The sickness at the heart of the international order

May 28, 2024Paul Hemphill Leave a comment

Last week, in sheeplike conformity with diplomatic niceties, Australia, together with the US, the EU and NATO offered condolences for Iran’s vicious hanging judge President Ebrahim Raisi.

A year ago, the International Criminal Court issued a warrant for the arrest of Russian President Vladimir Putin for crimes against humanity. It would deepen Russia’s international isolation, pundits pronounced. The announcement did not receive the breathless coverage of the recent news that the court was considering similar warrants with respect to Israeli and Hamas leaders with repeat to the atrocities of October 7th and the bloody war that has followed.

A year on, and Vlad’s star still shines as Russia makes gains on the Ukrainian battlefield.

But the ICC is only one part of the malaise that has contaminated international institutions.

I have long believed that the United Nations has long passed its usefulness – if it ever had any purpose at all having been strangled at birth by the veto wielded in the Security Council by the US and Russia.

It has indeed gotten worse. As Greg Sheridan wrote in The Australian on 25th May

“The ethos of institutional liberal internationalism, especially when associated with the UN, has become an inverted parody of what it was once meant to be. The UN culture is a result of a combination of activism from dictatorships, especially China and Russia; plus the in-built voting power of the Arab, North African and Muslim blocs, none of which is sympathetic to democracy, and the ideological leftism of the activist and NGO class in Western societies themselves. Thus. the UN frequently produces abominations with a kind of PG Wodehouse comic quality – committees on women’s rights headed by Saudi Arabia, human rights bodies chaired by China, non-proliferation committees headed by Pakistan and the like”.

On Ebrahim Raisi in particular, Sheridan wrote:

“Before becoming president Raisi was most famous for his role on the Tehran Death Committee in 1988. Across the Islamic Republic of Iran at that time many thousands of political prisoners were tortured and killed. No jurist was a more enthusiastic deliverer of death than Raisi. Later, when president, he looked back on those days with fondness and claimed the executions as a particular achievement for Iran.

Raisi ran unsuccessfully for president a couple of times. He was neither popular nor in the first rank of Iranian leaders, or of Islamic theologians, though he gave himself the title of Ayatollah. In 2021 Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khameini, decided, with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, they would make Raisi president. He was a reliable hardliner and someone the IRGC in particular thought they could control”.

For more on Israel and Palestine in In That Howling Infinite, see Middle East Miscellany. See also, Lebensraum Redux – Hamas’ promise of the hereafter, Total war in an urban landscape – Israel’s military quandary, Flight into Egypt, and the promise of the hereafter , and The Calculus of Carnage – the mathematics of Muslim on Muslim mortality

“The ICC is a sign of a deep sickness

That UN agencies mourn the Butcher of Tehran as they seek to arrest democratic Israel’s leaders presents the morally inverted, politically corrupted nature of what passes for liberal internationalism today.

Greg Sheridan, The Weekend Australian, 26th May 2024

The contrasting treatment, especially at the UN, of Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and Iran’s president, Ebrahim Raisi, who died in a helicopter crash on May 19, starkly presents the morally inverted, politically corrupted and more than half insane nature of what passes for liberal internationalism today.

The chief prosecutor at the International Criminal Court in The Hague has formally requested arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Israel’s Defence Minister, Yoav Gallant, accusing them of war crimes in Gaza.

Netanyahu is the duly elected Prime Minister of the Middle East’s only democracy. On October 7 his country was attacked, while a ceasefire was in place, by the terrorist group Hamas, which is sponsored by Iran. In the attack the most savage, sadistic and sexually depraved terror was unleashed as 1200 people were exuberantly tortured and butchered, and some 250 taken hostage. Hamas then retreated into its tunnels below the civilians of Gaza.

The ICC has formally requested arrest warrants for Israel’s PM, Benjamin Netanyahu, and Defence Minister, Yoav Gallant, accusing them of war crimes in Gaza. — The ICC has formally requested arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu, and Yoav Gallant

Netanyahu’s government retaliated, with a few clear objectives – to end Hamas rule in Gaza, to destroy Hamas and to ensure October 7 wouldn’t happen again. Hamas vowed it would repeat October 7 over and over. Meanwhile it killed some of the hostages, tortured others, even small children (there’s video) and subjected women and girls to sexual assault, sexual terror.

Raisi, unlike Netanyahu, didn’t have a background in politics, certainly not democratic politics, more the legal system, specifically as a prosecutor. In a totalitarian theocracy such as Iran, prosecutors are always busy. Before becoming president Raisi was most famous for his role on the Tehran Death Committee in 1988. Across the Islamic Republic of Iran at that time many thousands of political prisoners were tortured and killed. No jurist was a more enthusiastic deliverer of death than Raisi. Later, when president, he looked back on those days with fondness and claimed the executions as a particular achievement for Iran.

Iranian elections used to have some limited meaning. Elected officials never really had power and Iranian voters several times elected notionally moderate presidents to no avail. The real powers, the IRGC and the office of the Supreme Leader, decided who could run. But much more than

Consequently, Iranians stopped bothering to vote. When Raisi won, the turnout was claimed to be 49 per cent, though even this is regarded as an exaggeration.

Since Raisi became president in 2021, Iran has been energetic. It redoubled the vice police. Iranian women and girls are routinely arrested, sexually assaulted and beaten to death for offences such as not wearing their hijabs properly. One such case, of a young woman named Mahsa Amini, who died in 2022, set off a round of riots and protests that were savagely repressed, with hundreds dead and more than 20,000 imprisoned.

Internationally, Raisi’s government became famous for murdering Iranian dissidents in Europe and the US. Western governments regard Iran as the chief state sponsor of terrorism. Apart from Hamas, Iran has built Hezbollah, in southern Lebanon, into a powerful non-state military force, with perhaps 150,000 missiles and tens of thousands of soldiers.

Mourners hold posters of Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi during a funeral ceremony in Tehran, on May 22. Picture: AFP — Mourners hold posters of Ebrahim Raisi during a funeral ceremony in Tehran. AFP

Tehran funds and provides weapons to Shi’ite militias in Iraq and Syria. All these groups deal out death fairly indiscriminately to their opponents and internal critics. Iran also backs the Houthi rebels, whom Australia has just declared a terrorist organisation under our law. They fire missiles at Israel but the Houthis’ great significance has been to massively disrupt shipping in the Red Sea. They exempt Chinese and Russian shipping, which is as sure a sign of Iranian control of their activities.

Many of the deaths Iran caused under Raisi occurred on the soil of nations over which the International Criminal Court claims jurisdiction. Yet the ICC never produced a warrant for Raisi’s arrest. Indeed, the UN lowered its flag to half-mast to honour Raisi after his death. The EU, not quite as otiose as the UN but surely its first cousin in the fatuousness of much that it says and does, used its most senior officials to send heartfelt and sincere condolences over Raisi’s death.

A former immigration minister of Belgium, Theo Francken, chided the EU for praising a “butcher and a mass murderer”. A Swedish member of the European parliament, David Lega, asked the EU leaders: “Can you ever look the brave women and freedom fighters of Iran in the eye again?”

You’ve never heard of Francken or Lega and you never will. Voices like theirs are marginal now.

The ethos of institutional liberal internationalism, especially when associated with the UN, has become an inverted parody of what it was once meant to be. The UN culture is a result of a combination of activism from dictatorships, especially China and Russia; plus the in-built voting power of the Arab, North African and Muslim blocs, none of which is sympathetic to democracy, and the ideological leftism of the activist and NGO class in Western societies themselves.

Thus the UN frequently produces abominations with a kind of PG Wodehouse comic quality – committees on women’s rights headed by Saudi Arabia, human rights bodies chaired by China, non-proliferation committees headed by Pakistan and the like.

Feeding into that are two other dynamics. One is that most nations are concerned, understandably but dismally, only to avoid getting themselves criticized in any UN committee. So they go along to get along. And they like to get their little share of UN goodies. So they don’t object to some moral grotesquerie to secure the position of deputy rotating chairperson of the Pots and Pans Committee of the Under Secretary’s eminent Consultative Group.

Far more toxic is the sick obsession in this fetid culture with Israel and Jews. This is a kind of reverse intersectionality. Modern demented left-wing activism absurdly defines Israel as a colonist state. Demented right-wing activism draws on centuries of Western anti-Semitism. Most Arab nations, though many have recently made good accommodations with Israel, would nonetheless rather not have any non-Muslim state in the Middle East, while the tradition of Arab anti-Semitism roars. China, Russia and all their friends will routinely seek to hurt Israel in order to hurt America.

All of this comes together in a witch’s brew of anti-Semitism cloaked in the faux high-minded verbiage of liberal internationalism. Very frequently, specialist UN human rights bodies pass more resolutions criticising Israel than they do concerning the rest of the world combined. Don’t worry about Uighurs or Tibetans or Christians in China; never mind about labour camps in North Korea; leave the Arab world’s treatment of women or indeed of gays to one side – all the human rights evil in the world is insanely attributed to Israel.

By the way, the only nation in the Middle East that has big gay pride days is Israel. I’ve seen the gay pride days in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. But somehow you never see a protest march with a sign: Queers for Israel.

That the UN and its institutions have become so morally corrupted is partly the fault of the West, as it has lost power, cohesion, self-confidence and the ability to believe in and argue for the values it once regarded as universal.

The UN has been a politically corrupt body for a long time. Our response was not always this feeble. In 1975, only 30 years after the Holocaust, the UN General Assembly passed a resolution equating Zionism with racism. At the time, under Gerald Ford’s presidency, the US seemed all astray, after Watergate and the failures in Vietnam. Its ambassador to the UN was the professorial, slightly dishevelled-looking Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a cloud of stray hairs and half-dropped papers but a whirlwind of moral force. He went on, this most untelegenic of figures, to be a long-term Democrat senator for New York.

He strode, this ungainly figure, to the lectern and thundered forth a modern Gettysburg Address, in its way the finest speech ever delivered at the UN. Moynihan began: “The United States rises to declare before the General Assembly of the United Nations and the world that it does not acknowledge, it will not abide by and it will never acquiesce in this infamous act.” This was not bluster. The US stirred itself to get what was in fact a racist motion reversed, and it succeeded.

Back then Australia voted with the US, unlike now. Joe Biden denounced the ICC action as an outrage. His Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, said he’d work with Republican senators, notably Lindsey Graham, to consider imposing US sanctions on officials of the ICC who enacted such infamy. Biden, in my view a generally weak president, on this has been strong. Perhaps the issue called to an earlier version of Biden, when America itself was stronger.

Of course, Netanyahu deserves great criticism. He has become an increasingly counter-productive Prime Minister for Israel. This is despite past mighty achievements – liberalising and growing the Israeli economy, pioneering new relationships in Asia, welcoming millions of immigrants into the country, creating a good life for Jewish and Arab Israelis alike, and then, during Donald Trump’s presidency, achieving the Abraham Accords in which Israel exchanged diplomatic recognition with the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco.

But he became too arrogant, too self-obsessed, too complacent. The October 7 attacks are wholly the moral responsibility of Hamas, but they also reflect a shocking intelligence failure, and simple preparedness failure, on Israel’s part. Similarly, Netanyahu has not been able, or perhaps not willing to try, in recent years to control the lawlessness of some of the Israelis who live in the West Bank.

Netanyahu must bear responsibility for these matters. Now, he faces intense criticism from his cabinet colleagues for refusing to address governance in the Gaza Strip once Israel is finished its military operation. None of this remotely makes Netanyahu a war criminal. Israel has not starved Gaza. Hamas itself has made it difficult to get aid convoys safely into Gaza. Egypt has shut its border with Gaza because it doesn’t like Israel controlling the other side. But this means no aid from that quarter. Hamas and its allies have attacked aid shipments coming through the pier the US built to provide a sea route for aid to Gaza.

Similarly, Hamas’s casualty figures are greatly exaggerated. There has been terrible death and destruction in Gaza and this is entirely Hamas’s responsibility. Even today, Hamas could end all the suffering by releasing some Israeli hostages and accepting the ceasefire Israel has been offering for months. Hamas attacked Israel in the most sickening manner possible, then hid among and underneath Palestinian civilians. The ICC seems to be of the view that this means Israel is forbidden from waging a military campaign against Hamas. The UN itself recently halved its estimate of the number of women and children killed in Gaza, which suggests Israel’s efforts to keep civilian casualties as low as it can have been meaningful.

The ICC has no jurisdiction as Palestine is not a state and Israel is not a signatory to the Rome Statute that established the ICC. And finally, the ICC is meant to act only where national governments can’t or won’t act. Israel has a strong judicial system and will certainly have a plenitude of inquiries once the military action in Gaza is complete. The odious ICC action therefore has to be seen as a political expression of the cultural collapse and degradation of the old liberal international ideals.

It’s up to the nations that believe in those ideals, most importantly the US but, you would expect, also its allies and like-minded nations, to vigorously reform or, if this is impossible, simply walk away from those institutions.

Instead, Ireland, Spain and Norway extended formal diplomatic recognition to the state of Palestine. This is a common but bizarre conceit of our day. There is no state of Palestine. Hopefully one day there will be, but this can come about, as the US argues, only through negotiation between Israel and Palestinian representatives.

But, as everyone knows, any Palestinian leader who makes any kind of peace with Israel will surely be assassinated by extremists in his own camp. Some Palestinian groups, such as Hamas, are utterly transparent in their anti-Semitism and vow never to recognise any Jewish state. Others theoretically recognise Israel’s right to exist but have erected a whole lot of preconditions and red lines they know Israel can never possibly meet. Therefore, they won’t ever have to face the hard compromises and choices a Palestinian state would necessitate.

Instead, all the Western gestures of solidarity with the Palestinians have amply and warmly justified Hamas’s terror. The Albanese government rewarded Hamas when it declared, through a very confused and poor speech by Wong, it would recognise Palestine before an agreement was reached with Israel.

Israeli legal scholar and commentator Eugene Kontorovich surely calls out a gruesome truth when he writes: “Hamas’ grisly terror raid on October 7 has proved to be the single most stunningly successful act in gaining support for the Palestinian cause … The bloodier the terror attacks, the more stark the eliminationist rhetoric, the more support for a Palestinian state.”

Kontorovich identifies a crippling syndrome. The more savage the terror, the more entranced Western elite opinion becomes. If Israel responds that same elite instantly reverts to the rhetoric and operating principle of de-escalation.

When Biden was backing Israel most strongly early in the campaign, Hamas released hostages and agreed to a ceasefire. Washington’s efforts more recently have caused Israel delay, and this delay itself prolonged Palestinian suffering and helped Hamas. As Hamas has seen Biden come under political pressure, and therefore put Israel under pressure, it has been effectively rewarded for its barbarism and encouraged to make no compromise.

The ICC is not a court but a sign of the deep sickness at the heart of the international system. Don’t think that sickness cannot kill us here in Australia in time.

Greg Sheridan is The Australian’s foreign editor.

How the jihadi tail wags the leftist dog

May 2, 2024Paul Hemphill Leave a comment

… as of October 2023, the Anglosphere’s far-Left has neatly pivoted from the infantilization of black people to the Palestinian cause with the coordinated grace of a synchronized swimmer … Thus, an organization established for the defense of free speech of every sort – including the overtly Zionist kind – is necessarily obliged to openly advocate for Hamas, a murderous, cheerfully anti-Semitic cult whose interest in free speech on its home turf would fit in a thimble … For these authors, defense of free speech, promotion of tolerance, and opposition to violent political oppression – the very purpose of PEN – counted for nothing when weighed against any injury to the delicate feelings of fundamentalist Muslims

…Much has been written about the unholy and in some ways hilarious alliance developing between the progressive Left and Islam (Lesbians for Palestine, etc.). But for Western writers to embrace a restrictive, prescriptive, and stifling culture isn’t merely ironic or comical; it’s self-defeating. One needn’t consult a professor of Middle Eastern Studies to conclude that these fair-weather friends in Gaza may welcome useful idiocy, but the permissive ethos of the Anglo-Left is diametrically at odds with despotic Islamic theology. Moreover, for American writers to express increasingly shrill and little-disguised hostility to Jews is to disavow a substantial chunk of the country’s distinguished literary canon: Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Bernard Malamud, and Elie Weisel just for starters.

American author Lionel Shriver, Unherd 30th April 2024

Luxury beliefs and historical illiteracy

From “You want it darker?” … Gaza and the devil that never went away …

The term “luxury beliefs” was coined to describe how privileged progressives like to traffic in a kind of unhinged extremist rhetoric. Partly, it’s a byproduct of their insulation from ever having to experience the practical impact of what they advocate. When people in Australia chant “from the river to the sea”, and “gas the Jews”, relatively few are saying this because they have a material interest in obliterating the real Israel and rendering the land “Judenfrei” (remember that word!) More have no particular animus toward Jewish people – they just don’t care about them. But most are moved by a desire to weaken what Israel symbolizes: the US.

Many left-wing impressions are coloured by a an antipathy for the policies of the United States, an antipathy that for many was born of the Vietnam War and was perpetuated by America’s interference in the affairs of nations large and small since then – and of course, America’s strong ideological and military support for Israel. Uncle Sam certainly does have a case to answer. There’s no denying the hundreds of thousands, millions maybe, of bodies of men, women and children that could be laid at the foot of Abe Lincoln’s huge statue in Washington DC. But giving aid and comfort to a regime that is antithetical to your beliefs and also your lifestyle does not compute. It is an ideological stance uninformed by knowledge and awareness of the nature of the Israeli and Palestinian entities, their peoples, and their cultures in the 21st Century. None of these are what they were in the nineteen seventies and eighties.

Writing in The Australian on 29th October, commentator Gemma Tognini wrote: “As I watched mainly white, middle-class privileged (in the truest sense of that word, not the co-opted, cheapened version) people parade themselves around as soft apologists for a declared terror organization, I felt despair. How? How did we get here? … What’s been on display on university campuses since October 7 has been terrifying in its historical illiteracy, lack of humanity and ideological zealotry”.

