle class or conversely, the working class closeup. The eleven plus was the border crossing where children who’d come through primary school together were filtered off onto different paths.
My recollections concur totally regional differences were less pronounced in primary school where children were drawn from a particular locality, where even Scottish, Welsh and Irish accents were to a degree diluted and normalized by schoolmates. My Roman Catholic primary school in Yardley Wood in south Birmingham was located between middle- and working-class neighbourhoods, the former on the eastern side of Trittiford Road, the latter on the west and south, so we were a socially mixed bunch. But Catholics all. Of Irish parentage, went through primary school without mixing socially with non-Catholics. Secondary schools drawing on a wider yet still local catchment saw more familiarization with differences accents, often of a social character. But it was in tertiary education that young people came into continued contact with contemporaries and teachers from all over the country and even from abroad.
Conscription in the Anglosphere post 1945
The following is a brief overview of postwar conscription in Australia and the United Sates, particularly with reference to its introduction in the light of these countries’ controversial involvement in the Vietnam War. Britain sat this one out – to the great relief of myself and my peers, who were all of conscription age and had no inclination to take part in America’s Asian war – although US President Lyndon B Johnson endeavoured unsuccessfully to strongarm and indeed blackmail British Prime Minister Harold Wilson into committing British troops to the conflict. A more comprehensive overview of conscription in the Eastern and Western blocs during and after the Cold War is provided in an addendum at the end of this post.
Britain had done away with military service in 1963; Belgium did so in 1992. France in 1997 and Germany 2011, between 2004 and 2011, a vast swathe of Europe did away with national service. Only Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Cyprus, Greece, Austria and Switzerland have never abandoned conscription.
In Australia, I’d meet veterans who’d been conscripted for the Vietnam War through the notorious, discriminatory birthday ballot – a method actually rejected by the British government as inequitable, unfair, and contrary to the notion of universal obligation.
It was introduced in April 1964 primarily to meet the challenges if of the Indonesian “confrontasi” and the emerging threats from communism in Asia and Australia’s overseas commitment to Cold War allies. Tensions were increasing between North and South Vietnam by May 1965, and as an ally of the US, Australia agreed to allow national servicemen to be sent overseas to Vietnam.
Australia sent over 60,000 military personnel to Indochina between 1962 and 1972, including large combat units and conscripts under the National Service Scheme. Most 20-year-old Australian men had to register for national service between 1965 and 1972, and 15,300 ‘nashos’ as they were called were conscripted into. More than 200 died and at least 1,200 were wounded on active duty.
Conscription was generally supported by Australians. Polls showed widespread support for the policy. Parents saw it as a way of instilling discipline in their sons, as well as teaching valuable life skills. At the time, the Australian media portrayed conscription in a positive way. Army life and national service were generally praised. The army was not so enthusiastic. Instead, it argued the need for skilled tradesmen and officers and not what it considered a ragtag selection of semi trained men. Public support waned after the first conscripts were killed, stirring the anti-war movement. Australia’s last combat troops came home from Vietnam in March 1972, and the national service scheme ended that December after the election of the Whitlam Labor government.
Like Britain, Canada did not enter the Vietnam War. New Zealand, the last of the ”Five Eyes” allies did, for similar geopolitical reasons to Australia’s.There was domestic opposition, but never on the scale or intensity of Australia’s anti-Vietnam movement.New Zealand’s total deployment was around 3,500 personnel over the whole war, but all of them were volunteers. There was no conscription in NZ and therefore not the same resentment about people being forced into service – major driver of Australian protests. The protest narrative focused on the morality and legitimacy of the war, not the injustice of conscription.
While in both countries, the conservative governments framed Vietnam as part of the Cold War “forward defence” strategy and alliance obligations (SEATO, ANZUS). the scale and visibility of the commitment in NZ were smaller, and the government carefully emphasised the limited nature of the force.
Early in the war, like in Australia, public opinion was more favourable toward involvement, partly due to alliance loyalties and the perception of a communist threat in Asia. Opposition grew in the late 1960s and early 1970s, particularly among students, churches, and parts of the Labour Party – but large street protests only became common toward the end, especially around 1970–72. There was no equivalent of the huge moratorium marches across the Tasman. NZ began winding down combat deployments earlier than Australia; the infantry company was withdrawn in late 1971, with only a small training team remaining until 1972. The Labour government elected in 1972 (Norman Kirk) quickly ended remaining involvement. It never became the same national political crisis that it did in Australia, but it did, help cement a more independent foreign policy during the 1970s–80s, culminating in the nuclear-free policy and tensions with the US.
America’s Vietnam conscription experience was combustible and cathartic. Between 1964 and 1973, the U.S. military drafted 2.2 million American men out of an eligible pool of 27 million. All men of draft age (born January 1, 1944, to December 31, 1950) who shared a birthday would be called to serve at once.
Although only 25 percent of the military force in the combat zones were draftees, the system of conscription caused many young American men to volunteer for the armed forces in order to have more of a choice of which division in the military they would serve. While many soldiers did support the war, at least initially, to others the draft seemed like a death sentence: being sent to a war and fight for a cause that they did not believe in. Some sought refuge in college or parental deferments; others intentionally failed aptitude tests or otherwise evaded; thousands fled to Canada; the politically connected sought refuge in the National Guard; and a growing number engaged in direct resistance. Antiwar activists viewed the draft as immoral and the only means for the government to continue the war with fresh soldiers. Ironically, as the draft continued to fuel the war effort, it also intensified the antiwar cause. Although the Selective Service’s deferment system meant that men of lower socioeconomic standing were most likely to be sent to the front lines, no one was completely safe from the draft. Almost every American was either eligible to go to war or knew someone who was.
Global areas of operation for National Servicemen, 1947-63
National Service: Conscription in Britain 1945-1963
The forgotten history of Britain’s peacetime conscription
Fifty years ago, at the dawn of the cultural revolution of the 60s, there had never been so many ex-soldiers and ex-sailors in British history. Mods and peaceniks were reacting against generations that had been mobilised during two world wars. Yet the militarisation of British society was not just the outcome of war. Under the National Service Act, introduced in 1947, healthy males aged 18 or over were obliged to serve in the armed forces for 18 months. After the outbreak of the Korean war in 1950, the length of service was raised to two years – more onerous than elsewhere in Europe. In practice national service was a catch-all for men born between 1927 and 1939 whose childhoods had already been overcast by economic depression, wartime bombing and evacuation. Although its abolition was announced in 1957, it continued until 1960, and the last conscripts were not demobbed until 1963.
Every fortnight some 6,000 youths were conscripted, with a total of 2,301,000 called up over this period. The army took 1,132,872 and the RAF much of the rest, leaving relatively few sailors. After discharge, conscripts remained on the reserve force for another four years, and were liable to recall in the event of an emergency. Many drilled men became conformist and respectful of authority, but others reacted to their experiences with a lifetime of insubordination and resentment. National service did not cause the upheaval or leave the distressed aftermath of the US draft in the Vietnam war, but the significance of the forgotten militarisation of mid-20th century Britain is enduring.
National Servicemen relax in the NAAFI canteen at Weybourne Camp, April 1954
In an era when it was hard to recruit enough regular soldiers to meet Britain’s commitments in Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Asia, conscripts trained to police regions occupied by the British after the war, to provide a reserve of troops who could be called up in any future major conflict, and they were available for immediate deployment, notably in the decolonisation wars in Malaya, Kenya and Cyprus. Most of them were not yet old enough to vote (voting age was only lowered from 21 to 18 in 1970) and felt disempowered. They had scant pay, and provided a cut-price way for Britain to maintain its illusory great power status. But withdrawing this number of fit youngsters from the economy at a time of labour shortage harmed British post-war reconstruction.
Vinen admits that he could write a whole chapter on a Conservative MP’s claim that he was offered a commission because an officer spotted that he was circumcised and concluded that he must be a public school boy. In turn, a reviewer could write a monograph on Vinen’s book, which is chock-a-block with important themes, provocative ideas, arresting stories, heartbreak and good jokes.
Nowadays we commemorate the launch of the National Health Service as promoting a historically unprecedented mentality whereby a benign state provided its citizens with social benefits rather than treating them as subjects serving the needs of the nation. The National Service Act was the negative counterpart of the NHS, whereby civilians were dragooned into compliance with the demands of the state. Its chief proponent was Field Marshal Montgomery, the posturing bully who was in a permanent panic of denial about his repressed homosexuality, and hoped to use military service to mould national character towards chaste combative virility. For many conscripts their sense of the state was not the benign NHS but the bullying of national service square-bashing.
Generally, though, national service was not intended as an instrument of social discipline. It was disliked not only by antimilitarists and left-wingers, but by middle-of-the-road people because it disrupted the lives of their sons in a period when there was full employment for the working classes. Welsh chapel-going traditions were hostile to conscription. Working-class Scotsmen fought army discipline. As Vinen writes, “Sometimes the single word that aroused most terror in the War Office was ‘Glasgow’.” Regular army officers resented national service, especially during its early years, because the need to train a constantly renewed stream of conscripts was dull, repetitive and diminished “real soldiering”.
