Matthew Carr's Blog, page 9

The Settlers

I’m currently writing a book about the conquest of Patagonia, and some readers may remember, I was lucky enough to go to Patagonia last year as part of my research last year. I’ve spent most my time since reading and writing about the issues that I looked at during that journey. So naturally, I was very keen to see the film Los Colonos (The Settlers), by the Chilean director Felipe Gálvez Haberle, which is set in some of the places that I visited and deals with some of the themes in my book.

For those who don’t know, Gálvez’s film deals with the genocide of the Selk’nam or Ona people, who lived in the north of the Isla Grande (Big Island) of Tierra del Fuego. Unlike the Yámana or Yahgan ‘canoe Indians’, the Selk’nam were ‘foot Indians’, who lived in the grassy hills and plains north of the Sierra de Alvear on Isla Grande that they called karakinká - our land.

Separated from the South American mainland by the Strait of Magellan, Selk’nam tribes had inhabited these lands for some 9,000 years, living off the guanaco (a camelid species similar to lamas) herds that provided their main source of food and clothing.

The Selk’nam hunted guanaco on foot, using bows and arrows to wound or kill them and dogs to run them down. All this came to an end from the 1880s to the first decades of the twentieth century, when the colonization processes that were taking place elsewhere in southern Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego reached the Selk’nam, and all but wiped them out.

Until then, the Selk’nam had rarely seen white men. Unlike the Yahgan or Kawésqar ‘canoe Indians’ who inhabited the islands and coasts further south, they had very little contact with Europeans until the 1880s, when alluvial gold deposits were discovered on the coasts of Isla Grande, the Strait of Magellan and the surrounding islands. The ‘Patagonian gold rush’ brought miners and prospectors to Isla Grande for the first time. Selk’nam sometimes attacked miners who they saw as intruders and competitors for food, and miners sometimes kidnapped Selk’nam as sexual slaves.

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Military/scientific expeditions began to explore the island in this period, and these encounters also turned to armed confrontation. In 1886, the Romanian adventurer Julius Popper explored Tierra del Fuego on behalf of the Argentinian government. Popper took various photographs of the expedition, including this infamous picture of the aftermath of a ‘battle’:

But the real calamity for the Selk’nam people was the advent of the sheep-farming economy. From 1874 onwards the Chilean government began to lease large tracts of land to Chilean and foreign nationals who were willing to use them to churn out wool and mutton for mostly European markets. In theory, these concessions imposed limits on how much land you could own, in order to encourage smallholdings, but in practice these limitations were overcome by big landowners, using their political contacts in the local and regional governments.

This was the period in which men like José Menéndez, Mauricio Braun, and Rudolf Stubenrauch amassed vast wealth, and the Sociedad Explotadora de Tierra del Fuego (The Tierra del Fuego Exploitation Society), took over most of Isla Grande to become the biggest sheep-farming corporation in the world by 1930.

Genocide

All this was a disaster for the Selk’nam. Their lands were fenced off, depriving them of access to the sea, and driving away the guanaco herds on which they depended. Devoid of any sense of private property, they began hunting the animal they called the ‘white guanaco’ to compensate, and the ranchers and landowners responded with extreme violence. Unlike the conquest of northern Patagonia, which was primarily a military enterprise, the elimination of the Selk’nam was mostly privatised, paramilitary violence, carried out by hired gangs, peons and estate workers, who massacred and killed Selk’nam for their employers, and often provided body parts to prove each kill.

Many of them were foreign. One of the most notorious ‘Indian hunters’ of the period was Alexander MacLennan, a Scottish veteran of Kitchener’s army in Sudan, who the Selk’nam called the ‘chancho colorado’ (red pig), because of his reddish hair and beard. In Lucas Bridges’ classic memoir Uttermost Part of the Earth, MacClennan appears as ‘McInch’ to avoid libel, and Bridges describes the ‘uncrowned king of Rio Grande’ as ‘a most curious mixture. He who took open pride in having persecuted and murdered the Indians - albeit for their own good - hated to see a sore-necked yoke-ox, or a horse being unduly spurred.’

There were many MacLennans on Isla Grande, who regarded the Selk’nam as vermin and shot them on sight, or left sheep poisoned with strychnine for hungry Selk’nam to eat. Eventually, landowners reached an agreement with the Salesian order to deport Selk’nam to the Salesian mission on Dawson Island - the site of one of Pinochet’s future concentration camps - where they died in droves from measles, tuberculosis, smallpox and syphilis.

By the 1920s, a people that had numbered between 3,000-4,000 in the 1880s had been reduced to less than a hundred. The Selk’nam stood in the way of an economic model, financed by national and international capital and directed towards foreign markets, that saw Patagonia’s ‘empty’ lands purely as pasture for sheep and cattle.

Until relatively recently, the horrific consequences of that model received little public acknowledgement. In the 2008 report by Chile’s Comisión Verdad Histórico y Nuevo Trato con los Pueblos Indígenas (Commission on Historical Truth and New Deal with Indigenous Peoples) described the destruction of the Aonikenk, the Selk’nam, the Kawésqar and Yahgan as a ‘great tragedy. The greatest committed against the Indigenous peoples in Chilean territory.’ The Report declared unequivocally that ‘ It was a process of extermination that took place. It was a genocide.’

The ‘genocide of the Selk’nam’ was the title of the sculptor Richard Yasic Israel’s epic mural in Porvenir on Isla Grande, which I saw last year:

And it’s also the subject of Gálvez’s brutal and uncompromising film. There are real historical characters here: Alexander MacLennan and José Menéndez are central protagonists. Even the legendary Argentinian scientist, explorer, and obsessive collector of indigenous skulls, Francisco ‘Perito’ Moreno makes an appearance.

But Los Colonos is not a documentary rendition of any particular event, but a personal reflection on colonization in general, and the genocidal colonization of the Chilean south in particular. It asks its (Chilean) audience to see how the violence it depicts was both central to the history of the nation, and also how it has been erased from that history.

On the surface, the ‘plot’ is a conventional Western device: hard men sent on a violent journey, in a harsh, unforgiving landscape that is also breathtakingly beautiful. Anyone who has ever been to Patagonia will swoon at the way the Gálvez’s cinematographer Simone D'Arcangelo has rendered the wild desolation of northern Tierra del Fuego.

From the opening sequence, the film has a stark, ominous intensity, as ‘José Menéndez’ sends his murderous lackey ‘Alexander MacLennan’ - still wearing his British army uniform - to clear Tierra del Fuego of Indians from the Strait of Magellan to the Atlantic. The trailer gives you the flavour:

We’ve seen something like this before, in The Searchers or The Unforgiven, in Cormac McCarthy novels. MacLennan is accompanied by an American bounty-hunter named Bill, who can ‘smell an Indian from ten miles away.’ And the third member of the party is Segundo, a mestizo (mixed race) peon from the island of Chiloé, chosen for his marksmanship.

Segundo is a reluctant participant in this exterminatory journey. And even though he rarely speaks, the camera frequently registers his anger, horror and disgust at his two companions, both of whom treat him with casual racism. Segundo, like the other indigenous characters in the film who have become part of white society, reminds me of the Incas who accompany the Spanish conquistadores in Herzog’s Aguirre, Wrath of God.

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In both films, the ‘Indians’ are prisoners of colonial society, whose survival depends on doing what they are told and never questioning or challenging anything. Even when they are protagonists in the dubious enterprises they have been forced into, they are also observers, witnesses to events they want no part of, who exude unexpressed trauma and profound melancholy.

Segundo is accused by his companions of ‘dual loyalties’, and it’s clear that he is sickened by what he is being asked to do. I won’t say what that is. Suffice to say that the violence is as brutal as it needs to be, but no more than that. Compared to Sam Peckinpah or Clint Eastwood, it’s almost restrained.

MacLennan’s journey takes him to places that he didn’t expect, including a terrifying encounter with a psychopathic Kurtz-like English army colonel who doesn’t appear in any historical record of the period. But Segundo meets a Selk’nam woman named Kiepja - a little homage to the Selk’nam shaman Lola Kiepja (1874-1966), who the American anthropologist Anne Chapman once described as the ‘last Selk’nam.

And at this point, about three quarters of the way through the film, Gálvez does something no director of Westerns would do: he suddenly abandons the characters, the landscape and the exterminatory journey, and takes us to José Menéndez’s palace in Punta Arenas, seven years later.

Menéndez and his wife are receiving an envoy of the Chilean president, named Marcial Vicuña, who has come to the south, supposedly to investigate some of the crimes against the Selk’nam for which MacLennan - and Menéndez were responsible.

For a few moments, you’re allowed to believe that the Chilean government really did seek justice for the Selk’nam, even if that meant challenging the all-powerful ‘king of Patagonia.’ Menéndez and his wife believe it, and launch into a spirited a defence of their actions. But Vicuña has other intentions. He’s there to show the public that the government cares about mass murder, but not to actually do anything about it or seek redress. As far as I know, nothing like this ever happened, apart from the 1895 judicial investigation into the vejamenes - abuses - against the Selk’nam, ordered by the Chilean government, which came to nothing and found no one guilty of anything.

But Gálvez’s point is well-made, and it’s rammed home further in a brilliant sequence in which Vicuña visits Segundo and Kiepja (now named Rosa) who are living by the sea in Chiloé. Accompanied by two policemen, Vicuña tells Segundo that he is seeking justice for MacLennan’s crimes, and then forces Segundo and Rosa to drink tea, wearing ‘civilized’ clothes, so that he can film them.

Kiepja refuses to play the part of ‘Rosa’, and disobeys Vicuña’s order to ‘drink tea’. The last shot of her angry, defiant face reminded me of the photographs taken by the French army of ‘unveiled’ women in Algeria during the Algerian war. This, Gálvez suggests, is the colonial masquerade that Chile remembers. As the credits roll, old film sequences show immigrants arriving in Chile, trains and boats, and all the trappings of modernity. It’s a long way from the brooding ‘bloodlands’ of Tierra del Fuego, and a bold invitation to Chile to rethink how it got to be the way it is, and what the ‘conquest’ of Tierra del Fuego really entailed.

Of course Tierra del Fuego and Patagonia aren’t the only places where these processes unfolded, and this why, in the 21st century, the fate of the world’s indigenous peoples under colonialism remains a searing political issue. And this brilliant film/essay is part of that re-examination of why, in the 21st century, and a powerful reminder of Walter Benjamin’s observation that ‘there is no document of civilization that is not also a record of barbarism.’

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In Plain Sight

It’s more than two decades since I read the late Stanley Cohen’s ground-breaking States of Denial: Knowing About Atrocities and Suffering (2001). In the introduction, Cohen recalls his own experiences growing up in apartheid South Africa, when he asked himself why his own outrage at the injustice he observed all around was not reflected in the society around him:

Why did others, even those raised in similar families, school and neighbourhoods, who read the same papers, walked the same streets, apparently not “see” what we saw. Could they be living in another perceptual universe - where the horrors of apartheid were invisible and the physical presence of black people often slipped from awareness? Or perhaps they saw exactly what we saw, but just didn’t care or didn’t see anything wrong.

Cohen went on to become a sociologist and a lifelong human rights activist. States of Denial was a valiant attempt to bring his discipline to bear on the subject of why people become become ‘everyday bystanders’ of atrocities who ‘block out, shut off or repress’ troubling or disturbing information to the point when they ‘react as if they do not know what they know.’

Some of these observations related to Israel, where Cohen moved in 1980. A Zionist in his youth, Cohen opposed the military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, and became a strong critic of Israeli repression of the Palestinians. In his book, he describes his work with the Israeli human rights group B’Ttselem on the torture of Palestinian detainees and the obstacles it encountered:

Our evidence of the routine use of violent and illegal methods of interrogation was to be confirmed by numerous other sources. But we were immediately thrown into the politics of denial. The official and mainstream response was venomous: outright denial (it doesn’t happen); discrediting (the organization was biased, manipulated or gullible); renaming (yes, something does happen, but it is not torture); and justification (anyway ‘it’ was morally justified). Liberals were uneasy and concerned. Yet there was no outrage.

Cohen returned to the UK in 1996, and died in 2013, but were he alive today, I suspect he would have recognized the ongoing devastation of Gaza as a textbook example of the ‘politics of denial’. According to the latest figures from the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, the IDF has killed more than 31,988 people, most of whom are women and children, with another 7,000 buried in the rubble, and wounded 74, 188. To put these figures in perspective, this February civilian casualties in Ukraine were estimated at 10, 582 dead and 19, 875 injured since the Russian invasion began on 24 February 2022.

So in just under six months, Israel has killed more civilians in Gaza than Russia has killed in two years. It has destroyed or damaged more than 60 percent of Gaza’s housing stock, 3 churches, 224 mosques, 155 health centres, 126 ambulances. Nearly 2.3 million Palestinians have been displaced, and 1.1 million people are facing ‘catastrophic levels of food insecurity,’ which threatens to become a famine.

All this has been done with the indirect support or direct collusion of the United States government, the European Union, and the British government. Despite the outpouring of rage and horror on the streets of so many cities across the world, liberal democracies that claim to uphold an international order based on human rights and universal moral norms have ‘known and not known’ what has been taking place in front of their eyes.

