Matthew Carr's Blog, page 11

Just Talk: A Tale of Two (Non) Ceasefires

Seventeen years ago, at the G8 Summit in St Petersburg on 17 July, 2006, the outside world inadvertently found itself eavesdropping on a conversation between two of the most powerful men in the world. The conversation took place during a lull in the summit, when Tony Blair and George Bush were overheard discussing the war in Lebanon between Israel and Hezbollah, because a mic had accidentally been left on.

The war was then into its fifth day, and Blair and Bush were discussing what they clearly regarded as an unwelcome possibility that UN Secretary General Kofi Annan might be about to call for a ceasefire. This resulted in the following exchange:

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Blair I don't know what you guys have talked about, but as I say I am perfectly happy to try and see what the lie of the land is, but you need that done quickly because otherwise it will spiral.

Bush I think Condi [US Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice] is going to go pretty soon.

Blair But that's, that's, that's all that matters. But if you ... you see it will take some time to get that together.

Bush Yeah, yeah.

Blair But at least it gives people ...

Bush It's a process, I agree. I told her your offer to ...

Blair Well ... it's only if I mean ... you know. If she's got a ... or if she needs the ground prepared as it were ... Because obviously if she goes out, she's got to succeed, as it were, whereas I can go out and just talk.

Bush You see, the ... thing is what they need to do is to get Syria, to get Hizbullah to stop doing this shit and it's over.

Blair Syria.

Bush Why?

Blair Because I think this is all part of the same thing

At the time the British press focused on the frat boy greeting ‘Yo Blair’ that Bush used to attract Blair’s attention, rather than his astonishingly cynical proposal to go to the Middle East and pretend to be a peace envoy, in order to extend the war.

Blair never got the opportunity to go to the Middle East and ‘just talk’. On 20 July, Kofi Annan called for a ceasefire in a speech to the United Nations Security Council. On 25 July Condoleeza Rice visited Lebanon and Jerusalem, where she and Prime Minister Ehud Olmert rejected a cease-fire if it left Hezbollah in control of southern Lebanon.

When the war finally ended with a ceasefire on 14 August, Hezbollah was still in control of south Lebanon. By that time, Israel had carried out seven thousand airstrikes across the whole of Lebanon, against an array of targets that included airports, bridges, electrical facilities, ports, supermarkets, water treatment plants, gas stations, and residential areas, including the Dahiya district in Beirut - a Hezbollah stronghold.

In a 2008 policy paper, the Israeli general Gadi Eizenhot described what he called the ‘Dahiya doctrine’ as a template for future operations:

What happened in the Dahiya Quarter of Beirut in 2006, will happen in every village from which shots are fired on Israel. We will use disproportionate force against it and we will cause immense damage and destruction. From our point of view these are not civilian villages but military bases.

This ‘doctrine’ was clear at the time, and its military objective was also clear: to turn the Lebanese government and population against Hezbollah by visiting war on the whole population. In his memoirs, Blair claims that the G8 Summit initially believed that ‘Hizbullah had it coming’, before ‘European opinion quickly solidified around the demand that the Israelis should stop’.

Blair, however, felt ‘it was wrong that there should be a unilateral cessation. It should be on both sides, and we couldn't expect Israel to stop unless the rockets stopped. But that was not how it seemed to most people.’

Not for the first time, Blair was being economical with the truth. A ceasefire cannot be a ceasefire if it is unilateral, and no one expected that. In his Security Council speech Kofi Annan criticized both Hezbollah’s ‘provocative attack’ on 12 July and the ‘excessive violence’ of Israel’s response to it.’ The eventual ceasefire on 14 August was agreed on by both sides.

Blair later acknowledged that the Israeli response was ‘at one level disproportionate’, and agreed that ‘ the deaths of so many innocent civilians, especially children, were completely wrong and unacceptable’. He also asked

how many families would mourn, how much bitterness would be generated, and how if you were an ordinary Lebanese caught up in this nightmare, you would just want to rage against the world. But I also worried about the risk of a Hezbollah ‘victory’, of a situation where they could calculate the provocation, pull Israel into retaliation and emerge as winners. I felt a unilateral cessation gave them that. I felt anything which left them in any doubt as to the calculation of risk next time round was a real and possible future threat.

Blair accepted Israel’s assessment of the ‘calculation of risk’, albeit with a heavy heart and much handwringing. And his proposal to go to the Middle East and ‘just talk’ was intended to give Israel time to continue its ‘disproportionate’ response. Blair later came to believe that this stance did him ‘more damage than anything since Iraq,’ and galvanised his backbenchers into pressuring him into leaving Downing Street.

All of which brings us to the current Labour leadership’s spectacularly inadequate response to the devastating violence in the Gaza Strip. As someone who - like millions of others - desperately wants to see the end of these terrible years of Tory misrule before society collapses altogether, even if a rightwing Labour government is the only viable option, it is deeply depressing to see the Labour leadership exhibiting the same cynicism that Blair showed seventeen years ago.

The circumstances are obviously different. Hamas’s savage pogrom/assault on 7 October was a far greater ‘provocation’ than Hezbollah’s border skirmish in 2006, and the Israeli response in Gaza has already caused a higher civilian death toll than in Lebanon, and may yet outstrip the casualties in any of Israel’s wars.

And yet it is astonishing how bad Labour have been in the face of these calamitous events. Until 7 October, Starmer and his team had been inching towards power, like participants in a game of Grandmother’s Footsteps, freezing whenever the government or a rightwing paper turned round and looked at them. It was hardly inspiring, but it had established Labour as a credible government, as the Tories continued to scrape new layers from the bottom of its own barrel. Starmer achieved this through a carefully-constructed veneer of grey-suited managerial competence that made even disillusioned Tory voters consider Labour as a viable option to their trainwreck government.

But there some issues that require political courage and principle, not managerialism, and the war in Gaza is one of them. And throughout the last horrifying few weeks, Starmer and his team have shown themselves to be as cowardly, unprincipled, and complicit in the catastrophe that is now unfolding as the government they hope to replace.

Asked on 11 October, whether Israel had the right to cut off water and fuel to Palestinian civilians, Starmer replied that it did, while also insisting that ‘everything should be done within international law’. But Article 54 of Additional Protocol 1 of the 1977 Geneva Convention, clearly states

It is prohibited to attack, destroy, remove, or render useless objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population, such as foodstuffs, agricultural areas for the production of foodstuffs, crops, livestock, drinking water installations and supplies, and irrigation works, for the specific purpose of denying them for their sustenance value to the civilian population or to the adverse Party, whatever the motive, whether in order to starve out civilians, to cause them to move away, or for any other motive.

International law also imposes specific obligations on the occupying power to protect the civilian population, and contrary to the way the situation in Gaza has often been portrayed, Israel still is the occupying power. At the most basic humanitarian level therefore, Starmer could have reiterated these obligations and insisted that Israel meet them. But it wasn’t until he faced mass resignations from Labour councils and criticisms from his own MPs, and realised that Labour might lose crucial votes, that he began to deny that he had said what he had said, and re-emphasize his commitment to international law.

Throughout these slippery twists and turns, Starmer has consistently rejected a ceasefire in much the same terms that Blair once did. In a speech to Chatham House he claimed that a ceasefire was not the ‘correct position’ because it would ‘freeze hostilities’ and therefore ‘embolden Hamas’ to carry out more attacks.

His team has followed the same template: condemn Hamas; lament Palestinian casualties, but blame them on Hamas; issue vague calls on Israel to observe international law while refusing to condemn Israel for any specific breaches of international law; call for humanitarian aid while refusing to condemn Israel for making it all but impossible to get humanitarian aid into the Gaza Strip.

All these ingredients were present in a dreadful article by David Lammy in the Observer on Sunday, that could have been written by Blair in 2006:

I understand why so many are calling for a ceasefire now. We all want the bloodshed and suffering to end. But a ceasefire now would just embolden Hamas. They would still hold hundreds of innocent hostages. They would still fire rockets into Israel. And they would still have the capacity and determination to repeat the horrors of 7 October “again and again”, as a Hamas official boasted last week.

Like all those who make these points, Lammy fails to explain how the ‘bloodshed and suffering’ can stop without a ceasefire, or how these operations will free the hostages, or what the ultimate endgame of these operations is, or who will govern Gaza if Hamas is ‘destroyed.'

As for ‘emboldening’ Hamas, the belligerent statement by one Hamas official cannot be a justification for Israeli operations that have already gone way beyond any conventional understanding of military necessity. In Lebanon, Israel used the same persistent and dehumanising references to ‘terror operatives’, or terrorist ‘hubs’ and ‘infrastructure’ in order to justify an assault on the civilian population. Yet Labour politicians have accepted these terms, and continued to blame the Palestinian death toll on Hamas, or described it as a tragic and inevitable consequence of war.

David Blunkett - no surprise here - has accused Labour MPs calling for a ceasefire, of engaging in childish ‘gestures’ to ‘make themselves feel better.’ In a visit to UNRWA offices in Cairo, Lammy and Lisa Nandy could not even acknowledge that 70 UNRWA casualties in Gaza had been killed by Israel. Instead they were merely ‘tragic deaths’.

At times the cowardice of Labour frontbenchers has been breathtaking. Here is Nandy, with her trademark ‘concerned person’ frown, refusing to tell Victoria Derbyshire whether Israel has violating international law because to do that would be ‘grandstanding.’

Such contortions are painful to watch. Polly Toynbee and others have urged the Labour Party not to tear itself apart over Gaza, and Toynbee has criticised the party’s critics, on the grounds that Labour doesn’t have the power to change the situation on the ground. But this is a flimsy distraction. No one, not even Biden, has that power, by themselves alone. But that powerlessness should not stop the main opposition party and potential future government from adopting a principled position, and sticking to it.

No one expects anything close to that from this shambles of a government. But it matters when the main opposition party, in the country more responsible than any other for the Palestinian tragedy, wrings its hands and does nothing, while a key ally kills ten thousand Palestinians in a month. It matters when Labour demands that Israel doesn’t breach international law as a generic position, without actually daring to say specifically if it actually has breached international law.

There are many reasons why Labour behaves like this; the funding it receives from pro-Israel organisations and individuals; its paralysis in the face of criticisms that equate support for the Palestinian cause with antisemitism; Zionist sympathies within the party; its historic willingness to do whatever the United States demands; the sheer amateurishness and inexperience of its top team as far as foreign policy is concerned.

But faced with a crisis like this, that requires political leadership and moral courage, it has shown neither. Faced with demands for a ceasefire from the United Nations, from charities, and from an international grassroots movement of solidarity with the people of Gaza that also permeates its own potential constituencies, its leaders have retreated into the familiar default position of supporting Israel in whatever it does.

No one can be remotely surprised when the utterly gormless head prefect Sunak tells Netanyahu ‘we want you to win’. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that Labour wants that too, even if has no more idea what winning means than he does. For all their humanitarian rhetoric, it is difficult to avoid the suspicion that its leaders are prepared to accept whatever Israel needs to do to achieve that, while also seeking ways to reduce any potentially negative domestic political consequences.

Labour cannot stop what is happening in Gaza by itself. But it could call for both sides to observe a ceasefire and for Hamas to return its hostages. This is what a joint letter from UN humanitarian agencies and international charities called for on Monday. Labour should be supporting that. Instead, like Blair, it has chosen sophistry, prevarication and handwringing, while Israel sates its vengeance and unleashes unprecedented carnage on a defenceless population.

Lammy’s letter yesterday criticising Israeli settlers in the West Bank doesn’t change that. It’s easy to criticise settlers, and it feels, after the last month, like a headline-grabbing initiative for domestic political consumption.

In other words, like Blair, Labour has chosen to ‘just talk.’ And like Blair, Labour will pay a political price for its duplicity, as the ground shifts beneath its feet, and it will thoroughly deserve to.

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Welcome to the North?

Dear Friends and Readers,

This is just a short post to let you know that Grim Up North, the podcast that I co-host with the poet and photographer Adrian Scott, is back. It’s been a while, because Adrian and I have both been travelling and involved with other projects, but we’re very glad to be back, because this really is a labour of love for us.

In the past we’ve looked at religion, art, crime fiction and other subjects with a northern flavour.

We’re very proud of the work we’ve done so far, and as far as I’m aware, I don’t think anyone else is doing anything like it. The first episode of the new series is called Welcome to the North? Note the question mark. Adrian and I looked at the subject of immigration, taking a long view from the Romans to the present. Along the way, we take in the Spanish Civil War, racism and resistance to racism in the North, solidarity, welcome, and Lemn Sissay.

We were lucky enough to interview Zaiba Malik, the journalist and author of the very wonderful memoir We Are a Muslim Please, about growing up in 70s and 80s Bradford.