The Church of England, unlike the nonconformists and the Catholics, encouraged its clergy to undertake national service. Anglicanism and “manly morality” were promoted together by the military authorities. An army guide of 1947 declared, “the sexual appetite was implanted in man for the lawful use in Wedlock”. Yet Christian morality had minimal influence on the sex lives of conscripts. Rather, says Vinen, national servicemen, as opposed to regular soldiers, believed in “that greatest of all postwar virtues: deferred gratification”. His findings support Claire Langhamer’s wonderful study The English in Love(2013) in showing how strongly young men of the 1950s were romantics who believed in love at first sight, idealised virginity and had sweet dreams of domestic bliss within the institution of marriage. The discomfort and violence of military life, the lack of privacy and the mindless rules imposed without consent produced a generation that cherished intimacy and non-confrontation. Most conscripts came from families where defiance of the law was inconceivable. Yet the armed forces gave innumerable opportunities for non-commissioned officers and clerks to exploit conscripts, pilfer stores and make dodgy deals. Many conscripts learned how to duck and dive, to break rules and subvert authority. One RAF clerk issued instructions that officers must count the number of flies stuck to flypapers at all bases. Such experiences chipped away at the law-abiding, respectful traditions of Britain before peacetime conscription.
Vinen depicts “the hellish chaos of basic training”: its violence, verbal savagery, the dumb misery of military drills, the horrors of bayonet practice. Several young men killed themselves during training – usually by hanging from a lavatory cistern, because “the shithouse” was the only place that gave a moment’s privacy – but suicide statistics seem to have been doctored by officials. Sergeants with booming voices and curling moustaches were fabled figures, but it was corporals who gave the orders in training – many were malevolent, sadistic figures. Vinen gives numerous instances of cruelty, both in training and in combat. These include the massacre in 1948 by a Scots Guards patrol – mainly national servicemen – of 24 Chinese labourers on a Malaysian rubber plantation, killings and mutilations in Kenya and a rampage by troops in Cyprus after two British servicemen’s wives were shot. A serviceman described: “wholesale rape and looting and murder”, including “a 13 year old girl raped and killed in a cage”.
Royal Engineers homeward bound from Suez on the SS ‘Dilwara’, 1954
National Service may prove to be the most original social history book of 2014. It is written with cool, elegant lucidity and there are neither ideological tricks nor obscure jargon. The book is bigger than its ostensible subject, embracing class, masculinity, sexuality, compliance, rebellion, combat atrocities, petty crime, notions of national identity, group solidarity, the fallibility of memory and what it means to be a man.
How National Service introduced in 1949 saw more than two million young men take up military roles
Males aged between 17 and 21 were conscripted between 1949 and 1960
Initially recruits had to serve for 18 months, but this was extended to two years
Did YOU do National Service? Email harry.s.howard@mailonline.co.uk
Harry Howard, History Correspondent, Daily Mail, 31st August 2023
For those who did not enjoy the experience, it must have felt like the Second World War had not truly ended.
Between 1949 and 1960, more than two million men aged between 17 and 21 were conscripted into the armed forces as part of National Service.
The proposals – mooted by think-tank Onward – would not be compulsory, but youths would have to opt out if they did not want to join. As many as 600,000 youngsters could be involved.
Triplets Allan, Brian and Dennis Kirkby (front, left to right) reporting with other recruits at North Frith Barracks, Hampshire, in 1953
Michael Caine (back row, fourth from left) was among the men who were called up. He served in the Royal Fusiliers from from April 1952 and ended up fighting in the Korean War
National Service was deemed necessary in part because of Britain’s military commitments abroad.
The British Empire – although diminishing – still existed and both Germany and Japan were still occupied following the end of the Second World War.
Ministers also wanted to re-establish British influence in the world, including in the Middle East.
Further manpower demands were imposed by the Cold War with the Soviet Union, whilst Indian independence in 1947 meant Britain no longer had the huge Indian Army to call upon.
Those who were conscripted as part of National Service would have to sleep 20 to a room in ramshackle barracks, with little heating, primitive toilets and poor washing facilities.
They would be woken at 5.30am and spent hours marching on the parade ground, with afternoons taken up by field or rifle training, ten-mile runs and obstacle courses.
Recruits spent their evenings cleaning the barracks, their kit and their rifles in a routine that was known as ‘the bull’.
Former boxing champion Sir Henry Cooper (pictured left with his twin brother George), who died in 2011, spent two years in the Army after representing Great Britain at the 1952 Olympic Games
Sir Henry Cooper (left) is seen on a training jog with other recruits during his National Service
Former Conservative minister Michael Heseltine, was called up but served for just nine months before obtaining leave to stand as a Tory candidate in the 1959 election: (middle row, fifth from right) with fellow conscripts at Caterham Guards Depot in 1959
Conscripts are seen at a depot in Kingston upon Thames in 1953
National Servicemen at a depot in Kingston upon Thames enjoy a smoke as a comrade examines his rifle in 1953
National Servicemen are seen marching at a depot in Kingston upon Thames
National Servicemen training with the Royal Air Force at RAF Booker in Buckinghamshire in 1951
Punishments for any slip in standards included being confined to barracks, washing latrines or peeling potatoes.
Recruits also had little chance to see their families. They were given just 14 days’ leave for every eight months of service.
Basic pay in 1949 was 28 shillings (£1.40) a week, much less than the average weekly wage of around £8.
But the men still had to buy all their own razor blades, shaving soap, boot polish, haircuts, dusters and Brasso for polishing any buckles and badges.
If any kit was lost, recruits would have to pay for it twice. Once to replace it and once as a fine.
After finishing basic training, conscripts were posted to regiments both at home and abroad. Overseas postings included Germany, Cyprus and the Middle East.
Other National Servicemen who went on to become household names include Oliver Reed, Tony Hancock, and Bill Wyman of the Rolling Stones
Around 125,000 National Servicemen were deployed to war zones such as the conflict in Korea and 395 lost their lives in combat.
Others saw action in Malaya and during the Suez Crisis in 1956.
Although for some the experience of serving was a negative one, many National Service veterans look back fondly on the period.
They often formed bonds that have stayed with them ever since.
During his stint in the Royal Fusiliers, which began in 1952, Sir Michael, now 90, served in the Korean War.
He recalled his experiences in an interview with the Daily Mail in 1987.
Commenting on the tactics employed by the enemy, he told of ‘attack after attack, you would find their bodies in groups of four’.
‘We heard them talking and we knew they had sussed us…Our officer shouted run and by chance we ran towards the Chinese. Which is what saved us; in the dark we lost each other,’ he added.
Lord Heseltine, 90, served for just nine months before obtaining leave to stand as a Tory candidate in the 1959 election and then getting his solicitor to persuade the War Office that he did not need to return to the barracks.
Sir Bobby, 85, combined his football career at Manchester United with a stint in the Army in the mid 1950s.
He served with the Royal Army Ordnance Corps in Shrewsbury, meaning he could still play football at the weekend.
Former boxing champion Sir Henry Cooper, who died in 2011, spent two years in the Army after representing Great Britain at the 1952 Olympic Games in Helsinki.
Eighteen-year-old conscripts on parade at the Royal West Kent Depot , November 1955
Teenagers line up at the Royal West Kent Depot in Maidstone forinoculations in November 1954
Major General Sir Reginald Laurence Scoones of the British Army takes the salute at the passing-out parade of 32 National Service and regular recruits from the depot of the Royal Fusiliers (City of London Regiment) at the Tower of London, October 17, 1958
National Service recruits lined up in 1952
He joined up with his twin brother George. Recalling his first day, Sir Henry previously said: ‘Well, it’s all a bit nerve-wracking because we didn’t know what to expect.
‘We went to Blackdown where we did our basic training.
‘We had to have medicals, strip off in front of doctors, put our arms up and they stuck a needle, one in our shoulder, one in our arm, and we wondered what was going on.’
He added: ‘They were hard on you in those days. Thank God we were a little bit better than a lot of the ordinary guys.
‘We were very fit because we’d been training as amateur boxers so the physical fitness side didn’t bother us at all.’
Sir Henry was crowned Army Boxing Association champion two years’ running and went on to win the Imperial Services Boxing Association title.
In the late 1950s it was decided to bring National Service to an end, in part because of the burden it placed on the Army and the fact that workers were being drained from the economy.
Rifleman E Akid showing National Service recruits a captured Korean flag at the Royal Ulster Rifles Depot in Ballymena, County Antrim, Northern Ireland
Yorkshiremen a posing for a group photo before they entered the armed forces 1955
A group of national servicemen in the canteen at their barracks, November 1954
Swansea Town and Wales international footballer Cliff Jones serving his National Service at with the Kings Troop Royal Horse Artillery regiment of the British Army. Here he is having his rifle inspected at the St John’s Wood barracks, October 14, 1957
Recruits taking part in an assault course in 1955
The last recruits entered the armed forces in November 1960, with their service coming to an end in 1963.