Many of these governments once railed against ‘dictators killing their own people’, and used atrocities and human rights abuses as a moral lubricant for liberal ‘interventions’ and ‘ humanitarian’ wars to prevent ‘massacres’ and ‘bloodbaths.’ Apart from a few tepid words of condemnation, when the obscenity of what is unfolding became too much to ignore, these same governments have enabled Israel to inflict incredible carnage on a mostly unarmed and defenceless population.

None of is taking place in secret. In February, Amnesty claimed that ‘Fresh evidence of deadly unlawful attacks in the occupied Gaza Strip…demonstrates how Israeli forces continue to flout international humanitarian law, obliterating entire families with total impunity.’ Israeli soldiers routinely post tweets and TikTok videos of themselves gleefully blowing up Palestinian homes, wearing Palestinian lingerie and women’s dresses, humiliating Palestinian prisoners made to strip down to their underwear, and generally exulting in the destruction.

They have done this without any criticism or sanction from their own government, or from the governments that support what Israel is doing. When Israel accused 14 UNRWA workers of being Hamas operatives in January, nine of the countries that fund UNRWA immediately cut their funding even though Israel has still not provided any evidence to support these allegations. The US has just announced that it will not resume funding to UNRWA until 2025 - regardless of the fact that UNRWA is more necessary now than at anytime since 1948.

This is not ignorance, but complicity, and no amount of handwringing or piecemeal, performative drops of emergency aid can conceal the collusion of these governments in the dismantling of Gazan society and the destruction of its people. Biden recently warned Israel not to attack Rafah on the grounds that ‘[We] cannot have another 30,000 more Palestinians dead,’ - the first thirty thousand are tax-free - yet Netanyahu has declared that Israel will carry out its planned assault on Rafah that is clearly intent on turning Gaza into a Palestinian-free zone.

There is clearly no red line that Israel’s allies are prepared to impose, and no outcome they will not tolerate. It is an epic moral failure that will resonate for decades, and whatever the strategic and geopolitical calculations behind this collusion, it is matched by a consistent refusal to recognise or acknowledge the full dimensions of the horror that is unfolding in front of our eyes.

All the factors that Cohen analyses in his book have contributed to the ‘atrocity denialism’ in Gaza: ‘normalization’; ‘defence mechanisms and cognitive errors’; ‘collusion and cover-up’; the ‘discourse of official denial’; ‘lies and self-deception.’

There are many reasons why we have reached this point, not the least of which is a well-honed and effective Israeli propaganda machine, supported by a range of organizations from the Anti-Defamation League to the Jewish Board of Deputies that deny everything Israel is accused of, accuse its critics of ‘blood libels’ and antisemitism, or use the word ‘Hamas’ as the explanation for everything that is happening, and for everything that Israel is doing.

Why did Israel attack a hospital? Because Hamas operatives are there. Why have civilians been killed? Because Hamas killed them. Why are Palestinians starving? Because Hamas is starving them. Why have doctors been killed? Because many of them are Hamas operatives or members of NGOs linked to Hamas. Why is UNRWA criticizing Israel? Because UNRWA is a proxy for Hamas. Why are demonstrators across the world criticizing Israel? Because they are ‘hate mobs’ and antisemites who support Hamas.

Why has the UN Security Council just agreed on a (non-binding) resolution calling for a ceasefire? Because, according to Israeli minister of national security, Itamar Ben Gabir, the Security Council ‘is an anti-Semitic institution, with an anti-Semitic Secretary General, who is encouraging Hamas towards total victory.’

If you believe that, you will believe anything, and too many are prepared to believe whatever Israel tells them: social media trolls, rightwing influencers, celebrity Zionists, and politicians who are too cowardly to admit to their own hypocrisy and complicity directly, but prefer instead to give lectures on ‘extremism’ from the Downing Street podium, or use the war in Gaza to accuse Sadiq Khan of handing over London to Islamist radicals, or cut off funding to German pro-Palestinian artists and cultural organizations.

There is no doubt that there are extremists and antisemites who have rallied to the Palestinian cause, some of whom have used the Gaza war to spread antisemitic conspiracy theories. As I write, Twitter is awash with people citing the Moscow terrorist attacks to prove that Mossad is behind Islamic State, and behind the attacks in Moscow as well.

There is more where this came from. At the same time, there is a vast protest movement that does not ‘support Hamas’ or approve of Hamas’s actions on October 7th, and which sees the ongoing slaughter in Gaza as another dire chapter in the oppression and dispossession of the Palestinians that began in 1917. But Israel and its supporters have spread the antisemitism net so wide that it is virtually impossible to criticize the actions of the Israeli government in Gaza without being accused of it.

The few public figures who do this can instantly expect to have these accusations flung at them. Charlotte Church is just the latest example. Church can speak for herself, and she has done, with far more eloquence than the legions of outraged trolls who called her stupid, naive and a Jew-hater.

Such manufactured outrage is also part of Gaza atrocity denialism . And regardless of the messages emanating from pro-Palestinian street protests, the mainstream political and media conversation continues to downplay Israeli atrocities, or refers continuously to October 7th as if the horrific events of that day somehow cancel all the horrors that have unfolded afterwards or - to those who have followed the ‘Israeli-Palestinian conflict’ - to those that came before.

As a result , Israeli newspapers like Ha’aretz and less mainstream outlets like +972 Magazine often present a far more nuanced understanding of the war - and a more honest assessment of the Israeli government’s actions - than you are likely to find in any British or American news report, especially when such reports rely on the likes of Douglas Murray.

In the last five months, Murray has been a ubiquitous figure in the British and American media, even though his view of the ‘conflict’ is firmly aligned with the most extremist sectors of the Zionist movement that call for the complete annihilation of the Palestinians. Murray claims to be ‘covering’ the war in Gaza, but it is his willingness to relentlessly recycle IDF talking points that has made him something of a hero to the Israeli far-right and to legions of internet trolls, as a February article in the Spectator makes clear:

Hamas’s own figures – not to be relied upon – suggest that around 28,000 people have been killed in Gaza since October. Most of the international media likes to claim these people are all innocent civilians. In fact, many of the dead will have been killed by the quarter or so Hamas and Islamic Jihad rockets that fall short and land inside Gaza

These are standard component of Israeli atrocity denialism: If Palestinian civilians die, it’s because Hamas killed them or used them as ‘human shields.’ If you can’t prove that, or the statistics reach a point when that argument looks flaky, you simply cast doubt on the casualty figures by suggesting that Hamas made them up. And if some other organization cites these statistics, you say that it got them from Hamas. This what Stan Cohen would call ‘the discourse of official denial’, and if that fails, there is always another smear to fall back on, as Murray does again and again:

I suspect it is a moral explanation which explains the situation so many people find themselves in. They simply enjoy being able to accuse the world’s only Jewish state of ‘genocide’ and ‘Nazi-like behaviour’. They enjoy the opportunity to wound Jews as deeply as possible. Many find it satisfies the intense fury they feel when Israel is winning.

The fact that this preening apologist for mass slaughter thinks that Israel is ‘winning’ is another example of why Israel’s rightwing friends are not necessarily the kind of friends that Israel needs. An article in Ha’aretz recently worried that ‘the mass killing in Gaza will poison Israeli souls forever.’ Even the Economist recognises that an Israeli ‘victory’ in Gaza has already become a moral defeat, and warned recently that the failure of ceasefire talks ‘ could leave Israel locked in the bleakest trajectory of its 75-year existence, featuring endless occupation, hard-right politics and isolation.’

You will find more facts in the courageous and comprehensive testimony on the destruction in Gaza by the Hebrew University professor Lee Mordechai, than anything from Murray’s ‘moral clarity.’ Mordechai is a historian who specialises in Byzantine environmental history, and he wrote his piece as a personal response to ‘the disappointing general silence on this issue among many international and Israeli academic institutions, especially those that are well-positioned to comment on it.’

The information Mordechai has collected is all in the public domain. Murray could have found it too, were it not for the fact that his icy Etonian bloodlust is matched by such complete indifference to the deaths of Palestinians whose ‘innocence’ is always questionable. And he isn’t the only one. Take this recent tweet from the week the renowned ‘defence intellectual’ Edward Luttwak:

Yes, how dare a newspaper write an ‘uncritically sympathetic’ article about the ‘missing’ youth in Gaza who look like ‘us’, instead of the ones who look ‘Arab or Muslim’, and can presumably be killed with impunity? For Luttwak, like Murray, there is no Palestinian who cannot be killed, and no such thing as an Israeli atrocity.

This dehumanisation has always been present in media depictions of the Palestinians, and the Gazan Palestinians in particular, but Hamas’s ISIS-style rampage on October 7th has deepened and intensified it, to the point when Hamas’s atrocities have become both a justification and a smokescreen for limitless Israeli retaliation, and a rhetorical device with which to attack anyone who criticizes the scope of such retaliation.

The Zone of Disinterest

Consider the response to Jonathan Glazer’s Oscar speech earlier this month, following his award for The Zone of Interest. For those who haven’t seen it, Glazer’s film is a mesmerising and disturbing study of the Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss and his family, and of the normalization of atrocity that makes its possible to live an everyday domestic existence only a few yards away from a place where the most unspeakable horrors are unfolding.

Hoss’s family live in the shadow of genocide, in precisely the state of knowing-but-not-knowing that Cohen discusses. Their collective compartmentalisation enables them to go through the motions of normality, even as machinery of mass murder snarls and churns in the background, and the occasional body part floats down the river in the midst of a picnic.

Though they rarely speak about what is going on next door, the film subtly makes it clear that most of them are aware of or sense what is taking place beyond their ‘zone of interest’; they have simply decided to screen it out. Before the Oscars, The Zone of Interest had mostly been praised, but that abruptly changed when Glazer stood on the podium, and read out a speech saying the unsayable:

All our choices were made to reflect and confront us in the present, not to say look what they did then, but rather look what we do now. Our film shows where dehumanization leads at its worst. It’s shaped all of our past and present. Right now, we stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation which has led to conflict for so many innocent people. Whether the victims of October — whether the victims of October the 7th in Israel or the ongoing attack on Gaza, all the victims of this dehumanization, how do we resist?

Though the speech was applauded at the ceremony itself, it generated a chorus of horrified indignation elsewhere. László Nemes, the director of the Holocaust masterpiece Son of Saul, said that Glazer should have ‘stayed silent’ and accused him of disseminating ‘propaganda intended to eradicate all Jewish presence.’ The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) tweeted that Israel was ‘hijacking Judaism or the Holocaust by defending itself against genocidal terrorists’ and claimed that Glazer’s’ ‘factually incorrect & morally reprehensible’ comments ‘minimise the Shoah & excuse terrorism of the most heinous kind.’

At no point did Glazer ‘excuse terrorism.’ On the contrary, he explicitly referred to the ‘victims of October 7th in Israel’ as well as the ‘ongoing attack on Gaza’ as an example of the mutual ‘dehumanisation’ at the heart of the moral complicity he analyses in his film.

But to Israel and its supporters there are only ever victims on one side, and any public figure who suggests anything to the contrary will always be attacked, or find their words distorted. An open letter with 1,000 signatories from Hollywood creatives tried to use Glazer’s own words against him

We refute our Jewishness being hijacked for the purpose of drawing a moral equivalence between a Nazi regime that sought to exterminate a race of people, and an Israeli nation that seeks to avert its own extermination. Every civilian death in Gaza is tragic. Israel is not targeting civilians. It is targeting Hamas. The moment Hamas releases the hostages and surrenders is the moment this heartbreaking war ends. This has been true since the Hamas attacks of October 7th.

The use of words like “occupation” to describe an indigenous Jewish people defending a homeland that dates back thousands of years, and has been recognized as a state by the United Nations, distorts history. 

This response goes a long way to answer the question of how the ‘dehumanization’ that Glazer describes becomes possible, and makes the victims of Israeli violence invisible.

Firstly, there is the idea that the atrocities carried out by Hamas of October 7th had no other purpose, context or motivation beyond the extermination of all Jews - thereby making any response, no matter how violent, seem like a legitimate act of self-defense. Then there is the faux-war-is-hell anguish (‘every civilian death in Gaza is tragic’, ‘heartbreaking war’), which pays lip service to the idea that there are victims on both sides, while simultaneously ignoring the shocking discrepancy in the death toll and the devastation.

This is followed by the downright lie that ‘Israel is not targeting civilians. It is targeting Hamas.’ And lastly, but by no means least, the open letter refuses to even accept that there has ever been an occupation, deliberately conflating ‘homeland’ with ‘state’, and ignoring the differences between the two, while also suggesting that Jews, unlike Palestinians, are ‘indigenous’.

All this belongs to the nationalist playbook that Orwell once described, in which ‘Material facts are suppressed, dates altered, quotations removed from their context and doctored so as to change their meaning. Events which, it is felt, ought not to have happened are left unmentioned and ultimately denied.’

The result is the denialism that we are seeing now: the denial of atrocities and the denial of Palestinian humanity; the denial of history; the denial of occupation; the denial of everything except Israel’s seemingly unique right to engage in limitless violence.

It seems a long time ago now, since Tony Blair told the Labour Party in 2001, in a speech dripping with nineteenth century imperial moral fervour that ‘The starving, the wretched, the dispossessed, the ignorant, those living in want and squalor from the deserts of northern Africa to the slums of Gaza, to the mountain ranges of Afghanistan: they too are our cause.’