It’s worthwhile quoting what else she had to say about such “luxury beliefs”:

“… This is the soft generation. Their grandparents fought type 2 diabetes, not Nazism. It was reported that (perhaps unsurprisingly) the University of Sydney Student Representative Council urged students to “stand against oppression … until Palestine is free”. Let me tell you one thing I’m willing to bet on. Not one of them would volunteer to go help the cause. Not one of them would give up their Uber eats, days at the pub and total freedom to go live in a place where being gay is an offence punishable by death, fewer than 20 per cent of women are allowed to work and more than 20 per cent of women are married under the age of 17. Good luck wearing a bikini or your active wear in downtown Gaza.

And then, there’s a punchline: “… this conflict in the Middle East, this visceral, existential attack on Israel, and on Jewish people the world over, seems to have ripped something open to reveal an ideological hatred that I don’t understand. It’s a good impetus to raise the voting age, to be honest. If your response to the fact that the Arab states are refusing to take refugees, that Egypt won’t open its northern border for the same reason, is “Israel’s committing genocide”, then sorry, you’re not intellectually agile enough to be in the conversation … If it were 1400 young people barbarically slaughtered anywhere else in the world, if it were any other ethnic cohort, these same junior cowards, and the universities they attend, would be condemning the act and the actors”

I couldn’t say it better, particularly her allusion to “historical illiteracy, lack of humanity and ideological zealotry”. Many people out there in the world of university politics, social media, and reflex virtue signalling, have, for a variety of reasons a limited, even cursory knowledge of the roots and fruits of intractable conflicts that originated decades, centuries, millennia ago. As the late Israeli Amos Oz explained in his excellent book, How to Cure a Fanatic, Arabs and Jews typically understand each other far better than westerners understand either of them. Cost-free wisdom from western liberals is so often pathetically ill-informed and bathing in self-righteousness.

For more on Israel and Palestine in In That Howling Infinite, see Middle East Miscellany. See also, Total war in an urban landscape – Israel’s military quandary, and The Calculus of Carnage – the mathematics of Muslim on Muslim mortality

America’s Leftist Literati Fetishizes Hamas Brutality

When Western leftists celebrate an open defense of Hamas’ ‘exhilarating’ murder of civilians but censor texts that humanize Israelis or deplatform Jews, they’re not acting in solidarity with Palestinians. It’s an armchair glorification of faraway violence that could rightly be called colonial

Arash Azizi, Haaretz Apr 18, 2024

Relatives of victims of October 7 at an installation bearing the photos of loved ones killed or kidnapped during the Nova festival. AFP

By now, it shouldn’t be surprising to anyone that there are those on the Western left who openly support the attacks of October 7 on Israeli civilians. The past six months have produced a long list of examples.

The latest came when Verso Books, easily the most renowned left-wing publishing house in the English-speaking world, released an article on its website by political theorist Jodi Dean.

Dean’s position was made clear from her opening sentence in which she announces the image of October 7 paragliders, those who would go on to help brutally murder more than 300 young participants in a trance music festival, were “exhilarating” for her. She goes on to criticize the Western left for not doing enough to support Hamas and making clear that “[by] defending Hamas, we take the side of the Palestinian resistance.”

She writes: “Which side are you on? Liberation or Zionism and imperialism? There are two sides and no alternative, no negotiation of the relation between oppressor and oppressed.”

Palestinians transport a captured Israeli civilian, Noa Argamani, on a motorcycle from southern Israel, in the Gaza Strip during the Hamas attack on October 7.

Palestinians transport Noa Argamani, southern Israel to the Gaza Strip on October 7. AP

The article made even more news after Dean’s employer, Hobart and William Smith Colleges, started an investigation into her based on the article and temporarily relieved her of classroom duties.

Dean called the move “McCarthyism” and she has since become a cause in herself, with many among many well-known academics declaring their “solidarity” with her.

As an historian of political ideas, the fact that some human beings gleefully support brutalization and murder of others is, alas, not surprising to me. After all, the worst human atrocities, from the Cambodian genocide to Syria’s Bashar Assad‘s killing of hundreds of thousands of his own people, have long had their enthusiastic supporters, not least those on Western campuses

Images of Hamas militants parading the body of Shani Louk, a 22-year-old Israeli woman, on the back of a pickup truck, her body clad only in her underwear, while people take turn in spitting on her, were awful to many of us who could imagine in her, a sister, a cousin, a friend. To others, they could have been, well, “exhilarating,” justifiable as part of a broader political campaign. In the same way, some have rationalized any number of brutalities enacted upon Palestinian civilians.

So I am not writing these lines to profess my shock and disgust at Dean’s writing, but rather to place it in a political context and to show what it tells us about the state of the acceptable discourse on the Western left.

Just a month ago, about a dozen editors resigned from their unpaid positions at Guernica, a respected left-leaning American online magazine, over an essay published by Joanna Chen, an Israeli writer and peace activist.

Joanna Chen

The essay, which was soon retracted by Guernica, was denounced by one resignee as “hand-wringing apologia for Zionism and the ongoing genocide in Palestine.” In fact, Chen is pacifist enough to have refused mandatory service in the Israel Defense Forces.

When not translating Arabic and Hebrew poetry, she was volunteering to drive Palestinian children from the West Bank to Israeli hospitals. Her beautiful essay doesn’t give an ounce of support to Israel’s assault on Gaza and is instead brimming with humanity, full of empathy for all the people between river and the sea. As Guernica’s editor-in-chief, Jina Moore, who has since resigned herself amid the debacle, later put it, it addresses “caregiving as a political act as aligned with a long tradition of feminist writing.”

What was the controversy about then?

Simply put, Chen’s “crime” was that she is an Israeli who painted a humanized image of Israelis as real people; not nameless, faceless ‘settlers’ who are dehumanized enough so that a massacre of 1,200 of them, the kidnapping of over 230 be so boastfully celebrated.

Friday, Guernica’s founder Michael Archer, said Chen’s essay should have never been published, writing, “Rather than mine the personal to expose the political, individual angst was elevated above the collective suffering laid bare in the extensive body of work Guernica has published from the region.”

We saw another version of such controversy much earlier just after the October 7 attacks, when Canadian leftist writer Naomi Klein dared to write a piece in which she complained about “some of our supposed comrades on the left [who] continue to minimize massacres of Israeli civilians, and some even seem to celebrate them, as if doing so proves their bad-ass anti-Zionism.”

Even though Klein supports the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement and had gone out of her way to denounce Zionism in the very same piece, she met with such avalanche of opposition that she edited her piece within hours.

The new corrected version affirmed in a note at the bottom that “celebrations of the deaths were rare,” which begged the question: Why had she written it in the first place? She had now taken out the part about “bad-ass anti-Zionism” and added an acknowledgement about the “desire to celebrate the powerful symbolism of Palestinians escaping the open air prison that is Gaza – which occupied people have every right to do.”

The paragraph at the top is as it originally appeared in an op-ed in The Guardian by writer Naomi Klein published October 11, and the one on the below is as it appeared after it was edited following pushback.

The paragraph at the top is as it originally appeared in The Guardian by Naomi Klein on October 11, and below it is as it appeared after editing following pushback.

A bigger controversy is currently riling the literary world. Numerous writers, including many well-known names, resigned en masse from events and awards associated with PEN America, an association of writers dedicated to free speech.

This furor began in February when PEN America hosted an author’s event in Los Angeles for stand-up comedian Moshe Kasher’s memoir. He was joined on stage by his close friend, “The Big Bang Theory” actress Mayim Bialik whose pro-Israel commentary on the war has riled some. The event had nothing to do with the Middle East. The two were there to talk about the latter’s memoir which accounts his growing up in a deaf and Jewish household, journey through Alcoholics Anonymous and eventual landing in the world of comedy.

But PEN was accused of “platforming” Bialik, the implication being that she shouldn’t be allowed a platform to talk about anything, even if unrelated to the Middle East, not even her friend’s memoir.

Put together, these events show the framework of accepted discourse on Israel-Palestine on large sections of the American left and literary world. Publishing open defense of murdering Israeli civilians is hardly controversial and can even gain you “solidarity.” But publishing an essay that humanizes them is beyond the pale. This one-sided censoriousness is mirrored on the other side of the divide by those that ban any support to the Palestinian cause or sometimes a mere mention of Palestine, with the most extreme case being seen in Germany.

Turning to Dean’s essay itself, we find clues as to why some celebrations of violence against civilians are so welcome among parts of the Western left.

The very adjective “exhilarated,” which had already been used by at least one other American academic in the days after October 7, is quite telling.

Dean calls herself a communist but what “communist” measure can she take that influences politics in the United States in any meaningful way? She is a member of the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL) which has runs in US elections for years. Its most spectacular success came in 2021 when a candidate it supported for city council in a small college town in Illinois got 40 percent of the vote (he still lost.) What better way to compensate for political irrelevance than by defending the most extreme position in support of Hamas?

Unsurprisingly, staunchly anti-Western PSL also supports Russia’s annexation of Ukrainian territory, Assad’s regime in Syria and North Korea’s nuclear weapons program. This all sure sound more “exhilarating” than running and losing in a city council race in Illinois.

In defense of her position, Dean cites the Western left’s adulation of Palestinian militants in the heady days of 1960s and 70s, specifically the left-wing Popular Front for Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and its fabled plane hijackings including those by its most famous member, Leila Khaled. This works particularly well for her argument since PFLP continues to exist and celebrated the October 7 attacks.

This historical placing is also telling. Indeed, if the Western left then gave support to politically insane acts like PLFP plane hijackings, it was also to compensate for its lack of political relevance back home. Dean cites Khaled’s memoirs where she defended hijackings as “[acting] heroically in a cowardly world” and claimed that “the more spectacular the action the better the morale of our people.” With historical hindsight, we know that the “spectacular” actions of the militants produced a lot of “exhilaration,” but no progressive political change for Palestinians or anyone else. They arguably set back the Palestinian cause by decades.

The only difference is that, back then, those leftists actually took part in similar violent actions in home and abroad, putting their bodies on the line for their short-sighted political adventures. Now, a blog post is most they muster.

This isn’t about supporting the people of the Middle East, of which I am one, but using us as objects of amusement.

If Dean wanted to show solidarity to the Palestinian left, she could have done so by supporting Marxists such as those in the People’s Party of Palestine or the Palestinian-led Communist Party of Israel, both of whom have been on the forefront of countering the occupation and apartheid policies while also opposing the killing of civilians, whether in Gaza or in the kibbutzim.

But, in 2024 just like in 1970s, that would hardly provide much “exhilaration.” Dean’s act is not one of solidarity, but fetishization of violence in lands faraway. One might even call it colonial.

Arash Azizi is an Iranian historian and writer of “Shadow Commander: Soleimani, the US, and Iran’s Global Ambitions” (2020) and “Iran’s New Revolution: Women, Life, Freedom” (2023). Twitter: @arash_tehran

Deconstructing Donald – translating Trumpspeak

February 18, 2024February 23, 2024Paul Hemphill Leave a comment

“America is in a mess. We need someone to clean it up. And his name is …”

So run the opening titles of Tim Robbin’s’ 1992 satire Bob Roberts. In a dark case of life imitating art, the story of a Wall Street millionaire who begins his political career as a reactionary folk singer foreshadows the rise of a uniquely American autocrat who channels the pain and anger of millions who feel that they’ve been left behind. The eponymous Bob Roberts is portrayed as a rightwing Bob Dylan, right down to a parody of the famous Subterranean Homesick Blues story boards to the iconoclastic song Times are a’changin’ … Back. Read a 2020 retrospective of this prescient film HERE

False prophets and siren songs

The only path to a subversion of the republican system of the Country is, by flattering the prejudices of the people, and exciting their jealousies and apprehensions, to throw affairs into confusion, and bring on civil commotion,”When a man unprincipled in private life[,] desperate in his fortune, bold in his temper … is seen to mount the hobby horse of popularity … It may justly be suspected that his object is to throw things into confusion that he may ‘ride the storm and direct the whirlwind. Alexander Hamilton to George Washington in 1792.

One cannot and ought not underestimate the power and sheer durability of populism – a political style offering unworkably simple solutions to complex problems, an ebullient rejection of elite expertise in defense of homespun obscurantism. It is a particularly attractive to the many who cleave to populism, nativism, tribalism and atavism, and equate these with nationalism and patriotism – and feel that, nay believe that they’ve been ignored by the powers that be and left behind in life’s rat-race. Trust is in short supply, and indeed, people’s faith in democratic traditions and processes is shaking as populism and a taste for autocracy spreads throughout the ostensibly democratic world. And as the old epigram runs, “cometh the hour, cometh the man” …

We live, it feels, in a time of false prophets. A generation of different and dangerous populists now moves to centre stage. Some like Trump, are undisguised in their racial, sexist and selfish pitches. Trump knows the key to being a successful fraud is to be a grand fraud. He pledges “to make America great again” and wins wide applause. This is because he is an anti-politician, shaking the system, abusing the established politicians, trashing their ideas. He thrives on shock and extravagance in a culture drunk with mindless celebrity. He stands for economic nationalism, trade protectionism, xenophobic hostility, towards Muslims particularly and a US strategic withdrawal from the world and much of its alliance system. As a wannabe autocrat, he admires actual autocrats, whom, he believes get things done because they break the rules and brook no dissent or contradiction. Nor Americans too averse to the prospect of an American strongman. For decades, polls have suggested that many Americans prefer the smack of strong leadership, even at the cost of jettisoning democratic norms. Back in the mid-1990s, for example, one in 16 Americans thought that a military dictatorship would be a “good” or “very good” thing. By 2014, two years before Trump’s shock victory over Hillary Clinton, that figure had leapt to one in six.

Trump is the vessel through which vast numbers of angry Americans can channel their rage with the establishment. Back in March 2023, he told a Texas rally: “For those who have been wronged and betrayed … I am your retribution!” His ascent reflects not so much his political brilliance but the absolute contempt an increasing share of Americans have for the nation’s institutions. Hugh Hewitt, in an opinion piece in The Washington Post, wrote recently: “Trump’s fervent supporters continue to believe he is a noble Jean Valjean of American politics being pursued by a mob of Javerts”. Columnist Maureen Dowd is more blunt: “His hallucinatory worshippers admire him as a strongman, even when he’s shown to be liable for sexual assault and an aggrandising con man whose real estate empire was a Potemkin village”.

Irish writer Fintan O’Toole wrote in the New York Review of Book on January 19th how Trump “… exudes a dark energy. His is perhaps the most radical mainstream presidential candidacy in US history. He offers a program of organized revenge, telling his fans that “I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution.” He promises a transformation of democracy into authoritarianism. He envisages a war on all the “vermin” who have thwarted him. He plans, as The New York Times has reported, “to scour the country for unauthorized immigrants and deport people by the millions per year.” He wants to build giant camps to house those awaiting deportation and to vet would-be travelers to the US for political (and presumably also religious) purity: “US consular officials abroad will be directed to expand ideological screening of visa applicants to block people the Trump administration considers to have undesirable attitudes.” The relentlessness of this determination to reshape the US into an autocracy may be horrifying, but it has the vigor of grand ambition”.

Small wonder the US was recently named a “backsliding democracy” by a Swedish based think-tank, an assessment based on the attempted Capitol coup and restrictions on voting rights in Red states.

Trump could well win, against Biden or against another candidate. The issues he’s running on – illegal immigration, the cost of living, lawlessness and crime – are huge and real. Trump may defeat himself if he campaigns about the injustices done to him. If he campaigns on issues as the champion of ordinary Americans, he’s got a big chance. He is is both instinctively talented as a campaigner but also capable of grievous self harm through wildly undisciplined statements – as with NATO – and narcissistic self-absorption. Driven by grievance and will to power, and behaving, some say, like a mafia boss, he is in so many ways lawless and dangerous.

So dangerous indeed, that many pundits believe that individually, many of his positions and actions, actual and promised, pose existential threats to the United States and its institutions that are far more threatening than any concerns raised by Biden’s age. Some rush to remind Americans of the time when Benjamin Franklin, one of the original framers of the US Constitution, was walking out of Independence Hall after the Constitutional Convention in 1787, and someone shouted out, “Doctor, what have we got? A republic or a monarchy?” To which Franklin supposedly responded, with a rejoinder at once witty and ominous: “A republic, if you can keep it.”

If once elected, and at a second or third election outvoted by one or two votes, he will pretend false votes, foul play, hold possession of the reins of government, be supported by the States voting for him. Thomas Jefferson to James Madison in 1787

[The quotations of the founding fathers come courtesy of Jeffrey Rosen, The Washington Post]

Found in translation …

British writer and columnist Gerard Baker does not agree with these latter day Cassandras. I republish below an entertaining and informative article written by this self-ordained translator of Trumpspeak, who describes himself as a “right-wing curmudgeon, writer and media critic. Actually, he is quite Right, a Eurosceptic and according to some, a closet Trumpista. But his piece is quite perceptive.

“Parsing Donald Trump is a uniquely difficult linguistic task …There are multiple layers of challenge. First, you can never have more than 50 per cent confidence that what he is saying is true. Second, much of what he says is intended to entertain, rather than inform or inspire. Third, and most confoundingly, the meaning of what he says is often quite different from the actual content.

In what must be the only feature of Trump’s ministry on earth that is like that of Jesus Christ’s, the former president speaks in parables. Unlike Christ’s, Trump’s stories are primarily designed to showcase his own greatness but, crucially, like the Son of Man’s, they also convey an important larger message … in focusing just on the words – and frequently distorting them – to paint a picture of a deranged despot, they [his critics] miss the meaning, the meta-story, if you like. That is a problem because it means they miss a critical part of understanding what is happening in America.

The truth about Trump and his enduring appeal to so many Americans is that, beyond the unsettling mix of Borscht-belt schtick and Munich-beerhall menace, beyond the verbal minefields of untruths, half-truths and narcissistic bombast, is a serious message channeling the reasonable fears and doubts of at least half the country … Trump understands better than anyone the dissatisfaction of Americans, their weariness with burdens …Trump’s greatest political asset has always been an almost animal-like ability to sniff out public sentiment, and then, in hyperbolic manner, to articulate it; sentiments on immigration, crime or American self-identity that are unsayable, willfully ignored by the established political class”.

