Derek B. Miller's Blog

RADIO LIFE promo code

My fourth novel, RADIO LIFE, is a post-apocalyptic epic about a civilization on the rise, more than 400 years after the end of the world. It might be my greatest narrative achievement and I love this book, which was massively overlooked (but singled out by the Financial Times and The Guardian among others, for critical acclaim).

It is newly recorded for Audible by Gabra Zackman, which narrated THE CURSE OF PIETRO HOUDINI.

I'm giving away a free Promo Code for the audio book to anyone who can convince me why I should.

Derek

https://www.amazon.com/Audible-Radio-...

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In this riveting political thriller, The Commonwealth, a post-apocalyptic civilization on the rise, is locked in a clash of ideas with the Keepers, a fight which threatens to destroy the world ... again.

When Lilly was first Chief Engineer at The Commonwealth, nearly fifty years ago, the Central Archive wasn't yet the greatest repository of knowledge in the known world, protected by scribes copying every piece of found material—books, maps, even scraps of paper—and disseminating them by Archive Runners to hidden off-site locations for safe keeping. Back then, there was no Order of Silence to create and maintain secret routes deep into the sand-covered towers of the Gone World or into the northern forests beyond Sea Glass Lake. Back then, the world was still quiet, because Lilly hadn't yet found the Harrington Box.

But times change. Recently, the Keepers have started gathering to the east of Yellow Ridge—thousands upon thousands of them—and every one of them determined to burn the Central Archives to the ground, no matter the cost, possessed by an irrational fear that bringing back the ancient knowledge will destroy the world all over again. To prevent that, they will do anything.

Fourteen days ago the Keepers chased 16-year-old Archive Runner Elimisha into a forbidden Gone World Tower and brought the entire thing down on her. Instead of being killed, though, she slipped into an ancient unmapped bomb shelter where she has discovered a cache of food and fresh water, a two-way radio like the one Lilly's been working on for years ... and something else. Something that calls itself 'the internet' ...

Little Satan: A Dangerous Novel

I have written a novel called LITTLE SATAN: A DANGEROUS NOVEL. It is unpublished because, so far, I have been unable to find a publisher. Why? Hard to say because I think it is a superb and award-winning piece of work and among my best. Time will tell what happens to it because it has been rejected by the American literary community (but not the American audience that does not know it exists).

Agents often ask writers to produce a letter to editors who will consider a new manuscript. I wrote one for LITTLE SATAN, which is both the title of the novel and the term that the Iranian government uses for Israel.

I thought it would be interesting to share it with you here. It is common for books to be rejected. But I'm … established. That is less common. What does it therefore mean and tell us?

It is a worthy question to ask:
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LITTLE SATAN: A DANGEROUS NOVEL
By Derek B. Miller

I'm old enough to remember Rodney King's lament, "can't we all just get along?" I'm old enough to remember the caustic response to it and the social pressure to embrace a new orthodoxy that ridiculed him for being too naive and aloof to the revolutionary fury his beating unleashed. And yet, I also remember that I didn't submit to that pressure because — simple though his question was — it seemed to be one that united us all.


His question reminded me of Oscar Wilde's lesson that all bad poetry is sincere. So too, I think, are honest questions. I can see now that King's question wasn't meant to be answered. It was meant to be asked.


A question that needs to be asked is a powerful thing. My own upbringing taught me that questions unite us and answers divide us. I was also taught — and I still believe — that a good question can therefore change the world.


And so: I watched Hamas attack Israel and record their rapes with GoPros. I watched Israel level the place in rage. As I watched all of the unfolding horror, King’s question was not mine because I felt like I could see the unfortunate answer. But I was haunted by a kindred thought: It didn't have to be like this.


I didn’t mean October 7th of 2023. I didn’t mean the first months of 2024. I meant the entire damn thing.

The Middle East as we know it.



So … what if?

What if … what? I asked myself.

What if … there was a Palestinian state?

What if … it existed side by side with a flourishing Israel and the two exchanged students and ideas and art and … fluids?


What if it had been like that since 1948 and all was well? Or so both this hypothetical Israel and Palestine thought?



Two new questions came to mind: What might have happened to turn it all around back then? And — even more exciting — what would that world have looked like after it did?


I wanted to know. I wanted to see this remade world. I wanted to go there. Not to hide, but to find something that we have all lost. Some possibility that only an act of imagination can provide.


The fundamentals to an alternative history were clear: The Arabs would have had to have accepted the UNSCOP Partition Plan of 1947 and also the UN Resolution 181 that adopted it. Instead of a war in ’48, two states (Israel and the Arab Republic of Palestine) would have both declared their independence and Jerusalem would have become the corpus separatum — the separate body that was not a city nor a state but something unique and separate and other and only on the planet earth: which it is.


So: Peace in the Middle East?

Not quite: Because more remained and lingered and encroached on that fragile peace.


The "more" included the breakup of the Ottoman Empire, imperatives of the Cold War, decolonization, the birth of new states, and the development of new ideas in response to them. There were Marxists and Baathists and Pan-Arabists and Jihadists who wanted the Caliphate back. 

There was the Islamic Republic of Iran.


What would all that have meant for both Israel and this new Palestine and their prospects for peace?

And what was the story? I was getting closer to it.

I knew that turning the history around in 1948 would not be easy.

This was not Robert Harris's Fatherland where almost anything could have changed the course of WWII thereby allowing the Nazis to win. The Battle of Britain could have been lost. The Battle of the Atlantic. As I wrote about in my last novel, The Curse of Pietro Houdini, the Battle of Montecassino could have failed to break through the southern lines. The Germans could have developed the nuclear bomb. In this sense, Harris had it easy. 


For this story, the Arabs had to accept Israel. Not so obvious. I couldn't pick something from a list; I had to engineer it. Something outrageous and imaginative; dramatic and bold; plausible but startling. 


Still no story, admittedly, but an energy. A pulse. I felt life coming to this new place that was a function of its birth. 


What would it look like?


I wanted to know. I wanted to make it a reality. I wanted to rebuild the Middle East and then play that model forward for decades so I could dwell inside it and meet the people who lived there and share an adventure. And a part of me was convinced millions of readers might want to visit that world too.


I started reading with the intention of a dramatist but the background of a scholar. I have a doctorate in international relations, and I worked for over a decade at the UN in Geneva on peace and security issues. I have a professional’s knowledge and experience with the Middle East and my previous novel on the region —The Girl in Green — was critically acclaimed, in part, because of it. I knew such a story would be explosive in today's environment but I had the street cred to write it and at that point … I didn't care. I wasn't about to let one mob or another keep this from happening.


As I read I looked for details. Details in the UNSCOP findings and recommendations; details in Sayyid Qutb's Islamist philosophies that built the Muslim Brotherhood and inspired Khomeini and the Iranian Revolution. I looked for details in Islamic thinkers of the Golden Age like Al-Kindi, Al-Farabi, Ibn Sina, and then later, Ibn Khaldun. I looked for Soviet propaganda and active measures against the Jewish state. I looked for the fault lines; the cracks; the disruptions that would rip the Middle East apart and threaten the fragile peace that my Israelis and my Palestinians had created. 


A story formed out of the drama. I moved beyond facts and counter-factuals and found ideas and people and motivations and possibilities and excitement and dangers and a problematic for my protagonists to solve. As the story formed I turned away from the real war that I couldn't affect, the death I couldn't stop, justice I couldn't offer, and the pain I couldn't relieve, and I did what artists and intellectuals do when all else fails: I wrote.


I wrote a four hundred page alternative history spy thriller unlike any other in eight weeks in the middle of a war that is, as I write this, still not over.



Little Satan: A Dangerous Novel, is a bold and unapologetic new universe. It is a sui generis espionage novel set in 1979 during the Iranian revolution. It is a story of friendship against the odds and of the darkness of totalitarian theology encroaching on life, light and love. It is a chase-across-the-desert, no-holds barred adventure, while also being a lament and a cowboy song of sadness. It introduces a new kind of spy — the Venice Operative — and a new kind of spying. Like science fiction it is speculative. But unlike science fiction, it imagines a world we feel might be there, just beyond the looking glass, a world that might allow us to ask the new questions we need to ask if we are going to bring about better outcomes for everyone.