Here’s a little clip from the interview.

You can link to the full podcast via Spotify and most other streaming platforms, and you can also catch it here.

Please check it out. Even in a world filled with podcasts, we think you’ll like this one.

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Camus In Gaza

In January 1956, Albert Camus gave a momentous speech in Algiers, in which he called for a ‘civil truce’ in the war between France and the National Liberation Front (FLN). It was not the most propitious moment for the Algerian-French writer to deliver a message like this.

The war - never recognised as such by France - was in its fourteenth month. Camus spoke less than six months after the uprising at the town of Philippeville in August 1955, in which Arabs were incited by the FLN to massacre and mutilate more than a hundred settlers - unleashing reprisals in which more than ten thousand Arabs were killed. The local FLN leaders counted on precisely this outcome, and they could always rely on the racism of the European settler population and the French state to get the reaction they sought.

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To Algerian nationalists who believed that France would never abandon Algeria voluntarily, Camus was a bonne soeur or ‘good sister’ - a term not that far removed from the contemporary notion of a ‘virtue signaller’ - preaching morality in a war where morality was not required. To the pied-noir settler society that Camus came from, he was a traitor. When Camus gave his speech, he had to be escorted in and out of the building, to avoid an angry crowd of pieds-noirs that wanted to lynch him.

In this volatile atmosphere, Camus explained the purpose of his Committee for a Civil Truce to his 800 listeners:

What do we propose? Simply to get the Arab movement and the French authorities, without having to make con­tact or to commit themselves to anything else, to declare simultaneously that for the duration of the fighting the civilian population will on every occasion be respected and protected. Why this measure? The first reason…is one of simple humanity. Whatever the ancient and deep origins of the Algerian tragedy, one fact remains: no cause justifies the death of the innocent.

A former editor of the underground French resistance newspaper Combat, Camus was not a pacifist. But he was always sensitive to the dehumanising impact of violence on individuals and societies, and he was horrified by the viciousness of the war that was tearing his homeland apart, and concerned that it would make it impossible to reconcile French and Arab Algeria.

At this point, neither side was interested in reconciliation, and few people were prepared to respond positively to Camus’s suggestion that ‘we can at least exert some action on the most hate­ful aspect of the fight: we can propose, without making any change in the present situation, that we refrain from what makes it unforgivable—the murder of the innocent’.

Neither the FLN nor the French army fully recognized the category of the ‘innocent’ civilian, nor was either side prepared to place limits on the methods they used to fight each other. In these circumstances, Camus’s speech was brave and even noble, but also politically naive.

Depressed by the negative reception he received that night, and by the endless cruelty of the war itself, Camus made the decision not to make any further public pronouncements about Algeria. He was not always able to remain silent, however. Heckled by an Algerian student in Stockholm after receiving the Nobel Prize for literature in 1957, for his failure to condemn French atrocities in Algeria, he angrily retorted ‘I have always condemned terror. I must also condemn a terrorism which is exercised blindly in the streets of Algiers, for example, and which one day could strike my mother or my daughter. ‘

This was not exactly responding to the accusation. When Camus gave that speech, the Tenth Paratroop Division had just completed its brutal suppression of the FLN terrorist bomb squads in Algiers, known as the ‘Battle of Algiers’, in which more than a quarter of the population of the Arab kasbah were tortured, and thousands of real and suspected terrorists executed without trial.

Camus did not condone such actions, but he did not condemn them. For Camus, and for many of his countrymen, ‘terror’ was something that Arabs or Muslims did. Camus was contemptuous of the intellectuals who seemed to license what he called ‘comfortable murder’ from a safe distance, such as his former friend Jean-Paul Sartre, who supported the FLN throughout the Algerian war.

Algeria was a clear inspiration for Sartre’s (in)famous preface to Franz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, in which he argued that

The rebel’s weapon is the proof of his humanity…to shoot down a European is to kill two birds with one stone, to destroy an oppressor and the man he oppresses at the same time; there remains a dead man, and a free man; the survivor feels a national soil under his boot.

Sartre was not an entirely ‘comfortable’ advocate of revolutionary violence. His support for the Algerian cause carried some personal risk - two bombs were detonated outside his house by French fascists. But his glib celebration of violence-as-consciousness-raising could not have been more far removed from Camus.

History proved Sartre right - up to a point. The French lost, in part because of the way they fought, and because of the way the Algerians fought. But a million Algerians died before France finally recognized that it had lost, and more than a million pieds-noirs abandoned the country. Sartre had a more realistic political understanding of the war and its historical causes.

He recognized that the Algerian war was part of a global process of decolonization in which the European left had placed its revolutionary hopes, and he refused to criticise the methods that the ‘wretched of the earth’ might use to liberate themselves.

I mention all this, because there was a time when Algeria was cited as an inspiration for the Palestinian struggle, and for many other wars of decolonization, and throughout the last appalling weeks, the debates about terrorism, resistance, and counterterrorism have often echoed those of Algeria’s ‘war of peace.’

On the one hand there are those ‘comfortable murderers’, who, faced with the unbelievable savagery now being perpetrated in Gaza, shake their heads at the tragic inevitability of it all, and blame every atrocity on Hamas or the ‘tragedy of war.’

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But I have also read leftists-turned-Chuck Norris celebrating the fact that Israel ‘got its ass kicked’ by Hamas, or celebrating Hamas’s pogrom/assault of 7 October as a glorious Palestinian Tet Offensive. In a speech to a Socialist Worker-organised gathering last week, Tariq Ali gave a slightly more elegant version of this position:

When I heard that Hamas decided to go in and say to the Israelis, “Here we are, get out of our territory, lift the siege”, I was actually very happy. Obviously, I was not happy by the death of civilians anywhere.

Ali pointed out that the Vietnamese had blown up civilian cafés during the Tet Offensive because US servicemen used them, and he also cited Algeria and Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers:

The same goes for the Algerian war. I recommend you see the film The Battle of Algiers, one of the most brilliant Western films ever made about anti‑imperialism. It shows what a national liberation movement is like. In one part, a resistance fighter is asked why they bombed cafes where French families were killed. He replied that they [the resistance] would be more accurate if the French gave them an air force.

The scene that Ali refers to is based on an actual episode from the war, in which the captured FLN commander Larbi ben M’hidi is asked whether it is cowardly for women to carry bombs in baskets. Ben M’hidi points out the destruction of Algerian villages by French planes, and replies ‘Give us your bombers, and we’ll give your our baskets,’

Seen through Pontecorvo’s romantic humanist lens, the ‘terrorism of the weak’ seems to make a kind of moral sense, even if it leaves out a great deal. The FLN’s violence was far worse than the film depicts, and colonisers were not the only ones at the receiving end of it. The FLN massacred rival ‘moderate’ organisations, mutilated collaborators, tortured and killed its own members.

Hamas’s Gaza breakout was also far worse than the deaths of civilians that spoiled Tariq Ali’s happiness. Not everything can or should be sanctified by the incantation of the words ‘national liberation’, either then or now. Nor can hideous massacres like the bombing of Djabalia camp be shrugged off as tragedies of war, or legitimised by the callous nostrums of counter-terrorism.

For thousands of years, humanity has tried to at least impose limits on war, in the tortuous legal and moral evolution of ‘international law’. Many governments have refused to observe these regulations when it suits them, and many ‘non-state actors’ like the FLN and Hamas have done the same.

If Ali is close to Sartre in his embrace of revolutionary violence, there is, at least at first sight, a Camus-like anguish in the Guardian’s Jonathan Freedland’s article condemning Celtic supporters for waving Palestinian flags, and rejecting ‘this tendency, this need, to see one side as all good and the other as all evil.’

All very empathetic. In the same breath however, Freedland dismisses the notion of an unconditional ceasefire, because

It seems such a simple, obvious remedy. Until you stop to wonder how exactly, if it is not defeated, Hamas is to be prevented from regrouping and preparing for yet another attack on the teenagers, festivalgoers and kibbutz families of southern Israel.

This is what Israelis call yorim ve bochim -‘shooting and crying.’ Freedland is dismayed by military operations that have ‘ killed so many Gazans.’ But he rejects the ‘easy remedy’ of those who want Israel to stop killing them, and suggests that calls for a ceasefire are legitimizing further aggressions by Hamas.

And he also warns of the ‘shift…underway, that has been starkly revealed these last few weeks’, which

squeezes the Israel-Palestine conflict into a “decolonisation” frame it doesn’t quite fit, with all Israelis – not just those in the occupied West Bank – defined as the footsoldiers of “settler colonialism”, no different from, say, the French in Algeria. Never mind that Jews sought a refuge in Palestine motivated not by an imperial desire for expansion, but because they faced annihilation. Never mind that Israeli Jews have no imperial metropole, no France, they could ever return to. And never mind their ancestral, millennia-old connection to the land – all of which makes them utterly unlike the French in Algeria.

Algeria again. Or maybe not. Because this deeply-shallow stuff, beneath the performative profundity. For a start, there is no need for scare marks around “settler colonialism”. That is what Israel is and always has been, as far as Palestinians are concerned, and the fact that it is Jewish settler-colonialism makes no difference. Palestinians have always been asked - told, to be more precise - to provide the solution to a (European) tragedy of persecution that they had no part in.

Even if that history gives the state of Israel a special moral authority in the eyes of the governments that supported its creation, it doesn’t change the dynamic of occupation and dispossession that created the Palestinian exodus in 1948, and which now threatens another catastrophe.

The death toll in Gaza is now 7,000 and rising. Most of the dead are civilians and non-combatants, and nearly half of them are children - many, many more children than Hamas killed last month. The bombing of Djabalia may have killed 400 people in order, according to Israel, to kill a Hamas leader who may not even have been killed.

This is not happening by accident. It is not an inevitable tragedy. Given the amount of firepower being poured into Gaza Strip, even the most scrupulous observer of international law would struggle to avoid civilian casualties, and Israel is not as scrupulous as it claims, especially now, when it has basically been given permission to do whatever it wants.

The potential consequences of this nightmare are difficult to comprehend, and only a world that has lost its moral compass would even consider accepting them.

For this reason, it is worth revisiting the way that two writers, each of whom thought more deeply about the conflict that divided their country than many shallow commentators do about today’s conflicts - Andrew Roberts’s remarkably-fatuous suggestion in the Telegraph that Palestinians should just ‘move on’ being only the latest example.

Faced with a war of annihilation that neither side can win, and which has all the potential to provoke a regional conflagration, while unleashing inter-communal violence across the world, the world needs to recognize - as Sartre once did in Algeria - that the latest horrendous chapter in the ‘Israeli-Palestinian conflict’ has political causes and a political context that go beyond 7 October and beyond Hamas, and beyond binary formulations of good versus evil/terror versus civilization etc, and which has been left shamefully unresolved for too many years.

At the same time what Hamas did on 7 October should not be glamorised or glossed over, and not only because of the crimes against humanity that were perpetrated that day. For all its Tet Offensive comparisons, the fact is that neither Hamas, nor any other Palestinian organization, nor any Arab state or coalition of Arab states can defeat Israel, and the more Hamas fights, the more Palestinians will pay the price, until the last Hamas fighters die in the rubble of Gaza, and there are no civilians left..

Some fascist Israelis and settler-gunmen take satisfaction from this possibility, just as the fascist OSS death-squads once did at the mass murder of Algerians, in the last months of the war. They dream of final victory and the end of the Palestinian ‘problem’, and too many of Israel’s supporters seem to accept this too, or at least can’t be bothered to use what power they have to stop it.

But Israel cannot ‘eliminate’ Hamas without completely destroying Gaza itself, killing tens of thousand of civilians, and creating a new Palestinian exodus. Its leaders are clearly not concerned about these outcomes. Nor are they minded to heed the Israeli foreign minister and dovish Zionist Moshe Sharett warning many years ago, that Israel’s lawless violence risks transforming it into ‘a savage state that does not recognize the principles of justice as they have been established and accepted by contemporary society.’

So at this point, we should heed what Camus said in Algiers so many years ago, even if his listeners couldn’t. But we need more than a civil truce or a humanitarian ‘pause’.

We need a complete and immediate ceasefire - a cessation of hostilities. This is what hundreds of thousands of people are demanding across the world, but Israel is not listening, and the governments that support Israel are not listening, and Hamas is not listening.

The US, Europe, the UK government and the UK opposition continue to reject this option, on the grounds that it will enable Hamas to continue to threaten Israel - as if Hamas’s rockets are in any way comparable to the awesome machinery of destruction which is being unleashed on Gaza. As long as they continue to do this, they are complicit in every death, and they are helping to sow the seeds of despair, bitterness, and hatred that will poison the world for generations to come.