For more in In That Howling Infinite on American politics, see My Country ’tis of Thee

Trump flogging joggers at Sneaker Con, February 2024

Trumpspeak crazy but attuned to Americans’ dissatisfaction with their burdens

Gerard Baker, The Times, February 16, 2024

Republican presidential hopeful Donald Trump raises his fist at an event in Iowa in January. Picture: AFP

The Republican presidential hopeful at an event in Iowa in January. AFP

Parsing Donald Trump is a uniquely difficult linguistic task. There are multiple layers of challenge. First, you can never have more than 50 per cent confidence that what he is saying is true. Second, much of what he says is intended to entertain, rather than inform or inspire. Third, and most confoundingly, the meaning of what he says is often quite different from the actual content.

In what must be the only feature of Trump’s ministry on earth that is like that of Jesus Christ’s, the former president speaks in parables. Unlike Christ’s, Trump’s stories are primarily designed to showcase his own greatness but, crucially, like the Son of Man’s, they also convey an important larger message. The task of parsing this is so complicated that much of the media doesn’t even try. As with Pavlov’s dog, Trump rings their bell and away they go, barking like mad about some terrifying new thing the man is threatening.

“It is impacting the flow of support,” the NATO Secretary General said on Wednesday afternoon after a two-day meeting of defence ministers in Brussels. “To some extent, this can be compensated by increased support from… other allies. And European allies and Canada are stepping up, are doing more.

It’s understandable but in focusing just on the words – and frequently distorting them – to paint a picture of a deranged despot, they miss the meaning, the meta-story, if you like. That is a problem because it means they miss a critical part of understanding what is happening in America.

So when the permanently unfinished Rubik’s cube of Trump’s mind last weekend produced another multisided Technicolor shocker of an outburst – this time on the subject of the US and NATO – the media as usual gave us the version they wanted us to hear: “Trump says he would encourage Russia to invade NATO countries who do not pay their bills,” says the headline on a story that is still on the BBC website. “I want Russia to invade Europe” in other words.

The first thing to point out is that Trump didn’t say this. He was instead recounting a story from his presidency – telling a campaign audience that when he was pressing European governments to spend more on their own defence, he was asked by a NATO country leader if the US would still protect them from Russian invasion if they didn’t pay up.

“No, I would not. In fact I would encourage them to do whatever they hell they wanted,” he said.

As your reliable translator of Trumpspeak, I’ll say there are three key takeaways from this. First, it didn’t happen. Don’t you think we might have heard about this some time in the past five years if it did?

Second, the point of the story is primarily to emphasise Trump’s own negotiating prowess. This has always been central to his bloated self-image. From casino construction to global security, it’s always about his unique ability to get the deal done. The irony is that the point of Trump’s story was precisely the opposite of what’s been said about it – instead of representing the end of NATO, it is about how (in his own mind) Trump saved the alliance with an act of bravado that forced Europeans to action.

But the most important truth in this fictional story is that Trump understands better than anyone the dissatisfaction of Americans, their weariness with burdens.

Trump’s greatest political asset has always been an almost animal-like ability to sniff out public sentiment, and then, in hyperbolic manner, to articulate it; sentiments on immigration, crime or American self-identity that are unsayable, wilfully ignored by the established political class.

One of these is the idea that the world Americans inhabit is dramatically changed. It is 75 years since the founding of NATO, more than 30 years since the end of the Cold War. It is remarkable how little the foreign policy establishment in the US, or America’s allies, understand the world as it appears to Americans themselves.

This is obviously true of the conspectus of global threats. In this century, first Islamist terrorism and then the rise of China have imposed themselves on the American consciousness. It’s true that NATO allies were reliable contributors to the war in Afghanistan. But that ended in disarray and disillusion – hardly an advertisement for the power of the alliance.

But more important than all that is Americans’ own, very new, sense of their own precariousness. This is not just about the changing global threats but their confidence in the success of their own country.

For more than two decades, with very brief exceptions, the vast majority of Americans have told pollsters they think their country is on the wrong track. For the first time in history most Americans think their children will be worse off than they are.

In these circumstances NATO is increasingly seen not as a critical part of America’s own security but as a costly obligation to others. The statistics – a US that contributes well beyond its economic resources – tell only half the story.

With a few exceptions, most European nations would be unable and even unwilling to stand up to an aggressor. Americans watch as Europeans have grown prosperous but dependent on US security and they resent the obligation, particularly from Europeans who seem to go out of their way to express disdain for America.

This isn’t 1930s isolationism, which reaped its own whirlwind in the 1940s. America then was an emerging superpower reluctant to get into another world war.

Today Americans see themselves as a nation in decline, under siege from global forces – uncontrolled immigration streaming across their southern border, terrorists pledging to murder them at home and abroad, a rising nuclear-armed superpower across the Pacific. And they don’t see where NATO fits in.

Trump’s words are typically extreme. Don’t let the crazy blind you to the deeper message.

The Times

Goosestepping back to political relevance

The Shoah and America’s Shame – Ken Burns’ sorrowful masterpiece

March 18, 2023March 19, 2023Paul Hemphill 2 Comments

And high up above my eyes could clearly see
The Statue of Liberty
Sailing away to sea
And I dreamed I was flying
Paul Simon, American Tune

Ken Burns is a documentary maker and storyteller without equal. All his films are masterpieces of American history. I’ve watched much if not most of his work. They are among the most unforgettable histories I’ve ever viewed, high up in what I’d consider the pantheon of the genre, alongside The Sorrow and the Pity, The Battle of Algiers, Salvador and Waco – Terms of Engagement. The Civil War raised the bar so high that very few documentary filmmakers have reached it, with its mix of surviving photographic images (in an style that Apple now promotes as its “Ken Burns Effect”) and the mesmerizing recitation of diaries, letters home, and official communications. The West confronted his country’s enduring creation myth with an honesty balanced by empathy. The Dustbowl was breathtaking in its images, its narrative and the spoken testimonies it presented. The Vietnam War was a relentless, harrowing story told in pictures and the witness of the people ground zero of a a conflict that has been called “chaos without a compass”.

The US and the Holocaust is Burns’ latest film. It does not make for easy viewing being a searing indictment of America’s response to the catastrophe that was approaching for European Jewry. It’s a significant exposition centred on just how much evidence was accessible to Americans during that appalling time, and asks just why rescuing Jews was no priority, except for those few individuals who actually took risks to help. As Burns observed: “There is an American reckoning with this, and it had to be told. If we are an exceptional country, we have to be tough on ourselves and hold ourselves to the highest standard. We cannot encrust our story with barnacles or sanitise our history into a feel-good story”. As historian Rebecca Erbelding suggests, “There is no real perception in the 1930s that America is a force for good in the world or that we should be involved in the world at all. There is no sense among the American people, among the international community, that it is anyone else’s business what is happening in your own country”. There is indeed a disconnect between America’s self regard as the land of the free and the “light on the hill”, and the cold reality – and realpolitik – of its actual record at home and abroad. There is a none too subtle irony in the titles Burns has chosen for each two hour episode, drawn from extracts from the poem by Emily Lazarus that adorns the base of The Statue of Liberty (see below).

Burns work reminds us that historical memory in America, Europe, and indeed Australia is often like a sieve. Give it a good shake and only the big chunks are left. The story of the US’ public opinion and government policy regarding the worsening plight of European Jewry during the nineteen thirties and the a second World War is not one of those. When I posted an article about the film on Facebook, many Americans commented that they were unaware of their country’s disregard and outright obstruction. Burns has opened a crack that has let the light in.

The quotations cited above are from a review published recently in the Weekend Australian which I have republished below – it is an excellent and quite detailed account of the issues and the incidents featured in this sorry tale, and I cannot better it. But I will note one distinctive feature of Ken Burns’ documentaries – his skill at recounting unfolding stories which he interweaves through the ongoing narrative, drawing viewers inexorably in and acquainting them with the characters, their hopes and their fears, and ultimately, their fates be these tragic – alas. in the most part – or fortunate.

In The Vietnam War, I followed the journey of an eager and patriotic young soldier, Denton “Mogie” Crocker, as he roved out from mall town USA to the battlefields of Indochina. I recount it. in The Ballad of Denton Crocker – a Vietnam elegy. In America and the Holocaust, there is the story of Anne Frank’s family as they sought asylum in the USA from the moment the the Nazi regime started to come down hard on Germany’s Jewish community. We all know how that ended for Anne and her sister. There is also the saga of what Hollywood called “the voyage of the damned”, the subject of an overwrought and overacted feature film, which nevertheless was based upon the actual voyage of the SS St.Louis which departed Hamburg with nearly a thousand desperate but hopeful travellers, but was refused entry into American and Canadian ports, and returned eventfully to Rotterdam where Britain, Belgium, France and the Netherlands gave them shelter. The latter three were conquered by the Wehrmacht in 1940, with harrowing consequences for those passengers who settled there, but a half of the St. Louis’ human cargo survived the war, predominantly those who were permitted to settle in Britain.

On a personal note, whilst I am myself of Irish descent, Catholic and Protestant in equal measure on each side, my wife’s father’s family were Jews from eastern Germany and Czechoslovakia and experienced the same travails as those described in Burns’ film. Many, including her father’s elderly parents, perished in the death camps, and are memorialised the Yad Vashem shrine of remembrance in Jerusalem – which I have visited many times. Others managed to leave Germany, including her father, who settled in London, where she was born, and her uncle who a lawyer who left Germany in 1933 after the promulgation of the infamous Nuremberg Laws, who settled in England and and then made Aliyah to Palestine, ending his days in Haifa, in an independent Israel. Others headed westwards to Latin America in the hope of securing entry to the US from there.

Epilogue. Antisemitism, the devil that never dies

It has been said, with reason, that antisemitism is the devil that never dies. And yet, is antisemitism a unique and distinct form of racism, or a subset of a wider fear and loathing insofar as people who dislike Jews rarely dislike only Jews?

Fear of “the other” is a default position of our species wherein preconceptions, prejudice and politics intertwine – often side by side with ignorance and opportunism. it is no coincidence that what is regarded as a dangerous rise in antisemitism in Europe, among the extreme left as much as the extreme right, is being accompanied by an increase in Islamophobia, in racism against Roma people, and indeed, in prejudice in general, with an increase in hate-speech and incitement in the media and online, and hate-crimes.

We are seeing once again the rise of nationalism and populism, of isolationism and protectionism, of atavistic nativism and tribalism, of demagogic leaders, and of political movements wherein supporting your own kind supplants notions of equality and tolerance, and the acceptance of difference – the keystones of multicultural societies. It is as if people atomized, marginalized and disenfranchised by globalization, left behind by technological, social and cultural change, and marginalized by widening economic inequality, are, paradoxically, empowered, energized, and mobilized by social media echo-chambers, opportunistic politicians, and charismatic charlatans who assure them that payback time is at hand. These days, people want to build walls instead of bridges to hold back the perceived barbarians at the gates.

From Little Sir Hugh – Old England’s Jewish Question

Also, on American history and politics, My country, ’tis of thee- on matters American

The New Colossus

Emily Lazarus

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

Ken Burns’ “The US and the Holocaust” tells of a shameful past

Graeme Blundell, The Weekend Australian, 11th March 2023

The latest documentary series from Ken Burns’s Florentine Films, The US and the Holocaust, is inspired in part by the US Memorial Museum’s “America and the Holocaust” exhibition. The series was developed with the assistance of the museum’s historians (many of whom appear in it) and its extensive archives.

It’s a significant exposition centred on just how much evidence was accessible to Americans during that appalling time, and asks just why rescuing Jews was no priority, except for those few individuals who took the risk to help.

For Burns, the series is the most important work of his professional career.

“There is an American reckoning with this, and it had to be told,” he says. “If we are an exceptional country, we have to be tough on ourselves and hold ourselves to the highest standard. We cannot encrust our story with barnacles or sanitise our history into a feel-good story.”

The US and the Holocaust was originally supposed to be released in 2023 but Burns accelerated production by several months, “much to the consternation of my colleagues, just because I felt the urgency that we needed to be part of a conversation”. That conversation for Burns and his colleagues is about “the fragility of democracies” and demonstrating how, “we’re obligated then to not close our eyes and pretend this is some comfortable thing in the past that doesn’t rhyme with the present”.

The filmmaker is fond of quoting Mark Twain’s, “History doesn’t repeat itself but it often rhymes,” and like all his films he wants this one to rhyme with the present.

“We remind people that it’s important that these impulses are not relegated to a past historical event,” Burns says. “It’s important to understand the fragility of our institutions and the fragility of our civilised impulses.”

As Holocaust historian Deborah Lipstadt, a significant voice in Burns’s documentary, says with some alarm in the series, “The time to stop a genocide is before it starts”.

And Peter Hayes, also a revered historian, says, underling the subtext of the documentary, “exclusion of people, and shutting them out, has been as American as apple pie”.

The three-part, six-hour series is directed and produced by Burns, Lynn Novick and Sarah Botstein, two of his long-term collaborators, and beautifully written by another Burns regular, Geoffrey Ward. As always Burns manages to find major actors to play the parts of his central characters in voice over, including Liam Neeson, Matthew Rhys, Paul Giamatti, Meryl Streep, Werner Herzog, Elliott Gould, Joe Morton and Hope Davis.

And like so many of Burns’s films it’s narrated in that mesmerising way by Peter Coyote, who Burns calls “God’s stenographer”. Coyote is able to voice such complex ideas with authority and empathy, often with a kind of beguiling liturgical intonation.

Stylistically recognisable and cinematically audacious, Burns’s memorable documentaries (many of which he has co-produced with Lynn Novick) include The Civil War, Baseball, Jazz, The War, The National Parks, The Dust Bowl, Prohibition, Country Music and more recently Hemingway. He constructs a compelling narrative by using almost novelistic techniques, imaginatively selecting archival material, photographed in his now famous way, immersing us in photographs, developing characters and arranging details around their stories.

The filmmakers present their story in this new series across three overflowing episodes in six challenging, engrossing hours: the first The Golden Door (Beginnings-1938); the second Yearning to Breathe Free (1938-1942); and the final The Homeless, Tempest-Tossed (1941-).

There are two parallel storylines that continuously reverberate off each other – the American side details the history of American anti-Semitism, the notion of “race betterment” and the evolving immigration policy; the German narrative arc deals with the way hatred of the Jews sprouted over time, how the Nazis pursued the end of Jewish intellectualism, and of course the process of their extermination.

The first episode covers the period from roughly the end of the 19th century to the late 1930s, a historical background that delivers context and perspective for the complex narrative that follows.

It’s broken by a short pre-titles sequence that involves new archival material from the centre of Frankfurt in 1933 of Otto Frank, father of Anne, Hitler having been in power for some months. Otto is desperate to get his family to America, but in the absence of an asylum policy, Jews seeking to escape Nazi persecution in Europe had to go through a protracted emigration procedure. It’s an unanticipated and surprising piece of the Franks’s story highlighting an American connection to the Holocaust.

(It’s a lovely, if distressing, example of the way Burns likes compelling personal narrative to wrap his ideas around, finding “characters” who become involved as events dictate.)

There was limited willingness to accept Jewish refugees. America did not want them, as Coyote says. Frank would continue to apply when they moved to Amsterdam but his immigration visa application to the American consulate in Rotterdam was never processed.

As the filmmakers later show so tragically, existence for European Jews became a deadly, exhausting pursuit of passports, identification cards, transit visas, and affidavits. As the journalist Dorothy Thompson, who features in the series, said, “For thousands and thousands of people a piece of paper with a stamp on it is the difference between life and death.”

We then cut to a beautiful period film sequence of the Statue of Liberty, Mother of Exiles, surrounded by slowly floating clouds, and a beautiful reading of the famous poem by 19th-century poet Emma Lazarus printed on a bronze plaque mounted inside the lower level of the pedestal:

Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free …,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

But the Golden Door, which gives the title for the first episode, had begun to close. The filmmakers take us back through history at quotas and the favouring of northerners over immigrants from southern or eastern Europe. Asians were largely locked out by the time of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.

A so-called “racial abyss” was feared by Americans as the new century began; white people feared they would be outbred by the newcomers and their offspring. The white Protestant majority at the end of 19th century was certain that unless things changed they were about to be replaced.

A part meeting with a sign reading "Kauft nicht bei Juden"- Don't buy from Jews. — A US Nazi Party meeting with a sign reading “Kauft nicht bei Juden”- Don’t buy from Jews.

A “mordant sentimentalism” was blamed by some for the US becoming “a sanctuary for the oppressed”, and “suicidal ethics” were leading to the extermination of the white people.

Helen Keller called it “cowardly sentimentalism” and Henry Ford, the series reveals, blamed Jews “for everything from Lincoln’s assassination to the change he thought he detected in his favourite candy bar”. He even published a hugely successful newspaper to triumphantly publish anti-Semitic harangues.

Jews were dismissed as “uncouth Asiatics” and the hogwash “science” of eugenics, the theory that humans can be improved through selective breeding of populations, was promulgated by conservationist Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race. The filmmakers show how it evolved and thrived in response to America’s changing demographics.

It was a concept taken up by Hitler who also admired America’s expansion across the continent from east to west, brushing aside those who were already there. This was manifest destiny. “The immense inner strength of the US came from the ruthless but necessary act of murdering native people and herding the rest into cages,” he wrote. His dream was of territorial expansion and Germany would in time conquer the wild east of Europe he believed. “Our Mississippi,” he said, “must be the Volga”.

Jews, scapegoats for centuries, watched as anti-Semitism was normalised in the US, in and out of Washington. Burns and his colleagues closely follow the complex manoeuvrings of President Roosevelt as he coped with the anti-immigrant xenophobiaas well as a wilful, and for many, all-consuming obsession with white supremacy.

As historian Rebecca Erbelding suggests, “There is no real perception in the 1930s that America is a force for good in the world or that we should be involved in the world at all. There is no sense among the American people, among the international community, that it is anyone else’s business what is happening in your own country”.

The series unfolds with Burns’s typical elegance: the stylised organisation of personal anecdote, Coyote’s sonorous narration, erudite, subdued commentary from historians and some ageing witnesses to atrocities, an elegiac soundtrack from Johnny Gandelsman, and gracefully realised visual documentation.

Much of the German archival footage is not unfamiliar but some new sequences horrify and disturb deeply. SS soldiers parade in the streets, chanting “When Jewish blood spurts off a knife, everything will be all right”. And the midnight book burnings on May 10, 1933, are a frenzied, phantasmagoria of volumes hurled into bonfires, including the works of Jewish authors like Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud as well as blacklisted American authors such as Ernest Hemingway and Helen Keller.