If Rodney King's question attracted some eye rolling, so too did the final stanza of John Greenleaf Whittier's Maud Muller (1856), which all of us know: "For of all sad words of tongue or pen," he wrote, "The saddest are these: 'It might have been!"


Wouldn't it be a wonder, though, to see what might have been?

-- Derek B. Miller

Reflecting on Trump's victory

Trump's victory has left pundits and political scientists searching for answers. Such people come in different varieties. Some see the forest for the trees, others the trees for the forest, and an overwhelming number spend their time staring at the leaves (whatever the question). There is another place to stand, though, and something else to see: If we pull the camera way, way back we might take in the entire planet for a second. It may seem counterintuitive to get farther away to see better, great Pointellist artists like Georges Seurat and Camille Pissarro knew the secret: Sometimes the forms only come into view when you are far enough away.

I worked at the UN for over a decade and my expertise — my commitment — was developing new methods for the generation of local knowledge and then applying that knowledge the design and planning of local action for peace and security. That meant, in effect, trying to understand how people live and think and get things done in a plurality of different cultures to reach, in the words of Clifford Geertz, "an understanding of understandings not our own." The idea was that if we could learn what made sense to people locally, we could better design strategies for engaging them in ways that would work better. In our case: post-conflict stabilization.

Here's what I saw in Haiti, and Yemen, and Ghana, and Nepal, and Somalia, and Sierra Leone, and a dozen other places I worked in or cooperated with or studied that helps me see this election and those all across the world: As globalization continues apace, there is a decidedly clear turn to the local when faced with a dissatisfaction with the universal. We called it Localization.

Today we see countries like Hungary, Poland, Brazil, Italy and Israel all turning further to the right. We saw BREXIT. We saw and continue to see the rise of Trump but also Trumpism; a provincial, pragmatic, anti-nuanced "America first" ideology that sees American greatness lying in its past and not its future and one that prefers to craft fictions rather than face realities.

Outside the West the Localization trend is visible in India, the Philippines, and to some extent Russia (though their pale green dot sauntered off the democratic radar long ago).

And what about where democracy has no dominion or aspiration? We no longer see a striving for it as we did after World War two and the drafting of the UN Charter. Instead we acknowledge the rise of Jihadism, the Taliban, the Muslim Brotherhood, and a sharp turn toward increased Islamic observance rather than the softening of rules and enforcement.

What they all have in common is a turn to the local: a revitalized energy by communities to defend their own cultural systems and values and identities, all of which cohere into ways of life that matter to them. While these ways of life take a plurality of forms, the meaning is the same: We do not want to disappear. We want our ways of life to survive. And in some cases, we want them to expand and dominate.

Archimedes said he could move the world if only he had a place to stand. As the inventor of the fulcrum, he meant it rather literally. In our case, we do have a place to stand if we can take the leap: Into the minds eye where proper analysis makes world-changing observations possible, and offers a chance for action to follow suit.

Until we come to terms with the fear and desperation of people not to disappear into a homogenizing world we will not understand why the ground continues to shake beneath our feet and why all the institutions we have built to hold us together now threaten to tear us apart. Localization is the counter-force of the future. The pattern, as they say, is robust.



[Dr. Derek B. Miller is an Adjunct Senior Fellow at the Pell Center at Salve Regina, a former UN staff member, and novelist. His latest book is The Curse of Pietro Houdini.]

On Historical Fiction

There are no laws to writing historical fiction. Freedom of speech and expression have no bounds.

There are no rules. There is no body that oversees the writer's engagement with the genre.

And there are no customs that direct us to writing with a seriousness of mind guided by expectations or social norms.

No: there is only the writer and the covenant formed with the reader.

In my case, I am committed to historical accuracy. On reflection it is for two reasons. The fact that the two reasons work in synergy is why my commitment is firm.

The first is an ethical stance anchored in observation: People learn most of their history through drama; and that matters because in a democracy regular people make big decisions.

The Boston Public Library is the oldest in America. Engraved in stone on the frieze are these words: The Commonwealth requires the education of the people as the safeguard of order and liberty.

Yes. It does. And I want to be a part of that.

But literature is not merely a vehicle for education. It entertains. It expands. It engulfs. Done right, we fall into John Gardner's "fictional dream" and live other lives. So why — for art's sake — should we take historical accuracy seriously?

That brings me to the second reason found best in the words of Bruce Springsteen's "Blinded by the Light": "Mama always told me not to look into the sights of the sun, Oh, but mama that's where the fun is."

History is our burning sun. It is everything that came before and it is, indeed, blinding. And yet … what else?

My inspiration — my north star for finding the fun inside the courage to face the truth— are the first sentences of Edith Wharton's 1937 translation of The Trojan Women. There, she defined for me the gold standard for what historical fiction can and should do. She wrote:

The greatest piece of anti-war literature there is in the world was written 2,350 years ago. This is a statement worth a thought or two. Nothing since, no description or denunciation of war's terrors and futilities, ranks with The Trojan Women, which was put upon the Athenian stage by Euripides in the year 416 b. c. In that faraway age a man saw with perfect clarity what war was, and wrote what he saw in a play of surpassing power…

I was moved to tears by The Trojan Women. I quoted from it to start The Curse of Pietro Houdini — my latest novel — which is historical fiction, adventure fiction, and a survivor story. Euripides, I saw, did not root his plot in authenticity, but rather derived and discovered the plot from it. He did not weave together the threads of the past to create a new story, but rather internalized the essence of the events so profoundly that the characters, their dialogue, their decisions, their emotions, and their fates became a product of that intense act of empathy and listening.

Historical fiction is the movement of the past through the soul of the writer. What results is what the mind can learn, the soul can understand, and the writer's own creativity and craft can convey. As always, the better we understand the world, the better we can dwell within it.

Derek B. Miller
Olivella, Spain
August, 2024

It does not get easier

My debut novel, NORWEGIAN BY NIGHT, was rejected by so many publishers I stopped thinking about it. I know some writers keep track of these sorts of things, and some have even papered their walls with them, but I've never been one for histrionics or vanity projects. I haven't even framed my degrees. I figure … they're in my head. And if they don't express themselves in my words and deeds then they're rather pointless.

There must have been at least twenty, though.

My game plan at the time was this: I get published. I get descent sales and good reviews. I get a second book published on those grounds. I don't choke on the BIG SECOND NOVEL and instead show my range. Then, established, I open the aperture wider and start to have some fun. I publish what feels right; I bring in solid advances (read, $80-120,000), and after about three or four novels my back catalogue will start to kick in with the royalties to pad out the missing income from the advances. If I work hard and smart and get a killer novel out every eighteen months, I should be solid after five novels and living well so long as the well doesn't run dry.

I literally would bank on my imagination and hard work.

And, of course, at some point, Hollywood would come knocking and a movie or TV series would bring in the big money and give me some financial depth to ride out the bad times or else enjoy myself if they never came (knock on wood).

So how did that go?

[insert chuckle].

Not so well.

My first novel sold respectively and gained excellent reviews. I did not choke on THE GIRL IN GREEN and instead wrote a book I still love and that was critically acclaimed without exception.

My third novel, AMERICAN BY DAY, was the most fun I had writing in ages and Irv was a hoot. It landed me an advance "in the zone" and I was able to stay off the ropes.

And then … COVID.

I wrote three novels: RADIO LIFE, QUIET TIME, and HOW TO FIND YOUR WAY IN THE DARK. It was a train wreck.

RADIO LIFE is an epic science fiction novel that I'm convinced would be a brilliant series. But it was only published in the UK and never even sold in the U.S. And this was despite glowing reviews in the Financial Times and the Sunday Times among others. It was complete overlooked and broke my heart.

QUIET TIME was the only semi-autobiographical story I ever wrote (and I suspect, ever will) and it was intimate and funny and sad and timely and my agent told me not to publish it as a book because it would compete with RADIO LIFE as they'd come out at the same time and I had no time to wait because RADIO LIFE didn't pay me much. So it became an AUDIBLE ORIGINAL and never saw the light of day as a novel. That broke my heart.