Now - and this was clear even at the time - it turns out that the ‘slums of Gaza’ are not ‘our cause’, after all, and that there are some massacres that are tolerable, and some states that are allowed to commit them, without complete license and impunity. And when this happens, the same governments that once wanted to bomb the world into a new moral order, will fold their arms, shake their heads, and look away, and they expect everybody else to do the same.

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March 2020

Thanks for reading Matt Carr’s Infernal Machine! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Before I came to Substack, I had a blog with the same name as my current newsletter. By the time I made that move, I calculated that I’d written more than a million words in about twelve years. That is a lot of words, probably too many. I definitely wrote too much in terms of the readership I had (small) and the money I made (none). But I felt compelled to do it nonetheless , because writing was and is my main instrument for trying to making sense of this cruel and senseless world, responding the corrupt politics of the new century, and trying - a much harder task! - to imagine better possibilities.

The Internet gave me, as it has given so many others, a place where I could attempt to do this without catering to any editorial demands except my own. Many of the pieces I wrote were instant reactions to the catalogue of political horrors that the 21st century has given us, and which show no signs of abating.

Nowadays the voluminous flow of daily information and disinformation passes in such rapid succession, that some events, perspectives, debates, and outrages are easily forgotten. So my blog is a kind of antidote to my own amnesia and disorientation, if no one else’s. It can be useful, revelatory, and occasionally disappointing, to look back on what I thought at a particular time, or what was happening at a particular time, and consider to what extent things that I thought might happen actually turned out in the end.

Because they were instant off-the-cuff pieces, or perhaps because of the limitations of my particular analytical lens, the outcomes that I imagined didn’t always materialise, but I try to forgive myself, because prophecy doesn’t have to be one of my professional or personal skills.

In view of last week’s post about the pandemic, I found myself looking back to 2020, and saw how my responses to the Covid-19 virus changed within a month from a ‘keep calm and carry on’ stoicism to the stunned realization that yes, after so many false alarms, this really was exactly as bad as it seemed to be.

This piece was written on 15 March, 2020, the day before Johnson told the country ‘now is the time for everyone to stop non-essential contact and travel.’

Four years later, I offer it here, as a snapshot of a particular moment that I hope will never be repeated, when the world shut down in front of our eyes and no one really knew what would happen next.

Waiting for Corona

“The face of London was—now indeed strangely altered: I mean the whole mass of buildings, city, liberties, suburbs, Westminster, Southwark, and altogether; for as to the particular part called the city, or within the walls, that was not yet much infected. But in the whole the face of things, I say, was much altered; sorrow and sadness sat upon every face; and though some parts were not yet overwhelmed, yet all looked deeply concerned; and, as we saw it apparently coming on, so every one looked on himself and his family as in the utmost danger. Were it possible to represent those times exactly to those that did not see them, and give the reader due ideas of the horror that everywhere presented itself, it must make just impressions upon their minds and fill them with surprise.”

Daniel Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year, 1722

These are strange times, and they aren’t times that many of us expected to find ourselves living in. It’s not that we haven’t imagined them before. Pandemics, epidemics, plagues, alien invasions, terrorist attacks, floods, zombies, nuclear wars and cataclysms – all these possibilities have haunted the modern world for more than two hundred years, as writers, filmmakers, security analysts and governments have imagined and reimagined the potential sources of societal and civilisational breakdown that will push the world over the edge.

These visions of collapse aren’t uniquely modern. From the biblical apocalypse to the flood-myths of the Hopi Indians, different societies have considered the possibility – or the inevitability – of their own destruction.

In modern times however, such fears are often exacerbated by a persistent sense that there are too many people who are closer to each other than they ought to be, and connected by fragile structures that are easily overturned and broken. This is one reason why we constantly turn to disaster movies with a kind of awed fascination, because the prospect of our destruction is frightening and also fascinating, and even though human societies are often much more resilient than we think, we can never entirely dismiss the possibility that there might one day be an ‘end’ to the things we take for granted.

We are very far from this outcome – at least as far as the coronavirus is concerned. Nevertheless we are now in uncharted and unprecedented territory. In little more than three months we have entered a world in which what once seemed incredible or impossible has become normal.

In the space of a few weeks, entire cities and countries have been quarantined or subjected to various forms of lockdown, and millions of people have been subjected to the most extraordinary range of restrictions ever imposed in peacetime. In China, volunteers and state officials in hazmat suits have delivered fruit, vegetables, and even MacDonalds to entire regions, in a formidable feat of logistics and civil mobilisation, and phone apps now tell quarantined Chinese and Taiwanese where they are allowed to walk and whether they have gone too far from their allotted zone.

In South Korea, a single member of the Shincheonji Church of Jesus spread the virus through hundreds of people, and the state tracked down all 230,00 members of the group to see if they had contracted the virus. In Italy and Iran, health systems have been brought to their knees by the surge in cases. Some of them have died horrifically, isolated from their relatives and loved ones, and doctors have been forced through the sheer volume of cases to deny healthcare to some of the victims and decide who lives and dies.

All this has weakened and damaged the structures that underpin and hold global society and the global economy together. Stock markets have plummeted; supply chains have become frayed or broken – the whole notion of endless economic growth that sustains early 21st century capitalism has been undermined by a virus that crosses frontiers as easily as a hedge-fund or laundered money.

It remains to be seen how all this will play out. But already it echoes all the catastrophic films and novels we have seen and read, and which also seems to go beyond them. We now inhabit a world of fear, dread, and anxiety, in which planes turn back in mid-air to avoid a danger that is invisible and potentially omnipresent; in which Spanish police order people not to walk in parks; in which it is no longer possible to plan for anything more than a few weeks or even days ahead; in which we must think not only about washing our hands and not touching our faces, but about every surface we touch, and every person we meet.

All this has obliged us to move away from each other. We are told not to hug, kiss or shake hands, but to bump elbows and maintain a two-metre distance. We routinely use words like social-distancing, self-isolating, quarantine, and lockdown, that seem to have come from some dystopian movie. Like the Londoners in Defoe’s fictional reconstruction of the 1665 plague, we feed on, and often horrify ourselves, with bits and pieces of fragmentary and contradictory information, that ‘spread rumours and reports of things, and …improve them by the invention of men.’

Here in the UK, we hear one day that our government is pursuing a strategy of ‘herd-immunity’ that might require up to 500,000 deaths. Two days later we learn that the government is not pursuing that strategy, but may confine everyone aged over seventy to their homes for four months.

Even as we pinch ourselves to remind ourselves that this is real, we remain in a kind of ‘phony war’ situation. In about two weeks time we expect the numbers of coronavirus victims to soar, and we anticipate some form of lockdown, with no idea how long it will last. What we do know is that many people will die, and that most of them will the elderly and vulnerable, that is to say, our parents, grandparents, and relatives.

Many of us over a certain age know that there is a possibility that we may be the ones who die. All this is bad enough, but it is made worse by the fact that we are led by leaders very much like the ones Shelley once described, who neither see, nor feel, nor know.

Here we have a government led by a Poundland Churchill who compares fighting a virus to squashing a sombrero. In the United States, the president is a man who has apparently attempted to bribe a German pharmaceutical company into developing a vaccine exclusively for Americans.

This is the predicament in which we find ourselves, and here in the UK, neighborhoods and communities are beginning to mobilise in order to provide each other with the support and protection that they sense will not be forthcoming from their own government. All of us know that NHS workers will be on the frontline, but we also know that even their best efforts will not be able to save the people we care about, and that we will have to do what we can to help.

In these circumstances, it’s incumbent on us to show resilience, courage, humanity, and solidarity; to prepare ourselves for tragedy and loss, and also keep in mind that one day we will get through this. But however this ends, and however many people become sick or die, it is difficult to imagine that we can return to the same ‘normality’ that we had before. This emergency has been societal, national, and global.

In the UK and the US, it has exposed the weakness of national healthcare systems that were already poor or inadequate, or undermined by cuts and underfunding. In exposing the institutional and political failings that created this situation, the crisis has already called into question the priorities of the prevailing economic model and its abandonment of the public sphere.

It remains to be seen whether the coronavirus emergency deals a death blow to the populist movements that have wrought such havoc these last few years, but already it has revealed the uselessness and incompetence of some of its representatives when presented with a real crisis rather than the ones they have manufactured.

Already it’s clear that they will not be the heroes in this emergency. That mantle goes to the nurses and doctors across the world who have worked beyond the point of exhaustion, even at the risk of their own lives; to the scientists now working in laboratories to find a vaccine; to the volunteers who stepped up without even being asked to help strangers. We should take inspiration and hope from them.

Many years ago, imprisoned for years for his political activity, the Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet wrote these lines:

Living is no laughing matter: you must live with great seriousness like a squirrel, for example— I mean without looking for something beyond and above living, I mean living must be your whole occupation.Living is no laughing matter: you must take it seriously, so much so and to such a degree that, for example, your hands tied behind your back, your back to the wall, or else in a laboratory in your white coat and safety glasses, you can die for people— even for people whose faces you’ve never seen, even though you know living is the most real, the most beautiful thing.

It always will be. And if we remember that, we can get through this. If we can organise to protect each other, and extend that net of solidarity even as we demand that our governments fulfil their duty of protection to us; then perhaps we can turn this tragedy into the seedbed of a better future.

In fighting COVID-19, perhaps we can discover how we might respond to the even more calamitous possibilities now bearing down upon us as a result of the climate emergency.

In this way we might discover something entirely counterintuitive: that in separating from each other and withdrawing into our homes to save those weaker and more vulnerable than ourselves, we might find a way back to each other, even as we sing our songs at the empty streets, and sit between four walls waiting for corona.

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Breathtaking

In January this year, the comedian Rosie Holt did one of her brilliant fake-Tory MP sketches, in which her gormlessly wide-eyed Helen Whately-esque persona was asked by GMB’s Susanna Reid why the government hadn’t known more about the sub-postmaster scandal. In her defence, Holt’s character accused Toby Jones and ITV of failing in a ‘duty of care’ by not having made more tv dramas earlier.

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It was very funny, but not as absurd as Holt made it sound. Because nowadays, it really does seem that the UK public needs even the most egregious institutional failings and social issues to be presented as tv drama before it pays any attention to them, and certainly before the government does. Once upon a time you wouldn’t necessarily have looked to ITV to do this, but now we can add the NHS drama Breathtaking to ITV’s burgeoning list of true-life dramas that transcend mere entertainment.

Adapted by Jed Mercurio from Dr Rachel Clarke’s book, this three-part drama is a powerful, hard-hitting and visceral piece of work, which depicts in graphic detail the impact of the pandemic on the NHS, while also taking aim at the governmental lying and mismanagement that made a terrible situation even worse.

Watching NHS staff desperately trying to cope with a pandemic for which the service was so ill-prepared, while facing a welter of contradictory policies from the worst government in British history, brought back memories of those first months in 2020, when the world suddenly fell apart. It already seems like decades ago since Boris Johnson initiated - as we now know through gritted teeth - the first lockdown of March 2020.

I remember very well how I stood outside my house on the first Thursday of the official beginning of the pandemic and clapped, along with most of the houses on my street, for the NHS workers who were only just beginning to bear the brunt of the Covid-19 virus. We even persuaded a singer in our neighbourhood to sing Stand By Me from her attic window to a chorus from the street below.

Few of us knew what was going on in hospitals at that time, but many of us had seen the awful images coming in from Italy and other places, and all of us understood that the same thing could happen here. These were terrifyingly novel realisations, in a post-industrial society that tends to take its security for granted, and thinks of itself as immune to the calamities that take place elsewhere in the world.

Here in the UK, death belongs mostly to the private sphere - the one thing all of us can be certain about, and yet prefer not to talk about, until we have no choice. Only occasionally are we reminded of what lies ahead, when an ambulance wails past or we watch the stately progress of a hearse slowing down traffic.

COVID-19 was different. For the first time since World War II, we faced the very real prospect of mass death. Living, as most of us do, in an urbanised world of bricks and concrete in which nature and the ‘environment’ are seen as something separate from ourselves, we were all reminded that we were in fact part of nature, at the mercy of organic processes that might or might not have originated in a wet market or a cave full of bats on the other side of the world.

Many of us felt helpless as well as vulnerable, and so we retreated into our homes in an attempt to protect ourselves from a virus that seemed to spreading everywhere instantaneously, through transportation systems that had brought the world closer together than it had ever been. Airports, train and bus stations had now became lines of lethal transmission that bound Wuhan to Lombardy, Valencia to Milan, in the first genuinely global emergency that many of us had ever known.

We understood that our chances of survival depended on the men and women who were on the frontline risking their own lives, because they didn’t have the necessary protective equipment. It was a sombre and humbling realisation. Under better rulers than the ones we had, and in a better time than the one we have been living through, such a moment might have become the basis for a better society. Many other people clearly believed this. I remember walking through deserted Sheffield streets in which every window seemed to have a child’s drawing of a rainbow or a message praising the NHS.

The hope we placed in the NHS was easy. It was far more difficult to trust a government that millions of us had no faith in, led by a man whose entire career had been based on lying and bluff, who presented himself to us as a pandemic Churchill and who - we now know - believed that people who had passed a certain age had had ‘a good innings’ and should be abandoned and left to die.

But nevertheless we did what the government said, because we had no choice. Because we were all, or so it seemed, in the same predicament. We were all dependent on each other, and on people we had never met, and we recognised that we were buying time to help the NHS by reducing transmission, while we waited for a vaccine

Of course we weren’t quite in it together, because we never are. The virus found its way more easily to some sections of the population than others, penetrating faultlines of race, class and social inequality. ‘Lockdown’ was always easier to bear for some people than it was for others. For some it even became pleasurable; for others their homes became cages.