The series is an extraordinary piece of work, resonant and at times frightening. As historian Nell Irvin Painter says, “Part of this nation’s mythology is that we’re good people. We are a democracy, and in our better moments we are very good people. But that’s not all there is to the story”.

The US and the Holocaust is streaming on SBS On Demand.

Actor, director, producer and writer, Graeme Blundell has been associated with many pivotal moments in Australian theatre, film and television. He has directed over 100 plays, acted in about the same number, appeared in more than 40 films and hundreds of hours of television. He is also a prolific reporter, and is the national television critic for The Australian.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/arts/review/ken-burns-tv-series-the-us-and-the-holocaust-tells-of-shameful-past/news-story/1d48e24518158ea33e165edb0491024d

The ride of the psychotic Valkyries – Apocalypse Now Redux

January 22, 2023January 23, 2023Paul Hemphill 2 Comments

Photographs of guns and flame
Scarlet skull and distant game
Bayonet and jungle grin
Nightmares dreamed by bleeding men
Lookouts tremble on the shore
But no man can find the war
Tim Buckley 1976

Our recently departed friend Tim Page was the central character in the 1992 ABC miniseries Frankie’s House, the story of the celebrated, inebriated Vietnamese home-away-from home and party house in Saigon for transiting newsmen – a decadent, dissolute, de facto foreign correspondents club. Tim was portrayed by Scottish actor Iain Glen, famous nowadays for his role as Ser Jorah Mormont in Game of Thrones. This was not Tim’s first first portrayal in film. Denis Hopper’s strung-out photojournalist in the 1979 film Apocalypse Now was said to have been inspired by Tim’s Vietnam adventures. This was referred to many times in the many media tributes that followed his passing and at his farewell in August last year.

Rewatching the film recently, for the first time in decades, I thought Hopper’s over the top, incongruous and unexplained character bears little resemblance to the Tim Page we knew. And yet, as Tim and his partner Mau were later to point out to me, Hopper’s cracked and crazed camera cowboy illustrated exactly what the soldiers at ground zero experienced in America’s war, a war that has since been defined as chaos without compass.

The film is loosely based on Joseph Conrad’s novel Heart of Darkness, set in a dark and deadly Belgium-ravaged Congo. A special forces officer is sent on a mission to assassinate a rogue officer who has established a quasi-kingdom in the heart of the Jungle. With poetic and creative license Francis Ford Coppola created a psychedelic fever dream somewhere up the crazy river on a journey through a war that had already been lost while the powers that be had concealed the fact to the American public and to the world at large.

The Vietnam War’s echoes reverberate to this day. In the United States, it has taken more than 50 years for such a traumatic defeat to fade. The deepest scars, inevitably, belong to those who suffered most. Author and Vietnam veteran Philip Caputo in the preface to his memoir A Rumor of War wrote:

“I came home from the war with the curious feeling that I had grown older than my father, who was then 51,” writes. “A man saw the heights and depths of human behaviour in Vietnam, all manner of violence and horrors so grotesque that they evoked more fascination than disgust. Once I had seen pigs eating napalm-charred corpses – a memorable sight, pigs eating roast people.”

The scars on Vietnam itself were much much deeper and long lasting – on its politics, still a authoritarian communist regime; its people – millions died, were wounded or suffered long term psychological and genetic damage; and its environment – the effects of broad-acre defoliants and the damage and debris of war.

Two seminal scenes in the film encapsulate the carnage wrought in a country the US government wanted to “bomb back into the stone-age”.

Ou first introduction is where “little spots on the horizon, into gunships grow”, to borrow from Canadian songwriter Bruce Cockburn, as a squadron of US helicopters approach a tropical shore and attack a Vietcong camp in an idyllic seaside village to the exhilarating accompaniment of Richard Wagner’s rollicking The Ride of the Valkyries. Amidst the rattle of machine guns, the explosions and the flames, the American crews are portrayed as gung-ho and dispassionate participants in a real-time video game. The Vietnamese men, women and children are tiny black-garbed figures running around in panic like a disturbed ant’s nest, falling, flailing and flying through the air. Yet you know that this is no computer game. These helpless and doomed people are merely targets with nowhere to run to.

The second scene is set towards the end of the film, up that crazy river. The assassin, Willard, is about to slay his target, Colonel Kurtz – but not before Kurtz, filmed in a flame-lit semi-darkness, declares that he wants to die as a soldier and “not like some poor, crazed rag-assed renegade”. He then delivers his final testament on a war that has been all for nothing, and on why it has been lost:

“I’ve seen horrors … horrors that you’ve seen. But you have no right to call me a murderer. You have a right to kill me. You have a right to do that … but you have no right to judge me. It’s impossible for words to describe what is necessary to those who do not know what horror means. Horror. Horror has a face … and you must make a friend of horror. Horror and moral terror are your friends. If they are not, then they are enemies to be feared. They are truly enemies. I remember when I was with Special Forces. Seems a thousand centuries ago. We went into a camp to inoculate the children. We left the camp after we had inoculated the children for Polio, and this old man came running after us, and he was crying. He couldn’t see. We went back there, and they had come and hacked off every inoculated arm. There they were in a pile. A pile of little arms. And I remember … I … I … I cried. I wept like some grandmother. I wanted to tear my teeth out. I didn’t know what I wanted to do. And I want to remember it. I never want to forget it. I never want to forget. And then I realized … like I was shot … like I was shot with a diamond … a diamond bullet right through my forehead. And I thought: My God … the genius of that. The genius. The will to do that. Perfect, genuine, complete, crystalline, pure. And then I realized they were stronger than we. Because they could stand that these were not monsters. These were men … trained cadres. These men who fought with their hearts, who had families, who had children, who were filled with love … but they had the strength … the strength … to do that. If I had ten divisions of those men, then our troubles here would be over very quickly. You have to have men who are moral … and at the same time who are able to utilize their primordial instincts to kill without feeling … without passion … without judgment … without judgment. Because it’s judgment that defeats us”.

The film itself is much better than I recall it first time around. Perhaps it is because I now know substantially more about the Vietnam War than I did then. But also, because the 2001 directors cut, Apocalypse Now Redux has nearly an hour of footage that never reached the original cinema release, much of it quite crucial to an understanding of how pointless and crazy the war became.

The film contains several changes, mostly subtle, and two entirely new scenes, both of which enhance and serve to illustrate just how inchoate and crazy the war had become by the end of the sixties. By the time Richard Nixon was elected president in November 1968 with a promise to end the war and “bring the boys home”, it had almost seven years still to run.

One of the new scenes is set on the tiny US Navy river boat taking Willard up-country, Earlier in the story, the famous Penthouse Playmates arrive at a rear-base to entertain the troops. We now meet them again at a neglected and run-down forward fire base further up the river. It is a bizarre scene with an equally bizarre script in which two stranded and befuddled beauties struggle with the surreal setting and its drug and combat addled garrison. The other has Captain Willard and the team encounter a family of well-armed holdout French colonists on their remote rubber plantation. Here we have the film’s the only solid explication of the origins and inevitable outcome of the Indochina conflict. Having denounced his country’s folly in being surrounded and defeated in the battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954, which precipitated the end of French colonial rule and the beginning of US involvement in Indochina, patriarch Hubert de Marais declares: “You are fighting for the biggest nothing in history”.

Colonel Kurtz’s “Horror” monologue from Apocalypse Now, performed by Marlon Brando

Lost in the rain with no direction home – Dylan’s poem for Woody

January 14, 2023January 14, 2023Paul Hemphill 3 Comments

Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems.
Walt Whitman, Song of Myself.

The words of America’s national bard came to me as I read for the first time this very morning Last Thoughts on Woody Guthrie, written by Bob Dylan in honour of his idol Woody Guthrie, who at the time was dying from Huntington’s disease.

I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear, wrote Walt Whitman, setting song lines for a young nation, and what was seen at the time as its promise and its bold, independent identity. He reflected his country’s growing up and coming of age to his own personal awakening and awareness, in his seeing and being enlightened. Dylan was to become the young voice of an older but not wiser nation that seemed very much like it was not busy being born, but, rather, under the weight of its myriad contradictions – of the old and the new, the youth and their elders, of war and peace, black and white. Dylan heard the his country’s song in the turbulent, transformed and transforming sixties declaiming that he’d know my song well before I start singing.

In 1855, when Whitman published his first incarnation of Leaves of Grass, no one had yet heard anything like the raw, declamatory, and jubilant voice of this self- proclaimed “American”. And the same could be said of the young Bob Dylan when he broke out from the pack that had gathered in the folk cafés and clubs of New York City in the early years of the nineteen sixties, an enigmatic poetic figure whose songs spotlighted the chaos and division that have long defined what it meant to be an American. It is no wonder that in later years, Dylan would acknowledge his debt to Whitman in I Contain Multitudes – unoriginal and some would argue, pretentious, but then Bob has always borrowed, be it from the Anthology of American Folk Music, the British folk tradition, the avant guard poets of Europe, and the great books of the western literary canon.

Dylan read his poem for Woody aloud once only, reciting it at New York City’s Town Hall on April 12th 1963.

Introducing the poem, he told the audience he’d been asked to “write something about Woody … what does Woody Guthrie mean to you in twenty-five words,” for an upcoming book on the icon left wing singer-songwriter. He explained that he “couldn’t do it – I wrote out five pages, and, I have it here, have it here by accident, actually.” What followed was not a simple eulogy, but a lengthy, 1705 word stream of consciousness treatise on the importance of hope.

Dylan sets the scene by describing the stresses and strains of everyday life and challenging choices we have to make as we navigate it. He describes how these can cause us to feel alone, lost, and without direction. He then explains the need for hope and how we need something to give our lives meaning. He concludes by suggesting that, for him, Woody Guthrie is as much a source of hope and beauty in the world as God or religion.

Reading it for the first time ever this morning, I could hear words, lines and themes from songs that were yet to be written, songs that have followed me down these past sixty years, from those early albums of anger and introspection, protest and perception, through to My Rough And Rowdy Ways.

The recitation was recorded, but was not officially released until 1991, on The Bootleg Series Volumes 1-3 (Rare & Unreleased) 1961-1991, after circulating on bootleg releases for years. The poem is published in full below. The images in the video that follows it are clichéd and distracting; just shut your eyes and listen to the words. I prefer just reading and recalling all those uncounted ballads, songs and snatches and the improbable ‘echoes’ of things to come. I have added a gallery of favourite pictures of the man himself. Enjoy.

More on Bob Dylan in In That Howling Infinite: What’s Bob got to do with it?; Legends, bibles, plagues – Bob Dylan’s Nobel Lecture; Blind Willie McTell – Bob Dylan’s Americana; Cross the Green Mountain – Bob Dylan’s Americana; Still tangled up in Bob

In That Howling Infinite, read also, I hear America singing – happy birthday, Walt Whitman; The last rains came gently – Steinbeck’s dustbowl ballad, and The Sport of Kings – CE Morgan’s “great American novel”

Bob and Woody

Last Thoughts On Woody Guthrie

When yer head gets twisted and yer mind grows numb

When you think you’re too old, too young, too smart or too dumb

When yer laggin’ behind an’ losin’ yer pace

In a slow-motion crawl of life’s busy race

No matter what yer doing if you start givin’ up

If the wine don’t come to the top of yer cup

If the wind’s got you sideways with with one hand holdin’ on

And the other starts slipping and the feeling is gone

And yer train engine fire needs a new spark to catch it

And the wood’s easy findin’ but yer lazy to fetch it

And yer sidewalk starts curlin’ and the street gets too long

And you start walkin’ backwards though you know its wrong

And lonesome comes up as down goes the day

And tomorrow’s mornin’ seems so far away

And you feel the reins from yer pony are slippin’

And yer rope is a-slidin’ ’cause yer hands are a-drippin’

And yer sun-decked desert and evergreen valleys

Turn to broken down slums and trash-can alleys

And yer sky cries water and yer drain pipe’s a-pourin’

And the lightnin’s a-flashing and the thunder’s a-crashin’

And the windows are rattlin’ and breakin’ and the roof tops a-shakin’

And yer whole world’s a-slammin’ and bangin’

And yer minutes of sun turn to hours of storm

And to yourself you sometimes say

“I never knew it was gonna be this way

Why didn’t they tell me the day I was born”

And you start gettin’ chills and yer jumping from sweat

And you’re lookin’ for somethin’ you ain’t quite found yet

And yer knee-deep in the dark water with yer hands in the air

And the whole world’s a-watchin’ with a window peek stare

And yer good gal leaves and she’s long gone a-flying

And yer heart feels sick like fish when they’re fryin’

And yer jackhammer falls from yer hand to yer feet

And you need it badly but it lays on the street

And yer bell’s bangin’ loudly but you can’t hear its beat

And you think yer ears might a been hurt

Or yer eyes’ve turned filthy from the sight-blindin’ dirt

And you figured you failed in yesterdays rush

When you were faked out an’ fooled while facing a four flush

And all the time you were holdin’ three queens

And it’s makin you mad, it’s makin’ you mean

Like in the middle of Life magazine

Bouncin’ around a pinball machine

And there’s something on yer mind you wanna be saying

That somebody someplace oughta be hearin’

But it’s trapped on yer tongue and sealed in yer head

And it bothers you badly when your layin’ in bed

And no matter how you try you just can’t say it

And yer scared to yer soul you just might forget it

And yer eyes get swimmy from the tears in yer head

And yer pillows of feathers turn to blankets of lead

And the lion’s mouth opens and yer staring at his teeth

And his jaws start closin with you underneath

And yer flat on your belly with yer hands tied behind

And you wish you’d never taken that last detour sign

And you say to yourself just what am I doin’

On this road I’m walkin’, on this trail I’m turnin’

On this curve I’m hanging

On this pathway I’m strolling, in the space I’m taking

In this air I’m inhaling

Am I mixed up too much, am I mixed up too hard

Why am I walking, where am I running

What am I saying, what am I knowing

On this guitar I’m playing, on this banjo I’m frailin’

On this mandolin I’m strummin’, in the song I’m singin’

In the tune I’m hummin’, in the words I’m writin’

In the words that I’m thinkin’

In this ocean of hours I’m all the time drinkin’

Who am I helping, what am I breaking

What am I giving, what am I taking

But you try with your whole soul best

Never to think these thoughts and never to let

Them kind of thoughts gain ground

Or make yer heart pound

But then again you know why they’re around

Just waiting for a chance to slip and drop down

“Cause sometimes you hear’em when the night times comes creeping

And you fear that they might catch you a-sleeping

And you jump from yer bed, from yer last chapter of dreamin’

And you can’t remember for the best of yer thinking

If that was you in the dream that was screaming

And you know that it’s something special you’re needin’

And you know that there’s no drug that’ll do for the healin’

And no liquor in the land to stop yer brain from bleeding

And you need something special

Yeah, you need something special all right

You need a fast flyin’ train on a tornado track

To shoot you someplace and shoot you back

You need a cyclone wind on a stream engine howler

That’s been banging and booming and blowing forever

That knows yer troubles a hundred times over

You need a Greyhound bus that don’t bar no race

That won’t laugh at yer looks

Your voice or your face

And by any number of bets in the book

Will be rollin’ long after the bubblegum craze

You need something to open up a new door

To show you something you seen before

But overlooked a hundred times or more

You need something to open your eyes

You need something to make it known

That it’s you and no one else that owns

That spot that yer standing, that space that you’re sitting

That the world ain’t got you beat

That it ain’t got you licked

It can’t get you crazy no matter how many

Times you might get kicked

You need something special all right

You need something special to give you hope

But hope’s just a word

That maybe you said or maybe you heard

On some windy corner ’round a wide-angled curve

But that’s what you need man, and you need it bad

And yer trouble is you know it too good

“Cause you look an’ you start getting the chills

“Cause you can’t find it on a dollar bill

And it ain’t on Macy’s window sill

And it ain’t on no rich kid’s road map

And it ain’t in no fat kid’s fraternity house

And it ain’t made in no Hollywood wheat germ

And it ain’t on that dimlit stage

With that half-wit comedian on it

Ranting and raving and taking yer money

And you thinks it’s funny

No you can’t find it in no night club or no yacht club

And it ain’t in the seats of a supper club

And sure as hell you’re bound to tell

That no matter how hard you rub

You just ain’t a-gonna find it on yer ticket stub

No, and it ain’t in the rumors people’re tellin’ you

And it ain’t in the pimple-lotion people are sellin’ you

And it ain’t in no cardboard-box house

Or down any movie star’s blouse

And you can’t find it on the golf course

And Uncle Remus can’t tell you and neither can Santa Claus

And it ain’t in the cream puff hair-do or cotton candy clothes

And it ain’t in the dime store dummies or bubblegum goons

And it ain’t in the marshmallow noises of the chocolate cake voices

That come knockin’ and tappin’ in Christmas wrappin’

Sayin’ ain’t I pretty and ain’t I cute and look at my skin

Look at my skin shine, look at my skin glow

Look at my skin laugh, look at my skin cry

When you can’t even sense if they got any insides

These people so pretty in their ribbons and bows

No you’ll not now or no other day

Find it on the doorsteps made out-a paper mache¥

And inside it the people made of molasses

That every other day buy a new pair of sunglasses

And it ain’t in the fifty-star generals and flipped-out phonies

Who’d turn yuh in for a tenth of a penny

Who breathe and burp and bend and crack

And before you can count from one to ten

Do it all over again but this time behind yer back

My friend

The ones that wheel and deal and whirl and twirl

And play games with each other in their sand-box world

And you can’t find it either in the no-talent fools

That run around gallant

And make all rules for the ones that got talent

And it ain’t in the ones that ain’t got any talent but think they do

And think they’re foolin’ you

The ones who jump on the wagon

Just for a while ’cause they know it’s in style

To get their kicks, get out of it quick

And make all kinds of money and chicks

And you yell to yourself and you throw down yer hat

Sayin’, “Christ do I gotta be like that

Ain’t there no one here that knows where I’m at

Ain’t there no one here that knows how I feel

Good God Almighty

THAT STUFF AIN’T REAL”

No but that ain’t yer game, it ain’t even yer race

You can’t hear yer name, you can’t see yer face

You gotta look some other place

And where do you look for this hope that yer seekin’

Where do you look for this lamp that’s a-burnin’

Where do you look for this oil well gushin’

Where do you look for this candle that’s glowin’

Where do you look for this hope that you know is there

And out there somewhere

And your feet can only walk down two kinds of roads

Your eyes can only look through two kinds of windows

Your nose can only smell two kinds of hallways

You can touch and twist

And turn two kinds of doorknobs

You can either go to the church of your choice

Or you can go to Brooklyn State Hospital

You’ll find God in the church of your choice

You’ll find Woody Guthrie in Brooklyn State Hospital

And though it’s only my opinion

I may be right or wrong

You’ll find them both

In the Grand Canyon

At sundown

Bringin’ it all back home …

Bob and Sara

Bob and Joan

Bob and Alan Ginsberg at the grave of Jack Kerouac

21st Century Bob – the Never Ending Tour

Journey’s end – photographer Tim Page’s wild ride

September 12, 2022March 3, 2023Paul Hemphill 3 Comments

Time is an ocean but it ends at the shore
You may not see me tomorrow
Bob Dylan

Friends of acclaimed Anglo-Australian photographer, writer and humanist Tim Page, gathered from all across the shire, from the mountains to the sea, and from around Australia on Saturday 10th September to bid him farewell at his bush home in Fernmount next to Tarkeeth Forest to bid him farewell. Bellingen’s resident square-tailed kite did a fly past as if to salute him, and as we sat around the campfire under a full moon, a bevy of fireflies emerged from the forest like faeries coming for to carry him home.