And then came HOW TO FIND YOUR WAY IN THE DARK, a novel selected as a Best Mystery of 2021 by the New York Times, and became a Finalist for the National Jewish Book Award (previously won by Bernard Malamud, Elie Wiesel, Philip Roth, Safran Foer and other obscure authors like them). I was given my lowest advance yet because of lackluster prior sales, my former editor left, and because Houghton Mifflin Harcourt was so terrible at selling books they were bought out by Simon & Schuster and my novel got lost in the shuffle because — among other matters — it was handled by a junior editor who lacked the skills to see it through the acquisition.

Later, I had a fight with my literary agency (I have since been profoundly vindicated, and no, I won't go into details) and went to seek other representation.

Writers House took me on (bless them), and helped THE CURSE OF PIETRO HOUDINI into the world. But it was a challenging launch and still hasn't found its proper audience.

Now — on book eight — I have sent out LITTLE SATAN: A DANGEROUS NOVEL to wide, MY, consideration because my previous publisher didn't know what to do with it so we opted to withdraw it from consideration and put it out to market.

That means, I'm eight novels in (no movie, because those who wanted to make NORWEGIAN BY NIGHT really blew it) and I'm risking it all by sending the new manuscript out to everyone.

The state of affairs, ladies and gents, is that it's project to project, moment to moment, and it's a crazy way to live a life. My ex-wife couldn't take it. Or me. One of those two, but they're so intertwined they not be separate factors.

All of which is to say, it does not get easier. And yet … onward. Because what else?

AI and Literature

https://drderekbmiller.substack.com
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This is goodreads, which means people are here for books.

Or are they?

Some people love the carnal joy of books as artifacts. The first editions, the signed copies, the covers, the smell, the way a full shelf is a promise sure to deliver.

I share that joy.

However: Books are but a technology: a way to convey a story from one mind to another across a distance of space or time or both. The oral tradition required us to be together. People could see who was doing the telling. Now, the author is away. Soon — we now have to wonder — whether there is even an author at all.

Welcome to the new world of AI where computers will craft stories and — at least for a time — either assist or compete with people.

This is why I started "AI and Literature": A blog or newsletter or substack (or whatever we're calling these things) were I discuss the evolution of this new nexus between writers and AI.

I am not uniquely qualified to discuss this, but I am unusual. I'm a social scientist (Ph.D. in international relations and social theory) and I'm an established novelist (seven critically acclaimed novels and more to come). So I'm a practitioner with some capacity to reflect. My hope is that the space becomes an opportunity to explore the topic with other writers, researchers, scholars, engineers and more so that we evolve into a rich archive on the early days of this new — if worrying — encounter.

Join me. Spread the word. Because life is what we attend to. And if we give our attention to books, we really ought to care what's behind them.

https://drderekbmiller.substack.com

— DBM, 25 June, 2024

RADIO LIFE and A CANTICLE FOR LEIBOWITZ

Radio Life and A Canticle for Leibowitz
Derek B. Miller, 13 August, 2020

I was a Freshman at Sarah Lawrence College in 1988 meeting a friend for lunch. We were at the Pub. It must have been October or so because I remember the stone cottage in Westchester County, New York, being surrounded by the changing leaves. The sense of the school year was starting and the excitement was uplifting. Autumn was never melancholy or wistfulness on campus. It provided a kind of spiritual settling. Here comes the winter with the promise of books, ideas, and just maybe the cuddling of a new lover.
I can't remember the friend but I remember the conversation. We were talking about books — as people do at Sarah Lawrence — and in this case science fiction. "Have you ever read A Canticle for Leibowitz?" he asked me.
No. Never heard of it.
‘It's a classic,’ he said.
Sounded Jewish. And Catholic. And mystical, as though it was inspired by something real and was only masquerading as fiction.
All good stuff.
‘You've got to read it,’ he said.
OK.
He described it and I still remember the description: there was a Flame Deluge (a nuclear war) and the population was wiped out. The survivors blamed the scientists and burned all the books. But there was a tiny abbey of monks run by an order of people who protected every scrap of paper and knowledge they could find even though they had no idea what any of it meant. They came across a box that contained the seeds of new technology.
I can't remember the rest, but I was intrigued.

I didn't read it.
(I was a Freshman. There were changing leaves, and classes, and girls, and other books, and girls, and classes, and leaves).

Twenty years went by and I'd long-since forgotten all about it. Then I saw a movie called The Book of Eli with Denzel Washington (and Jennifer Beals, who was excellent and unappreciated in that role). I didn't love the movie but I was reminded of the premise of Canticle — as it was told to me — by the scene at the end where the survivors try and build a new library and Eli (i.e. Washington) recites the Bible so they can add it to the collection. This was a linear ‘homage’ to that 1959 story whether the screenwriter knew it or not.

I still didn't read it.
But I did start thinking about it partly because I had a premise for a new science fiction story that I was kicking around. I was noticing that all around me were dystopian stories (Planet of the Apes, Dredd, Looper, The Hunger Games, The Walking Dead, Oblivion …) but nothing about the renaissance of civilization after the end. Nothing about the rise.

Now it's 2012 and I'm watching a documentary with Keanu Reeves called Side by Side. It's about film-making and captures a moment when the industry is switching over from film to digital. The conversations ranged from artistic possibilities to what's gained and lost to what it means for the democratization of storytelling and whether we might lose something vital. It was all fascinating. But one issue jumped out: At the end of the documentary, a cinematographer named Geoff Boyle reflected (along with George Lucas, Martin Scorsese and others) on the lax state of our archiving and whether these films/movies would even still exist a few hundred years from now — let alone after an apocalyptic event.
Geoff's view? (I'm quoting from the film here), ‘We're f**cked.’

I was intrigued. It wasn’t about the rise of civilization but it suggested a kind of blank canvas from which a new civilization might rise. All movies, gone? Because the technology failed? If the failure was the internet and cloud storage, wouldn’t that also eradicate pictures and books and music and everything else that was being moved to the cloud?
If we projected into the future a few decades or a hundred years … what wouldn’t be in the cloud?
Eager (read: too eager), I wrote a whopping six pages of a screenplay based on this notion in 2012.
Then I abandoned it and moved on. I had books to write.

In 2015 I turned back to it. By that time I'd already written a feature-length screenplay to my first novel, Norwegian by Night, and was enjoying the new form of writing (not that it could replace novels, but it was fun). I had seen Mad Max: Fury Road (a masterpiece of visualizing the same-old same-old dystopian vision) and also read Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel, (which I quite liked), but even that thoughtful story too ended long before my idea for a story would begin. The only story I’d ever heard of that addressed the rise was that Canticle book I never read.
By the time of the 2016 election I was becoming convinced that there was a space in our conversation about the future for a new kind of post-apocalyptic story. One that wasn’t dystopian, per se, but about creation and the challenges we’d face if we all had to try again.
That year I wrote twenty-one new pages of a new screenplay. Something about a meteor landing in Antarctica. It wasn't good, and it didn't resemble Radio Life in any way except in three regards: I had the title and loved it. Henry and Graham were already named. And their repartee and relationship as a couple jumped off the page.
Still: it was terrible. I went back to novels.

After finishing my third novel, America by Day in 2017, I needed to do something else and I wanted to have another go at Radio Life, this time as a feature-length screenplay. I got in touch with Geoff Boyle from the Side by Side movie to get the homework started and to develop new ideas. Geoff’s very tapped into the technical community and so he started asking around on my behalf. He talked to the media storage companies that all the movie studios use to archive their material. Though it wasn't a scientific poll, he wrote me and said (I'm quoting our correspondence), ‘at least 80% use Amazon Web Services. None of them know where their material is stored. They'd never thought about it. One, who was willing to talk if they were not named, was really concerned by the question once they thought about it. They are one of the largest companies specialising in data-handling from camera to archive. It appears that nobody knows where or how their material is stored, even the companies that said they had their own storage would mostly admit that that was just front end immediate rushes and that everything else was “in the cloud”. There really isn't anything else to say, publicly it's all fine, privately they are scared.’
That was when the idea of Radio Life really came together. It was not only possible for the world to forget everything; it seems like we actually will if we put everything in ‘the cloud’ and the cloud fails. The first part is happening now. Libraries are closing. Books are being digitised. All of our photographs and music are online now. It’s only a matter of time before we have nothing on paper.
Could the cloud fail?
Does any technology not fail?