The last man to be discharged was Second Lieutenant Richard Vaughan of the Royal Army Pay Corps, who departed on June 14, 1963.
Ms Mordaunt enthusiastically endorsed the blueprint for the new National Service-style scheme yesterday in an article for the Telegraph, saying it would foster the ‘goodwill and community spirit, energy and imagination’ of teens.
She also insisted it could promote ‘good mental health and resilience’ after the upheaval of the Covid crisis.
Addendum – Around the World
Britain 1945–1962
Name: National Service (post‑WWII call‑up)
Period: Men born from 1927–1939 were called; effective peacetime service formally ran 1947 to 1960 for new call‑ups, with final discharges in 1963 (legal end often cited as 1960–62 depending on measure). (Double‑check exact administrative end dates for your footnote.)
Age at call‑up: typically around 18–20 (varied).
Length of service: initially 18 months (later raised to 2 years during Korean War era, then cut back to 18 months by the 1950s).
Exemptions/deferrals: students, those in reserved occupations, medical unfitness, and conscientious objectors (who faced tribunals and could receive civilian or non‑combatant service).
Context: early Cold War, Korean War, decolonisation operations; political consensus for a peacetime force to meet global commitments. Abolished as Britain moved to a smaller professional army and as political pressure mounted against peacetime conscription.
Comparative snapshot: selected Western & allied countries (1945 → present)
Note: “Present” means status as of mid‑2024 unless otherwise noted. Please ask if you want this converted into a formal table with citations.
France
Post‑1945 pattern: Mandatory service re‑established after WWII; heavily used during the Indochina and Algerian wars.
Length: historically 18–28 months at various times.
End/suspension: Standing conscription ended in 1996 (President Chirac suspended the appel). France shifted to a professional army; short mandatory civic training (Journée Défense et Citoyenneté) remains.
Notes: Algeria and decolonisation had big effects on French policy and public debate.
Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) / GDR (East Germany)
West Germany (FRG): Introduced conscription in 1956 (Bundeswehr). Length and rules changed over decades. Suspended in 2011 (modern Bundeswehr since then volunteer‑based; conscription remains in law but de facto suspended). Alternative civilian service existed.
East Germany (GDR): Conscription existed until German reunification in 1990.
Notes: Reunification led to integration and later suspension in unified Germany.
Italy
Post‑1945: Universal conscription throughout Cold War.
End/suspension: 2005 (Italy moved to an all‑volunteer force).
Notes: Length and structure varied; alternative civilian service for conscientious objectors established in the 1970s.
Spain
Post‑Franco transition: Conscription continued during Francoist era and into the transition.
End/suspension: Abolished in the early 2000s (commonly cited as 2001), moving to a professional force.
Netherlands
Post‑1945: Conscription kept for Cold War.
Status: Compulsory service suspended in 1996 (military became professional; registration obligations remain in law).
Notes: Like many NATO states, transitioned in the 1990s.
Sweden
Post‑1945: Long tradition of universal conscription.
Suspension and reintroduction: Suspended in 2010, reintroduced in 2017 (partial, gender‑neutral selective conscription) in response to regional security concerns.
Notes: Good example of 21st‑century reintroduction.
Norway
Status: Conscription continued after WWII and remains active; Norway extended recruitment to women (practical gender‑neutral service).
Notes: Nordic model with broad reserve obligations.
Finland
Status: Conscription has been continuous since WWII and remains active; long service and comprehensive reserves are central to defence doctrine.
Notes: Key example of a small state with universal conscription for territorial defence.
Switzerland
Status: Active conscription for men with militia model; long tradition dating well before 1945 and continuing to present.
Notes: Extensive reserve system; alternative service exists.
Greece
Status: Conscription has persisted; length and requirements have varied but it remains active (security focus with Turkey as contextual factor).
Notes: Frequently among the longer service lengths in Europe.
Turkey
Status: Mandatory military service continues; important political and social role.
Notes: One of the larger countries with longstanding conscription.
Israel
Status: Conscription active and central to society (included here though not in “Western Europe”).
Notes: Universal for men and women; unique labour/defence mix.
United States
Post‑1945: Draft (Selective Service) used during Korea and Vietnam (peacetime draft active through early 1970s).
End/suspension: All‑volunteer force established in 1973; Selective Service registration remains mandatory for men (no draft since 1973).
Notes: US is important precedent for transition to volunteerism.
Canada
Post‑1945: Canada did not maintain peacetime conscription after WWII (it had conscription in WWII and limited measures in WWI). No peacetime universal conscription for most of the Cold War.
Notes: Canada used volunteers and reserves; National Service not used after WWII.
Australia
Pattern: Australia used selective/periodic national service schemes post‑1945: e.g. conscription for Korean War era? (there were early 1950s programmes) and notably 1964–1972 conscription for the Vietnam War (National Service Scheme) — abolished in 1972.
Status today: All‑volunteer force.
Notes: Australia shows intermittent use tied to specific conflicts and governments.
New Zealand
New Zealand’s post-1945 conscription story is short and quite different from Britain’s or Australia’s. Compulsory military training (CMT) existed during the war; at the end of WWII, conscription was wound down but not entirely abandoned.
In 1949, New Zealand reintroduced Compulsory Military Training for men aged 18–26. This wasn’t the same as Britain’s two-year full-time National Service — instead, recruits did a few months’ full-time training (initially 14 weeks), followed by years in the reserves with annual camps. New Zealand’s 1949–1958 scheme was short-term training + reserves rather than Britain
Korean War period: CMT supplied trained reservists but no direct mass call-up for the Korean front; active service was still voluntary.
Abolition: The peacetime CMT scheme was abolished in 1958 by the Labour government (Walter Nash PM), in part due to cost and a belief that a small professional army plus reserves would suffice.
Later conscription: No peacetime conscription after 1958. During the Vietnam War, New Zealand’s forces were all-volunteer (unlike Australia’s mixed volunteer/conscription model).
Current status: No conscription; military is all-volunteer.
Cross‑cutting themes & political context
Cold War & immediate post‑war security environment — NATO, Warsaw Pact, and decolonisation shaped demand for mass armies in 1940s–1960s.
Colonial wars and conscription politics — France (Indochina/Algeria) and Britain (Malayan Emergency, Suez, later emergencies) faced public controversy and political consequences.
Economic costs vs. professionalisation — By the 1990s many democracies shifted to volunteer forces to improve quality, reduce political resistance, and cut costs; the end of the Cold War accelerated this.
Social effects & demographics — Education deferments, social class effects, and the experience of the working class vs. middle class; conscription often politicised by student movements (e.g., US/Vietnam).
Conscientious objection & alternatives — Growth of legal alternatives, tribunals, civilian service provisions from the 1950s–1980s onward.
Reserves, mobilization policy & territorial defence — Nordic and Swiss models retained conscription because of territorial defence doctrines; small states with perceived existential threats (Finland, Israel, Greece, Turkey) kept universal systems.
Gender & conscription — Mostly male‑only until the 21st century; some states (e.g., Norway) expanded to gender‑neutral service in recent years.
Legal suspension vs. abolition — Some countries (Netherlands, Germany) suspended conscription or kept the law on the books; others formally abolished it.
The USSR and the Warsaw Bloc (1945–1991)
The Soviet bloc had a very different conscription story to that of Western democracies, both in duration and in the political role of the draft. Here’s a condensed but detailed overview for the USSR, post-Soviet Russia, and Eastern Europe from 1945 to present:
Status: Universal male conscription was a central feature of Soviet defence. It had existed since before WWII and continued uninterrupted until the USSR dissolved in 1991.
Length:
Immediately after WWII: usually 3 years in the army, longer in the navy.
Reduced slightly in the late 1950s–60s (Khrushchev era) to about 2 years army / 3 years navy, which remained the basic Cold War standard.
Scope: All able-bodied men aged roughly 18–27; women could be drafted in wartime but were not subject to peacetime call-up.
Exemptions: Health grounds, some students (especially in priority fields), certain ethnic minority exemptions in early post-war years.
Role:
Central to the USSR’s massive standing force, supporting Warsaw Pact commitments.
Ideological as well as military — military service was seen as a key Soviet citizenship duty.
Notes: Discipline was often harsh, with hazing (dedovshchina) a chronic problem; conscripts served both in domestic garrisons and abroad (e.g., Eastern Europe, Afghanistan).
Post-Soviet Russia (1991–present)
1990s: Conscription continued under the Russian Federation; legal term reduced in the 2000s from 2 years to 1 year (army) under reforms completed around 2008.
Exemptions/avoidance: Student deferments remain; draft evasion became common in the 1990s/2000s due to unpopular wars (Chechnya).