Tim had departed this mortal realm at 4.15pm on Wednesday 24th August 2022, after a relatively short illness. He been sleeping most of the time during those last few days when we dropped by on our way over the hill. We knew it was very close as we’d visited several times, and almost at the exact time of his passing, we’re were actually driving by but decided not to disturb him.

The international and social media response to Tim’s death was astounding and almost instantaneous. Within hours, tributes had been published and posted all over the world. The New York Times published an excellent eulogy, as did the Sydney Morning Herald. The Guardian presented an excellent gallery of his work. An interview by the ABC with Ben Bohane, photojournalist and author and longtime friend and mentee, is both poignant and precise. We had the pleasure of meeting Ben when he visited Bellingen and spent several days with Tim immediately before his death.

He was given a fine send-off. As one mourner noted in a Facebook tribute, “It was a long, melancholic, yet kind of wonderful weekend … the kind of gathering he’d have loved, crammed with people he cared about, the Stones and Dylan rolling out over the Birds of Paradise grove in the gully, a grassy aroma in the air, and tales of his misdemeanours, wisdom and humanity prompting chuckles and affirmations as a light breeze loosened leaves and sent them down in lazy spirals onto his wicker casket …”

Fine eulogies were delivered by Tim’s “brothers” in photo-journalism who’d worked with him over all over the world and down the years. There were tales of battlefields and bar-rooms, of recovery and resilience, of road trips and revelries, of incidents and accidents.

Tim Page 1944-2022

I spoke too, as a friend and a forest neighbour, and also, as a resident of Bellingen Shire. We’d had the privilege and pleasure of sitting with Tim for many an hour during the three months of his decline. We talked of was and when, of our childhoods in Nineteen Fifties England, of life in our valley, of history and politics and of his long and colourful career – and we were able to say goodbye to him in person four days before the end.

This is what I said …

Journey’s End

Living just over the hill, and forever dropping in here at paradise park, Adèle and I spent many an hours sharing stories and gossip with Tim and his partner Marianne and her sister Annette, who we farewelled right here just over a year ago. We all shared a common English heritage, having all grown up in postwar Britain with its rationing, blandness and monochrome conformity – in the midst of the Cold War and under the shadow of the mushroom cloud.

During the three months of his decline, Tim and I would reminisce about our common boyhoods in nineteen fifties England before we both split for foreign parts.

We were into bicycles with drop handlebars and comics like The Beano and illustrated stories about “the war” – which was still a lived experience for the adults around us whilst the sons and brothers of our friends and acquaintances were called up for national service. We’d built the same Airfix aeroplane kits and hung our trophies from our bedroom ceilings – Tim’s are now hanging in his archive bunker over yonder. I believe he still has his Hornby train set and, no doubt, his Meccano – folks here of a certain vintage will know what I mean. He was and remained a great collector of stuff. He even picked up a UN Toyota “technical” utility truck in Bosnia and brought it back here. [Author’s note: he eventually gave the truck to a friend up the valley and it saw service as a water carrier during the devastating wildfires of our 2019-20 Black Summer]

In the sixties, we’d listened to the same music, and used some of the same drugs – me, much less than he. We both took to the Hippie Trail from Europe to Asia taking the ‘overland’ road that decades later would be called ‘the Hippie Trail’.

But Tim had already been two years “in country” when I was demonstrating in front of the US embassy in London’s Grosvenor Square against what Kenny Rodgers would call “that crazy Asian war”.

Tim virtually ambled into the Vietnam War, the last of the “great” wars of the Twentieth Century, and though photography was a teenage hobby, in Vietnam, he drifted into the profession almost by accident. The war was a conflict with many names, but the best is probably one from Ken Burns great documentary: “chaos without a compass”. Tim navigated it cannily if carelessly for several but left ‘Nam a few years later critically injured in a minefield and indeed clinically dead in a medivac chopper. Post-op and recuperating in the US, Tim took himself off to Woodstock, New York State. where it was being said that there was going be a cool scene – which indeed there was, as we all remember: the famous music festival held over three days in August 1969 on Max Yasgur’s dairy farm in Bethel, New York (65 km) southwest of the town of Woodstock. But Tim never got to hear any of the great music – complications from his injuries meant that he had to be medivacced out of Woodstock, probably on the same chopper that had just brought in the legendary Crosby, Stills and Nash.

Tim told us the clear-felled Tarkeeth Forest to our immediate south, just beyond those trees, reminded him of those Vietnam battlegrounds – indeed, the use of fires and herbicides in Forestry Corporation’s “forest re-establishment” reminded him of the devastation wrought by the defoliant Agent Orange in that unfortunate country. Ironically, Agent Orange may have contributed to his illness. He was unable to have MRI scans because of the shrapnel fragments in his liver from one of his many close encounters with the Grim Reaper.

Listening to Tim’s stories, you wonder whether this peregrinating, ever-restless bloke had more lives than a cat! When he was first diagnosed in early May, as Adèle and sat on his hospital bed, I remarked that he’d already used up his nine lives. He replied: “No matter how many times you’ve faced the prospect of death, you’re never prepared for it”.

But, when the end came, he faced it with stoicism and courage. I hope that when we get there, we’ll all be as brave.

Farewell wild rover.

Your’s was a life well lived, and to borrow from Rudyard Kipling, filling the unforgiving minute of the unrelenting day with sixty seconds worth of distance run.

As Bob Dylan sang, “Time is an ocean but it ends at the shore – you may not see me tomorrow”.

Of our elaborate plans, the end
Of everything that stands, the end
No safety or surprise, the end
Jim Morrison 1967

This painting by his friend Joanne Brooker portrays his long and colourful career.

Tim Page by Joanne Brooker

In Country

Tim Page’s War

Any good war picture is an anti-war picture. Tim Page

Almost exactly a year ago, In That Howling Infinite published a piece on Tim’s journey to a war. I had been editing one of his several autobiographical accounts of his adventures and reading Max Hastings’ tombstone of a book, Vietnam – an Epic Tragedy, and spent hours talking to Tim about his life and viewing his splendid if often harrowing pictures. In Tim’s words, written on his archive “bunker”, a converted shipping container that became his last great project (buoyed up on steroids, he’d risen from his bed finished unpacking his collection on the Saturday before he died), “Any good war picture is an anti-war picture”.

In Tim Page’s War – a photographer’s Vietnam Journey, I wrote:

“For Tim, it was the worst of times, it was the best of times. “Hot and cold running …” he says, using the vernacular of those days … booze, drugs, girls, he meant – battle injuries and diseases – and action, lots of it, in the air in helicopters and on occasion, fighter bombers, on the land in jeeps, armoured vehicles, and motor bikes, on the rivers in patrol boats, and on foot. The lure of sex, drugs, and excitement – and paid work for a major news agency saw him wash up in Saigon and the celebrated, inebriated Frankie’s House, a kind of home-away-from home and party house for transiting bao chi – ‘round-eye’ newsmen – a decadent, dissolute, de facto foreign correspondents club. From here, they would fan out though war-wracked South Vietnam under the often dodgy and dangerous protection of Uncle Sam. Like the soldiers they accompanied, many came back in body bags or on stretchers. Many just disappeared, and it has been Tim’s mission in life to trace these lost souls. They include his best buddy Sean Flynn, the son of famous actor and pants man Errol Flynn”.

In the 1992 series of Frankie’s House, based on Tim’s Vietnam days, he was portrayed by the Scottish actor Iain Glen, famous nowadays for his role as Ser Jorah Mormont in Game of Thrones.

Iain Glen on the left as Tim Page in Frankie’s House

“Any good war picture is an anti-war picture”.

For what is it to die but to stand naked in the wind and to melt into the sun?
And what is it to cease breathing, but to free the breath from its restless tides, that it may rise and expand and seek God unencumbered?
Only when you drink from the river of silence shall you indeed sing.
And when you have reached the mountain top, then you shall begin to climb.
And when the earth shall claim your limbs, then shall you truly dance.
Khalil Gibran

We die with the dying:
See, they depart, and we go with them.
We are born with the dead:
See, they return, and bring us with them.
The moment of the rose and the moment of the yew-tree
Are of equal duration…
TS Elliot, Little Giddng

In In That Howling Infinite, see also, Tall tales, small stories, obituaries and epiphanies

Also in In That Howling Infinite: The Ballad of Denton Crocker – a Vietnam elegy ; and Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold – 1968 revisited

Menzie’s Excellent Suez Adventure

February 3, 2022May 19, 2022Paul Hemphill 1 Comment

Many historians claim that the Suez Crisis of late 1956 was the end of the beginning of Britain’s retreat from Empire and its decline as a Great Power. Britain’s divestment of its non-Anglo-Celtic empire began with its withdrawn from Palestine and the independence of India in 1947 and 1948 and proceeded apace through the sixties and seventies until today when but a handful of dependencies remain.

Why Britain reacted as it did to the rise of Gamal Abd al Nasser and his seizure of the Suez Canal in 1956 has long fascinated scholars. Watching ‘The Crown’, recently, and its portrayal of Sir Anthony Eden, and recalling Dennis Potter’s marvelously surreal take on the Suez Crisis in ‘Lipstick on Your Collar’, I discovered one possible explanation (though It doesn’t quite explain the decision of France and Israel to join Britain’s last imperial adventure).

The Suez Crisis had far-reaching consequences – though none as catastrophic on a political and human scale as when Britain and Australia joined America’s Iraq crusade in 2003. The humiliating withdrawal from Suez accelerated Britain’s slow decline from “great power” status, and the US’ steady ascent to world leadership. It was the harbinger of the end of an empire on which the sun never set. It burnished Nasser’s revolutionary credentials and gave rise to an anti-western, secular, and socialist Arab nationalism that challenged and, in many countries, toppled the established order in the Middle East. It led, in a short time, to the rise of the Ba’ath regimes in Syria and Iraq, which, it can be argued, set these countries on the road to ruin half a century later. And what might have been the consequences for Eastern Europe is “the West” had not been so distracted on the canal during Hungary’s quixotic revolution and its brutal suppression by the Soviet Union.

The Suez Crisis in brief

The Suez Crisis came to a boil with what Arabs called the Tripartite Aggression, and Israelis, the Sinai War. Historians refer to it as the Second Arab–Israeli war – between the war that commenced with the conclusion of Britain’s mandate over Palestine, and ended with the establishment of the state of Israel and expulsion of over a quarter of a million Arabs from within the battle-won borders of the new state, and the Six Day War which has changed utterly Israel’s geography, politics, culture, society, identity and international standing.

It commenced with an invasion of Egypt in October 1956 by Israel, followed immediately by the United Kingdom and France. The aims were to regain control the Suez Canal a majority British owned strategic international waterway for the Western nations who depended upon it their oceanic commerce, and also, to remove Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser, who had just nationalized the foreign-owned Suez Canal Company, which administered the canal. After the fighting had started, political pressure from the United States, the Soviet Union and the United Nations led to a withdrawal by the three invaders. It humiliated the United Kingdom and France and enhanced the reputation of Nasser. Although the three allies had attained a number of their military objectives, the Egyptians scuppered forty ships in the canal rendering it useless. As a result of the conflict, the United Nations created the UNEF Peacekeepers to police the Egyptian–Israeli border, British prime minister Anthony Eden resigned, and the Soviet Union, taking advantage may have been emboldened to invade Hungary.

As with all international conflicts, the causes are much more complex than the actual casus belli that precipitate it, and beyond the intention and scope of this article. Issues geopolitical, strategic, tactical, historical, cultural and indeed, psychological proliferated, aggregated and aggravated, converging on one or more ignition points. The Cold War, the rise of Arab nationalism, the Arab Israeli conflict, the decline of the British Empire and Britain’s need to hang onto its status as a world power, and the personalities of the players, particularly the Egyptian leader and the British prime minister.

And into this complex and volatile maze stepped longtime Australian Prime Minister monarchist and empire loyalist Sir Robert Menzies.

But first …

The view from Down Under

When many British folk of a certain age remember the Suez Crisis in the fall of 1956, they think of the “ Gyppos”, the jumped-up Arabs who defied then embarrassed Great Britain, brought down a prime minister, and dropped the curtain on the empire on which the sun never set. They might also at a stretch imaging a connection from this to Dodi al Fayyad and his dad, Muhammad, the one time owner of Harrods and the creator of that infamous shrine to his lad and the people’s princess who both perished in the Paris car crash that launched a thousand conspiracy theories – one of which was the the establishment’s fear that Diana would would bring forth an Egyptian baby.

As a youngster in Birmingham, the events in Egypt passed me by – I was however quite excited by the revolution in Hungary and the Soviet invasion that followed soon afterwards, and would spend hours drawing pictures of street battles, of tanks and fighters and security services men strung up on lampposts. But many young men doing their compulsory national service, including the sons and brothers of my friends and relatives, were fearful of being sent off to a foreign war, the last one being barely over a decade. This anxiety, and also the imperial angst of crusty ex-army civil servants, is beautifully portrayed in Dennis Potter’s brilliant Lipstick On Your Collar, and also the very commendable drama series The Hour. I have friends and acquaintances of British, Italian, Maltese and French descent who had been born in Egypt but had to leave with their families in during and after the crisis as the Egyptian government, vindictive in its victory, showed them the door.

When Aussies remember the Crisis – well, probably very few do. But way back then, in the days of the White Australia Policy (yes, we really did have that) and the early closing Six O’clock Swill (and yes, we had that too!), apart from many former soldiers who had memories of Egypt in both world wars, we just got on with the matters that preoccupied us in a year that Australian academic and author Hugh Richardson recounts in his highly informative and very entertaining 1956 – the year Australia welcomed the world. Richardson recreates the events of the year surrounding the Melbourne Olympics of November and December 1956, including the introduction of television in Australia, the arrival of Rock Around the Clock, the British nuclear test in the South Australian outback, the Soviet Union’s invasion of Hungary, and immediately before it, the Suez debacle.

Nowadays, many commentators and writers looking back on the fifties paint Australia as an insular, inward-focusing and churlish nation which many now internationally famous Australian abandoned for greener, more cerebral and creative British pastures. Richardson acknowledges this too, but contends that the country was in fact changing, in the early stages of our development into the worldly-wise, technologically connected, creative, cosmopolitan and multicultural nation that we imagine ourselves to be today. Undoubtedly, we are, but some disreputable skeletons still rattle around at the back of our national cupboard and sometimes fall out into the public space to the embarrassment of ourselves and the discomfort of our friends and neighbours.

This is not to say that Australia was detached from world affairs. Our innate conservatism, and religiosity, a traditionally strong emotional attachment to Great Britain, the homeland of most immigrants to Australia in the since the days of the first settlement, and a firm commitment to our alliance with the UK and the US, saw us drawn into the mindsets and machinations of the Cold War.

We signed up for the United Nation’s euphemistically termed “police action” in Korea, a war that concluded with a forever armistice, and contributed troops to the Malayan Emergency, a guerrilla war between Commonwealth armed forces and the Malayan National Liberation Army, the military arm of the Malayan Communist Party, from 1948 to 1960 in today’s Malaysia and Singapore. Australia’s commitment lasted 13 years, between 1950 and 1963 and until Vietnam and Afghanistan, was the longest continuous military commitment in our history.

On the home front, Robert Menzies endeavoured to ban the Communist Party in an Antipodean echo of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s inquisition in America. There were other similarities with the USA as an adolescent ASIO, the Australian Security Intelligence Agency, encouraged dobbers and snitches to shop their neighbours and colleagues. The actual extent and effectiveness of this is unknown to this day. The Labor Party fractured as fervent anti-communist Catholics walked out to establish the Democratic Labor Party, a rift than kept Labor in the political wilderness where it had … for a further sixteen years. And in April 1954, Vladimir Petrov, a Soviet security officer in the Canberra embassy defected to the West with his reluctant, patriotic wife, Evdokia, a valued cryptographer at the embassy, much to the ire of Comrade Khrushchev. In 1956, therefore, Australia was very much on the radar of what President Robert Reagan would later call The Evil Empire.

When Robert met Gamal

In Richardson’s narrative, it appears that unbeknownst to the ordinary man or woman on the Bondi bus, Australia played a significant role in the Suez Crisis, and indeed, there might’ve been a fair chance that our government would have volunteered our soldiers to join the party, much as we’d answered the old country’s call oft times before. But, as far as we know, Britain never asked and Australia never offered. It would appear that longtime Australian Prime Minister Robert Menzies main preoccupation that summer and fall was Britain’s imperial anguish, and how he might help assuage it.

The following narrative is quoted directly from Richardson’s book.

“During the build-up to the Crisis, British prime Minister Anthony Eden became consumed with an obsessional hatred for Nasser, and from March 1956 onward, was privately committed to the Nasser’s ousting. The American historian Donald Neff has written that Eden’s often hysterical and overwrought views towards Nasser almost certainly reflected the influence of the amphetamines to which he had had become addicted following a botched operation in 1953 together with the related effects of sustained sleep deprivation (Eden slept on average about 5 hours per night in early 1956).