Even in the mad, brutal, hypocritical and dishonest world that we now have, it takes a kind of madness, and a kind of moral blindness to do this.

What comes after a ceasefire is impossible to predict, but anything is better than the ‘infernal dialectic’ that Camus once described in Algiers, in which

whatever kills one side kills the other too, each blaming the other and justifying his violence by the opponent's violence. The eternal question as to who was first responsible loses all meaning then. And because they could not manage to live together, two populations, simi­lar and different at the same time but equally worthy of respect, are condemned to die together, with rage in their hearts.

This is what is happening in Gaza. And in these circumstances, Camus’s plea on behalf of ‘simple humanity’ ought to be enough for the friends of the Palestinians, and the friends of Israel, to make it stop.

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From Singapore to Dresden

There’s a truism that says we should learn from the past, which is sometimes coupled with a warning that those who don’t learn from it are doomed to repeat their mistakes. But one of the curious aspects of our current age of endless catastrophe, is the absence of any past at all.

Twenty-four churnalism; shallow infotainment punditry; politicians devoid of any knowledge or understanding of history; the propagandistic interests of interested parties, and the sheer volume of ideas and facts required to understand what is taking place in front of us - it’s a grim combination that too often wipes the past clean, so that every war, conflict and conflagration appears newly-minted and stripped of context.

The ‘Israeli-Palestinian conflict’ has always been particularly prone to this process of forgetting and misremembering, and its latest horrific iteration is no exception. Consider, for example, the article on Hamas’s assault in south Israel that appeared in the Guardian on 12 October, in which the Israeli author and popular historian Yuval Noah Hurari lamented the fact that the Palestinians had not responded positively to Israel’s desire for peace, in the following terms:

During the 1990s Oslo peace process, Israel gave peace a chance. I know that from the viewpoint of Palestinians and some outside observers, Israeli peace offers were insufficient and arrogant, but it was still the most generous offer Israel has ever made.

This has been a familiar theme in Zionist political discourse that goes right back to the 1947 UN Partition Plan: of Israeli ‘generosity’ spurned by Palestinian intransigence or an addiction to terror and violence that is essentially antisemitic. Harari is at the softer end of the spectrum on this, but his lament ignores the fact that, for example, during this period of Israeli ‘generosity’, the number of settlers in the West Bank and East Jerusalem expanded from 110,000 in 1993 to 465,000.

Gaza is the main subject of Harari’s piece however, and it’s in his regret that Hamas did not respond positively to the ‘very significant step’ of the 2005 Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, that he wipes the past clean:

The remnants of the Israeli left hoped that the Palestinians would make an honest attempt to turn Gaza into a prosperous and peaceful city state, a Middle Eastern Singapore, showing to the world and to the Israeli right what the Palestinians could do when given the opportunity to govern themselves

Though Hurari admits that Israel ‘continued to impose a partial blockade on the Gaza Strip and to occupy the West Bank’, even after its withdrawal, and concedes that ‘it is difficult to build a Singapore under a partial blockade’, he nevertheless insists that

an honest attempt could still have been made, in which case there would have been greater pressure on the Israeli government from both foreign powers and the Israeli public to remove the blockade from Gaza and to reach an honourable deal about the West Bank as well. Instead, Hamas took over the Gaza strip and turned it into a terrorist base from which repeated attacks were launched on Israeli civilians. Another experiment ended in failure.

Once again we find ourselves in the same place where we always find ourselves: a generous Israel that only wants peace, only to be spurned by the mysterious Palestinian obsession with violence and terror. And as always, there is a lot missing from this.

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First of all, there is the simple fact which so often goes unobserved: an occupying power that has seized the territory of another people can never be ‘generous’ in abandoning that territory, or conceding some of what it has taken to the people who already lived there. This should be obvious, but it too often goes unsaid.

Secondly, the Gaza disengagement plan was not a ‘significant’ concession by Israel, but a strategic decision aimed at putting an end to an occupation/settlement process that was too difficult to sustain, financially and militarily. In effect, Israel was being generous to itself. Nor was the withdrawal intended to pave the way for ‘peace’. In October 2004, Ariel Sharon’s senior advisor Dov Weisglass explained its purpose in the following terms:

The significance of the disengagement plan is the freezing of the peace process, and when you freeze that process, you prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state, and you prevent a discussion on the refugees, the borders and Jerusalem. Effectively, this whole package called the Palestinian state, with all that it entails, has been removed indefinitely from our agenda.

Thirdly, and this has been barely mentioned in the last two weeks, Hamas did not - at least initially - ‘take over’ Gaza. In 2006, Hamas was elected, in elections for the second Palestinian Legislative Council. These were elections that the Bush administration had pushed for, in the belief that the dominant Fatah faction in the Palestinian Authority and its more malleable leader Mahmoud Abbas would win, despite warnings from Palestinians and Israel that things might not turn out that way.

The US spent $2.3 million through USAID in an attempt to boost Abbas’s profile. Israel also joined in, detaining Hamas members in the run-up to the elections, and banning rallies and public meetings in Jerusalem, and closing Hamas election offices.

All these efforts came to nothing in January 2006, when Hamas won 44.45% of the vote and 74 of the 132 contested seats, while Fatah received 41.43% and won 41. This stunning outcome was widely-believed to be a vote against the corrupt Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority, which had engaged in an often brutal factional struggle with Hamas for many years.

Faced with this unexpected and undesirable outcome, Israel and its allies in the Madrid Quartet (the US, the European Union, Russia and the United Nations) did what defenders of democracy often do when democracy produces results they don’t like: they imposed economic sanctions in an attempt to undermine the Hamas-led administration and pressure the Palestinian population to change their minds.

The Coup that Failed

Fatah was no less cynical. Encouraged by the US, it withdrew from the new administration, and even returned $50 million in US aid to prevent Hamas spending it. Not content with merely undermining Hamas, the US set out to overthrow it, and began channeling weapons to Fatah in Gaza, with the aim of bringing down Hamas and installing a pro-Abbas administration under Fatah’s sinister security chief Muhammad Dahlan.

This weapons-and-fighters pipeline was overseen by Condoleeza Rice and the ghoul-like Deputy National Security adviser Elliot Abrams - a veteran of El Salvador cover ups and the Contra program. All this fuelled the vicious conflict between Fatah and Hamas in Gaza, precisely as it was intended to. Dahlan’s men tortured and murdered Hamas members, and Hamas responded in kind.

This mini-civil war in Gaza burst out into the open in early 2007, when Dahlan’s forces attempted to topple Hamas. The bloody street fighting that followed reportedly led the US envoy to the Quartet to declare in a meeting in Washington ‘I like this violence’, because ‘it means that other Palestinians are resisting Hamas.’

Once again, the US called it wrong, and Hamas emerged victorious and expelled Fatah from the Gaza Strip.

So to recap: the US, Israel, and the ‘international community’ wanted the Palestinians to have elections. When the elections didn’t produce the desired results, they tried to incite civil war and overthrow the administration that Palestinians had elected. And when all these efforts failed, the Quartet introduced sanctions, and Israel imposed a blockade on the Gaza Strip, which by 2018, the United Nations warned, was on the brink of making Gaza ‘unliveable.’

That year the UN Special Rapporteur reported that the Gazan economy was in free fall’, with ‘70 per cent youth unemployment, widely contaminated drinking water and a collapsed health care system’, and urged that ‘all parties — particularly Israel — bring an end to “this disaster”.’

The world did not listen, and Israel did not listen. Bear in mind that Gaza was already one of the poorest regions in the Middle East before the disengagement. When I was there in the 1989s, I saw how its economy was suffocated by direct military occupation, to the point when Palestinian farmers could not even plant fruit trees without official position, and Gaza had become an Israeli bantustan, where Palestinians were obliged to work as ‘hewers of wood and drawers of water’ inside Israel, and return the same day or sleep overnight.

The arms-length occupation that followed the 2005 disengagement imposed new restrictions that precluded any possibility of independent economic development.

How could one of the poorest and most overcrowded regions on earth become Dubai or Singapore, when its education system was entirely depended on foreign/UN aid, it was not allowed an airport, or a seaport, and its land borders were controlled by its de facto occupier Israel, and Israel’s Egyptian partner. To evade this blockade, as the world knows well, Gazans built a network of tunnels, through which money, weapons, and all the other goods that Gaza from the outside world depends on have been smuggled into the strip.

Whatever its military possibilities, an economy based on these foundations was never likely to achieve Walt Rostow’s ‘take-off’, and it takes some gall to suggest that Gaza should have taken advantage of Israeli ‘generosity’ and become Singapore or Dubai on the Mediterranean. Of course such effrontery has not been lacking, because it will never not be convenient to portray Gaza as a mad place, sunk in fanatical barbarism.

This is why in 2014, Alan Dershowitz called on ‘innocent Gazans’ to launch an ‘Arab spring’ and overthrow Hamas, and observed that

When Israel ended its occupation of Gaza in 2005, it left behind farm equipment and other material capable of feeding the population. Donor countries promised support, both financial and political if Gaza would live up to its potential as a Singapore on the Mediterranean. But instead the leaders of Gaza enriched themselves and used the remaining resources to build rockets instead of plowshares.

This is one of the few occasions when Dershowitz has ever shown any interest in ‘innocent Gazans.’ But he is not the only one to wonder what happened to these ‘plowshares’. The standard explanation for their absence s the one put by Michael Kochin in a 2017 article, which argued that ‘Gaza is ruled by Hamas…Unlike Fatah, the party that controls the Palestinian Authority, Hamas is dedicated by its charter to the genocidal eradication of Israel’s Jews.’

Once again, this is a familiar story, which leaves out a great deal. Hamas is not simply the sum of its 1988 charter. As far back as 2004, Hamas offered Israel a ‘10-year truce’ in return for its withdrawal to its pre-1967 borders. In its 2017 charter Hamas softened its original position, and accepted the possibility of a Palestinian state according to the 1967 borders.

The document also insisted that Hamas was not at war with the Jewish people, but with Zionism. In pointing this out, I am not arguing that Hamas is a benign organization, or that it has not been authoritarian, brutal and recklessly militaristic. Nor am I denying that it has committed atrocities against Israelis and carried out acts of ‘resistance’ that have rebounded with terrible consequences on Gaza’s civilian population.

But Hamas is - or was - more pragmatic than it has often been portrayed. And it was - and is - capable of political engagement. It is also an organization that Gazans once elected, and seventeen years of war and blockade have made it impossible for them to revisit that choice or consider any alternative.

To expect, in these circumstances, that Gazans should rise up and overthrow the government that Israel and its supporters did not want them to have, simply in order to please the country that has trapped them in an open prison and bombed them repeatedly, is as delusional as the idea that a tiny, overcrowded strip of land that does not enjoy even the basic trappings of an independent state, could become Singapore or Dubai.

And there is another story here, which has not received the attention it deserves. Two weeks ago the Times of Israel suggested that Netanyahu preferred a Hamas-dominated Gaza, in order to prevent the possibility of a rapprochement between Hamas and Fatah, that might have laid the basis for an independent Palestinian state connecting Gaza and the West Bank. In order to achieve this

Hamas was upgraded from a mere terror group to an organization with which Israel held indirect negotiations via Egypt, and one that was allowed to receive infusions of cash from abroad. Hamas was also included in discussions about increasing the number of work permits Israel granted to Gazan laborers, which kept money flowing into Gaza, meaning food for families and the ability to purchase basic products.

In 2019, Netanyahu told a Likud Party meeting, ‘anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas.’

So all the time Israel said it could not negotiate with Hamas ‘terror’, it was in fact ‘bolstering’ Hamas, not in order to achieve ‘peace’, but to maintain Gaza in permanent isolation. Whatever else you can say about these squalid manoeuvres, they were never going to produce a Singapore-on-the-Mediterranean, and they were never intended to.

And now that strategy has blown up in Netanyahu’s face. And 2.3 million people are trying to shelter from the bombs that are daily turning Gaza into Dresden-on-the-Mediterranean.

This awful outcome is a despicable consequence of the despicable politics we have seen - or not seen - these last seventeen years, in which very few of its protagonists emerge with clean hands, but many people, most of them Palestinians, have ended up dead.

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By Any Means Necessary

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If there’s one concept that I’ve learned to be wary of in the 21st century, it’s ‘moral clarity.’ I first became aware of the term in the aftermath of 9/11, through the conservative writer William Bennett’s 2002 book Why We Fight: Moral Clarity and the War on Terrorism.