Current status: Conscription still active (as of 2024); men aged 18–30 serve 1 year. In wartime (e.g., Ukraine 2022–), the Kremlin has also mobilised reservists and in some cases extended service.
Differences from USSR: Smaller total force, more reliance on contract soldiers (kontraktniki), but conscription is still a key manpower source.
Eastern Europe – Warsaw Pact members (1945–1991)
General pattern: Every Warsaw Pact state maintained conscription for men during the Cold War; service length typically 18–36 months.
Common features:
Universal or near-universal male service, with medical and limited educational exemptions.
Conscripts formed the backbone of armed forces aligned with the USSR.
Political indoctrination part of military training.
Examples:
Poland: 2–3 years service until 1980s; some reductions late in the Cold War.
East Germany (GDR): Introduced conscription in 1962 (before that it was nominally voluntary); 18 months army service; alternative service existed from 1964 (construction units for conscientious objectors).
Czechoslovakia: 2 years for most of the Cold War; universal male service.
Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania: 18–24 months typical; service deeply integrated into socialist “citizen duty” ideology.
Post-1991 – Eastern Europe after communism
Ended or suspended conscription (most NATO-aligned former Warsaw Pact states)
Ukraine: Maintained conscription post-1991; partially suspended in 2013, reinstated in 2014 after Crimea; now fully mobilised for war.
Key contrasts with Western Europe/Britain
Longevity: USSR and its satellites kept conscription far longer, with no 1960s/70s abolition wave seen in Western Europe.
Purpose: In the East, conscription was linked not just to military manpower but to political indoctrination and socialist identity.
Transition after 1991: Most former Warsaw Pact states that joined NATO abolished conscription by the late 2000s, while Russia and some post-Soviet states retained it.
Resurgence: Some Eastern states (Baltics, Ukraine) have reintroduced or strengthened conscription due to perceived Russian threat — a trend not mirrored in Western Europe except in Sweden.
Key comparative themes
Duration & timing: Britain’s National Service was a comparatively short post‑war peacetime draft (roughly late‑1940s → early‑1960s) vs. the Soviet bloc’s continuous Cold War conscription and the patchwork Western transition to volunteerism from the 1970s–2000s.
Purpose & doctrine: Western shifts towards professional forces were driven by expeditionary/NATO interoperability, cost/quality debates and changing public opinion; Eastern conscription prioritized territorial mass, political control and bloc commitments.
Colonial/operational effects: Colonial wars (France, Britain) made conscription politically salient; in contrast, Moscow used conscripts for garrisoning client states.
Political contestation & social impact: Student movements, anti‑war activism (Vietnam, Algeria, late‑1960s), and changing labour/economic expectations shaped abolitionist pressure in the West; in the East, conscription was harder to contest publicly under single‑party regimes.
Resurgence & selective reintroduction: Recent security shocks (Russia’s actions 2014–present) have prompted reintroduction or reinforcement of conscription in parts of Eastern Europe; Sweden’s 2017 reintroduction demonstrates the flexible, security‑driven character of modern conscription policy.
Legal suspension vs formal abolition: Some countries suspended conscription (kept the law on the books) while others formally abolished it — an important distinction when discussing future reintroduction.
Señor, señor Can you tell me where we’re headin’? Lincoln County Road or Armageddon? Seems like I been down this way before Is there any truth in that, señor?
This story does not relate to Bob Dylan’s cryptic and nihilistic Señor (Tales of Yankee Power), from Street Legal (1978). As for the meaning of his song, well, that’s pretty hard to fathom. A cowboy fever dream, perhaps; one of those strange illusions you channel in the early morning between sleeping and waking, more about mood than meaning.
Rather, these tales refer to the United States’ troubled and troublesome historical and contemporary relationship with its Central and Latin American neighbours – and particularly, to its current crusade against Venezuela’s autocratic president Nicolás Maduro. And it is less about Venezuela than about the US itself – an empire in all but name struggling to recover its own reflection in the shifting mirror of history. The restless ghost of Manifest Destiny is still pacing the corridors of the West Wing and the State Department. The “tales of Yankee power” keep repeating because the empire cannot imagine itself without them. Each show of force, each threat of “covert operations” is a reassurance ritual, a way of proving that the old muscles still work. But as with all empires in decline, the performance reveals more fragility than strength. The Monroe Doctrine once kept others out; the Neo-Monroe Doctrine may exist only to convince America that it is still in.
In That Howling Infinite has walked this road before in a 2017 post also entitled Tales of Yankee Power, a feature on American songwriter Jackson Browne‘s1986 album Lives in the Balance. At the time critics reckoned that its contemporary content, the USA’s bloody meddling in Central America, limited its appeal and long-term significance. And yet, here in the early twentieth first century, where the wars of the Arab Dissolution dragged the world into its vortex, and Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine ended seventy five years of Pax Europa, the Great Power politics and proxy wars that taxed intellectual and actual imaginations in that seemingly distant decade jump back into the frame like some dystopian jack in the box. As Mark Twain noted, “history doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme”.
Eight years after the original Tales of Yankee Power, the story hasn’t ended – it’s simply changed key. The Uncle Sam is still abroad, still restless, still convinced the hemisphere cannot manage without his supervision. Only the script has been updated: what was once called the Monroe Doctrine is now “neo”; what was once the “war on communism” is now the “war on drugs”. But the music is familiar – and derivative: in this sad world, whenever Uncle Sam (or Comrade Ivan for that matter) plays his hand, something wicked this ways comes. As Canadian songwriter Bruce Cockburn, who also condemned the North’s intervention in the politics of the South once sang, “Little spots on the horizon into gunboats grow … Whatever’s coming, there’s no place else to go, waiting for the moon to show”.
Donald Trump’s Neo-Monroe Doctrine
Yanqui wake up
Don’t you see what you’re doing
Trying to be the Pharoah of the West bringing nothing but ruin
Better start swimming
Before you begin to drown
All those petty tyrants in your pocket gonna weigh you down
Bruce Cockburn, Yanqui Go Home (1984)
Which brings us to American journalist John Masko’s insightful analysis of Trump’s Latin American policy in a recent Unherd article. It is sharp and well-informed, particularly his framing of the “Neo-Monroe Doctrine” as the ideological scaffolding for Washington’s renewed interest in its southern backyard. Yet, like most American commentators, he skips over a crucial subplot – namely, the role of the United States itself in creating the very chaos it now claims to correct. Venezuela’s “descent into shambles,” as he calls it, did not occur in a geopolitical vacuum. Sanctions, economic strangulation, and decades of covert interference were not incidental background noise but deliberate acts of policy – the slow throttling of a regime that refused to align with the hegemon’s economic and political script. Without that context, the narrative too easily morphs into a morality play about Latin American incompetence, when in truth, it’s an old imperial story of cause, consequence, and selective amnesia.
Masko’s central thesis – that Trump has revived the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine – is persuasive. In Trump’s mind, security begins at home and radiates outward; when weak or corrupt neighbours threaten that security, they must be coerced or replaced. The author rightly traces this logic back to Roosevelt’s 1904 declaration that the US would “police” the Western Hemisphere, supposedly without territorial ambition but with the clear intent of monopolising intervention. From Cuba to the Dominican Republic, Guatemala to Chile, the Corollary became the moral fig leaf for American coups, invasions, and corporate extractions. Trump, Masko argues, sees himself as restoring that prerogative – a hemispheric sheriff cleaning up the neighbourhood after decades of liberal hand-wringing.
There is, however, a deeper irony in Masko’s framing. He presents Trump’s military buildup around Venezuela – F-35s in Puerto Rico, B-52s off the coast, CIA “covert” operations loudly proclaimed on television – as a return to historical normalcy, a reassertion of superpower swagger. But this conveniently ignores that America never really stopped intervening. From Plan Colombia to the Contra wars, from IMF leverage to trade sanctions, the methods simply evolved. The empire modernised; the mission never changed.
Masko paints Venezuela as a nation hollowed out by corruption, its military loyal only through fear and patronage, its once-mighty oil industry captured by criminal syndicates and foreign proxies. He’s not wrong — but he omits the pressure points that made reform or recovery almost impossible: the freezing of foreign assets, oil export bans, and a sanctions regime designed to collapse the economy under the banner of “democracy promotion.” The result is a country starving under siege, then blamed for its own starvation. It is the oldest of imperial tricks: break it, then call it broken.
The author is also curiously incurious about the demand side of America’s perpetual Latin drug war. He notes Trump’s pretext of “narco-trafficking” but fails to mention that the real market for those drugs lies not in Caracas or Bogotá, but in Chicago and Miami. As long as there is insatiable appetite and profit north of the Rio Grande, cartels will thrive no matter how many “suspect vessels” are blown out of the Caribbean. America’s own prohibitionary puritanism – the same logic that gave birth to Al Capone – continues to nourish the problem it claims to fight.