Increasingly Nasser came to be viewed in British circles—and in particular by Eden—as a dictator, akin to Benito Mussolini. Ironically, in the buildup to the crisis, it was the actually the Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell and the left-leaning tabloid newspaper The Mirror that first made this comparison. . Anglo-Egyptian relations would continue on their downward spiral.

During World War II British prime minister Winston Churchill asked Anthony Eden who was foreign minister, to help him identify an appropriate candidate for to be minister of state in Cairo, Egypt. The position was strategically important because of the war in North Africa, but the candidate did not have to be British. Robert Menzies by this time had lost the prime ministership in Australia to John Curtin and was therefore able to be considered. He did not get the job. Eden actually even admitted later Menzies had not been accepted because “he probably would not get on with the people of of the Middle East, being a somewhat difficult person“. Now, Eden as British Prime Minister, was about to send Menzies on a far more difficult assignment.

Edens original observation was perhaps born out several years later when Menzies was in Cairo on a different mission – an international delegation sent to meet Colonel Nasser himself in an effort to persuade him that the canal to be placed under United Nations stewardship). “These Gyppos are dangerous lot of backward adolescents, full of self-importance and basic ignorance”, Menzies wrote in his diary. The attitude, not uncommon at the time, extended beyond the Egyptians. A former Australian High Commissioner to India Indonesia Italy and Kenya, Sir Walter Crocker, noted in 1955: “Menzies is anti-Asian; particularly anti-Indian… he just can’t help it”.

… While race proved challenging for Menzies, perhaps the more confronting charge was his apparent lack of curiosity about other nations, his unshakable faith in English superiority, and his lack of engagement with European languages.

Menzies believed that a strong response might be required to get Nasser to appreciate Britain’s point of view. Menzies was, in the public eye, a “Commonwealth man”. He had walked that stage, found a spot of obeisance near the crown, and felt like a valued elder statesman within the Commonwealth club of nations. But this mission to Egypt propelled him into a new kind of universe where the old verities no longer applied. He was about to embark on a delicate international mission of diplomacy, trying to negotiate with a new leader who was driven by forces Menzies could not fully comprehend, in a region about which had little interest ….

… Menzies had worked assiduously in London to get command of the brief for his mission. He and four advisors had nine meetings exploring the finances of the canal, and had spoken to the canal’s directors and even an engineer who was an expert in the area. Yet there was no discussion about the social and personal elements he needed to understand: why the Suez Canal was so important to the Egyptians, and why Nasser felt it now is the time to express his independence of thought and action.

The consequences of this shortsightedness became clear early on during Menzies meetings with Nasser. Menzies conducted the discussions like the barrister he once was, laying out the evidence, interrogating opinions, prosecuting a case, just as us Secretary of State Dulles had expected him to do. Nasser, Menzies confided to his staff, was naive and uncertain. Menzies believed he could influence him. Menzies base view was far less hospitable. He told Eden that Nasser was “in some ways a likable fellow but so far from being charming, he is rather gauche … I would say that he was a man of considerable but immature intelligence”. Menzies had more generalizations to make: “like many of these people in the Middle East (or even India) who I have met, his logic doesn’t travel very far; that is to say, he will produce a perfectly adequate minor premise , but his deduction will be astonishing”.

Nasser had his own description of Menzies – he was ‘a mule’.”

Coda – “I did but see her passing by …”

Robert Menzies love affair with Britain has opened him to posthumous ridicule in some quarters. Many would not know remember that in 1952, he ordered charges against the communist journalists Rex Chiplin for criticizing the coronation. That came to nought but Chiplin was later hauled before the Royal Commission on Espionage (1954-55), a copycat version of Senator McCarthy’s Committee of in-American Activities

usually connected to his public comment during the visit of the young Queen Elizabeth and her consort to Australia in 1952 when quoting 17th century poet John Ford, he said: “I did but see her passing, and yet I’ll love her ‘til I die”.

And yet, Sir Robert was not alone in his adulation. As the Sydney Morning Herald wrote on the fiftieth anniversary if the Royal tour:

“Royalty can have a strange effect on people who come into contact with it. It had an extraordinary effect on an estimated 7 million Australians who flocked to see the young Queen Elizabeth 50 years ago …The estimated figure was about 70 per cent of the Australian population of nearly 10 million. Nearly one million people were thought to have crowded Sydney’s foreshores and streets when the Queen arrived on February 3, when the city’s population was 1.8 million. About 150,000 crammed around Sydney Town Hall and neighbouring streets when she attended the Lord Mayor’s Ball. A newspaper reported that 2000 collapsed in the crush”.

Until the abolition of royal honours by the Whitlam Labor government of 1972-76, Australian worthies were rewards with British knighthoods and were also entitled to sit in the British House of Lords as life-peers. It was Menzies’ fervent wish that he be accorded that honour, and after his retirement in 1966, prime minister William McMahon endeavoured to grant it – but he lost office to Gough Whitlam before he could satisfy Sir Robert’s hearts desire.

Sir Robert Menzies, monarchist, Empire Royalist,and consummate politician kept his hand on the steering wheel of a conservative and complacent Australia from 1949 until his retirement in 1966. Some believe that it was a stultifying hand. Others praise him – and praise him still – him for upholding traditional Australian values, and keeping us relaxed, comfortable and prosperous. But in his influential 1964 book The Lucky Country, academic, social critic and public intellectual Donald Horne wrote: “Australia is a lucky country run mainly by second rate people who share its luck. It lives on other people’s ideas, and, although its ordinary people are adaptable, most of its leaders (in all fields) so lack curiosity about the events that surround them that they are often taken by surprise”. It wasn’t meant as a compliment.

But the times they were a’changin’. Political, cultural and social change was already in motion at the time of the Melbourne Olympics, and continued apace through the sixties, reaching top speed with the election of the Whitlam Labor government in 1972.

I first arrived in Australia in December 1976 for a month’s vacation in my first wife’s home country, and immigrated a year later. Gough had gone by the time I landed, inauspiciously sacked by the Governor General at the instigation of the Liberal Party, Robert Menzies’ creation. But the country that became my home of over forty years was no longer that of 1956. That past was, to quote the much-quoted LP Hartley, “another country”.

For posts in In That Howling Infinite on the Middle East, see A Middle East Miscellany, on Australian history and politics, Down Under, and on history generally, Foggy Ruins of Time – from history’s pages.

A House Divided – the nature of civil war

January 27, 2022May 23, 2022Paul Hemphill 4 Comments

A house divided against itself cannot stand. Abraham Lincoln

The North would not let us govern ourselves, so the war came. Jefferson Davis

Perhaps is the personal dimension that makes civil wars so attractive to re-enactors in the U.K the US – the gloomy and yet paradoxically romantic concept of “a family divided” and “brother against brother”. When hundreds of ordinary folk meticulously don period garb and take up replica weaponry to replay Gettysberg and Shiloh, Worcester and Naseby, Towton and Bosworth Field, it is much, much more than a fun day out in the countryside. It might be good-natured play-acting, or participating in “living history”, but might it not also speak to some inner-need to connect with long-dead forbears who endured “the longest day” on those very fields in mortal combat with their own kith and kin.

This is just one of the many thoughts that entered my head on reading an article in the New York Review of Books in 2017 reviewing Civil Wars: A History in Ideas byDavid Armitage, and another in the Times in January 2022 reviewing a new book by american political scientist Barbara F Walter called How Civil Wars Start – And How To Stop Them. The review are reprinted in full below, but first, some of of my own observations.

Notwithstanding the fact that civil wars are so devastating in terms of lives lost, the destruction wrought on the urban and rural environment, and the shattering of social and political institutions, fear of civil war and its consequences apparently does not deter belligerent parties from marching down that road. Often, one or another actually forces the issue, aware of the potentially disastrous consequences, but rationalizing it along the lines of national, ideological or sectional interest, and indeed, some concept of community, social, religious or ethnic survival, a perception defined nowadays as an existential threat, as happened historically, one could argue, in England, in the US, Russia, Spain, and Bosnia. Sometimes, it is an accumulation of seemingly minor events, perceived slights, discrimination, actual atrocities, miscalculations, or overreactions that ignite pyres that have been building for ages – generations even. I think of Lebanon here, and Syria.

So often, casus belli that are in hindsight viewed by historians as pivotal, are not seen as critical to the participants, and indeed, many would protest that they had “no idea that things would come to this”, and that even then, there may have been a sense that wiser heads would prevail, that it would blow over or that it would be all over soon. The idea of what people are fighting about often looks different from the perspective of those actually engaged in it to his outside observers, both contemporarily and retrospectively. Indeed, sometimes, reasons are tacked on afterwards, and indeed, actually mutate progressively as matters escalate.

Lebanon and Syria, again, and perhaps even the southern slave states that sought to secede from the Union in 1861, and the English parliamentarians who challenged the royal prerogative. But one can be damn sure Generalissimo Franco knew what he was doing when he flew the Spanish Foreign Legion with its Moorish mercenaries to the mainland in 1936, as did Leon Trotsky when he unleashed the Red Army against the Whites in the wake of the Russian Revolution.

A civil war can spawn from a wider, ongoing conflagration when factions or parties dispute the nature and terms of the post-bellum status quo and fracture along political and ideological lines. Many civil wars have arisen from the ashes of a prior war, when there are what are perceived as existential issues unresolved and the availability of weapons and materiel and experienced and discontented men to use them. The Russian Civil War which followed on from The First World War and the Chinese and Vietnamese civil wars which followed the second spring to mind, and historically, the Paris Commune which raised its red banner after the Franco-Prussian War whilst the victorious Prussian Army was still camped outside the city. Ireland’s civil war bled out of its independence struggle against British rule after the Anglo-Irish Treaty left Ireland divided and dependent with the six Ulster counties excised as Northern Ireland.

The experience, cost, and legacy of civil war is often a powerful political and social disincentive to venture there again. It is this fear that probably prevents Lebanon from falling back into the abyss notwithstanding the many centrifugal forces at play in this perennially divided country. It most probably had a powerful influence on the political development of post-bellum England in the mid seventeenth century. The next and ultimate showdown between crown and parliament, and indeed “regime change” as we now call it, was a relatively peaceful one, and indeed, was thus named the “Glorious Revolution”. And yet, the deposition of James III and the ascension of Queen Mary and her husband,the Dutch Prince William of Orange, was preceded by what can be described as the last invasion of England by a foreign force. The spectre of the Commune haunts still the French soul. The beautiful church of Sacre Coeur was built as a penance for and as a solemn reminder of the bloodletting In the streets of Paris in much the same way as Byzantine emperor Justinian raised the glorious Hagia Sophia in Constantinople as a form of contrition after his soldiers had slaughtered tens of thousands of his rebellious citizens and buried their bodies under the Hippodrome.

There is a view that civil war can be retrospectively be seen as a crucible of nation, a fiery furnace through which the righteous must walk – an ex post facto rationalization of the Nietzschean paradox of “that which does not kill us makes us strong”. Abraham Lincoln verbalized this in his Gettysberg Address in 1863 on a battlefield where the fallen had been only recently interred. Franco made a similar play as he laid claim to the wreckage that was Spain in the wake of three years of carnage, but then petrified his riven, country in autocratic stone until his death many decades later. The Russian Civil War was not accorded such a nation-building ethos as it was viewed by the Bolshevik victors as the crushing of a counter-revolution against a new world already being born.

And finally, to conclude this conversation, let us briefly contemplate the article’s discussion of how and when protagonists actually define their internecine conflict as civil war. The American Civil War is a case in point, referred to at times as “The Rebellion” and “The War Between the States”. The American War of Independence, also know as The American Revolution was indeed a civil war as defined by the author, fought along political lines by people who had race, faith, culture and identity in common. The English Wars of the Roses, which staggered on for thirty years in in the fifteenth century is largely viewed as a dynastic struggle between noble houses rather than civil wars per se. And yet, nearly thirty thousand Englishmen died on the snow-swept fields of Towton, near York, the largest loss of English lives on a single day (a third more than perished on the first day of the Somme in June 1916).

The Syrian tragedy, as the author notes, is regarded by the concerned, and hypocritically entangled outside world, a civil war by any definition. But it is at present a harrowing work in progress, viewed by the Assad regime and its supporters as a rebellion and as an assault by extremist outsiders, and by the rebel forces, as a revolution, albeit a comprised and even hijacked one. Jihadis for their many sins, see it as a messianic prelude to Armageddon.

Once thing for sure, civil war, the Hobbesian “war if all against all” (Hobbes was thinking England’s) is undoubtably the saddest, bloodiest and most visceral of all conflicts. I leave the last words to WB Yeats:

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

   Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
   The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
   The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
   The best lack all conviction, while the worst
   Are full of passionate intensity.

This is a revised version of the original post of June 1st 2017

Now, read on…

What Gets Called ‘Civil War’?

Linda Colley, New York Review of Books, June 8, 2017

Civil Wars: A History in Ideas, by David Armitage (Knopf)

The end of the world is on view at Philadelphia. Hurtling across a twenty-five-foot-wide canvas in the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts are the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Together, Death, Pestilence, Famine, and War ravage the earth amid blood-red banners and what looks like cannon smoke. Warriors fall before their swords and spears, and women, children, and babies are slaughtered.

Benjamin West completed this version of Death on the Pale Horse in 1817, two years after the Battle of Waterloo. It is tempting therefore to see in the painting not only the influence of the book of Revelation, and perhaps the elderly West’s intimations of his own imminent mortality, but also a retrospective verdict on the terrible catalogue of death and destruction that had been the Napoleonic Wars. Yet West’s original inspiration seems to have been another conflict. He first sketched out his ideas for Death on the Pale Horse in 1783, the concluding year of the American War of Independence. Bitterly divisive on both sides of the Atlantic, the war imposed strains on West himself. Pennsylvanian born and bred, he was a supporter of American resistance.

But in 1763 he migrated to Britain, and he spent the war working as a historical painter at the court of George III. So every day he served the monarch against whom some of his countrymen were fighting, knowing all the while that this same king was launching his own legions against Americans who had once been accounted British subjects. It was this tension that helped to inform West’s apocalyptic vision. More viscerally than most, he understood that the American Revolution was also in multiple respects civil warfare.

Tracing some of the histories of the idea of civil war, and showing how definitions and understandings of this mode of conflict have always been volatile and contested, is the purpose of this latest book by David Armitage. Like all his work, Civil Wars: A History in Ideas is concise, wonderfully lucid, highly intelligent, and based on a confident command of a wide range of printed sources. It is also ambitious, and divided into three parts in the manner of Julius Caesar’s Gaul. This seems appropriate since Armitage roots his account in ancient Rome. It was here, he claims, between the first century BCE and the fifth century CE, that lethal conflicts within a recognized society, a common enough experience in earlier eras and in other regions, began to be viewed and categorized as a distinctive form of war: bellum civile.

How this came to pass is the subject of Part One of the book. In Part Two, Armitage switches to the early modern era, which is here defined mainly as the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and shows how elite male familiarity with classical texts encouraged Europeans and some of their overseas colonizers to interpret the civil commotions of their own times very much in Roman terms. Part Three takes the story from the nineteenth century to the dangerous and precarious present. Whereas the incidence of overt conflicts between major states has receded during the post-1945 “long peace,” civil wars have proliferated, especially in parts of Eastern Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. The “shadow of civil war,” Armitage contends, has now become “the most widespread, the most destructive, and the most characteristic form of organized human violence.”

But why ancient Rome to begin with? Armitage attributes its centrality to evolving Western conceptions of civil warfare partly to this culture’s marked success in establishing and stabilizing the idea of a distinct citizenry and political community. “Civil War could, by definition, exist only after a commonwealth (civitas) had been created.” More significant, as far as perceptions in later centuries were concerned, were the writings and careers of two brilliant Romans, each of whom in different ways was caught up in the rivalry between Julius Caesar and Pompey and destroyed by the violence of their warring successors.

Cicero, an opponent of Caesar, is the earliest-known writer to have used the term “civil war.” He also employed it in a speech that he delivered at the Forum in 66 BCE, close to the spot where his severed head and hands would be put on display twenty-three years later, as punishment for his activism and his words. In the following century, the youthful poet Lucan completed a ten-book masterwork, De Bello Civile, on how, under Caesar, “Rome’s high race plunged in her [own] vitals her victorious sword.” Lucan dedicated his saga to Nero, the emperor who later forced him to commit suicide.

Their writings and the gory fate of these men helped to foster and perpetuate the idea that civil warfare was a particularly nasty variant of organized human violence. It is in part this reputation, Armitage contends, that has made the subject of civil war a more impoverished field of inquiry than inter-state conflict. Given that the English, American, and Spanish civil wars have all long been historiographical cottage industries, I am not sure this is wholly correct. But it is the case, and he documents this powerfully throughout, that the ideas and negative language that have accumulated around the notion of “civil war” have resulted in the term’s use often being politically driven in some way. As with treason, what gets called civil war, and becomes remembered as such, frequently depends on which side eventually prospers.

At times, the term has been deliberately withheld for fear of seeming to concede to a set of antagonists even a glimmer of a claim to sovereignty in a disputed political space. Thus the royalist Earl of Clarendon chose in his history to describe the English Parliament’s campaigns against Charles I after 1642 not as a civil war, but as a rebellion. In much the same way, an early US official history of the Union and Confederate navies described their encounters between 1861 and 1865 as a “War of the Rebellion,” thereby representing the actions of the Southern states as a mere uprising against an indisputably legitimate government.

For Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg in 1863, by contrast, it was essential to insist that America was undergoing a civil war. He wanted to trumpet in public more than simply the rightness of a particular governing regime. Since its survival was still in doubt, he needed as well to rally support for the Union itself, that “new nation, conceived in liberty” as he styled it: “Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived, and so dedicated, can long endure.”

Of course, had the American Civil War ended differently, it might well not have been called a civil war at all. Later generations might have remembered it as a “War of Southern Independence,” or even as a “Southern Revolution.” As Armitage points out, when major insurrections break out within a polity, they almost invariably start out as civil wars in the sense that the local population is initially divided in its loyalties and responses. But if the insurrectionists eventually triumph, then—as in Russia after 1917, or China after 1949—it has increasingly been the case that the struggle is redescribed by the victors as a revolution. Partly because of the continuing influence of the ancient Roman cultural inheritance, “revolution” possesses far more positive connotations than the more grubby and ambivalent “civil war.”