Moral clarity is almost always invoked in ‘why we fight’ justifications for waging wars on terrorism. Those who use this kind of language tend to imagine such wars - and demand that such wars are seen - as unambiguous conflicts between good and evil, in which the state is entitled and even obliged to use whatever means are necessary to defeat the terrorists.

Once this binary framework is accepted, any attempt to understand the motives, context, tactics, or strategy of the terrorist organization or movement, or even suggest that the state might bear some responsibility for the emergence of such movements, becomes a concession to evil, and evidence of the absence of a moral compass.

Like heresy in the olden days, terrorism is such a fearful and toxic force that it cannot be understood or even thought about, except in quasi-theological terms. To make such an effort, or even to criticize the tactics or the methods of the ‘counter’ terrorist state, is to be guilty of ‘moral equivalence’ - the ugly sister of moral clarity.

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It doesn’t matter how many people die as a result of wars on terror - even if they die in far greater numbers than those who die in acts of terror. The evil of terrorism always justifies them, and such wars can never be limited or cut short.

To the moral counterterrorists, this is not about numbers, especially the numbers of people who don’t matter, and there is always a difference - a moral difference - between the terrorist who plants a bomb in a crowded market and the state that drops a bomb in a crowded market or destroys an entire neighbourhood.

The first is always a crime, the second is always a tragedy. And that is why terrorists are so often described as animals, wild beasts or hostis humani generis - the enemy of mankind.

Because you cannot understand or accommodate or reason with a wild beast, and only a fool, a lunatic, or a moral coward would try. Instead the theologians demand that you accept their version of every terrorist emergency. Do terrorists have a legitimate political cause or grievance, even if their methods or not legitimate? No. Why are there terrorists in the world? Because terrorism exists. Why does terrorism exist? Because there are terrorists in the world. What is terrorism? Something that terrorists do. Where do terrorists come from? From terrorism. And what we do about terrorism? Fight it, until it is erased from the earth.

Needless to say, wars fought on these premises rarely end well, either for those on the receiving end of them, or for those who start them. Did William Bennett imagine that US soldiers would end up dressing Arab prisoners in female underwear and setting dogs on them? Did he foresee that the US would lose two wars, in part, because the clarity he demanded rarely clarified anything? Probably not.

The ‘Israeli-Palestinian conflict’ has often been accompanied by rhetoric like this. Long before the horrific events of the last two weeks, Israel explained its long struggle with the Palestinians as a war between democracy and terror, between the villa and the jungle, whether this framework was applied to Fateh, the PFLP, or Abu Nidal.

In recent years, it has often been attached to Hamas and Gaza. In 2009, Alan Dershowitz - no surprises here - wrote a book called The Case for Moral Clarity: Israel, Hamas and Gaza. In 2021 Charles Krauthammer weighed in, with the following observation:

Some geopolitical conflicts are morally complicated. The Israel-Gaza war is not. It possesses a moral clarity not only rare but excruciating. Israel is so scrupulous about civilian life that, risking the element of surprise, it contacts enemy noncombatants in advance to warn them of approaching danger.

Some may regard the concept of ‘enemy noncombatants’ as a contradiction in terms, or conclude that telling a ‘noncombatant’ family that you are about to blow their house to smithereens is not as humanitarian as it looks to Krauthammer.

Others may ask why, in all the Gaza wars and the periods of ‘peace’ in between, Palestinian casualties -both combatants and civilians - have consistently outnumbered Israelis, and why in all these wars, Israel has had a virtual carte blanche to do anything it wanted, as Private Eye suggested this week:

Private Eye and Ian Hislop have received exactly the kind of criticism you might expect, from exactly the kind of people you might expect. Because covers like this are not the stuff of moral clarity, but another demonstration of the moral depravity that Newsweek editor-at-large Josh Hammer, described in a 2021 article on “the Palestinians' century-long civilizational jihad to destroy the world's sole Jewish state.”

There is too much wrong with that characterization to go into here. But if you believe this kind of ahistorical nonsense, then you are not best-placed to make serious observations on the morality of any armed conflict, and you are not so much a journalist as a propagandist.

Nevertheless, if you accept what Hammer is proposing, a lot of things become possible, and some things become impossible. Because what can you do with a people engaged in ‘civilizational jihad’ except occupy their land, or keep them locked up behind walls and cages, and periodically ‘mow the grass’ with bombs, missiles, and white phosphorus as fertiliser?

But now Hamas has broken out of the cage, and containment is no longer enough. Now U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has flown to Tel Aviv to tell Benjamin Netanyahu, ‘Too often in the past, leaders have equivocated in the face of terrorist attacks against Israel and its people. This is — this must be — a moment for moral clarity.’

The Law of the Jungle

As the world has seen many times over, there has rarely been any ‘equivocation’ from Israel, and now there is nothing but the most shocking and relentless devastation. And in case anyone had any doubts as to why it is happening, Netanyahu posted this now-deleted tweet on Monday, using the same words he had used in a speech the day before:

Not everyone describes this struggle in quite these terms, but this is the underlying framework, behind the staggering destruction now unfolding in Gaza. The displacement of nearly 1 million people; the destruction of entire neighbourhoods; cutting off food, water, and electricity to two million people; daily bombings that have already killed more than 4,200 Gazans - all these actions have now become expressions of ‘moral clarity’ from a country that has been the authority to destroy its enemies by all means necessary.

All previous Israeli actions are forgotten. The political context is forgotten. The occupation-from-a-distance is forgotten. The occupier becomes nothing but a victim. Humanity is buried in the rubble in the name of humanity.

Israel likes to suggest that if only Hamas ceased to exist, then everything would become normal again, and ‘peace’ and politics would become possible once again. But there has not been a normal worth keeping in Gaza for many years, and even as Israel and its supporters invoke quasi-theological notions of ‘moral clarity’ and ‘evil’ to justify the wilful destruction of an entire society; at the other end of the political spectrum, there are those who find their own justifications for the unjustifiable:

Or Norman Finkelstein:

If we honor the Jews who revolted in the Warsaw Ghetto - then moral consistency commands that we honor the heroic resistance in Gaza. I, for one, will never begrudge - on the contrary, it warms every fibre of my sould - the scenes of Gaza’s smiling children as their arrogant Jewish supremacist oppressors have, finally, been humbled.

Or the Harvard Undergraduate Palestine Society Committee, which declared, ‘We…hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible’ for Hamas’s attacks.

Did Israel force Hamas operatives to murder women, children, and the elderly, and violate all the codes, customs, and laws that have been drawn up to limit the scope and the severity of war? Should we ‘rejoice’ in these attacks? Is that what ‘resistance’ is? Is Finkelstein’s ‘moral consistency’ a kind of moral-clarity-in-reverse? Such questions are likely, in some sections of the left, to receive comments like this X/Twitter post:

This concept of ‘resistance’ is as vapid in its own way as the notion of ‘moral clarity.’ Where the former uses the occupation to justify or even celebrate any act of violence, either explicitly, or implicitly, by ignoring whatever doesn’t fit within its Warsaw/Tet analogies; the latter invokes the ‘terrorism’ of the terrorist as a justification for its own violations of basic human norms and aspirations.

Both end up in the same place: in a war of vengeance to be fought by any means necessary, that neither side can win.

Hamas has also described its ‘Al Aqsa flood’ operations as ‘resistance’. Its leadership insisted that its targets were military. This is partly true: Hamas operatives did attack military targets - they captured soldiers and a general, after all. But they also shot old people in bus stops, tied up children and burned them to death, and slaughtered hundreds of defenceless partygoers without a weapon between them.

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According to the IDF, some Hamas fighters carried orders instructing them to ‘kill as many people as possible.’ Personally, I find the idea that fighters would carry orders like this into combat to be not entirely credible, but nor can it be entirely dismissed. In any case, many people died, who were not-military targets by any stretch of the anti-colonial imagination.

Hamas has denied this, of course. In an interview with the Economist, (paywalled) Moussa Abu Marzouk, a senior member of the Hamas politburo, insisted that his organization ‘obeys all international and moral laws.’

Hamas has also issued a statement insisting that reports of atrocities were ‘fabricated and disseminated by certain Western media outlets that uphold the Zionist narrative.’ On its website, Hamas spokesperson Izzat al-Risheq said ‘We categorically affirm the falsehood of the fabricated allegations promoted by some Western media outlets... the latest of which was the claim of killing children, beheading them, and targeting civilians.’

In an interview on Sky News, Basem Naim, director of Hamas’s international relations also dismissed allegations of atrocities. Although Naim claimed that ‘we didn’t kill any civilians’, he also insisted on the need to

redefine what you mean by civilian. I cannot consider a settler on the West Bank carrying a gun who has stolen my land, burning the city of Harawa a civilian.' We cannot consider anyone sitting around the border working on cyber and artificial intelligence to control and besiege 2.3 million people in an open prison as a civilian.

Redefining civilians, and blurring the distinctions between civilians and combatants into ‘terrorist nests’ and ‘hubs’ is exactly what Israel does, and Naim’s ‘redefinition’ may or may not explain the pogrom-cum-assault which Hamas carried out on 6 October.

That Hamas has the right to resist occupation is indisputable - though Israel and its supporters do dispute it. It’s a right enshrined in various UN resolutions and international conventions relating to military occupations. Israel may not occupy Gaza directly, but as its current restrictions demonstrate, it exercises complete control over its land and maritime borders, its electricity and water, in ways that contradict any notion of territorial sovereignty. Using Hamas as the pretext, it has sealed Gaza off from the West Bank, thereby making a viable Palestinian state impossible to achieve.

Hamas has the moral and legal right to resist this, in accordance with UN General Assembly resolution 37/43 on Dec 3, 1982, which confirmed ‘the legitimacy of the struggle of peoples for independence, territorial integrity, national unity and liberation from colonial and foreign domination and foreign occupation by all available means, including armed struggle”

But that right does not - or should not - entail what took place on 6 October. Article 75 of the Geneva Convention Additional Protocol 1 in 1977, prohibits occupying powers from murder, torture, mutilation, the taking of hostages, and humiliating and degrading treatment.

There is no law anywhere that says an occupied people are entitled to do the same things, yet that is what happened on 6 October. Whether this was done on direct orders from the leadership in Qatar or from the military leadership n Gaza itself, is not known. Nor is it clear what these atrocities were intended to achieve. Was it an all-or-nothing gamble, intended to wreck the Israel-Saudi rapprochement? Did Hamas factor into its calculations that Israel would obliterate the Gaza Strip, but hoped that it could generate enough ‘horizontal’ political support to limit the damage and force Israel to the negotiating table?

We don’t know, but the costs for the people of Gaza has been awful beyond belief, and Hamas bears responsibility for this - which is not the same thing as saying that Hamas is responsible for everything Israel does. Military occupations and episodes of ethnic cleansing are not going to produce saints, but nor should the crimes of the powerful become a justification for the violation of basic human norms by the powerless.

Nor is it the responsibility of those who want to show solidarity with the Palestinians, to applaud or ignore actions that are brazenly immoral and illegal, and also tactically and strategically obtuse. The only time in my life time that the Palestinians have ever held Israel in check, was during the first Intifada, when the entire community, from the old people to young children took part in a range of mostly non-violent actions that Israeli military power could not cope with.

It is not for outsiders to dictate how the Palestinians resist, but not should the ritualistic invocation of the slogan ‘by any means necessary’ obscure or legitimise acts of violence that are cruel, immoral, and often horrifyingly counter-productive.

The result, is the situation we have now, where a savage act of militarism - however audacious - has turned the entire population of Gaza into a military target, and threatens to set the world on fire. And where the principle of ‘any means necessary’ - whether invoked by the occupier and the occupied, has paved the way for a generalised descent into barbarism, and a nightmarish humanitarian catastrophe that can only be prevented by releasing the hostages and an immediate ceasefire.

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Gaza Destroyed

There are times when writing feels like trying to speak in the midst of a howling gale, and the 21st century has often felt like that to me. This is an age where people slaughter airplane passengers and office workers in the name of God; where you bomb cities and torture people and call it spreading democracy or counterterrorism; where you murder old people and partygoers and call it resistance.

But even in these grim decades, where the next worst thing always seems to be waiting round the corner, the horror of what is now unfolding in Gaza plumbs new depths. Two days ago an Israeli military spokesman pledged to turn Gaza City into a ‘city of tents.’ This morning I woke up to discover that the Israeli military has ordered 1.1 million people in Gaza City to leave their homes and move south within 24 hours.

This is first of all, an abomination - a genuinely monstrous act that only makes ‘sense’ within the grim and shallow logic of counterterrorism. It’s an act that will reverberate for decades, and will stain the name of the country that carried it out and the countries that allowed it to happen. It will shake our flimsy international ‘order’ to its foundations, and plunge Israel, the Middle East and the wider world into a new era of conflict with no endpoint, no possibility of ‘victory’ - nothing but death, destruction and the toxic spread of fascistic, religious and ethnic hatred.