Masko’s analysis of Trump’s strategy does capture one key insight: the re-militarisation of hemispheric policy as a form of domestic theatre. Trump’s “Neo-Monroe Doctrine” is less about Venezuela per se and more about a symbolic restoration of dominance. It is the same playbook that guided the 1989 invasion of Panama, when Noriega — once Washington’s man in the canal zone – became inconvenient and was duly removed under the banner of anti-narcotics and democracy. The echo is unmistakable. Venezuela today serves as both scapegoat and proving ground: a chance for Trump to replay history, cast himself as the avenger of American sovereignty, and perhaps even seize a few oil fields in the process – though that, as always, is to be disavowed in polite company.
What Masko misses, perhaps by design, is the wider economic and ideological dimension. To call this merely an attempt to “seize Venezuelan oil” is too simple – Trump’s doctrine is more performative than acquisitive. It is about reasserting that the Western Hemisphere remains, in practice if not in name, America’s exclusive zone of influence, a region where Chinese investment and Russian advisors are not just economic competitors but existential affronts. In that sense, the “Neo-Monroe Doctrine” is less a new foreign policy than a nostalgic hallucination: the dream of a hemisphere restored to its “natural order,” where Washington’s word is law and the rest are junior partners or failed states.
And yet, the danger lies precisely in that nostalgia. Venezuela’s collapse – accelerated by sanctions and corruption alike – has left it a tinderbox of criminal fiefdoms and shattered institutions. Push too hard and you get not regime change but fragmentation. The military Masko describes as Maduro’s bulwark could just as easily splinter, leaving behind a patchwork of armed enclaves and foreign proxies – a Caribbean Libya with oil rigs.
Trump, Masko concludes, is signalling not just to Caracas but to the continent: the Roosevelt Corollary is back. America will once again “help its friends and hamper its foes.” Perhaps so. But the hemisphere has changed; the hegemon’s writ is no longer automatic. China, once a distant abstraction, now bankrolls half the region’s infrastructure. Russia, Iran, and Turkey are present in the margins. The Monroe Doctrine may have been written to keep Europeans out of America’s backyard, but the world has since moved into the neighbourhood.
What emerges, finally, from Masko’s piece is a portrait not of a coherent strategy but of imperial muscle memory – the reflex to intervene dressed up as rediscovered purpose. Trump’s “Neo-Monroe Doctrine” is at once a geopolitical manoeuvre and a campaign slogan: Make Latin America Great Again, or at least make it obedient again. The tragedy, as always, is that ordinary Venezuelans – impoverished, exiled, and exhausted – will pay the price for another American morality play performed for domestic applause.
Trump is coming for Venezuela
…John Masko, Unherd 24 October
America’s foreign policy appears to have been turned upside down. In the Middle East and Far East, which have consumed most of America’s defence planning energy over the last few decades, trade wars and diplomatic negotiations have replaced shows of military power. Meanwhile, the US is stockpiling both materiel and manpower off the shores of South America to a degree unseen in many decades.
As of this week, the US had positioned 10 F-35 fighter jets in Puerto Rico, along with three MQ-9 reaper drones. More than 4,500 Marines and sailors have taken up residence at US Southern Command in Miami, Florida. Last week, President Trump publicly announced that he was authorising CIA covert operations in Venezuela, and a group of B-52 bombers flew near Venezuela’s coast. More than five suspected drug ships, some originating in Venezuela, have been interdicted and destroyed by US forces over recent weeks.
To many in the foreign policy establishment, Trump’s fixation on squeezing Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro has been an enigma. He has justified the buildup on the grounds that Maduro’s regime harbours drug producers and distributors. But when Maduro has tried to satisfy Trump — even accepting planeloads of deported Venezuelan nationals from America — Trump has rebuffed him and redoubled US pressure. Perplexed analysts are asking: what exactly is Trump trying to achieve, if nothing Maduro can offer will please him? Where can this lead except to war or a humiliating walk-back?
This reveals a fundamental misunderstanding between the Trump administration and the foreign policy establishment. Rather than focusing on the near-term risks of war in Venezuela, Trump is asking a higher-order question: What is the point of being a superpower if you can’t stop your neighbours from sneaking deadly drugs and unapproved migrants across your borders?
In Trump’s understanding, security begins at home, and then extends to the near-abroad. When weak or corrupt leaders nearby threaten the stability of the US, they must be either forced to change their behaviour, or they must be replaced. This has not been US policy for several decades, but for most of the 20th century, it was. The name of this policy was the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. What Trump is signalling in Venezuela is that the Roosevelt Corollary is back.
President Theodore Roosevelt announced the Corollary in 1904 in his Annual Address to Congress. Since the presidency of James Monroe a century earlier, it had been American policy to oppose any new colonisation or subjugation of lands in the Western Hemisphere by European powers. Monroe’s policy did not, however, provide a road map for when European countries sent ships into America’s backyard to collect debts or fight wars, as occurred during the British, Italian and German blockade of Venezuela in 1902. Determined to keep European warships out of America’s near-abroad, Roosevelt declared that US policy would be to have a monopoly over policing power in the Western seas. He further declared that it was no longer the sole purpose of the Monroe Doctrine to keep Europe out of our near-abroad; the doctrine would also now be used to protect American interests more generally. He explained: “It is always possible that wrong actions toward this nation or toward citizens of this nation… may result in our having to take action to protect our rights; but such action will not be taken with a view to territorial aggression, and it will be taken at all only with extreme reluctance.”
During the ensuing decades, the Roosevelt Corollary was periodically called upon to reestablish order in Latin American war zones and to prevent the accession of regimes dedicated to, in Roosevelt’s words, “wronging” the US. The Corollary underlay the brief US occupation of Cuba, from 1906-1909, after the Spanish-American War, two occupations of the chronically unstable Dominican Republic, and support for the Contras against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. It also inspired the CIA-supported overthrows of Guatemalan President Jacobo Árbenz following his nationalisation of United Fruit Company lands, and of Chilean President Salvador Allende as he led that country’s mining-based economy into ruin. It was also behind America’s futile efforts — through an embargo, assassination attempts, and the failed Bay of Pigs invasion — to topple Cuban communist dictator Fidel Castro.
America’s failure to overthrow Castro, coupled with the relative untouchability of many Soviet-allied Latin regimes during the Cold War period, caused the Roosevelt Corollary to fall into disuse. The liberal internationalist order that followed the Cold War further discouraged the use of hard power to overthrow regimes hostile to American interests. But in 2025, the Trump Administration seems determined to bring it back.
Within the Roosevelt Corollary (or, as I’ve been told it’s referred to within the administration, “Neo-Monroe Doctrine”) framework, some of Trump’s harder-to-figure foreign policy actions begin to make more sense. One of these is the appointment of Cuban-American Florida Senator Marco Rubio as Secretary of State, which was perplexing alongside Trump’s more provocative foreign policy nominations of Pete Hegseth and Tulsi Gabbard. But when one considers Rubio’s knowledge of Latin America and his hawkish record on Latin American dictators in the context of the Roosevelt Corollary agenda, he fits perfectly.
Then there are Trump’s recent actions toward Argentina and Colombia, both of which would have seemed peculiarly drastic in past administrations, but represent a return to a Rooseveltian approach to doing business. For Argentine President Javier Milei, a libertarian friend of the US who faces a fiscal crunch at home, Trump recently structured a $40 billion loan package and floated a huge purchase of Argentine beef, much to the chagrin of American cattle ranchers. Colombian socialist President Gustavo Petro, on the other hand, faced a cutoff of all American aid (Colombia has received $14 billion in aid since 2000) due to his failure to address Colombian drug trafficking. In a Rooseveltian world, the President wields plenty of carrots and a big stick.
“What Trump is signalling in Venezuela is that the Roosevelt Corollary is back.”
In order to understand how Trump’s Roosevelt Corollary framework applies to Venezuela, we must first consider the state of the country today. Maduro’s Venezuela is a shambles by every possible metric: aside from its ruler’s personal security. Owing to a combination of mismanagement and corruption, Venezuela, once the wealthiest nation in Latin America, is now an economic basket case. Its economy is projected to contract by 3% this year, and inflation is at 682%. Venezuelan oil exports — the foundation of its economy — have declined by two thirds since 2012. As living standards and safety across the country have plummeted, nearly 30% of Venezuelans have left over the last 10 years, mostly for neighbouring Colombia, but many for the US (both legally and illegally).
Even with a hostile third of the country now gone, Maduro still received fewer votes for president than opposition candidate Edmundo González in last year’s election. While international organisations urged him to accept defeat, he declared victory and began a third term in office. Opposition leader María Corina Machado, whose exit polling efforts demonstrated that Maduro’s reelection was rigged, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for her efforts to fight the regime.