At this point I also knew that I had to read A Canticle for Leibowitz. It was now a full thirty years since I first heard of the book and its premise. It was hovering over me. There was no writing Radio Life without engaging with this book written by Miller; a man who only published one novel in his tragic life and then one posthumously.
In 1959 there was no internet. There was no ‘cloud.’ There was no digitisation of knowledge and there was no way for it all to vanish at once. To achieve that condition in his imagined world, Miller (I later learned) created a period called the Age of Simplification where survivors set out to destroy all the knowledge, having blamed it for the destruction of the world. Mechanics aside, there was no denying that I was utilising a premise that he established some sixty years earlier. To my mind, it would have been both dishonourable and counter-productive to proceed as if I didn’t know it; the former for obvious reasons, but the latter because Radio Life’s potential value to our cultural conversation would be — if there would be any at all — in revitalising a conversation about remembering and forgetting, truth and lies, knowledge and wisdom, competition and cooperation all within the domain of science fiction.
After all, two things were colliding all around us by 2017: the rise of world-changing technology on the one hand, and the decline of trust in reason, logic, facts, truth, and scientific method on the other. A strange combination, it would seem, but a real one. In an age of strong(er) AI, nanotechnology, CRISPR and gene manipulation, killer robots, and STEM cell research we were also experiencing a full-on assault on our core democratic processes and institutions, multilateralism, international cooperation, and the post-WWII liberal order. We were once again moving in the direction of all-engine, no steering wheel. That was Miller’s world in the 1950s.
I was now certain that Ignorance needed to be the new Bad Boy of science fiction. After all, haven't we had our fill of asteroids, comets, aliens, waves, tornados, earthquakes, supervillains and monsters?

Now I had to read Canticle.
I still didn’t read it.

But this time was different. I wasn’t distracted or hesitant or busy. I deliberately didn’t read it because I knew that I needed to attend to the core themes and problematics of the story on my own without being swayed by Miller’s own answers.
I’m a mature writer and I’m not anxious about being influenced, as Harold Bloom might have suspected. I’ve written a doctorate, four books, and much more. So I don’t have a young writer’s fear about being lead on matters of style or tone or voice. But ideas – solutions to problems and mysteries – are more furtive. More insidious, in a way. It is easy to accidentally adopt philosophies and concepts them as one’s own and then move forward without a second thought to attribution. Art, after all, thrives not only on inspiration but theft. The weak-minded and the weak-willed are too fast to mistake an analytical product, or a hard-won insight, or a conceptualisation of a problematic, as their own. Watching the world rise again in the distant future, where knowledge and the act of remembering were central tensions in a drama where other people wanted us to forget, were ideas explored by Walter Miller Jr. in A Canticle for Leibowitz. They were also ideas largely untouched since then, and the book itself all but forgotten (which I’ll come to in a moment).

I didn’t need the will to read Canticle now. I needed a strategy.

My solution was to write about three quarters of Radio Life. Alessandra, by that time (in the screenplay), had escaped and Elimisha had not. The ending, more or less, was clear to me. I knew what I believed and the ideas were on paper. Canticle wasn't going to direct me now. It could only give me a basis for reflection and comparison against what I had already written. This was safe ground.

I read it.
I also read about it.

On March 6, 1960, Edmund Fuller (no less), wrote a full-page review of the book in Magazine of Books for the Chicago Sunday Tribune. ‘It is projected into the future – it has elements in common with science fiction, yet it would be quite impossible to classify it narrowly as such. It is fanciful, yet as deeply true as any book I’ve read. It brilliantly combines several qualities: It is prodigiously imaginative and original, richly comic, terrifyingly grim, profound both intellectually and morally, and, above all, is simply a memorable story as to stay with a reader for years.’
At the end of that same month, the comparatively tiny Wisconsin Jewish Chronicle would write, ‘The conjunction of day-to-day life with the sweep of centuries, of individual characters and masses of men – all viewed under the aspect of eternity – makes A Canticle for Leibowitz a unique experience in faith and adventure, in raw humanity and in the exploration of the spirit.’ The review continues with a brief biography of Miller, noting that he ‘enlisted in the Army Air Corps a month after Pearl Harbor and spent most of World War II as a radio operator and gunner. He participated in 55 combat sorties, among these was the Benedictine abbey at Monte Cassino, the oldest monastery in the Western World.’
Those who know the book and its author also know that it was Miller’s participation in this raid that led him, in part, to write Canticle. As the Jewish Chronicle put it, ‘the story of another abbey with a somewhat parallel history.’
The part left unsaid in the reviews was that the abbey at Montecassino, Italy was erected in AD 529 outside of Rome. The Allies bombed it thinking the Germans had occupied it. After destroying it, the Germans did occupy it. The Battle of Montecassino was comprised of four assaults between January and May of 1944. Some 55,000 allied casualties resulted, and 22,000 German.
The monks of the abbey had copied and accumulated forty thousand manuscripts, including the majority of the writings of Tacitus, Cicero, Horace, Virgil, and Ovid. All were destroyed.
The abbey had been filled with hundreds of civilians who had fled there as a sanctuary.
Miller was one of the people who killed them.

Whatever the size of the publication, and wherever the book went, the reviews were all positive. In The Gazette, in Montreal, Canada, Phyllis Reeve wrote that Canticle ‘transcends the bounds of any fiction, impudently invading those of poetry and philosophy’, and in The Guardian out of London, Roy Perrott wrote in April of 1960, ‘… by AD 3700 the world is ready for another atomic war. The people and politicians have learned nothing; the scientists have passed the buck again; religion is nowhere. Platitudes of our time, perhaps, but Mr. Miller gives them room to breathe in a forceful and ingenious way. A deeply interesting book.’
Despite the universal acclaim and favourable comparisons to A Brave New World and 1984 among major fictional works of political philosophy, Miller disappeared almost entirely from the literary stage. By 1966 – a mere seven years after publication – Edward Ducharme at Teachers College, Columbia University, wrote a piece for English Journal (an academic periodical) and notes that, ‘[i]t went through several printings and was finally published as a paperback by Bantam in 1961. Since then it has died the death of most best-sellers.’
Ducharme, though, was only partly correct. For one thing, Canticle won the Hugo Award in 1961. For another – and with the benefit of decades of data and hindsight – we can now see that Miller’s book did not actually die; not by a long shot. Despite his being a recluse and not publishing another novel in his lifetime, Canticle would go on to sell two million copies over thirty-seven years until his death in 1996 and would also inspire — seemingly at random — staged theatrical productions in small towns and even a fifteen-part NPR radio production in 1981 adapted by John Reeves (which we can still listen to on Old Time Radio, https://www.oldradioworld.com/shows/A...)
Now, in 2020 – though I don’t have sales figures – it is still in print and selling well on Amazon, which is at least indicative. Those with access to Bookscan data can add the needed footnote here.
What is notable, however, is that talk of the book seems to have fallen into near silence, despite the themes it elevated being now central to science fiction (aside from one excellent piece in The New Yorker in 2014 by Jon Michaud that drew on many of the scant sources I too have found). How many of our stories today — from The Terminator to The Matrix to West World — are centrally concerned with whether we will ever have the wisdom to control the technological demons our minds create?
Looking through thousands of newspapers and archives on Newspapers.com as well as JSTOR and of course Google, I was struck by the utter lack of institutional engagement with this novel, whereas Huxley and Orwell are household names. Where is it being used in high school or college curricula? Where are the references to it as a benchmark in science fiction? Where are the novelists and screenwriters who credit that book with their inspiration or ideas? Surely there are instances, but there is no trend. In 1997, when David Streitfeld wrote his piece on the death of Miller, he entitled it, 'Canticle' author unsung even in death. Between then and now, I would posit that little has changed.
To be sure, the Huxley and Orwell comparisons can be over-stated. Their output as writers was incomparably greater, as was their public engagement. But Orwell was dead in 1950 and Huxley famously died the day Kennedy was assassinated in 1963. So – not to be cheeky about it, but – they didn't do much publishing after 1961 either.
So why is Miller still unsung?
Much of the blame, if that’s the word, seems to lie with Miller himself. ‘“Walt was deeply depressed by post-traumatic stress disorder and had been for half a century,” said writer Joe Haldeman, the closest thing Miller had to a friend in the science fiction world,’ according to Streitfeld of the Washington Post in October, 1997. ‘I don't know how many people he felt responsible for killing [during World War II], but it was a lot.’
The PTSD and depression isolated Miller from the world. ‘Miller's long-time agent, Don Congdon, said Miller was “the only client I never met, although we talked a lot,”’ Streitfeld explained.
Miller’s wife died two years earlier. By 1996, Miller had had enough.
With 90% of his second and final novel completed (which would be published posthumously), Miller called the police in Dayton Beach on January 9, 1996 at 8:29 a.m. and said there was a dead man on his front lawn. They arrived three minutes later at 8:32. ‘They found the 72-year old writer sitting in a chair on his lawn, dead from a bullet to the brain.’
Miller’s problems and reclusiveness, however, can’t shoulder all the blame for our amnesia about this book.
Streitfeld noted that ‘the first surprising thing about Miller’s suicide is that even now, 20 months after the fact [in 1997], it hasn't been widely reported. No obituary ever appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, or the Associated Press. His children apparently wanted the information kept secret, and they largely succeeded.’
If there is a final conspirator in our amnesia it is the rest of us. It might be natural to take for granted the ideas that shape us, but there’s virtue in remembering and going back to core documents and concepts to better ensure that the conversations that define us remain anchored, rich, enlightened, and progressive.