It is an act of collective punishment of a whole people, and it is very likely to become an act of ethnic cleansing, carried out under the rubric of counterinsurgency, retaliation and ‘protection’, which makes the entire population of Gaza responsible for the atrocities perpetrated by Hamas last weekend.

It doesn’t matter how loudly Israel says it’s not doing this - this is what it’s actually doing. And let’s remember - because too many people forget or never knew - that collective punishment has been the governing principle of Israeli military policy ever since the state was founded.

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In Lebanon, Jordan, Gaza and the West Bank, the principle has always been the same: when Israel is attacked it attacks the civilian population that the attackers come from.

It doesn’t matter whether such attacks are directed against civilians or military targets. The logic is always the same: to ‘deter’ further terrorist attacks, Israel must turn the civilian population against whatever armed organisation is attacking it and punish the population for supporting or not opposing these organisations in the first place.

This principle has been applied over and over again, against Palestinian raiders in the 1950s; against the PLO in Jordan, against Shi’a populations in South Lebanon, and repeatedly, in Gaza. It has never ‘worked’ even on its own terms. It hasn’t made Israel secure. As last weekend’s atrocities proved, it hasn’t deterred anyone. On the contrary, it has created a vast reservoir of hatred and resentment throughout the countries and communities where it has been applied.

Let them hate as long as they fear may have worked for the Romans, in the short term, but it won’t work for Israel. It can’t work, in a world where killing people is not that difficult, for anyone who wants to do it, and where political problems do not have military solutions.

Violence begets violence, and it begets hatred and it begets vengeance, and this should be obvious to anyone with even a Beano-level understanding of humanity.

Because, odd as it seems to those who cheerlead operations like the one that is now unfolding, people who are being bombed, whatever they may think of the armed organizations that ‘invited’ such attacks, always know where the bombs come from. They know who is driving them from their homes or killing them in their homes, and they know that a country that behaves like this is their enemy, and they will fight it, by any means possible, even if fighting it simply means hurting it in its weakest points, and bringing even more devastation on themselves.

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This is one reason why, whatever Gazans may feel about Hamas and its tactics, they haven’t turned against it and come running towards Israel with flowers in their hands, looking for a friendly hug. Because as horrific as last weekend’s murderous assault was, it is just the latest horrific chapter in a festering and vicious conflict, in which both sides have dealt blow after blow without ever being able to destroy each other.

Does Hamas also bear responsibility for this calamity? Of course, and not only because of the massacres last weekend. But it is entirely facile for the fourth most powerful military power in the world to refuse to negotiate with Hamas because of what its charter says.

Making peace means making peace with people you don’t like, and Israel has never had any interest in doing this. And now the deadly game that we have witnessing every since 2006/7 is approaching breaking point, not just for Hamas, but for an entire society.

Because what is happening now is different in scale and intent. It isn’t just vengeance, and it isn’t just ‘counterinsurgency’. It has a terrifying, apocalyptic, blood-chilling finality about it, coupled with an indifference to its consequences and a lack of any coherent strategic outcome that borders on insanity, and makes cavemen look dignified.

Israel, with the support of the most powerful liberal democracies of the ‘international community’ - the US, the EU, the hapless and ridiculous UK - is preparing to make the Gaza Strip uninhabitable, and turn an entire population, most of whom are already refugees and the descendants of refugees, into refugees again.

This simply can’t be done, without creating a human catastrophe on a scale we haven’t since World War 2. You can’t move 1.1 million people anywhere that quickly. You can’t ask 1.1 million people to live in a territory half the size of the area they already inhabit, where another million people are living under bombardment, where there is no government and no agency to look after them, where hospitals are being bombed, and where there is no food, water, or fuel.

Watching this happen, I often find myself thinking of the people I once knew in Gaza, when I taught English there for two summers in the mid-1980s, and again as a member of the World University Service delegation on education during the first Intifada.

Even then, Gaza was known in Israel as Indian country - a reservation where you could get your throat by the Arab fanatics. That’s not what I found. Gaza certainly looked like an American cavalry fort, with its dusty stockades flying the Star of David, where soldiers watched the population through binoculars. But the Palestinians I met were not who Israel said they were.

I found a people misused by history, victims of decisions taken by empires and nations far from their borders, where families spoke to their relatives across the Rafah ‘shouting fence’ that marked the southern border, but could not meet them. I saw the pool of sewage at Djabalia refugee camp - a camp that is only days from obliteration - where the Israeli army forced the entire male population to stand up to their waists following the invasion of the strip in 1967.

I visited Khan Younis refugee camp, where, in 1956, Israeli troops lined up 278 unarmed Palestinians and shot them. This massacre is remembered by Palestinians - Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi, Hamas’s political spokesman in 2004 saw his uncle shot there - but the outside world has never even registered it.

It wasn’t until Joe Sacco included it in his Footnotes on Gaza docu-comic in 2009, that it made even a ripple. By that time al-Rantisi was dead, blown to pieces by an Israeli missile only a month after his predecessor was blown to pieces by an Israeli missile.

Long before the all-out wars of the 21st century, this history of dispossession, massacres, punitive raids, and house demolitions was ingrained in the collective memory of the population. Everyone, from the oldest Palestinian to the kids in the refugee camps who followed you around waving V-for-Victory signs, knew someone who had been killed, shot, imprisoned, or beaten.

Most people also knew why they were there. Passengers in taxis zipping up and down the strip would ask you politely ‘You know about Balfour?’ in reference to the Balfour Declaration. Or they would ask my opinion on the Labour Party Conference - in the UK.

They breathed politics, because they had no choice. Politics had placed them where they were, and yet the Gazans still kept up the British military cemetery where soldiers were buried during Allenby’s 2017 campaign. That campaign resulted in the British Mandate, and the implementation of Balfour’s decision to favour ‘a national home for the Jewish people’ in Palestine, and yet the graveyard of the invaders was as immaculately kept up, as if Palestinians were buried there.

Did the dreamily romantic Tory lord know that ‘national home’ meant ‘Jewish state?’ Historians have long argued about that one, but the Palestinians I met in Gaza, who lost their homes in what is now southern Israel, and sometimes went to look at them just to remember that past, understood the forces that had dispossessed them.

In the mid-80s, Palestinian resistance to Israeli occupation was still largely ‘secular’, and Israeli repression of the nationalist organizations appeared to be matched by a surprising leniency towards the Muslim Brotherhood - the precursors to Hamas - who seemed to be able to operate with more freedom than the PLO or any other affiliated organizations.

This was a time when ‘the West’ saw political Islam in many countries in the Middle East as a useful tool and a counterweight to the left - nice move there chaps - so it would not have been surprising for Israel to do the same.

These were the kinds of things we talked about, but not only that. The people I met were courageous, passionate, and linked by a sense of collective purpose and collective identity. I have never, before or since, encountered people with such a strong sense of who they were and who they wanted to be. So everyday in Gaza was a political education for me, and I have never forgotten it.

But the Palestinians were also funny, and curious and knowledgeable about the world they wanted to be a part of. And there were moments of pleasure that you could only find in Gaza. Sitting under the palm trees near Khan Younis or Djabalia watching the surf roll in during one of those unforgettable Gaza sunsets. The long lunches in Gazan homes. The young Palestinian who swam out to save me when I went swimming off Beach Camp and got caught out by the strong Gaza undercurrent. The teenage schoolgirls who came to our school and sang ‘One man went to mow’ in English to entertain us.

I remember the wit, the humour, and the ordinary humanity of the people I met in Gaza City and the camps. I remember Ghazi, the caretaker at the school where we stayed who desperately wanted to learn English, and kept saying ‘I am a university’ or ‘I am a chair’, when you asked him what his name was. I remember the young woman - already a military veteran - who lost an arm fighting Sharon’s soldiers, and led a successful strike in a women’s prison, in which tear gas was pumped into her cell.

I remember the kids I taught at UNRWA schools, who thrust their hands into the air whenever you asked them a question, even if they didn’t know the answer. No apathy there: they came from families who knew what education meant, and what it meant not to have it.

And they also knew what community meant. One Palestinian teacher from Djabalia became lonely and homesick during a two-week visit to London - the only time he had been abroad in his life - because he couldn’t stand the alienation, cynicism and indifference of the city.

And on that third visit, with the World University Service, I saw the kids of Gaza once again, drawing pictures of helicopters and soldiers, beating and shooting them, the same kids who had been arrested by Israeli soldiers for attending clandestine classes, because schools had been closed as ‘centres of nationalism.’

All that was before Hamas. And I’ve thought of these people over the years, and wondered how many of them survived wars that seemed unimaginable when I knew them. They lived their lives while I was living mine, in a claustrophobic world of violence, occupation, and trauma, and yet they had so much more humanity, dignity, and grace than the likes of Lindsey Graham and Douglas Murray, who are now salivating at the prospect of their destruction.

That these people should now be removed again, and depicted as soulless fanatics, subhuman inhabitants of a ‘terrorist hub’ or written off as unavoidable collateral damage, is a tragedy piled upon tragedy - a moral failure of barely credible proportions.

And that is why I have accompanied this article with a picture of a beach, not more destroyed buildings. Because the beach was always the only escape in Gaza, the place where the sweetness of life became possible, where Ai Weiwei once met a group of laughing young women in hijabs and long dresses looking through a book of Andy Warhol’s paintings, while making his film about refugees.

Ai Weiwei was surprised, but then Gaza is a surprising place. And if there are people there who have done monstrous things, they are not monsters, and no country has the moral right to destroy their society.

If this happens, then the great powers that are allowing it to happen, and that never stop talking about peace, human rights, and international law, will never be able to use these terms again, without being reminded of the time they stood back, and allowed the Israeli military to make a desolation, that has nothing do with peace.

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The Gaza Raid

Settler-colonial conflicts aren’t like other armed confrontations. They are conflicts between peoples who lay claim to the same territory, in which one side must gain everything and the other must lose everything. In these conflicts, the settlers - a word that sounds much more innocuous than it actually is - aren’t necessarily interested in exploiting or enslaving the people they colonize.

They might do that, as an afterthought, but basically they want land, not people, and given that few people willingly abandon the land in which their memories, their past, their livelihood, and their aspirations for a collective future are all bound up, then the settler-government and settler-army must either subjugate the people who already occupy that land, or drive them away from it.

In the case of the Palestinians, Israel has done both these things, and as in other similar confrontations, the almost constant violence that has continued ever since the 1930s is not like the violence of conventional war.

In settler-colonial confrontations, violence is always bitter and personal. It is face-to-face and fought up close, door-to-door and in the home or the farm. In some cases settlers will throw you out of your own house. Or they will knock your house down. Or put a fence or wall around the land where you wanted to build a house, for yourself, your children or your grandchildren.

And if you persist on staying there, they will tear up your olive trees, kill your animals, throw stones through your windows, and terrorize you till you leave. They might drive you from your land by force with the keys still in your hand, and you might spend years watching as someone else moves into your house, or hunts the animals that you used to hunt, or exports crops from the land that you used to harvest, or builds towns and cities in the places that you already had names for, and turns the country that you thought was yours into their country.

So of course these confrontations are vicious and hateful. They aren’t impersonal battles between uniformed combatants, with distinctions between the innocent and the guilty, civilians or fighters, combatants and non-combatants. And the ferocity of such confrontations is likely to be intensified by an imbalance of power. Unable to challenge a stronger opponent militarily, the weaker side is likely to attack the soft points in its enemy’s defences. It will seek to maximise its own resources and hurt and wound its enemies where they least expect it, disrupting their confidence and their ability to protect their population, spreading insecurity and fear even in territories they thought they had complete control over, and looking for political gains that go beyond their limited military capabilities.

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Sometimes they will do this as part of an overall politico-military strategy, or in order to demonstrate to their own supporters that they are still in the battle, and sometimes they will do it out of pure vengeance.

At this point, it is difficult to know which of these categories the savage and audacious coup de main carried by Hamas over the last few days belongs to. Maybe it contains a little of all of them. In terms of its planning and execution, the raid is an act of military brilliance. It has humiliated Israel’s government and its much-vaunted surveillance system; destroyed its attempts to normalize what Amira Hass has called the ‘largest prison in the world’. It has captured soldiers and even a general, and forced Israel to choose between a series of bad options that are unlikely - even on its own terms - to compensate for the most lethal blow to its internal security and its military prestige that any Palestinian organization has ever managed to achieve.

All this was planned and prepared over months and years without Israel knowing a thing about it, and no wonder some Israelis are looking to blame Iran.