But still we clapped, because NHS workers were beginning to die, because we recognised their courage and heroism, or at least most of us did. In a single week in March 2020, the Royal College of Nursing warned that community nurses in uniform were being spat at in the street by people calling them ‘disease spreaders’, and the Kent Ambulance Service reported that six of its ambulances had had holes drilled into their tyres, so that the vehicles could not be used.

That same month, Piers Corbyn attributed the pandemic to ‘mega-rich control freaks Bill Gates, George Soros+cronies’ in order to produce a ‘world population cull…by their mass vaccination plan containing poison.’ In Pakistan, the rightwing media commentator Zaid Hamid also argued that Bill Gates had created the virus in order to inject Muslims with a vaccine intended to ‘destroy Islam’ and bring about the New World Order. That same month, the government of Michigan cancelled its legislative session after armed protesters converged on the state capital for a ‘Judgement Day’ protest against Governor Gretchen Whitmer’s shutdown orders, after Facebook groups called for her to be hanged, shot, beaten, and beheaded.

In April, the powerful ‘You Clap for Me’ video/poem was read out by BAME and foreign NHS workers who had only recently been vilified as intruders and parasites. This provoked a storm of vicious abuse on Twitter from the usual suspects, who called it ‘racist’ and ‘political.’

By the end of that month I, and many others, had stopped clapping, when Johnson caught Covid and a Central Office propaganda effort began asking us all to ‘clap for the boss’, as if the man who had boasted about shaking hands with everybody only weeks before had suddenly become essential to the NHS. These efforts were every bit as grubby as we had come to expect, whether it was the ministers who had themselves photographed while clapping, or the Daily Mail blaming Michel Barnier for infecting Johnson.

In March the urologist Dr Abdul Mabud Chowdhury sent the following message to Johnson in March asking for protective equipment:

Remember we may be doctor/nurse/HCA/allied health workers who are in direct contact with patients but we are also human beings trying to live in this world disease free with our family and friends. People appreciate us and salute us for our rewarding jobs which is very inspirational, but I would like to say we have to protect ourselves and our families in this global disaster.

Three weeks after that message, Dr Chowdhury died at the age of 54.

By June 2021, 1,500 NHS workers had died of Covid, yet still Matt Hancock was denying that PPE shortages had anything to do with it. This was the political strategy of the government: deny responsibility for anything that it had done wrong or not done: seek to gain political advantages wherever it could, whether it was ‘Captain Tom’, the NHS, or Brexit-boosting ‘we rolled out the vaccine first’ gloating. And last, but not least, ensure that some of its friends made a lot of money.

It was horrendous to watch this from a distance, but as Breathtaking makes clear, it was far, far worse for those who had to face the consequences every day of their working lives. And, as one would expect from Rachel Clarke, the series pulls no punches in identifying who was responsible. It’s painfully grating to hear Johnson’s oily homilies and Bertie-Booster posturing alternate with scenes of patients being intubated. I remember very well how Johnson told the nation, in May 2020, in one of his many convoluted jokey metaphors:

We have come through the peak. Or rather we’ve come under what could have been a vast peak, as though we’ve been going through some huge alpine tunnel. And we can now see the sunlight and pasture ahead of us.

That same month I read a piece in the Manchester Evening News on the care home crisis in the city:

Residents in care homes across Greater Manchester are dying painful, lonely deaths – ‘drowning’ in the fluid building up in their lungs, crying out for loved ones who never arrive and suffering nightmarish hallucinations…Staff tell of feeling powerless as they lose resident after resident to this cruel disease. They say they have seen patients test positive for Covid-19 in hospital before being moved to a care home without disclosure of their condition – risking the lives of staff and the elderly….And they live daily with the problem that’s plagued key workers from the start – the shortage of testing and PPE

No sunlit pastureland there. So many of these horrors have been forgotten, much too quickly. The pandemic ended - or seemed to end - with COVID IS A HOAX and I DO NOT CONSENT marches in London; with boozy parties in Downing Street; with Matt Hancock eating kangaroo testicles on a reality tv show; with rightwing shills calling nurses lazy; with the government attacking nurses and doctors who had the temerity to ask for pay rises; with the main opposition party calling once again for NHS ‘reform’.

So far more than 223,300 people in the UK have died with Covid on their death certificates. Many of them should not have died, but many more would have died, had it not been for the men and women celebrated in this short but devastating series. The nation has moved on, in part, because it suited the government and its supporters to move on. Here and there a few attempts at commemoration and recognition have been made, to those who lost their lives:

And to the key workers who tried to save them, or delivered food to their communities:

But the powers-that-be have returned to their default setting in their treatment of the NHS workers they once told us to clap for. Last year, it was Steve Barclay accusing junior doctors of harming patients and wasting NHS cash. Only two weeks ago James Cleverly was bragging that the government intends to prevent carehome workers from bringing their dependents with them. Even Nigel Farage now feels able to tell junior doctors they are asking for too much money.

All this is an affront to fairness and justice, and Breathtaking reminds us how offensive it is. And we shouldn’t need tv dramas to remember the heroism showed by so many men and women when the country was on its knees; we should be able to recognise it when we see it. I remember at some point in the pandemic one of Matt Hancock’s cronies dared to claim that he was ‘the best of us.’

Hancock’s needy attention-grabbing narcissism has made it clear that he thinks the same. But he is wrong on so many levels. Our NHS workers were the best of us, even though most of their names will never be known to us. They fought the pandemic and fought for the lives of their patients in spite of, and not because of, their government. And even if we can’t make up for the mistakes that were made in 2020, and which forced so many people in the NHS to take risks that no public servants should ever have to take, we can at least make sure that the nurses, doctors, and other NHS workers get the pay and conditions they deserve, and the support they need.

They helped us get through the last Great Pandemic, and none of us can say that we won’t need them for the next one. In a country that has had little to be proud of in recent years, we should all take pride in what they did. We should acknowledge the bravery, the dedication, and the service of those who gave so much to save so many.

Because if British society can’t do that, then what kind of society is it?

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Lizzie ❤️ MAGA

Last month I wrote a piece here about the descent of the Conservative Party into Trump-style MAGA extremism. This wasn’t intended to be nostalgic: I have no fond memories of the Conservative governments of the past. But anyone who doubts that the Tory Party has embraced extremist ideas that would have been anathema to its predecessors should consider the grim series of events that unfolded last week.

Our story begins in America, where Liz Truss popped up at Trump’s CPAC conference to plug her book Ten Years to Save the West - a title, coming from her, to rival Harold Shipman’s Better Living for the Third Age or The Katie Hopkins Guide to Empathy and Compassion. On this side of the pond, the idea that a politician with Truss’s catastrophic record could save anything at all tends to prompt a hysterical belly-laugh, but the Trumpies will embrace anyone who embraces them, and Truss is pretty much the same.

And so she sat earnestly in conference next to Nigel Farage, before delivering a shrill speech on the decline of the West and how she needed Americans to help her save it, ‘cos she can’t do it alone. This nonsense was followed by an interview with the fraudster, insurrectionist, white nationalist and Walmart Goebbels-gone-to-seed, Steve Bannon. In a hallucinatory exchange, even by Truss’s dire standards, the most spectacular failure in British political history blamed the collapse of her government on the ‘administrative state,’ i.e. the ‘deep state’ that the MAGA/QAnon zealots know controls everything we do and think.

Holding up a copy of the Financial Times, Truss denounced its writers as ‘the friends of the deep state’ and called for a ‘bigger bazooka’ to blow them all to metaphorical smithereens. These wild fantasies were delivered with the same conviction with which I, if I were to fall from a great height and hit my head on the pavement, might testify to seeing multicoloured piglets in tutus floating past as I waited for an ambulance or the Angel of Death.

But Liz can’t be tamed. She lapped up Bannon’s adulation of Nigel Farage, saying that she would welcome him into her party and work with ‘whoever it takes to make our country successful’. An actual journalist rather than a propagandist might have noted this beyond satire moment, considering Farage’s record, and hers. But Bannon is only interested in people he can use, and Truss might as well have worn a sign saying ‘use me.’ And so the following jaw-dropping exchange then took place:

Bannon: Nigel Farage said yesterday that you’re going to have a radical Islamic party have seats in the Commons in the next election. Do you believe that’s true?

Truss: Well, there’s going to be a by-election in the next few weeks, and it could be a radical Islamic party wins, so that is a possibility.

Bannon: You’re saying a radical Islamic party, in a couple of weeks in a special election…is it one of these midland urban areas that that they had the-?

Truss: Rochdale

Bannon: The one that’s had the rape situation?

Truss: Yes.

Bannon: The grooming situation?

Truss: Yes.

Bannon: Hang on, I don’t understand this. The grooming situation Tommy Robinson and all these heroes fought it, the rape situation, and in that community you’re going to have a special election and you may have a radical jihadist party send someone to the Commons, after all that problems?

Truss: That is correct.

If it bothered any leading Tory that a former prime minister was accepting praise heaped on Farage and ‘Tommy Robinson and all those heroes’, we have yet to hear from them. And as much as I dislike George Galloway, he is the one who may win the Rochdale bye-election, not a radical Islamic party. Yet there was a former British PM, butter not melting in her mouth, giving Bannon exactly the radical Muslim grooming gang/immigrant rapist red meat that he and his followers feed on.

But as mad and bad as Truss clearly is, she wasn’t the only one pontificating about the forthcoming Muslim takeover of British politics last week.

The Ceasefire Debate that Wasn’t

And here, our story moves to Westminster, where the two main political parties sought to avoid paying any political price for their cowardly complicity in the ongoing massacre in Gaza. Whether or not you think that the SNP’s original motion with its denunciation of Israel’s ‘collective punishment’ of Gaza was a cynical ‘trap’ for Labour, or simply an expression of deeply-held principle, this was not a debate that reflected well on anyone involved in it. If any of its participants had really wanted to reach a consensual position calling for a ceasefire in Gaza, they could have found the words to express it.

Instead each of them seemed to be trying to avoid political damage for themselves, or to inflict damage on each other. So far, so par for the course, in present-day UK politics. But if there is one talent that Tories still have, it’s the ability to make a bad situation worse. So, when the House Speaker Lindsay Hoyle claimed that he had adopted Labour’s motion, not because he feared being sacked, but because he was concerned about the safety of MPs, some of Sunak’s MPs stirred from their sullen slumber and argued that Labour, and even the entire country, had succumbed to the deadly embrace of Islam.

No one will be surprised to find the Right Dishonourable Robert Jenrick amongst them. In the last two years, the former immigration minister and home secretary has established a reputation for performative cruelty in his treatment of migrants that makes Suella Braverman look like someone from Call the Midwife. Fresh from salivating over Texas governor Greg Abbott’s anti-migrant buoys in the Rio Grande, Crooked Bob was in parliament the day after the debate, arguing:

The real issue is not the party political shenanigans suggested by the shadow leader of this house. The real issue is that this house appears cowed by threats of violence and intimidation. The mother of parliaments appears weakened and diminished as a result. We have allowed our streets to be dominated by Islamist extremists, and British Jews and others to be too intimidated to walk through central London week after week. And now we’re allowing Islamist extremists to intimidate British members of Parliament.

This is precisely the kind of thing we have come to expect from Jenrick, and as usual, there was a yawning chasm between his words and reality, not that he cared.

It is not at all clear how Hoyle’s decision to allow a motion that was actually weaker in its condemnation of Israel than the one that the SNP originally wanted, represents a successful example of ‘intimidation.’ Nor is there any evidence that there actually was such intimidation. And lastly, the idea that pro-Palestinian marchers or protestors against the Gaza war are ‘Islamist extremists’ is a unsubstantiated smear.

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But when Tories smell blood, they can’t get to it quickly enough. The Leader of the House, Midshipwoman Penny Mordaunt, told Jenrick, ‘I could not agree more with the right honourable member. British Jews are suffering a grotesque level of hatred and abuse, which quite frankly shames our country.’

Something does indeed shame our country, but without a decent mirror, the likes of Jenrick and Mordaunt are never likely to find it. Are British Jews suffering a ‘grotesque level of hatred and abuse’? Statistics certainly demonstrate that antisemitism has risen sharply since the Hamas attacks on 7 October. According to the Community Security Trust (CST), which monitors anti-Jewish abuse and attacks, there have been 4,103 reported antisemitic incidents in the last four months - a 589 % increase compared with the previous year.

These are grim figures. The barrier between anti-Zionism and antisemitism may be thin, but it must be recognized, by all concerned. It is the responsibility of all communities and organizations involved in the Palestinian solidarity movement to do what they can to ensure that Jews are not abused or held responsible for the crimes of the Israeli state because they are Jews.

But equally, it is the responsibility of politicians to recognize the difference between anti-Zionism and antisemitism, and not deliberately conflate the two, even if that is what Israel does. Because if antisemitism has risen as a result of this latest deadly phase in the ‘Israeli-Palestinian conflict’, that does not mean that the pro-Palestinian protests are responsible for this.

Statistics also show that Islamophobia has risen steeply since last November. The charity Tell Mama has reported the ‘greatest rise in reported anti-Muslim hate cases’ since 7 October - a 355 percent rise compared with the same timescale the previous year. As is the case with reported antisemitic attacks, these 2,010 reported incidents include abusive behaviour, threats, vandalism, online abuse and discrimination.