I loved A Canticle for Leibowitz. It was imaginative and playful and bold. It seemed to be uninhibited by any fear of censure or criticism like all great novels and works of art. It wasn’t only the ideas. I liked the characters, I liked the settings, I was swept away by the story. My criticisms, and I have some, are best discussed in person rather than in print; I’m not a critic.
What I did find was that my reading of Canticle was different from many others. Miller may have been compared to Huxley and Orwell, but when I read it I thought of The Gallery by John Horne Burns (1947), The Naked and the Dead, by Norman Mailer (1948), From Here to Eternity by James Jones (1951), and of course, Catch-22 by Joseph Heller, which was written between 1953 and 1961.
The other book I thought of (which I also consider a war novel) is Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut, published a decade later in 1969.
These were books about war. And not only war in general, but World War II specifically. Canticle was not. Not by any reading. So why did it strike me this way?
I think the answer lies with Emily Dickinson who once wrote ‘tell the truth but tell it slant —‘ and ended her poem (1263) with, ‘The Truth must dazzle gradually, or every man be blind—’
Canticle, like Slaughter-house Five in my opinion, was a war novel told slant.
Interestingly, even Miller himself didn’t notice it at the time. Jon Michaud wrote, “By his own admission, the Miller [sic] did not become fully aware of the driving force behind his novel until he was working on its third part. ‘I was writing the first version of the scene where Zerchi lies half buried in the rubble,’ Miller recalled. ‘Then a light bulb came on over my head: ‘Good God, is this the abbey at Monte Cassino? . . . What have I been writing?’”
While Vonnegut integrated his experiences from the firebombing of Dresden into his science fiction(esque) story, Miller didn’t — not explicitly. Instead, he injected his fears, his theology, his philosophy, his terror, and his sense of dread. He wrote about it using the only medium he could: Science fiction.
I’m speculating, but I think this happened for a number of reasons, some personal and some social.
We already know that Miller wasn't able to deal with his depression and pain from the war. So his need to come at the truth from any direction other than head-on might be obvious. And while I don’t want to psychologize his philosophy, because I think that would be an injustice to the depth of this reflection, I can't help but imagine Miller on 55 bombing sorties during World War II — a time when the likelihood of surviving 25 missions was extremely low — and wondering what that did to his view of the world. You take off. You fly a straight line to the bomb target where flak tries to kill you and often does. You kill people you never knew and will never see and will never atone for, and then you fly straight back. And then you repeat this another 54 times. Is it a wonder that his views of humanity represents a linear path from knowledge to destruction, only to be repeated over and over again if the destruction was not complete?
Even with this, I think there’s more to the story.
At some point, the canonical literature on any historical event begins to tie-off and the attention — of the agents, the editors, the publishers, the booksellers, the critics, the reading public — moves on. This happened with WWII literature. It happened with Vietnam literature. It happened with The Gulf War. Many will remember the key September 11 novels like Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer (2005), The Zero by Jess Walter (2006) and Falling Man by Don DeLillo (2007). It happened there too. Today, no one can write a ‘September 11’ novel anymore. It's too late. One can mention the events, but the literature is closed.
And yet, even after a literature has been tied off, the compulsion to write among writers lives on. It is little wonder to me that after the most explicit and realistic fiction about World War II, great writers like Miller or Vonnegut started turning to science fiction as the domain in which to explore the themes, philosophies, counter-factuals, emotions, and pain that was left behind in a world that no longer wanted novelistic expression of that war. In fact, I think that one of science fiction's greatest attributes is to be the last domain where all great ideas are welcomed and where neither time nor space will inhibit the exploration of what still matters.

I had a fresh reading of Miller’s book and I knew his fate. I wanted to say to him, ‘You didn't just write a book. You started a conversation about hope and possibility as we contend with knowledge and ignorance, reason and morality, conflict and cooperation. I thank you for that and for placing those things at the center of science fiction. You then abandoned all of that and eventually yourself but I'm not letting you off that easy because the conversation is bigger than you. It's current. It's pressing. And as best I can tell, it is also unattended. So forgive me, but Radio Life is going to pick up the baton you discarded."

Hubris? Arrogance? I didn't much care and still don’t. Sometimes the person who moves an agenda forward is simply the one who cares enough to try.

I finished writing the screenplay with some modest influences from Miller. I loved the story but the screenplay was weak. I soon decided that the only way to really attend to what was on my mind was to write a proper novel. I am, after all, a novelist. So I got started.


Though in conversation with Canticle, Radio Life was no homage, no sequel, no parallel, no competitor. However, it was a conversation between two books that I wanted to make explicit. Now I had a chance to give both Miller (and poor, hapless brother Francis) a better end.
In Part IV I elevated Miller's Brother Francis (who was eaten by cannibals, "eat! eat!") to the Abbott in Radio Life (it isn't Francis himself, of course, as they are very different men but I adopted the name), and I created an abbey in the forest (not the desert) defined by joy and humanity and hope, not devotion or work. That abbey was made possible by Miller's as his — in its way — was forced into being by Montecassino. And so destruction begets creation, and creation inspires new possibilities. The lives and loss at Montecassinno (or anywhere) can never be recovered. But what we do with the memories and remains define us. Which, of course, is what Radio Life is all about.
As I wrote the ending I had the privilege of comparing my own philosophies and education with Miller's in order to sharpen the philosophical underpinnings of the dramatic enactments — the scenes, the dialogues, the debates. The reason I could do this without fear of re-writing Miller’s book (so to speak) is because I see things differently than Miller did.
I never dropped bombs on people but I was under missile attack for over a month in Israel during the Gulf War in ‘91. I never served in the military, but I studied alongside mid-career military officers when I earned an MA in national security studies at Georgetown. Unlike Miller, I didn’t lament the absence of peace in our world and bury my head on apocalyptica (let’s call that a word) but worked for a decade at the United Nations on disarmament, peace, and security after earning a doctorate in international relations. And along the way I learned a few things relevant to my implicit debates with Canticle. To wit: I know, that the development of new technologies is not linear but contingent. The directions we take are a function of the values we hold and sustain through time as a culture, as well the resources we choose to allocate at specific moments in time as a polity. We could develop better chemical and biological warfare weapons, or blinding laser weapons, or exploding bullets, but they are banned by international convention and law and we do not. Even if they are developed in secret, that development is hampered by international norms and also by the values we teach our children who will later choose a career path of their own and hopefully will not want to develop such weapons because they are bad.
We could have developed new technologies for perfecting genocide and the eradication of swaths of humanity so that we might be more efficient than the Nazis were. We have not done this — not because we can't improve on the speed of murder as it was performed until 1945 — but because we are outraged by the Holocaust and will resist this rather than perfect it.
And then there are our failures. We might have cured cancer by now if we'd been as dedicated to that goal as increasing GDP. We might have eradicated malaria if wealthy and northern nations had considered the suffering of others as though they were our family and not distant strangers, but we haven't made those investments or directed our attention to those ostensibly-achievable goals either.
Inevitability, linearity, and determinism are easiest to believe when you are hindered from seeing the range of other possibilities. Many things hinder us. Our characters and personalities. Our cultures and conversations. Our imperatives and problems. Sometimes, simply our imaginations. But this is why we have to rely on each other; to break through the walls that contain us to reach the betterment on the other side. Stories can do that because we need the greatest imaginations to show us what is possible, what is desirable, and what is not.
Miller was a pessimist. I am no optimist but instead embrace the reality of uncertainty to find possibility. Faced with the truth of our own limitations, I encourage us to both imagine more and get our hands on the wheel of our fate.
I would have liked to tell Miller that what is possible is made possible by who we are and what we value; by what we will do to have a certain life. Technology itself will not doom us. Abandoning our values and humanity as the mechanisms to direct it, however, absolutely will. So in this way, I believe Miller was wrong about the linear relationship between thought and destruction. And I wish he'd known that and believed it. Though it didn’t set out to be and is not limited to this, I nevertheless see Radio Life as a response to the suicide letter Miller never wrote and the book that he did.