I point this out, not as a cause for celebration. I don’t celebrate the murder of old people waiting at bus-stops, or families in their homes or partygoers - though I do question what kind of society would think it was a good idea to hold a ‘trance music’ rave within earshot of the Gaza prison camp.

Some people might depict these monstrous acts as ‘resistance’, but I won’t dignify them with that label. They are unforgiveable and inexcusable war crimes and crimes against humanity, and should be recognized as such, without any caveats.

But - and there is a but here - even if too many of Israel’s supporters refuse to recognize it. There is always a but, which has been drowned out by the usual predictable cant, and the Israeli propaganda chorus that describes the entire raid as nothing more than a continuation of the age-old battle between the evil of terrorism and a moral/democratic/human rights-based society that is supposedly innocent.

Innocent people have been killed, but that does not make Israel innocent . There is a context here, that has always been denied by Israel, and by much of the outside world. Approximately 1.7 million of the 2.1 million people who live in the Gaza Strip are refugees or the descendants of refugees, most of whom originally came from the same areas in the south of Israel that Hamas has just targeted. So they are products of a settler-colonial confrontation - enabled by military occupation - that is still going on in the West Bank, and which has been going on throughout all the decades of the ‘peace process’ and the decades since the possibility of ‘peace’ vanished.

The West knows this perfectly well, and yet no national government has ever seriously raised its voice to condemn it, or put any serious pressure on Israel to do anything about it. The pressure is always on one side only.

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These governments know that even after its withdrawal, Israel is still the de facto occupier of the Gaza Strip, which controls everything that goes in or out, and which has used that power consistently to deny the Palestinians even the slightest possibility of a dignified existence or a liveable future. Western governments know this, because they have been complicit in this stranglehold, ever since 2006. In all Gaza’s wars, and the periods of ‘peace’ in between, they barely raised their voices to condemn the military assaults and bombardments that have killed many more Palestinian civilians than the Israelis who have died at the hands of Palestinians.

They gave Israel carte blanche, to the point when it is barely possible to criticize Israel in the UK without running the risk of being called antisemitic or a terrorist sympathizer; when even local councils are banned from engaging in campaigns intended to put pressure on Israel.

Anyone who thinks this is going to bring about ‘peace’ is either dreaming or complicit in the suffocating occupation-at-a-distance or occupation at firsthand that has crushed but never entirely defeated the Palestinians who live under the Israeli boot.

Those who - rightly - condemn the murder of young Israelis, where were their voices over the last few years, when Palestinian children were shot dead in record numbers in the West Bank by settlers and soldiers?

Those who claim to want the Palestinians to demonstrate peacefully, where were they when Palestinian children had their legs and arms broken by Israeli soldiers on the orders of the peacemaker Yitzhak Rabin during the first Intifada? And where were their condemnations when Israeli soldiers shot and wounded thousands of unarmed Palestinians who demonstrated at the border fence in Gaza in 2018?

When are Israeli soldiers ever prosecuted or even criticized for the endless cruelties and humiliations they have heaped on the Palestinians? Why were these voices who condemned the ‘terror’ of Hamas silent when Israel bombed cities all over Lebanon with the sole intention of terrorizing the civilian population into abandoning its support for Hizbollah? Or when the journalist Shireen Abu Akleh was shot in 2021? Where were these peacemakers, while Israeli settlers - with the complicity of the army - terrorized and bullied Palestinian farmers in order to drive them off their land?

These are rhetorical questions, because we know the answer. When Palestinians die, their deaths are barely worth a rueful shake of the head. They are inconsequential collateral damage, anonymous inhabitants of a savage and senseless fanatical world inhabited by people who, in the eyes of so many governments, will never achieve the status of full humanity.

Before this week’s raid, 10,757 Palestinians were killed since 2000, compared with 1, 346 Israelis, according to the United Nations. Of these, 2, 345 Palestinians were children, compared with 143 Israeli children.

Anyone care to explain that disparity?

When Israelis die, they have names, stories and biographies, because they are ‘victims of terror’. Palestinians, on the other hand, will never be much more than another Muhammad or Ahmed shot dead in a war zone, victims of snipers who are never asked to justify anything, or ‘surgical strikes’ that are never that surgical.

Don’t get me wrong - because I know there are those who specialise in such misunderstandings - they should have names, stories, and biographies. But if humanity is reserved for one side only, don’t expect that the side whose humanity has been denied will not notice. Don’t expect it to observe the rules, or the morals, that you claim to uphold when you don’t uphold them.

And if you talk of peace in the context of a settler-colonial project, facilitated by military occupation, and only expect the side that has been occupied, dispossessed, humiliated and oppressed to recognize the existence of the occupier, while demanding no concessions from the occupier, then you are on a fool’s errand. Or maybe you are just a hypocrite. Either way, you are not doing Israel any favours, and you certainly aren’t doing the Palestinians any.

Nor, of course, is Hamas. Because if there is one thing we know for certain about Gaza’s latest war, it is that Palestinian civilians will pay the greatest price for it. There are those who are already talking of ‘turning Gaza into a car park’ - without even realizing the disparity of force that that implies.

Hamas undoubtedly knew this, and factored it in to its calculations. So whatever satisfactions this raid has brought to those who wanted to hurt the oppressor are likely to be temporary.

Most governments will simply urge ‘restraint’, and ‘stand with Israel’ while Israel takes its revenge for the vengeance that Hamas has taken. When Netanyahu calls for the Gazans to ‘leave’ the prison in which Israel has trapped them, the same governments will be silent, as they have always been silent.

Here in the UK, the scum of the Tory Party are using these awful events to try and attack Corbyn - and by association, the Labour Party - because Corbyn called for an end to the occupation. In the United States, the dregs of MAGA are blaming Biden, while Biden offers Israel the usual uncritical support that the US has always given, with the sole exception of the Suez invasion.

None of this will do a single thing to bring this horrendously destructive conflict to an end. This uncritical support for Israel will merely encourage Israel to indulge its worst instincts. And uncritical support for Hamas will encourage it to indulge its worst instincts.

In 1919 Arthur Balfour - the author of the 1917 Balfour declaration which laid the foundations for the creation of the state of Israel - wrote the following memorandum:

In Palestine we do not propose even to go through the form of consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants of the country. The four powers are committed to Zionism and Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long tradition, in present needs, in future hopes, of far profounder import than the desire and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land.

This was entirely at odds with Balfour’s public pledge ‘that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.’

More than one hundred years later, that essential dishonesty still prevails, after so many wars, rebellions, blows and counter-blows, and occupations. And until it changes, and the West uses its power to bring about a just resolution to this nightmare instead of blindly cheerleading the occupier in everything it does, there will be more raids, more wars, and many more deaths - most of which will be Palestinians - and neither Palestinians nor Israelis will ever know security or peace.

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Trump's Last Stand

Would you prefer to die from electrocution or be eaten by a shark? I only ask, because the ex-president of the United States raised this philosophical question last week in a campaign speech. The fact that Trump felt the need to raise these possibilities could be a sign of a guilty conscience. Perhaps, metaphorically-speaking, Trump sees himself like Robert Shaw in Jaws, sliding down the sinking boat into the gaping mouth of the US Justice Department.

But it’s never a good idea to count on happy endings in politics, not these days nor any other days. You can hope for them and try and imagine what they might be, but that doesn’t mean that you get the outcome you want. And, the lesson of the last seven years is that you should never allow yourself to believe something simply because it makes you feel better.

Once upon a time there were those who never believed that a man like Trump could become president, but he did. By the end of his four-year reign of unprecedented lies and chaos, which - among other things - resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of Americans through his catastrophic mismanagement of the pandemic - there were those who could not believe that a president who had behaved like that could possibly win a second term.

But he very nearly did. And when he refused to accept defeat and tried to overturn, and incited a violent mob to attack the Capitol building, there were those who thought, surely now, the scales must fall from his supporters’ eyes? Surely now, even the angriest and most embittered MAGA voter, would see that this was a man who had attempted to undermine his own country’s democratic institutions and thwart the ‘will of the people’, which so many of them claim to care so much about? Surely even the Republican politicians who had supported him would say, enough is enough, and back away from him?

Surely, after the Jean Carroll case, it would finally come clear even to Trump’s evangelical supporters, that the man they thought was ‘God’s flawed vessel’ was a rapist, a liar, a con-man, a crook, and a tawdry instrument of mammon?

No to all these questions.

When Biden won in 2020, there were those - myself included - who hoped that a few years of competent government would drain the destructive toxins from the MAGA movement. But that movement has remained unmoved. Even Trump accumulated an incredible 91 charges, surely now, NOW, the voters and politicians that had clung to this garish monstrosity would pull away in shame and disgust? Surely the cowardly politicians who had supported him only in public would be emboldened to speak out? Surely the voters who believed that he cared about them would feel just a teeny weeny bit betrayed?

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Negative. In fact Trump’s support amongst Republicans has actually increased as a result of these charges. As things now stand, Trump is streets ahead of his Republican contenders, most of whom are as bad as he is, or at least don’t have the courage to say how bad they know he is. Last week Trump gave some reminders of who he is, and who his supporters are:

On the campaign trail in South Carolina, he visited the Palmetto State Armoury - a gunshop known for its use of imagery associated with the far-right ‘boogaloo’ movement. In August a white supremacist killed three black people in Jacksonville with an AR-15 semiautomatic rifle that he bought from the store. According to initial accounts, Trump bought a Glock pistol - which would have been in violation of federal law given that he faces criminal charges - though his team subsequently claimed only to have expressed interest in buying one.

That same week he suggested that the outgoing chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, should have been executed for treason - an allegation that has obliged Milley to take security precautions. This message was echoed by the Arizona Republican Representative Paul Gosar - one of so many ghouls who haunt the GOP’s year-round Halloween, who wrote that ‘In a better society, quislings like the strange sodomy-promoting General Milley would be hung.’

At a speech to the Republican Convention in California, Trump pledged to have shoplifters shot. He also mocked Joe Biden for getting lost on stage and he laughed at ‘crazy’ Nancy Pelosi’s husband, who was nearly beaten to death with a hammer - a gag that prompted a chorus of laughter from his audience

That laughter gives an indication of why Trump is still a contender, because this audience is not laughing at Trump but with him, and supporters like that are not going to be put off by criminal indictments, rape victims or anything else. It’s not just that they believe the charges against Trump are the product of a ‘deep state’ conspiracy. They don’t care if the charges are true.

They who don’t like Trump in spite of his cruelty: they like him because of it. They are complicit in his cruelty, and his cruelty is part and parcel of his party’s political identity. Consider that House Republicans nearly brought the US government to a halt last weekend, by voting for a savage swathe of cuts to law enforcement, poverty relief, education, childcare, and -incredibly - to a Meals on Wheels program for more than one million seniors.

These cuts were driven by the MAGA ‘Freedom Caucus’ cohort in Congress to which white nationalist lowlifes like Marjorie Taylor Greene, Matt Gaetz and Lauren Boebert belong, and which basically does Trump’s bidding. At the last moment, Biden’s budget was approved, with the single exception of military aid to Ukraine.

That was a a goal that Trump had supported, and no on will be surprised that it was celebrated by Elon Musk, and will no doubt go down well in Moscow too.

All this may be just a taste of what is coming down the road if Trump wins a second term. From Trump’s point of view, he has to win in order to stay out of jail. And if he does, he and his movement will take revenge on the law enforcement agencies and the individuals that indicted him. He will pardon himself and everyone who has been indicted for attempting to overturn the 2020 election and for the assault on the Capitol. He will legitimize corruption and criminality on an epic scale.

He will transform America into the closest that it has ever been to a fascist state - a state that will effectively be in thrall to Putin’s Russia. It will be the end of American democracy, and it will have calamitous consequences for democracies elsewhere.

None of this inevitable, but nor should any of these dire possibilities be dismissed. According to the average of various polls collated by Real Clear Politics, Trump is the current favourite to pip Joe Biden to the presidency in the 2024 US presidential election.

Polling consistently indicates that Biden has approval ratings in the mid-40s. Such ratings don’t guarantee defeat. Trump isn’t much more popular amongst voters overall. Independent candidates could drain crucial votes away from either of the two. Trump could even be in jail before November next year. That wouldn’t necessarily stop him, or have any impact on his cult, or translate into support for Biden.

Last month, a CNN poll found that 73 percent of voters believe Biden’s age may affect his physical and mental competence, and 76 percent doubt that he will be able to serve a full term if elected.

These figures should make grim reading. Last month Biden reiterated what is likely to be a core message of his campaign, when he attacked the ‘extremist movement that does not share the basic beliefs of our democracy: The MAGA movement.’ Biden also pointed out that ‘Their extreme agenda, if carried out, would fundamentally alter the institutions of American democracy as we know it.’