In this volatile situation, we need calm, honest, principled, and sensitive politicians, who can do their best to ensure that these tensions are not exacerbated to the point of no return. Such politicians are conspicuously absent from a faction-ridden Tory party in freefall, that is not doing its best, but its worst, and which is increasingly prepared to embrace even the most toxic and extremist positions in a desperate attempt to save itself, or simply to distract from its collusion in the Gaza slaughter.

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In an article in the ceasefire debate in the Telegraph, Suella Braverman - no surprise here - warned that ‘Islamists are in charge of Britain now’; and that Britain is ‘sleepwalking into a ghettoised society where free expression and British values are diluted. Where sharia law, the Islamist mob and anti-Semites take over communities.’

Commenting on Braverman’s column on his GB ‘news’ show, Lee Anderson - the posh Tory’s idea of the ideal working class person - gave a more nuanced view, and claimed that only London had been taken over by the ‘Islamists’, because Sadiq Khan had ‘given our capital city away to his mates.’ Elaborating further, Anderson claimed:

We’ve got a very cowardly Khan running London, and he seems to be letting not only the Jewish population down but the whole population of London and Britain as a whole. I heard some of the comments Suella made earlier this week and I don’t actually believe that the Islamists have got control of our country, but what I do believe is they’ve got control of Khan, and they’ve got control of London, and they’ve got control of Starmer as well.

Anyone who has spent any time on Twitter will know that Sadiq Khan has been a target of this kind of abuse from the likes of Katie Hopkins and other extreme-right ‘London has fallen’ types for years, and no one who knows anything about Lee Anderson will be surprised to find him using antisemitism in an attempt to damage his former party.

This time - finally! - Sunak acted, and withdrew the whip from his erstwhile salt-of-the-earth party chairman. A belated crackdown on Islamophobia? Not quite. Downing Street then revealed that Anderson had been asked to apologise for his words, and refused.

As a result, Anderson had the whip withdrawn not for saying a bad thing, but for not saying sorry about the bad thing that he said. And as for what he said, Oliver Dowden - a politician whose face always suggests a man living on a permanent diet of nettles - was on the Laura Kuenssberg show telling viewers that he didn’t ‘believe Lee Anderson said those remarks intending to be Islamophobic’, it was just that his remarks ‘could be taken that way.’

Given the opportunity to apologise for the fact that he used words that could have been misinterpreted, Anderson refused, and that’s why he lost the whip, though Dowden didn’t rule out the possibility that he might come back. You can see Dowden’s problem here. To condemn Anderson’s words as Islamophobic would mean condemning Jenrick, Braverman, and Truss too, since all three of them had said variations on the same thing. As principled stands against prejudice and bigotry go, this one leaves something to be desired. But Dowden is right about one thing: If you argue that the mayor of London has handed the capital over to ‘Islamists’, then it could indeed be taken as Islamophobic. But what did the leader of this shambles think?

Finally, on Sunday, Rishi Sunak told us, in a statement condemning the ‘explosion in prejudice and antisemitism since the Hamas terrorist attacks,’ because ‘Simply put, antisemitism is racism. And speaking as someone who has experienced racism, I know it when I see it.’

Head Boy may or may not have experienced racism, but he has also weaponised it for political gain, or simply been to weak to stand up to certain forms of racism that didn’t suit his government’s interests. And so he praised his own immigrant family for ‘embracing and serving their new community’, unlike those - you know who they are - responsible for ‘the violence, intimidation and intolerance for others we have seen infect our streets recently.’

In case Head Boy’s readers didn’t get it, Sunak echoed Jenrick’s characterisation of last week’s ceasefire debate as a watershed moment in which a ‘dangerous signal was sent that intimidation works.’

You don’t need a PhD in cultural studies or media analysis to understand what is going on here. For Sunak and his party, the only racism worth recognising and condemning is the one they can use. Having squeezed what rank political capital they could out of the ‘Stop the Boats’ - even laying bets on it, such larks - they are now moving into Melanie Phillips/Douglas Murray/Bat Y’eor land: where every opponent of Israel is an antisemite, and every Muslim opponent of Israel is ‘un-British’ or ‘anti-Western’ and engaged in a plot to take over the country and perhaps the world.

I’m old enough to remember when such things were said about a very different ethnic and racial group. But the extreme-right has re-aligned over the years, and on the evidence of last week, there are significant sectors of the Tory Party willing to re-align with it in an attempt to damage Labour and silence criticisms of Israel’s actions in Gaza at the same time.

If that means spreading paranoid ‘Londonistan’ conspiracy theories and establishing a hierarchy of racisms entirely for political purposes, so be it.

There are some Tories who have spoken out against this. Robert Buckland has condemned his Tory colleagues for stoking racial hatred and division. Ruth Davidson has said her party is better than this, despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Sayeeda Warsi, as one would expect, has been as forthright as she usually is about the toxic forces devouring her party.

But those of us who are not Tories should not rely on Tories to cure their party of the disease their party is suffering from. Because as bad as the Tories are now, they can get a lot worse. And the Gaza war can also get a lot worse. And whatever positions we take on the conflict, we should do what we can to ensure that no member of any community is abused, attacked or denigrated because of the community they come from.

And in these difficult times, it is up to all of us to call out unscrupulous political actors who seek to polarise society for political gain. Because issues like racism and free speech are too important to be used merely to advance careers or party self-interest, and silence criticism of the merciless slaughter that is still far from over.

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Things My Mother Taught Me

My mother, Kathleen Ann Carr, died on 28 December last year at 7.10 in the morning, at Addenbrookes Hospital in Cambridge. Much of this year has been taken up with preparations for her funeral and burial. She was the second parent I’ve lost, although the circumstances were very different.

My father, Bill Carr, died in Guyana in 1992 from cancer and alcohol-related illness. At the time of his death I had only seen him once since the disastrous collapse of my parents’ marriage in Georgetown in 1967, so I didn’t really feel his death as a loss. The father that I remembered was violent and abusive, and prone to vicious rages that turned my childhood into a traumazone. It wasn’t until five years later that I returned to Guyana myself and discovered another side to him.

My mother was ninety years old when she died. She had a very harsh old age, and suffered from multiple health problems that left her effectively disabled. In her final years, she had little appetite for the life she was forced to lead, and sank into despair and depression. Those years were searing for many people who knew her and cared about her, and especially for those of us who remembered the years when she wall

Like so many families, we found ourselves trying to solve a problem that had no solution, juggling different forms of care, none of which ‘worked’, essentially because my mother emotionally rejected them all, and could not thrive in any of the environments that we tried to provide for her.

Part-time and 24-hour home care, care homes - we tried them all, but nothing could halt her steep decline. The pandemic didn’t help, but even if it hadn’t happened, I think the outcome would have been much the same.

My mother had savings, and she could pay the eye-wateringly expensive costs that such care demanded, but at no point in this grim trajectory was she ever able to accommodate herself to a predicament that just got progressively worse. She was not a glass half-full person - her glass was mostly empty and she was not inclined, in her final years, to fill it.

In her last months, she rarely even left her bed. Her situation was not unique. Many of us are living much longer than we once expected to. A long life span, or a ‘good innings’ - as our sociopathic ex-PM memorably put it - was once seen as something to aspire towards and a hallmark of a ‘developed’ society, but it doesn’t always work out like that.

If things go wrong - and they can go very wrong - you can find yourself trapped in Tory Britain, dependent on the increasingly threadbare reserves of care provided by a society that often treats its oldest people with the same yawning contempt with which it treats its youngest

I’m not referring to the actual care workers - many of whom were foreign, despite the endless denigration of immigrants so ingrained in British political discourse - who looked after my mother. Most of them were kind and thoughtful, and did their best, but there was only so much them any of them could do to help someone who had lost the will to go on

There was a time in my mother’s life when all this would have seemed unimaginable. Because she had so much courage and resilience. She left school at the age of 16 and took her articles of clerkship. In Jamaica she became a solicitor, where she also worked as a volunteer for the Howard League for Penal Reform, visiting prisoners in Trenchtown on death row.

My parents moved to the West Indies in 1960 at a unique point in history. It was a period of national liberation struggles, Third Worldism, Black Power, and decolonization, when the islands of the former ‘dustbin of empire’ were becoming independent; when English Literature - the subject my father taught at the University of the West Indies - was coming under the same criticisms regarding ‘stale white males’ and the ‘Western Canon’ that have become more familiar in recent years.

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My dad was very much a representative of that canon, a lover of Conrad and Henry James, who believed in Matthew Arnold’s maxim of the ‘the best that can be thought and said.’ He was also a strong advocate of what later became known as ‘post-colonial literature’. He was a friend of Derek Walcott, Martin Carter, and other Caribbean writers, and Walcott even wrote a poem about him. He was a passionate and idiosyncratic leftist, who opposed both Bustamante’s government in Jamaica and the long tyranny of the Burnham years in Guyana.

He was also fairly useless as a father. In his public life he fought tyrants and bullies. In his own house, he was both.

Our households were domestic battlegrounds, littered with beatings and broken things, with overturned bookshelves, plate-smashings, with my father’s wild rages and vicious boozy tirades against my mother that went on late into many nights.

Parenting was not his strongpoint: if you were sick in the night he would slap you. Fail to eat your food and he would empty the plate on your head. On Christmas Day in Guyana, in 1966, my dad drank too much homemade punch and upturned the entire contents of everyone’s Christmas dinner onto the floor.

My mother was the one who picked up the pieces. She was the one who spent a week alone with three kids in a boarded-up house in Kingston during Hurricane Flora in 1963, because my dad had left us, as he often did. She was the one who shopped, got us to school, and did the things that parents are supposed to do, while my dad lectured and played at revolution. In newly-independent Guyana in 1966, she would go down to Stabroek Market to shop for vegetables, while Forbes Burnham would ride around on a white horse performing for his base.

Burnham was the British choice, who Britain and the US used to rid themselves of Cheddi Jagan’s socialist PPP, and then went on to run Guyana into the ground.

My father naturally aligned himself with the PPP, which he later joined and campaigned for. The West Indies became his political theatre, where he acted out his own emotionally-deprived childhood through politics, lecturing, and theatre, while slipping deeper into alcoholism. Parental separations, reconciliations, and occasional outbreaks of peace alternated with vicious physical and verbal abuse of my mother.

In those days women who found themselves in that situation very rarely got much support. And my father was the great man, Matthew Arnold-cum-Che Guevara. He was the dazzling lecturer, the organic intellectual who appeared on the ‘Brains Trust’ TV show in Kingston to pontificate on a range of matters, including…ahem, bringing up children.

But even in these circumstances, my mother managed to prosper. In Jamaica, she became such a good lawyer that when Victor Mishcon, the founder of Mishcon de Reya, visited Kingston on business, he told her to look him up in England if she ever needed a job.

In Georgetown she couldn’t find work, and my dad became too deranged during those nine months for her or anyone else to cope with.

And so she came back to England, with four kids, no money, and no prospects - a soon-to-become-divorcee at a time when single mothers were not held in much esteem. She never took up Mishcon’s offer, but she went on to become a partner in her firm (at a time when only 3 percent of lawyers in the UK were women) while bringing up children who were still reeling from the madness of my father’s household.

Somehow she managed it. But she was often ill, and her chain-smoking didn’t help. I used to tease her about her ability to catch any virus drifting in from the Fens. But in her prime, when we were gone, she travelled all over the world, mostly with organized tours. She saw dozens of countries, and loved them all. Travel was her reward and her escape from herself.

My mother’s past in the West Indies, and her frequent travels, gave her politics a very Third World-ish orientation. She was never as leftwing or as political as my father, but she had strong moral principles. Her maxim,which she often repeated to us, was ‘do whatever you want, but don’t hurt anyone.’

She always gave money to development charities. She was very sympathetic to the Palestinians, partly because I had been to Gaza and the Occupied Territories, and also because she saw the Palestinians as the underdogs, with whom she always sympathized, just as my father did.

These issues of justice, liberation, literature, and morality were another component of the tumultuous life that I led with my parents in the West Indies. I grew up in houses filled with books, with the names of writers constantly being passed back and forth in car journeys and mealtimes; with my father constantly trying to force Shakespeare and other ‘great literature’ down my youthful throat even though I preferred James Bond, Jesse James, and the Hulk.

I heard the music of Dylan, Joan Baez, Peter, Paul, and Mary ushering in the new world of Hope and protest from my parents’ little record player, and the Mighty Sparrow, Ska, Frank Sinatra, and Herb Albert and His Tijuana Brass that provided their party music.

Sometimes you learn things because of your parents, and you also learn things in spite of them. In my case it was both. I learned from my father that I did not want to be the kind of man he was, and I sensed that he himself could not be the sober, wise man that a part of him genuinely wanted to be. I learned - earlier than most - from both my parents about the Holocaust, and slavery, about racism and apartheid, and World War II.

As a child, I was shocked to find that I lived in a world where such things could happen, and I dimly sensed that it was part of the responsibility of being alive to do what I could to stop them from happening.

I also learned - belatedly, from my dad’s point of view - to revere great writing, and books have accompanied me throughout my life. But my mother was the one who breathed poetry into me at a time when I barely understood the words she read, beyond the vague sense of mystery and the longing to be somewhere else that her readings often expressed.