— Derek B. Miller

Why the Humanities Matter

On 29 February professor Agnes Callard published (though dated 2 Dec. 2023) “I Teach the Humanities, and I Still Don’t Know What Their Value Is,” ending with the worrying — and seemingly dismissive claim that — "No one can genuinely ask a question to which she thinks she already has the answer,” which intends to tell us that not knowing the value of the Humanities is OK and perhaps more intellectually appropriate than knowing.

Her thesis is, "I am prepared to come out and admit that I do not know what the value of the humanities is. I do not know whether the study of the humanities promotes democracy or improves your moral character or enriches your leisure time or improves your critical thinking skills or increases your empathy."

As it happens, I think it is not OK not to know the value of what you're teaching, and that it is intellectually disingenuous to pretend otherwise. In fact, I think it is essential to communicate that value to others. So here is my answer after a brief mention of who I am and how I know:

I have a doctorate in International Relations and I’m now a rather respected novelist. I was a senior researcher and project manager at the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research for about a decade. I remain connected to numbers think tanks including one at the Pell Center at Salve Regina, another at the Graduate Institute in Geneva, and a third — as a design fellow — at the Somali Public Agenda’s Policy Lab in Mogadishu.

I know exactly what the value of the humanities is, because I have worked with (i.e. tried to get real problems solved with) people who did or did not have a background in the humanities and I saw the consequences of that. In other words, my answer is not philosophical or deductive: it is empirical (though I long for a wider data set).

By "problems" I mean, for example, the reintegration of excombatants after wars and conflicts; the integration of refugees into economic life; the reduction of gender-based (i.e. sex-based) violence in war; arms control and disarmament with disparate societies, from Yemeni tribes to Russia, and the list goes on.

My expertise over some twenty professional years in IR was designing and planning projects, programs, and policies that can have positive social impacts in the communities where they were implemented. My focus was on method; Not what to do, but how to successfully design what to do across cultural systems.

My projects were usually on peace and security but I have worked in development and humanitarian affairs too.

As the years rolled on, I stopped taking interns with backgrounds in political science, conflict resolution, peace studies, development studies, and even security studies favoring instead students with degrees in English, literature, religion, and philosophy.

I did not do this because — as professor Callard speculated — "the study of the humanities promotes democracy or improves your moral character or enriches your leisure time or improves your critical thinking skills or increases your empathy."

No. I didn't care about any of that and I didn't expect to see that when they walked in the door.

Rather, every single intern I took on with a background in the humanities showed up with a core understanding of something the others were almost beyond the capacity to learn: an understanding that the world is comprised of a plurality of social and moral and ideational systems; that those systems are stable but not immutable; and that any meaningful engagement with another society requires attention to the premises, practices, and meanings that organize and animate — but also sustain — that community through time and, crucial. In understanding this, they also knew that the next step was comparison, because our own lives are also part of a distinct culture.

They may not have been taught to phrase it that way, but they “get it.”

They "get" that things are different in different places and that things change in the same place through time. They understand that action is reposed on, and animated by, thought. The humanities did not merely teach them ideas: it taught them how much ideas matter.

In HG Well’s time machine, the passenger did not move, but rather could venture backwards and forwards in the very same spot. When the pilot left the machine two hundred years earlier in the same room, she was effectively in a different world with different rules, and different primary structuring ideas.

In the same vein, what is true in a place through time is also true across places contemporaneously. Peru is not China, nor is China Canada. What turns a “space into a place” is the people, and what makes the people different is essential to understanding where you are and how that world works.

To what does this matter?

Or better yet, to what does this not matter?

Interested in AI? You’d better start understanding the plurality of socio-cultural systems because what is “intelligent” here is not the same as what is “intelligent there. You think the universalist engineers are going to "get it" having no background in the humanities? Forget it.

Interested in sales? Service design? Team dynamics? Innovation? Cooperation?

Progress?

If so, our students will need to learn what Clifford Geertz called, “an understanding of understandings not our own.” That means we need to know where our perspectives and ideas come from (Homer, Greece, religion, theology, law, interaction with other societies) and also know how our own ways of thinking relate to systems of thought elsewhere. That is far more than "critical thinking." It is an education.

America, and indeed Western civilization, is not going to be economically competitive or wisely run if we mask the challenges of the world in what Harald Lasswell called make-believe universalism.

Instead, we must attend to the differences.

The humanities is not only necessary but it is the gateway with the widest aperture for teaching students a habit of mind and an orientation to thinking that will eventually be necessary to save us all from extinction.

Now: Who wants to fund THAT?

Why are they Marching for Hamas?

The Financial Times released a poll today conducted by YouGov that showed — as the headline reads — "The US is far more pro-Israel than other western countries.

While I object to the question, as it should have read, "Which side in the Hamas-Israeli conflict do you sympathize with more," — as Israel has not attacked the West Bank and has stated repeatedly that its goal is the eradication of Hamas, I do see the findings to be both expected and explicable, but not for the reasons the FT offers.

I'm a political scientist who has lived in Europe for over twenty-five years. I worked at the UN for a decade on peace and security matters, and as it happens I'm American, studied in the UK, now live in Spain, was married in Italy and know it well, and spent ten years in Scandinavia. So I not only read the data, I've lived it.
Why do we see this, and why would we expect to see this?

The answer, as it happens, has nothing whatsoever to do with the Palestinians, history, or even anti-semitism (which is nevertheless on the rise everywhere). It has do to with the moral philosophies taught by socialist theory.

Let's start from the bottom of the FT graph that lists the UK as the most supportive of the Palestinians.

Before WWII, the UK was hesitant about engaging Germany and wanted "peace in our time." Most history books will talk about the UK and Europe generally being war wary; of recognizing Germany's seemingly-legitimate desires to unify the German-speaking peoples; and the unfairness or excessiveness of the Treaty of Versailles. Few scholars of WWII would disagree on any of these individual points. The problem with the list is what it leaves out. One of the unspoken (and less heroic) concerns of the British aristocracy in the inter-war years was the encroaching threat of socialism (theory, moral philosophy that focused on workers' rights and value), and the more geo-strategic concern with Soviet power. The British had an aristocracy to defend, a class system extraordinaire, and a colonial empire. Socialism was threat to all that and Germany was not.