Joseph Eid/AFP/Getty Images

Rebel–held al-Shaar neighborhood of Aleppo, recaptured by government forces, March 2017

As a searching, nuanced, and succinct analysis of these recurring ideas, linguistic fluctuations, and shifting responses over a dramatic span of time, and across national and continental boundaries, Armitage’s account is a valuable and suggestive one. But as he admits, it is hardly comprehensive. This is not simply because of the scale of his subject matter, but also because of his chosen methodologies.

In dealing with civil wars he practices what, in an earlier work, he styled “serial contextualism.” This means that he offers detailed snapshots of a succession of discrete moments and of particular intellectual, political, and legal figures spread out over a very long stretch of time. The strategy is sometimes illuminating, but one has to mind the gaps. Most obviously, there are difficulties involved in leaping, as he does, almost immediately from ancient Rome to the seventeenth century. By the latter period, for instance, England’s “Wars of the Roses” were sometimes viewed and described in retrospect as civil wars. But at the time, in the 1400s, commentators do not seem to have resorted to medieval Latin phrases such as bella civilia or guerre civiles to describe these particular domestic and dynastic conflicts. Although classical texts such as Lucan’s De Bello Civile were known to medieval scholars, the impress of this ancient Roman inheritance on contemporary interpretations of fifteenth-century England’s internal wars does not appear to have been a vital one.

Why might this have been? The question could be rephrased. Why should it be imagined that language and concepts drawn from the ancient Roman past supplied the only or even the dominant ideas and methods for subsequent Westerners wanting to make sense of the experience of large-scale civil contention and slaughter? After all, in the medieval era and long after, most men and even more women possessed no direct knowledge of the Roman classics. Multitudes in Europe and everywhere else could not even read, never mind afford books. Yet in the past as now, it was precisely these sorts of “ordinary” people who were often the most vulnerable to the chaos and bloodshed of civil warfare, and so had little choice but to work out some ideas about it. What were these ideas?

A practitioner of intellectual history from the so-called Cambridge School of that discipline, Armitage barely touches on such questions. More international in range than many of his fellow scholars, he shares some of this school’s leading characteristics: its fascination with the long-term impact of Aristotelian and Roman republicanism, its overwhelming focus on language and on erudite elite males, and its comparative neglect of religious texts. It is partly this deliberately selective approach to the past and its sources that allows Armitage to venture on such an enormous topic over such a longue durée. But again, there is a mismatch between this methodology and the full extent and vital diversity of his subject.

To be sure, many of the impressive individuals who feature in his book were much more than desk-bound intellectuals or sheltered and austere political players. One of the most striking segments in Civil Wars is Armitage’s treatment of the multiple roles of the Prussian-born American lawyer Francis Lieber, who provided Lincoln with a legal code for the conduct of the Civil War. Lieber had fought at Waterloo and was left for dead on the battlefield. During the 1860s, he also had to bear the death of one of his sons who fought for the South, even as two others were fighting for the North. As he remarked: “Civil War has thus knocked loudly at our own door.” The fact remains, however, that most men caught up in civil wars throughout history have not been educated, prosperous, and high-achieving souls of this sort. Moreover—and this has a wide significance—civil wars have often been viewed as having a particular impact on women.

In harsh reality, even conventional warfare has usually damaged non-combatants, women, children, the elderly, and the infirm. Nonetheless, the idea long persisted that war was quintessentially a separate, masculine province. But civil wars were seen as taking place within, and cutting across, discrete societies. Consequently, by their very nature, they seemed likely to violate this separation of spheres, with women along with children and the old and frail all patently involved. This was a prime reason why civil warfare was so often characterized in different cultures not just as evil and catastrophic, but as unnatural. In turn, this helps to explain why people experiencing such conflicts have often resorted, far more avidly than to any other source of ideas, to religious language and texts for explanations as well as comfort.

The major holy books all contain allusions to civil warfare and/or lines that can be read as addressing its horrors. “I will set the Egyptians against the Egyptians,” declares the King James version of the book of Isaiah: “and they shall fight every one against his brother, and every one against his neighbour.” It was often the Apocalypse, though, as demonstrated by Benjamin West’s great canvas, that Christians mined for terrifying and allusive imagery. Such biblical borrowings sometimes crowded out references to the Roman classics as a means of evoking and explaining civil war altogether, as seems often to have happened in medieval England.

At other times, religious and classical imagery and arguments were combined. Thus, as Armitage describes, the English poet Samuel Daniel drew on Lucan’s verses on the Roman civil war when composing his own First Fowre Bookes of the Civile Wars between the Two Houses of Lancaster and Yorke in 1595, a work plundered for its plots and characters by William Shakespeare. But it is also easy to see in portions of Daniel’s text the influence of the Apocalypse:

Red fiery dragons in the aire doe flie,

And burning Meteors, poynted-streaming lights,

Bright starres in midst of day appeare in skie,

Prodigious monsters, gastly fearefull sights:

Straunge Ghosts, and apparitions terrifie,

…Nature all out of course to checke our course,

Neglects her worke to worke in us remorse.

It was never just Christians who turned to holy books and religious pieties so as to cast some light on the darkness of civil war. Unlike allusions to the Roman past, such responses seem to have been universal. Indeed, I suspect that the only way that a genuinely trans-continental and socially deep history of civil warfare could conceivably be written would be through an examination of how civil wars have been treated by the world’s various religions, and how such texts and interpretations have been used and understood over time. In particular, the idea that Samuel Daniel hints at in the passage quoted above—that civil war was a punishment for a people’s more than usually egregious sins—has proved strikingly ecumenical as well as persistent.

Thus for Sunni Muslims, the idea of civil war as fitna has been central to understandings of the past. But fitna in this theology connotes more than civil warfare. The term can evoke sexual temptation, moral depravity—once again, sin. The First Fitna, for instance, the war of succession between 656 and 661, is traditionally viewed by Sunnis as marking the end of the Rightly Guided Caliphs, the true followers of Muhammad.

As Tobie Meyer-Fong has shown, the civil wars that killed over twenty million Chinese in the 1850s and 1860s, the so-called Taiping Rebellion, were also often interpreted as divine retribution for immoral, decadent, or irreligious behavior.^* Confucian, Daoist, and Buddhist commentators on all sides rationalized the carnage and disorder in these terms. Poor, illiterate Chinese caught up in this crisis seem also to have regularly turned to religion to make sense of it, and not simply out of faith, or as a means to explain apparently arbitrary horrors. By viewing civil war as punishment for Chinese society’s sins in general, they could also secure for themselves a strategy and a possible way out, even if only in spiritual terms. They could make extra and conscious efforts to follow a moral pathway, and hope thereby to evade heaven’s condemnation.

Analogous responses and patterns of belief continue today, and understandably so. As the ongoing civil warfare in Syria illustrates all too terribly, vulnerable people caught up in such ordeals can easily be left feeling that no other aid is available to them except a deity, and that the only alternative is despair. David Armitage concludes his book with a discussion of how the “long-term decline of wars between states” (a decline that should not be relied on) has been “accompanied by the rise of wars within them.” As in his previous book, The History Manifesto (2014), co-written with Jo Guldi, he also insists that historians have a duty—and a particular capacity—to address such large and recurrent features of human experience:

Where a philosopher, a lawyer, or even a political scientist might find only confusion in disputes over the term “civil war,” the historian scents opportunity. All definitions of civil war are necessarily contextual and conflictual. The historian’s task is not to come up with a better one, on which all sides could agree, but to ask where such competing conceptions came from, what they have meant, and how they arose from the experience of those who lived through what was called by that name or who have attempted to understand it in the past.

Certainly, a close reading of Civil Wars provides a deeper understanding of some of the semantic strategies that are still being deployed in regard to this mode of warfare. Thus President Bashar al-Assad and his supporters frequently represent Syria’s current troubles as the result of rebellion, revolt, or treason; while for some of his Russian allies, resistance in that country is to be categorized as terrorism.

But historians can illumine the rash of civil warfare that has characterized recent decades more deeply than this. Whereas Armitage focuses here on the making and unmaking of states, it is the rise and fall of empires that have often been the fundamental precipitants of twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century civil wars. At one level, the decline and demise of some old, mainly land-based empires—Austrian, Ottoman, and Soviet—have contributed to a succession of troubles in Eastern Europe. At another, the old maritime empires that invaded so much of Asia, Africa, and the Middle East frequently imposed new boundaries and yoked together different peoples in those regions in ways that were never likely to endure, and stoked up troubles for the future. In these and other respects, Armitage is right to insist that history can equip men and women with a better understanding of the past and of the troubled present. It always has done this. But only when its practitioners have been willing to adopt broad and diverse and not just long perspectives.

1.Tobie Meyer-Fong, What Remains: Coming to Terms with Civil War in 19th Century China (Stanford University Press, 2013).

Linda Colley is Shelby M.C. Davis 1958 Professor of History at Princeton. Her latest book is Acts of Union and Disunion: What Has Held the UK Together—and What Is Dividing It?  . (June 2017)

Is America’s second civil war brewing? All the signs are all there

The Balkans conflict gives an ominous glimpse of potential future strife in the US. A democracy founded more than two centuries ago, has entered very dangerous territory

David Aaaronovitch, The Times, January 21, 2022

It turns out that there is a discipline that you might call “civilwarology” – the study of the factors that lead to civil war. It exists in think tanks and universities, and its experts are consulted by state agencies anxious to better understand the world in which they operate.

Barbara F. Walter became a civilwarologist nearly a quarter of a century ago and her entry is evidently well thumbed in the Rolodexes of the CIA and the US State Department.

In other words, she knows what she’s talking about – which makes this book rather scary.

The discipline is based on observation and measurement over time. Out of these have emerged a series of data sets and analytical tools relating to the progression towards or away from the conditions likely to lead to civil war. And it adds a word to the list of possible-ocracies.

Anocracy, disappointingly, is not government by assholes, but a troubling middle point between democracy and autocracy. An anocracy may exist during the transition from authoritarianism to full democracy, or the other way round, but it is less stable than either. Right now some states that lay claim to being democracies are in fact anocracies.

If anocracy is a key precondition for the outbreak of a civil war, “factionalisation”, Walter says, is another. Not to be confused with polarisation, this is “when citizens form groups based on ethnic, religious or geographic distinctions – and a country’s political parties become predatory, cutting out rivals and enacting policies that primarily benefit them and their constituents”. Winner takes all. Or loser loses all.

The postwar conflict that features most prominently in this book happened in the territories that had once been Yugoslavia. For 35 years the communist autocrat Marshal Tito had suppressed any latent ethnic rivalry between a series of closely related peoples. When he died in 1980 this settlement died with him.

As the component republics of the old state began to agitate for more autonomy, one group – the Serbs – saw themselves as losing out. This sense of loss on the part of a large group, Walter says, is a significant element in creating the conditions for war.

She reminds us that the election of Abraham Lincoln as US president in 1860 meant slaveholding Southern states no longer exercised a veto on federal policy; the other states could outvote them.

In Yugoslavia the new anocracy opened the way for what experts call “ethnic entrepreneurs” – a breed of politician that mobilises around ethnic grievances or anxieties. These included most notably Slobodan Milosevic in Serbia, Franjo Tudjman in Croatia and Radovan Karadzic for the Bosnian Serbs.

At a more local level ethnic politics became exploited by “violence entrepreneurs” – the men who formed and armed militias to take control and to kill their enemies. These militias do not need to be large. In the town of Visegrad one man with 15 gang and family members carried out a local genocide of Bosnian Muslims.

Rescue workers remove the body of victim following mortar attack on Sarajevo market in 1994.

A common dimension in civil war development, Walter tells us, is a rural/urban divide, in which resentful “sons of the soil”, organising away from the supervision of the authorities, see themselves at cultural war with the more cosmopolitan town-dwellers. In Bosnia this was embodied in the bloody four-year siege of Sarajevo, with the Serb hicks from the hills mortaring and sniping the occupants of the city.

One of Walter’s reasons for reminding us of the horrors of the former Yugoslavia is to point out that to the population of these lands, civil war had never seemed likely until it happened and suddenly, one day, their good neighbours turned into their executioners.

And here we come to the nub of it. The title of the book is misleading. It isn’t really about civil wars generically, but about one conceivable conflict in particular: the Second American Civil War. Roughly at the halfway point, having established how fratricidal conflict occurs, Walter turns her attention fully to her own country. Naturally, she knows how absurd such a possibility will seem to many readers as they take the subway to their downtown offices or listen to the audiobook as they drive the children to school.

“No one wants to believe,” she writes, “that their beloved democracy is in decline, or headed toward war; the decay is often so incremental that people often fail to notice it or understand it, even as they’re experiencing it.”

Yet objectively the danger signs are there. So that “if you were an analyst in a foreign country looking at events in America – the same way you’d look at events in Ukraine or the Ivory Coast or Venezuela – you would go down a checklist, assessing each of the conditions that make civil war likely. And what you would find is that the United States, a democracy founded more than two centuries ago, has entered very dangerous territory.”

My psychological disposition inclines me against claims such as these. In the Great Journalistic Division between the hysterics and the phlegmatists, I tend to side with the latter. But happenings in the US since 2016 – and especially the events of the past two years – have shaken my complacency.

There has been the loss of conventional politics from much of the national discourse, so that sharp political difference no longer concerns taxes or the environment, but (for one side at least) is almost entirely about ethnicity, identity, culture and loss. The Kyle Rittenhouse court case arose from armed men stalking the ungoverned streets shooting at each other in pursuit of political, not criminal objectives. Militias line statehouse steps openly carrying weapons of civil war lethality.

Erick and Jade Jordan guard the perimeter of Civic Center Park while activists protest the verdict in the Kyle Rittenhouse trial on November 21, 2021 in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Picture: AFP

Then there was January 6, 2021, and the storming of the Capitol, in which political thugs sought to prevent the accession of a democratically elected president. Even more alarming than the mere fact of this act of what the CIA classified as “open insurgency” has been the way the Republican Party and its supporters have minimised this attempt at insurrection.

Walter shows how developments in the US match the conditions for other civil wars.

The sense of loss among many white-identifying voters (the US as a whole will follow where California and Texas have led by becoming minority white by 2045), the rural-urban divide, a failure of trust in politicians and other citizens, the factionalisation of politics, the rise of grievance-exploiting “ethnic entrepreneurs” (in this case most obviously Donald Trump), and all of this hugely exacerbated by the catalyst of that great creator of anxiety, social media.

Portland police officers chase demonstrators after a riot was declared during a protest against the killing of Daunte Wright on April 12, 2021 in Portland, Oregon. Picture: AFP

The psychological fuel for civil war, Walter reminds us, is not hate, but fear. Between January and October 2020 a record 17 million firearms were sold in the US. In December 2020 one poll showed that 17 per cent of respondents agreed with the statement: “A group of Satan-worshipping elites who run a child sex ring are trying to control our politics.”

Walter admits that in light of all this she and her husband, children of European migrants to the US, considered leaving the US last year. A useful rule of thumb could be that when your experts on civil strife start moving abroad you may be in trouble.

Yet for all that, Walter is not fatalistic. If the forces of division have a playbook, then, she writes, “we have a playbook too”. She advocates better civics lessons in schools, prosecuting armed militias as terrorists, reform of what is a terribly inefficient and patchwork voting system, tech regulation and much greater attention to developing policies that benefit the majority of citizens. The threat can be averted. To which the watching Brit, otherwise powerless, can only whisper a heartfelt: “Amen.”

How Civil Wars Start – And How to Stop Them, by Barbara F. Walter (Viking)

David Kilcullen’s 2021 wrap up – a weak US emboldens its rivals

December 20, 2021December 20, 2021Paul Hemphill Leave a comment

Commentator and counterinsurgency expert David Kilcullen is always worth reading – and below is his latest piece for The Australian.

As the time of the year would have it, I read his review of 2021 as I was completing my own for publication in the That Was The Year That Was series. Here is mine. Kilcullen’s follows.

As for the world at large, COVID19 continues to dominate the news, with more contagious variants popping up all over the place lake a game of “whack a mole”. As does the ongoing struggle to reach global consensus on the need to confront climate change. Tackling both looks a little like the story of Sisyphus, the Greek King of old who was condemned by Zeus to spend eternity rolling a huge boulder to the top of a hill only to have it roll back down as soon as he reached the top.

The year kicked off to a fine start with the January 6th Insurrection in Washington DC as Donald Trump endeavoured to cling on to office by inciting his supporters and sundry militias to storm the Capitol to stop the count of electoral votes that would cede the presidency to Joe Biden. Though he failed, and was impeached for a second time, and the Biden administration sought to calm America’s troubled waters, the Orange One haunts The US’ fractious and paralyzed politics and the prospect of a second Trump term is not beyond imagination.

Trump’s bestie, Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s longest serving Prime’s minister, also got the push in the wake of the third election in just over a year. The unique coalition that emerged from torturous negotiations spanned the political, social and religious spectrum – left and right, secular and orthodox, Arab and Jew, and promised little more than maintaining the unsatisfactory status quo, that pertaining to the occupation and the settlements, illegal migrants, and the disproportionate influence the Haredim, none of which are morally, politically, socially or economically sustainable.

China under would-be emperor Xi Jinping continues to aggressively build its military and economic power, determined to take its rightful and long overdue place at the top of the geopolitical ladder, causing consternation among its neighbours and also other powers and fears of war in our time. With Xinxiang’s Uighurs and Hong Kong firmly under its autocratic boot, it continues to expand its nautical footprint in the South China Sea and signals loudly that Taiwan’s days as a liberal democracy are numbered. It’s belligerency is increasingly meeting blow-back as other nations react in various ways to what they perceive as clear and present danger. What happens next is anybody’s guess.

Russia under would-be czar Vladimir Putin continues to aggressively rebuild its military power and influence, determined to revive the glory days of the defunct Soviet Union, whist channeling memories of its former imperial glory. Whilst in no way as powerful as China, it is taking advantage of the the world’s preoccupation with the ascendancy of the Celestial Kingdom Redux to reassert its influence in its own backyard – including the veiled threat to reconquer Ukraine – and also in the world, particularly in Syria and also, through the use of shadowy proxies and mercenaries, in Africa. What happens next is anybody’s guess.