She once told us that she was ill in bed in August 1963 on the day before her birthday, when she heard Martin Luther King’s ‘I have a dream’ speech. I don’t know if she heard it on the radio or whether it was playing on a loudspeaker in the college campus. Perhaps she was suffering from one of her ‘viruses’ or the consequences of one of my father’s assaults.

But this poignant anecdote expresses the contradictions between the personal and political that were so much part of my parents’ lives. On the one hand, my sick, unhappy mother. On the other, King’s evangelical cadences and rich stream of metaphors calling on America to live up to its own promises. These hopeful messages permeated my childhood.

My mother was born in the year Hitler came to power. She spent the last two months of her life horrified by the merciless bombing of Gaza, which she watched all through the day with her characteristic obsessiveness. Even as her memory crumbled, and she was disconnected from so many things, she continued to donate to NGOs and charities working in Gaza.

After she died, someone stole twenty pounds from her hand-bag while she lay in her hospital bed. My mother would have given that money to anyone who had needed it, without a second thought.

She deserved a better end. I would have liked her to leave the world, surrounded by her children and grandchildren, knowing that some of the ideals that she and my father had once shared had not been in vain.

But history doesn't always give us what we want or what we expect, either personally nor politically. All we can do is toil in the dark and the chaos, and look to the light when light appears, and hope that our small efforts are contributing to something better than what we are seeing around us.

Sooner or later, we all end up as other people’s memories.

And even in these dark times, when there is not much light around, I try to think of my parents not at their worst, but at their best, and I try to remain faithful to the best dreams that they once had. And I think of my mother, I still hear her singing A Hard Rain’s a Gonna Fall and Where Have all the Flowers Gone, and wondering what the hard rain was, and where had the flowers gone?

And I can still hear Dylan’s chiming guitar and bold, confident voice on my parents’ record player, telling the world that the times were changing, reminding me that, sixty years later, there is still so much to change.

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Elon Goes to Auschwitz

Credit: U.S. Airforce

On 22 January, the world’s second richest man paid a  visit to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Some two million people visit Auschwitz every year.   These visitors have included some high-profile celebrities, from Arnold Schwarzenegger and Katy Perry, to Oprah Winfrey and Wayne Rooney. Nothing wrong with that. You can be rich and famous and still go to Auschwitz with good intentions.

But there were no such intentions behind the much-covered pilgrimage of tech billionaire Elon Musk to the world’s most infamous concentration camp, as an invited guest of the European Jewish Association (AJA). It was on one hand a grubby, and - given the object of his visit - scandalous exercise in self-promotion, which also demonstrates how low some of Israel’s supporters are prepared to sink to achieve their aims.

First of all, let’s take a closer look at the EJA’s illustrious invitee. In May last year, following a spike in migrant arrivals at Lampedusa, Musk compared George Soros to the Marvel villain Magneto in a tweet that accused the billionaire philanthropist of  wanting ‘ to erode the very fabric of civilization. Soros hates humanity’ – an unproblematic recycling of the racist ‘Great Replacement’ conspiracy theory with blatantly antisemitic undertones that can frequently be found coursing through various white nationalist and neo-Nazi fora. 

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Since Musk took over Twitter/X, messages like this have been all over the platform, and Musk has done nothing to stop them. He has on occasion amplified them, most notoriously on 15 November last year, when someone calling himself ‘The Artist Formerly Known as Eric’ tweeted the following:

To which the world’s second richest man replied:

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) were among those who condemned Musk for such tweets. As a result advertisers began leaving the platform in droves – resulting in a 60 percent drop in advertising revenues by September.  In response, Musk called the CCDH ‘evil’ and its CEO a ‘rat’, and claimed that he was being persecuted:

In Musk’s world - and he’s hardly alone in this - he is always the victim, no matter what stupid, evil utterances he comes out with. And because he is the world’s second richest man, there are always those willing to cut him some slack. On 17 November, two days after Musk’s ‘dialectical hatred’ exchange, the self-styled ‘free speech absolutist’ announced that pro-Palestinian expressions such as ‘decolonization’ and ‘from the river to the sea’ would be banned from his platform.

To which the ADL’s director Jonathan Greenblatt, no less, responded

Notice how Greenblatt accepts Musk’s assertion that these banned slogans ‘necessarily imply genocide’ and constitute ‘clear calls for extreme violence.’

Musk’s willingness to ‘show leadership’ on such matters did not go unnoticed in Israel itself. On 27 November, Musk was accompanied by Netanyahu on  a tour of the kibbutzim attacked by Hamas.  Musk agreed with Netanyahu’s insistence that Israel had ‘no choice’ but to get rid of the ‘poisonous regime’ in Gaza, ‘as you did in Germany, as you did in Japan.’

Musk also agreed not to allow his Starlink internet communications system to be used in Gaza without Israeli consent, which, in addition to his control of X/Twitter, also explains why he was given the red carpet. To paraphrase an old American expression, Israel seems to have taken the attitude that Musk may be an antisemite, but he’s our antisemite.

All of which brings us to Auschwitz, where Musk was accompanied by Ben Shapiro – the ultra-Zionist ‘conservative’ commentator famous for his vicious disavowals of Palestinian rights, and insightful observations such as ‘Israelis like to build. Arabs like to bomb crap and live in open sewage.  This is not a difficult issue.’

More recently, Shapiro mocked Rachel Corrie - a woman crushed by an Israeli bulldozer for trying to prevent the demolition of a Palestinian house - as one of the ‘great idiots of history.’ These were the two humanitarians who the European Jewish Association invited to walk Auschwitz together. And Musk took the invitation seriously, so seriously that he brought his three-year-old son ‘X’ - yes that really is his name - with him, even though the Auschwitz administration recommends that under 14-visitors should not visit the camp, and advises visitors to ‘observe the appropriate solemnity and respect’.

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Musk observed the appropriate solemnity and respect by posing in front of the Arbeit Macht Frei sign with his son on his shoulders - one for the family album for sure. And after the visit – cue lots of moody shots of Rocket Man gazing moodily into the moody overcast sky, barbed wire fences, huts etc, the EJA staged a conversation between Musk and Shapiro in Krakov.

Before it began, the EJA’s chairman, Rabbi Menachem Margolin, showed a slideshow of fantasy ‘tweets’ posted during World War 2 about the mass murder of Jews, in order to make the dubious argument that these events might not have happened had social media existed at the time. Margolin then he presented Musk with a little sculpture made from a Hamas rocket found in an Israeli kindergarten with the words ‘Never Again’ welded onto the tail.   

Some context here: In 2019, Margolin criticized an EU ruling that Israel was ‘in breach of humanitarian law’ as ‘the worst kind of fiddling while Rome burns’ and accused the EU of ignoring Hamas rockets. In fact the EU condemned  the ‘utterly unacceptable’ rocket fire on Israeli civilians as well, but it also criticized Israel, and as the world has learned again and again, there is only one side in the ‘Israeli-Palestinian conflict’ that can ever be criticized and condemned.

Margolin clearly belongs to that category, and it is not clear what Musk had done to earn this ‘award’, beyond actually condescending to show up. But the symbolism could not be clearer: Hamas is an extension of the Holocaust and Israel’s response to the assault/pogrom on 7 October is an extension of Never Again.

Did Musk appreciate this? When Shapiro asked for his responses to what he had seen, Musk replied that he was a ‘student of history, so I’ve seen the pictures and the videos’, but it nevertheless ‘hits you much more in the heart’ to see the actual place where these things occurred.  Naturally Musk agreed that Nazism could not have happened if social media had existed because ‘it would have been impossible to hide.’ Musk also suggested that  if ‘there’d been freedom of speech’, it would have stopped the rise of Nazism, because the Nazis banned free speech after taking power. 

These shallow claims do not bear much scrutiny. Fortunately for Musk, there was no scrutiny at all, as he went on to boast that he had so many Jewish friends that he was therefore ‘Jewish by association’ and ‘aspirationally Jewish’. 

No one asked what it meant to be ‘aspirationally Jewish’. When Musk laughed and said ‘Am I Jewish?  Look, I’m Jewish,’ Shapiro laughed with him.   These are the kind of jokes you can tell after a visit to a death camp where nearly a million Jews were murdered, and if you are the world’s second richest man, you will always find people who will laugh with you.

Because he had so many Jewish friends, Musk claimed that he had been ‘naïve’ about not recognising antisemitism. It was not until he saw the ‘pro-Hamas riots that took place in nearly every major city in the West’ that Musk realised the seriousness of the situation. There have been no such ‘riots’ in any city in the West, but there have been many pro-Palestinian and pro-ceasefire rallies and protests. None of them have been pro-Hamas, though a minority of participants in some of them have expressed pro-Hamas messages. 

Such nuances did not matter to Shapiro, the EJA, or Musk.  Instead Shapiro pontificated about the ‘conspiracy theory of antisemitism’, which he described as and a ‘conspiracy theory about power.’  This is true, but it has has nothing to do with Shapiro’s subsequent argument that movements calling for diversity and equality are a continuation of antisemitism, because they directed against ‘people at the top who are successful’ in other words…people like Musk.

Musk heartily, telling his audience

Diversity, equity [sic] and inclusion – always be wary of any name that could come out of a George Orwell book.  That’s never a good sign.  Because diversity, equity and inclusion, these all sound like nice words, but what it really means is discrimination on the basis of race, sex, sexual orientation, and it’s against merit, and that I think is fundamentally antisemitic.

So here was a man accused of recycling antisemitic white supremacist conspiracy theories, telling his audience that attempts to end racial and sexual discrimination are inherently antimeritocratic and antisemitic. This shallow dialogue continued like this, as Musk and Shapiro exchanged half-digested lumps of history, smears, strawmen arguments, and tendentious propositions.  

At one point,  Shapiro got to the elephant in the room, and suggested to Musk that ‘Legacy media have spent a lot of angst on you, they’ve made a lot of attempts to paint you as antisemitic, X as antisemitic. Where do you think that’s coming from?’

As Jodie Foster would say in True Detective: wrong question.  Shapiro might have asked why the Center for Countering Digital Hate has  accused Musk of ‘making brazen verbal and legal threats against CCDH, all the while allowing racist, antisemitic content to proliferate on his platform.’

He could have pointed out that one of the foremost Jewish advocacy organizations in the world believes that Musk’s changes to Twitter have empowered a host of far-right extremists who ‘regularly share hateful and conspiratorial content as well as links to more extreme spaces, creating a potential radicalization pipeline that could help these toxic ideologies spread’.

He could have addressed the claims made by Andrew Torba, the former CEO of the disactivated rightwing extremist Gab platform - where the 2018 Pittsburgh synagogue killer allegedly posted - in May last year:

Shapiro could have asked who ‘our largest enemy’ was, and why Musk had allowed Korba’s ‘guys’ back onto the platform to wage ‘total war’. Instead he and Musk agreed that the ‘legacy media’ was jealous of truth telling platforms like Twitter/X, and that this was why Musk had been targeted. The historian Guy Walters, who was in the audience, has written that Musk ‘hoodwinked’ everyone present, Jews and Jews alike.

On the evidence of what I saw, this was a game in which everyone played everyone else. Musk used the visit and the discussion to buff up his tarnished brand, and effectively committed himself to recycling Israeli messaging about Hamas and Gaza, in the name of fighting antisemitism. Shapiro had his own self-importance and inane talking points about the decline of the West and diversity agendas reaffirmed by the world’s second richest man.

This is the kind of thing you might expect on the Joe Rogan show or a Jordan Peterson podcast. But to do this at Auschwitz is a sordid abdication of moral decency by all concerned. On the same day that Musk staged his faux-pilgrimage/reflection, 195 people were killed and 354 injured in Gaza.  All this is known all over the world.  None of it is hidden. And Musk’s visit to Auschwitz was another attempt to galvanize support for the slaughter and shame those who oppose it into silence.

That same week, Musk announced that his Neuralink company had succeeded in planting a microchip in the brain of a monkey.   Perhaps the world’s second richest man should insert a chip into his own brain, preferably with a conscience attached to it. 

And the same could be said about some of his fellow-participants, who used the memory of the most terrible genocide in history, for reasons that have little to do with fighting the very real threat of antisemitism in the 21st century, and much more to do with the annihilation of Palestinian society that is unfolding in front of our eyes.

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Saving Private Johnson

If there’s one thing the British political class will never abandon, it’s the martial spirit. Age cannot wither it. No defeats or reversals. Politicians may claim to want peace, but they sense that war is what once made the country great, and might make them great too. In their heart of hearts many of them relish the opportunity that war provides to step out of the humdrum world of domestic politics and do something genuinely serious, meaningful and Churchillian, on the ‘world stage’.

Tony Blair got a taste for it during the Kosovo War, which he never lost, regardless of the outcome. The feckless David Cameron swanned into the Libyan War in 2011, desperately seeking the gravitas that has persistently eluded him. ‘What more do I want?’ he told the diarist Sasha Swires, with whom he went on holiday to Cornwall even as Gadaffi met his gruesome end. ‘ A great day on the beach, I’m with my old friends the Swires and I’ve just won a war.’

Not exactly the most Churchillian statement, but you can’t expect much more from a man for whom humanitarian intervention, like politics, was a game that he could play - knowing that he would never feel whatever negative consequences might ensue from it. And if Libya descended into violent chaos from which it has yet to emerge, why should he care? He’d done his bit, and it was thrilling while it lasted.