Yet while Maduro may be the world’s least legitimate leader, his position within Venezuela is still secure. As centuries of Latin American history have shown, military loyalty is the single most important requisite for regime security in the region. And while Maduro may have little else, he has that. As the Wall Street Journal has shown, Maduro has successfully “surrounded himself with a fortress of lieutenants whose fortunes and future are tied to his”. He has done this by imprisoning or exiling the disloyal, while encouraging the loyal to accept patronage jobs in state-run companies or payoffs from drug-traffickers to allow their shipments to pass. The result is a military that is just as fearful for the personal ramifications of regime failure as Maduro is himself. And in case Maduro’s reign of blackmail were to fail, there are Cuban counterintelligence officials and other paid spies installed in the ranks to detect any hint of insurrection. According to Edward Rodríguez, a defected former Venezuelan army colonel, snitching is richly rewarded with “jobs, money, cars and even homes” in a country where much of the population cannot consistently afford food.
With the government preoccupied by personal security and self-enrichment, it will surprise few that much of the official territory of Venezuela (precisely how much is unknown) is no longer under government control. Much of western Venezuela is controlled by Colombian drug-running and human-trafficking organisations like the National Liberation Army. And much of southern Venezuela is given over to feuding megabandas or organised crime rings — most infamously the gang Tren de Aragua, recently designated a foreign terrorist organisation by the US. The megabandashave outposts in Venezuela’s major cities, and all around the world, including in the US. One reason for Venezuela’s declining exports is that large parts of its major extractive industries — particularly mining — have been taken over by criminal enterprises whose activities occur off the books. These organisations control territory in the Orinoco Mining Arc in Venezuela’s southeast, where many of their mines are located.
Since Trump’s pressure campaign, Maduro has pumped out propaganda to recruit a citizen militia that can bolster the country’s depleted military. According to the Wall Street Journal, “on state television, radio and social media, announcers are telling Venezuelans that the U.S. is a rapacious Nazi-like state that wants to dig its claws into the country’s oil wealth but that the Venezuelan military, the National Bolivarian Armed Forces, are positioning to repel any invasion”. Maduro’s army currently numbers about 125,000 — a combination of military regulars and new recruits, so many of whom are above typical military age that they have been dubbed a “Dad’s Army” in the British press. According to recent reporting, the army is underfed, under-resourced, and has suffered from a significant brain-drain due to Maduro’s loyalty tests. Maduro reportedly also plans, in the event of invasion, on having the support of Colombia’s National Liberation Army — the least it can do for Caracas’ salutary neglect of its drug and human smuggling (whether before or after he delivers to Trump his proof that there’s no drug trafficking in Venezuela, one can only guess).
For the US, this all adds up to a puzzle: the Maduro regime’s continued existence directly hurts American interests, but the regime has hollowed out Venezuelan society and institutions to such a degree that regime change will probably result in further chaos, and very possibly a civil war — outcomes that also hurt American interests.
Trump has likely still concluded that regime change would help the US, but that to be effective, the muscle behind it will need to come from inside Venezuela itself. His military buildup is therefore an effort to pressure fence-sitters inside Venezuela’s military and underground political opposition (a group that still includes Machado herself) to provide that muscle. Perhaps if military brass begins to see that the Maduro regime’s days are numbered, their calculus on how best to preserve their own lives and careers will shift. There is also an outside chance that a skirmish with US forces, and a glimpse of the untenability of his position, might convince Maduro to resign or flee.
For the time being, direct covert action against Maduro’s person seems to be off the table. Ironically, we know this because of Trump’s highly irregular decision to broadcast his authorisation of CIA covert action to the world — meaning it would no longer be, well, covert. Trump’s threat of covert action, rather, functions as a nuclear bomb of psychological warfare, ensuring that every night for the foreseeable future, Maduro dreams of exploding cigars. Far more likely is covert action that assists in forming and resourcing opposition parties or militias, as the US has done in past Latin American revolutions. Conventional military strikes on Venezuela are possible but would need to be provoked. Conventional forces could also be deployed in ungoverned spaces against drug-traffickers, further underlining the impotence of the Maduro regime.
Where the Trump-Maduro standoff goes from here is hard to know. But the reasoning behind the buildup is abundantly clear, and it goes far beyond Venezuela’s drug distribution or human trafficking. It is a signal to the world, and to Latin America in particular, that American policy toward the Americas has changed. More precisely, it’s changed back from a policy of salutary neglect to an active posture in which American interests are stridently defended. As in the days of the Roosevelt Corollary, America will help its friends and hamper its foes. If a Latin American regime harms American interests, and regime change will improve the situation, America will not hesitate to affect its overthrow.
Venezuela resonates particularly with the original purpose of the Monroe Doctrine, which was to preclude European incursion into American waters. Venezuela is a long-term strategic partner of China, which relies heavily on Venezuelan oil and offers economic and political support to Venezuela internationally. Even as Venezuela has descended into ruin over the last few years, it has continued to serve as a beachhead for Chinese influence in America’s backyard. Just as President Monroe’s original doctrine intended to keep hostile foreign interference far away from American waters, President Trump’s updated Monroe Doctrine can do the same for America’s 21st-century threats.
Trump is likely gambling on the fact that Maduro’s fall would be universally popular. The rest of the world has watched in horror over the last several decades as Maduro and predecessor Hugo Chávez plunged their country into poverty and chaos. This means that if US pressure results in Maduro’s overthrow, Trump’s new Roosevelt Corollary will start out in the win column in the court of international public opinion. Whether the US stays in that column as it addresses challenges in Colombia, Peru and Argentina, only time will tell.
John Masko is a journalist based in Boston, specialising in business and international politics.
Danger angel
Comes screaming through the clouds
She’s coming for your soul, child
She’s gonna take you down
Larkin Poe
Once in a while, In That Howling Infinite is attracted to “out there” larger than life identities, and, like mainstream and social media, gives them much more oxygen than they deserve. MAGA activist and provocateur Laura Loomer is one of those. Avatar and avenging angel, she is both symptom and symbol – the female face of Donald Trump’s politics of vengeance, fuelled by entitlement, envy, and zeal. shes turned grievance into influence, outrage into profession, loyalty into performance art. Some see her as comic relief; others, as proof that moral panic now pays. Either way, she’s the perfect child of her time – restless, theatrical, and forever online. Equal parts scandal, spectacle, and self-made legend, she’s the Right’s answer to the Left’s cancel culture: a one-woman inquisition armed with a smartphone and an inexhaustible sense of grievance.
We republish below Unherd editor and reporter James Billot’s article tracing the rise of this “hit woman” of MAGA politics, the scalps she has lifted, and the theatre of fear and fandom she inhabits. It’s an entertaining but nonetheless disturbing portrait of ambition, vanity, and the politics of outrage. Billot paints her as a digital Torquemada: part gossip columnist, part bounty hunter, part true believer.
As for the title of this piece, there is indeed a Ballad of Laura Loomer. It follows the précis.
Précis: A hit job on a ‘hit woman’
Danger angel Won’t listen to your prayers She’ll drink your holy water Slip into your nightmares There’s nothing you can give her That she hasn’t already got While you might think you’ve caught her You’ve blown your only shot, look out Danger Angel!
Loomer has made herself indispensable to Donald Trump not through proximity or power, but through her peculiar genius for weaponised outrage – the art of turning suspicion into spectacle. Her method is almost monastic in its discipline. For 16 hours a day, she trawls social media for ideological impurity – anyone in government who displays insufficient loyalty to the Great Leader. The sins are various: vaccine sympathy, a whiff of neoconservatism, a stray Black Lives Matter post. The punishment is swift. She “Loomers” them – posting their misdeeds to her 1.8 million followers, tipping off the White House, and waiting for the axe to fall. According to her, dozens have been purged at her prompting: an FDA vaccine chief, an NSA lawyer, a West Point academic, defence and security staffers, and even senior Trump appointees who thought they were untouchable. It’s research as blood sport.
Billot’s portrait is gleefully surgical: the self-declared “most banned woman in the world” living in a Florida rental with four rescue dogs and a livestream habit, railing against the “Big Tech” cabal that simultaneously victimises and enriches her. She’s banned by Uber, Lyft, Twitter (then reinstated by Musk), PayPal, GoFundMe, Facebook, Venmo, and Clubhouse. Each ban becomes a badge of honour, another stripe on her martyr’s uniform. She wears persecution like perfume — and sells the bottle for $29.99 on her website.
Loomer’s life is powered by thwarted ambition. She missed out on Dartmouth, lost two congressional races, and has been repeatedly blocked from a White House role. Yet each rejection feeds her legend. Her career began in the Project Veritas circus — dressing in a burqa to “expose” voter fraud — and evolved into a full-blown performance art of paranoia. She disrupted a Trump-themed Julius Caesar production in 2017, screamed about “violence against Donald Trump”, and became a Fox News darling overnight. She has accused Casey DeSantis of faking cancer, called Islam a “cancer on humanity”, and suggested that Parkland and 9/11 were staged. Apology, for Loomer, is treason.