America finally ended its “endless war” in Afghanistan, in a chaotic, deadly scramble that left that country’s forever unfortunate people in the hands of a resurgent and apparently unreformed and unrepentant Taliban. It’s over a 100 days since the last evacuation plane took off in scenes of chaos and misery, leaving behind thousands of employees and others at risk of retribution, and the new regime has yet to establish a working government. Meanwhile professionals, human rights workers, officials of the former regime, members if the old government’s security forces, and especially women and girls wait, many in hiding, for the worst. Meanwhile, winter is coming and th country is broke and on the brink of of starvation. A major humanitarian crisis is imminent. What happens next, everybody does indeed know. As St. Leonard said, “We have seen the future and it’s murder!”

Whilst the war in Afghanistan ended, there are still plenty to go around for the weapons manufacturers and arms dealers, the mercenaries and the proxies. The year began well for Azerbaijan when it emerged victorious from a vicious 44 day drone and missile war against Armenia for control of the Nagorno-Karabakh enclave that saw Turkish and Syrian proxies engaged each side of the conflict. An old War was rekindled in Ethiopia as a Nobel Peace Prize winner sent his troops to rake pillage and conquer a fractious province which turned the tables and is now poses to seize his capital. Hubris extremis? Meanwhile, war went on in the usual places – Syria, Libya, Mali, the Central African Republic, and places too obscure to mention.

Meanwhile, back home DownUnder, the story that dominated political news – apart from COVID19 and the total fuck-up of the vaccine roll-out, was the delinquent behaviour of politicians and their staffers in Parliament House – commentators have likened the goings-on in there to a school yard or frat house, and more bluntly, to a Roman orgy, with tales of bullying and sexual harassment, drunken parties, mutual masturbation sessions, and even rape. The prime minister huffed and puffed and asked his wife how he should deal with the situation; commissions of inquiries were set up; and reports handed down. The motto is “we must do better – and we shall!” But as with most things these days, nobody believes what politicians say anymore.

And not just here in Australia, but all over the world. Trust is in short supply, and indeed, people’s faith in democratic traditions and processes is shaking as populism and a taste for autocracy spreads like … well, a coronavirus. The US was recently named a “backsliding democracy” by a Swedish based think-tank, an assessment based on the attempted Capitol coup and restrictions on voting rights in Red states. In the bizarro conspiracy universe, American right wing commentators and rabble-rousers are urging their freedom-loving myrmidons to rescue Australia from totalitarianism. Apparently we have established Covid concentration camps and are forcible vaccinating indigenous people.

In early December, US President Joe Biden held a summit for democracy, and yet his administration are still determined to bring Julian Assange to trial, a case that, if it succeeds, will limit freedom of speech. The conduct of the trial also poses a threat to the US’s reputation because it could refocus attention on the ugly incidents during the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that were exposed by WikiLeaks. There is a strong humanitarian and pragmatic case to look for a way out of Assange’s Kafkaesque nightmare, but the bastions of freedom, America, Britain and Australia show no interest in doing so notwithstanding the harm it does to their democratic credentials.

Uncustomary for him – it must be the season of goodwill – Kilcullen ends his review on a note of cautious optimism:

“Given the events of 2021, all this suggests that in 2022, despite the darkening international threat picture, a more independent, self-reliant, resilient and capable Australia, stepping up to confront the challenges of great-power competition – amid a rising threat from China, declining US influence and an increasingly complex and dangerous security environment – will be necessary and achievable. We should all hope for a sense of urgency and commitment in the face of the new environment’.

I am more sanguine. To quote the famous American coach Yogi Berra. As we leave 2021:

“Predictions are always very hard, especially when they’re about the future”

Other articles by David Kilcullen featured in In That Howling Infinite: : One, two, three, what are we fighting for?; The Man with the Plan; and Between the idea and the reality falls the shadow – judgement in KabuL

Over to David Kilcullen …

.Weak US emboldens China, Russia and Iran

The security picture for Australia has never been darker or more complex. But several key events this year offer clues into the challenges we’ll be facing in the year ahead.

David KilCullen, Weekend Australian 18th December 2021

Afghans struggle to reach the foreign forces to show their credentials to flee the country outside the Hamid Karzai International Airport, in Kabul.

Afghans struggle to reach the foreign forces Hamid Karzai International Airport,Kabul.

As we look forward into next year, the geostrategic and security picture for Australia has never been more complex and rarely more challenging. In security terms, this year was one of American weakness, Afghan betrayal, rising Russia-NATO tension and the emergence of space warfare and advanced technologies as domains in a new Sino-American Cold War.

But it was also the year of AUKUS and the year Australia found its feet despite increasingly belligerent bullying from Beijing. Several key events shaped 2021, and these in turn give us a clue as to how things might develop next year.

US weakness

The year began in chaos as Donald Trump’s supporters stormed the US Capitol, seeking to stop what they saw as a stolen election. Belief that an election has been stolen is one of the most well-documented triggers for revolutionary unrest.

Many Republicans, independents and even some Democrats still see the election as rigged – and, by extension, the Biden administration as illegitimate – boding ill for US stability into next year. The unrest that peaked during deadly riots in 200 US cities and all 50 states through the summer of 2020 seems to have subsided. But this is an illusion, since last year’s tension was stoked by the media and anti-Trump politicians.

Now back in charge, establishment institutions have an interest in damping dissent and, as a result, media amplification of unrest has been more subdued this year. But the underlying issues remain: riots continue in places such as Portland and Seattle, racially charged trials have triggered deadly protests, extremists are active on left and right, and murder rates are at levels not seen for 30 years. All of this is likely to come to a head next year around the US midterm elections. The worst inflation in four decades, supply-chain disruptions, labour disputes, retail shortages, soaring fuel prices, persistent Covid-19 restrictions (800,000 Americans have now died during the pandemic) and the most illegal border crossings since records began in 1960 complete the picture of a superpower in decline whose domestic weakness encourages its international adversaries.

Afghanistan: a triple betrayal

US feebleness was evident in August when, without bothering to consult his allies, President Joe Biden insisted on the rampantly incompetent withdrawal from Afghanistan that prompted apocalyptic scenes at Kabul airport. The botched evacuation was not only a betrayal of our Afghan partners – in whom the international community, at Washington’s urging, had invested unprecedented effort since 2001 – but also a betrayal by Biden of NATO and non-NATO allies, including Australia.

Afghans climb atop a plane at the Kabul airport in Kabul,lAugust 16, 2021,

It was a defeat on the scale of Saigon in 1975, though the comparison is unfair to that withdrawal, which was more professional and less self-inflicted than this one. The resulting contempt in coalition capitals (and military headquarters) has been quietly intense, even as Americans’ trust in the armed forces plummeted to its lowest level this century, reflecting the military’s recent inability to win wars and its failure to hold anyone accountable when it loses.

It was a triple betrayal: Afghan leaders from president Ashraf Ghani down abandoned their people in the moment of truth, fleeing to safety while leaving them to the Taliban and the prospect of famine. The UN estimates that more than 20 million Afghans are at risk of starvation this winter, meaning 2022 may well turn out to be an even worse year for Afghans than 2021. Even while many of us continue working frantically to help evacuate his people, Ghani is calmly writing a book in Abu Dhabi – perhaps a sequel to his well-received Fixing Failed States – while his henchmen live large on money squirrelled away in advance of the collapse or carried with them as they fled. Some, such as the leaders of the National Resistance Front, Amrullah Saleh and Ahmad Massoud, fight on, while others (including former president Hamid Karzai) proved courageous in the crisis. But with these few exceptions, never was a people so ill-served by their own leaders or so badly left in the lurch by their self-styled friends.

Russia: playing a poor hand well

America’s enemies, and not only the terrorists emboldened by the Taliban victory, have noticed its weakness. Vladimir Putin moved quickly to fill the vacuum in Afghanistan’s Central Asian borderland, partnering with China on several military and economic initiatives, deploying troops to the Afghan-Tajik border and signing a weapons deal with India, a move that parallels his efforts to win Turkish support through arms sales. In the Pacific, Indian, Atlantic and Arctic oceans Russian ships, submarines and aircraft are more active than at any time since the fall of the Soviet Union 30 years ago next week.

Putin always has been brilliant at playing a weak hand well, and this year has been no exception. In the early months of 2021, with Biden distracted after the Capitol riot, and congress impeaching Trump for the second time, Russian forces pressured Ukraine with a troop build-up and threatening deployments on its border. The result was a conciliatory summit meeting between Putin and Biden in June, seen in Europe as mostly benefiting the Russan side.

President of Russia Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping toast with vodka during a signing ceremony in Shanghai, China.

Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping toast with vodka during a signing ceremony in Shanghai

After the Afghan fiasco, Russian activity in the Baltic States and Ukraine ramped up, and Russia’s ally Belarus tested the frontier defences of Poland and Lithuania with a manipulated flood of refugees, copying a Russian technique pioneered in Norway in 2015 and repeated several times since. Now Russian forces, including missile, tank and artillery units – perhaps 175,000 troops in all – are again massing within striking distance of the Ukrainian border, prompting urgent concern in Kiev.

Again, the US response reeked of appeasement, with Biden allegedly urging Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to offer formal autonomy to the eastern region of his country that has been under de facto Russian occupation since 2014, while assuring Russia and NATO that the US has no plans to fight for Ukraine’s freedom. These assurances were given the same week Biden hosted the Summit for Democracy, posing as leader of the free world. Neither Ukraine’s elected leaders nor Afghan parliamentarians – now on the run for their lives – commented, though Russia and China issued stinging critiques.

With winter approaching, Russian energy exports remain essential for Europe, while Russia – as a side effect of US policies targeting domestic energy production in pursuit of the Green New Deal – is the second largest source of US petroleum imports, giving Putin yet another card to play. The northern hemisphere winter of 2021-22 is thus likely to see Russia making use of its “energy weapon” within a broader suite of coercive tools.

China’s uneasy rise

If Russia played a weak hand well this year, China continued strengthening its hand. Beijing’s navy is growing at an astonishingly rapid pace while the modernisation and professionalisation of its land, air, cyber and rocket forces continue. The regime’s nuclear arsenal is undergoing substantial expansion, with hundreds of new missile silos discovered in remote desert areas. Cyber attacks, economic coercion and diplomatic bullying remain core elements of the Chinese repertoire, even as Western business leaders and sports stars (again with honourable exceptions) turn a blind eye to its crackdown in Hong Kong, bullying of Taiwan and oppression of the Uighurs.

China’s completion last year of its BeiDou satellite constellation, equivalent to the US Global Positioning System, threatened the dominance of GPS for the first time since 1993, with implications for every aspect of Western society, from EFTPOS transactions to infrastructure and transportation. Then in mid-October China tested a fractional orbital bombardment system, a shuttle-like spacecraft moving at hypersonic speed, able to evade missile defences and deliver a nuclear warhead anywhere in the world with limited chance of interception.

The Chinese test demonstrated how far US technology is lagging in this area, while marking the emergence of space warfare as a domain of conflict. Russia’s demonstration of a counter-space capability, destroying one of its own satellites in orbit (and creating a debris cloud that threatened the International Space Station) showed China is not the only adversary in space. Moscow and Beijing have announced joint plans for a permanent moon base, while China’s space station appears to include military modules.

More broadly, hypersonic technology – missiles moving at more than five times the speed of sound that can manoeuvre to avoid defences – are proliferating.

The so-called tech war among the superpowers includes these technologies alongside directed-energy weapons, robotics, nanotechnologies, bioweapons, quantum computing and human performance enhancements. These are among the most important areas of competition in the new cold war, along with the contest to control commodities (rare earth metals, copper, cobalt, lithium and uranium) and assets such as silicon and gallium nitride semiconductors that sustain them.

The first big event for China next year will be the Winter Olympics in February. Australia has joined a US-led diplomatic boycott of the Games, with Britain, Canada, Japan, New Zealand and Lithuania. Others may follow, but a diplomatic boycott – where athletes still participate – will have limited impact.

The Olympics are important for another reason: Admiral John Aquilino, newly appointed chief of US Indo-Pacific Command, has argued that Beijing is holding back on any move against Taiwan until the Games are over, meaning that from next March the risk of war in the Taiwan Strait may rise significantly.

Reservists of the Ukrainian Territorial Defence Forces line up during military exercises at a training ground outside Kharkiv, Ukraine December 11, 2021.

Reservists of the Ukrainian Territorial Defence Forces Kharkiv, Ukraine, December 11, 2021.

Beijing may be emboldened towards any future conflict by US failure in Afghanistan, of which China is the biggest beneficiary. China’s control of mineral resources in the country (and its de facto recognition of the Taliban) gives it leverage, while Beijing’s alliance with Islamabad allows the currently dominant Taliban faction in Kabul, which is heavily influenced by Pakistan’s intelligence service, to draw on Chinese support to consolidate control.

Indirectly, the failure of two decades of intervention in Afghanistan is seen as discrediting Western attempts to meddle in the internal affairs of other countries, vindicating China’s transactional approach.

Beijing’s 25-year strategic co-operation agreement with Tehran, signed in March, lets China import oil directly from Iran, helping to draw Afghanistan into a Chinese-dominated regional economic and security order.

It also reduces China’s reliance on seaborne petroleum imports through the Malacca Strait and South China Sea, making it less vulnerable to US action in the Pacific.

Iran: further than ever from a nuclear deal

For its part, Tehran has made great strides in developing its nuclear capability since 2018, when Trump suspended US participation in the multilateral deal signed by Barack Obama in 2015. This prompted severe concern about Iranian nuclear weapons in Israel and in the Sunni Arab states of the Middle East, while European diplomats warn the 2015 deal will soon be beyond saving. Iran suspended its involvement in talks to rescue the deal, conducting an internal review after its presidential election in June. Though talks have resumed, and Tehran seems willing to co-operate with UN monitoring, a return to the previous deal appears further away than ever. The fact Iran is revising its stance largely because of pressure from Russia and China, rather than in response to US sanctions, underlines American impotence and Sino-Russian influence, even as the two US rivals meet this week to discuss joint responses to what they describe as increasingly aggressive US rhetoric and sanctions threats.

Iran’s dominance in Iraq, Syria and Lebanon (and Lebanon’s ongoing humanitarian and security crisis) has helped cement Tehran’s influence across the Middle East and Levant while reinforcing the regional role of Iran’s proxy, Hezbollah, and the Russia-Iran and China-Iran partnerships that made that position possible. This will persist next year. After the Afghan withdrawal it is hard for Washington to justify its troop presence in Iraq (where the anti-ISIS combat mission has officially ended) or eastern Syria, where US forces are deployed without approval from congress or any clear mission or end state. Something to watch in the coming year will be whether progress towards any resumption of the nuclear agreement coincides with further US withdrawals across the region.

AUKUS: doubling down on a weak partner?

As this overview shows, Australia’s environment this year has been more threatening and less predictable than at any time since the 1930s, as recognised in last year’s strategic update and cyber-security strategy, and underlined by the AUKUS agreement in September. Much has been made of the nuclear-powered submarines to be acquired under the agreement, a truly transformational move for Australian naval capability, though one that will take a long time to implement. Much sooner, indeed starting next year, long-range strike capabilities including Tomahawk and JASSM-ER missiles for the navy and air force, Apache attack helicopters for the army, and self-propelled artillery (under a separate deal with South Korea) will represent an immediate step up in Australia’s military posture. A new national critical technologies strategy, part of the broader technological component of AUKUS, is another important element of the new, more assertive stance.

As 2022 unfolds, AUKUS will represent an important indicator of the way ahead. If the agreement becomes a broadbased framework on which to build expanded co-operation with like-minded players – particularly Britain, which is rediscovering a role East of Suez and partnering with Australia on more issues than ever – then it will strengthen our leverage in the face of this new era of conflict.

If, on the other hand, AUKUS becomes another way to double down on the US relationship, increasing our reliance on a declining partner, the agreement could quickly become a net negative.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison announces the AUKUS pact with the President of the United States Joe Biden and the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom Boris Johnson in Canberra. Picture: Newswire/Gary Ramage

Scott Morrison announces the AUKUS pact oe Biden and Boris Johnson

The alienation of France (given that the French have more citizens and more capable military forces than any other European power in the Pacific) carries significant risks, as the South Pacific increasingly looks like a new theatre of conflict with China. Likewise, as India’s recent weapons deal with Russia illustrates, AUKUS can neither replace the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue – the informal partnership between the US, Japan, India and Australia – nor should it.

Encouragingly, 2021 seems to have been the year Australia found its feet despite bullying by Beijing since Canberra’s call for accountability on Covid-19 last year. China’s diplomatic high-handedness, shrill anti-Australian propaganda, economic coercion, cyber attacks, political interference and aggressive deployment of intelligence assets near our coastline were designed to teach us a lesson and show every Western-allied power what happens to those who step out of line. This backfired badly, pushing Australia into closer relations with allies, helping Australia’s economy diversify away from a damaging dependence on China, and prompting a sharp decline in Australians’ perceptions of China.

As a global energy shortage began to bite in late 2021, and China’s growth slowed, Chinese dependence on Australian iron and coal revealed itself as a key aspect of economic leverage – naturally prompting Beijing to threaten Australia over it.

Given the events of 2021, all this suggests that in 2022, despite the darkening international threat picture, a more independent, self-reliant, resilient and capable Australia, stepping up to confront the challenges of great-power competition – amid a rising threat from China, declining US influence and an increasingly complex and dangerous security environment – will be necessary and achievable. We should all hope for a sense of urgency and commitment in the face of the new environment.

	Enoch knocking on En… on Recalling The Mersey Poet…
	Arguments of Monumen… on Bringing it all back home…
	Arguments of Monumen… on Arguments of Monumental Propor…
	Lukannon … Rudyard K… on A Son Goes To War – the…
	Lucifer descending… on The Rest is History – a…

	Enoch knocking on En… on Recalling The Mersey Poet…
	Arguments of Monumen… on Bringing it all back home…
	Arguments of Monumen… on Arguments of Monumental Propor…
	Lukannon … Rudyard K… on A Son Goes To War – the…
	Lucifer descending… on The Rest is History – a…