All true. And it’s precisely for that reason that the campaign to prevent this outcome should not be led by a man who the majority of Americans don’t believe should be president. In 2020, Biden pulled off an amazing achievement, effectively mounting a campaign from his basement in the midst of a devastating pandemic in which open campaigning was difficult, and often impossible.

There is no guarantee that, four years older, he can do the same thing. And with just over a year to go before the election, those who want to prevent the implementation of Trump’s ‘extreme agenda’ ought to be feeling much more confident in his principal opponent than they do.

Debates about whether Trump’s MAGA cohorts represent a genuine fascist movement, are often too rigidly fixated in the fascist movements of the 1920s and 30s, with black uniforms, militarism and shiny leather boots. But there can be little doubt that a second Trump term will be as close to fascism as America has ever seen. It will be a threat to the constitution and the rule of law, concentrating power in the hands of a criminal executive. It will undermine and actively attack women’s rights, and the rights of minorities, migrants, and LGBTQ communities.

It will weaponize xenophobia, embolden white supremacist paramilitaries, legitimize corruption and outright political gangsterism, entrench the GOP as the permanent party of government, replace even the idea of an enabling state with anti-woke intolerance and censorship. It will empower similar movements across the world.

And yet there doesn’t appear to be any sense of urgency in the Democratic Party about these possible outcomes. If there was, the Dems would not be seeking to win the 2024 election with an 80-year-old man in whom the majority of Americans have no confidence, but seeking to build an across-the-board coalition that includes anti-Trump Republicans, centrist, right and left wing Democrats and beyond. They would be looking for the candidate with the best possibility of presiding over a movement like this and guiding it to victory.

They would be mobilizing every resource that liberal America can muster, and preparing to fight Trump and Trumpism with the same ferocity that Trump and his movement will bring to bear against them. The Democrats might not be the party you would choose to lead a campaign like this, but they are the only ones who can do it. They can’t just go through the usual motions in the hope that normality will be restored. These are not normal times when normal wins. These are Weimar times, and the Democrats need to show that they understand this.

That means finding alternative leadership as soon as possible, because it is madness to enter a fight like this with a leader who your own potential voters don’t believe is up to it. For the next thirteen months, Biden will be constantly in the public eye. One trip. One slip of the tongue. One moment of tiredness, forgetfulness or slowness, and Biden will become sleepy Joe or senile Joe, and his credibility will be torn to shreds.

To go forward, knowing that this might happen, is like walking towards an elephant trap that you laid yourself. There are other potential contenders: Gretchen Whitmer. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Gavin Newsom. Elizabeth Warren. Pete Buttigieg and others.

Each of these politicians has their strengths, weaknesses, and possibilities. It’s up to the Democrats and the voters to find the one who works best and can lead the coalition required, the sooner the better.

The best thing Biden could do right now, for his party, and more to the point, for his country, would be to announce that he will not be running, and initiate the process of choosing his successor. It would be an honourable exit, and it would pave the way for a revitalised democratic movement to take on Trump and his movement, and confine both to the dustbin of history.

All democracies are flawed. But you don’t have to believe in the shining city on the hill to recognize that a Trump victory would be a blow to everything good about America, and a blow to democracies everywhere.

The Democrats have the responsibility to prevent that outcome, and lead the resistance to it. If they don’t live up to it, they will never be forgiven, and they won’t deserve to be.

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Conspiracies of Dunces

Cinemagoers of a certain age may remember the moment in the movie Poltergeist, when little Carole Anne announces ‘they’re here!’ as her family tv set begins to flicker. Her tone is frightened but also expectant, even a little excited; whoever’s interfering with the tv set is a familiar visitor, to her at least, even if the adults in the house don’t know it.

The 21st century often has a similarly haunted feel, except that it’s mostly adults - or people pretending to be adults - who are looking out for the ghosts and monsters. I’ve often thought the Enlightenment wasn’t what it was cracked up to be, but at least it was a good idea. And nowadays we seem very far from its essential premises, and increasingly closer to Goya’s sleep of reason, as the wildest and most delirious ideas peck at our heads on a daily basis.

Earlier this month, for example, Elon Musk - Mister ‘interplanetary species’ himself - responded to Twitter footage of migrants arriving at Lampedusa that referred to a ‘George Soros led invasion’ of Europe, with the observation:

The Soros organization appears to want nothing less than the destruction of western civilization.

As they say on Twitter, let that sink in. Here is one of the richest, if not the richest man in the world, attacking another rich man by referencing the white nationalist conspiracy theory of the ‘Great Replacement.’ For those that aren’t familiar with it, the Great Replacement was originally disseminated by the French author Renaud Camus in his 2011 book Le Grand Remplacement, who argued that ‘replaceist’ liberal elites are conspiring to replace ethnic French and white European people with non-white migrants - particularly Muslim migrants.

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Variations on this them have been around for a while, in Jean Raspail’s racist 1973 novel The Camp of the Saints; or Bat Ye’or’s Eurabia, in the writings of Oriana Fallaci, Melanie Phillips or Douglas Murray. Nazi demonstrators chanted ‘You will not replace us’ at the deadly 2017 Charlottesville that killed Heather Heyer. The New Zealand Christchurch mosque killer Brenton Tarrant posted a manifesto called ‘The Great Replacement’ to ‘explain’ the massacre he was about to carry out.

This is the toxic sewer that Musk was paddling in, because in the far-right imagination - and apparently in Musk’s imagination too - George Soros is using his money to bring migrants to Europe, in order to destroy ‘western civilization’ ie. white people. Why Soros? Well, partly because Soros is rich, and his Open Society Foundation, in its own words, supports groups that work towards the ‘safety and well-being of migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers.’

That’s bad enough, and there is also the fact that Soros is Jewish. By painting a Jewish billionaire as the ‘cosmopolitan’ mastermind plotting the downfall of western civilization, the right is entering very well-worn Nazi territory. And this is what Musk was doing. Like Carole Anne in Poltergeist, he was turning to the adults in the room - because he is most definitely not the adult in the room - to announce ‘They’re here!’

And he’s done it before, back in May, when he made the following observation:

No wonder Nazis have been flooding back into Twitter. Here is the platform’s CEO essentially echoing and amplifying their messaging, comparing George Soros to a comic book villain who ‘hates humanity’. This is disgraceful enough in itself, but let’s leave aside the antisemitism for a moment, and the fact that nothing that Musk and his Nazi/white nationalist fellow travellers say about Soros bears any resemblance to who Soros is and what he actually does with his money.

Let’s just focus on the paranoia, idiocy and intellectual shallowness required to believe that thousands of men and women are being deliberately brought into Europe and America by liberal ‘elites’ that hate white people; aided by a vast secret network of international ‘elite’ institutions like the Open Society, is working with the World Economic Forum, the Davos Forum, and the United Nations and probably - according to Suella Braverman - with ‘activist charities.’

The very least that can be said about this proposition is that it is epistemologically weak. To believe it, you have to accept a) that a secret or not-so-secret group of all-powerful people are evil enough to want to do this in the first place b)that they are powerful and clever enough to pull whatever strings are required to get away with it and c) that 21st century migration is entirely the result of their actions.

The Hidden Hand

And it isn’t only migration that requires this kind of suspension of disbelief. Leaving aside its racist components, the Soros/Replacement theory is a variant on the grand conspiracy narrative, which suggests that negative political and social events happen because hidden but all-powerful organizations and individuals are working together to make them happen.

Such secret ‘agendas’ have become obsessive themes in 21st century conspiratorial politics: from the ‘9/11 was an inside job’ theories that brought the likes of Alex Jones to the surface of the pond, to the ‘scamdemic’, QAnon, and ‘climate scams, lockdowns, masks, multiculturalism and so much else.

Week after tedious week, Neil Oliver warns his audiences on GB News that ‘they’ are trying to scare us and control us by forcing us to wear masks, accept vaccines, or submit to lockdowns.

In fact the scariest thing about Oliver’s bug-eyed monologues is the shallow fanaticism of Oliver himself, as he delivers his starey-scary monologues in the belief that he is some kind of daring truth-teller/highlander warrior, slaying the evil ones with a plastic claymore, when the truth is that he is a well-paid alt-right tv presenter who faces no risk whatsoever beyond the very remote possibility that Ofcom might one day wake up from its slumber.

But there are so many people like him, from Andrew Tate and Russell Brand to Tucker Carlson and Victor Orban - all doughty warriors on the hero’s path. All of them, like Carole Anne, see the shadows moving behind the static, but unlike her, they know the ghosts in our smartphones and tv sets are not our friends.

However dishonest and manipulative their intentions may be - and there’s no doubt they are mostly deeply dishonest - they have many credulous followers who will lap up whatever conspiracy they throw at them, the grander and more outlandish the better. Once upon a time, political manipulation was a collective activity, which depended on the madness of crowds.

Now millions of solitary and atomised individuals stare at screens at what the MSM isn’t telling them, following whatever rabbit holes the algorithms and the tech bros take them to, until they find ourselves in a world of demons and witches with a distinctly sixteenth century or even medieval flavour; a world that they are invited to believe as nothing more than a manufactured illusion and a puppet-show.

And behind the scenes the truth-tellers and the truth-seekers know who the puppets are: the MSM. The Deep State. Soros. Bill Gates. China. Liberals. Big Pharma. The Project for a New American Century. The Matrix. Jeffrey Epstein. Anthony Fauci. The WEF.

Once you start to see reality like this, and understand power like this, you can apply the same plotlines to anything. Why did 9/11 happen? Because the Project for the American Century wanted to shock America through a ‘new Pearl Harbour’ into a new era of dictatorship and endless war? Why has Trump been indicted 91 times? Because the paedophile deep state network is afraid of him. Why did the Pandemic happen? Because Bill Gates or China or Big Pharma or just ‘they’, as Neil Oliver puts it, want to ‘control us’ and take away our rights, and because - Oliver once again - ‘evil grows first of all in the darkness’.

The same can be said of stupidity. Why has Russell Brand been accused of rape? Because he was getting too close to the truth. Why did Putin invade Ukraine? Because the military-industrial complex wanted him to. Why do migrants come to Europe? Well you know why now. Why did the chicken cross the road? Because the global elite wanted to control the pavement on the other side.

This is scary stuff, enough to keep you huddled under the bedsheets while Steve Bannon reads you a bedtime story. But it’s also comforting, in a way, to think that history is a grand conspiracy and reality is not what ‘they’ say it is. Rather than try and make what sense of the world we can, in the little time we have, we gawk at our smartphones in the way the Gnostics looked at the skies, searching for signs of the demiurge and the archons, to the point when it is possible to know, as the crackpot former CNN correspondent Lara Logan recently insisted she knew, that Satan himself was sending migrants across the Mexican border.

These dark forces may be malignant and all-powerful, but evil can be comforting if you know it’s there and believe that truth and goodness are on your side, as Logan obviously does. At least these ‘theories’ explain why bad things happen, even if they don’t explain why such conspiracies rely on people like Matt Hancock to achieve their aims.

I mention the little fellow, because of the furore that his leaked 2020 emails caused in conspiratorial circles, when he promised to use the Kent variant to scare the public into compliance with the government’s covid restrictions. In one of these exchanges Hancock’ asked ‘When do we deploy the new variant?’

This expression was taken to mean - I can’t say by people who should know better because they clearly don’t - that Hancock was literally ‘deploying’ the variant. A true gotcha! moment, in which the puppet-masters behind the scamdemic reveal their strings, even if one of them turns out to be a needy attention-seeking little grifter.

The grand conspiracies of the 21st century often draw from a similarly mediocre casting pool, none of which makes any difference to the intensity with which some people cling to them. In a world that is increasingly suspicious of conventional ‘experts’, an endless succession of Youtube prophets and truthtellers and talkshow hosts is available to guide us towards enlightenment and become ‘awakening wonders’, while also tapping their viewers for subscriptions.

Leaving aside the techie elements of our age of conspiracy, there are precedents for this. Paranoia, as Richard Hofstadter pointed out, has been a hallmark of the far-right for a long time, and there is nothing entirely new under the sun. Governments also have their own grand conspiracy theories: the subversive freemason conspiracies imagined by reactionary governments in the aftermath of the French revolution; the non-existent ‘anarchist international’ of the late nineteenth century; international communism; the 1970s ‘terror networks’ conjured up by Clare Sterling and various other spooks and spook-related ‘terrorism experts’; the wildly-exaggerated depictions of al-Qaeda as an Islamic version of Spectre.