All British contenders for prime ministerial office understand this thrill, even the most ludicrous. Thus China hawk Liz Truss rode around in a tank, signalling her willingness to ‘go to war’ against China or like, whoever. Liz’s principled advocacy of Taiwan didn’t stop her lobbying for an arms company seeking to sell weapons to China - if nothing else, she could multi-task.

And now none other than Boris Johnson has responded to General Patrick Sanders’ call last week for a ‘citizen army’ with a fatuous - even by his standards - article in the Daily Mail professing his willingness to obey the ‘kitcheneresque finger.’

‘ No sooner had I posed myself the question — would I sign up to fight for King and country?’ the Great Man proclaimed proudly, ‘ - than I had the answer. Of course I jolly well would.’ Of course he jolly well would, except that he jolly well can’t because he’s too old for military service, if not for military cosplay, and he jolly well didn’t when he was young enough to actually serve.

Johnson’s long-distance love of khaki is not entirely new. Even before he slunk out of office, reeking of other people’s party vomit, he thought he had found a pathway to seriousness in Ukraine. So he went off to Kiev to take part in dangerous photo operations, and then dressed up in camo with Ukrainian troops training in the UK - cue more photo ops with grenades and rocket launchers.

Such fun, as Miranda’s mother used to say.

Britain: A Great Nation

It’s easy to be repelled by such grotesqueries, but we should also be wary of them, because the heroic parts they want to play are written into the national script of the movie Britain: A Great Nation that repeats itself for every generation like old Sunday wartime movies, in a slightly attenuated form. Every Prime Minister knows this, and this is why so many of them want to play the leading role, and why they see Churchill’s bulldog countenance staring back at them when they look in the mirror, even in Chipping Norton.

And to play that role there must be a dastardly villain, and not just some run of the mill upstart Johnny Foreigner, but ‘dictators who kill their own people’ (and aren’t our allies). They must be anti-democratic authoritarian supervillains who want to sweep across Europe, use weapons of mass destruction in 45 minutes, or seek, as General Sanders warned darkly last week, to destroy ‘our systems and our way of life.’

Some might conclude, on the evidence of the last few decades, that the British political class is well on the way to destroying our systems and way of life all by itself, without any help from Putin or Xi Jinping.

But the movie Britain: A Great Nation doesn’t allow for reflection, self-criticism, or self-doubt. In this movie, we are always the knight who goes out into the world to slay dragons, or help others slay theirs. It’s a noble pursuit, or would be, if it was true.

But the problem that General Sanders, would-be Lance Corporal Johnson, and the other scriptwriters have, is that many of the generation who would normally be expected to play the role of extras in the battle scenes, seem averse wish to the ‘whole nation undertaking’ that General Sanders would like to see unfolding across the country.

A YouGov poll found this month that more than a third of under-40s would refuse conscription even in the event of a world war, and that 30 percent would not serve in the event of an invasion of the country. What has happened? Have the young been taken over by Russian bots? Is it Instagram? Or wokery, as Johnson suggested? Even Johnson the human fridge-magnet, bemoaned the 'growing moral squeamishness of the kids themselves’ and speculated about its possible causes:

They say that Generation Z are dubious about the ethics of the most recent conflicts in which the UK played a significant role — Iraq and Afghanistan — and do not therefore blaze with martial ardour at the thought of being engaged in the next one.

This was as close to an insight as anyone was likely to find in Bunter’s fluff-piece - instantly eclipsed by an attempt to fat shame the young for being ‘more Colonel Sanders than General Sanders’.

It should go without saying that young people do not need to be lectured on such matters by Johnson. Nor do they need lessons on decadence from the man who partied with the son of ex-KGB men; who turned the highest office in the land into a drunken karaoke session for his entitled insiders in the midst of a pandemic, and then went on to lie repeatedly about it until it was no longer possible for him to get away with it.

The least you can say about such behaviour is that it is not Churchillian. But the problem that people far more serious than Johnson have, as they seek to transform the young into a ‘pre-war generation’, is not just the absence of any moral principle in one of the country’s leaders, but its absence throughout a series of ill-conceived and often brazenly-dishonest wars in which Britain has willingly participated through this grim quarter of a century.

To put it mildly, these wars have tarnished our knightly armour, and there is nothing at all that the current crop of leaders - let alone the likes of Johnson - can do to make it shine again. Consider what happened last week, when the International Court of Justice (ICJ) presented its interim ruling that ‘there is a real and imminent risk that irreparable prejudice’ may be perpetrated on Palestinians under the genocide convention.

Though the court didn’t actually accuse Israel of genocide, it paved the way for that possibility. And it also found that Israel’s invasion of Gaza ‘had resulted in a large number of deaths and injuries, as well as the massive destruction of homes, the forcible displacement of the vast majority of the population, and extensive damage to civilian infrastructure.’

The UK’s reaction to that interim judgement was…nothing at all. Yet on the same day, Israel made allegations that 12 employees from the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), were involved in the October 7 Hamas attack/massacre. Without the slightest hesitation, the UK halted its contribution to the financial assistance on which UNRWA depends. Bear in mind that UNRWA employs 13,000 people in Gaza, and is the only organization able to meet the humanitarian needs of the population even in times of ‘peace’, let alone now.

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Other facts are also worth bearing in mind: that the 12 people accused by Israel of involvement in October 7 have either been sacked, left UNRWA or died; that Israel has killed 152 UNRWA employees; that the elimination of UNRWA from Gaza is a war aim that Netanyahu and the Israeli right have wanted to achieve for some time.

None of this mattered to the US, and therefore it didn’t matter to the Sunak government, which immediately and unquestioningly followed the US lead. This is not a ‘mistake’; it is active complicity in the savage military assault that has killed more than 25,000 Palestinians and reduced the Gaza Strip to a humanitarian catastrophe.

In the midst of that, the UK cuts off aid to the one organization working to alleviate this disaster, on the basis of unsubstantiated claims against a tiny minority that UNRWA itself has already begun to investigate. There is nothing good or noble or moral or well-intentioned about any of this. It is cynical realpolitik. And the fact that the majority of 18-24 year olds in the UK support the Palestinians suggests that young people recognise this perfectly well - even if the likes of Douglas Murray try to smear them for their ‘naivete’ or antisemitism.

It’s difficult to separate this anti-militarism from the UK’s participation in the horrific global violence unleashed by the US following 9/11, from the anti-militarist sentiments that worry General Sanders and Johnson. Too many eggs were broken in these wars that left no omelettes. Too many people were killed for no good reason. Too many lies and falsehoods were told by politicians who never paid any price for them. And at no point has the British public been invited to reassess and think seriously about the broader context in which these wars evolved, or consider the strategic miscalculations behind them, or the other options that might have been pursued to avoid them, or what interests Britain itself may have had in its botched responses to our world of endless ‘threats’.

Such things are not part of the script of Britain: A Great Nation. And so now, when the UK’s discredited rulers want the young to prepare to fight Russia, or China, while allowing Israel to batter Gaza, you can’t be surprised if they don’t believe you.

This is a country where poor schoolchildren go without school meals or attend crumbling schools without proper heating; where there aren’t enough doctors or nurses or ambulance drivers or social care workers; where more than ten million people go hungry every week, and fourteen million mostly young people are trapped in insecure, over-priced rented accommodation.

In short, it’s not a country that cares too much about its young people even in peacetime, and so when some of the worst leaders it has ever had ask the young to fight for King and country, you can’t be so many young people have concluded that they won’t do it.

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Monster's Ball

There was a time when conservatives, with a small c, were supposed to be sensible, cautious, level-headed people; when the Conservative Party with a capital C had principles that you could at least identify, even if you didn’t agree with them. As the Tory peer Sayeeda Warsi observed last year, ‘Most Tories used to believe in democracy, the rule of law, and decency. We used to think this country was an amazing place where all of us who make it up could live together. We weren’t toxic mad fascists like some of my colleagues are now.’

Anyone who has followed the dizzying downhill trajectory of UK politics over the last eight years will know which colleagues Warsi was referring to. At the time there were those who considered her comments to be a harsh judgement of her party’s fortunes, but I would argue that it wasn’t harsh enough. Because the great problem the Tory Party has, and that those of us who are not Tories also have, is that the entire party has become a place where the toxic mad fascists set the agenda, and the Tories who are not mad toxic fascists are too weak and cowardly to face them down.

This is why the party leadership has invested so much political capital in the Rwanda policy, even though the ‘prime minister’ - you have to put the word in scaremarks - doesn’t believe it will work and has offered no evidence that it will work. The detestable rabble airing their rank ‘principles’ - scaremarks also necessary - in parliament last week also have no idea whether it will work, but that hasn’t stopped them presenting Rwanda as an ‘existential’ issue for their party and expression of the ‘will of the people’ - running out of scaremarks here.

In short, this is a party that has lost its way and gone over to the dark side. And the question is, why has this happened? What explains the implosion of the most successful political party in the western world? How did the toxic mad fascists break into the building and take it over?

The Republican Party in the United States has a similar problem, but the Conservative Party’s descent into the abyss is rooted in the very specific context of Brexit, and there is a fearful symmetry between the decision to leave the European Union and the proposal to fly asylum seekers to Rwanda.

Both are symptoms of advanced political derangement, in which fantasy has taken the place of the careful calculation that the Conservative Party once represented - at least in theory. Both are decisions rooted, at least in part, in xenophobia, paranoia, and anti-immigrant, anti-foreign sentiment. Both are regarded by their supporters as expressions of ‘sovereignty’ - regardless of the negative and practical consequences that unilateral sovereignty implies. Both are aimed at wresting the UK from European or foreign control, and both draw their emotional force from the idea that the UK has been victimised and taken advantage of.

Both of them are policies, or processes, whose supporters have bet their entire political capital, without any guarantee whatsoever that their bets would ever produce the outcomes that they predicted.

This gulf between expectation and reality doesn’t matter for the likes of Farage and Tice, who never take responsibility or pay any political consequences for anything, but it has had an extraordinarily destructive impact on the Tory Party, which has actually been expected to govern. These Brexit Tories are not like Sisyphus, condemned to push a rock up a hill that continually rolls back on them. For all their endless rage, bluster and fake-passion, they are political gambling addicts, throwing good money after bad, believing, in spite of all evidence to the contrary, that the big win is just around the corner - the one that will make up for the loss of the house and car and their shredded reputations.

From Brexit to Rwanda

As we have all learned over and over again, the architects of the Brexit victory did not know what was coming, did not prepare for any negative outcomes, do not even seem to have considered any other possibilities beyond the fantasies they presented to the public, and refused to take any responsibility when those fantasies burst, one by one, in front of their lying eyes.

Instead they blamed others, or looked around desperately for distractions, until finally they settled on Rwanda, even though none of them have any more idea whether the Rwanda policy will produce the outcomes they say it will, than they did about Brexit.

But Rwanda isn’t a mere distraction. It’s a direct response to the failure of Brexit, which contains all the essential features of that failure. It’s a demonstration of ‘sovereignty’ when sovereignty has so far produced nothing else. Brexiters promised that immigration would fall after leaving the EU. Instead it went up. Unable to use the instruments available to it through EU membership and the Dublin Convention, the UK became, for the first time in its history, a destination for ‘boat people.’

So Rwanda - a policy that will almost certainly fail - became the response to Brexit - a policy that has already failed. On the isle of Tory unicorns, when one miracle fails to materialise, and actually produces an unexpectedly negative result, you might as well offer a miracle cure. And this refusal to acknowledge reality has unravelled the Tory Party completely.

Once upon a time you could identify these tendencies through the various Tory factions: the Spartans, the European Research Group, the Five Families, the Common Sense Group, the New Conservatives, the Conservative Growth Group, the Net Zero Scrutiny Group. Now there is the latest insane iteration in Liz Truss’s Popular Conservatism, which its architects have catchily named PopCon - a name that doesn’t have nearly as much resonance as they think it does.

But the factions scarcely matter, when the entire party has succumbed to the same addiction to the unknowable, the same fanatical disdain for any legal impediments or limitations that might prevent it from doing what it wants to do, even if what it wants to do cannot really be done without harming the country it claims to represent.

Like Michael Douglas in Falling Down, the party has lost it. Infuriated by the petty humiliations that being in the real world involves, it wants to smash up the Korean grocer shop. Like a retired stockbroker in an existential suburban cul-de-sac, party has drank the Jack Daniels, shot the dog, set fire to the house, and set off screeching into the political night, with no way back home.

The sickness is so advanced that every cure makes it worse. First the opportunist May latches onto Brexit only to discover too late that what she wanted to do can’t actually be done. Then the conniving fraud of frauds that topples her tries to do what can’t be done and doesn’t care, but gets brought down anyway by his usual moral incontinence. And now the Hunt/Sunak tandem that was hastily brought in to sort out the Truss/Kwarteng is madly dragging the country off to pariah status in order to get a policy off the ground that no one, literally no one, can demonstrate will work on its own terms.

Some of these tendencies were already present when Cameron stifled a yawn and agreed to have a referendum on EU membership as a party management exercise, casually offering the entire country as collateral, because why the hell not? It worked at Eton. And having lost his bet, the Great Man sauntered out of the casino, humming a tune, and retreated to his faux-gypsy caravan to rake in some lobbying cash, before boredom and Sunak’s desperation brought him back.