After WWII, the colonies were lost and the standing joke was that "Britain leads the world in decline." Today it is far less funny because a weakened Britain is bad for world peace. Nevertheless, ever since WWII, socialism in the UK has radically increased even considering the times the Tories were in power. Academia (I studied at both St. Catherine's and Linacre at the University of Oxford) is smitten by any theory that can undermine British historical pride or confidence in itself, and that is most often post-modern, French, African (e.g. Fanon, the Negritude movement) philosophy, and post-colonial theory.

Britain has swallowed — hook line and sinker — the theory that the Palestinians were colonized. They have no interest whatsoever in the idea that the Jews are indigenous to Judea; that no Arab state has ever existed there called Palestine or anything else for that matter; and that when Jews started returning to the region it was under Ottoman control and only British after WWI. To the British, colonization is bad and — though is not accurate — Israel is a colonizer. That is enough to explain sympathy for the Palestinians.

Italy was fascist from 1922 until 1945 (though the '45 is debatable as Germany effectively occupied it after Italy withdrew itself from the war). It was at war with the democracies and only became one after democracy was imposed on it after WWII. Italy today is a mind-bogglingly complex political landscape and much of it is anchored in the complexities of sympathies about the past. While the UK is pro-socialist because of their industrial past, Italy was pro-socialist because the Communists did, in fact, support their cause against the fascists. Socialists ran the philosophical gambit from moral, thoughtful, just, Enlightenment-inspired thinkers angry at the excesses of capitalism or the unfairness of colonialism, or the arbitrariness of racism, genocidal psychopaths who would go on — in camaraderie at least — to kill millions under Stalin, a million or more under the Khmer Rouge, millions more in the gulag and the list goes on. Italy is pro-Palestinian because they are pro-Communist, and being pro-Communist, to them, means standing up for the little guy. They have swallowed the idea that because Israel is technologically advanced, educated, Western, and many in the population at least look European in style and fashion and complexion, the Palestinians are the "subaltern" as theory theorist Gramsci would have said.

Spain: Spain is a nation that has never healed from its own civil war of 1936-1939 and Franco's murderous rampage for about ten years after. The bodies were never recovered. Families never grieved. The white terror did eclipse the red terror, but both were read. The nation was torn, and separatist ambitions in the Basque Country, Catalonia and Galacia were quashed but never forgotten. To be from one of those three areas today means holding that socialist past close to one's heart: One can even see how the population of Barcelona "dresses down" compared to more formal, well-tailored Madrid as part of their legacy of being "working class" or at least having elitist working class sympathies (many academics are left-leaning and their administrations even more so). People can try and argue the fashion difference is because of the water and weather but I don't think so. I think it's history. Spain is pro-Palestinian or uncertain because A) Jews played as rich and complex and positive roll in Spanish society before their expulsion in 1492; B) were left-leaning when they came back but C) Catholic propaganda against the Jews runs deep. So if we combine the ambivalence of their socialism with their ambivalence towards the Jews, we see why they're in the middle.

France. Ah, dear, dear France. As it happens I love France despite being American. A decade in Geneva had me almost surrounded by France, I learned French, and their history, culture and regionally diverse culture and ideas and experiences has never stopped being dear to me. However, they do have one problem which is an uncritical affection for rebellion. That is, anyone or anything that seems to "fight the power" is considered rebellious. It was, after all, a nation of rebellion and the Republic remains defined by it. But that rebellion was also a moral one. They aspire to a moral position at all times but — like many of us — often fail abysmally. They also have a large Muslim population that is either not well integrated, or not integrating well depending on one's analysis. Writers such as Michel Houellebecq have made a career out of poking that problem with a stick. The country is torn: They know their anti-semitic past and are shameful of it (though it persists); they know their colonial past and are shameful of it; they try and be pro-Arab because that's the liberal elite default situation, which aligns to their post-modern theories and self-hatred over Algeria and colonialism; but they are also burning with rage over Islamism and the Jihadists who have murdered French civilians and decapitated teachers. France used to be pro-Israel.

Today it is not. But it is conflicted.

The Scandinavians are more conservative than you might think. While being social democrats on the outside, and emitting a sort of aura of coziness, warmth, welcoming, and tolerance, the Danes and Swedes have strong aristocratic, conservative, and extremely homogenous societies that are now facing the headaches of pluralism. They want to be liberal. They try and be liberal. But reality keeps getting in the way. As the old saying goes, "Scandinavians can tolerate anything except difference." It is currently the Muslim immigrants into Sweden that are causing the greatest social tensions and while very few are Palestinian, they are less inclined to adopt abstract social ideas about the minority always being right due to their daily confrontation with conservative and often anti-Western Islam.

Germany: Lord Ismay, the first Secretary-General of NATO allegedly said (off the record, but it was heard) that the purpose of NATO was "to keep the Americans in, the Russians out, and the Germans down." Germany, even in 2023, has still not entirely rejoined the family of nations on equal footing, just as Japan as not. Germany almost never takes offensive military action or even positions; debates furiously about whether its ammunition should be used in Ukraine in its war of self-defense against the clear aggressor that is Russia; and intellectually it is pro-Jewish and pro-Israel. Usually.
Germany, a bit like Italy, is a very complicated place. It was only unified into a single state in the mid-1800s and it has now been blamed for two world wars – the first was debatable and second was not. It is also responsible for the Holocaust, for genocide, and for a virulent strain of anti-semitism; the consequences and effects of which, in my view, haven't even begun to be understood, just as the impact of Marxism still remains deeply unappreciated though it now marching down the center of our cities. German public opinion on the Jews is going to be notoriously difficult to measure because whatever people are really thinking — about Jews, about Israel, about the conflicts in the Middle East — they are not likely to be as forthcoming about those ideas as pollsters might hope. Like much of Europe, they too have a "Muslim problem" but their fear of being called racist, and therefore eliciting a Nazi comparison, is palpable. They want it all to go away.

America: America — land of the free and home of the brave — was never a colonizing power; not in the way the Europeans were. While some might call its westward expansion "colonialist", even such theorists see how quickly the analogy and theories break down. American went west and stayed there, "from sea to shining sea." They didn't establish colonies, they built a civilization. America has also never been colonized, and has never been occupied by a foreign power. The wars it lost were all far away. Jewish contributions to American life are vast, monumental in importance, and on-going. Jewish comedy, philosophy, political experience and culture are embedded in American pluralism. And while only 2% of the U.S. population, they have a big impact. It is not the Jews, though, who make America pro-Israel: It is the evangelicals.

As The Washington Post reported in 2018, "Half of evangelicals support Israel because they believe it is important for fulfilling end-times prophecy," and that number seems very low to me. Their power in state politics and national politics is very high, and those who don't explicitly support Israel are rarely against it, and when they are, they are not exactly pro-Muslim, pro-Arab, or pro-Palestinian.

Americans also hate terrorists. They seem to hate them more than Europe does, if our pop culture, political speeches, and general outrage can be measured.

I've long believed that the big difference between murderous liberals and murderous conservatives is that liberals can talk themselves out of anything whereas conservatives don't find the need to. Communist philosophy is overflowing the bookshelves. Fascist? Not so much. Body counts? As Tim Snyder suggests in Bloodlands, it is probably beyond reason to even compare or sometimes even distinguish because dead is dead.

What is striking about all of this, is that motive support for the Palestinians has almost nothing to do with Palestinians. That is, it is not the worthiness of their cause; the charm of their comedians; the depth of their literature; the warmth of their political tolerance and opinions; or their sharing of common values that orients som countries towards the pro-Palestinian (if not necessarily pro-Hamas) cause (recounting my earlier objection to the phrasing of the FT question). It has to do with us. We project our own philosophical conclusions onto the world, and find causes to support that help us define ourselves and our worldviews.

History, facts, and even reality — the falsifiable kind, anyway — doesn't even come into play.

Socialist philosophy once positioned the worker has "moral" and the bourgeoisie and industrialist as "immoral" because the worker created the value but reaped no rewards. Later, anyone who seemed lower — or "subaltern" — in a power dynamic was elevated to morally superior status and in this way, "victim culture" was born.

But of course, morality is not a trope, a mechanical process, or an algorithm; just ask everyone slaughtered by the Communists and their ideas. In fact, the ones to ask might be the Jews because they decided — more than two thousand years ago during the Babylonian exile — that "an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth" cannot be taken literally and we must never adopt ease or ideology in place of moral reasoning.