All these conspiracies were offered as explanations for complex and disparate political phenomena with many different causes. But most of the conspiracy theories that are coursing through the 21st century are anti-government, or at least stem from a deep distrust of government and a cynicism about what governments can do or claim to be doing.

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Such distrust isn’t unwarranted. No one can say we live in a world full of good people at the top just trying their best. Conspiracies do happen. Governments do lie, and make terrible blunders. Corporations and politicians make plans in secret, and have agendas, even if their plans don’t always turn out the way they want or expect. The Bush administration may not have carried out 9/11, but it did take advantage of it, and manipulated intelligence to ensure that the public accepted the necessity of war, and the same could be said of our own government.

But neither government was prepared for what happened afterwards, and strategically, they lost. So much for the new Pearl Harbour. No one has ever paid any price for this. No one has been held accountable. And this is the point: that governments fail and conspiracies fail, and these failures have become part of the history that we are still living through, in a century overflowing with disturbing and often downright sinister events.

These events don’t need puppet-masters. 9/11 was bad enough, without assuming that it was a ‘false flag’ attack. The Iraq war was bad enough. The financial crisis was bad enough. The tragedy of 21st century migration is bad enough. We don’t need to believe that all these events and episodes were orchestrated. We don’t need to believe that Big Pharma created the pandemic to know that pharmaceutical companies made money out of it, or that the Tory governments siphoned off vast sums of public money for PPE to companies and individuals who never provided it.

We should be able to criticize the mistakes and missed opportunities made by NATO and Europe in dealing with Russia, without assuming that NATO wanted Putin to invade Ukraine or that Putin had no choice but to invade. It’s perfectly possible to see how governments and powerful individuals use the media at certain times to influence and shape public opinion, without thinking that the ‘MSM’ acts like a single monolithic gatekeeper, and that truth can only be found in a Russell Brand video.

Corruption and conspiracies are all around us. Cover-ups take place. But conspiratorial elites don’t explain why our haunted century is the way it is. They don’t explain why pandemics happen. Because history is the sum of many different forces and processes, and no group of people can control it or entirely predict it. And sometimes governments do their best and sometimes they don’t, but we need to believe in the possibility of the former, otherwise, why bother with governments at all?

And the mad, bad and frightening conspiracies propagated by the likes of Oliver, Jones, Tate, Bannon and so many other false prophets are not leading us to enlightenment, knowledge or a great awakening.

They are paving the way for a new kind of dystopia, in which good government becomes impossible to achieve, in which public health measures are seen as a sign of imminent dictatorship, in which re-election of a criminal gangster becomes possible, and taking action against climate change or pollution becomes impossible, and any notion of the common good is regarded as another expression of a secret agenda of the evil ones.

And the longer this goes on, the more difficult it will to find solutions to the real problems that we face, or make the world any better than it is, and our societies better than they are.

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Brand On the Run

By now there can’t be many people who read a newspaper or go online who haven’t heard of the Dispatches documentary, Russell Brand: Hiding in Plain Sight, with its sickening allegations of rape, sexual assault and emotional abuse. Since then, thousands of outraged words have been written about misogyny, toxic masculinity, and the protection granted to powerful sexual predators by the institutions they work for.

There has also been a fair amount of back-pedalling, limited mea culpas or silence from leftists and left-of-centre writers who once fawned over Brand and ignored his brazenly misogynistic cruelty for years because he echoed their political views. I remember very well that strange period in 2014-15, when Brand was considered so important to the left and even to the Labour Party that the likes of Naomi Klein, Alistair Campbell, Owen Jones and Ed Miliband all felt the need to pay homage to him.

It was grotesque and ridiculous at the time to engage in such craven celebrity-worship, and it seems even more so now. Watching the clips from his live shows on the Dispatches programme, I was staggered to see people laughing when Brand joked about gross acts of sexual humiliation that - it now appears - he was actually carrying out.

You shouldn’t have had to know that he was doing these things in order to find this kind of humour repugnant and disturbing. But there was a lot that people did know. It’s shameful how many high-profile people who should have known better ignored Brand’s vicious bullying of Andrew Sachs and the slut-shaming of his grand-daughter, or the fact that he tried to pimp his assistant out to Jimmy Savile in a live interview.

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But then the same can be said about Brand’s fans today, such as the 2,000-strong audience that gave him a standing ovation at Wembley on the night the Dispatches programme was broadcast.

Apart from the mini-scandal that followed the Sachs affair, Brand’s open cruelty and depravity has not - until now - done him any harm whatsoever. 11.3 million Twitter followers; 6.3 million subscribers to his ‘Stay Free’ Youtube channel; wellness courses at Hay-on-Wye; articles for the Guardian and a guest-editorship of the New Statesman; books, tv appearances, Hollywood films - let no one say that toxic masculinity doesn’t pay if you wash it down with a Thesaurus and also make people larf, even if they don’t know what they’re laughing at.

Since his flirtation with revolutionary politics, Brand has moved away - or ‘metastasized’ as he would put it - into something very different, reaching into that increasingly wide Venn Diagram territory where ‘wellness’ and Gwyneth Paltrow-esque New Age spirituality overlap with alt-right conspiracy theory and anti-establishment ‘truth-telling’.

This is a man who calls his Youtube watchers ‘awakening wonders’, and sells Audible books on recovery and addiction which his website claims will awaken listeners ‘to the beauty and power in everything and how to escape the culture that wants to imprison you.’

Words are crucial to Brand’s grift. Orwell once said that the best prose should like a pane of glass, and reveal its meaning without drawing attention to itself. Brand’s public intellectual prose - and speech - is the opposite of that. It’s entirely designed to draw attention to himself and conceal its meaning, or hint at a meaning that is, if you think about too much, essentially meaningless. Consider this extract from a Big Issue interview that Brand gave last year:

‘Think about how the way you live today is connected to what you evolved for. Because when you came out of your mother, that infant was expecting to be living in a hunter-gatherer tribal society. Everything that’s happened to it since has been a jarring shock. And the psychological consequences you are experiencing are the result of that.’

I don’t know about you, but I’m pretty sure I did not come out of my mother looking for nuts or a sabretoothed steak, nor am I experiencing any psychological consequences of that , but doesn’t it sound freakin’ deep? Morecambe and Wise, eat your hearts out. This is what Brand does. He sounds deep even when he’s just splashing about in the paddling pool. And this pseudo-intellectual verbiage is layered with a light seasoning of lefty/sub-Chomskyite discourse about the ‘MSM’ and bug-eyed swooning about secret elite ‘agendas’ and ‘narratives’ .

Brand’s own ‘narratives’ have touched a wide range of themes and individuals dear to the alt-right’s toxic heart: from anti-Vax and Big Pharma to Covid denialism; from US biolabs built by Bill Gates in Ukraine to UFOs and extra-terrestrials; from the anti-Covid benefits of Ivermectin to Teddy Kennedy, and Hawaiian fires orchestrated with a laser beam (Bill Gates again), from FBI DNA harvesting programs to the Great Reset and the World Economic Forum.

The Truth-teller

All this is part of Brand’s ‘just askin’ questions’/challenging the corporate media truthism, and all delivered with manic intensity by the shamanic Jesus-cum-Charles Manson lookalike with the necklace and beads and the pendant who might have stepped out of Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia.

This is why Brand has received so much support from people like Alex Jones, Andrew Tate, Jordan Petersen, Dan Wootton, Ben Shapiro, Elon Musk, Donald Trump Jnr, Toby Young, George Galloway and Tucker Carlson. And it’s why you end up in pictures like this:

These are character references that you only want if you are trying to get a particularly warm place in Hell, and there’s a reason why you get support from people like this and - hint - it isn’t because of your support for social justice, equality and socialist revolution, or women’s rights.

Beyond these bigshot grifters, Twitter is awash with messages condemning the women who spoke against Brand, accusing them of making it up, doing it for money, or describing the Dispatches/Sunday Times team as instruments of Rupert Murdoch or, as Andrew Tate put it a ‘Matrix attack.’

This is the ‘agenda’ that Brand hinted at to his followers the night before the programme, and many of them appear all too willing to believe that he is indeed being ‘taken out’ by the ‘MSM’ or Big Pharma because he is an independent critical voice and an alternative media source.

No use trying to point out to these people that the allegations against Brand have been circulating for years, and - reportedly - subject to super-injunctions to prevent them from being made publicly. Or that the ‘MSM’ is not a monolithic entity at the beck and call of Rupert Murdoch and the pharmaceutical industry.

Or that Brand’s ‘truthtelling’ may not be as threatening as they think it is, because political dissidents aren’t usually millionaires who become even richer by monetizing their dissidence.

When Brand’s supporters say that Brand is being ‘tried by the media’ you can tell them till you’re blue in the face that the criminal charges that eventually put Harvey Weinstein in jail also began with a journalistic investigation. Or that the joint C4/Sunday Times investigation was a meticulous process that took more than a year to put together, and would not have reached the public eye had it not been absolutely legally watertight, which is why Brand’s lawyers have not taken any action against it.

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Brand’s followers know what they want to know and believe want they want to believe. But this terrifying credulity - and the callous indifference to Brand’s victims that goes with it - cannot be attributed to misogyny alone. If Brand is an expression of toxic masculinity, he is also a product of a very 21st century phenomenon: the political and cultural charlatan.

Charlatanry is not the same thing as lying, though it may certainly include it. Because charlatans do more than lie: they sell versions of themselves and project ideas and illusions that reflect whatever their target audience wants to see in them. The political charlatan is a mountebank and snake-oil vendor, peddling imaginary cures for real or imaginary diseases, feeding on fear, cynicism and anxiety, and happily swimming in the most toxic waters.

To paraphrase Egeus in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the charlatan seeks to steal the impression of other peoples fantasy in order to acquire fame, money, power, and cultural influence, or a combination of all these things.

The charlatan may or may not believe in what they’re selling. But because their beliefs are entirely directed towards their own personal aggrandisement, they can change their beliefs at any time, as Boris Johnson does, whenever it suits them. Because reality is only useful inasmuch as it can be bent to their whims and serve their own interests, charlatans can lie without considering the difference between truth or lies.

Needless to say, the early twenty-first century has been a golden age of charlatanry, and most, but by no means all of its proponents, are politically on the right. Some take up charlatanry from small beginnings as a career choice, and acquire huge followings by pumping toxic messages in the body politics - you know who they are.

Others, like Brand, use their celebrity status as a launching pad for all-out charlatanry. Some commentators this week have speculated that Brand intentionally began working the alt-right conspiracy seam in order to protect himself from the Weinstein-style reckoning that he knew would come. Personally, I doubt he had the foresight. Everything about the behaviour revealed in the Dispatches documentary suggests that he already felt powerful enough to do whatever he wanted, and sufficiently protected by his fame and money from any unwelcome consequences.

The grim ‘they’re coming for Russell’ and ‘why now?’ responses to the programme suggest that he was not entirely wrong. And this is the really alarming thing about our age of charlatanry: it’s not just the fact that charlatans exist, it’s the fact that so many people let them get away with it.

Because the golden age of the gilded charlatan isn’t just the mysterious product of individual charisma and amorality. It’s not just because there are new technological conduits available from ‘X’ to Youtube or Rumble, that enable them to gain access to wider audiences. The successful charlatan requires a willing and credulous audience that is waiting for the charlatan to appear - an audience that can be easily duped and perhaps wants to be duped. Nowadays, there is no shortage of digital crowds like this, to whom where the charlatan can offer anything from biolabs in Ukraine to Ivermectin so that they can ‘stay free.’

Distrustful and suspicious of politics-as-we-know-it and the media-as-we-know-it; frightened, disorientated and confused by a chaotic world that has no easy answers to complex problems; rocked by a seemingly endless procession of crises that challenge the late capitalist notion of the good life - the 21st century is an era overflowing with Gramsci’s ‘great variety of morbid symptoms.’

The entirely resistible rise of trashy, shallow narcissists and pseudo-libertarians like Russell Brand is one of those symptoms. And so is the collusion of his fans in his depravity and misogyny, and the cowardice and venality of those who once supported him and now, like Thomas Wyatt’s former friends, flee from the man who onetime did him seek.

There is no easy way out of this. If we live in an age of stupidity we also live in an age of depravity, in which way too many people are so desperate for the charlatan who can reflect their own paranoid views back to them, that they will not care if their hero is a rapist or a crook.

But in this particular instance, with this particular charlatan, it needs to end in court.

And if the allegations are proven to be true - and there is no reason beyond the conspiracy-sphere to believe that they aren’t - then we can only hope that this latest phase in Russell Brand’s ‘journey’ leads him to join Harvey Weinstein in jail, and that 2023 goes down as the year in which one more toxic charlatan finally got what he deserved.

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