She calls herself an “investigative journalist”, but the investigations are really moral witch trials – improvised, viral, and frighteningly effective. She boasts that cabinet secretaries call her in panic to explain themselves before her next blast. Even those who despise her respect her reach. Her Rumble show – part soapbox, part sermon brings in $15,000 a month and features the MAGA trinity of sponsors: hair loss, erectile dysfunction, and gold. It is populism as home shopping channel.
What emerges from Billot’s piece is a grotesque yet compelling portrait: a woman who believes fear is the measure of respect; who seeks validation from a man who will never truly give it; who builds empires of influence on foundations of resentment. She is both symptom and symbol — the female face of Trump’s politics of vengeance, fuelled by a cocktail of entitlement, envy, and zeal.
The article is, yes, a hit piece – but on a hit woman who has built her fame on delivering them. It is difficult not to admire, in a perverse way, her ferocious will, her talent for narrative manipulation, her intuitive understanding of the algorithmic age: how outrage, once properly branded, can become a career. And yet, one senses that when the spotlight shifts, she will be alone again — another pawn discarded once her usefulness fades. Like all propagandists, she lives by the flame she feeds, and it will consume her soon enough.
Step outside Billot’s irony and the picture of Laura becomes at once less cartoonish and more troubling.Academic analyses of the post-2016 MAGA media sphere – by researchers at George Washington University’s Programme on Extremism, the Oxford Internet Institute, and the Pew Research Centre – suggest that Loomer is neither a fringe eccentric nor an isolated provocateur but a structural feature of the ecosystem itself: an entrepreneur of grievance, feeding and fed by a self-sustaining outrage economy.Her claim to be “the most banned woman in the world” is the cornerstone of what political scientists call the martyrdom loop- censorship begets notoriety, notoriety begets income, income sustains further provocation.Studies by the Knight Foundation and NewGuard show that de-platforming frequently increases engagement among core followers; the sense of persecution becomes the product.She is thus less an aberration than a prototype: the logical child of a system that monetises moral panic.
Her success, such as it is, also mirrors the logic of the platforms themselves.Engagement-based algorithms on X, Rumble, and Truth Social reward moral extremity; the next post must out-outrage the last.Her “hits” against officials accused of ideological impurity exemplify what information-ethics researchers call punitive virality – online denunciation with real-world consequences.When civil-service careers collapse under these pile-ons, activism becomes indistinguishable from intimidation.Even conservative outlets such as the Washington Examiner have begun to note the irony: this is cancel culture re-engineered by its own supposed opponents, a revolution now devouring itself.
Sociologically, Loomer’s self-reinvention – cosmetic transformation, performative devotion to Trump, ritual declarations of loyalty – fits a broader pattern noted by scholars of the American right: women in hyper-masculinist movements often claim power by policing the boundaries of belief more fiercely than their male counterparts.She embodies that paradox of agency and subjugation, the inquisitor disguised as devotee.Feminist media critics see in her a parody of empowerment—the female enforcer of patriarchal purity tests, punishing deviation with theatrical zeal.
Factually, her record is less about fabrication than inflation.Independent checks by Reuters, AP Fact Check, and the ADL show consistent distortion and exaggeration, but rarely outright invention.Yet every correction, every ban, every supposed silencing, only reinforces her narrative of persecution.Communication theorists have observed this since the early Trump years: to her audience, refutation is proof that she must be right.Counter-speech becomes confirmation bias, feeding the myth of suppressed truth.
Politically, she operates in the zone that historian Timothy Snyder calls sadopopulism, a political strategy where leaders inflict pain on their followers to maintain power, combining sadism (pleasure from inflicting pain) and populism (claiming to represent the common people) in a way that manipulates and controls the populace through fear, anxiety, and division – there is always an “other” to look down on and pillory. In this way ,Snyder argues in his video (see below), America can be governed without policy and with pain.
Economically, she exemplifies the gigification of politics: a freelance inquisitor in the attention marketplace, thriving precisely because trust in institutions has collapsed. Psychologically, she is a practitioner of narcissistic moralism – the conviction that outrage itself is virtue. To dismiss her as a comic sideshow, as Billot half-invites us to do, is to miss the larger point: Loomer is not exceptional but emblematic. She is the distilled essence of a system that confuses virality with validity, noise with news, emotion with evidence. She is dangerous not for what she believes but for how effectively she has turned belief into business.Remove her and another will appear, promising to keep everyone on their toes – another entrepreneur in the endless market of grievance that now passes for public life.
The above commentary was composed in collaboration with ChatGPT
Laura Loomer – American activist and provocateur – rose from the fringes of the internet to become MAGA’s self-appointed scourge, a zealot in the age of algorithms.Armed with outrage, she turned “opposition research” into ritual sacrifice, serving her King with names from the digital pyre.But every court has its fool, every prophet her reflection; and when the storm subsides, only the glow of the screen remains.This ballad is her mirror – half elegy, half exorcism, part lampoon, part lament, a hymn for the saint of spite.
She was born again in the wild news feed Where the truth and thunder rhyme With a restless greed and an aching need To be trending one more time
“Fear’s the only faith I keep” she said “And respect is just for the weak” So she chased down the treasons fathoms deep In the wastelands of the Woke
Sing a song for Laura Loomer In the glow of her laptop’s light In the name of all unholy Raise a glass to the saint of spite
She courted the King with her venomous tongue Fed him names from her digital pyre He smiled and winked and the faithful sung And the fearful fled her fire
But kingdoms built on shifting sands Fade away like snow in June She mistook his fickle favour For promises carved in runes
Sing a song for Laura Loomer In the glow of her laptop’s light In the name of all unholy Raise a glass to the saint of spite
Her dogs keep guard in the Florida rain Her livestream hums in a world of blame Each post is a rosary bead of pain And each follower whispers her name
“I’m cancelled for telling the truth” she said Though that truth was over blown It rests with the ghosts of the posts that she made And the crown she thought she’d owned
So raise a glass to the saints of spite Who confuse the glare for grace For they’re the children of the night And are locked its wild embrace
Trump’s muckraker-in-chief wants to be feared
James Billot, Unherd, 11 October 2026
The famous Italian-American crime boss Frank Costello once said, “I’m a man who believes in the law. But I also believe in a little intimidation.” It’s a sentiment that Laura Loomer, MAGA’s most notorious activist-journalist, embraces with gusto. “It’s good to be feared because you have to keep people on their toes,” she says. “You’re not going to command respect otherwise.”
No one is feared more in MAGA world than Laura Loomer. She is Donald Trump’s unofficial muckraker-in-chief, a human-sized security wand who scans for political impurities in the government workforce. As she describes it, her job as an “investigative journalist” is to root out anyone disloyal to the President, be they bureaucrats, judges, or even cabinet secretaries.
Loomer does this by spending 16 hours a day, seven days a week, researching targets on the Internet. When she finds an incriminating piece of information — BLM support, vaccine promotion, or, worst of all, neoconservatism — she will push out the news to her 1.8 million X followers. She then presents it to the President, either in person or through his staff, and days later, that person is out of a job. They have been, as she modestly puts it, “Loomered”.
Once a Right-wing internet provocateur confined to the dark corners of the internet, Loomer now wields extraordinary influence in the White House. With near-unfettered access to the President — an informal adviser whose online crusades can make or break staff careers — she proudly declares that she has claimed over “four dozen” federal employee “scalps”, and expects “hundreds” more. These might be a “good metric” for success, but there is a more important measure in her eyes: validation from Trump, her peers, and the public.
Loomer’s life, though, has been characterised by disappointment: missing out on a spot at Dartmouth University (her father’s alma mater), narrowly losing a Congressional seat twice, and most recently being passed over for a White House job. Each loss has fuelled an enduring sense of injustice — that somehow the world owes her for her misfortune.
When I speak to her, she is seething with indignation. “I am the most underappreciated and undervalued journalist in America today,” Loomer tells me. “I don’t get the respect I deserve.” It is an interesting assumption from someone who has spent the better part of a decade stretching the bounds of what can be called “journalism”. Back in her college days, Loomer worked for Project Veritas, an activist group that uses sting recordings, stunts and entrapment to create bad publicity for its targets. On the day of the 2016 presidential election, Loomer arrived at a polling station dressed in a burqa and demanded a ballot under the name Huma Abedin. Her ballot was rejected, but the lesson stuck: outrage got attention.
Nine years on, her taste for controversy is undiluted. She has seized on national tragedies to advance her own political agenda and rarely, if ever, apologises when she is in the wrong. In September this year, shortly after a gunman killed four churchgoers in Michigan, Loomer claimed, “hate against Christians is widespread in places like Michigan because the entire state is being taken over by Muslims who refuse to assimilate”. The shooter later turned out to be a Trump-supporting Republican, yet Loomer stayed silent. And weeks before Charlie Kirk’s assassination, she labelled him a “charlatan” — a charge she stands by to this day.