Why?

Because — said the Rabbis — "no two eyes are the same."

— Dr. Derek B. Miller
Most recently the author of the forthcoming novel, THE CURSE OF PIETRO HOUDINI.

Untangling Anti-Semitism from Anti-Zionism

At this moment there is a crucial need to understand the complex, but not inexplicable, difference among anti-semitism, anti-zionism, and criticism of Israeli policies and politics.

Anti-Semitism is hated of the Jews. This takes many forms. Historically it has come from Christianity and, in the 20th century, through a pseudo-scientifistic racism inspired by, if not grounded in, theories of evolution.

Christianity has a problem with the Jews. For one, the Jews are the parent religion that never came around to accepting the claims of the offspring. As Milton Steinberg explained in Basic Judaism (1947), Jews believe that everything Jesus preached was already part of Judaism and where he made up ideas of his own, to quote Steinberg, "he blundered." He blundered by positioning the afterlife as a higher concern than this one. He blundered by saying we should turn the other cheek to evil rather than engage it immediately. And the list goes on. Whether or not one agrees, the Church was not amused.

Likewise, for Jesus and Christianity to be distinct from Judaism and a "correction," it is necessary to find Judaism to be incomplete, insufficient, or otherwise inferior. Tolerable, to be sure, but not up to snuff. A common approach is to point to something egregious in the "Old Testament" and explain how Jesus solved it. An old chestnut here is "an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth" being an example of "Biblical justice" (i.e. Jewish justice) and it was Jesus who raised us all up to a more humanistic understanding and practice (i.e. beyond the base Jewish view of the world).

Now, as it happens, in three thousand years no one has ever started a joke with, "A one-eyed Jew walked into a bar looking for a dentist…" though perhaps after this piece they will. Why? Because Jews — in the Talmud — concluded that the sentence cannot be taken literally. Why? Because "no two eyes are the same." Therefore, it was read to be an aspiration for proportionality not a literal best practice. Further it was a repudiation of the idea that justice can be, ever, merely mechanical. That is, the Jewish reading is 180 degrees from what the Christians say it is.

Anti-Semitism is a product of the West and Christendom. For centuries Jews lived better, and flourished, in the Muslim world from Moorish Spain to Baghdad and into Persia. Jews were not treated as equal to Muslims, but the nature of the objections were different and did not lead to purges, ghettos, pogroms and more.

Anti-Zionism is a political position against the idea of Jews returning to the Land of Israel and rebuilding their state. Anti-Zionism comes in many varieties, from those who deny the facts of Jewish origins in Judea and ancient Palestine, to Arabs and Muslims who do not want to given up control of land, to ultra-Orthodox Jews who say there can be no Israel until the coming of the Messiah (Jesus didn't count). They believe there should be no Jewish state, that Israel either should never have existed, should not exist, or should be wiped off the map and the Jews driven into the sea. That includes Hamas and Iran.

Criticism of Israel, finally, is the normal ebb and flow of political discourse about policy decisions and politics. The Jewish State's right to exist is not discussed because it beyond the range of discussion, and the topics are how it should perform as a permanent entity. Israelis have recently been protesting against their PM, Benjamin Netanyahu. They are not Anti-Semitic or Anti-Zionist. They are protesting to save and improve their country, not destroy it. Whether or not one agrees with the protests is a matter of political analysis and preferences.

So how do we make sense of scenes outside the Sydney opera house where pro-Palestinians gather to chant "gas the Jews"? Or the outpouring of support for Hamas in London and Montreal? What are we seeing?

We are seeing the merger of three anti-Jewish cultural systems finding each other, developing common ground, and merging their discourses about the Jews. It is a new phenomenon and it is hard to understand so bear with me:

On the one hand we have old-fashioned Jew haters. These are the conspiracy theorists, the Aryans, the Nazis (Neo or Paleo). Some of these people are inspired by the Christian theories about Jews that mutated into conspiracy theories about Jewish power, catalyzed by The Protocols of the Elders of Zion which I have still seen for sale (!) in Spain. They believe Jews are both in charge of everything from the shadows and are also evolutionarily inferior to the white race. I cannot explain this, but there it is.

Then we have the "progressive" Jew haters. These are people who have found one theory of morality to unify all their thoughts and ideas and philosophies and thereby simplify the expanse of human thought. Anchored in Marxism, inspired by French post-modernism, and then reduced and redacted through the American anti-intellectual meat grinder, they believe that the oppressed are always morally superior. The more oppressed, the more moral. The more angles you can claim victimhood, the more saintly. The more inter-sectionally oppressed, the closer to Godliness.

Except for the Jews. Their oppression doesn't count because they are secretly oppressing us all.

How did this come about? Well … I think it was a misapplication of Karl Marx. Marx believed that the laborers were oppressed by the industrialists. They were "in the right" because they did all the work but did not benefit from the gains. The nature of their moral value was in the functional benefits they gave to the world through their efforts, whereas the industrialists were tyrannical and greedy (even if they did create the jobs). But this idea mutated so that anyone who was oppressed by anyone else for whatever reason was also in the right. This was popularized by Marxist-educated anti-Colonial theorists (Franz Fanon, the Négritude movement in France, Gramsci in Italy, etc.). The colonized people were not responsible for their oppression, and anything they did to fight it was morally good. The algorithm was remarkably simplistic but, written in French, it sounded complicated.

Finally, we have the Arabs. The Muslim Middle East is not a product of Greece, Christendom, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Romantic Movement, or Humanism. While Bernard Lewis has fallen out of fashion with liberals, he's still the scholar to read on this as is Adda B. Bozeman whose work is less primary and more about the synthesis of other primary sources. In any event, the Muslim Middle East was not anti-Jewish in the ways described above. Rather, when the Jews migrated to (or back to) the Ottoman Empire's Palestine, and then to the British Empire's Palestine, or else to newly Independent (by UN vote) Israel in or after 1948, the Arabs became angry that a foreign tribe was gaining power over Arab land and they didn't like it. The Jews were a tribe, not an ethnographic-religious people with local roots, and that tribe was to be resisted. Their anti-Jewishness was tribal, not rooted in religious tensions or racial theories.

Today, however, we in the West have pluralism and freedom of speech and porous or even open borders (at least within Schengen). Twitter and social media and the news; airplanes and trains and automobiles; and telephones and Youtube and TokToc create spaces where discourses that were once distinct and separate now co-mingle and find common cause.

The anti-Jewishness seen in London and Montreal and Sydney among other Western cities is where an orgy of shared sentiment — though often coming from desperate causes – can find common expression. We hate the Jews because of what they did to Jesus. We hate the Jews because they secretly run the world. We hate the Jews because they are the oppressors of us all, and also the Palestinians and the Palestinians are the "subalterns" and colonized (ignore the obvious history of the Jews) and so must be morally right in all they do; we hate the Jews because they are a foreign tribe that stole our land and drink from our wells.

We just hate the Jews. Join us and celebrate our shared revulsion.

It once made sense to say the Palestinians are anti-Zionist (obviously) but not ant-Semitic because they were not raised in the West and were not influenced by Western and Christian anti-semitism. But now … when they shout "gas the Jews" in Sydney one has to pause and recognize that today, young people are reaching out to find new ways and forms to express and experience their generic hatred of Jews and can now freely select and employ different rhetorical models. In short, it is becoming impossible to distinguish — in many, but not all cases — anti-semitism from anti-Zionism. Criticism of Israel, however, is still simple to separate out because the litmus test is whether the nature of the criticism is about Israeli practices or Israeli existence. I am very critical of the American government and that is because I love my country and want to improve it. Others may want to destroy it. That's the line.

So as we watch the world explode in anti-Jewish sentiment; celebrate the murder of hundreds of teenagers and young people at a music concert; rape and murder and dismember women and then parade their corpses through the world to the chants and celebration of the onlookers, we can start to see where is comes from, why these worlds are joining together and how – and why — we must fight back.

Dr. Derek B. Miller, Barcelona, 10 October, 2023

(Sorry about the typos. The world is moving pretty fast …)