And all the time his party and the country as a whole descended into political chaos from which they have yet to emerge, and the rest of us cannot escape.

This is what political derangement means, and this is why the Tory factions are no longer just factions, but the splinters of a fragmenting party that has no other purpose beyond maintaining its choking death-grip on power - a wild-eyed party purged of anyone who might once have acted as a moderating influence.

Such lunacy has become so normal for so long, that it’s difficult to recall that there was once a time when the Conservative Party did not behave like this, or at least not to the extent that it does now. In his excoriating assault on the culture of lying and the ‘emergence of a new moral barbarism’ under Johnson and Trump, The Assault on Truth, the Conservative political journalist Peter Oborne remembers nostalgically how

Conservatives used to be careful students of history. They knew that men and women are frail, imperfect, corruptible and, at times, capable of great evil. That explains why they always paid such attention to the importance of institutions which, as Edmund Burke explained, embody wisdoms and truth which are beyond the comprehension of individual minds.

Personally, I don’t feel quite as nostalgic for this type of Conservatism as Oborne does. In my lifetime, and before it, there have been Conservative politicians and voters with far less philosophically exalted motives for their political choices than Oborne’s ideal suggests. But I don’t doubt that they existed, and still exist somewhere.

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There were Conservatives who did not lie as a matter of course; who did not rush into uncosted budgets without considering the consequences; who took the national interest too seriously to squander it in the interests of their party or their own careers; who sought talent and ability, not chancers and loyalists; who did not attack civil servants as traitors; who did not oppose the Supreme Court when it found their decisions to be unlawful; who resigned when they were caught doing things wrong; who would not have elected as Prime Minister a man who attended parties hosted by the son of an ex-KGB man and then promoted that same son to the House of Lords; who would never in a million years found space for the likes of Lee Anderson, Suella Braverman, or Therése Coffey in cabinet.

Oborne himself is that kind of Conservative: a journalist of intelligence and integrity whose invocation of what he regards as the Conservative ideal is intended to show how far Johnson and his clique have destroyed it. Oborne goes on to quote from the philosopher Michael Oakeshott’s description of a ‘Conservative disposition’ which

understands it to be the business of government not to inflame passion and give it new objects to feed on, but to inject into the activities of already passionate men an ingredient of moderation, to restrain, to deflate, to pacify and to reconcile.

If there is any of that type of Conservative in the party of Braverman, Cleverly, Jenrick, Anderson, Truss, McVey and Sunak, they have kept themselves well-hidden, and when they have emerged from the shadows, they have either been ignored or pushed out of the party altogether.

But this is not a captured party; it’s a party that has destroyed itself and hollowed itself out. It was not conquered by Faragism; it conquered itself. Consumed by the struggle to make the impossible possible and terrified of being out-flanked from the right, its dilettante leaders gave their extremist fringes more power than they had ever previously enjoyed, and effectively invited the lunatics in.

Unable to make any sense of the calamitous legacy that Cameron’s poor decision had left them with, a succession of mediocrities and chancers sought to use Brexit to boost their own careers, promising non-existent opportunities and unrealizable goals that depended on politicians who were even more mediocre than they were.

This was why the 2019 election brought in some of the worst MPs ever to enter a British parliament. It’s why Johnson and Liz Truss became prime minister; why Robert Jenrick got any job at all; why Esther McVey is Minister for Common Sense; why Lee Anderson is Tory deputy chairman.

It’s also why the ghastly Rishi Sunak is fervently clinging onto a Rwanda policy that he doesn’t believe in, in a desperate bid to hold his imploding party together and prevent its factions from tearing him to shreds.

The good news for the rest of us is that the nightmare may finally be coming to an end. The polls consistently suggest a party on the way to political Armageddon, with eleven cabinet ministers set to lose their seats, and its MPs reduced to a post-1997 rump. The party’s core demographic is now primarily rooted in the over 55s. Amongst younger voters, Toryism has barely any support at all. Its party membership in 2022 was 172,000 - less than half of Labour’s.

Unless we assume that voters inevitably become Conservative when they reach a certain age, this is a party that has very little to offer the young in terms of a better future, and which depends on voters who look to the past, and - as the last eight years have shown - an imagined past.

For the millions of people that have had to endure the torment of the last fourteen years, this can only be grounds for relief. Not because of the quality of the government that will take over - that remains to be seen. And if that government does not succeed, it is entirely possible that the Tory Party may make a comeback, in an even nastier and more extremist form than its current incarnation.

For the time being, we can only hope and yearn for, not just for the defeat, but the complete destruction of a party that deserves annihilation more than any of its predecessors. Because only when that happens, will this country have even the slightest chance of repairing the damage of the last fourteen years, and emerging from the gutter into which we have all been dragged.

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The Ghost of Tom Paine

The humble market town of Thetford isn’t the most obvious place to look for political inspiration in these politically-depraved times. Years ago I spent a few hours there with a ghosthunter and his equipment, in the supposedly haunted honeymoon suite at the Bell Inn, waiting for ghosts and poltergeists that never appeared. It wasn’t as wild a night as it might sound. I was recording a radio documentary on ghosts for the BBC World Service, and the honeymoon suite has a reputation for rattling beds, which may not entirely surprise you, were it not for the fact that some couples claimed to hear noises that they had not caused.

That night I arrived after dark, and left before midnight, bored with waiting for ghosts and listening to my companion’s melancholy explanations for their absence, and so I never saw the town itself. This time I stopped to have lunch on my way to visit a friend in Norwich. As we walked into the pretty but nearly-deserted King Street in search of a café, I saw the golden statue standing on a plinth with a quill in one hand, and a book in the other, and I remembered that this was the birthplace of Thomas Paine (1737-1809).

The gilt veneer is a somewhat garish and outlandish tribute to a revolutionary thinker who devoted his life to the pursuit of truth and justice, rather than financial gain, and it reminded me of the spray-painted living statues of the Ramblas. But it makes a kind of sense if you consider that Napoleon once called for a golden statue of Paine to be erected in every city in the world.

Paine was less enamoured with Napoleon, who he once described as ‘the completest charlatan that ever existed.’ But there he was, Thetford’s most famous son, recently re-gilded, holding an upside-down copy of The Rights of Man in front of the former palace of King James.

The quotations on the plinth testify to the astonishing life of a man who challenged kings and empires, campaigned against slavery, pioneered the concept of universal human rights, universal education, and state support for the poor, and who was hounded out of his own country for his radical views.

No mean achievement at for the son of a tenant farmer and corset-maker, who was educated at the grammar school which still stands just a few yards away from his statue. And it’s even more astonishing to think that Paine’s impact on his times was due, almost entirely, to his writings. Paine wrote with fearsome logic, with fierce and lucid eloquence, and unyielding moral courage that made him as many enemies as friends, and often led him to fall out with people who had been his friends.

It’s not surprising that a local Tory once opposed the monument back in 1964, because he considered Paine to be a traitor and ‘anarchist.’ Come closer to the statue and you can see some of the reasons why Paine would not have appealed to Tories in 1964, or at any other time. There is the definition of Paine as an ‘Englishman by birth/ American by adoption/Frenchman by decree,’ and the sash wrapped round a winged globe proclaiming ‘My country is the world/My religion is to do good.’

Facing the King’s House, a striking quotation from The Rights of Man declares

Justice is due to everyman. I seek no recompense. I fear no consequences,. Fortified with that proud integrity that disdain’s triumph or to yield, I will advocate the rights of man. It is an affront to truth to treat falsehood with complaisance.

I felt moved to read these words in 2024, in an age dominated by hysterical and paranoid hyper-nationalism that constantly seeks to curtail any notion of universal rights, where integrity is so often absent, where many politicians seek continual recompense, and not only treat falsehood with complaisance, but actively promote it.

Paine was the product of a very different world, where truth, reason and the pursuit of virtue were considered to be the highest Enlightenment values, and integrity was something not lightly abandoned. Nevertheless, he would have recognized the charlatans and would-be tyrants of our own era, and the persistent lying that so many them have adopted as a strategy to divide and rule. ‘To argue with a man who has renounced the use and authority of reason, and whose philosophy consists in holding humanity in contempt, is like administering medicine to the dead, or endeavouring to convert an atheist by scripture,’ he wrote in The American Crisis.

Today, reason has become an increasingly disposable commodity in an anti-Enlightenment culture that wilfully promotes ignorance, stupidity, unsubstantiated opinions, and the most insane conspiracy theories. The democratic American republic that Paine helped bring into being is facing political implosion, and the triumph of a corrupt and vicious demagogue who holds humanity in contempt, and whose followers have long since renounced the pursuit of virtue.

Project Hope

It’s a dangerous moral and intellectual vacuum into which so many democracies are sliding. The day after visiting Thetford, I caught extracts of Keir Starmer’s insipid ‘Project Hope’ speech on the World at One, in which he exhorted voters to ‘hold on to the flickering hope in your heart that things can be better, because they can.’

I have nothing against flickering hope, provided there’s something credible and realisable attached to it, but there was nothing in Starmer’s anaemic bromides to give any reason whatsoever to believe that he was capable of fulfilling such expectations. Like so many Labour speeches - or speeches by any British political party for that matter - it read like a collection of soundbites and advertising slogans stitched together.

One minute Starmer was invoking ‘the potential for national renewal. The chance, finally, to turn the page, lift the weight off our shoulders, unite as a country, and get our future back’. In the next breath he was arguing that ‘To truly defeat this miserabilist Tory project, we must crush their politics of divide and decline with a new “Project Hope”. Not a grandiose utopian hope. Not the hope of the easy answer, the quick fix, or the miracle cure.’

Translation: little or no money for public services. More austerity. More cap-in-hand burnt offerings to the gods of fiscal responsibility. That is the substance of Starmer’s ‘credible hope, a frank hope, a hope that levels with you about the hard road ahead, but which shows you a way through, a light at the end of the tunnel. The hope of a certain destination.’

Perhaps he should borrow from Hope Not Hate, and adopt the slogan ‘Hope Not Hope’ as Labour’s rallying cry. Because who, exactly, is asking for quick fixes and miracle cures? And who, beyond the Tory ‘Five Families’ and the Tufton Street mafia, seriously believes that the reason this country is in the mess it’s in, is because ‘government in this country is too centralised and controlling’ or ‘content just to mop up problems, after the fact, armed only with a big state cheque-book?’

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This turgid flow of soundbites and mind-killing clichés was delivered in Starmer’s earnest, nasal whine, interspersed with common or garden paeans to ‘a politics that aspires to national unity, bringing people together, the common good.’

Tom Paine would not have opposed a focus on the common good as the rallying cry for a new left-of-centre politics. Like Starmer, he might have recognized the difficulty of getting such messages out to an electorate roused to perpetual anger by artificial culture wars, or sunk apathy and despair.

But Paine was not afraid to fight the fights that need to be fought. He knew who he wanted to represent and who he wanted to oppose. He had principles that never wavered. He stood up to the powerful, the dishonest, and the downright corrupt, and he inspired others to do the same. And as I listened to Starmer’s cowardly ‘hopey changey thing’, as Sara Palin once described the politics of a far more impressive politician, I couldn’t noticing the absence of any willingness to fight anybody, beyond a clapped-out government that has already proven itself to be so useless that even Tories are abandoning it in droves.

That same afternoon I listened to an an-depth interview from Evan Davies with Peter Kyle, the Shadow Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology that revealed the lack of depth of its interviewee and his partner. It was excruciating to listen to this would-be minister twisting and turning away from Davies’s questioning, while paying repeated homage to his leader’s vision, and no doubt to his own job prospects.

Kyle sounded like an encyclopaedia salesman with an empty suitcase he didn’t want to open. He was as pedestrian, unconvincing and evasive as his leader, and it is genuinely terrifying to consider that we may soon be led by politicians like this in a year fraught with political perils, none of which Labour seems to even recognize, let alone dare to confront.

I’m not pursuing any political vendetta here. I recognise that elections must be won by reaching out beyond your party’s natural constituency. I long for the obliteration of this government and the party that foisted it upon us. I don’t ask for a ‘grandiose utopian hope’, but I do want to see a political opposition that doesn’t bow at the neo-liberal altar to make itself seem ‘credible’.

I want an opposition that has something to offer that goes beyond not being the Tories; that can think it terms of fairness, social justice, and helping the exploited and the vulnerable rather than ‘growing the economy’ and public sector ‘reform’; that doesn’t fold its arms when genocide is taking place in Gaza; that doesn’t tiptoe towards power like the contestants in Squid Game, relying on the government to make mistakes and freezing whenever the doll of the rightwing press turns its head.

I want politicians who don’t hide their intentions in hazy soundbites; who aren’t afraid to say what they mean and mean what they say; who stand up for the powerless even if it upsets the powerful.; who recognize, as Paine once did, that ‘he who dares not offend cannot be honest' and that ‘moderation in temper is a virtue; but moderation in principle is always a vice.’

I want politicians who recognize that the world is their country, that want their country to be good, not great. And I just don’t see them, precisely when we need them most.

And that is why, when I drove back to the North, I wasn’t looking back at the absent ghosts from the honeymoon suite. I was thinking about the farmer’s son from Thetford, who helped destroy kings and empires with his pen, and I wished that his gold statue could climb down from the plinth, and remind this country and the Labour Party, that both of them could be so much better than they are, and aim for so much higher than they do.

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