Trump remains a fan, describing her as “a free spirit” and a “patriot”. She boasts that the pair of them chatted just a couple of weeks ago, but when I ask for details, she affects coyness, claiming she “doesn’t want to get into specifics”. This is the President after all. “I never ask him for anything,” says Loomer, “which is probably why he likes me so much.”
“She has seized on national tragedies to advance her own political agenda and rarely, if ever, apologises when she is in the wrong.”
Loomer’s devotion to the President is total. Her work, her weight (she lost 25 pounds to look “presentable” for him), and even her Mar-a-Lago face is shaped for Trump-appeal. But it took years of relentless campaigning, cheerleading, and provocative stunts for him to even notice her. In one memorable — and eerily prescient — example, Loomer disrupted a New York City production of Julius Caesar in 2017, in which Trump was reimagined as the titular character during his first term. Onstage, she screamed: “This is violence against Donald Trump! Stop the normalisation of political violence against the Right! This is unacceptable!” While Trump never publicly acknowledged the incident, it would be hard to imagine that he did not notice the subsequent widespread Fox News coverage.
Loomer revelled in the controversy that these stunts generated, and as her profile grew, so too did her notoriety. In 2017, she was banned by Uber and Lyft for complaining about a lack of “non-Muslim” drivers. Then, in 2018, Twitter banned her for attacking Ilhan Omar as “anti Jewish”, claiming that she was a member of a religion in which “homosexuals are oppressed” and “women are abused”. The bans kept coming, but she only grew louder and more provocative. By 2021, she had been barred from at least eight platforms — Uber, Lyft, Twitter, PayPal, GoFundMe, Venmo, Facebook, and Clubhouse — for hate speech and disinformation.
“I don’t know anybody else, aside from President Trump, who has been subjected to the level of deplatforming that I’ve been subjected to,” Loomer tells me with something akin to pride. She says this is why she failed to win her two Florida Congressional races in 2020 and 2022, despite Trump’s endorsement in the latter. “I was the first candidate in federal history that was completely denied all access to social media… I would have been the youngest woman ever elected to the United States Congress in US history had I not been silenced by Big Tech.” And the outrage-generation business clearly has benefits. On her website, where you can buy “Donald Trump did nothing wrong!” and “Forever Trump” T-shirts, a $30 book is on sale called Loomered: How I became the most banned woman in the world. Free speech martyrdom seems to have a few financial perks.
Her irritation has only deepened after the Supreme Court threw out her appeal this week against Big Tech over her bans — a case so weak that both X and Meta waived their right to respond (Elon Musk reinstated her in 2022). And she is indignant about her “stolen potential”. While she languished in Palo Alto purgatory, other Right-wing podcasters made their riches. “As a woman, you’re in your prime time in your twenties and thirties, so I wasn’t able to amass a fortune and build a media empire,” she says. “What’s so special about Ben Shapiro? He’s not breaking stories. He’s just commenting on the news. He’s Jewish, I’m Jewish. He’s conservative, I’m conservative. And yet, he has a company that is worth hundreds of millions of dollars.”
But nor was Ben Shapiro going around calling himself a “proud Islamophobe” and stating that Islam is a “cancer on humanity”. He wasn’t dressing up in Burqas to vote in presidential elections either. But Loomer breezes past these awkward facts. “I carry this resentment against Big Tech with me on a daily basis,” she says. “’I’ve had professional opportunities stolen from me, I’ve also had social opportunities stolen from me.”
Despite these bans, she still records a twice-weekly Rumble show that brings in around $15,000 a month. It is filmed in the spare bedroom of her Florida Panhandle rental apartment that she shares with her boyfriend and four rescue dogs. Each show runs for around three hours and features extensive, unscripted monologues on the “EXPLOSION” of Islamic terror in Britain, along with interviews with RFK’s so-called “Tylenol whisperer” and Camp Lejeune widows. They are part crusade, part carnival and part confessional; the only breaks come in the form of MAGA’s holy trinity of ads: hair loss, erectile dysfunction, and gold.
Her broadcasts are filled with a litany of familiar gripes. She is angry that she’s not a millionaire; angry that her work is overlooked; and angry that other journalists are deemed more respectable. “I know a lot of people who don’t even have anywhere near the following that I have — people who are kind of a joke — who have been given access to Air Force One,” she says. “It makes no sense.”
All the while, Loomer swims in a river of bitterness and entitlement. Her home is the command centre for what she describes as “opposition research”, where tips pour in about Biden holdovers, closet Leftists, and anyone she considers disloyal to the President. It is a craft she learnt from Roger Stone, her mentor and a longtime GOP operative who was sentenced to 40 months in federal prison during the Russiagate investigation in 2020. The 73-year-old made his name as the “original political hitman” by unearthing damaging (and sometimes fake) information about his political opponents. It turned him into an invaluable resource for not only Trump, but his Republican predecessors too.
Loomer’s approach to politics bears all the hallmarks of Stone’s skullduggery. She has weaponised opposition research and public pressure into tools which topple officials. During one particularly productive week over the summer, she claimed three “scalps”: the Trump administration ousted FDA vaccine chief Dr. Vinay Prasad, dismissed NSA General Counsel April Falcon Doss, and revoked Jen Easterly’s appointment as chair of West Point’s social sciences department — each decision coming shortly after her public attacks.
Loomer has also shown no hesitation in taking on even the most prominent figures in Trump’s cabinet. After attacking Pam “Blondi” for her handling of the Epstein files in July, a month later, she turned her sights on RFK Jr., claiming that he was plotting a 2028 presidential run. He denied the allegations, but what happened next was classic Loomerism: the pair made amends, with RFK meeting Loomer and announcing a plan to phase out animal testing — a cause close to her heart.
“Cabinet secretaries all try to have cordial relations with me because they’re scared of getting blown up,” she says when I ask whether she maintains contact with the administration. “So there’ve been a couple of times that I’ve had them call me and say, ‘Hey, I just want to explain what happened here’ because they’re worried about the backlash.” Are they frightened of her? “Well, my receipts are bulletproof,” she says. Was it the same with RKF? “We had a few conversations,” Loomer cryptically replies.
She will even criticise the President on rare occasions. Earlier this year, Loomer attacked Trump’s decision to accept a $400 million Qatari jet for Air Force One, calling it a “stain” on the presidency. And more recently, she threatened to pull her 2026 midterm vote when Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth announced that the US had approved the establishment of a Qatari Emiri Air Force facility in Idaho. “I cannot in good conscience make any excuses for the harboring of jihadis,” she posted. “This is where I draw the line.” “America could have been so great,” she followed up. “Now we will be a Muslim country. This must be what hell feels like.”
Given this power, why then, I ask, has she not been given a White House role, let alone a press pass? She claims that Trump has offered her a job four times, but White House staff have quietly blocked it on each occasion. “It’s professional jealousy,” she says. “President Trump’s staff who don’t like the fact he likes me… They just get high on their own power and don’t let me in.” She is, she insists, the victim of small-minded gatekeeping — a misunderstood ally whose loyalty is undervalued by the petty bureaucrats who feel threatened by her power. In Loomer’s eyes, she is utterly blameless.
But there is a danger here. As she recklessly burns through the administration, tying herself so closely to the fate and fortune of one man, with no formal role or official recognition, what, then, happens when he goes? She is left with no allies, no job, no platforms, no car rides — just scorched earth. For the first time, Loomer sounds uncertain. She pauses; introspection doesn’t come naturally. “By the time Trump’s out of office, I’ll be 36 years old. And by then, I’m going to have to start thinking about other things in life. So who knows whether I’ll be doing this forever.” And then she adds, with a straight face, “the Right-wing ecosystem has also become very toxic”.
Loomer, arguably more than anyone else in this sphere, has helped stoke that toxicity. Haranguing politicians with bullhorns, filming people without their knowledge or consent, and attempting to cancel public figures online represent the Right at its worst. These are gutter politics — and that’s before we flick through the long charge sheet of particularly “provocative” statements, including that the 2018 Parkland and Santa Fe high school shootings involved crisis actors; that Casey DeSantis, wife of then presidential candidate Ron DeSantis, exaggerated her breast cancer to boost her husband’s campaign; and that 9/11 was an “inside job”.
Our conversation revealed a woman who is a cocktail of festering resentment and entitlement, who will use any new connection for her own ends. She is the classic Trump pawn: deployed for as long as she is useful, and then discarded. The President will throw her a morsel of camaraderie from time to time, but it’ll never be more than that. She’s driven by this toxic frustration. It came as no real surprise when, a day after our conversation, she texted me a photo of “independent journalists” at the White House from Trump’s press secretary, Karoline Leavitt’s account. “No invite for me though.”
Loomer will inevitably be cast out — though she doesn’t seem to know it. “I don’t aggregate news, I create the news,” she says proudly. “The President has said that he sees my content and I’m pretty much followed by every single main White House staffer and cabinet member on X.” Her content extends far beyond X, but the poison that she helped to inject now courses through America’s body politic.
In That Howling Infinite 